Nancy Johnson, THE KINDEST LIE

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

Nancy Johnson: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. I'm a huge fan of yours. I listen to your show all the time. It's just a delight to be. Thank you.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice of you to say. Thank you. Your book, I could not put it down. I read it in a day or something. I thought it was so good. I loved the whole thing, but the beginning introduction and first couple chapters on the heels of the Obama election and all of that, I have never seen an election results situation like that in contemporary fiction. It was so strong. It was just so great. The leading down the road with all the people wearing white and that whole event, it was so visual and fantastic. Then of course, as the book went on, you just got more and more immersed. In terms of awards for openings, I felt like --

Nancy: -- Thank you. I think that's one of those times in history, everybody remembers where they were on election night. It was such a monumental time.

Zibby: It's so great to watch it through fictionalized people. It's different to take contemporary fiction versus historical fiction and -- I don't know. It's just really neat. It was great.

Nancy: Thank you for that. I'm glad you enjoyed that.

Zibby: Tell me about the inspiration for writing this novel. I saw in your bio you've won all sorts of prizes for first novels before. Tell me how you got into fiction after your whole career in TV and everything else.

Nancy: I'm from Chicago. I worked in television for eleven years as a reporter. I got tired of it because it turned into that whole if it bleeds, it leads kind of thing. I'd be on a really cool feature story that I loved and was interested in. Then the pager would go off and the scanners would go off and you've got to go to a triple homicide a couple counties over. I got tired of that. I think that was the training ground for moving into writing fiction. I've always been curious about the world and been a storyteller, but now I get to create the world of the stories. That's the best part of it. Also, just training in terms of writing for the ear and being able to hear the cadence of a story, so much of that's important in broadcast journalism. I use a lot of the same techniques when I'm writing my fiction. The inspiration for The Kindest Lie came November of 2008 when Obama was elected president. It was a bittersweet time for me personally. My father was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer during that year. It was so difficult. He was looking forward to Obama being president.

I remember at one point he was in hospital. You know how the doctors ask questions just to see how lucid you are, like, what's the date, what's your date of birth, that kind of thing? The doctor asked him, "Who's the president?" This was in October of '08. My father in this croaky voice said, "Barack Obama." The doctor said, "Well, hold off, not quite. Not yet." I knew that it was important for him that Obama become president, and so I convinced him to vote early. He voted early in October. He was very sick. By the time of election day, he was confined to the bed. Here was a man who survived World War II and the Great Depression and Jim Crow. He cast the last vote of his life for America's first black president. That was just so pivotal. That election was such a point of pride for us as a family. I think for so many in the country no matter what your political persuasion was, it was kind of that moment of saying, America, we did this. We made history. We overcame something by electing a black president.

The thing was, I had a lot of folks say to me, we are now in a post-racial era. I knew right away that was a fallacy, that there was nothing post-racial about it. All I had to do was go on my social media feed. Back then, Facebook was just kicking off and getting started. I remember going on Facebook and just seeing the ugliness and this bitter divide between black and white in America. So much of it was not about policy debates. I could've understood and respected that, but it was deeply personal and it was racially motivated, a lot of what I saw there. Then through the first two terms, those two terms of Obama's presidency, we saw so much racism, a lot of racial violence, so I knew it was not a post-racial period at all. This was something I was very interested in, was just how we were all in these separate entrenched corners, black and white America. Then I tried to think of, who are the characters that I could create in fiction who could inhabit this kind of world? I was interested in the tiny, small lives of people, of characters who could speak to these larger macro issues. That's where the idea for the book came from.

Zibby: Wow. That's great. Really beautiful. Yes, I would say we are definitely not in a post-racial era. I feel like things have become magnified and everything has been spilling out, good, bad, ugly, recently. There's no better time for a book like yours and the empathy that characters bring, just stories to show how all this racial divide I find just -- I don't mean to sound stupid. It's just that we're all people underneath. All this attention to color I feel undermines how similar we all are in so many ways. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox here. [laughs] Yes, that was a pivotal moment. You captured it beautifully in your story. Your story also contains a lot of secrets and the damage keeping a secret can do in the secret keeper and in the secret keeper's relationships. What happens when the secret comes out? When should it come out? I was actually thinking, I don't know if this was the kindest lie. Was it kind? I don't know. Tell me about choosing this title. Do you even see it as a lie, the secret that was kept?

Nancy: First, maybe I should tell you what the book's about a little bit.

Zibby: Oh, yeah. That would be good. Sorry.

Nancy: Just so people know what the book is about. It's about race, class, family at the dawn of the Obama era. It centers on Ruth Tuttle, a black woman engineer. She's a very successful chemical engineer in Chicago on the come-up. She's got this great husband, great life. He's ready to start a family, but she can't do that until she makes peace with her past. She's been harboring this huge secret that she gave birth to a baby when she was just seventeen years old. She never told anybody about it. Her husband doesn't know it. She decides to go back to her hometown, which is a dying Indiana factory town, of her youth to try to search for her son. When she gets there, she meets and forms this unlikely connection with Midnight. It's a white boy, eleven years old. He's nicknamed Midnight. He's adrift also searching for his own sense of family connection. He's really mired in that very poverty that Ruth managed to escape. When the two of them come together, they're just on this collision course of race and class. It ends up upending both of their lives. That's the background of the story. The title, The Kindest Lie, it's so interesting. I kept thinking, will the publisher change the title? A lot of times, you come up with a working title. Then it changes as you go along in the publishing process, but it stuck. I was excited about that. I chose The Kindest Lie because quite often, we keep secrets, we tell lies for the best of reasons, the best of intentions. That's what I meant by The Kindest Lie.

The grandmother in the story -- I don't want to give too much away. That's Ruth's grandmother, the character Mama. She's keeps a lot of lies. She tells a lot of secrets and tells lies, but she does it not to be malicious. She does it to protect her grandchildren. It's out of that love that she tells lies. Then I also think the other level of lies is that there are lies that we tell ourselves. Ruth, in this story, is lying to herself in many ways because she thinks she can outrun her past. She's got this nice, fancy life, chic in Chicago. She's upwardly mobile, great job, great husband, all that. She thinks that this is it. I can just live this life and not worry about what I've left behind in my hometown, and not just her son who she left behind, but also her family. They're the ones who convinced her to never come back. Still, she's left them behind, this community that she grew up in and the family that she was part of. In that way, she's lying to herself because as we find in the book, she cannot outrun her past. Then the other level on which The Kindest Lie works is America. When you look at it in a larger sense, I think America has lied to itself about how good it is, how decent and honorable it can be. It's not always decent and honorable to everybody in the country. We still have so much work to do as Americans. I think a lot of times we wrap ourselves in the flag. We like to lie to ourselves and pretend that we're better than we really are when there's really so much work to do.

Zibby: That was beautifully said. In the book when you were just talking about how her family wanted her to leave everything behind, it almost became not her choice. They were like, go, go, go, we'll take care of everything. A lot of the text, and maybe this is because I went to Yale, but I feel like there was a lot about Yale in the book and how her going there was a totally life-changing moment and from there on she could study engineering. She could get this amazing job. It was a huge turning point. It was the fork in the road, so to speak. You can go this way or you stay here. You obviously depicted what happened would she have stayed when we see what happened to her brother and the other people who work in a factory town and the effect of that. Tell me about that. Is it really one moment? Is it those one-decision nodes that change everything?

Nancy: I do think so. I think it's all about the choices that you make. Sometimes you have that one moment in time to make a decision. Your life can just go in a certain direction or not. I think that's really what Mama is getting at with saying, you need to leave this behind, and that sometimes leaving is the best way, that you have to make a decision or your life trajectory can change forever and it can go the absolute wrong way. I think that's what the message from Mama was. We have the scene where Ruth gives birth at home in her bed. It's a really difficult scene. I was really dealing with the two difficult things, going into labor, giving birth to a baby, but also at the same time dealing with the emotional labor as well of trying to decide, what do I do? I'm having this baby. In a way, she's like, I want to hold onto this baby. This is my child. Yet she's also dreaming of what's beyond this tiny bedroom in this little shotgun house in this little auto plant town. That's Yale. That's life beyond. I do think that there are times in life where we make a choice. Even if you make a choice, it may not be the wrong choice. Whatever the choice is, I think it just impacts the rest of your life and the way that's going to go. I think you also have to revisit too.

Zibby: It's like a sliding doors moment. Sometimes the decisions are the ones you make. Sometimes they're by chance. The decision of what to do with a child born either too soon or in the wrong circumstances is a very politically fraught one in and of itself. It is part of the book which also touches on politics in its opening scene and as a theme that courses through it. Was there any intention of why she had the baby? Were you trying to make any sort of statement, or was this just the mechanism to tell the story you wanted to tell?

Nancy: I think it was a mechanism to tell the story. You mentioned that opening scene with the election night. It's in that scene that Ruth and her husband, Xavier, at different points are thinking about what it means to have a child at this moment in time, in history. She's brought a child into the world and she's excited about this new era and this new president and all the promise of opportunity for black people in America, but she doesn't really know what situation her son is in. She's assuming the worst, that he's languishing in the poverty that she managed to escape. I thought that was interesting, this whole idea of a child out there. Children, we think of them as the future and think about what the opportunities are for them. We all want the best for our children. We want them to have a better life than you had. That's part of what the character of Mama is wanting. She's got a lot of unfulfilled dreams of her own that we find out about in the book. Yet she wants the best for her children and for her grandchildren. Just that legacy of generations and always wanting the next generation to go beyond and exceed the opportunities that you had, to me, that's really interesting. That's one reason for having childhood and motherhood be a part of this narrative.

Zibby: The scene where -- I don't think I'm giving much away, but when Ruth goes home and Mama has a gentleman suitor trying to fix the toilet and she feels like even though Papa is not here, having another man in the house rubs her the wrong way. You mentioned, sadly -- I'm so sorry about your father and having lung cancer. I'm wondering if that stemmed from some sort of situation with your own mom? Did your mom start dating again? Where did that particular scene come from? Just out of curiosity.

Nancy: No, that did not happen. She did not start dating again or anything like that. I was just really thinking how things change with loss, with the loss of Papa. He was the patriarch of that family, the foundation that they all clung to. Then when he was gone, that really interrupted everything in the lives of the characters. Mama's had a hard time moving on, and then Ruth too. Ruth was very tethered to her grandfather. I think that's one of the reasons that she got involved with Ronald, her high school boyfriend, and got pregnant. It's because she was looking for that love and looking for that male figure in her life. I was just really interested in someone who's not present but still has such a huge presence in the life of the characters in the book. It was very difficult for Mama to move on. It's kind of like she's trying to find herself too just as Ruth is trying to find herself. I thought it was interesting that you've got a black woman, seventy-eight years old. You don't usually see that kind of a character on the page and someone who's not just there to take care of the people in her life. She's doing that, of course, but she also has a love interest. To me, that's interesting for a woman that age to have that on the page. She has, like I said before, unfulfilled dreams of her own too. She's really her own person. I thought that was pretty cool.

Zibby: My grandmother recently passed away at ninety-seven. When she was in her early nineties, someone tried to set her up with a man who was ninety-five. She was like, "Don't be silly. He's way too old for me." [laughter]

Nancy: That is so cute.

Zibby: It just never ends.

Nancy: It's true.

Zibby: It just doesn't end. Tell me a little more about the writing of this book, the actual writing. Did you structure the whole narrative beforehand? Did you outline? Where and when did you write it? Tell me about all that.

Nancy: In the writing circles, people talk about being a plotter where you outline everything or you're a pantser where you write by the seat of your pants. I'm definitely more on the pantser side of things, so I did not outline anything. I never had an outline the entire time. Then sometimes it takes you a little longer. It took me six years. Of course, this was the first book, so it takes a little longer because you don't necessarily know what you're doing. You're kind of fumbling around in the dark as you write the book. As a writer, I'm definitely interested in what keeps me up at night. What are the burning issues that are on my mind? That was the whole thing with the election and the racial divide and the class divide in America. That's where I tend to start, is with what I'm really passionate about at the time. Then from there, it's all about the characters. I'm definitely a character-driven writer. I'm really interested in delving deep into the character motivations. Why do they do the things they do? What is it in their past that informs their present? Those are the things I definitely get excited about as a writer.

Then the ideas come to me at the most inconvenient times. I'd say most of the ideas I get or a lot of the most brilliant ones I get, or exposition or snaps of dialogue, come to me when I'm driving on the interstate. I'm here doing sixty, sixty-five on the interstate, driving along. An idea will hit me. For safety reasons, I can't write it down. I usually pull out my iPhone. I use the voice memo function of the phone and just talk into it. It sounds really weird later when I listen to it, the ramblings when I'm on the interstate. You might hear horns honking or crazy noises. If I don't do that, I lose it if I don't get the idea down right then. Then I'd say in terms of where I write, because we're in the pandemic, I'm usually writing at home. When I was writing this book, I wrote some of it at home but a lot of it at Starbucks. People wonder, how can you write in a coffee shop? For some reason, that whirl of the cappuccino machine is kind of cool. I like the rhythm of that. I can write to that kind of noise, and people sitting right next to me talking. Maybe because of my news days, I'm accustomed to just writing on the side of the road or in the back of the police car going on some kind of drug raid or wherever. It doesn't matter. I can write pretty much anywhere and block out the noise. That's my writing process.

Zibby: Back to you at Starbucks. What is your go-to Starbucks drink when you're working on your writing?

Nancy: Funny thing is I don't drink coffee. [laughs] I don't like the taste of it. I love the smell of it, but I don't like the taste of it. I drink hot chocolate. I'm really into things that are sweet. I like hot chocolate really strong, five pumps of mocha, no whip cream. Sometimes the whip cream cuts down the chocolate-y part of it. I love chocolate.

Zibby: I am totally with you. Whip cream is a distraction.

Nancy: It's a total distraction from the -- nah, that's okay. Sometimes they make a mistake and they put it on there anyway.

Zibby: I am a fan. I just actually tried the Starbucks peppermint hot chocolate for the holiday theme. I would not do that if I were you. I would skip it. You can skip it.

Nancy: Oh, really? That probably also cuts down on --

Zibby: -- On the chocolate.

Nancy: On the chocolate, yeah. It's all about the chocolate.

Zibby: The best thing at Starbucks, and then I'll get back to your writing, is the chocolate-covered almonds. Have you ever had them there?

Nancy: I have not had those.

Zibby: They keep being sold out everywhere. I feel like somebody else knows that they're so good and is snatching them. If you ever see a pack, they're the best chocolate-covered almonds, extra chocolate-y.

Nancy: I will look for those. People probably are hoarding them.

Zibby: Really good.

Nancy: Okay, I'll try that.

Zibby: Are you hard at work on another book now? You must be. I can't imagine that you're letting it go at this.

Nancy: No, I don't want to be just a one-book wonder. That's for sure. I can't say a lot about it yet, but I am working on something new. The thing is, I'm still waiting to finalize these initial three chapters and summary, which is called option material, to send to my editor to see if she wants to acquire it for William Morrow. Fingers crossed about that. I can say that it's again about race, class, and identity, so some of those same themes that I'm always interested in but at some different moments in history. I seem to always be fascinated by certain moments in time like the big national moments and how individuals fit into that, individual lives fit into those big moments. That's what I'm looking to do again. A lot of people have asked me when I've done other interviews or just check Goodreads, people want to know about a sequel to The Kindest Lie. I don't have any plans for that, but if Hollywood is listening and wants to continue the story of Ruth and Midnight on the big or small screen, that would always be fun. I think there's probably more to tell about where those characters go from here. Hopefully, somebody will do that.

Zibby: You could do a whole spinoff about the lesbian couple. I'm forgetting their names. They were really interesting too. You had that one scene where one of them confides to Ruth, "You're so lucky that you can just touch the person you love in public. It's not that easy for us," and the feeling of being emboldened after the Obama win and how much more public they were in their displays of affection.

Nancy: I think that could be another story too.

Zibby: That could be another good book if you're running out of material.

Nancy: Yes, I think that would be fascinating.

Zibby: They also have -- I'm late to this party. Have you heard of Scribd?

Nancy: No. What is it? I'm even later than you to the party.

Zibby: They have audiobooks and books. It's almost like Audible in a way. They summarize. They’ll have articles, excerpts. My point is they have Scribd Originals. They're like ten thousand words. You could do a Scribd Original on just the two characters.

Nancy: I love that idea. I'm writing that down, Scribd Original. It's audio?

Zibby: No, you can read it too.

Nancy: You can read it too, okay.

Zibby: I'm interviewing someone who wrote one shortly.

Nancy: I'm thinking about those -- aren't there Audible Originals too?

Zibby: There are Audible Originals. This, you read. There's probably an audio version as well.

Nancy: That's another format, I love that, to extend the life of the story and of the book. That's actually a good marketing idea too, to do that kind of thing.

Zibby: I know.

Nancy: You're good. I like that.

Zibby: I'm good. [laughter]

Nancy: I need to hire you to feed me all the best ideas. I love that.

Zibby: Part of this podcast is my unsolicited advice.

Nancy: That is the best. I really like that.

Zibby: I'm kidding. Speaking of advice, what advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Nancy: I would say for authors to really be true to yourself, to whatever the intention is for the book that you want to write. Stay true to that, to what's authentic and real for you. I talk to so many writers who say, "You know what? I think I might want to write about vampires because I heard vampires might be coming back in vogue. I'll do domestic suspense because I hear that's kind of hot. If I put 'girl' in the title, it'll definitely sell." I don't think you can write to trends and do your book any justice because then you're just writing to market. You're writing what you think people want to read and what you think is going to sell. I think what's going to sell and what's going to be successful is what comes from your heart, from your soul, from your passion. That would be my main advice. Just write what's true to you.

Also, be gentle with yourself too. Going through the pandemic, everybody is just going through so much emotionally right now. Our lives are crazy even though we are tethered at home and sequestered. Be gentle in terms of how often you write. I don't necessarily believe you have to write every single day to be a successful writer. I think you write when you feel compelled to write. Also at the same time, I think you have to be disciplined too. If you ever want to get anything done, I think you have to keep plugging away at it and not always writing just when you feel like it because you may not always feel like it. Sometimes you do have to push yourself, but don't feel that you have to do it every single day. As long as you're getting words on the page and you are telling the story that only you can tell, that's going to resonate with other people because it's your story.

Zibby: That's great advice. You make me want to stop what I'm doing and start writing.

Nancy: Start writing. There you go. That's my gift to you.

Zibby: Thank you. Thanks, Nancy. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." As you can see, moms also don't have time to do podcasts. Thank you for your great book. Let's stay in touch.

Nancy: Definitely. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure.

Nancy: Buh-bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Elin Hilderbrand, TROUBLES IN PARADISE

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

Elin Hilderbrand: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. I know that you and I have been conversing on Instagram about various different crazy things that are happening in life. Plus, of course, you have all of your own books to discuss as well. We have so much to talk about. I don't even know where to start. Why don't we talk first about Troubles in Paradise? which is your most recent book and the last of trilogy which starts off with amazing gossip. We can segue into talking about gossip from there.

Elin: Perfect. I can't say too, too much about Troubles in Paradise because it is a book three. Just a little history as to how I came to write the Paradise series is that back in 2013, my publisher, Hachette, called and said, "We've had a book fall off our holiday list. Can you write a Christmas book in four weeks?" I was writing a novel called The Matchmaker which was very emotionally draining. I said, "You know what? I'm not going to stop this and write a Christmas book, but I'll do it when I finish." I came up with an idea for a Christmas trilogy. I know this sounds like I'm talking about something else, but I am getting to Paradise.

Zibby: It's okay.

Elin: I came up with this idea for a Christmas trilogy. It turns out they didn't want a trilogy. They only wanted one book. I wrote this novel, Winter Street, and gave it no ending. Immediately, a contract for the next two books appeared because they loved the premise. Then, ironically, in the summer of 2016, my editor called and said, "What do I have to do to get you to write a fourth book in the Winter Street series?" At that point, Zibby, I was finished. I didn't want to write a fourth book in the Winter Street series, so they really had to be persuasive. I said to them, "I'd really like to write a novel or a series of novels that are set in the Virgin Islands." That was the place where I had styled a writing retreat, time for myself in the Virgin Islands. I'd fallen in love with it. I feel like, again, Hachette was a little bit hesitant. Because I was a Nantucket author, they didn't necessarily want a series set in the Virgin Islands, but they very desperately wanted this fourth Winter Street book, so they said yes. Then again, irony is the Paradise series has far, far, far outsold the Winter Street and has taken me to a new location. It's been successful, so I was right. I felt vindicated I was right. The Paradise series, book one focuses on a woman in her mid-fifties named Irene Steele. On New Year's Day, she gets a call that her husband has been killed in a helicopter crash in the Virgin Islands. Hello. She didn't know he was in the Virgin Islands. She's completely gobsmacked. She and her two adult sons fly down there only to find -- guess what? This dude has a second life including a mistress and a child. Then it's like, what else was going on? That takes us through to book three where I'm trying to tie up all of the mysterious loose ends in a way that is satisfying and surprising. That is where we are.

Zibby: Awesome. It's so funny because in the beginning of book three, you open it up and you talk directly to the reader. You're like, no, no, no, this is book three, so just put this down and go back to the beginning and read the other two books. I was like, okay. [laughs]

Elin: I'm very concerned. I feel like some people maybe are like, I'll just be opportunistic and if they buy it accidentally, oh well. I am not that person. I am the person who is like, I would like them to have pleasant reading experience where they're reading book one, book two, and book three where it's very clear where they are. I know that people have read book three first which just gives me agita, honestly. It makes me upset.

Zibby: That's so funny. And you have another book coming out soon. You've been posting about that one. That's exciting. It's coming out in June.

Elin: Yes, I have a book out in June called Golden Girl, which is my summer novel. I was doing two books a year. It has been extremely stressful the last seven years. I'm going back with Golden Girl just to one book every summer. That is my new jam. I don't know what I'm going to do with all my extra time, but I'll find something.

Zibby: How did you even get into this? How did you become who you are today? When did you start writing so much and at this rapid pace? How did this whole thing happen?

Elin: Let's see. How did this whole thing happen? It's, of course, a longer story. I went to Johns Hopkins undergrad. I was a writing seminars major. A lot of people don't think of Hopkins as a place where writers are born. However, they do have a dedicated creative writing major. Every week, I would go to a workshop. I had Steve Dixson, Madison Smartt Bell, John Barth, really great writers guiding me. When I graduated, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I went and I sat with Madison Bell. I said, "What do I do? Do I go to graduate school? Do I get a job?" He said, "You have to go out in the world and live, Elin. You have to have experiences. You're twenty-two." I moved to New York City. I lived on the Upper East Side. I worked in publishing. I hated it. I thought because I wanted to be a writer, for some reason, that publishing would be my thing. No. I hated it. I needed a job where I would have time, so I started teaching. I taught first in the New York City public schools at IS 227 in Queens. Then I got a better job teaching in Westchester County out of the city. I would commute backwards.

The summer between those two school years I wanted to get out of the city for the summer, and so I decided I would go to Nantucket. I had grown up going to Cape Cod in the summers with my family. I had been to the vineyard in college. I just felt like Nantucket was the natural third point on the triangle. I got a room in a house, fell madly in love with the island. Then after my second year of teaching, I moved back to Nantucket. I'm like, I'm going to live in Nantucket. I traveled in the offseason. I would work during the summer season and then travel. Eventually, after I felt like I had gone out and lived, I applied to the University of Iowa for graduate school and ended up getting in there, miraculously, and went to Iowa and was totally miserable. It's a very intense place. There's a lot of competition. I was just very unhappy. I was away from the ocean. I was out in Iowa City. It was bad. One of the ways that I made myself feel better is I started writing a novel that was set on Nantucket. That was The Beach Club.

Then in my final workshop at Iowa, my professor had his agent come. His agent said, "Which one of you lives on Nantucket?" I said, "Oh, that's me." It was a small-world coincidence. He said, "Stay and see me after class," which I wasn't even going to do because I had my U-Haul packed. I was ready to go, but I decided to. Thank goodness because Michael has been my agent for twenty-one or twenty-two years now. I told him I was working on a book set on Nantucket called The Beach Club. He said, "When you're finished with it, send it to me," which I did. At that point, 1999, I'm printing out the novel, sticking it in a box, and taking it to the post office. He read it. He said, "I'd like to represent you. I'm going to make you lots and lots of money." Who doesn't want to hear that? This is greatest words ever. He sends the book out, and it gets rejected everywhere. Finally, five months later, he calls and says he has an offer of five thousand dollars. I'm like, is five thousand dollars a lot of money? I can't quit my job. Since it was the only offer that we had, we took it. The Beach Club was published in the summer of 2000.

Two weeks after it came out, it was People magazine's book of the week. Immediately, my publisher ran out of copies. This was my first publisher who I think will remain nameless during this interview. I'm not sure. I was frustrated because we were without books for three weeks. This in 2000. You can't download it on your Kindle. You cannot read it on your iPhone. The copies have to be in the stores. It sold pretty well. I ended up with a two-book deal. Those books did less well. Then I got another two-book deal. Those books did even worse. I got my own publicist for book five, a private publicist that I paid for myself. She did an excellent job. Again, I got People magazine with the picture. It was book of the week and four stars. I was so excited. Again, the publisher ran out of books. I was super frustrated at that point. My agent, same agent, said, "I think we need to switch publishers." I had Stockholm syndrome and was in love with my captor. I'm like, "I will not switch publishers," but he persuaded me. I went and had what I call my Cinderella day in New York and met with ten publishers and ended up settling or deciding on Little Brown. Little Brown has turned my last twenty, twenty-one books into New York Times best seller. They did that gradually, Zibby. I didn't write Crawdads. I didn't go right to number one. The first book I had that hit number one was Summer of '69. It was my twenty-third novel. It was an incremental climb and a gathering of readers. It was a very careful, thoughtful process to get to the top.

Zibby: Wow, that is an amazing story. I loved that. That's amazing. Just that you kept persisting through and kept doing what you do, that's the greatest part. You had confidence in what you were producing. You just had to wait until everybody caught up with you.

Elin: Yeah, and I don't think I understood the book business. I didn't the first five books. Also, publishing was changing too. I can remember with my second book with Little Brown -- it was called A Summer Affair. I had a marketing person named Miriam Parker. Now she's at Ecco. She's a brilliant woman. At that time, she was like, "We're going to go to all these blogs. We're going to get all these blogs." I'm thinking to myself, I don't even know what a blog is. Why are we doing this? Why is this where we're putting our resources? She was a visionary. It came out in the summer of 2008. That was the thing to do. They were very systematic and careful, and they still are, about how they do their marketing and how they get more readers. They're so impressive. I'm very lucky.

Zibby: That’s great. That's really awesome. I know that reader response and how people accept and embrace your book is something that's been really important to you. You have all these devoted fans and everything else. Then when we were communicating about the recent situation with Jane Rosen's book on Instagram about how a moms' group turned against her and ended up banning her from the group and canceling her book event, you were up in arms about it. I just wanted to talk to you a little about that.

Elin: I've only gotten to the -- I'm on page forty of Jane's book, which I'm so enjoying. I am so enjoying. I have to say, my appetite was really whetted by the fact that this group canceled her. I can't figure out, because I'm not sure if it comes back up, but I've gotten to the part where the Upper East Side group is mentioned.

Zibby: Yeah, that's it.

Elin: I'm like, was this what [distorted audio]?

Zibby: That was it. The whole thing is on page thirty-nine to forty. The whole rest of Eliza Starts A Rumor has nothing else to do with Upper East Side moms at all.

Elin: That cracks me up. I just feel like, wouldn't you be excited or laugh? It was very tongue-in-cheek, I thought. I'd be interested to know if I actually know anyone. You live in New York, right, Zibby? You may know somebody in that group. I live in Nantucket. I may know somebody in that group. It felt so overt and unnecessary for them to decide to cancel the book based -- especially now that I know what you're talking about. I thought maybe there was more later in the book that was really scandalous. It's tough. Also, it's fiction. Jane very skillfully picks up the essence of things. I'm really, really enjoying her book. I'm also going to post about it. I may, I can't decide, mention this scandal because I think it will encourage other people to want to read it too. People always like things that are attached to real life, which makes no sense because we are in the business of writing fiction. If it has a real-life scandal attached, so much the better. I predict big things for Jane. I'm really, really enjoying the book.

Zibby: Good. Come to our event. We're doing an event. I can talk to you about this later. I'm going to do an event with her coming up too. Anyway, back to your books and all that. You open up Troubles in Paradise with a whole gorgeous description of the juiciness of gossip and how it's like a mango. You debated which fruit to pick and all the rest. There is something just so irresistible about small-town gossip or even big-town gossip. New York City really, in different neighborhoods, is just as much a small town as probably Nantucket wherever you go. How do you use gossip in fiction and in your work in particular to keep the intrigue going?

Elin: Totally. I wrote a novel in -- what year did it come out? -- 2015 called The Rumor. My purpose with The Rumor had been -- there was a lot of gossip going on on Nantucket. There's always gossip, oh, my god. I've lived here twenty-six years. I've heard it all. I decided that I was going to write a novel called The Rumor and I was going to put every single person who gossiped on Nantucket in the book. This was my goal. This is exactly, in fact, what I did. I put everybody that gossiped in the book. However, I disguised them so much because they have to fit the narrative. I disguised everybody so well that I am the only person that knows who's in there. No one has ever come up to me and said, I was the blah, blah, blah in your book. No one has ever said that. Also, if you're a villainess or whatever, you often will not recognize yourself. That was very satisfying to me because I did, in fact, get to put all the gossipy people in the novel, but nobody knew it.

One of the things about being a mother -- you know this. We all know this. Everybody listening to this knows this. It is a very fraught group. The gossip among the moms, it's mind-blowing. It's ruthless. I have graduated out of it, which I'm very, very happy to say. My children are twenty-one, eighteen, and fifteen. One of my sons is at college where gossip is no longer an issue. One of my sons is at boarding school. Because it's sort of remote, I don't have to worry about any of that. My daughter is fifteen. She's my third child. I know everybody. I no longer engage in any of the gossip. I almost feel like that is something you do more with your first child and sometimes your second child. By the time you get to the third child, you're like, you know what, I am so done. Also, with age, I feel like, is this piece of information important to me? The answer is no. I just do not engage in any local Nantucket gossip. I now say that, and I'll probably be embroiled in a scandal next week. Over the last five or six years since the kids have been to high school, it's been very mild. It's something that I think you graduate out of.

Zibby: I think the thing with moms, especially first-time moms or just really -- gossip is the grounds of the insecure. It's the feeding ground. When you're in a new situation trying to figure out what on earth you're supposed to be doing with your kids, especially in the beginning, all you want to do is compare yourself to other people and then somehow get that little glint of, not that I'm speaking for myself, but I've heard, any sort of little win you can have. Oh, I heard her kid did X, Y, Z. There's always something to make you feel better when you feel so bad. It's not any justification for it. It's not just that the kids are older. It's that you're better. You know what you're doing, and that confidence that comes from surviving.

Elin: Right. That's the thing. Ideally, you're the one that has evolved. You are now self-aware. You do not need to be boosted or fed by other people's misfortunes. [laughs] I think if you evolve the right way, it's just live and let live.

Zibby: It's so true. What you said in the beginning was also super interesting to me. A lot of people grow up wanting to be writers. There really is something to waiting. It's not a career you can necessarily dive into out of college and go up the ranks. You can go to adjacent careers like publishing or maybe a magazine in the olden days or something related. To just sit down and become a novelist without that wisdom or experience is really tricky. When you're that age, you don't want to be told that you have to go live. That's very annoying to hear because you know what you want. Let's say your kids now want to go be writers. What do you say to them? What does it mean to go live, really?

Elin: They have to have experiences. They have to travel. We've traveled with the kids. My ex-husband and I traveled extensively, lived in Australia, did a bunch of things. They’ve been all over the place. They need to go out and have experiences. They need to have jobs. They need to fall in love. They need to have their heart broken, all of those things. When I started, Zibby, I was pregnant with Max. It was twenty-one years ago. That's when I started writing The Beach Club. What did I know about life? Not one thing, really. I hadn’t had children. I hadn't been divorced. I hadn’t had cancer. All of the things that have happened to me over the twenty years that I've been doing this, in theory, should have been contributing to the richness and the nuance and emotional integrity of the writing. That’s the best-case scenario. Hopefully, it has. In theory, every book gets better. I've also been reading. One of the great things about you and other book influencers like you is that the way we can make ourselves better, the way every single woman can make themselves better, is to read. I definitely believe that. All of the thousands of books that I've read over the last twenty years have all contributed also to my work.

Zibby: It's so true. I think the value of reading is huge. Thank you for saying that about me in particular. It's so funny. Someone posted today, a little funny thing how she couldn't keep up with all the details of her family group chat, but she could remember all the details in a multigenerational family saga novel that she read six years ago. I feel like I'm the same way. I can look around and be like, oh, yeah, I totally remember the characters in that book and this book. When it comes to my own life, I have these big blanks. Why do I remember all the stuff about books? It's the weirdest thing.

Elin: We attach. We escape and we attach. One of the things that I hear a lot from my readers just because I do write escapist fiction is, I'll hear about the terrible, worst moments of their lives. They're in the chemo chair. Their parents are dying. They're at the hospital. Their children have cancer, whatever. They have my book. My book allows them to escape. That is the most humbling experience. I don't need to write the great American novel. I have no desire to do so. What I'm doing now is so fulfilling just because I'm giving people in a lot of pain, either physical or emotional, a place to go. I find value in that.

Zibby: There's tremendous value in that. Wait, tell me briefly about your whole experience with your cancer. That sounds terrible. I know you are a breast cancer survivor. I would love to know, in terms of feeding the richness of your work, how did going through that -- how did you even manage that when you're churning out so much fiction at such a rapid pace? Did you stop writing for a while? How did you handle all that?

Elin: The writing was really my, it was my gasoline. I'm very disciplined anyway. I got sick and I just said to myself, I'm not going to stop. I'm going to stop only when it's absolutely necessary. I was diagnosed in May of 2014. I had a book coming out, The Matchmaker. I had a book coming out on June 10th. My oncologist called. She said, "You have cancer." You go through a lot of steps. As it turns out, I had to have a double mastectomy. I said to her, "Can we just schedule it for August and preferably after all my social obligations? I have a book coming out. It's summer in Nantucket." She was just like, "Elin, reality check, no. You need to have this as soon as possible." My book came out on a Tuesday, as they do. My book came out on Tuesday, June 10th. Had the double mastectomy on the 13th. I had to cancel all these events. I did a couple events. Then I had to cancel a bunch of events. Then I said to my publicist, "Two weeks after my surgery, I'm going to start back and do a tour." I did. Twelve days after my surgery, I flew to Chicago. I did two events in Chicago.

I tell this story. Sometimes I cry. I will recover if I cry. The first event, I was on drugs. I don't even remember it. It was a straight signing, though. The second event was the brown bag lunch at the Cook County Library. There were a hundred women. There were two women up front that had -- one had no hair. One had very short hair. At that point, I have drains in which were hidden by my dress. You have drains, which are these horrible things that come out your back. Then they collect the lymphatic fluid. It's too awful to talk about. I was on oxy and very emotional. Everybody there knew what I had gone through. I'd been on the news. I went on with Gayle King and Norah and Charlie on CBS This Morning. The women come through my line. They say to me, "Elin, we both had double mastectomies. Together, we've undergone thirty-six rounds of chemo and sixty-four rounds of radiation. We came today to tell you that you're going to be fine." I thought to myself, okay, these women are far sicker than I am. They showed up at my book signing. They are so optimistic and so encouraging.

I really, at that point, felt like they passed me a baton which I held onto for a while. Once I was recovered -- I had some bumps in the road and wasn't really recovered until May of 2015. Then I started speaking at breast cancer events and telling that story. The good thing, I guess, about breast cancer is that the demographic, it's my demographic of my readers as well, so there was a lot of opportunity for me to connect with other people who were just starting out. I do it all the time on my social media. People will say, my sister has breast cancer. She's starting chemo tomorrow. I always reach out, always, if I can, personally. I've met a lot of really wonderful, wonderful women that way. In some sense, it was a gift, not only because of the connection it gave me with my readers, but also the gut check with what's important. You and I talked just a little while ago about the gossip. That ceased to be important. Who cares? Nobody. What became important was what was happening with my kids and the truth in my fiction.

Zibby: Elin, you have gone through so much and are such a powerhouse. You can just tell it in the way you speak. You're just a force. You're so driven. It's amazing. I'm so impressed. Were you just born this way? Do you feel like at some point this shifted, or is this just your personality in everything you do?

Elin: You know, I don't know. I've always been disciplined. I do all this crazy stuff. I exercise for three hours every morning. I do that because it's a discipline that sets up my day. I never ever skip a day. The people in my life like my ex-husband and my boyfriend now, they really hate it because, of course, it takes three hours away from my time. It's a very important discipline for me because doing what I do, which is writing two books, now one book, a year, requires a laser focus. The time in the morning, it's the discipline of doing something that -- nobody wants to exercise for three hours. Nobody wants to exercise for five minutes. Making yourself do it is setting up a discipline. I've always been like that. The connection with the readers is just something that I've learned over twenty years. It's a process. I could be sitting in my basement writing for myself, but it's so gratifying to have a back-and-forth with my readers. I think they feel the love. They know that I love them very deeply.

Zibby: Wow. Amazing. Do you have any parting advice for aspiring authors aside from going out and living?

Elin: I think it's just, you have to stick with it. That's always what I say. If you're writing a novel, you start at the beginning. You move through middle. The middle is always tough. There are lots of times when I do not know what's coming next and it feels scary. That's when you put the novel in a drawer and you think, I guess I'll get to it later because I know how it ends. Everyone always knows how it starts and they know how it ends. The challenge is making yourself get through it and moving scene by scene. In a micro sense, I would say for serious writers, you must dramatize. You must have a scene in a location with dialogue and characters and a conflict. That is a scene. My novels are one scene after another after another, but at least I can pinpoint them saying, this is the scene at the beach restaurant where she drops the tray of glasses. Everybody stops. Then the owner asks if she's on drugs. You need to have dramatization. In a larger sense, you just have to keep going until you get to the end. Then you can always go back and fix it. Wait, Zibby, you have a book coming out. When is your book coming out?

Zibby: I do. February 16th, my anthology.

Elin: Oh, my god. Can we just talk about that briefly before we part?

Zibby: Sure. [laughs] Yes, I'm super excited about it. I have sixty-plus essays that authors wrote mostly during the pandemic, some a little bit before. It was going to be this whole website goop. I had this whole idea, and that did not happen. I ended up just posting them up on my website during the pandemic. Then afterwards, I was like, wait a minute, I have enough for a book. This is a book, what got published. Then I just sold it as a book. Now it's coming out.

Elin: It's called Moms Don't Have Time To. Then is every essay a different ending to that sentence?

Zibby: No. This book is five different sections. Moms don't have time to eat, workout, read, breathe, and have sex. The essays are inspired by those topics, but they're not specifically about them. It's a personal essay about something. Then I have another one coming out in November where I picked five different things that moms don't have time to do.

Elin: What a great idea. I have to say, I'm sort of past it now, but it was definitely challenging where moms don't have to write novels. That would be my essay.

Zibby: If you want to be in the next one... Not that you don't have enough to do.

Elin: I know. That's the thing. Moms don't have time to do anything. I love, love, love. Make sure you send it to me.

Zibby: I will. I will absolutely send it to you. Thank you so much for coming on this show. I loved talking to you and hope to see you in real life.

Elin: I hope so. Bye, Zibby. Thank you.

Zibby: Bye, Elin. Thanks.

Caroline Gertler, MANY POINTS OF ME

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

Caroline Gertler: Thank you for having me, Zibby, I'm really excited to be here today.

Zibby: I feel like it was not that long ago that Sarah Mlynowski introduced us and we sat next to each other at the library lunch. You told me about this book you were working on. Now here we are. It's coming out, Many Points of Me. It's in my hand. This is so exciting.

Caroline: I'm excited. I actually can't believe how fast it's happened. I remember being at one of your events and you announcing to the room that I had just had my book go out on submission.

Zibby: Sorry about that. [laughs]

Caroline: No, it was really nice because it led to a really nice conversation with some writers after. It was really sweet of you. You're such an amazing supporter of authors and books. I love watching what you do. Your podcast really helped get me through some of the pandemic and the quarantine, so thank you.

Zibby: I'm so glad. I really felt like we were all going through that submission process with you. You told me the day you sent it out. Then every day, I was worrying and wondering and seeing you in the halls at school. It's a nerve-racking process knowing it's out there. Does the timing of hearing matter and all of that stuff? We were all flies on your shoulder in that event, so sorry for blasting your anxiety out to the crowd.

Caroline: I kind of wish I could reexperience it. Now that it's come to a published book, I can say it was enjoyable.

Zibby: That's good. Let's go back to the beginning. When did you start writing at all? Then let's just go from there. When did you know you wanted to write?

Caroline: I'm someone who's wanted to be a writer my entire life since I knew what it meant to be a writer, I would say certainly by the age of -- I had taught myself to read at three or four. I had two older sisters. All the learn-to-read books were around the house. I just picked them up and never stopped. My first diary that I ever wrote when I was nine that I kept, I have an entry from when I was six. I wrote that I wanted to grow up and be a writer and have two girls and a dog. My husband's like, "Where was the mention of the husband?" I'm like, well, you know...

Zibby: Means to an end. [laughs] Wow, that's impressive. What is it when you will something into happening? I don't know. I'll think of it. Prophesying or something of your future.

Caroline: It's hard work. It was sort of willing it to happen. I had to work and work. It didn't come fast. I thought, by the time I'm twenty, by the time I'm twenty-five. Now here I am in my early forties. I just kept working and working and working. I think that's what made it happen. It wasn't just a childhood dream. You have to work to make it come true.

Zibby: A hundred percent. Very true. Yes. I was not trying to suggest that the heavens just flew down the book deal for you or anything. You knew you wanted to be a writer as a child. Then tell me about some of that hard work that led us to this book.

Caroline: Just years of playing as a child and writing stories and reading. Then for a little while, I sort of moved away from it thinking I could never become a writer. I looked into journalism. I thought about other things, art history. I went and I did a degree in art history. Then at a certain point, I decided books are really my thing. I had done an internship in college for a children's book editor. After I finished my art history master's degree -- I was in London. I moved back to New York. I started looking for jobs in publishing. While I was doing that, I actually got a temporary job working at the bookstore at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were hiring seasonal temp workers for the holiday season. I was there, which was an amazing experience. It was my first exposure to being on the staff side of the Met and got some internships in curatorial departments. I was just applying for publishing jobs. Then I got my first one with [indiscernible] at Henry Holt who I had interned with when I was in college. I spent a few years working for her and Wendy Lamb at Random House. That was kind of like my MFA, learning about how to write and being on the other side of publishing. I was just writing on the side and practicing and working.

Zibby: How did you choose what audience to write for? Why write for younger readers versus adults, or was it just for this specific book?

Caroline: I was thinking to write for adults when I was younger. In college, I took a writing class with Mary Gordon. I was writing short stories. I always was writing about children and childhood. My absolute favorite period as a reader, that time from eight to twelve, reading middle grade novels was such a rich experience, just the way those stories made me feel. Then also, when I got the internship in publishing in college, I applied to a children's book editor and then also to an adult publishing internship. I went for both interviews. Above and beyond, I just fell in love with the children's book world. That's sort of how it came to be. For a while in my twenties, I maybe was still trying to write adult stuff. Then actually when I was twenty-four or so, I think I took my first class in writing for children at NYU with Amy Hest. That's when I focused in on really trying to write for this audience.

Zibby: Wow. Let's talk about how your experience at the Met ended up informing this book because there's so much of that in it, the art world and drawing and the famous artist and all of it. Tell me about deciding to use those bits and pieces of your professional life for the backstory, or not even the backstory, but the whole setting and everything of this book.

Caroline: First of all, I loved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler as a child. The idea of having some sort of behind-the-scenes access to the Met really spoke to me. There have been a few other books that have done it nicely, Masterpiece by Elise Broach which I actually got to help work on when I was at Henry Holt. Then Under the Egg by Laura Marx Fitzgerald was another really good recent one. I wanted to write something that was an ode to the Met and drew on my art history background, my love for art, for the place, for New York City. That's really where it came from. Then I was just intrigued by the idea of, what would it be like to be a kid whose father was a famous artist and who died and left behind this legacy that is visual that people see and have exposure to but doesn't necessarily speak to what the actual personal relationship was? That was the other part of it.

Zibby: That was so interesting how you went into the whole discussion of how you refer to artists in the present tense. Yet they’ve passed away. In a way, it's keeping them alive.

Caroline: Yeah, that's exactly -- the first line of the book, which is a line that stayed through several drafts, then I had actually taken out that line towards the final drafts that I was working on with my editor. Then I finally was like, I want to put that line back in. I put it back in the beginning. I'm glad that I did.

Zibby: I'm glad you did too because it makes you think about the whole -- if you've lost someone and it's up to you to bring back their memory, if you think of them or items trigger them or something, that's one thing. It's another thing to have somebody who you're constantly being re-sensitized to. You're exposed to it, so your trauma keeps coming back up, and your loss, but not even because of you. My grandmother, I can see her sweater and be sad. The famous artist here as the dad, you can't get away from that. It's a very interesting conundrum, the private and public spheres of loss.

Caroline: It is interesting. I'm sorry for your grandmother.

Zibby: No, I didn't mean to bring it in. Most people have lost a grandmother at some point.

Caroline: I lost one grandmother. The one I'm really close to is luckily still with us. My heart goes out to you.

Zibby: Thank you. It was very sad. Tell me about the writing of this book. Knowing your daughters and your life and everything firsthand, when did you do it? Was it when they were all at school? How did you structure your time? How long did it take to write and all of that?

Caroline: I am the most undisciplined person that exists. As our common friend Sarah Mlynowski can testify, she was so key in helping me to settle down and find that discipline. I met her on a plane to Montreal when my older daughter was just starting kindergarten at the same school that her daughter went to. We actually ended up spending ten hours together in the airport because our flight was cancelled. My husband was already up there. She was going up for the holidays. She and her husband took me under their wing -- I was with my two girls alone traveling -- and helped us all get up to Montreal. Then after that, we started meeting at a coffee shop right after drop-off. She would make me sit there at a place with no internet and just write. She would be like, "Just sit down and write for an hour." Of course, we had many wonderful conversations too. She’d be like, "Stop talking now. Write." She really helped me get into this mode of doing that. Then after that period, I started going to the New York Society Library on the Upper East Side after dropping my younger daughter at nursery school. I just made myself do it. I was like, I just have to go. I'm not leaving here. I knew what time I had to go pick up my daughter. I was like, I'm not leaving until I get out this number of words. I just kept going. It was a lot of discipline for someone who's not disciplined, which is hard to do.

Zibby: I think your story just there negated your claim that you are not disciplined because you clearly are. I think having a friend or having accountability of some sort is so key. I'm jealous of you. I wish Sarah still lived on the East Coast. I'm jealous that she was the one because she's such a champion and cheerleader. To have somebody in your corner who believes in you and wants you to do your work, that's so awesome. It's really amazing.

Caroline: I was very lucky. I also had a writers' group that's disbanded slightly now, but I would be meeting with them once every other week. Having that accountability and knowing that I could check in with them was helpful too to keep me going, and those times when I just got so down and thinking, this is never going to go anywhere. I'm never going to be able to finish. I don't know what to do. It's just very helpful to have writerly emotional support and find those people.

Zibby: Very true. Do you draw? I know there was a lot in here about different types of art forms and all the rest. Are you an artist at all?

Caroline: Not at all.

Zibby: I know you say no, but maybe a little? No?

Caroline: Oh, no. I love visual arts. I love textiles and fabrics and visual things, but I cannot draw. I remember in college meeting someone who -- he runs a drawing center or something. He was like, "Everybody can learn how to draw. Close your eyes. Draw what you see." I'm sure that it's like never say never, anybody can do it, but I'm just not talented that way. There's a parallel with writing that I think is really interesting. It's just that difference between what you have in your head and then actually putting it onto the page. I have no conception of how you'd go about that with a piece of art, how you would capture something figuratively. I guess abstract I could try to do. Even then, I just don't have that vision. With writing, I understand from the inside out how it works or how that feels to be able to have this vision in your head and then put it onto paper. Everyone who writes knows what initially comes out is nowhere near close to what you envisioned in your head. Even the final product is never really what you had in your head, but you work and work and try to get it there through all the tools that you have as a writer which you get better at by practicing them.

Zibby: It's true. The artist has all their equipment they can line up, all the brushes and the colors and everything they need. Then writers, it's the transition from head to fingertips in some way, and that's it. All your tools are your hands. I always get so worried whenever I slam my finger in the door or all these ridiculous things where I'm constantly hurt or something's hurting or whatever. I'm like, what if I couldn't use my hands to type? [laughs] I feel like not only is it our primary communication method now, at least for me, I rarely pick up the phone, but also just to get my feelings out of my head. It would be devastating to not be able -- now I'm jinxing myself.

Caroline: Two things. I have a friend who has arthritis. She got arthritis at a young age and has that issue. She has a hard time typing. Also, I think it's so interesting how we've grown up. I learned to type in fifth or sixth grade just on the cusp on when computers were becoming common. Just how my thinking is so attached to typing on the keyboard and being able to hit delete and move and cut and paste, I don't write well by hand, and just how different that is. I always admire when I hear writers who are still writing their first drafts by longhand. My hands are not strong enough. I don't have a good pencil grip. It hurts me to write. I think there must be something very special about writing it out by hand first and then translating that onto the computer when you don't have the time to fidget with every word.

Zibby: I used to write by hand ages ago, like ten and under or something, maybe even a little bit further. Now I just feel like it's so much faster. I can't write as fast as I'm thinking, so it's just so frustrating to wait for the pencil to catch up. This is such a silly thing.

Caroline: That's where some writers that I admire that are very beautiful writers, they probably are writing more slowly and more deliberately because they're not just -- I'm a speed writer. I'll be like, I'm going to sit down and punch out three pages. I can do it in fifteen minutes, but it's not always as well thought through as it would be if I slowed down and took some time with it, maybe.

Zibby: Yes, I'm not good at slowing down pretty much anything. Good point. Having been through this whole process and getting it published, having it coming out into the world, which is so exciting, what advice would you have for young writers, you years ago starting on this journey?

Caroline: The big things are just keep reading so that you learn story and internalize a sense of how a story and plot and character work. I think that's something you just learn by reading a lot. And writing, just practicing, just doing it, and having fun exploring different worlds. I don't know how important finishing a project is. I had this conversation with another writer friend who teaches writing to young children. I never was really great at finishing things when I was a kid, and even well into my adulthood which I think eventually becomes a very important feat. I remember the first time I finished something. It didn't matter if it was good or bad. When you're young, you have so many ideas. It's okay to just keep exploring them. Actually, my almost eleven-year-old daughter writes. It's so fun to watch how she -- she's way better than I ever was or ever am or will be at thinking of plot and character and motivation, all these things that I can't consciously think about. She can talk through it. It's amazing. She'll write a hundred pages of something and then move on to something else. I'm like, is it important for her to finish at this age or just get it down? She was asking me about copyright rules. She wants to quote from [indiscernible/crosstalk]. "I want to have them acting out a play. Can I use the actual lines of dialogue?" I was like, "Don't worry. Unless you're publishing it, you could just have fun and use it. If you do get to the point of publishing it, then we'll figure that out." It's fun to have that in the house, this person to have these talks about writing with.

Zibby: That's amazing. Wow. If a kid of mine could finish a page, that would be a miracle. [laughs] No, I shouldn't say that. Some of them like writing more than others, but none of them are writing a hundred pages and worrying about copyright infringement. That's pretty impressive. Did writing about all of this enhance your appreciation of art? Do you have a favorite room in the Met that you really love? Do you now feel more attached to it having just had it in your consciousness for even longer?

Caroline: I think that came from my -- I'm a docent at the Met. I give tours there. For the past ten years, I've done volunteer training. We used to have volunteer training on Mondays when the Met was closed to the public, so I got to spend a lot of time there when it was closed. I think that's really where my love for the Met has solidified, that it feels like my own backyard. There's so many things I love. I love the period rooms which I think I mention in this book. You feel like you're walking through a giant dollhouse. The American rooms are amazing too. Of course, I love European paintings, which is my field. I'm especially a fan of seventeen century Dutch art. They’ve had a special exhibition on it for the past couple years as they're renovating the European paintings gallery. They're all gathered together in one place. I could just live there. There's so many wonderful places to explore. It's funny. When I go with people to the Met, I'm racing through. I could cover the whole Met in ten minutes because I used to give a tour of the whole museum. People think, where are we? I forget that not everybody is as comfortable, doesn't have the whole floor plan of the Met living in their heads. It's a really special privilege to be able to have that relationship with such an amazing place.

Zibby: I have that with the Museum of Natural History because all four of my kids took a class there for several years, each child. We had to tromp through every single thing.

Caroline: I did that class with Elizabeth, actually.

Zibby: There you go, for years.

Caroline: The asterisms in the book, the stuff about the dad painting stars and he painted this series of asterisms, I learned about asterisms from the natural history class that we did last year. This year, we were doing even more, like astrophysics and learning even more about stars. I was like, I wish I had had all this information last year [indiscernible/laughter] book because we're going a little deeper now.

Zibby: I know. As I go from child to child, I'm like, can I remember the answer to these questions? One time, it was a six-year jump.

Caroline: Have all of them done it? All four of them?

Zibby: Yeah, I did it with all four of them.

Caroline: I'm always amazed at those parents who are there four times a week with each one of their kids.

Zibby: I never did more than two times a week. Dutch art, I love. I took a class in college. I took an art history every semester, but I didn't major in it because I only wanted to take the ones I wanted to take. There was some amazing class by Christopher Wood who's this preeminent scholar on Dutch art. He was amazing. I hear his voice every time I'm tromping through exhibits. Anyway, Caroline, thank you so much. It's so exciting that your book is coming out. I'm excited to do the event together at Shakespeare and to have this book. I started reading it out loud to the kids, but then I couldn't read it fast enough to them for the pace that I wanted to read it. At least they got a few pages. It's really awesome. I'm so excited for you. It's really fantastic.

Caroline: Thank you so much, Zibby. This was fun. I'm looking forward to our event. I'm also looking forward to your books coming out next year, your anthology and picture book.

Zibby: Yes, that’ll be fun. Awesome. I'll talk to you later.

Caroline: Thank you.

Zibby: Told you it wouldn't be bad. [laughs]

Caroline: Thank you so much.

Zibby: Bye.

Caroline: Bye.

Helen Fisher, FAYE, FARAWAY

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

Helen Fisher: Pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: How are you?

Helen: Fine. I feel like I know you because I've just watched a few of your podcasts the last couple of days.

Zibby: Thanks for preparing. [laughs]

Helen: I love your bookshelves in the background with all the color coordinated.

Zibby: Thank you. What is behind you? What is that? What are you counting?

Helen: This lives here. I love it because when I have Zoom meetings, people do comment on it. Over time, it gets colored in. This is a grid that I use now when I'm writing a novel. I know that at about eighty thousand words, I know that I will be near the end. This starts off as a blank grid. Every time I write a thousand words, I color a square in so that I can see myself making progress.

Zibby: I love that.

Helen: It just helps. Although it says the end makes eighty thousand words, this bit was never there. It was always eighty thousand. The actual end was here at 102,000. I finished it last Friday.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Amazing. Congratulations.

Helen: Thank you. What a relief. I loved writing it. It's just nice. When you get started, you feel like, yeah, I'm getting there. Then just one square at a time. That was the most exciting part of my day was getting the colored pencils and coloring a square in. Monday to Friday when I'm writing, I have to write at least a thousand words. I have to color a square in. Then as I got to the end, you can see there was four thousand on that day. You get that momentum towards the end where you think, I've got to get it out.

Zibby: Wow. How many days did that take? Were they consecutive days? Do you work weekends?

Helen: Actually, I was trying to work out how long it took me because I was planning to start this in September when the kids went back to school. I think I wrote a little bit towards the end of August. Essentially, that was about three months. I finished on the 30th of November, but that was finishing a read-through as well. I think it's about three months. It was good. If it was Monday to Friday, I had to do at least five thousand words. Some weeks, I was doing ten thousand words because I was hitting two thousand a day.

Zibby: This is an ingenious system.

Helen: You see, now and then, I can't see where I've got [audio cuts outs]. I had two days there where I wrote three thousand on the first day, then three thousand on the next day. Then it was one thousand. I didn't beat myself up because I'd already hit my quota. It's so hard to keep going sometimes. That's just taking that one chunk at a [audio cuts outs].

Zibby: That was an amazing way to start off this podcast because I usually ask for advice at the end. This was the best advice ever right off the bat. I love it.

Helen: I actually saw a grid like this on Twitter when I first went on Twitter. I don't know who put it up there. Somebody had a little grid. I thought, right, I need a grid like that, just that way to take one step at a time. It's quite useful for pretty much anything you do that's a project that's quite a long time.

Zibby: I just actually found a flip chart of paper stashed away in the kids' stuff. I literally said to my son, who's turning six, I was like, "Should we just throw this away?" Then I was like, how can I throw away perfectly good paper? Where I am going to put it again? What are we going to use it for? Now this is great.

Helen: You've got the flip chart paper, but have you actually got the flip chart, the thing with the stand?

Zibby: Yes.

Helen: Good. They're brilliant for Pictionary and stuff at Christmas.

Zibby: Ours actually, if you pull it off, they have Post-it sticky so you can pull it and stick it on the wall.

Helen: Nice one. Love it. We love our stationary things, don't we? I love anything.

Zibby: Yes, totally. I'm the same way. So your book in the US is called Faye, Faraway, but it is not called that in the UK. Tell me about that and your frustration, perhaps, with the toys and what we call them here versus where you are.

Helen: It was never anything I thought about. This is the proof in the UK. It's Space Hopper, as you know. This is my first novel that's been published. I didn't have an agent or anything. I was writing it because I wanted to write something. I just called it The Space Hopper. It was a little bit of a, what should I call it? Anything. I picked that. If I knew then what problems it causes when you get your heart set on a title, I probably would've just called it Book. [laughter] It was called The Space Hopper. Then my agent said, "Let's perhaps change it to Space Hopper." When it was picked up by a publisher and then the US were interested -- first of all, the UK side did want to change it. We went through all sorts of different ideas. One of the reasons it needed to be changed was because -- I don't think Americans know what a Space Hopper is. Do they know what Space Hopper -- no. I didn't really know that. I am half American, but I was very young when I moved here. I didn't realize. I was googling it thinking, we'll just call it the American version of the Space Hopper, but that was Hoppity Hop. I was like, we can't call it Hoppity Hop.

Zibby: Oh, yes, Hoppity Hop, those little things you bounce -- yeah.

Helen: In England, Space Hoppers are iconic. They represent the seventies, practically, or seventies childhood. I don't think in America that Hoppity Hop has the same relevance. For Americans, was...

Zibby: I remember having one in the seventies, but not everybody, maybe. I don't know.

Helen: We just thought, well, we won't go with that. We'll change it so that we've got a title that works across the pond both ways. The flip chart was full of names, different ideas. They were flooding in, the different names, the different options. Some of them were like, eh. Some of them were like, yeah, that's okay. Some of them, we were starting to be a bit brutal with each other. "Don't like it," that sort of thing. [laughs] In the end, we came up with something. I think it was Twenty Questions for Jeanie Green. We settled on it, or sort of settled on it. Then I had in meeting in London with my editor and another colleague from Simon & Schuster over there. Every time the book was mentioned, they said Space Hopper. I was going, Twenty Questions for Jeanie Green. They were going, Space Hopper. I said, "Why do you keep calling it Space Hopper? We've had our tears. We've put it to bed. We're changing it." They said, "The thing is, everyone in the office keeps calling it Space Hopper. It sort of stuck." They then decided that we would have it Space Hopper over here and just something else in the USA. I think the preference is to have it the same name everywhere. On this occasion, they just decided that it was a really strong, iconic word and image to have in the UK, strong enough to keep it. Then Faye, Faraway, which it's called in America, has got a very different feel to it, I think. The cover that's going to come out does actually have a Space Hooper on the front. Have you seen it? There's a girl. She's a bit blurred. I love that little nod to the Space Hopper. That's the story behind the name of that.

Zibby: I found it so interesting because how you market a book -- they say not to judge a book by its cover, of course, but your covers and names both make it feel very different in both places. I'm glad you told me about the backstory and all of that. Either way, it's great. I feel like Space Hopper is sort of a double entendre, but it's fine. Faye, Faraway is still intriguing.

Helen: I know what you mean. I have to say, whilst they both give me a very different feeling as well, I love them both. I love both the covers. I love both the names. The Faraway is a reference to The Faraway Tree. Do you know The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton? Again, an English writer, quite iconic here. She wrote about a million books. Growing up in England, Enid Blyton was everything that I read. As a child, I loved her books. There's a book called The Faraway Tree. It is mentioned in the novel. Faye, when she goes back home, sees this book on the shelf.

Zibby: Now that we've established the different tones and titles and everything, let's talk about what's in the book and the content of it which, by the way, I cannot stop thinking about. I did not see any of that coming. I keep spinning around in my head and going back to the beginning to see how it all works. It's thought-provoking and amazing. It was so cool. I love how you did the whole thing. I read somewhere that that wasn't even your plan at the beginning. Is that true?

Helen: I didn't know how it was going to end at the beginning. I don't think I'd be able to write a novel like that now because I like to know the destination, at least, and then find my way there, but I didn't know. What happened, I was at a friend's house. She was there with her teenage daughter. She said, "Tell us about your novel." I said, "It's about this." Then the teenager girl, Megan, she was going, "Then what happens?" I told her the next bit. I didn't want to bore them, so I didn't carry on. She's like, "No, no, then what happens?" I told them the whole thing up to where I had written it. I was about two thirds of the way through or maybe three quarters of the way through, maybe not quite as far as that. I was chatting to them. I don't want to give anything away. It was a bit like, I'd love to do maybe this. I'm driving home. That's where my characters, that's when they come to life and they start doing things, when I'm in the car on my own. Driving back home that day, I thought, oh, my god, I think I could do that. I didn't put my foot down. I didn't speed because I don't do that, but I certainly sped up with my writing. I just couldn't stop then. I was really worried I'd get hit by a bus before I got the ending down. I was really happy with the ending. I felt that it worked. Oddly enough, it's almost like it was lurking because when I went back, the things that make it work were sort of there anyway. A lot of them were there anyway. I was quite pleased. They do things on their own, the characters in there. They know what's happening before you do sometimes.

Zibby: It's true. Wow.

Helen: Thank you. Thank you for liking that because I'm quite proud of that ending.

Zibby: It's great because I feel like it's hard sometimes to keep people's attention. I hear this all the time from busy people asking me, how do you get to the end? It's great when there's a plot that -- I didn't know there was going to be anything special at the end. It just made me want to keep reading anyway. It was really enjoyable. Also, even from the very beginning -- I just want to read your opening sentence and maybe a couple other passages. You said, "The loss of my mother is like a missing tooth, an absence I can feel at all times but one I can hide as long as I keep my mouth shut, and so I rarely talk about her." So sad. I just wanted to know -- I'm sorry to even ask this. It's probably none of my business. Did you lose your own mother? Is that where this plot is coming from? No? She's around?

Helen: My mom's still alive. She's eighty. No, the physical losses of parents are none of mine. I do have friends who lost their parents when they were kids. That's where the nugget of the idea came from. When you write about loss, which I had never done before -- in fact, when I was writing this, I had the idea for the story and I didn't really latch onto the fact that it was about grief and loss really until afterwards because I just wanted to get the story down, the plot. Sometimes the grief got in the way a little bit. When I wrote the first draft, I was a bit like, and then she cried and they move on. They’ll get it. I sort of did that. I left the grief out a little bit. When I went back and I had to work on it, that's what I had to work on. When the grief and the emotion needed to be there, it actually dropped out of the -- when I first wrote Space Hopper, I didn't have an agent. I scrapped all my money together and I sent the manuscript off to an editor. When she came back, she was really positive, but she said that. She said, "The thing you need to work on is when the emotion is supposed to be higher, it just drops off the page." I start telling and not showing. It's almost as though I've gone, ah! I can't deal with the grief. I had to face that head on. I dealt with loss from a personal perspective because I didn't ask my friends how they felt about it. I didn't delve into their personal feelings of what it was like to feel loss. I have done that with the new novel that I've just finished. I have really looked at grief face on. I avoided it in Faye, Faraway and Space Hopper at first. No, it's not my loss. My parents are both alive.

Zibby: Now I have to ask about your next novel now that I have the visual of how many words you've gotten done and all of that. Facing grief head on, so what is the plot of your next one, if you can share it?

Helen: I don't know how much I can share, actually. This was a two-book deal. This is still under contract with Simon & Schuster. I will tell you the stage I'm at because it may end up being changed. The stage that I'm at is I've finished and I've sent it to beta readers. I only sent it a week ago to them. They’ve all come back. They’ve all finished it. I was really pleased. It's been really positive feedback. It doesn't really mean anything ultimately because, of course, agent and editors have to like it, but I've had really positive feedback. The central character is a young woman who loses her leg in an accident. She's a very talented sculptor. She lives in Cambridge. She's got good friends. She's very cool. She's gay. She's a boi lesbian. She's just a great character. She's very funny and cool. She lost her parents when she was young. There was a lot of grief to deal with because there was not only the leg, but there was the way that grief -- actually, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about this. One of the podcasts I watched when I was trying to see what you were like --

Zibby: -- Uh, oh. [laughs]

Helen: Is it Hope Edelman?

Zibby: Yes.

Helen: She wrote something.

Zibby: The AfterGrief.

Helen: The AfterGrief. She was talking about parents and how and you lose a parent, that grief never goes away, but it evolves. Then there are days when it's really hard, and days where you're sort of getting on with life and it doesn't impede too much, and other times when it's just terribly difficult. With my character in the new novel, she carries her grief, again, a bit like Faye in Faye, Faraway. She carries it, but she's not walking around -- you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know she's grieving, but she carries her grief. Then when she has this loss, this physical trauma, grief from the past -- it's just too much. It's a loss too far, really, to deal with without her parents being there. There are a cast of characters who are there for her. A bit like in Faye, Faraway, I like nice people in my novels, quirky and unusual, yes, some of them, but generally, good people. I don't think that's unrealistic because they're the sort of people I have in my life. I'm not surrounded by nasty people. I am grateful for that. I've tried to do something similar, that cast of loving characters that we can hopefully get that heartwarming feeling off.

Zibby: What do you think it is that makes you drawn to writing about grief?

Helen: I've thought loads about grief in the last few months because I was asked to do a webinar in the summer called How to Write Grief in Fiction. I was like, "I don't know how to do that." She said, "But you wrote Space Hopper. There's a grieving woman in it." I thought, oh, yeah. Well, I don't know how to write it. If it's worked in Faye, Faraway, in Space Hopper, the grief, some of that was, either it came a little bit naturally or I got a little bit lucky. When I was asked to do this webinar, I did lots of research. They said to me, "You do a webinar on how to write grief in fiction." I was googling, how do you write grief in fiction? [laughter] I don't know how to do it. It was really eye-opening. Of course, I did what you do at the beginning of something. You say, I'm not the expert, but don't let that put you off listening. I found out some really interesting things that are helpful to me. I'll tell you all those things that were so helpful to me and that have really helped with writing this.

When I wrote Space Hopper, like I said a minute ago, I don't think I was drawn to the grief. I think I was repelled by it. I really found it hard to touch it because it was like touching an electric fence. I had to go near it in order to make things happen in the book, but I really didn't want to touch it because it felt like it was going to hurt. I did have an emotional time in terms of writing about the grief in Space Hopper between mother and daughter just because of what I tapped into to try and make it work. I don't know how many people do this. When you're writing and you're trying to feel it, I'd be at the keyboard going, [sigh]. I'd be trying to feel it and trying to tap in, trying to remember what it was like to feel hurt or feel abandoned or feel betrayed and try and tap into that. I think you've got to be willing to feel the hurt yourself in order to get it down authentically. Otherwise, how are you going to do it? You can't pretend. It's a bit like pretending you like a Christmas present. You've got to really pretend you like it. Otherwise, they're never going to believe you. With Space Hopper, I wasn't drawn to grief. I just didn't think about it. It was a side effect. I was interested in the other parts of the plot. I'm more interested in it now. I've been reading it to my son. I've felt much more removed from it, so I've been able to look at that part of it. I'm rambling now. What am I talking about?

Zibby: I love it.

Helen: Ask me another question. Move on. [laughter]

Zibby: There's another line I wanted to talk about. You said, "I realized I knew nothing about this woman even though I loved her with all my heart." I underlined it as I read. So often with our parents, we feel like we know them, but we have a side of them. It's perhaps carefully chosen, perhaps not, but it's a side nonetheless. There's so much we don't know about our parents. Now as parents, there are things that my kids might not know about. I hope they're not listening. Nothing specific. Nothing too revelatory in any way. There is this sense of, can you love someone wholly if you don't know all of them? I don't know. It just raised some question marks. I don't know if you gave that line any thought or it was just a throwaway, but it made me pause.

Helen: I give every line a thought. I mean that. I really think about every line. It's interesting, that one. I've sometimes been with my mom, and then one of her friends will turn up. I'm watching them going, who are you? I'm looking at my mom thinking, you're never like that when you're just with me. That more than the grief, I'm quite drawn to the fact that you present yourself in different ways to different people. I think parenting is the strongest version of that. We feel like we know our kids or they know us because we're around them so much. I know that I have friends who I am a completely different person around compared to other friends. I guess with parents it's the same. I don't know if there's a generational thing as well. My parents would've wanted me to think that they had always been good and never stepped out of line. My daughter asked me the other day if I'd ever skived off school. Skived, is that an English...?

Zibby: Like cut school?

Helen: Yeah, cut school. I did once or twice, but it was horrible. I said to her, "Yeah, I did. Then I found myself sitting on the other side of a hedge outside the field and feeling really weird and lonely. Then all my friends were in the classroom. They might be bored or annoyed, but they weren’t on their own. I felt really out of place. I just tried to get back into the school." It was quite nice to be able to share it. I think we do that a bit more these days. We think it might be useful to tell our kids that we weren’t perfect because then they can let us know when they’ve done something wrong or whatever and not feel so intimidated. Then you don't want to be a really bad influence. Yeah, my mom skived off. I'm going around smoking. [laughter] There's a line to be drawn, isn't there? I think it's better to talk more. I'd have loved to know my parents a little bit better when they were younger.

Zibby: How old are your kids?

Helen: My son's ten. My daughter's twelve. How old are yours?

Zibby: I have thirteen-year-old twins, boy/girl. Then I have a seven-year-old and an almost six-year-old.

Helen: You've got four kids. Wow. Lovely.

Zibby: I do. They're all doing homeschool as we speak. So far, we haven't been interrupted, so it's a miracle.

Helen: They're not going into school at the moment?

Zibby: No. Hopefully, after the...

Helen: Over here, the kids are going to school, which is a bit different. It's good that you're able to homeschool so well. It really wasn't working here.

Zibby: It's remote. The teachers are on. Not to say I got the supplies and all the rest of it. I thought this book was amazing. I love your personality. I'm so excited for what's going to happen when this book comes out. I just had to get that out. I want to know, aside from the flip chart which I am obsessed with, and I'm going to go start one as soon as we get off, and aside from the motivation and the regular writing, what advice do you have to aspiring authors who are trying to write a novel that gets picked up and that you start -- I know you started writing later in life and this is a dream come true. Maybe tell me a bit about that and then go into your advice. Then I'll leave you alone. [laughs]

Helen: No, don't leave me alone. I'm loving it. The first thing I wrote, I was about forty-four. A friend had said to me, "Why don't you write something?" I'd had this idea. I gave her a chapter every week. This isn't Space Hopper. This is something I tried before and I ended up abandoning. I wrote the whole thing. I was just very pleased to have finished it. Then I abandoned it because I'd had the idea for Space Hopper. I've got a couple of bits of advice. One of them kind of relates to this. Have you heard of the author EL Doctorow and his famous quote which is writing a novel is like driving home in the dark? You can only see as far as your headlights will allow, but that's enough to get home if you just keep doing a bit at a time. When I write, I kind of know what I want to achieve in that bit of writing. I write that. Then in between then and writing the next time, I think about what needs to happen just for the next little bit. I do think, for me, it's useful to have a plan of the whole novel first. Taking it a step at a time, that's where that comes in too. If I can take it one step at a time and fill in one bit at a time and gradually see myself getting there, that really helps.

When I sent Space Hopper out to agents, I got a lot of rejections. I started sending out in October 2018. Between October and December 2018, I had about fourteen or seventeen -- I can't remember how many it was -- rejections. Honestly, they ground me down. I had just got to December. I thought, I can't take this anymore. If I can't do it with Space Hopper, I can't do this. I can't do it better than that first time. I just can't go on. Then quite a strange thing happened. In the October that I started sending out, my ex-husband's fiancé who I get on well with -- haven't always got on well with, but we do get on well. She loves books. I didn't realize at the time quite how much she loves books. She said to me, "Can I read your novel?" I was like, "I don't know if that's a good idea." She said, "I'll read it. I won't tell anyone." She read it. She said she loved it. She said, "I've deleted it."

I got all those rejections. In December, I gave up. I cried myself to sleep every night for a very long time. I thought, well, I was happy before. I can be happy again. I kind of got over it. I didn't write anymore. I just left it. Then in February 2019, this girl, Sarah, sent me message. She said, "I've just finished reading a book. It's not the same as yours, but I got a similar sort of feeling, that seventies vibe and just that mother-daughter thing. It just reminded me of your book." That's it. She just wanted to tell me. I was like, that's nice. Then the next day, I was in Waterstones, the bookstore, with my kids. I saw the book that she was talking about. I flipped to the back thinking, I wonder if the agent has been mentioned. She was. I thought, I'll just send it to one more agent, her. I sent it to her. Then I googled her. She's a super agent. I thought, I've got no chance here, but I sent it anyway. A few days later, I had a message from her assistant saying -- it's Judith Murray from Greene & Heaton -- "She's loving the first chapters. Can you please send the rest of the manuscript?" I was in the cinema at the time with my kids and my friends and their kids. I was like, yes! I didn't even want to watch the film. I was like, I've got to go home and send this. Somehow, I managed to get through the film. Sent the manuscript.

It all happened very quickly. That was February. I met my agent on the first of March. My point is, and every aspiring author is told this, you've got to find the right agent. If you don't, it doesn't matter how brilliant it is. If it's not for them -- they have to get passionate about it. I would say read stuff, if you can, that you think is something like yours. It's just got that same feel. Find the agents that worked on them. Genre, for me, wasn't enough. I'm sorry, I'm going off on a bit of a tangent. One of the problems for me with Space Hopper and Faye, Faraway was that because it had a time travel element but it's not science fiction, it's not fantasy, it's not really about time travel at all -- it's about loss and grief and hope and a longing that a lot of people have, everybody has. If I sent that book to agents that were interested in science fiction and fantasy, they weren’t going to be interested. If I sent it to any other agent, they're like, oh, it's time travel. It's not for me. That was really tough for me to get the right agent. Luckily with Judith, I guess she saw beyond the time travel element.

Zibby: What was the other book?

Helen: It was The Queen of Bloody Everything.

Zibby: Now I have to go read that.

Helen: That's really strongly set in the seventies and a very strong mother-daughter relationship. No time travel.

Zibby: Very interesting. Last parting advice and then I'll let you go for real.

Helen: Just read lots. This is another massive piece of advice. I found something that really triggered in me -- I don't know if you're interested in this. I found it fascinating. Everybody says read a lot because, actually, you're getting ideas. For me, sometimes I'm a bit boosted if I think, I think I could do better than that. Then sometimes I read something, and it's so great. I over-awed. I'm like, I'll never ever be able to write something this good. There's something else as well. Space Hopper is written in the first person. This novel is written in the third person. I read loads when I was writing this or just before I was writing it and while I was thinking about it and then when I was actually doing it. If I'm writing in the third person, I can't read in the first because when I come to write, I have to switch the way around that I'm thinking. If I can read really good stuff in the same person as I'm writing in, that really helps. I found that when I wrote Space Hopper, I sometimes thought, I mustn't read because if I've got time to read, then I've got to time to write. I was really pushed then because I was working. My mom had had a stroke. The kids were at school. I'm a single mom. It was quite hard to get those slots of time. In me, reading seems to trigger a writing button in my brain. I would advise that. Sorry, I talk so long about stuff.

Zibby: I love it. This is what it is. It's a podcast so I can listen to people talk about really cool stuff. In my mind, this is perfect. It's a perfect podcast. Helen, thank you so much. By the way, it almost reminded me, in terms of feel -- I don't know if you've read Rebecca Serle's In Five Years. Have you read that book?

Helen: No, but I'm going to write it down. I don't need to because I can watch the podcast. [laughs] What's it about?

Zibby: It's a similar alternate reality thing, but it's really about love. You might want to check it out.

Helen: I do want to check it out.

Zibby: Thank you. You're so delightful. I don't know if we'll ever end up in the same place, but it would be great to grab a drink or anything at some point.

Helen: I would love it. If we're in the same place at the same time, that would be fantastic.

Zibby: In the meantime, congratulations on your book.

Helen: Actually, I'm right outside now. I'm going to knock on the door.

Zibby: Wouldn't that be funny? [laughs]

Helen: I've got a mask on and everything. Your room is massive, so we can sit quite a long way away.

Zibby: It looks big in this Zoom. It's really not. I promise. My ottoman is three feet away from me. I don't know what it is with Zoom. I know it looks much bigger. Anyway, have a great day. Thank you so much.

Helen: And you. Lovely to meet you.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Helen: Bye.

Jennifer Rosner, THE YELLOW BIRD SINGS

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

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

Judy: Thank you for joining us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: We'll take you. [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Are you still singing?

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

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

Jennifer: I'm inspired.

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Thank you.

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

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

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

Christina Baker Kline, THE EXILES

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

Christina Baker Kline: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Zibby: As were chatting about before the podcast, we just did this fantastic event for the North Castle Public Library together last week, but it wasn't recorded. We're going to do it again as a podcast. At least now I got all this inside information about you from that, sort of like an extra prep session. I promise this is being recorded, so we're all good. [laughs]

Christina: Perfect.

Zibby: Let's start with The Exiles. Can you please tell listeners what it's about and what inspired you to write it?

Christina: The Exiles is the story of the convict women who transformed Australia and the Aboriginal people whose way of life was destroyed when British colonists landed on their shores. That is the epic version of the description. It's about three women, essentially, who are transported. There's one Aboriginal who ends up living with a British aristocratic family. It's not so exciting for her, and fun. I read a piece in The New York Times maybe a decade ago that was in a column that Lisa Belkin used to have called Motherlode. Zibby, I think you've contributed to it.

Zibby: Yes, I did. Much less highbrow of a piece, though. It was my being sad I couldn't go to Kids In Sports or something with them anymore and I had to sit on the sidelines.

Christina: I was a mother of kids in the parenting needy ages, and so I always read it. This one column happened to be about the convict women and how they took care of their children on the ships, which were often repurposed slaving ships, headed to Australia for four to six months at sea. I read that and I got this tingle. I realized this is what I want to write about next. It was totally intimidating because it's in the 1840s. It's in Australia and England, neither of which I've really written about. I've written a little bit about -- one of my novels has a character who's English. I grew up in England for nine years. I was born there. I have dual citizenship, so I feel a little bit on sturdier ground with that, but not so much with Australia. I knew it would be a big project. I had been obsessed with Australia ever since going there as a Rotary fellow in my twenties. I loved it. I became really interested at the time in the story of the convicts because, of course, Australia was founded as a penal colony. Twenty percent of Australians today are descended from convicts. Also, learning about what had happened, it's a similar parallel or inside out version, I suppose, or our own story of British settlers coming into America and taking over. It was fascinating to research. I have taught in a women's prison. I did a book on feminism with my mom and interviewed all these women for it. Those experiences, all three of them came back when I wrote this book and came together.

Zibby: I can't believe that twenty percent of the people in Australia still are descended -- isn't that crazy? You would think that it would be mayhem and disorder. Yet it's the place everybody just wants to go visit. They're so laid back. What do you think that's about? That's crazy.

Christina: I do think that the Australian sensibility is in part because of their origins as a penal colony. These people came from a very stratified world in Britain where there was no social mobility. You could not go up and down the social ladder. There were no social programs. The poor were just stuck at the bottom. They got to Australia. Even though the journey was difficult and prison life was definitely not fun, if you got out -- in fact, one descendent of a convict said to me, "Our character is forged out of having survived all this and then being able to start anew," and having all kinds of social mobility once they got out, becoming entrepreneurial, for example, and also this irreverence and this kind of humor that you see a lot of Australian people share. I do think that there's something about that journey that was very specific. It makes them different than Americans. Religion was never part of the forming of that country. It's a very different feeling.

Zibby: I am deep in American history these days. I've been helping my thirteen-year-old daughter study for her social studies test, so it's very fresh in my mind exactly how we became a country. That's all super interesting and timely for what's going on in my house at least.

Christina: I love how these separate colonies show us different iterations of the effect of British colonialism.

Zibby: How did your family end up -- you were you born there and why did you leave, in the UK?

Christina: My parents are Southern. They met at college. My dad was actually in seminary. He was going to become a minister. They were raised Southern Baptist. He got a fellowship for a summer to go to Cambridge and study with Owen Chadwick, this very famous theologian. My father was the first person to graduate from eighth grade in his white trash Southern family, basically, whereas my mother had come from a long line of teachers. They were these two very different backgrounds. I think she influenced him because he agreed to go to Cambridge for the summer. He thought it was just for the summer. Then he fell in love with learning there and became a professor. He got a PhD studying with Owen Chadwick. He became a professor of British labor history of all things. My parents became total hippies and threw off their Baptist shackles. It was also at the height of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and the women's movement and all that. They were very radically involved with all that stuff.

Then when we moved back to the South and my father -- they were sort of rabble-rousers. Finally, my father was fired from this conservative college -- he was teaching in an all-male college -- for anti-American activities for housing draft dodgers or something. They moved to Maine. He became a professor at the University of Maine because I think that was as far as you could get from the South without going to Canada. [laughs] That's just a circuitous way of saying that that was how we ended up in England. My parents became huge anglophiles. My mother's sister married a novelist. We have relatives over there now. My children even have dual citizenship because I was born there. That's kind of wonderful. If Trump had -- sorry to be political, but if things had not changed, we were very much considering -- I don't know if you know Jane Green.

Zibby: Yes, of course.

Christina: She's just relocated to London.

Zibby: I know. I've been watching her redo her house on Instagram.

Christina: Don't you love it?

Zibby: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] her room, her wallpaper, painting, whatever. Yes, I love it, her bathroom. It's fantastic.

Christina: She's so fun.

Zibby: She is so fun.

Christina: We're sort of living through her. I'm sort of living through her.

Zibby: Yes, me too. This also gives more context because the other night we discussed your dad and how you didn't mean to but ended up emulating his deep research skills and how you thought you were a novelist only in that you sort of poo-pooed that whole cerebral sitting just pawing through research. Yet your historical fiction has become a cross between him and what you thought you were going to do. Now that I hear his trajectory, it's even more interesting.

Christina: He was sort of an autodidact, I guess you would say, growing up. He just was in love with learning, always. He was meticulous. He has like a dozen books. I'm really proud of him. His brother and sister then went to college also, and then of course, subsequent generations. It's this American success story of education changing your life kind of thing. I started out writing contemporary novels. I loved that. I stumbled into the Orphan Train story because my husband's grandfather was an orphan train rider, was featured in this article. None of us knew. He was dead. We discovered that he had this whole past that my mother-in-law never knew. Orphan Train, only a third of that novel is set in the past, a hundred pages, but that's what people think of when they think of the novel, and obviously the title and all of that, but also because it was just such an -- people didn't know the story even though a quarter of a million American children went on trains to the Midwest in a labor program ending in 1929. That was how I got into researching.

I realized it's terrifying to write about the past. I remember reading a book by Kathryn Harrison, a novel, that was about foot binding, I think. She wrote contemporary books, novels and memoir. Then she wrote this book set in the past. My first though was, why would she do that? That's so weird. Then my second thought was, that's way too hard. I could never do that. I would never presume to understand any culture other than my own. That seems ridiculous. Then Orphan Train, I sort of was terrified every second that I was writing the stuff set in the past, but I learned I could do it. Then the next book was a whole different challenge about Andrew Wyeth and the subject of his painting, Christina's World. Then this book was an entirely different challenge. Writing Orphan Train made me realize -- here's a big lesson for aspiring writers. Don't box yourself in. Don't tell yourself what your style is or what your subject is or what your interests are or what you're capable of. You never know. If you take chances, you'll surprise yourself, always. It might not always work. In the case of my writing these books, I wrote my way into learning that I could write this way.

Zibby: And that you obviously liked it. You must have enjoyed it to be able to [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Christina: Yeah, that was the thing. Right, that was your original point. My father, his research style and everything, I thought, I will never do that. I do do that. I take notes the same way he did. We both write longhand. We talked about that the other night. I love that part of it. With that said -- I did an event with Lily King last month.

Zibby: I love her too. She's amazing.

Christina: I know. I love her too. She's so great. She has written a contemporary novel after writing one set in the past. She's like, "Oh, my god, it's so much easier." I was reminded that it is a little easier to write about the world you know. At some point, I will definitely do it again. Maybe I'll bring some of what I learned about this stuff to the present day. We'll see.

Zibby: But then you said your next one, you're making the same mistake again by delving into Civil War history. [laughs]

Christina: It's so stupid. The Civil War is the worst period to write about because there are so many real experts. What am I doing? It's about two couples. I'm just going to hew closely to their world. We'll see.

Zibby: It's great. You obviously enjoy challenging yourself on some level. That's okay. Maybe it's too easy. Maybe you thrive on it. I don't know.

Christina: You know what? Here's another secret that's not secret. I think that writing about the past in some ways makes plot easier because writing about the present is sort of amorphous. If you're writing about people in your own world, in a way, then you have to make terrible things happen to -- something has to happen in a novel. You put people through misery in one way or another. That's sort of the plot of every novel. In some ways, writing stories set in the past gives you more of a frame for the story. That's what I have trouble with. The words on the page are one thing. Really, the structure and the plot, I could just write and write not have a plot, but that is not how a novel works.

Zibby: I was just talking to people about some Holocaust-era fiction and how just knowing it's about World War II or the Holocaust or something, you already know the general plot. You might not know the substories and exactly what the book's about, but you already are moved and emotional. You know where your emotions are going to go because of that. This is going to come out the wrong way. It's not cheating, but you're relying on an inherent structure, which is sort of what you're saying about some of your stories, not cheating though of course.

Christina: No, I totally know what you mean.

Zibby: It's like riding that wave.

Christina: I am flabbergasted at the ongoing interest in novels about World War II. Of course, I get them all across my desk in advanced reading copy form because I write about the past. It's amazing to me, the appetite for World War II fiction that doesn't end. In fact, I was talking to an editor about it who said, "We really thought it was a trend." They have all these trends in publishing like chick lit, whatever. Then you never hear that anymore. She said, "What we're finding is that there's an endless appetite." Not all the books succeed, but you're exactly right. I actually, Zibby, had never thought of it that way, that it is about knowing what you're getting in a certain way when you read a book about World War II, especially a novel. Not to generalize too much, but a novel by women with a certain kind of figure on the cover is going to yield a certain kind of story about World War II.

Zibby: If you like that, then you can just keep dipping into that well.

Christina: One of the things for me is that I don't want to -- maybe somebody I will, but I don't want to revisit the same territory. Even though I've written three books set in the past, they're all very different from each other. They're all very different parts of the world and in the past.

Zibby: It's not like the past is limiting. You can write about anything anywhere. The world is your oyster. You could do this forever. You probably will do this forever. There's an endless amount of really interesting things. Particularly with The Exiles, I didn't know a lot about this at all. I feel kind of like a moron with all the things that I've learned from you about it. Even the idea of being trapped on a boat with your children for three to six months, even that alone, that little tidbit when I can't even drive from here to the grocery store with all four of my kids sometimes, I'm like, how do people do that for months on end with no iPads or no nothing to distract them?

Christina: Oh, god, I know. It's just amazing what they went through. We don't know the stories of the poor and the dispossessed because those are not the people who write the history. History is wars and presidents and generals and treaties and robber barons and the wealthy and the educated, the people who are in power. The people I write about are not the people in power. They're the quiet stories. They're the stories that nobody has heard. This story of the convict women, as you say, every continent has its own stories like this. A lot of them are still ongoing. That's one of the things that writing about the past opens you up too, is the realization -- I think we talked about this the other night too. I'm sorry.

Zibby: That's okay. [laughs]

Christina: The realization that, yes, things have changed in some amazing ways and it's great to recognize that, but a lot of things stay the same. Character is the same in some ways. In other words, the feelings people had in 1840 are as real and as deeply experienced as the ones we have today. I think that's what I try to do in these novels, is to stay very close to the bones in terms of making my characters feel as if they could live now so that readers experience these situations through their eyes in a way that feels familiar in some ways. I'm not trying to approximate what someone wrote like in 1840. I'm writing as a contemporary writer about the past. If the books succeed at all, I think it has something to do with that, that impulse to make it feel fresh and modern, to make 1840 feel as relevant as 2020.

Zibby: Which you totally did. You also do it by letting the reader into the inner world of your characters. If you were to see a picture, not even that there were pictures, but a sepia-toned brown and white picture, people seem so different, but they're not. The child -- I always forget her name.

Christina: Mathinna.

Zibby: Thank you. Mathinna, she's an orphan who doesn't want to go off with strangers. That's any child today. Of course, you poke fun at the people who actually were real people in real life with their snootiness and wanting to dabble in basically child snatching for their own amusement. You immediately put us there. It feels so real, which is great.

Christina: When I was researching Orphan Train, I was at New York Public Library a lot. The Lewis Hine collection of photographs of immigrant children working in factories, The Lives of the Poor, really interesting stuff. A friend of mine on Facebook, Margaret [indiscernible], is doing a project. She's working with an expert colorist. They're taking his photographs -- it's stunning. I'm going to send you one of them. It looks like my child or me standing there because she makes it as if it’s today. This kid's standing on a factory floor. You're like, wow, this is not this cracked sepia-toned photo. This could be now. It's cool. That's sort of what I'm trying to do, is a written form of that idea of colorizing, of making a story come to life that seems as if it's in the dusty pages of an old book.

Zibby: Tell me about all the different movie-ish adaptations of the various projects you have going on.

Christina: My three latest novels have all been optioned, two for -- does the big screen even exist anymore? -- for movies and the latest one for a series, which is where everything is going these days. The team that bought The Exiles is all female. They're half in Australia, half in Sydney, half in LA. They're just so fun and wonderful. I'll be executive producing and hope to be quite involved. COVID has delayed everything. They did Big Little Lies and The Undoing that we saw recently on HBO.

Zibby: Which we watched start to finish from eight PM to two AM nonstop. We could not get off the couch, whole thing. I couldn't believe it. This is last weekend, by the way. [laughs]

Christina: Don't you live somewhere near where they filmed? The house?

Zibby: Yeah, I live in the middle of every scene. I felt like I was in the movie. I'm glad I watched it while I was in the city because she could've been walking down my block as I was watching it.

Christina: I just found it really fun and stylish. I think all of us got a little boost in the dark days of November watching that.

Zibby: Yes, though I have heard from some Upper East Side moms, "Nobody would dress like that." We'll leave that alone. Anyway, Christina, thank you for doing another conversation with me that's so fun. I feel like I could just chit-chat with you about your work and why you do the things you do. Next time.

Christina: Next time, we'll talk about you because you have a very interesting life. I want to hear more about it. I can't wait until we can hopefully get together in person.

Zibby: Me too. That’ll be great.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Zibby: Thank you. This was so delightful. I'm thrilled to have gotten to do it twice.

Christina: Yay! I hope it's entertaining for people.

Zibby: It was entertaining for me, so that's all I care about. [laughs]

Christina: That's good. Have a great day, a snow day. Hope to see you again.

Zibby: You too.

Christina: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Felicia Luna Lemus, PARTICULATE MATTER

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

Felicia Luna Lemus: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here to get to talk with you. Thank you.

Zibby: You too. Particulate Matter, do you call it a poem? How do you describe it? It's beautiful and made me feel so accomplished because on this page, all it says is, "Don't they have an app for that?" and I read an entire page. [laughs] I feel like this is the perfect book for people who don't have time because each page just has about one sentence, which is great.

Felicia: I'm glad that it's handy in that way. That's wonderful to hear.

Zibby: Very handy. Not your intention, but a side benefit.

Felicia: It's creative nonfiction. I don't refer to it as a poem or memoir, but I think that it is a bit of both of those things. For me, it's just the best way that I was able to try to create a portrait of this particular moment in my life. This was the form that it took. In part, the funny thing that you say, for folks who don't feel like they have a lot of time to read, I felt like I didn't have a lot of bandwidth and energy and headspace at that particular moment to write. Part of it was, things came out in a concise form. Then I edited it even more to get it even more exact in the ways that I wanted it to be. There's something to that. I could hear that.

Zibby: For listeners who don't know, why don't you tell us about the story that is encapsulated in this work of creative nonfiction? What is it you needed to work through? Tell us that time and place and the emotion, which obviously comes across on the page immediately, but for those who haven't read it yet.

Felicia: Thank you. This is a piece that I wrote when my spouse was very ill. There was a point where she developed -- she’d been a lifelong athlete her entire life, and an avid hiker, played all kinds of competitive sports through school, always incredibly healthy. Out of nowhere, she developed adult-onset asthma. She went away for a business trip at one point to Seattle. We live in Los Angeles. She went away to Seattle where the air is wonderful, no air pollution or anything. She was feeling much better with her asthma. Came back home, and literally could not breathe. It was this emergency situation where the doctors said it's truly a matter of life and death. You need to get to cleaner air immediately. We lived in a very polluted part of Los Angeles. It was the air pollution that was making her sick. It was an incredibly devastating moment for us to all of a sudden -- I can't think of many things that are -- to lose a loved one and to feel the fear of, at any moment this person who I had a fairy tale, wonderful, happy life with all of a sudden might be taken away for no fault of her own.

I wrote this in that year that we were experiencing -- we had to live apart for a while. It was just a really hard time. It was a very hard time. At the same time, I think it was one of those moments where I realized that these everyday details that are so -- sometimes you're just rushing around, rushing around in life. Before, I did not stop to notice the beautiful things in the everyday. All of a sudden, I was profoundly aware of them and grateful for them, just any little thing that could get me through to the next day and to try to get us through this thing that we're going through. Thankfully, the air helped. That's been a wonderful change in our lives. This is the book that came out of that. It's a love letter to her. These were the things that I noticed when we had to be apart and I was facing the possibility of losing her. It was a horrible, horrible thing to think about.

Zibby: What did she say when she read it?

Felicia: It's hard for both of us, honestly. It takes us back to a particular moment that we are so grateful to be past at this point. She knows how much I love her. She's my one. I think it's hard to read about a difficult moment in our life. At the same time, it's a love letter. She knows it. She knows it's filled with love. It's just how profoundly I adore her. It's the whole thing of when you love someone so much, when something happens, it's really devastating. I felt the earth shake when this was a possibility.

Zibby: It's also so timely because of everyone's sort of collective inability to breathe right now with the pandemic, emotionally, but also physically. This is the main effect that people have, when COVID attacks your lungs and you can't breathe. Everyone is going through their own version of this hell at the moment, and the fires, even, in the book. Then there were more fires. It's your own experience, but you're closely tracking collectively certainly what everyone in Los Angeles is going through and around the world, really. It's a moment in time that maybe -- I'm sure you couldn't have possibly intended it to mirror our reality. It just goes to show how much your individual experience can really reflect a greater collective. That sounded like a total ramble. I hope you know what I'm talking about.

Felicia: Thank you. I really appreciate that. It was a profoundly vulnerable-making human experience. In whatever form that comes into our lives, we all experience it one way or another. I don't wish that experience on anyone. The pandemic that we've been going through, just the ways that it so profoundly impacted people's lives and rippled out all across the globe, it's horrifying. It's really awful. At the same time, I'm hopeful that there's something in what I wrote that can give some comfort to someone who maybe has gone through something similar. There's so much beauty in the world. Also, we all have pain. We all love. We all experience loss. If there's any way to have that human connection, I'd be really grateful for that. That would be really wonderful.

Zibby: Even just flipping through randomly, these simple images you have. "This bean and cheese burrito is, as always, too much for me to eat. Your half is waiting for you." Then of course, it's tinged with, is this person going to come back? "The hearing in my right ear keeps going out. Quiet whispers. I stand at the mirror and hold a flashlight to my ear. The whispers stop. The only scratching I could hear stopped. I keep walking into spiderwebs face first. Another web. I am beyond exhausted and numb. I don't want to get used to this." It's just so raw. It's like I'm reading your diary and you're here in my computer. It's like some bizarre experience. "Down the rabbit hole we go. The ten-minute nap with you on the new bed, heaven. I hope we can keep it. A cup of peppermint tea made from you with a spoonful of wildflower honey, heaven. You, heaven." It's so beautiful. It's really beautiful. Here is my question. In terms of making this into a book -- there aren't that many words. I don't know how long it would be if you put it in one Word doc, to be totally technical now to get us away from this emotion and whatever. It's so cute and small. Cute is the wrong word because this is a serious book. The format of it is so compact. How did you know this could actually be a book versus a novella or a short essay somewhere? How did you convince somebody to publish it in this form? It's awesome. People are always like, publishers don't want this, publishers don't want that. Now here is a book which is totally different, which is, in part, why I wanted to talk to you about it because it's just so cool. How did it become a book? Do you know what I mean?

Felicia: I think you hit on something, though. It really is, in some ways, like my diary of that particular time and experience. There would sometimes be one thing that I would fixate on in a day. My mind would just play with it all day, one detail from the world around me or something that I was noticing at home that normally I would just tell Nina about at the end of the day in passing. All of a sudden, it had this huge importance and magnified presence in my life. I'd write it down. It'd be sometimes one sentence, one particular detail that I would just try to capture as specifically as I could. It's that thing of when you're going through something that is so all-encompassing, sometimes that's how the brain works through a situation. I was giving so much energy to do everything that I could to help her get better and to try to keep our life together.

Sometimes all that I could focus on was one specific detail. That's what got me through. It was that one particular beautiful detail like a hummingbird's nest, just this magical thing that this hummingbird's nest fell outside our house. All of a sudden, it was there. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. It gave me some hope. It made me sad too because I thought there should be little birds in here. [laughs] It was this whole mix. Everything had the layers like that. I'm lucky that I work with really wonderful publishers who are happy to take risks and are happy to try to push the boundaries of what's included in literature. Akashic Books, they're amazing. That's what their whole purpose is, is to really expand those boundaries and to bring to the center, pieces that may not be conventional in some ways but that still really speak to a human experience and hopefully are good literature. I'm hopeful that this lands in a way that, even though it's so different, people will appreciate it as much as one of my novels.

Zibby: I didn't mean different would be bad. Different is very good. As somebody who reads a zillion books and looks at books so often, even the books I don't end up reading but I evaluate or whatever, to have something so different makes me stop and sit and look. In a way, that's also what these life experiences do to us. You're going and going and going. Then next thing you know, you're not going anywhere. You're just forced to stop and sit. I feel like the form of the book mirrored the sentiment of the book. I think it really worked. That's my own two cents. Tell me more about your writing in general and novels and how you got started as a writer and how we got here, you and me, this afternoon.

Felicia: Well, because you very graciously invited me to come talk with you. [laughter] It's funny. I thought I was going to be an academic. I studied history in college. I absolutely loved it. I was all geared up to go and focus on German history in particular. I was really interested in cultural history and all different sorts of things like that. I went through my program as rigorously -- I was a nerd. I'm just going to say that. I was an absolute nerd. I was convinced that I was going to be a professor. My professors were supportive of it. Then all of a sudden about a year after I had finished that and I was actually in a teaching credential program because I thought maybe I'd want to do this for a little bit first, I saw an advertisement in the OC Weekly where I lived in Orange County in Southern California at that point. It was kind of like The Village Voice publication.

It was a photograph of this historical figure, [indiscernible]. I saw this picture. I was like, oh, my gosh, who is this punk riot girl? She looked fierce and wonderful. That was kind of my scene at that point. I thought, there's got to be some great show that's coming through town. No, it turns out that it was actually an Edward Weston photograph. There was some very classy, very lovely exhibit in Laguna Beach that I ended up going and seeing. The second I saw this person -- I had no idea who this person was. There was very little written about her at that point. I was just absolutely obsessed and compelled and could not stop thinking about her and started writing. That's how it happened. I was obsessed with this person that I couldn't find anything out about. I started writing these stories trying to imagine who she was. That material became part of what was then transformed into my first novel. Then I came back to it for my second. That's where it went. It's the whole thing of if you just have that one moment where everything changes course. Here I am.

Zibby: Wow. Tell me about, when did you get off the main track and sit and start writing and said, this is it? How did it work in terms of publication? Did you sell the pitches of that? Tell me a little more about it.

Felicia: I ended up going to graduate school. As a nerd, I felt like I needed to learn more and be guided and just learn more. I wanted to know more about how to do this and to learn from some people who knew how to do it well. I went to graduate school. My thesis ended up becoming my first novel. It was really difficult at first to try to get it placed. Then once it happened, it just all clicked really beautifully. I'm really grateful for it. It was a really lucky set of events that happened.

Zibby: Amazing. Are you working on anything now?

Felicia: Oh, my gosh, I'm always writing. There's so much going on in the world right now. I'm trying to figure out what the next project's going to be. There's so many things that I've been thinking about. It's going to take a minute. There's just so much going on in the world that is worthy of being addressed in a really smart way. I think it's going to take me a second to try to figure out how I might try to contribute to that.

Zibby: All right, we'll give you a second.

Felicia: Thank you. [laughter]

Zibby: What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Felicia: Read everything you can, especially the things that inspire you. Read it as a book lover and also actively reading it to figure out how writers are doing the magic that they do that inspires you. Work really hard. Be kind. I think that's important. Be kind to the people who support you and take time to read your work and offer feedback. Be appreciative of all of that because it's always a group effort to get this stuff done. Stay humble. Just keep working hard. Keep at it. If it's what you love, it'll click.

Zibby: And don't forget to breathe.

Felicia: That too, and stretch, especially right now with everything being on computer all the time. Be sure to go outside and enjoy beautiful nature. Spend time with people that you find joy in. Stay human

Zibby: I miss people. I miss people a lot. Thank you. Thank you for your time. I'm so glad our paths have crossed in this bizarre format such as it is. Thank you for talking about your work. I'm glad that your partner is okay and that you guys got through this. I hope you both have continued health and all the rest.

Felicia: Thank you. I really appreciate it. You and your family too.

Zibby: Take care.

Felicia: Bye. Thank you.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Ashley Audrain, THE PUSH

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

Ashley Audrain: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you for having me. As I was telling you before we started recording, I am a huge fan of your podcast. I love it. I listen to it every day. I don't know how you do it, but the content you put out for us, for all of us listeners, we just appreciate it so much, especially during these COVID days when you just need something to get through the day. You're always there. Thank you.

Zibby: Aw, thank you so much for saying that. It really, really means a lot to hear, especially from an author whose book I so enjoyed. To know that you are out there listening to other interviews, it's awesome.

Ashley: I have to start by telling you a funny story. I listen to your podcast a lot in the car when we're driving to school and driving home from school. My son, who's now five, he humors me and listens along with me all the time to your podcast. He always, especially when he was bit younger, he would hear your opening and he would say, "Mom, why is this lady saying you don't have time to read books? She's saying you can't read books. You don't have time." It's just so funny, trying to explain to him what it means. [laughs] He's always very concerned about the title of your podcast and what that means for me. I've assured him I read, so it's okay.

Zibby: Maybe I should put a disclaimer that it's just a joke. I read lots of books. I love reading books. I have an almost-six-year-old, but he's still five. The other day, he was in the corner. He was holding up some little toy. He's like, "Hi, I'm Zibby Owens from Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." [laughs]

Ashley: They're always listening.

Zibby: Always listening. Five is the cutest age, by the way. I'm really sad that it's coming to an end having lived through it now four times. Anyway, can we talk about your amazing book, The Push? which is alternately chilling and life-affirming and worrisome. I just wanted to run out and find a therapist to throw in the pages. I was like, oh, my gosh, now she needs a therapist. Wait, now she needs a child psychiatrist. Wait, now. Oh, no! Then last night, literally in some scenes, I have to close my eyes. Tell listeners, please, what The Push is about and what inspired you to write it.

Ashley: The Push is about a woman named Blythe Connor. She comes from a history of women who have struggled deeply with motherhood in various ways. She's quite determined that her experience is going to be different and that she's going to be this warm, empathetic, present mother that she never had. She and her husband have their first child, a daughter. Her name is Violet. At first, Blythe goes through the various typical early days of motherhood that we can all relate to, tired and just overwhelmed. Then as Violet gets a bit older, she kind of starts to realize there's something wrong with Violet. There's something different about her. She's quite aloof and doesn't really express much emotion. She's not very attached to her mother. As she gets a bit older, she starts to witness some behavior that she feels is malicious towards other children. The problem, of course, is that her husband cannot see this. Nobody can see this. She's really the only one who believes this about her daughter. They try to move on in their marriage and have another baby, Sam, who's born shortly after. In Sam, she finds that connection that she had hoped to have as a mother with her child until something very tragic happens in the family and they're all forced to face what has happened and who their daughter and who Blythe herself is. The rest of the novel looks at that unraveling of the family from there. That's sort of what happens without giving too much.

Zibby: I have to say, the whole time I was reading the book, I kept flashing back to your opening scene of the book which makes you wonder, how did they arrive there? I don't think I'm giving anything away because it's the opening scene. You have the mother in the car looking in through the window. You're wondering why. What is going on? How did she end up there? As you go, you still don't know. What is it? How is this happening? It's almost suspense, but it's not a thriller. How would you even describe? I don't view this as a thriller. It's more like a psychological drama of sorts. Yet there's this element, this big question mark hanging over it.

Ashley: It's interesting you say that because a lot of people have described it as a thriller. I didn't really set out to write a thriller. It wasn't what I had intended. I love, like a lot of us, just a page-turning book, something that you want to find out not so much what happened, but why. Why did that happen? Why have we got there? It's funny. One of my editors described it as emotional suspense, which I thought was maybe a better description for it than thriller. I think people who enjoy thrillers will hopefully enjoy this book because of the pace of it, but it's really more emotional suspense than anything. It's really more of a family drama, I think, than a straight thriller where you're trying to figure out what happened.

Zibby: You can definitely tell in the writing just how close to early childhood you are. You can tell in some books, maybe this author has young children. Maybe she doesn't. With a galley, you never really know how old anybody is. I'm not looking at the author photo. I don't have any context. I just always am diving in. In this book, I was like, this author definitely has had children recently. You remember all of it. I started finding myself wondering what your view on motherhood was because there seems to be so much ambivalence on the part of the characters. Did you feel that way? Then I was thinking, if you didn't have any of these ambivalent feelings, how would you have put these characters together, and even just the inherited trauma of generation after generation of mothers who are disappointing their children? Tell me about where this is coming from for you.

Ashley: It's interesting. I started writing this book when my first child, my son, was six months old. When he was born, he had some health challenges that we didn't know about. We didn't expect them. It puts you in this situation where you're planning for a baby and you enjoy your pregnancy and you have this healthy pregnancy, and you think everything will be fine. Then when he was two weeks old, we discovered it was not. We were going to be spending a lot of time basically living in a children's hospital and trying to get him better and figure out how to manage the problems that he was having. We know how hard those early days of motherhood already were. At two weeks old, two weeks in, to have everything completely change and flipped upside down was very challenging. I loved him. I loved being his mother, but I just didn't know -- I guess I was learning how to mother within the walls of a hospital and with nurses helping you instead of your family members. It was very challenging, obviously. It just really made me think a lot in those days about those expectations of motherhood. Society sort of teaches us to think that it's going to be a certain way and that we're going to feel a certain way and it's going to look a certain way. Then when it isn’t, it's very isolating. It's a very isolating experience. You really don't feel like you can really relate to anybody. I remember all my friends having babies at the same time, which at first, seemed like such a wonderful thing. Then when my experience ended up being just so different and so far from the experience they were having, it was hard.

Those are the things that I was mulling over in those days. Then having the mind that I do, taking it a bit further and wondering, oh, my gosh, this was not experience with my son, but what would happen if it was even worse, if you didn't like your child or you couldn't feel like you loved your child or your child did something that you couldn't forgive or you really regretted having that child? What would that feel like? Those were the things I started writing about. The stuff I was writing about was so much darker than what I was going through. I was going through a hard time, but the stuff I was writing about was darker. Maybe that was a way of working through or coping with I was going through at the time. It's just exploring that.

Those were the seeds of thinking that grew into the character of Blythe and her daughter, Violet, and the story that became The Push. Then once I started exploring Blythe and figuring out who she was, especially through revisions, I started to understand that I couldn't really understand Blythe without understanding the women that she came from. That was when the backstory started to develop, which is basically the story of Blythe's mother and Blythe's grandmother and the challenges that they went through. I was very much interested in that idea of inherited trauma and what we carry from the women before us and how much of that is this maternal anxiety and how much of it is true, literally in our DNA, in our genes. That really interested me. Although, I feel like I must disclaim this on every interview I do that my mother is nothing like the mother in the book, nor is my grandmother. I feel like I owe her the service. [laughs]

Zibby: I had a feeling this was coming. I could tell you were going to that place. I do not blame your mom. She is off the hook. You seem pretty normal from our little limited interaction. [laughs]

Ashley: It's really funny because I didn't talk to my mom, my parents, or really anybody much when I was writing this book about what it was. It was internal and living within me. Then when I realized that this was going to happen and the book was going to be published, I had to tell my mom what the book was about. She was like, "Oh, wow, interesting." It was a lot for her to take in.

Zibby: It's interesting, too, how at one point you have Blythe go to the support group for mothers whose kids have done sort of unpardonable offenses. I always think about that when I hear about the mother of this shooter or the mother of this. How does that mother feel? Of course, the mothers of the victims. You do your best with your kids. As parents, I know I've had moments where I'm like, oh, my god, I cannot believe my child did that. Then it reflects on me or reflects on my parenting. What does it say? Then you wonder, like you did, let's extrapolate and make this the biggest mess ever. Then what?

Ashley: It's so funny. I always think that too. When you hear something in the news or see something that's happened, I always think of the parents, if the biological parents were the people who raised them and were involved in their lives. My mind always goes there to think also, what did the parents know about their child? Did they ever suspect? Did they ever think that something like that could happen? Did they believe the humans they were raising capable of that? If they did, did they say anything to anybody? Would you say anything to anybody? It kind of comes back to that question that I tried to explore in the book. Ultimately, what do we owe our children? What do you owe them? We, in many cases, birth them and raise them. What's our obligation in helping them to live in this world? It's really interesting. A lot of it comes back to just the nature versus nurture argument, of course. It almost goes further than that, asking yourself, what are the lengths that you would go to? It's really more of an ethical debate. It's funny that you say that because my mind always goes there too.

Zibby: There was just in the paper this week -- this episode will come out not this week. Now we're in -- I don't even know what we are. November, pre-Thanksgiving. There was just, on the New York Post, some man pushed a woman onto the subway. He had done so also in January. The mother had said, "Don't let my child back out on the streets." They did. He did it again. She was like, "I told you." It's her face in the paper. He was adopted, not that that matters. It's so on the theme we're talking about, not necessarily all the themes. Wait, so let's go back to the fact that you had a six-month-old son and decided to try to write a book at that point and that the book ended up becoming this, which is a good book, not the tired musing of a completely stressed-out new mother. Tell me about that undertaking and how you did it.

Ashley: I think it did start as the tired musings of an overtired mother. It's gone through a lot since then. It's gone through a lot of revisions since then. It's interesting. I had always wanted to write. I was writing. I was taking writing courses at night and writing on weekends. I had another full-time job and career. I couldn't afford to do an MFA when I was in school. I honestly felt like I couldn't really afford to pursue writing for a lot of my life because I needed to go to university and work part time to pay for that and then get a job that could pay the bills when I left. Writing just never felt attainable to me, writing as a career, and so I didn't pursue it that way.

Zibby: What kind of jobs did you have?

Ashley: I worked in public relations agencies. Then after working in agencies for a while, I did move over to publishing and worked at Penguin Canada as a publicity director. I was just really focused on that and writing when I could even though I would've loved to be a writer full time or to consider myself that or be published. When I had Oscar, when I had my son, I realized I wasn't going to go back to work after that because, I mentioned, he had these health challenges. Life felt different. I just couldn't really see myself being able to balance both of those things. It was around that six-month mark where we weren’t spending as much time in the hospital. I was home a bit more. We were lucky to have a bit of babysitting help through the week. I used those hours to write. It's funny. You had an author on your show, Rumaan Alam. Yours was such a good interview. I thought he put it just perfectly. He talked about when you have children, sometimes it can really clarify for you what you really want out your life and who you want to be and who you want to show up as in the world. Who do you want to be for those children? Who do you want to be for yourself? Your time becomes so limited when you have kids.

I really started thinking about that limited time very differently. I just thought, I need to do it now. This is when I need to pursue this because this is the time. Yes, I was tired and exhausted. It's very hard to write during those months. It is a privilege to have help with childcare. That is for sure. If I didn't have help with childcare those few times a week, I wouldn't have been able to do that, I don't think, because that's really how it started. Our babysitter would walk through the door, and I would run past her with my laptop under my arm running to the coffee shop on the corner trying to get in as much as I could while she was here. It wasn't easy. I think without help, it is very, very difficult. There was just so much on my mind then too. It's funny. A lot of writing advice you get is, write the story that's just burning inside you or you feel like only you can tell. I did have a bit of that. I had this creative energy around that time that I just felt compelled to do it. Looking back now, of course, I'm like, I don't know how I did that. I don't know if everything were to happen all over again, if I could do it again. It just felt like what I needed to do at that time, if that makes sense.

Zibby: Can I even ask, how is your son? This might be personal. Is he okay?

Ashley: He is. Thank you for asking. That's so kind. Yes. He has a chronic illness, a chronic condition. He will have that forever, but it is very manageable now. He is thriving and is just the most incredible five-year-old, almost-six-year-old like yours. Now those days feel so far behind us when things felt so much worse because he's doing so well. We've learned how to manage it. It does get better.

Zibby: I know you said earlier, I can't remember if we were recording yet or not, that he was upset that I was always talking in your car radio about how moms don't have time to read books. Tell me about your reading life. Are you reading a lot around the house? Do you have books everywhere? What's your relationship to reading like these days, or do you just not have the time?

Ashley: We read a lot in our house. We do. We do read a lot. My kids love books, which is great. I'm definitely a nighttime reader. I have a hard time reading during the day, but I read every night. It's amazing how fast that can add up if you just commit to doing it at night. I love to read new releases. I love to read debuts. I love to read whatever the newest book -- which is probably why I love your podcast because you have many authors whose books are just coming out. It's such a nice pairing with reading what's publishing at the moment. We do read a lot. I always make sure my kids know how much I'm reading. Even though I'm reading at night when they're asleep, the books are piled on the bedside. We go to the library a lot and buy books a lot. I hope that my kids grow up with that. We'll see.

Zibby: It's so funny because I didn't set out to do books that were coming out now. In fact, I remember at the very beginning when I was trying to get an author on my podcast, the response was, "So-and-so doesn't have a book coming out." I was like, so? It never occurred to me that authors would only be interested in doing publicity around new books. It's become this because that's what the authors need the most, but I never would've thought. I was like, I'm going to work my way around my bookshelves. Luckily, most of those authors end up coming out with new books. Then I'm like, let's talk about your new book, but really, I want to talk about the old one from ten years ago. [laughs]

Ashley: It's funny, isn't it? I would've thought that too. Now that I'm writing, I sort of get it a little more because it's hard to talk about one book and be writing another book. You have these two totally different worlds in your head. I think a lot of it is people needing to kind of shut out the world and dig into the next project. You can't even let your mind go back to the other book. Maybe that's part of it. It is funny. There's something fun about always wanting to dig into whatever’s new and whatever's out. I'm definitely a news junkie. I love reading the book that's everyone's talking about. The reviews are happening. I just find that adds to the whole experience of reading for me.

Zibby: There's some books, though, I know they're going to be big books, but I know I wouldn't have bought it. This is my big thing. I'm always like, I was pitched that, but I didn't do it. My husband's always like, "Maybe you're passing on way too many books." I'm like, "I just have to stay true to the books I would want to read. Maybe it's going to win a huge prize, but I'm not sure I would want to read it." I don't know. I have to want to read it.

Ashley: I'd still have to want to read it. It still has to speak to you in some way.

Zibby: Not that I haven’t read tons that don't go beyond my comfort zone. I am so grateful for them. If it's just a little too -- I don't know. I don't even know why I'm talking about this.

Ashley: I know what you mean. Books still have to speak to you. I don't know about you, if I'm not enjoying a book, I will put it down. I will never force myself to finish a book because that's just not what reading is to me. Reading's just about being swept away and enjoying it, enjoying every page and enjoying every minute that you're devoting to that book. If I'm not in love, I usually don't finish it. I get it. I totally get it.

Zibby: As a big book lover, tell me about the thrill of the publication journey for you then from when you were starting to write and then editing. Then what happened? Tell me about what happened.

Ashley: It was really crazy. It was a wild ride, for sure. I worked on the book for about three years from that time I was talking about when I first started to get it to where I felt like it was maybe ready to go out there in the world. Because I'd worked in publishing for a couple years, although I was on the editorial side, I was on the publicity side, I think I had an idea of how things worked and going to agents. Even though you have that knowledge, you still don't know what you have. I hadn’t shared it with that many people. As I shared with a few, had got a few more readers, I started getting more comfortable with going out there with it. Again, because I worked in publishing, I kept friendly with -- it was Penguin Canada at the time; this was just before the Penguin Random House merger -- with the head of Penguin Canada, Nicole Winstanley. She and I would meet a couple times a year for tea or whatever just to keep in touch. I met with her. This is when I was just working on my query letters getting ready to send it out to agents. I met with her for tea. I was so anxious to meet with her because she didn't know that I was writing. When I worked there, I never talked about wanting to write a book or publish a book. I didn't tell anybody that I used to work with that I was doing this because it just seemed like such a pipe dream and was so interior, living within me only.

I thought, I want to just get her advice on agents. I had this list of agents I wanted to go to and would love her opinion on it. I sat down with her for tea. I said, "I have something to tell you. I'm nervous to tell you this." She interrupted me and said, "Let me guess. You've wrote a book." [laughter] "Was I that transparent? I thought you would never guess that I would do this." It was kind of funny. She gave me some good advice. Then it was out to agents. From there, it was really a whirlwind. It was life-changing. I will always remember and I always save that email back from my agent, Madeleine Milburn, she's now my agent, just her reaction to it. It's really incredible to see this dream, to see something that you've worked on for so long that you just don't know if it will ever be anything. Then to have these people take a bet on you and have this kind of reaction to your work, it's a very magical thing. I will never forget it. I don't take it for granted. I feel very lucky to have had that experience. Then from there, it very quickly went out to publishers and went out into the world, and we're here. Magical is kind of a funny word, but that's just how it felt. It felt kind of magical, kind of incredible.

Zibby: That's amazing. Are you working on anything else now?

Ashley: I am. I'm revising the second novel now, which has been a really fun process. The process of writing it has been very different than writing the first one just because life looks a little different now. I have two kids. They're a little bit older. We're in a pandemic, obviously. That's another challenge. I've been working through that now. I'm so new at this still. I still am just trying to figure out how to write a book. This is the second one, so just working my way through it.

Zibby: Can you give a glimmer of a plot, or not really? Is it too early? If it's too early, don't worry. I don't want to jinx it or anything.

Ashley: I feel like it's for the same readers of The Push. I feel like it's for those same kind of readers. It's family drama. It's emotional suspense. It's motherhood and female friendships and marriage. I'm really excited about it. I'm enjoying writing it.

Zibby: That is a combination that I would be like, yes, sign me up. Pre-sale, pre-order, okay, you sold me on that. That's good enough. I will definitely be reading that book. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Ashley: After I just said I have no idea what I'm doing? [laughs]

Zibby: I don't believe that at all. Scratch that and be honest.

Ashley: I have advice for new mothers who are writing because I think that's my experience. That's the place where I can offer advice. It's two-part advice. The first part is that it's okay to ask for help to write your book specifically. It's so hard to ask for help, period, as a mother, we know this, or as a parent, especially when your kids are super young because you just have so much anxiety about other people caring for your kids and all of that. Something that I had to learn with the first book when my son was so little was that it was okay to ask my mom or have a babysitter or obviously my husband, whoever, to say, I need help for two hours and it's because I'm going to go write this book, and making that really a priority, showing people that writing a book is a priority for you and that writing is as important as the things that my husband got to go out to do like go to work, where I was home. Making it a priority, committing that time, and letting other people know about it. Giving yourself permission to make that as important as doing the errands and going to the grocery store and everything else. That was my number one.

The part two to that advice is that everybody says, so many writers, accomplished writers, say you have to write every day. I really believe that when you have little kids, you cannot write every day, and it's okay. I did not write every day. It took me longer to get this book done, but I could not write every day because I was exhausted. I was overwhelmed. Babies get sick. Things pop up. Some days, I just did not have it in me even if there was a blank slate for the rest of the day. Some days, I just could not rally to write. I think if you're a new mom, throw that advice out the window. Just do your best. Write when you can. When you can get those windows of help, write during those windows of help. Something I could do every day, which I do recommend doing every day, is think about the book. You can think about the book even when you're not sitting down at your computer to write it. I would think about the book at the park or think about the book when I was walking or think about the book when I was bouncing the baby or whatever at night.

It's funny. I won't say which writer it is because I don't want to freak her out, but I live across the street from an accomplished Canadian writer, which is kind of funny. She has no idea who I am, so as I said, I won't mention who she is. I remember -- this is with my second. I was going through revisions on The Push. My second baby, she was such a bad sleeper. She was up. It took me so long to get her to bed. I remember standing in my house rocking her and bouncing her from the witching hour until the wee hours of the morning and looking out across the street and seeing this other writer's office light on and just thinking, oh, my god, she's in there writing. She's in there writing her next book. She's able to write for hours on end. I would just sit there and bounce my daughter and think, I wish I had that. I wish I could do that. It made me so anxious thinking that this woman across the street had all this time and I did not because I had this crying baby. I couldn't write every day, but I could think about the book every day. I could make notes. I could come up with ideas. I could feel committed to the project every day in other ways. That is my best advice. Don't worry if you can't do it every day.

Zibby: By the way, some people find having too much time to be a paralysis of sorts as well. If you just have blank pages in front of you and endless amounts of time, I find it harder to get anything done than when I have like two seconds and so writing is an Instagram post. I'm like, well, that's all I got. I can't even remember the last time I opened up Pages or Word on my computer. Anything I "write" now is in the body of an email or it's a post or it's something. I'm like, you know what, it might not be this way forever, but this is what we got right now. [laughs]

Ashley: That's what you have at that time.

Zibby: You got to go with it.

Ashley: Being a mom is hard. You got to do whatever you can get done. You can't live up to other people's expectations of what it looks like to write a book.

Zibby: Whatever you're doing, you look amazing. [laughs] I say that because I'm particularly disheveled. You look so put together like you're Kristen Bell on her way to the Oscars or something, and I'm just like, oh, my god, with this great book. For all the drama, from the outside, it looks like you have it made.

Ashley: That's very, very sweet. Thank you.

Zibby: I'm really excited for you. I can't wait for this to come out in January. I'm just so thrilled. I'm so thrilled for you. Thanks for our little intro pre-recording and the conversation and the hours I got to spend with your novel, which were great.

Ashley: Zibby, thank you. That means so much coming from you, truly. Thank you so much.

Zibby: Thank you. Let's stay in touch. Buh-bye.

Ashley: Bye.

Nessa Rapoport, EVENING

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: That sounds like fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Whoa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nessa: You have to get there yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nessa: Thank you for inviting me.

Zibby: Of course. Buh-bye.

Nessa: Bye.

Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher, SANCTUARY

Zibby Owens: Hi, everybody. Hope you're having a good afternoon. I am really excited to be doing an Instagram Live with Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher. I've been carrying this around in my bag all day, as I often do with all my books. I hope people are going to join or I'll feel really silly. Anyway, first, I am going to talk to Paola and then Abby because you can only have two people on at a time. I'm going to invite Paola to join in a second. I'll just read you this description if you want. "It's 2032, and in this near-future America, all citizens are chipped and everyone is tracked--from buses to grocery stores. It's almost impossible to survive as an undocumented immigrant, but that's exactly what sixteen-year-old Vali is doing. She and her family have carved out a stable, happy life in small-town Vermont, but when Vali's mother's counterfeit chip starts malfunctioning and the Deportation Forces raid their town, they are forced to flee. Now on the run, Vali and her family are desperately trying to make it to her tía Luna's in California, a sanctuary state that is currently being walled off from the rest of the country. But when Vali's mother is detained before their journey even really begins, Vali must carry on with her younger brother across the country to make it to safety before it's too late. Gripping and urgent, co-authors Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher have crafted a narrative that is as haunting as it is hopeful in envisioning a future where everyone can find sanctuary." That is your preview. Now I'll get Paola into this discussion. She can tell us all about writing this book, writing it jointly with Abby, what inspired the book, and so much more. Hi, Paola.

Paola Mendoza: Hi.

Zibby: How are you?

Paola: I'm good. How are you?

Zibby: I'm good. Sorry it took so long for us to connect on this. Congratulations on your book.

Paola: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for reading it and having me here today.

Zibby: You're welcome. It's a chilling thought, what would happen if this was reality. How did you envision this alternate universe? How did you think about it? Then how did you make it into a novel? Which came first?

Paola: I've been working in the immigrant rights space as a storyteller for over fifteen years. I've heard and had the privilege to listen to the stories of immigrants, specifically undocumented immigrants in this country, for a very long time. In 2018, the Trump administration implemented a horrible policy called Family Separation. What that did for those that might not remember is that families across the southern border into this country were ripped apart from their children. Their kids were placed in foster cares. Their kids were placed with strangers in some instances. To this day almost three years later, not all families have been reunited. In that moment of despair and darkness, there was a group of us that started organizing against this policy. We organized marches across the country. The, I don't want to ever say good news, but there was a positive outcome in that the zero-tolerance policy that allowed family separation as we knew it then, it stopped. It was ended within six weeks.

Then I started to imagine what would've happened if we hadn’t stopped that policy. What would that allow the Trump administration to -- what would he have done next? What would've been the horrible thing that he would've done next? I started to imagine the beginnings of the world of Sanctuary. I started to see this really scary, dark, unfortunate place that I didn't want to live in, a United States that seemed possible, but definitely not the future that we wanted. I then asked myself, what's the answer to this horrible nightmare? The answer was Vali, our main character, sixteen-year-old in the book. She's undocumented in the book. She does extraordinary things to protect herself and ultimately protect her community. That was the beginnings of Sanctuary. Then I started working with Abby Sher, who's my cowriter. The two of us really dug deep into the bones of the book and wrote this together.

Zibby: What made you decide to have a cowriter?

Paola: It's a great question. Three things, if I'm being really honest. One, I had written a book previously by myself, and I hated every moment of writing it by myself. I'm a collaborator. I love collaborating as an artist, as a writer, as a director. That process was so solitary and so lonely that I was like, I will never do that again. That's one. Two, also, the Trump administration, working within immigration and telling stories of immigrants, what we've seen in the past three and a half years is that Trump really attacks and dislikes immigrants. His policies are really horrible towards immigrants, and so I knew that I didn't have the luxury at this moment in time to post up in my house for two years and just write a book. I knew that I was going to be needed to do other things on top of writing this book. In order to write this book within the two-year time period that we had given ourselves, I had given us because I wanted it to come out before the election, I knew that I couldn't do it alone. Those are the two real answers. The third answer I would say is that I'm a better artist when I collaborate. All of my previous work, whether it's filmmaking, whether it's visual art, photography, writing, I'm a better artist, I create better, I enjoy the process better when I am collaborating. I feel like my voice is actually much clearer when I'm collaborating. I was excited to experiment with collaborating on writing a novel, which is probably the artistic process that has the least amount of collaborations in it.

Zibby: How did you do it together? Did you each take a section? Were you on Zooms? What was the process like of your cowriting?

Paola: Everyone is very curious about our collaboration.

Zibby: I know. I'm always so intrigued by this. How do people do this? It's like making magic together. It's like a witches' brew or something.

Paola: It is a witches' brew. It absolutely is. We didn't set out with any specific rules in place. It just kind of fell into place. We don't live in the same city. We live close enough, but not in the same city. A lot of the work was actually done remotely. Google Docs were our best friends. We wrote live on Google all the time. We would plan out the story more than just a detailed outline, specifically, all of the action plot points of what was happening when and how the character got here and what they encountered, and the conversation was about this. It was a very, very, very detailed outline, for lack of a better word. We each knew where the story was going. Then that took, obviously, a very long time because it was so detailed. Then we would go and we would individually write. Our strengths revealed themselves. Abby, her strength is in character and in detail. My strength is in plot and in story. We each knew that that's where our mastery was. That's what we gravitated to, though it doesn't mean that we didn't work on other aspects of it because we did. At certain points, the drafts were just going back and forth. We're editing and writing, and editing and writing, and going back and forth with one another. It's unclear exactly who did what because it just becomes this witches' brew, as you said. We were just there stirring the pot.

Zibby: [laughs] It's great you found somebody you could work so well with. That's so great you are great at collaborating. I just feel like it's so easy to find the wrong person. You can like someone a lot as a person, but maybe you don't work so well together. You don't know until you know. Hard to get into that when you're writing a book, I would think.

Paola: It's true. It's true. It's a marriage, but it's a marriage that will last a finite period of time. Hopefully, it doesn't end in divorce. In our case, it did not end in divorce. We're renewing our vows. That is a good thing.

Zibby: Are you writing another book together?

Paola: Yeah, that's the plan. We want to. We want to write the second book to Sanctuary.

Zibby: Maybe if marriage actually was for a finite period of time, more people would be able to be successful at it if you knew. Just saying. Maybe it's time for --

Paola: -- You might be onto something.

Zibby: I don't know. Not that I want my marriage to end. I'm very happy. Anyway, back to the book. [laughs] Tell me a little more about your background in film and photography and how all these creative juices seem to flow in you. How did this all happen? How did you get started?

Paola: I started off as an actress, actually. I have my undergraduate and my graduate degree in the theater, in acting and directing. That was what I wanted to do, and then I realized as I started working professionally as an actress that the life of an actress was not for me because I didn't want to tell the stories that were being told. I had other desires for stories. It was very unfulfilling. I had nominal success. I was a working actress, but it was just not a happy place for me. I decided that I wanted to make a documentary. I picked up a camera. I worked with one of my best friends. He had never made a documentary either. The two of us were like, let's figure this out. We had a lot of filmmaking friends, so we called them. We were like, "We have this camera. How do we turn it on?" That's where we started. We followed a family for about a year and half, really committed to their story, and learned how to make a movie while we were making a movie, both of us did. Then we edited the film, learned how to edit while we were editing, and finished this film.

I fell in love with the movie-making process. I fell in love with the ability to see a story, envision a story, and tell the story how I wanted to tell it. Then I was like, okay, that was a documentary. I want to write a script. Never had I written a script, but obviously had read so many plays. As an actress, I'd read so many scripts. I was like, I'm just going to try. I worked with a friend of mine who had been my editor on the documentary. I was like, "Let's write this script together." She had never written a feature script either. She was like, "Okay, let's do it." We figured it out. It was based on my mom's story when we first came to this country. The film is called Entre nos. I was like, "I want to direct this. Let's co-direct it together." We co-directed Entre nos. That's kind of just been the process. My first book, the opportunity landed in my lap. I was like, I've never written a book before, but let me try.

This idea of experimenting in different mediums comes from actually something that I, when I taught -- I taught quite a lot before I had my son. It was something that I told my students. It's really this mantra that I had lived by as an artist. I would tell my students, don't be afraid to create bad art. We will all create bad art. If you just embrace the fact that what you try and do might be bad, but it doesn't make you a bad artist, it's more freeing. I look at my work and what I'm working on as the entire body of my work that I'm working on for my entire life. That will determine my value personally. I'm not talking about the value to the exterior world, but my value personally as an artist. There might be some work that is way better than other work. There definitely is some bad shit that I've created, but that doesn't determine my value as an artist, nor does the "masterpiece" I might have created determine my value as an artist. It's about the entirety of my body of work. Knowing that, it's allowed me to go out and experiment and try things that I've never tried before and get an idea and be like, okay, let's try it. Let's figure it out. Let's try it and see if I like it and see if it works. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't.

Zibby: Your son is so lucky because that's exactly what they tell you to do as a parent, is encourage your kids just to try and not to worry about if they're doing it well or not doing it well. That's how you end up creating all of this stuff. If you're afraid to try and fail, then forget it. That's amazing and very inspiring. You liked writing, so this is now something you want to keep doing and not just a one-time experiment. Do you prefer different -- which is your favorite if you had to rank them? Just wondering, like film and...

Paola: I think that I am more naturally a director. That is definitely my initial voice. In the past three and a half years since Donald Trump was elected to the presidency, I realized making movies takes years to make, writing a script and getting a movie produced. I tend to work in independent film. It takes a very long time. I knew that I was not going to be able to do that in the Trump administration. I was, again, going to have to be working on a much faster pace. All that to say is that I haven't made a feature film in a very long time, but my heart is pulling me back to that. I feel that that's kind of my natural zone as an artist. To have the ability to experiment in other things is really exciting too.

Zibby: Is Sanctuary going to become a movie?

Paola: That's what we hope, yeah. That's what we're in the process of. Cross your fingers. Lots of things can happen, but that's what we're trying to make happen right now.

Zibby: Amazing. Do you have any advice for people just starting out, writers, creators, anybody who could use your encouragement? You tried, and look how successful you've been.

Paola: I would say, A, most importantly, don't be afraid to create bad shit, bad art. That's really important. Two, tell the story that is keeping you up at night. Tell the story that you can't ignore. Tell the story that, maybe it's lived inside of you for decades. Maybe it just got planted into your heart or just started whispering in your ear. Tell that story because the road to creating art is a very difficult road. It is not easy. Everything in the world will conspire to make you stop. If you have this story inside of you that you can't let go, that you can't ignore, you will be able to push away all the things that are telling you not to do it and get to the finish line and tell the story how you want to tell it. Be very protective and specific with the stories that you invest in.

Zibby: Will you continue to be an activist/creator? Would you see yourself as an activist?

Paola: Yeah, absolutely. All of my artwork is social in its storytelling.

Zibby: I didn't want to label you an activist if you didn't self-identify that way.

Paola: I definitely self-identify as an activist, but I absolutely identify first and foremost as an artist. I'm an artist first and an activist after my art.

Zibby: Awesome. This is great. Thank you. Now we're going to talk to Abby. Thank you so much for coming on and discussing. I'm sorry we can't all do this all three of us. I'm a moron for not remembering that Instagram couldn't be three ways, but this is great too.

Paola: No worries. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. I just want to say that the book is available at all bookstores. You just can click on my link or my name up there. The link is in my bio. Please support women writers, Latinx writers. Please support immigration stories. Go out and vote right now if you can because early voting is happening now.

Zibby: I voted.

Paola: Oh, good. Where do you live? What state do you live in?

Zibby: I live in New York, but I got an absentee ballot because I wasn't sure if I would be in the city. I voted, so everyone can leave me alone. [laughs]

Paola: Wonderful. I'm so glad. Didn't it feel good to vote?

Zibby: It did. I felt a huge relief. I felt like I was happy to spend a month telling everybody that I already did it. [laughs]

Paola: Good. Thank you so much. Take care.

Zibby: Bye.

Paola: Bye.

Zibby: Now we're going to talk to her coauthor, Abby Sher. Let me get her to join. Abby was also on my podcast for Love You Miss You Hate You Bye, which was a fantastic book. Hi. How are you?

Abby Sher: I'm good. How are you?

Zibby: I'm good. Where are you?

Abby: I'm doing something scary just for you, Zibby. I'm doing this from soccer practice for my son. I'm sitting on a public bench, which freaks me out. I thought walking around would be a little bit more disturbing.

Zibby: Did you put something down like newspapers?

Abby: No, it's just me. That's me.

Zibby: It's going to be okay.

Abby: It's going to be okay. I'm just going to wash my butt really well tonight.

Zibby: Get your clothes, put it in the laundry. This is so typical. "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," you're at soccer practice for your Instagram Live.

Abby: Let's hope no one gets hurt. I'm just going to keep one ear over there.

Zibby: I just talked to Paola. She's amazing. That was so fun. I didn't know her at all, so that was great, or I hadn’t talked to her at all. Tell me your side of collaborating with her and how it went on this book. I know you've written all by yourself and now together. What was it like?

Abby: I have to say, now that I've tasted the juice, it's really fun to collaborate. It really is. Writing is a very solitary sport. I've whined for the past ten years, I just want to do this with someone. It was really dreamy because, as Paola said, I think we just gravitate towards different things. I gravitate towards the character side of writing. She gravitates toward the plot. It's not like we set that out for each other, but it really helped us because she had a vision of where these characters needed to go. Then I would need to get in their brains and be like, why would they -- I was staying up at night going, why would they want to go into a desert? She was staying up at night plotting out how physically they would get out of a desert. Spoiler alert, they get out of the desert, but you know that.

Zibby: [laughs] That's okay. I feel like you have this great skill of getting into the minds of, I guess, high schoolers. I feel like your last book was all about helping a friend through a really difficult time and getting through that period of life. Now we have Vali who's getting through this and dealing with her brother and eagerly sitting there while her mother -- what's going on with her aunt? All that anxiety you feel as a pseudo-adult, tell me about that. Tori O'Connell just wrote, "You're a YA savant."

Abby: [laughs] Tori, that's because I'm stuck at that age. I think I've been told by many a therapist, are you sure that you're in your forties? You act like a fifteen-year-old. I do think that I, in many ways, am emotionally stuck as a teenager. I also think that they wear it all. They have it all happening to them. They don't know how to hide it very well. They put on a good show, but they don't know how to hide their feelings very well. They don't know how to process them very well. It gives me, as a writer, a real treat to try to process it with them. We've been talking to some middle schools and high schools now, which has been really, really fun. We're talking to students who are this age. It's fascinating to see. Vali doesn't want to be an activist. Vali doesn't want to be a revolutionary. She doesn't want to be in the limelight. She's not someone who's even going to go try out for the spring play. She's a thoughtful teenager. She's concerned about friends and lip gloss and things that we all are concerned about. There's no part of her that's like, "I'm going to change the world," when we start the book. She's forced into this role. I think that's how a lot of us learn our skills, is that we're forced into it. I didn't want the circumstances I was raised in. She certainly does not want the circumstances she's raised in. It was fun seeing a class the other day be like, how do you learn how to fend for yourself like that? They didn't know exactly what it meant to be undocumented. Paola's really, really great at explaining it to any age. It was really fun to see how a sixteen-year-old processes that literally right in front of you.

Zibby: Wow. Paola was saying she identifies first as an artist and then as an activist. Where are you on the activism scale?

Abby: I think she's changed me. I didn't start this book thinking I need to be an activist. I thought, moms don't have time to read, moms don't have to time to get out and -- I'll march. I have my pussy hat. I will do all those things that I can, but at the end of the day, I also have soccer practice. I don't know how to do that without somebody really falling through the cracks. Paola's definitely inspired me to take more action. I've brought my kids to a lot of marches. They did family separation marches. Now I just don't even offer it as an option. I just say, "Mom has to go canvasing." If there is an argument, I guess it happens when I close the door. [laughs] That's really great parenting. Don't take this advice.

Zibby: I was sitting there thinking, wow, this is impressive. If I say I'm going to this doctor's appointment or something, they're like, "Why? Why can't you take us here? Why can't you do this?" I'm like, I don't know, I just can't.

Abby: Exactly. There's definitely that. Then the more that they learn, the scared-er they get right now. "Why are you going to a protest? Can people shoot you at protests?" It's a crazy time to be alive. It's a crazy time to be raising children and trying to explain what's going on.

Zibby: Wow. Are you one of these people who's asking everyone if they’ve voted?

Abby: I will be honest, I have not voted yet. I have my ballot. I don't know exactly what I've been waiting for. I think I'm going to be so sad when I let it go. I feel like it's my conch. I have to do it. I've been phone-banking. That's not fun. I hate phone-banking.

Zibby: I know that Paola said she wanted to work on another book with you. That's really awesome. Are you also doing stuff on the side just yourself for your own writing, or are you waiting to do another with her?

Abby: I'm always noodling on something. I've been playing with these characters for a long time. It's an adult book, I hope. Although, I always say that, and then it winds up being a YA book. I'm trying to take it from the perspective of the mom for a change. I have been working with Rebel Girls, which is a really fun company that started Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. I love the spirit of that whole team. They just had a virtual rally this weekend, which was really fun. People from all over the world joined in. It was led by girls who are young activists. I'm dipping into things. My goal is definitely to write the next book with Paola and see what happens of these movie talks and things like that.

Zibby: Excellent. That's exciting. It's really good to see you again.

Abby: You too. We talked right before this all happened, right before the lockdown.

Zibby: You were one of my last in-person interviews.

Abby: It was another lifetime.

Zibby: Another lifetime. Now through the screens, I've gotten to know a lot of people. Anyway, congrats on this book. Stay in touch. Have fun at soccer.

Abby: Take care. Have a nice day.

Zibby: Bye.

Abby: Bye.

Zibby: Everybody, I know that many people aren't watching right now, but hopefully later, please buy Sanctuary. This is a really interesting book about -- it's basically a what-if for our country. Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher. You can get yours now. Bye.

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Jean Kwok, SEARCHING FOR SYLVIE LEE

Jean Kwok: Hi. I'm so honored to meet you. Hello.

Zibby Owens: Hi. It's so nice to see you.

Jean: It's great to see you too. I am such a fan of yours and of your show. When they said you were interested in talking to me, I was just thrilled.

Zibby: Aw. I'm a fan of yours too, so this works out perfectly.

Jean: You're so kind. How are you?

Zibby: I'm okay. Thanks. I'm okay. How about you?

Jean: It's a crazy time, right?

Zibby: It is a crazy time.

Jean: Especially today. I just have to survive this.

Zibby: I know. Being mid-election results is a tricky time to have anybody focus on anything else.

Jean: It's a great break. It's great to do something else for a little bit because I'm just obsessively watching CNN. What's going to happen to us?

Zibby: I know. I know. Finally last night, I was like, I'm just going to go to sleep. I can't do this anymore.

Jean: I have to put it away. I have to not keeping looking at it every two seconds because it feels like the fate of the world is in the balance.

Zibby: It certainly does.

Jean: It's really, really hard, but thank goodness we have books. We have other ways of reaching people.

Zibby: I completely agree. Let's talk about your book because that's why we're here, give you some more room to promote your amazing work of fiction. Would you mind telling listeners what Searching for Sylvie Lee is about? Then I want to hear what inspired you to write it.

Jean: Searching for Sylvie Lee is the story of two sisters and a mother. What happens is that the dazzling, beautiful, successful, older sister, Sylvie, goes to the Netherlands to visit her dying grandmother, and she just disappears. Her younger sister, Amy, who's always been in her shadow -- Amy's the stuttering, shy one. Amy has to pull herself together and try to find her beloved older sister. It's this story about these deeply rooted secrets that tie these three women, Sylvie, Amy, and her mother, together.

Zibby: Amazing. How did you come up with the idea for this book?

Jean: The inspiration for this book was actually deeply personal. My brother, Kwan, who was the dazzling, brilliant one in our family, disappeared about ten years ago. He was the one that we had always looked up to. He was the one that we always went to when there was a problem. I was the black sheep of the family, so nobody ever listened to me. I grew up in a very conservative Chinese family. I am the youngest of seven children.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, seven children.

Jean: Exactly, and I'm a girl. The two markers of hierarchy were age and gender, so I was at the bottom of the bottom my entire life. My brother and I, we really loved each other. He always was so great. There was never any jealousy between us, maybe because there was a ten-year age gap as well. When he disappeared that night, I really thought, oh, my god, there's nobody to turn to. The person who has to figure out what happened and take charge is me. That is the beating heart of this book, that feeling of loving someone so much and having relied on them your whole life and then needing to grow as a person in order to try to help them.

Zibby: What happened with your brother?

Jean: What happened was that -- it happened right before Thanksgiving, so right around this time of the year. At first, he hadn’t called home when he was supposed to call. That's the kind of thing where you think, for a responsible person, that's strange, but it can happen. You can get really busy. You could forget. Nobody had been able to reach him. People were kind of alarmed, but not really panicked. When he didn't come home for Thanksgiving, that was a true sign that something was wrong.

Zibby: How old was he at the time? How old were you? When was this in life?

Jean: I was in my thirties. He was in his forties. I was already living in the Netherlands. I was getting these panicked phone calls from my family in New York. As you may know, I was born in Hong Kong. I grew up in New York City. We grew up extremely poor. We're a working-class immigrant family. I lived in an apartment in Brooklyn that was unheated for most of my childhood. I worked in a clothing factory with my brother and with my family from the age of five through, really, most of my childhood. That was our background. Kwan had always been the person that I looked up to and who kind of showed me a way out of that circle of life at the factory where you'd go in as a child and you leave as an old woman dragging plastic bags home to your apartment because you really never leave the factory.

Zibby: Sorry to keep interrupting. Wait, so did you go to school, or were you working? Did you go to school, or not?

Jean: I did. We all went to school. What would happen is that my father would pick me up -- I would wake up. I would go to school. My father came and picked me up after school. I would go to the factory in Chinatown and work until nine or ten at night. All of my homework, all tests, everything, had to be on the subway or during breaks at the factory. My brother, Kwan, and my other brothers who were ten years older, they were in the high school phase at that point. They did the same thing. They had, of course, much more pressure. They had SATs. They had papers, projects, tests, all of which could only be squeezed into those train rides or breaks at the factory. What was even worse was that, for them -- I would go home around nine or ten at night with my parents, which is late for a little kid. For my brothers, they actually went on to a second job waiting tables at a restaurant until the middle of the night. In fact, that was how I actually began to write. I didn't decide to be a writer, but the moment I began writing was when -- I remember one night. I was sleeping on my mattress on the floor because we didn't have beds. Oh, my god, you do not want to be sleeping on a mattress when your apartment is overrun with vermin the way ours was because you would just hear the mice racing past you in the night. I'm a very terrified-of-vermin person to this day. When I go in the garden, I put on a radioactive suit. I was the same when I was a kid. I was just terrified of things crawling on me. I would be constantly making noise and banging around me to try to keep things away.

In any case, I was already asleep. One night, Kwan came home. It was the middle of the night. He laid a package on my pillow next to me. That was so unusual because we were paid one penny per piece of clothing that we did at the factory. After a long process of processing the clothing, we were paid one penny per piece. Of course, piece work is also illegal, but that's a whole other story. There are a lot of things in my childhood that were illegal. We were paid by the piece instead of by the hour. You can imagine. We had debt. We had rent. We could barely afford food. It's a hundred pieces of clothing before you have a dollar. I really didn't have toys or anything like that. It was amazing to get this gift. He had somehow managed to save enough to get me a gift. What amazes me to this day is that he had not given me a toy or a piece of candy, but he gave me something that would change my life. He got me a blank diary. He said, "Whatever you write in this will belong to you." That was just a powerful idea for a kid who had changed countries, changed culture, changed languages. I didn't speak a word of English when I came to the US. I suffered for it greatly in school. It was just amazing to have a place where I could put down my thoughts and my dreams.

My parents had gone from being parents to being people who were even more scared and confused than I was. Kwan was a really important person in my life. He was the first person to leave the family. He went to MIT. He showed me that there was a way out. He would help me by giving me things like a typewriter to work with. Eventually, I followed him. I went to Harvard as well. I kind of began the rest of my life in his footsteps. The fact was still that he was the older brother. He was the one who was listened to at home. When things went wrong, he was the one who stepped in and fixed them. When he did not come home for Thanksgiving, I remember I just thought, oh, my god. I realized that this was something that was going wrong on a level greater than any I had ever experienced before. This was not failing a test or the normal things that go on or some guy breaking up with you. This was really serious. We didn't know what had happened to him. He wasn't in a relationship at that time. It wasn't like we had a girlfriend or a wife who would know what he was doing day by day.

Finally, we found out from a friend that he had flown to Texas to buy an airplane. We'd grown up. He became quite successful. He was a scientist. He loved everything that went really fast, so he was a pilot as a hobby. He'd gone to buy an airplane. That was all we knew. Of course, I start trying to call small airports in Texas. Do you know how many airports there are in Texas? There are really a lot of airports. He picked the wrong state to disappear in. That is not a good place to disappear. It was just impossible to figure out where he was and what had happened. Finally, I hacked into his email. Once I did that, I was able to retrace his steps. Of course, all these things are going through your head. What happened to him? Was he kidnapped? Did the sale go through? Did they trick him? So many things could've happened between that airplane purchase and his disappearance. We found out that what had happened was that he had bought the plane. Everything had gone well. He had taken off, but he had not landed. That was the next stage of the mystery, was to try to figure out what happened to the plane. Something that I never realized before was that if you have an accident in a car, you are found because you are by a highway or you crash into someone's house.

If you crash in an airplane, actually, a lot of people who crash in those small planes, especially if something happens in a wooded area, they're never found. An airplane may seem large to us, but it's actually nothing compared with the forces of nature. They can just disappear into the woods. You never know what happened to that person. There was a period of a couple of weeks when we were trying to track down what had happened to him, amazing volunteers, search and rescue. You're thinking every day, oh, my god, he might be dying of thirst with a broken leg next to that plane. That's the worst thing. You don't know if any delay is making the difference between life and death. What happened eventually was that they did find his body. He had been flying it home to West Virginia. Somehow, in the mountains, a sudden storm had come on. He had to lower the plane to escape the lightning and thunder of the storm. In doing so, he nicked a tree and crashed into the side of a mountain. When that happened, he had died instantly. It was, of course, the worst thing that had ever happened to me, to hear this news. In a way, it was also a relief to know. Just the act of knowing is a gift in a time like that. It's a tremendous loss, but I was really grateful to all of the volunteers and the air force and everyone who had looked for him and actually found out what happened.

When I set out to write Searching for Sylvie Lee, which is my third novel, I wanted to talk about this story, but I couldn't do it. It was so painful. There was so much that was tied between me and story that I just couldn't move forward. Then I realized I need to not make it a man who disappeared. It has to be a woman. The moment I made the story about two sisters, it changed everything. Sylvie and Amy took on their own life. Of course, the emotional engine is still there because that's at the heart of why I wrote this book, and also, many issues about language and culture. How well do we really know the people that we love most? What secrets are we hiding from the people we love the most? What secrets are they hiding from us? Once I made that change, then the story just flowed and came out as if it were complete.

Zibby: Wow. What a story. First of all, I am so sorry for your loss. Second, I'm incredibly impressed by your detective skills and ability to have figured out what happened at the time. I'm just so sorry that that all fell into your lap and that you had to live through that. Also, going back to your childhood, the fortitude and immense mental willpower and just strength to get through that type of childhood and still end up at Harvard -- I went to this cushy private school, and kids couldn't even get into Harvard, falling over each other to try to get in. I am just so impressed. I didn't know that entire backstory. The novel, which I did read, I didn't even realize -- now it, of course, all has so much more meaning to me. Thank you for sharing that story. Then I also saw that your mother has passed away. Not to open up every old wound you have, but I wanted to hear what happened with her. I know it was about ten years ago. You've written a lot about that. I wanted to hear about that and how maybe that affected this other trauma. When, in sequence, did everything happen? This is a lot of questions. How were you able to move on and go back to writing, go back to focus after everything that had happened?

Jean: Zibby, this is what I love about you and why I'm such a huge fan of your work. You go right to the heart of why people do the things they do. I think that I kind of write from trauma to trauma. If I try to write about something too directly, then I can get blocked. Writing, for me, is a way of transforming the things that happen to us. I think that's what books are about. Books are about connection and communication. Yes, maybe you went to a cushy private school, but you had your own problems. Life is hard for us all. Life is hard in so many ways. The great thing about books is that you can live somebody else's life, but you can also connect to them and realize how much they are like you and how many struggles they’ve gone through that are actually, at heart, similar to the struggle that you went through yourself. My mother is indeed a very big influence in my books. Tragically, my mother died after my brother. This is how life is so unexpected. It's one of the things I say to people. Love the people you have around you. Try to appreciate having them around you because you can never know what's going to happen. I never ever anticipated that I would lose my young, healthy, vibrant brother before I lost my mother.

My mother was, of course, a tremendous loss and influence in my life. When I was little and we were working in the factory and I was going to sleep on that mattress on the floor, I would look up and every night of my childhood, my mother was sitting up late falling asleep over these bags of clothing that she had brought home from the factory. Because the apartment was unheated in New York City, which is, of course, incredibly cold in the winter -- in the back of the apartment, in fact, people had thrown bricks through the windows. The landlord hadn’t bothered to fix it like the landlord had not bothered to fix many things. In the front, they did fix the windows because, obviously, they didn't want a complaint. In the back where nobody could see, they didn't. Our windows there were only covered with black plastic bags and duct tape. The wind would gust against them all winter. We did the only thing we could, which was that we turned on the oven. We left it on day and night throughout the winter so that it was this little source of heat in the kitchen despite the lack of glass in the windows. My mother would just sit by that oven and fall asleep next to the oven every day working hard.

In my books, of course I talk about language gaps and about the differences between the first generation and the second generation, but I have a lot of sympathy for the first generation. I am a first-generation immigrant myself, and I know what my mother went through. I know what it's like to be the person on the subway who is dressed weird, who maybe smells weird, who's carrying a lot of plastic bags, and oh, my god, does not even speak English. To us English-speaking folks, it feels almost like an insult that somebody didn't bother to learn English because English is the universal language. We have the luxury of traveling everywhere over the world and everyone bends over backwards to speak English to us. We never have to think, how good's my Russian? What if I had to speak Russian to everybody in the world? How well would I be able to do that? It's very easy to make a judgement about somebody based upon how they speak and what level their English is at. I saw people making that judgement upon my mother my entire life. She never learned to speak English. The only words she ever learned of English was, when boys would call the house, she would pick up the phone and she would say, "She not home." Then she would hang up the phone. That was the only bit of English she ever learned.

I saw what she looked like from the outside. I knew what she was like in Chinese from the inside. When I wrote Searching for Sylvie Lee, for example, the narrative is told by these three women, Sylvie, Amy, and Ma. They're all thinking in their own languages. Sylvie was raised in the Netherlands with her grandmother. Sylvie is thinking in Dutch, which I also speak because I married a Dutch guy and I'm now living in the Netherlands. Amy is thinking in English. Ma is thinking in Chinese. You have moments like when Amy goes to see Ma and we see Ma for the first time. We see how Ma, from the outside, is this quiet, beloved-but-simple woman who's kind of getting berated by the customer in the dry cleaners. Then we open into Ma's chapter, and we realize this is a completely different person in her own language. She's deep. She's poetic. She has a wealth of feeling that she cannot communicate in English and that she also, tragically, cannot even really communicate to her own daughter. That's what happens in an immigrant family. We come to the US. Oftentimes, the younger generation does not know the original language as well as the parents. The parents don't pick up the new language as well as the kids. Then you have this huge language and communication gap between the people who actually love each other the most.

Zibby: Then what ended up happening with your mom?

Jean: My mom died of cancer. We knew that she had been sick for a while. She was doing really pretty well until the very end, so she didn't suffer very long, for which I'm glad. We knew she was getting old and getting frail. When she passed away, it was a different kind of grief. It's always a huge shock. It's always really terrible. I still have dreams where everybody's alive. Then you wake up and you're just confused by what's reality and what's not reality. It was different. My brother, who disappeared so suddenly out of nowhere, that was just such a shock. You're knocked for a loop because you did not see it coming.

Zibby: Wow. I, again, am just so sorry for all the stuff that you have been through. I'm curious about your family. I know I'm barely talking about the book now, but you have such a captivating story yourself. Was your mother still working in the factory? What happened to your older siblings? Were they able to achieve a point of comfort in their financial situations that your parents could stop working? What ended up happening?

Jean: We all, luckily, wound up doing well and getting out of the factory. Because I have these older siblings, they worked really hard. They were actually able to take my parents and us out of the factory. My mom had a lot of happy years along with my father. My father was pretty sick when I was a kid. He died when I was pretty young. My father wasn't as much of the day-to-day life of the family as my mother was. My mom had a lot of happy years. I remember, my brother, Kwan, and I understood she was getting old even before she began to get sick in any way. We would make sure to take her on trips to Las Vegas. Can I just tell you, don't go to Las Vegas with your mother. [laughs] I love my mom. It was great to be there with her. She was like, "Those girls are not wearing anything. Don't look." We would go through the casinos blind. She's like, "They're gambling, oh, my god. Come on." She really liked the food. She liked all the buffets. She liked the big hotel and stuff like that. We had a good time. We took her on a lot of trips. We had a lot of really good times with her. I guess it's one of the ironies of life that when my brother died first, I had all these photos of the three of us that I had taken, really, to remember my mother. Then instead, it was my brother who had gone.

I will say that that was the time in my life when my debut novel, Girl in Translation, was published. It was surprisingly very successful from the moment it was published. I was really happy that they were able to see that. They just saw the beginning of that. At first, my family was kind of surprised that I do write about my past. Searching for Sylvie Lee is, of course, in many ways, about the disappearance of my brother, but also the price of the American dream. Who pays and how do you pay for achieving that type of success? What happens if you're not capable of achieving the American dream, of achieving that success? That's what Sylvie Lee is about. My first book, Girl in Translation, is really about those years when we were really poor and living in that apartment and working in the factory. I remember they were a little bit surprised that I had written about it because people who come from a background like mine don't usually grow up to become writers. I had that instinct as well for a long time that if you're able to escape that life, you want to put it behind you. You want to forget about it. You feel ashamed of it. It feels like nobody else ever had anything comparable to what you went through. You just want to move on.

I had written the book as fiction thinking that nobody would ever read it and that nobody would ever ask me, is this based on your real life? Then of course, my books became very successful. Everybody was asking me, are your books based on your real life? My family, they were a bit in a shock when that came out. Then I think it really turned to pride because so many people were so kind and had the generous reaction you just had which was, how amazing that you survived that and managed to come through whole and in one piece. I think that that shame has turned into pride. I give a lot of credit for who I became and coming through as, I hope, as a kind person as opposed to a bitter, hard person -- that can also occur when you reach success. I really give credit to my mother because my mother really brought us up to say, the most important thing is who you are and the people you love. The things you have -- yes, it's nice to have enough. It is essential to have enough. Once you have enough to eat and to live, after that, it's really all about who you love and who you are.

Zibby: Wow. That's so nice. It's so important. It's so important to get that message out and find what unites all of us. In a time of such divisiveness, stories like yours are so important to hear. Messages like your mother's, they just go to the root of what is common and shared among everybody no matter what the background or circumstance is like. Jean, I am just in awe and so impressed. Now I have to go back and read your first two books which I haven't read yet. You're giving me more work here. [laughs]

Jean: I think you are so right. We are in a time of such divisiveness. This is a moment when books can do so much for us. It's something that I think about when I'm writing. I don't want to preach to anybody. I want the book to be a really fun read just by itself. It's a page-turner and a mystery and suspenseful. You can turn the pages just enjoying the story. I also think that the reason I do these things with language and with culture and race and immigration in the books as underlying themes is that I hope that somebody who's reading the book just for enjoyment and pleasure might pick up something else about, what is it like to not speak the language? What is it like to be judged? The great thing about novels is that it's the one medium where you are really placed inside someone's mind regardless of gender, color, race, socioeconomic status. It does not matter who you are. You really walk a mile in someone else's shoes. That's an opportunity for the author to show the reader, this is what it's like. This is what happens.

Especially since Searching for Sylvie Lee was a Read with Jenna Today Show pick, I reached a wider audience than I had before. I reached some people who had really not read books like mine. It was really great. They say, wow, I had no idea that somebody who might be of another race but who might speak English perfectly could still encounter racism the way that your characters did. I had no idea how frustrating it must be to be Ma and to be kind of trapped within this bubble of not being able to express yourself truly the way you want to, to the world and to your own children, to listen to your children be on the phone and not know what they're talking about. That's just so difficult. Yet so many people go through that. I do see a book as a means of connection, absolutely.

Zibby: It's great. A lot of books serve as a tool to share your voice, to find your own voice. I feel like your book actually helped you find your mother's voice, the voice that maybe you never got to experience and that you didn't want to be lost. That’s just beautiful. That's amazing. I say this, by the way, to my kids a lot. How would you like to be dropped in Tibet? You try to talk. I took French in college or whatever, but I'm not particularly good at languages. To drop me in another culture, no matter what people said about the importance of that language, it's not going to make me be able to learn it or master it any faster. Everyone has skills. Some people are foreign language people. Some people are not. To have that one skill out of so many be the thing that determines your intelligence is something that not enough people think about on a day-to-day basis. You're absolutely right to highlight it and all of that. Now I have to find out, what's going on now? Are you writing another book? What's happening with you in the future? Sorry, I've been captivated. I'm running long on this interview, and I didn't ask you anything I wanted to ask you.

Jean: I'm loving our conversation as well. I am actually finishing my next book. I'm really excited about this book. It is a mystery, thriller, an immigrant story kind of like Sylvie Lee. What happens is that when the book opens, we are reading a letter from a Chinese woman to someone she loves. We don't know who she's writing to. She is begging this person for forgiveness for her role in a murder. We know that somebody was killed. We know that she was involved in it. It was a person who was very important to the person she's writing to who she loves more than anything in the world, but we don't know who any of these players are. She says, I hope that when you hear my full story, you will forgive me and that maybe you will come to me and we could be reunited. Then we rewind fifteen years, and she starts to tell the story of what actually really happened all those years ago. It's only at the end of the book that we find out who she's writing to, who got killed, and why she really did everything she did.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, now I can't wait to read that.

Jean: We'll send you a copy as soon as [indiscernible/crosstalk].

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

Jean: Yeah, I have a lot of advice. To go back to my own problems with writing Searching for Sylvie Lee, I think that, as a writer, you kind of have to walk this line. On the one hand, you need to write from your burning passion. You need to write from your trauma. You need to write the things that make you uncomfortable, that hurt you. What I do think is wonderful about that is that -- sometimes stuff happens to us and it just seems like, why is this happening? There's nothing good in this. There's nothing redeeming. This is so unfair. This should not be happening to me or to this other amazing, kind, wonderful person. I find writing to be a kind of magical thing. I guess it's giving your attention. When you pay attention to something like that, when you describe it, when you tell it to someone else, it transforms something that is senseless into something that is a means of connection that we can learn something from, into a thing of beauty. I would say that as a writer, yes, you need to write to that place. You need to write that truth. On the other hand, sometimes it can be too right on the nose. It can be too hard to go forward in that way. What you have to do is just change the thing that's silencing you. It could be a change like I did from changing from a man to a woman and letting the book take on its own life. It could be that you have a character in your book that is a censoring character that might be connected to somebody in your own past that didn't want you to speak. I would say, just kill that person off. There's nothing wrong it. Just kill them off. It's fine. I mean, not in real life.

Zibby: [laughs] I know. I know.

Jean: In your book, just get rid of them. Sometimes if you do that, that can be pretty magical. Suddenly, you're able to tell things that you were afraid to speak about before or change them enough that you can deal with having them in your book. That is what I would say. Maybe one last thing to say to aspiring writers. Sometimes it's very hard to know what advice to take and what advice not to take. I would say, yes, absolutely, be as open as you can. On the other hand, you wrote what you wrote for a reason. I always think that it's better to have a living, vital, imperfect creature than a perfect corpse lying on a slab that is maybe in total proportion but is no longer alive. Whatever that vital spark is that is making you write what you write, you have to nurture that and keep that alive.

Zibby: Wow. This is amazing. I feel so fortunate that we got a chance to talk. I just wish we could talk longer. Now I want to stay in touch and meet you and all of the rest. I'm so glad our paths have crossed in life. I'll email you after. [laughs] Thank you, Jean. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for showing everybody what's really important about life in so many ways and also for the entertainment that your books provide. It’s a one-stop shop with you.

Jean: Zibby, thank you so much. I do want to say before we get off that you do so much to promote reading and authors. You have incredible, impeccable taste. I have been a really big fan of yours for such a long time. I'm so happy we got to meet and that we had this chance to talk.

Zibby: Me too. Thanks, Jean.

Jean: Take care. Bye.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Julie Buxbaum, ADMISSION

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

Julie Buxbaum: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to do this.

Zibby: Me too, finally. I feel like we met so long ago now. It was months and months. I'm delighted we're doing this.

Julie: Thank you.

Zibby: As I just was telling you, you're a really great writer. It was really a pleasure to read this book, and so topical. Can you please tell listeners what Admission is about?

Julie: Admission is about this girl, Chloe Wynn Berringer, who at first glance seems to have everything. She just got asked to the prom by the boy she's had a crush on since middle school. Her mom, who's a B-list celebrity, is on her way to the B+ list. She just got into the college of her dreams. She is living the life until one day her doorbell rings at six AM in the morning. The FBI shows up to arrest her mother in a nationwide college admissions scandal. From there, her entire life falls apart. It basically asks the question, first of all, what did Chloe know and when did she know it? Will her mother go to jail? Will she go to jail? More importantly, it fundamentally asks, what does it mean to be complicit?

Zibby: And what does it mean to want to achieve? What does the success really mean? What does achievement mean to her mom? What does it mean to her? Just adding my two cents.

Julie: Yep, and at what cost? What are we selling?

Zibby: At what cost? Exactly. You had this interesting note at the beginning about how you were mid-work on another novel and then this whole scandal broke. You felt you were cheating on the characters you had been writing on by wanting to write this book. Tell me what that process was like. What happened?

Julie: When the story broke, I started reading the articles just like everybody else, except I wasn't like everybody else. I became unhealthfully obsessed. It's all I could think about. I used to be a lawyer, and so I ended up reading the two-hundred-page complaint. I got suddenly really wrapped up in what wasn't being covered by the media. I felt like the media definitely focused on the adults, for good reason because they were the ones who were arrested. I kept thinking about what it must be like to wake up one morning and have your entire reality change fundamentally and what it must be like to be the teenagers at the center of this huge media fallout. Then I started thinking about this character, Chloe. I fully understood who she was from day one. Slowly, that story started to unfold in my mind. I knew exactly what was going to happen. I took a few days to just figure out if there was a full novel there before I sent that email to my agent and editor being like, hey, can I drop the book I'm writing and write this whole other thing? Is that okay? I just knew. Every once in a while as a writer, you can see the whole thing. It doesn't happen often. It's super lucky when it does. In this case, I could just see it. I did. I thought about it for a few days. Then I called my agent and editor. I was like, "Please don't kill me, but can I write this whole other book and put aside the hundred and fifty pages I've already written?" They were totally game. They were like, "Just as long as you write fast," and I did.

Zibby: What happened to those characters that you cheated on? What happened to that book?

Julie: I have reconciled with them. [laughter] We've been hanging out lately. I'm working on that book now.

Zibby: See, so it all worked out.

Julie: It did. It's funny. I kind of feel like they're still a little mad at me. They're a little bit slower to show themselves. It hasn’t been as natural a process as Admission was. It's partially, I think, because I left them. They're like, I'm a little pissed off, Julie. I'm not going to reveal myself as easily this time.

Zibby: There is no lack of you bringing your characters to life. You are in conversation with them. I guess that's what it takes. To make them seem so real in a book, you have to actually believe that they're real.

Julie: They do feel very real to me. I realize that sounds a little bananas. Often in the novel-writing process, there seems to be some outer force that you can't control. You just have to let yourself be open to it. Sometimes it's easier and sometimes it's harder, which is probably one of the most frustrating things about what I do.

Zibby: I have to say, I feel like some characters in fiction are so real that I still think about them the way I would an old friend. As the writer, you must have to have that to the nth degree to be able to convey that to the reader. I mean, this is obvious. [laughs]

Julie: One weird thing about that, though, is they feel so real to me when I'm writing the book, but once the book is out in the world, I actually completely let them go and stop thinking about them. They sort of now no longer belong to me and now belong to the reader, which is something I didn't expect. Often, I'll revisit a book I'd previously written for some reason, maybe an interview or something. I'll be like, oh, my god, I have no memory of having written any of this. It happened in a whole other state. It's really bizarre.

Zibby: That's sort of how I feel about the kids' whole childhoods, the beginning years. I'm like, I know I was there. I see the pictures. I don't know what your first word was. I don't remember. [laughs]

Julie: There's no processing whatsoever. You're just getting through it.

Zibby: Yeah, just getting through.

Julie: The whole thing is like childbirth, I think. Making books and childbirth are ridiculously similar. One's a little uglier.

Zibby: I feel like, though, the way you're saying about sending your kids into the world, you're almost a surrogate. You're acting as a surrogate for the child versus the mother, in a way, because then you just say goodbye.

Julie: You hand it off. Exactly. I think surrogacy is actually a really great example.

Zibby: Now that we nailed that... [laughter] Like you, by the way, I was totally riveted and obsessed with the admissions scandal, probably not quite as deep a dive into the whole thing as you took. It was hard not to wonder and think about, oh, my gosh, these poor kids if they didn't know. Or did they know? If they didn't know, how that would feel and to feel like that their parents had so little faith in them, in a way, that they would be willing to do all of this behind their backs. What does that say about their confidence? How are these kids going to process? When you were doing all this research, did you end up talking to any of the actual people this happened to or any celebrity children or people who have had some scandal like this happen to them? Was it more your imagination?

Julie: No, I intentionally didn't because I wanted to make sure I told my character's story, and that's a fictional story. I wasn't trying to tell the actual college admissions story. Those people will probably write their own books one day. I didn't want to steal their stories. I was more interested in this particular character who is wrestling with what she knew and what she didn't know. I found I had real empathy for her, but I didn't always like her. I thought that was important as the author, not to be a hundred percent on board with everything she did because she made a million mistakes throughout the book. What was more interesting to me was the thematic concept of willful ignorance and doing a deep dive into when we know things but don't really know them, or we know things but we don't want to know them, and what that feels like in our bodies and our minds. I did do some research on shame and vulnerability, though.

Zibby: Not that you had to. I was just wondering. When Chloe tells her mom when she overhears her mom trying to basically sell her diagnosis of ADHD which she doesn't even have so that she can take her SATs on time, she was like, "Time isn't the problem. Not being able to figure out the answers is." Tell me about this, how she first started to get some glimmers and how that came to be.

Julie: I think what's so interesting about the college admissions scandal is that it's so much bigger than the college admissions scandal. It just sort of highlights all these bigger issues that are going on in society. The people who were arrested in the college admissions scandal are not the first people to get their kids a diagnosis to get them better times on a test. This has been going on for years and years and years where people literally pay a doctor to give their kids a diagnosis so they get more time on a test not only in high school, but for when they go to college so they can do better there too. It's just one of the many ways in which people who have a lot of money can buy their way into better outcomes for their children. It's this interesting space where kids who are at the center of it may or may not know whether a diagnosis actually fits. They're not an expert. An adult is telling them that it fits. It goes along with this whole thematic question of over-trusting experts, in a sense, buying your way into more information as opposed to trusting your instincts.

Zibby: Interesting. Do you feel like your book is trying to give some sort of lesson or take a point of view on it? Were you trying to do that, or were you just trying to paint the picture and let the reader decide?

Julie: I don't like to moralize. Instead, I like to have characters wrestle with questions. I think a lot of these questions don't actually have answers, or definitive answers at least. Instead of taking this higher moral ground, instead, I just wanted to examine these questions that have come up for these particular people and also come up in my everyday life too as a parent.

Zibby: It's so true. It's always like, how do you make sure your kid has the opportunities for success, but within reason? They are who they are. That's why I feel one of the saddest parts is maybe Chloe, she shouldn't be at that particular school. That's not going to be the right college for her. Maybe she’d be really happy at a different college that would be a much better fit, and not just Chloe, but so many people. I personally have moved my kids' schools so many times because I really believe they need the right school for them. It might have a great name and all, but if it's not the right fit, it is not going to do anyone any favors in the long run. I think that even when I pulled my kid out of one school, people are like, you're so brave. I'm like, I'm not brave. This is my child. I'm trying to maintain their sanity.

Julie: I think that's exactly right, but I think it's really difficult to figure out actually what the right thing is for your kid when you're living in this larger community of people who are telling you something different than what you believe. If my neighbor's kid is having her daughter take Mandarin in fourth grade, should my daughter be taking Mandarin? No, my daughter should not be taking Mandarin. She's not interested in Mandarin. There's always this moment of, if my larger community is doing something and all these other kids are getting this advantage, am I hurting my child by taking this different stand? I think it gets really complicated.

Zibby: It's really a shame because I feel like in mothering or parenting or fathering or whatever, these questions come up. It's almost like you're being taught to not trust your instincts at all, and in the most intimate relationship in your entire life where you know the person better than anything. It really, actually, makes no sense when you think about it. I'm just like you. Oh, everybody signed up for this class. I don't know. Do I care if my daughter can needlepoint, whatever it is that everybody seems to be doing when I know it's not right?

Julie: I totally agree. I think there's also this weird culture of putting your kids first above the community. That's also really uncomfortable. I haven't quite figured out how you make that all work. I'm trying to think of a really basic example. There was this piece in New York magazine maybe five, ten years ago. I remember reading it. It stuck with me. They posed this question about ethical parenting. One of the questions they said is, say your kid has this really important standardized test tomorrow, but just before your kids goes to bed you notice they have lice. Do you keep them up late combing out the lice, or do you pretend like you haven't seen the lice and you send your kid to school to take the standardized test so they won't be tired and they’ll be best prepared but your kid probably knows you know they have lice? What lesson are you teaching your kid by sending them with lice? What lesson are you teaching your kid by keeping them home up too late for the SAT or whatever test it is? There are a million micro-examples of this in parenting where you have to balance -- I think a lot of people tend to put their kid above the community when we should be putting the community above our kids.

Zibby: I'm talking to you now in the midst of the coronavirus. We're all stuck at home. This is so timely.

Julie: We're all hoarding toilet paper because we want to make sure that we have enough at the expense of our neighbors. I know I've spent many hours talking to my friends about, what is hoarding here? If I can get that extra box of wipes, should I? Should I save it for someone else? It's impossible to know any of these answers. I feel like the first step, at least, is to notice our privilege and to grapple with it.

Zibby: The grocery store where I am ended up limiting people to two items. You could only take two of the same types of items. They were policing it at the end because there was no internals checks and balances. It's obviously hard for everybody to know.

Julie: And then also to remember that we're talking about toilet paper in the coronavirus. Five seconds ago, I was talking about Mandarin lessons. Mandarin lessons do not matter. [laughs] As parents, we sort of forget our privilege bubbles. For a second, it does seem like it matters, but it doesn't matter.

Zibby: No, it doesn't matter. None of it matters, really. Now that we're home, all those extracurriculars, we don't need them. I don't know about you. My kids are in school. Then they had stuff after school, especially my littlest guy who's still in preschool. Now all the after-school places are getting in touch to be like, we've developed a Zoom thing for after school. I'm like, no way. If I could get them through a couple hours of school, are you kidding me? Forget it. He'll just play. During the year at school, you don't say that. You don't have that same attitude.

Julie: I think there's something really important about teaching our kids, first of all, how to be bored, how to be resilient. These are the exact opposite of the things that are taught by overscheduling them and making sure they're taking Mandarin and everything. I don't know why I keep bringing up Mandarin as the example, but I think you get my point.

Zibby: Yeah, I get your point.

Julie: [laughs] I feel like I'm going so way off topic. I'm so sorry.

Zibby: No. You know what? I find this really interesting. This is what it's all about. Everybody out there who has a child or who has friends with children or whatever, this is the culture. This is the pressure. Your book is just a total perfect example. It's the cherry on top of the whole thing. That's the wrong analogy. This is like the -- [laughs] I can't even find the words -- the extreme example of the whole phenomenon. I think it's topical.

Julie: The reason why it struck such a chord with so many people, the scandal itself, is I think it works its way down through all segments of society. It's not just the very top. I think middle-class parents are also struggling to keep their kids doing all these things. Competitive parenting has sort of taken over as the model and the dream. Not dream, the parenting you're supposed to be doing when in fact it's making all of us struggle.

Zibby: When does it end? When is it okay? Is it okay to have an SAT tutor? All these things that we take for granted. Should nobody go out and buy those SAT books? How far back do we have to go?

Julie: That's one of the questions I wanted to ask with the book. I don't know. My character starts to question all of those things. This is someone with great privilege who hasn’t actually taken the time to examine her own privilege. One of the great joys of the book was forcing her to do that.

Zibby: I love how in the beginning her mother -- and I love how you say going from a B to a B+ actress. How does one even know that they're crossing that threshold? That's my question. In the beginning, she has this whole photoshoot for, I think, Marie Claire where she's making pancakes. She's dressed in all color-coordinating clothes. Her friend comes over and is like, basically, "What's up with your mother?" She's like, "Oh, no, photoshoot. She would never be doing this on a Saturday morning. That's not the type of mom she is." It also raises into question just the very crux of the mother-child or parent-child relationship and that trust. I know I mentioned this before. What does it say if your mother is saying that she doesn't believe in you, really? What does that mean?

Julie: Exactly. One thing that was really important to me when writing the book is, yes, the mom is the villain of the story. At no point does anyone question her guilt except for maybe the mom herself. Everyone else knows she is guilty. That is at no point part of the story. She is also an incredibly loving mother and cares deeply about her child. Obviously, she goes about it completely the wrong way, but at no point do we doubt whether she loves Chloe and wants what's best for her. She just got confused, I guess. That's probably the kindest way to put it, messed up in her own way of trying to do what was best for her daughter, also what was best for her. There's a whole reputational angle to all of this as well. It poses the question about whether this kind of parenting, this hyper-snowplow, clearing all obstacles for your kid so your kids can climb as high as they can possibly climb is actually what's best for children. It teaches them that we don't think they're capable. Whether they see it or not, they eventually learn that lesson that they couldn't do it on their own. I think that's really dangerous. That's what we see Chloe coming to terms with.

Zibby: You did a good job. I feel like this such a good book club type -- people are going to sit around and be like, what do you think? What would you do in that situation? It's such a conversation starter because it's a topic that's on all of our minds. It's great.

Julie: If anyone out there is doing any Zoom book clubs, I am free because I am not leaving my house.

Zibby: I just started a Zoom book club, actually.

Julie: I saw. That's awesome.

Zibby: I just did that. Maybe we can make that work. Let's see what else. One thing that I also thought really propelled this story along was how you did alternating chapters between now and then until it basically all came together. That was so cool. How did you come up with that? Was that part of your initial vision when you saw the whole thing?

Julie: Yes, exactly. I knew that from the very beginning. I had never done a before and now type thing. With this particular story, I felt like it needed it for narrative suspense because the then of her -- let me just explain what it is in the book. The book starts with the FBI coming and arresting Chloe's mom. Then it flips back to the fall of her senior year when she's applying to colleges. Then each chapter goes back and forth between then and now. I felt like the narrative suspense of the then needed us to already know what happened in the now. Each action, we're watching from this way higher narrative level of knowing what's really happening while Chloe doesn't actually. I felt like the narrative suspense wasn't, did they cheat? The narrative suspense is Chloe's awareness of how much they cheated and when.

Zibby: Yeah, which is super interesting.

Julie: I felt like it unfolds in a different way because of that.

Zibby: It made it really page turning, plus the short chapters. It wasn't a thriller at all, but it had that same kind of intensity, pacing, as one of those types of books, I thought.

Julie: Thank you. I really wanted it to be propulsive. I wanted you not to want to put it down.

Zibby: I was going to say propulsive, but I feel like I've been using that word so often. [laughs]

Julie: It's a slightly gross word, right?

Zibby: At first, I heard it and I was like, ooh, propulsive. Then I overused it. Now I've put propulsive back in the drawer for now. But yes, propulsive.

Julie: I feel like it's kind of like moist. It just has a slightly off grossness to it.

Zibby: [laughs] In terms of what's next, you're working on your new/old novel and resurrecting it. Is that your full time -- are you able to work on it now while you're in isolation?

Julie: Not really. I'm trying. I'm trying very hard. I'll be honest. I have not figured out my quarantine rhythm. Having two kids home, homeschooling, keeping my house in order, cooking three meals a day plus snacks -- so many snacks. I don't understand all the snacks. My kids want dinner every night. Every night, they want to eat. Theoretically, I am writing, but I have not actually had the focus required to write the way I need to write right now. I actually haven't been reading as much as I want to be. I find my brain is so scattered, but I'm trying. I'm hoping next week I'll figure it out.

Zibby: I've been hearing that a lot. You're not alone in that.

Julie: I need to quit Twitter. I think that’ll change things for me.

Zibby: I do not let myself look at the news until the evening otherwise I can't get anything done during the day. That's my newest thing. The world could burn down. If something major happens, my husband will tell me. I don't look. I just don't look.

Julie: That's really smart.

Zibby: What advice do you have to aspiring authors?

Julie: My number-one piece of advice to aspiring authors is to read, and to read everything, but not to read as a reader but to read as a writer. When you're reading a book and it particularly works for you and it's flowing and it's magic, stop the magic, rewind, and figure out why it's magical. Why does this character matter to you? Why is this plot interesting? On a sentence level, why is the prose singing for you? If you're reading a book and it kind of isn't capturing you, do exactly the same thing. Ask the questions. Why isn't it working? What is this author doing? What is this author doing right? What is this author doing wrong? Every book is a masterclass in novel writing. Then sit your ass down and write. That's the other important tip. You got to write.

Zibby: I love that. Thank you, Julie. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for the book and this really interesting discussion.

Julie: Thanks so much for having me. I probably should've talked more about the book. I'm sorry I went off on this whole -- [laughs].

Zibby: No, this is all related to the book. It's not like we were talking about learning bridge or something.

Julie: How to source toilet paper. We didn't go there.

Zibby: Exactly. [laughter] Hang in there. Take care. Thank you. Bye.

Julie: Thank you so much, Zibby. Bye.

Peace Adzo Medie, HIS ONLY WIFE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Peace. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss your book, His Only Wife. Congratulations on the book.

Peace Adzo Medie: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. I have to say, I listened to this in the car on a bunch of drives that I did. I had it with all the kids in the car. I would listen back and forth, back and forth. Then I finally said, "You know what, guys? This is the book we've been listening to." They were like, "It's so short. What do you mean? We've been listening to it for hours." [laughter] It's been a part of my family, so I'm happy to tell them that we're finally doing this interview. Can you please tell listeners what His Only Wife is about? Also, what inspired you to write this book?

Peace: His Only Wife is a story of a young woman in Ghana. Her name is Afi. She is in an arranged marriage. It begins as Afi gets into an arranged marriage to a man. His name is Eli, very wealthy man. This is a marriage that has been arranged by Eli's mother who is called Aunty. Aunty has arranged this marriage because she doesn't approve of Eli's partner. On one level, Afi has this task of bringing Eli closer to his family because the woman has come between Eli and family. On another level, this is a book about a young woman finding her voice, finding her place in the world, and coming to a place where she can speak about what it is that she wants. That is His Only Wife. I wrote the book for several reasons. One being that I'm very interested in how social pressures shape women's lives. I do research on a variety of issues including on violence against women. I've done some fieldwork in Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire. I've spoken to survivors of violence. Something that came through in my interviews with them was how they wanted to leave abusive relationships, but they didn't because people encouraged them to stay. People discouraged them from leaving, usually family and friends. That really got me thinking about the decisions that women make in relationships because of the pressures and the advice that they receive from the people around them.

Zibby: All very good things to investigate. I read this -- this is going to sound so silly. Maybe not silly, just surprising I should say. There was an ad for a dog food company. In the ad, it said forty-seven percent of domestic abuse victims don't leave because they don't want to leave their pets. Isn't that interesting? I just keep storing this fact away and repeating it because I find it so interesting that you can feel so trapped and so helpless and be in such an awful emotional and physical place and yet your allegiance to your pet is placed at a higher premium, almost, than your own mental and physical health. I found it very interesting.

Peace: I think it makes sense that if you're in such a difficult position that something that brings you joy, something that brings you a bit of comfort, it's something that would be very difficult to part with.

Zibby: Yes. I couldn't part with my dog. Do you have dogs?

Peace: Not anymore.

Zibby: I just inherited a dog. I'm already in love with her after a month. Also, you were the Reese's Book Club pick. It must have been so exciting. Was that even on horizon of things you were hoping would happen with this book? What happened when you found out? Tell me about that.

Peace: I hoped briefly before I ever knew. Then I thought, don't even think about that. What are the chances that would happen? It was an extremely pleasant surprise. Honestly, I found out, and I had no idea what to do with myself. I was almost just frozen. I was like, what do you do with this information? I'm so, so happy. What do I do with this information? The Reese's Book Club community, they're just a wonderful community of book lovers. They have been so supportive in so many different ways. It's been wonderful being the October Book Club pick.

Zibby: That's exciting. I was watching you today because I was wondering if they had posted -- our interview will air later, but a lot of places were airing their November picks today. I was on there and watching you give all the clues. I was thinking to myself, does Peace know the answer to this, or do they just give her clues? Do you know the answer, or did you just get the clues?

Peace: They just gave me the clues. Everyone, reading their responses, I was like, oh, okay. Is this what people think it is? I just know the clues. [laughs]

Zibby: Everybody in the comments seemed to be pretty convinced it was one particular book, but I don't know. They all wanted that free giveaway, I guess, so they hopped on the bandwagon.

Peace: We'll find out today, I think.

Zibby: This book was so realistic, particularly the scenes where Afi was in the apartment just biding her time waiting for Eli to come visit. She didn't know what to do. Luckily, she was able, through Richard and her family, to go take some sewing classes and go to different schools and all the rest. For a while, it was just her with the thick carpet and her mom, alone padding around and wondering if she should be dressed and ready and what was going to happen for her husband to show up, who she hadn’t even seen including at the wedding, which is crazy. Tell me about crafting that moment and that feeling. Did you have a period of time where you felt that same sense, that the minutes were so long? That's how you made it feel for the character.

Peace: I've definitely felt like that when waiting for things to happen. I really wanted to communicate the things that women do for men and the sacrifices that women would make for men, including a woman like Afi who is ambitious, who is smart, but has been led to believe that she should make these sacrifices. She should be willing. She should be ready and prepared and perfect-looking all the time in order to please this man who she's never even met officially since they’ve been married. In crafting that period in Afi's life, I really wanted to show this excruciating detail of just waiting, and waiting because you’ve been led to believe this person is so important and you should give so much of yourself to this person.

Zibby: By the way, when Eli did finally arrive -- as I said, I was listening in the car with the kids. They finally got together. My daughter was like, "Mom!" I turned it down. I was like, "I'm sure this scene's almost over." Then I turned it back up. They had gone out to the kitchen. Then you had them go back in the bedroom. It started again. She's looking at me. I was like, "Okay, okay, okay, I'll do it later."

Peace: Oh, no! What have I done? [laughter]

Zibby: I was so mortified. Mental note, don't listen to this middle part in front of your kids. Part of the book, too, was not only her allegiance to Eli, but also the postmortem allegiance to her father. Her father passed away leaving the family in financial ruins. She had to live with her aunt and felt indebted to her aunt for a long time. This is part of why she wanted to repay the aunt. It's the loss of not only her father, but also the lifestyle that her father provided and what it's like to have been somewhat frivolous with her purchases and not really thinking. Then you had a whole thing where she's like, if only I could go back and have a moment of those clothes that I didn't care about or all of that and just hold onto those not knowing that they were about to go away. Tell me a little more about that element and the kind of fall from grace that can so easily happen.

Peace: A big part of this story is the class divide. I really wanted to show that. I've thought about it and said, would Aunty have proposed this marriage if Afi's father was alive, if they were middle-class? I don't think so. I think it's because of the family's financial situation. That is why Aunty felt bold enough to propose this marriage. I just really wanted to explore how economic disparities impact the decisions that women make, but also even how it shapes marriages. Then you have a relationship where one person has more power than the other because that person has the money and is therefore then able to call the shots. I really wanted, in small ways, to show how the death of Afi's father and their financial fall was even driving the behavior of her mother. I think her mother would have been a very different woman if Afi's father had been alive. I just really wanted to explore this and show how the change in their financial status was influencing them in different ways.

Zibby: And also how the mom and daughter's different views on what a marriage should be affected their relationship. They used to be more like friends. Then as soon as she got married, it became a much more mother-daughter, I'm going to tell you what to do, you have to do this, a didactic-type relationship, and how a wedding, a relationship, as we all know, can seriously change your other relationships in unforeseen ways.

Peace: Yes, yes. A big part of it is Afi's mother has an idea of what a marriage should be. Afi starts off disagreeing, but then agreeing, and then disagreeing. Definitely, along those lines, we see the relationship between Afi and her mother change in so many ways. I think it's actually very realistic. Once money comes into the picture, a lot of our relationships tend to change.

Zibby: That too, yes, for sure. Are you married yourself? This is none of my business. You don't have to answer. I'm wondering if you're married, if your parents are married. What types of models for a marriage do you have in your own life?

Peace: Wonderful marriage. I think this book is unusual in two ways in that there's an arranged marriage. I tell people that it's actually not common, where I come from at least. A lot of it was me imagining what an arranged marriage would look like and what a person in an arranged marriage would feel. It's also kind of a polygamous relationship where you have one man with multiple partners or wanting to have multiple wives, not entirely succeeding. That is also not as common as it used to be in Ghana. These relationships still exist, but they are not as common as they used to be. What I would say is that I'm not in an arranged or in a polygamous marriage. I'm very interested in these institutions. I'm very interested in why people are within these institutions, but also how they have changed and why they are changing. If I look at my grandmother's generation, for example, there were more relationships or marriages with more than one partner, with more than one wife. In my generation, my parents' generation, it's become much less common. To me, it's very interesting. It also says a lot about what women's expectations are and what women are willing to accept within marriage as well in Ghana and I'm sure in many other places.

Zibby: Interesting. Tell me about the writing of this book. How long did it take you to write? What was your process like?

Peace: I began thinking about this book around 2010, 2011. I was finishing up my doctoral dissertation at Boston College. I was spending a lot of time just sitting at my desk trying to write the dissertation and graduate.

Zibby: By the way, I had this vision of you in Ghana writing with all the sights and sounds the way they are in the book. You're in freezing cold Boston around the corner? That's crazy. Okay, go on.

Peace: [laughs] Some of the writing did happen in Ghana, but I began thinking about it when I was in Boston. Then I seriously began writing late 2012, early 2013. I was back in Ghana by then. It took me five years because I went back and started teaching at University of Ghana and still had a full-time job where I was doing academic research and writing, teaching, and everything else, but also writing fiction. I had a very hectic day. I'd wake up four in the morning, write fiction. Around six in the morning, I would switch to writing -- I no longer do that, thankfully. Then switch to nonfiction around six. It was very demanding, but I really enjoyed it. I use fiction to relax. I use fiction to step back from my academic work. While they were very long days, it was very enjoyable.

Zibby: That’s good. What are you working on now?

Peace: I'm the final stages, I'm editing the second book manuscript. I was supposed to be done Monday morning. I told my agent I was going to send it to her yesterday morning, and I haven't.

Zibby: It's only Tuesday. It's okay.

Peace: I'm finishing up that manuscript and excited about the third one.

Zibby: Wow. Can you give any previews as to what those two are about?

Peace: The second book is about friendship. It's about two cousins who are very close. I'm very interested in how relationships come apart. It's two cousins who are very close, but then they come apart over time. I explore why it is that this happens. I'm also interested in how two people can experience the same thing but think about it very differently. Two friends, they are both convinced that the other person is in the wrong. For me, that it just so interesting. Basically, it's a book about friendship.

Zibby: Great. That sounds good. I've definitely been in situations where I'm convinced I'm right and perhaps I'm not, so that will be good. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Peace: It's important that you love what you're writing. For me, that has worked really well because writing, it's long hours, very demanding. I think that if you don't love what you're doing, if you don't love the story that you are telling, I think it will be really tough to just stick with it for years and years. I've been working on this book, if I count editing, it's almost nine years, almost ten years. I feel like if you don't love the story, if you don't love the characters, it will be hard to keep at it. Write the things that make you happy. Write the things that you love. Eventually, the writing will find its readers.

Zibby: That's excellent advice. This book has certainly found a lot of readers, so that's great, including me and apparently my kids. [laughter] Thank you for all of our hours of entertainment in the car. Thank you for chatting with me today. Thanks for this beautiful story and all of its different elements that really made me think. Thanks.

Peace: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed chatting with you.

Zibby: You too. Have a great day.

Peace: Buh-bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Janet Evanovich, FORTUNE AND GLORY

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

Janet Evanovich: My pleasure. Fun to be here.

Zibby: Tantalizing Twenty-Seven, your latest book in the Stephanie Plum series, Fortune and Glory, congratulations on this one. Are you still getting excited when this is the twenty-seventh book in a series? Do you still get excited for pub day and all of that?

Janet: Yeah, I do. I usually get a little bit more excited when I can actually do book tour and go out and see everybody. This is a new experience for me, all this virtual stuff. It's fun to have it out there because that's why you write the book, so that other people can read it, especially for me because I think of myself as being the fun author. I don't kill any good people in this book, only bad people. I look forward to it.

Zibby: You might argue that killing people at all does not make you a fun author. Just saying. [laughter] There are some books where nobody dies at all. I read a lot about your background and how you got started and how your manuscripts were rejected and your romance novel career. I would like to hear a little more from you about how you became this powerhouse author of this hugely successful best-selling series in such an unexpected way if I were to tell you at age twenty that this is what would happen. Can you tell me a little more about getting started and how you kept the resolve to keep going?

Janet: I was this amazing overnight success that took twenty years. [laughter] I wasn't published until I was in my forties, which is amazing since I'm only thirty-five now.

Zibby: Exactly.

Janet: I was always the kid that could draw. I was not a big reader. I read comic books. I loved comic books. I still have a subscription to Uncle Scrooge. Being a writer was not something that I thought about as a kid or in high school or even in college. I was always a visual artist. Then I had a couple kids. I was at home. Painting just wasn't working for me. What I realized is that what I always loved about painting was telling the story about the picture I was doing. I loved reading stories to my kids. All of a sudden, it was this thunderbolt moment that hit me. God, maybe I should be telling stories instead of painting pictures. I had no background. I didn't know anyone who was a published author. I had very small literary background. I think I had English 101 in college. It took me to a long time to learn my skills to figure out where I wanted to go. I started out writing bizarre books because as a student in the Douglas College Art Department, I had teachers like Roy Lichtenstein and big guys that were really kind of out there. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to say, who I was, where my voice was. The difference was that after about ten years of sending out stories and not having any success at all, I realized that it wasn't enough for me to write for myself. I love to write. I enjoy it. I get up in the morning, and I go into my own world. It's the world's best job. You sit in this chair at five thirty in the morning. I go into some place. It's almost like being an actress and assuming another role. What I realized is that if people weren’t reading it, it wasn't any fun for me. It wasn't enough that I was enjoying it.

When I realized that what I wanted to do was to write for other people and not for myself, that just made a huge difference. I started looking at audience and what books I was reading. I was a young mother. I knew about love and relationships and happiness. That was where I started, with the romance novels that I was reading. Actually, after about three years of that, I needed money. By then, my kids were looking at college. My husband has a doctorate in mathematics. He has a good job, but we were competing with two-income families. I was a stay-at-home mom. I really needed to get smarter about it. Not only did I have an audience to read my books, but I could help out with the family income. That was when I turned to the romance novels. Halfway through that, my son was at Dartmouth. The romance novels were not making enough money. I wasn't reaching enough audience. It was a very finite audience that I had with romance novels. I decided to go into crime fiction. I had little snippets of adventures and crimes creeping into my romances anyway. I had a hard time with three hundred pages of relationship. It wasn't my thing. There were many things I loved about romance. I tried to bring them over into the mystery genre. I wrote romance for, I guess it was five years, did twelve books, and then took a year off and tried to retool and figure out where I wanted to go.

Decided that it was in crime fiction. What I was going to do was I was going to take all the things I loved about romance and squash it into a mystery format. That's what I did and sold the first book to Scribner. Had a fantastic editor, a really nice lady. She thought she was buying a mystery. It wasn't much of a mystery. It really was kind of a sexy book with some romance in it and some characters that I found interesting. I knew I wanted to do a series, so I set it in New Jersey because that's what I know. I gave my heroine, Stephanie Plum, a lot of my own history so I knew where she was going. I put it in Trenton. I spent a lot of time in Trenton. My parents lived just outside of Trenton at the time. That first book did not get me a lot of money, but it got me a start. I didn't sell a lot of books. Mostly, I sold them to my relatives and my neighbors. By the second book, it started to pick up. By the third book, I was learning a lot about myself and a lot about where I wanted to go and a lot about my audience. The audience is the best part. I love my audience.

When I have signings and I go out and I get to meet everybody, it's amazing. Whole families will come out to say hello to me, four generations and husbands. The husbands say things like, "I finally read one your books. I really liked it." They were shocked because their wives had been reading me and had been laughing in bed. Finally, they took a look at it to see what it was too. I probably answered about fifteen questions now. Once I get started, especially about how this all happened to me -- I'm the American dream. My grandparents immigrated to this country as indentured servants, domestics and factory workers. My dad and mom were the first to graduate from high school. My dad worked in a factory. My mom was a homemaker. I was the first to graduate from college. We didn't have money for me to live in a dorm. I commuted. I was a commuting student at the state college in New Jersey and was an art student. Hate to admit this on air, but sort of supported myself with some shoplifting of groceries and art supplies when I had to.

Zibby: Oh, no!

Janet: Here I am. It's amazing. This is a fantastic country. I'm the proof of the opportunity that you can have. I've been very lucky.

Zibby: It's so nice to hear you say that because I feel like the American dream right now is this elusive concept. I feel like it's so much less attainable than it used to be. It seems so impossible to achieve it. It's so nice to see an example, particularly from a woman who's saying, look, I can do this, and so can you. That's amazing.

Janet: Absolutely. I think it's a lot of baloney out there that the American dream is not achievable. I think it's more achievable than ever before. It's that people are trying to tell us that it isn't. We don't hear about all of the successes. We have a tendency to have people out there with a lot of the negatives. That not a bad thing because we need to broaden the scope of what's available to people. My gosh, we have so many opportunities in this country. Look at the standard of living that we have and the standard of living that we can have, that we can bring out into even more people, the healthcare that we have, the fact that in such a short amount of time we found better ways to treat COVID. We have a vaccine right on the horizon. Unheard of. Just amazing. What I find really, really fantastic is that when COVID hit -- it just did terrible things to the economy. There are a lot of people out there, all those little small businesses, that are just dying. They're just struggling to survive.

At the same time, there are a lot of people that took the American spirit and said, you know, I could make some money out of this. I'm going to start making masks. I'm going to do takeout in my restaurant. I'm going to deliver curbside. There's still a lot of opportunity out there. Maybe it's not as available to everyone, but it's there. I'm a real believer in the American spirit. I just think it's there. People are going to find it. You have to persevere. It took at least ten years to get published. I started writing in my thirties, all this bizarre stuff, sending it out. Nothing. I started collecting rejection slips. I started out in a little shoebox. Then it got to be a bigger box. I had rejections that were written on bar napkins in crayon. It was bad. After ten years of rejections, I gave up. I went out and sat on the curb in front of my house with this big box and cried my eyes out and burned every rejection. I wish I hadn’t done that because I would've liked to have had them now. The next day, I borrowed a suit from my sister, and I went out and I got a job with Manpower. I worked at Manpower for -- I don't remember. I think it was maybe three, four months.

I had given up. It was my dream, and it was crushed. Because we needed the money, I just didn't feel like I could keep going anymore. After work, I went to pick my daughter up at an ice-skating rink. She was ice skating. I was standing there waiting for her. My husband and my son came up. They put their arms around me. They said, "Your editor just called." This was a hundred years ago, and I can't think about it without getting very emotional. There was my dream. My dream came back. My life just started over. I made two thousand dollars on that first book. The very next day, I went into the office with a box of donuts. I left it at the office. I took my hairspray and my extra pair of shoes, and I went home. Right there, I just quit. I just walked right out. Then I didn't sell another book for a couple years. We sort of had to give up eating oranges to make ends meet. Eventually, I started getting multiple-book contracts. Here I am.

Zibby: Wow, what a story. That's so amazing. It's so inspiring. When you were telling it, I had goosebumps everywhere. That's amazing.

Janet: It's been good.

Zibby: Congratulations. The role modeling of all of it is just great. It shows if you just stay with it and you keep doing something that you love, it will pay off in some way, shape, or form. Yours was a particularly big payoff. I will grant you that, but still. Tell me a little more about starting with the romances and how, for instance, your son at Dartmouth felt knowing those scenes were out there. I read that you said somewhere that you stopped writing romance when you ran out of positions to put your characters in. [laughs] Tell me a little more about that and being a mom and having all this sexualized content out there.

Janet: It wasn't that sexualized. As a romance writer, it was a very positive genre, which is one of the things that I love about it. It's one of the things that I think is such a great reflection of women. We're nurturers. We try to be positive people. It was a positive genre. The romances ended happily. They were about basically good people. I didn't have to kill anybody in a romance. When I started doing this, initially, my family was a little embarrassed. They were like, oh, god, Mom is writing this book. My husband, "Is this a reflection on me?" It turned out that it was actually a very good reflection. My son was very popular in college. He told everybody his mother was writing soft porn. [laughter] That was good for him. My husband found out that he'd be in the elevator and women would come in and would want to talk to him. I noticed that his ties started getting a little flashier. He really milked it. When I eventually moved over into the mystery genre and I started with Plum, then he could tell everybody he was actually Ranger and everything was patterned after him. My family really got into it. We all work together now. We're a little family business.

Zibby: I saw that. You have Evanovich Inc., right?

Janet: Yeah.

Zibby: What does everybody do? How do you make sure to work together in a seamless way?

Janet: We all have different talents. At the same time, we're sort of like water. When there's an opening, we flow into it. There's not a lot of ego involved. We actually like each other. We pretty much live together. We move around like a little herd. In the beginning, it was that -- my daughter went to film and photography school, Brooks in California. She had some aspirations of her own and then decided that maybe that wasn't who she was. At the time, the computer was just starting to really have an influence. She said, "You're sort of halfway supporting me while I'm doing my thing in San Francisco. Why don't I set up a website for you?" She started my very first website. It became a full-time job for her because she turned it into this entertainment site, really helped to grow my audience, made it fun, made it a lot more fun. That was initially what she did. My son is brilliant. He took over family finances. He had some legal experience, so he was the contract reader, as was my husband. Everybody edited. They were all my first editors. They still are. As we went along, they sort of modified their roles. Until now, my husband is still editing. He's still reading contracts. He keeps track of foreign sales and that kind of thing. My son and my daughter are doing more creative things. They're still my editors. They edited me for so many years that they picked up a lot of writing skills. My son has been working as a coauthor with me. He actually has been a coauthor for longer than people realize.

When books would come in and they weren’t exactly in my voice and they just needed some extra help, Peter and Alex would jump in. They would do some writing for me because I had a pretty heavy schedule just doing original writing. They really did a very heavy editing job for me for several years. Now they're branching out. They're doing their own thing. Alex is in charge of everything that is on the computer, all my media. She interfaces with publishers and publicists and my agent. She's really the one that says, "Your fans aren't going to like this." She always toured with me in the early years. She was the one who read the emails. She was the one who got in the lines and talked to people when I only had a couple minutes. When I was doing the big book tours, I'd have two, three thousand people out at a night. We'd start signing at five thirty. We'd end at two in the morning. I was moving along pretty fast saying, "Hi. How are you? Would you like your name on this?" Then they'd have to move along. Alex was there. Alex got to go down the line, and she got to talk to everybody and made friends and exchanged Christmas cards and found out what they thought and what they liked and what they didn't like and what they wanted to see. She's just been huge in the development of my career, the Plum series, some little side series that we've done just to give me some variety for fun. I'd like to clone myself so I could do more of those side series.

Zibby: It turns out that the secret weapon in your whole crime series is your children. That's pretty awesome.

Janet: It's true.

Zibby: First of all, how high are we going to go with this Stephanie Plum series? Do you have a number? Are you stopping at thirty? Is this an indefinite amount? Then also, what's the next project to come out after this one?

Janet: No, I don't have a number. As long as I'm enjoying it, I'm going to keep doing it, and as long as people out there are buying the books. The difficult thing is these two guys in Stephanie Plum's life. There's this tendency, you want her to make a choice. You want her to have babies and live happily ever after just like I did. That doesn't work in that series. The fun of it is the adventure, the not knowing, the choices that she has, and the life that she can have that the rest of us really can't. It would be scandalous if we did. I don't have any set number for her. The next book that's coming out is one of the coauthor books. It's The Bounty. It's in the Fox and O'Hare series. It has a new coauthor. I've had a lot of coauthors. I'm like death on coauthors, I think. I don't know how James Patterson does it. I don't know how he keeps these same great coauthors. It goes on to infinity. My coauthors are with me for -- they're all friends, is part of the problem. Lee Goldberg, I knew him for years. Same with Phoef Sutton.

They come on board. We have some fun. We write a bunch of books. Then they say, "I think I'm going to go be a big shot in television again." They were all A-list sitcom writers. I have a new coauthor on this book. The last coauthor in the Fox and O'Hare series, my son jumped in and did. He did that at the last minute. That book almost didn't come out. Peter said, "Okay, I can do it," and stopped his life for about two and a half months and helped us get the book out. This book is in another new direction. That comes out in March. Then after that, I have a spinoff from this book that's out there right now. It's about a woman, Gabriella Rose. Whenever I do these little miniseries, I always like to do something that -- the heroine is very different from Stephanie Plum just to give to myself a break so I can have some fun too. What I find is that when I go into some other woman's head other than Stephanie Plum and then I go back to Plum, I always know a little bit more about her because of what I've learned about this other person. That book should come out sometime in the summer. It's about Gabriella Rose.

Zibby: Very exciting. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Janet: If it's important to you, just don't give up. Keep trying to do better. Keep learning. Join a professional organization like International Thriller Writers, Romance Writers of America. That really helps because it allows you to get a peer group. It allows you to learn some things about agents and the process and publishers. Basically, you got to keep your ass in the chair. You really do. I like to tell people it's like a job. If you took a job working at 7-Eleven and they expected you to be there for three hours at seven o'clock at night, you'd do it. You'd get there. If you had a cold, you'd show up anyway. You'd take some pills. Writing is like that. If you want to do it, you think of yourself as a writer. When people say, "What do you do?" you say, "I'm a writer. I'm not published, but I'm a writer." Every day, if it's only for a half an hour, you sit down and you write because that momentum is very important. It's important that you believe in yourself even when you have ten years of failure like I do. Look at me. I was rejected for ten years. I was not giving up. Until you make my ten-year mark, don't worry about it. Just keep going.

Zibby: And be ready to forgo oranges for as long as necessary, I guess.

Janet: You have to do what you have to do.

Zibby: Do what you have to do. Thank you, Janet. Thank you so much. It's such a privilege to chat with you and hear the backstory and all of your encouraging remarks from the American dream to your first novel to everything. Thank you for sharing your time with me and with my audience.

Janet: You're welcome. It was great being here.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Janet: Bye.

Sarah Crossan, HERE IS THE BEEHIVE

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

Sarah Crossan: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Here Is the Beehive is so good. I love how you did it in a poetic style. It's almost like one big long poem. I want you to tell listeners what it's about. Then tell me about your decision to make it styled in this way, please.

Sarah: It opens with Ana Kelly who's a solicitor, an estate lawyer, getting a call from a woman to say that her husband has died and that she took care of the last will and testament. Ana realizes very quickly in this conversation that the woman is referring to her lover and a man that she had been having an affair with. This is how the book opens. We learn straight away that her lover is dead. It's how she deals with this grief. The book takes place in -- it's sort of a parallel text. You have the past where you see how she met Connor and how that relationship blossomed. Then you also have the present tense. We see how she copes with the loss of this person who she cannot tell anybody about. She has to grieve alone because of the secret nature of that relationship. She has things about her life that come out through the book. I think the reader is, on occasion, surprised by things that we find out about her life. Writing in verse, it wasn't a decision at all. It just happened that way. I've written lots of YA novels, children's novels in verse. I started to do that when I read the wonderful Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse which won the Newbery Medal in the eighties. I was teaching that to a sixth-grade class in New Jersey. I thought, my goodness, what is this way of writing? It's amazing. I started to write that way at that time. I haven't been able to let it go. I have written some prose novels. This is my first adult novel. I felt it had to be written in verse, really.

Zibby: There you go. I loved, actually, in the first few pages, trying to figure out who everybody was. I read a couple passages again. I was like, no way, is this really what's happening? I couldn't believe it, the way you had it set up and just sitting there, this lawyer with the run in her stockings getting this horrific news and then the devastation that followed. It's the combination of horrible secrets with affair and love. You got all the ingredients. I was reading it this morning as my kids were crazy. I grabbed a little scratch paper and wrote this by hand, a quote from your book. You wrote, "We plan for death, make sensible decisions while gorging on life, but no one intends to die." I loved that quote. Tell me about that thought behind that and all of it.

Sarah: I think that we always believe we're promised a tomorrow. I don't know that we are. This book was written before COVID, but I think COVID has made that perfectly clear to all of us. What house have you chosen to live in or apartment have you chosen to live in? Who have you chosen to live in that space with you? Those things become glaring and have become glaring in the last six months. I just wanted to imagine a world where something was taken away suddenly and then the collapse, the aftermath of that. For me, it is absolutely a book about grief and who is eligible to grieve. I think that a lot of people come to the book really disliking this character because the setup is sort of exposing for them. A lot of readers have reacted quite violently and said, well, she was having an affair. Who cares how she feels? I think that's a really interesting reaction. Women particularly have had very, very strong reactions to the book; young women, perhaps stronger reactions than older women who have scars and know that life is complicated. That's been really interesting for me, that it has polarized people. I have people saying they love the book and then people hating the book. [laughs] It's been a good one for book groups. I've chatted to a few book groups. In the nicest possible way, people say they don't particularly enjoy the character. As I say, I think that's because it's kind of exposing for the reader. It's not really about the character. I think it's about the reader and what the reader is bringing to that story.

Zibby: Your book already came out in the UK. Is that where you had the book groups?

Sarah: Yeah. The UK and Ireland have had some book groups. It came out on August 20th over here.

Zibby: It's like ESP. You get a little glimpse forward of what's going to happen over here, a little test marketing run. Not really a test market. It's an enormous market. Where did writing from grief come from? Have you gone through something yourself? Is this something that you just wanted to tackle? Tell me where the feelings of this came from.

Sarah: I've experienced grief, not in the same way that the character, Ana, has experienced grief. I wanted to also write about secrecy in grief. I think there are a lot of things that for a lot of people, they grieve silently, whether that's that they have -- doing the research and speaking to lots and lots of women, I didn't just speak to women who had affairs. I spoke to women who were going through grief. Then I just tried to talk to women generally about, what is a secret that you keep? In terms of the relationships that women have had in their lives, the secret the women have kept, having an affair with a coworker, a relationship with someone of the same sex, someone of a different religion, a family member, a teacher or a professor, a huge number of women that I spoke to were in secret relationships. Then also just other types of secret grief, so speaking to a woman who had a child who was not neurotypical and how that felt for her on a day-to-day basis. She didn't really want to talk about it because she felt so bad about that. She felt so bad that she was even upset in the first place that she had a child who was a challenge to her. That's what I meant at the beginning, is legitimacy of grief. Who is entitled to grieve? For what are we entitled to grieve?

I was listening to Brené Brown speak on her podcast recently about COVID and how we say to ourselves on a daily basis, well, I shouldn't get too upset because I have a house. I have food on the table. My home is warm. She said there's no hierarchy here. We're all allowed to have our feelings. Just because a person might be going -- externally, it appears to be something that's much more difficult. Doesn't mean you don't have your cross. We're all bearing something. When we have empathy for ourselves, we're much better at having empathy with other people. When people do say they don't like the character of Ana, I think, I wonder how hard you are on yourself, the fact that you can't empathize with this character who is grieving in this book. Are you particularly hard on yourself? From the friends that I know who read the book, it does seem that those who dislike the characters have things about themselves as well that they're not coping with too well. That was a challenge for me to like this character. As a writer, it was a real stretch. Can I give her nothing that makes her sympathetic and yet can I as a writer, by the end, be devastated for her and feel for her and cry for her and want her to be okay? That was work. That was me having to do a lot of emotional work myself to get there, to feel for this person who if you told me her story, I wouldn't like her either.

Zibby: Wow. There is that universal human compassion. Whenever anybody has someone ripped away from them, you also immediately kind of put yourself in their shoes and think about the things that have been ripped from you and then have that compassion. I think it's hard to limit it based on circumstance.

Sarah: I think that says a lot about you, actually. I don't think that's a general feeling. That hasn’t been the general reaction. I think that says a lot about the person who is listening, not necessarily about the story that's being told or a general compassion that we have. I think it says something quite nice about you. [laughs]

Zibby: Thank you. It's just in the same way that no matter how terrible a person is, I don't want anything bad to happen to them. There's all this stuff in the news now. Everybody's hoping for terrible things to happen to people who can be terrible. I don't think anything justifies -- I don't know.

Sarah: I know. I think it's Scott Turow, the writer, who said you judge a society not on the way that we treat people who are loved, but on the way we treat people who are hated. How do we treat the people who are most hated? That shows a lot about who we are. I think you're right. There's a lot of sending ill wishes towards particular people at the moment hoping for their downfall.

Zibby: I think you also, in your book, captured some of the immediate aftermath, that shock value of grief and how Ana stops eating and lets her hair go. Everybody notices, but no one can pinpoint it. The fact that she can't reveal it, it just makes it all the worse. Those first days or weeks when you're integrated that information with everyday life are so challenging. I feel like you got to the heart of that particular time.

Sarah: Thank you. It was watching, observing, having gone through things myself, but also -- spoiler. It's a spoiler. I don't know what page it comes out on, but she's a mother as well. She finds that difficult. That's something that readers have judged her for as well. She's just this terrible mother. Have we all not had moments where we have not been our best selves? I can think of many. I'll write you a list. It will be pages and pages where I know I could've done better. That's the one thing that's leveled at Ana which bothers me. I think if the protagonist had been a male, that wouldn't be leveled at him, that he's a terrible father, he's disconnected from his children. Of course she's disconnected from her children. She's disconnected from herself. She's disconnected from her whole life.

Zibby: Having kids makes everything more complicated. I was on Instagram debating if I should admit how not proud of my mom behavior I was the other day. I was like, nope, I think I'm going to delete this. Nobody needs to know. They can imagine. Everyone's been there. Still, I don't necessarily need to put it on display. Everybody slips, not in a lifelong-damage way, but it's a lot having kids. When you throw on extra emotion over it, it's a lot. Then they take on your emotion too. Kids are like sponges. You can't hide it, necessarily.

Sarah: They're a reflection, aren't they?

Zibby: How old is your daughter? Do you have other kids? It's just your daughter?

Sarah: I just have one, yeah. She's eight. She's back at school now after six months. She's not happy. I thought she would be delighted to go back, but she's not enjoying it massively. I think she feeds off my anxiety. I feed off hers. I need to be better at hiding my feelings. [laughs] I don't know that a psychologist would say that was a good thing. I suppose because she's been at home so much, I end up revealing things to her or she ends up overhearing conversations that I'm having. There was an illness in my family. I was trying to deal with that. There was nowhere for me to go. I'm on the phone. I have to take the phone call. I keep talking about the pandemic. During the pandemic, I think parenting has been particularly difficult. We spend so much time protecting our children from things, and then they're face to face with it. There's nowhere to hide.

Zibby: It's true. My mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law both had COVID and both passed away during this summer within six weeks. My husband, Kyle, and I, were in charge of her care. It has to be remote. She was in Charlotte, North Carolina. Anyway, I have four kids myself. As all the calls were coming in, and the nurses, I tried to be like, everything's good, let's go on the trampoline. It seeps in. Then it comes out of them in other places too. Then all of a sudden, they're having separation anxiety, which they haven't had in years. Even if you put on a happy face and don't talk about it, they feel it. It's one of these things that nobody really warns you about. You can't actually hide your feelings. You have to change your feelings if you don't want your kids to feel them.

Sarah: I completely agree. I was speaking to a psychiatrist not that long ago who was saying one of the worst things for children is a house where there's silence because they know there's some kind of danger, silence in terms of tension, silence in terms of a house where people are not getting on very well, but they're not shouting at each other. A child senses it. They know. They feel that energy. They attach that danger elsewhere. I notice something's not quite right, but everything looks right, so you know what? I'm going to suddenly be scared of buttons. I'm going to suddenly be scared of ice cream or whatever, not likely.

Zibby: It's just like a dog approaches a situation. You don't hear anything, necessarily. They pick up everything. They just freeze, and they're looking around.

Sarah: With my dog, it's howling in the middle of the night. [laughs] Be quiet, Hilda. Be quiet.

Zibby: So tell me more about the process of writing. What's your writing process? Do you work there at a shared space? How long does each of your books take? What made you switch to adult fiction versus younger children's fiction?

Sarah: I used to work in a cowriting space in the Writers Room in New York City, actually, when I lived in Jersey City. I used to go in every day. Then my daughter was born, and I stopped doing that and then eventually relocated to the UK. Then I had a writing space built at the end of my garden. Actually, that stopped working. That kind of isolation in my own studio didn't really benefit me creatively, I don't think. I was a schoolteacher for ten years. I need people. I need relationships. I need noise. I, half the time, ended up going out to a library or to a coffee shop anyway. I'm now relocated again. I'm still in the UK, but I've moved two hours away from where I previously lived. I found this amazing coworking space where I'm allowed to bring my dog. They have little rooms for Zooms. They have desks that you can book out and tea and coffee. It's lovely. I'm trying to not come as much because I'm trying to stay as distant from people as possible, but it's great. There's hand sanitizer everywhere. You have to spray all your desk down. People stay away from one another.

Just the noise, it's quite nice to have this noise in the background of other people living and working. There's all different types of people working here, which is quite nice as well. You might chat to an architect one day and a web designer another day. That's quite interesting because writers tend to talk to writers, and that it. We forget all these other amazing jobs that exist. That's how I'm working at the moment. In terms of writing for adults, it was not a conscious decision at all. It was just that I had this idea, this hook that I imagined. What would it be like if a woman was to lose somebody and she couldn't tell the world about it? Then I had a conversation with some friends when we were out in the pub one night and asked, "Have you ever been in a relationship with a secret?" Slowly but surely, every single person around the table revealed a secret. I thought, gosh, this is a really universal experience. I wanted to write about it. I couldn't write about it within children's fiction. I couldn't find a way into that story.

Zibby: Oh, yeah, that's probably better.

Sarah: I gave it a go.

Zibby: Did you? [laughs]

Sarah: I thought, could I write about a parent having a relationship and it being secret and what that does to the family? I decided to write an adult novel instead. I was interviewed by someone who said, "your apprenticeship in children's fiction." I was horrified because I absolutely don't see writing for adults as a step up in any way. In fact, to some extent, writing for adults has been a little easier because I don't have to watch every single word. I do in terms of making the language as good as it can be, but the swearing and being careful not to say something that may be interpreted by a child in a particularly way that is damaging or just not of my politics. With an adult reader, you can say what you want and let them do the hard work of dismantling it. I need to make my children's books palatable to teenagers. I don't have to do that for adults. I don't care about it being palatable. I just want it to be as real as possible. In a way, it was kind of freeing. Easier is not the right word, but definitely freeing and less painstaking in some ways, especially when it came to the edit. The edit was so joyous compared to editing a children's book.

Zibby: How long did the book take to write, the first draft?

Sarah: About three years. Probably, three years in total. I think it was kind of clean when it got to the publisher, which is always quite nice to not have a huge edit to do with your publisher. I will, probably, for the next book. For this one, it was kind of clean. That was nice.

Zibby: Tell me about your next book.

Sarah: I haven't started writing it yet. I'm actually meeting my editor in a couple of weeks so we can talk through some ideas. I had written some stuff and sent it to her. She said, "Do you really want to write this? It just doesn't seem to have the energy." I was like, "No, not really, but I'm on deadlines. That's what you're getting." [laughs] She said, "Hey, why don't we just wait and see what comes to you rather than forcing you to write something that you don't want to write?" In the meantime, I've written a YA, a young adult novel in verse again. That's going to come out in August, but I haven't edited that yet. I'm doing that at the moment.

Zibby: Excellent. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Sarah: Yeah, I guess. If you wanted to be a connoisseur of wine, you drink loads of wine. [laughs] That's what I would do. If you wanted to play tennis, you'd just pick up a tennis racket and you'd start banging a ball about. I think a lot of people have an idea of what it is to be a writer which is a fantasy and a romantic idea. Being a writer, there's a lot of drudgery involved in it. To write, you just got to sit down and get writing rather than have a fantasy about it. Also, it's so easy to think of publication as the holy grail. With publication, come other problems. Where I am on the best-seller lists? Have I won a prize? What are my reviews like? That idea that you will suddenly feel like a real writer once you get published, that's not true because there are always new mountains to climb and hurdles every day. I'm giving a lot of advice now, but another thing I tell people is it's not going to make you happy. I think a lot of people think that once they get an agent or once they get a publisher, it's going to make them happy, but your other life goes on. All the other stuff continues.

I won a big prize in the UK, a children's prize called the Carnegie Medal. I got a call from my publicist to say, "Are you sitting down?" I thought someone had died. I was like, "Yeah." She was like, "You've won the Carnegie Medal." I said, "Oh, my goodness." I'm screaming. I was like, "I'm so happy." Then I put the phone down. My daughter was basically saying I needed to wipe her bottom. [laughs] She was like, "I need you wipe my --" I was like, okay, there we go, back into reality, back into life. I was given four seconds to enjoy this moment. Then, right, you're a mom. Back to your real life. So it's not going to make you happy. It might add to it. It might take away from it. It's certainly not going to give you everything that you think you want in life. For me, it took winning the Carnegie to realize that my relationships had to be the thing that fed me and nourished me, which they do now.

Zibby: Although, I would say that phase of parenting is not always the most nourishing when you're in it. I wouldn't beat yourself up about that too much. [laughs] Sometimes you just have to get through certain things. That's great perspective to have. Thank you. Thank you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I have a virtual book club called Zibby's Virtual Book Club. We have authors come on. We all read the book. Then there's Q&A with the author. If you have any interest, I think this would be a great book for my club. If you want to do it, I could work with your publicist and try to find a time.

Sarah: Yeah, I would love to. One thing, if the readers were reading it, my mom suggested that readers were one of three people. She suggested that the reader was either a person who had had an affair; a person who had had an affair done to them, they were the victim of it; or they were a person who was terrified it was going to happen to them. When I've spoken to book groups before, it's like, which of those people are you before you go into it? Know who you are when you're going in. It will tell you a lot about why you feel what you feel when you come out of it. I would love to. I would really love to.

Zibby: Your book is like a Rorschach test. I am divorced and remarried. This is years ago. When I would tell friends and sit down with them, I'm getting a divorce or whatever, their reaction had nothing to do with me. It just said everything about their own marriage. It was basically like, if you want to find about your friends' marriages, tell them you're getting a divorce. See how they react. Then be like, I'm kidding. [laughter] That's the way to get at the heart of -- I don't actually recommend that. I'm just joking. Sometimes when you put up a sort of mirror is when everything else comes pouring out in the same way as your book does.

Sarah: I had a friend who, when she told another friend that she was getting divorced, her friend said, "Who's going to do things like change the lightbulbs in your house?" She thought, that is literally the only use you can see for your husband. [laughs] He changes lightbulbs. That is it. That's the extent of what he adds to the marriage.

Zibby: Husband handyman. [laughs]

Sarah: It was so nice to speak to you. It's been really, really nice.

Zibby: You too. Have a great day. Thanks so much.

Sarah: You too, Zibby. Bye.

Fariha Roisin, LIKE A BIRD

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Fariha. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Like a Bird: A Novel.

Fariha Róisín: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Your book, I read it at night. I was so disturbed and scared from some of the scenes. I loved it. It was gripping and powerful. Then I was almost closing my eyes at some of the things were happening. It's rough to take. It was gritty and out there. That's what a good book does. It makes you feel. Why don't tell listeners what it's about?

Fariha: It's funny. Under close inspection, it's about so much more than just the broad strokes. It's a survivor story. It's a story about, this young biracial girl is gangraped by a family friend. It's really in that lurching from her family, being disowned by her family, that she realizes that she actually has a lot more autonomy than she ever thought she did. That, for me, is such a personal story as well. I think a lot of women probably relate to that experience of being raised a certain way and thinking certain things about your capacity and who you are and how you should be defined and what determines you. Then you go out into the real world and you're like, oh, I have all of this that I can actually find and discover about myself. It's all of those things, but it's also the cracking of a family and the rupture that happens when people don't talk about their emotions and when they don't talk about the gravity of what they're feeling and experiencing in a day-to-day way. There's a lot of themes that might sound kind of out there, but they're also really real, like ancestral trauma. This idea of epigenetics, that's something I really wanted to bring in just even as a subtle motif because, again, it's something I think about so much. Some of us do become bearers of a familial burden, and we don't even know what it is that we're experiencing.

Zibby: Wow. This particular family has gone through so much trauma in a relatively short period of time. The scene where you have the mother when the main character is leaving after she's been cast aside and you have the mom wailing left alone with her two daughters without them, that was so powerful. I know I keep saying the same thing. I'm sorry. [laughs] I know you know it's powerful and everything, but I'm just reiterating.

Fariha: It's important to hear this, honestly. It's very validating.

Zibby: How closely does your background align with your character's?

Fariha: Not at all, really. I'm of South Asian descent. Taylia, the character, her mother is half Jewish American and her father is half Bengali Indian. That was also something I really wanted to explore because, again, the failures of assimilation and the failures of wanting a life that you think you deserve and you do deserve, but then what is lost in all of that? What happens in that transaction when you do prioritize certain things about what your family looks like, what the façade looks like as opposed to what is going on internally? Her parents are so cool. That's something I really wanted to show. Katherine and Adi are both really smart people. They're very cultured. They have taste. They want to see the world. Katherine is political. She married her husband even though her parents didn't want her to because she believed in her beliefs. She wanted expansion. She wanted to see what was outside. Then she married him. Because they kind of signed onto the same contract of living a lie together of something, there is another rupture with them that I think is so important. It's such an important facet of the story that I don't think we ever talk about, when parents, who are people, don't know what to do with themselves.

Zibby: It's so true. You were so funny writing about her mom. You wrote, "Like many white girls, even Jewish ones, Mama wanted to cause her Ashkenazi parents deep distress. She watched Guess Who's Coming to Dinner with a sadistic revery and preached to her friends that the racial divide was the true abomination in American society. Ignorant to the fact that her white-girl utopian idealism was a privilege in and of itself, she considered herself a savior and thought her protests were enough." [laughs] Love it.

Fariha: I like that you like the humor because I wanted it to be funny as well. Humans are so funny. We're so strange. We have so many contradictions. It's not like Taylia's the victim. Everybody's the victim. That's something that I really also wanted to show. That's something, definitely, I can attest to in my own life. Maybe the similarity between me and the family is that I had a pretty traumatic life. I think that's actually kind of common. We experience so much more than what we're willing to put into language. Really trying to see them through a lens of humor and trying to place them contextually in a way that's honest was really, really important to me. I didn't want it to seem like they were two-dimensional. That's also why in the end of the book there was a return to the idea of memory. What is memory? Can we trust it? She starts to replay these memories that she has of her mom and ideas that she has of her mom. Even writing them, I was just like, I've never seen this anywhere before, that questioning of, do I have this right? Did she love me? Maybe. I don't know. That was really fun and heartbreaking to play with.

Zibby: As someone who feels like she's losing her mind every day, this is very comforting to hear because I'm always like, wait, I'm sure this is what happened when I was growing up. Then of course, I'm like, maybe I should call my brother and just find out. Of course, I'm completely wrong. It's close enough. I'm like, I think this happened with this girl on this Valentine's Day. Anyway, you also poked fun at these poor parents where you were talking about how they achieved a new class, essentially. They had become wealthier throughout their, not hippy-dippy -- what's the right word? -- very, very liberal anti-wealth dogma. Then suddenly, they're wealthy, but they don't want to accept that about themselves because what would that mean to their whole identity? They kind of pretend that they're not. Yet they're living the high life in some regards. I thought that was very funny because there's so much of that, I feel like, now. You have to wonder with all this anti-wealth sentiment everywhere, if you won the lottery tomorrow, would this still be the same rhetoric or would it shift a little bit?

Fariha: Exactly. Capitalism, especially right now, it's something that we're all thinking about. I was raised by a Marxist. I was raised by a very intense Marxist. He's very anti-wealth. That's how I was raised. I have a lot of family members that are really rich. You're always navigating and seeing how they interact with their wealth. Oftentimes, there is this deep un-comfortability with the things that they’ve achieved. I can say that about my own life. I have a good life. I'm an artist. I'm a writer. I did this on my own, so I think I feel more vindicated by that. There are those contradictions that we all have to face. That's really what the book is trying to get you to do. It's trying to make you question yourself and question the way that you live your life.

Zibby: It's also, not the kindness of strangers, but whereas there's such capacity for these hateful, horrific acts, there's equal capacity for love and caring. I always forget everybody's names in books, but how the coffee shop owner takes her in not only to give her a job, but into her actual home. Then is it Kai who comes into the store and then offers her a place to live as well having just met her and saying, "It looks like you need a friend"? These are really wonderful things. I think it's important that you highlighted those too as opposed to just this tale of doom and gloom because that is what's so crazy about the world. You can have these diametrically opposed responses to the same person, essentially.

Fariha: Exactly. That is another reflection that I definitely had in my own life. I moved from Australia when I was nineteen to New York and didn't know anybody, came to go to school. I was very naïve, very vulnerable, and met so many people that lended me a hand in way or another. After having such a traumatic, almost loveless upbringing, I really needed that. I really needed to believe that there were people out there that could offer me things that I felt were just too big. That's something she tries to explore, the guilt and the shame of taking things, of wanting things, of wanting safety. There's a lot of shame around that. You think that because you've never gotten it, maybe that's just how your life is going to be. Then when someone offers you a hand, it causes you to question everything that you've accepted before that moment. In a way, I know that it probably seems quite dramatic, but those things that happened to Taylia have all in one way or another happened to me. I negotiate them as an adult all the time. The sexual violence didn't happen like that, but sexual violence has happened to me in my life. I am constantly having to balance those extreme moments with joy and community and real care. That, to me, is the plight of being human, as you kind of said.

Zibby: Wow. So really, just some tiny minor themes here in your book, nothing too deep. Did you have a relationship with a tree in the same way?

Fariha: [laughs] I have relationships with trees, for sure. I'm definitely a little bit of a kook, I'd say. I do a lot of plant medicine, so trees are really important. The natural world has so much to teach us. Again, it is this sweet sentiment that I wanted to bring out. When I was young, I didn't have a lot of friends that I could lean on. The natural world became my friend, sticks and stones, whether it was a little patch on the grass that I knew was mine, that kind of stuff. Especially when you don't have a lot, you find ways to protect yourself, totems.

Zibby: Pretty close to, actually, a totem pole in form and shape. My heart breaks that you experienced some of the same things and emotions because the experience of this character, Taylia, broke my heart over and over again. That devastation and loneliness was really tough. I'm sorry if that was part of your upbringing. That's not fair. That just stinks, honestly.

Fariha: Yeah, I had a really bad life. I had a really hard life for a really long time. I'm a child abuse survivor. All of those things come from deep, deep places. I don't know if you knew this. I wrote this book over eighteen years. I started writing it when I was twelve. I actually wrote myself out of my pain. Through a therapist, I've kind of figured out that even though it wasn't my life completely, I was creating a story a way to have a cathartic process. My family, we didn't know what therapy was. None of those things were options to me eighteen years ago. For whatever reason, I figured out at a young age that I could do this. I had to survive. I had something to say. That's really what carried me through. I don't even know how I did it, but I did it.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, bravo to you. That's amazing. When you said you started this eighteen years ago, I was like, you must have written this when you were five years old. I'm thinking, did you start this as a drawing? You look so young and everything. I think you might win the award, then, for longest time it's ever taken anyone to write a novel.

Fariha: [laughs] It's funny because when you write something, when you work on something for so long -- also, naturally, who I am, I'm very self-critical. That's why it's validating to hear that you like the book because I don't know. I don't know if anyone's reading this book. It becomes such an isolating experience when you put something out. I hope for the best. Here's all of my pain and trauma on the page. I'm trying to also show people that survivorship is real and possible. You question yourself. Especially after this long, you're like, is this story even good? It's an everyday process of reminding myself that at least I stuck to something for eighteen years. If that's all I have, that's pretty remarkable. I always have to pat myself on the back for that because I don't really know how I did it.

Zibby: Turns out it started on a floppy disk. Then you put it on a CD-ROM. Now you finally have it on your phone.

Fariha: [laughs] Google Drive. The evolution.

Zibby: The evolution of Like a Bird. It actually started as a baby bird. Now it's grown and flown away.

Fariha: I love it. Exactly.

Zibby: Did you start by handwriting this? How did you end up deciding now is the time? You're still only thirty. You could've done another eighteen years on it. That would've been justified.

Fariha: I know. I started writing it on hand. Then eventually, maybe a couple months later, we had a family computer. I was talking to my dad about it, who's a professor. He was like, "You should start typing it." With his direction, I started typing it. I would show him the pages and be like, "This, this." I have a really close connection with my dad. I was always looking for his approval. Then eighteen years later, it's a book. It's a three hundred-page book. So much work has gone into it. The evolution is, I started when I was twelve. I finished a first draft when I was fifteen that doesn't look -- it was more of a basic simple draft. All of the things are basically the same, which is wild. I finished it when I was fifteen.

Zibby: Did you lose a sibling?

Fariha: Mm-hmm. Everything -- oh, I didn't personally lose a sibling, no, no, no. Thank god. I was around a lot of death. It was a really palpable thing for me to think about death. Around the time that I started writing this, my favorite grandfather died. I was just being faced with a lot of death. It makes sense to me in the universe of Taylia to have something that triggers her into motion. It's not the rape. The rape isn't what triggers her. That's the last straw for her. She's just like, no, fuck this. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to live like this anymore. It's really the loss of her sister and trying to compute why somebody would do this that brings her to her own evolution. Then I formally started writing this book again when I was in my early twenties. I've been working on it more full time for about eight years.

Zibby: It's so crazy to think when you were twelve, you were writing this. When I was twelve, in my journal, it's like, I slowed danced with Chris McFarron. [laughs]

Fariha: I love that.

Zibby: It's insane. Now I feel horribly guilty for having these ridiculously middle school traditional privileged ups and downs. Then this is going on in your head. It's just insane. Yet here we are as adults just having a normal conversation. What you bring to it, what I bring to it -- not to say I haven't had lots of trauma in my life. It's just not at that young age particularly. Then the way that that informs how you grow up and what you do with your life is so important.

Fariha: Don't you think that we all -- I don't know if this is how you feel. We all become products of our lives. We make choices. At a certain point, maybe you did this as well, but I wanted a better life, so I fought for it. I think the things that happened to me, my therapist might disagree, but I've come to place of a lot of peace. It brings me pain, but I have a lot of peace with my life because I wouldn't be who I am if I didn't go through it. I like who I am a lot. The fact that I can write this book -- I'm being clownish and light. I obviously want people to read it. I obviously want people to connect with it. That is my offering, sourcing all this pain and putting it onto the page so people can have a toolkit. If every survivor is able to read this book, and there's a lot of survivors on this planet, that would mean so much to me. From my heart, it's been written to aid people through this journey.

Zibby: It's beautiful that you did that. I feel like I should put a theme song to this episode that's like, [singing] "I'm a survivor."

Fariha: Destiny's Child. [laughs]

Zibby: Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Yes, Destiny's Child. Thank you for not stopping the singing. That's my first singing on a podcast ever, and my last. [laughter]

Fariha: It's great.

Zibby: Thanks. What's coming next for you? In, let's see, 2038, will we have your next novel eighteen years from now?

Fariha: I'm working on another novel which I'm really excited about. It's still really early stages, so I won't talk about it, actually. I'm also writing a book of poetry called Survival Takes a Wild Imagination. Then I have my fourth book that comes out January 2022 or spring 2022 about the wellness industrial complex. It's my first nonfiction. I'm diving into, again, the things that we're talking about, trauma and my own experience and rooting it in my own experience, but also looking at the failures of the wellness industrial complex and how we very much owe it to one another to care more about one another, and especially in this climate and everything that's happening and where the world is going with climate change. It's going to be really, really interesting. Those are my two major book projects that are coming up. Then the novel, I think in a couple years. Stay tuned. Then I'm writing some screenplays as well. A lot of things are happening.

Zibby: Wow, that's great, as they should. You deserve nothing but success, especially having taken what was so painful for you and given it, as you said, as an offering to others. I hope that the circle of life gives back to you what you needed from it. It's just great.

Fariha: Thank you.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Fariha: Trust your voice. Don't let anyone tell you that you don't have something to say. If you feel like you do, really trust it and nurture it. Read. Read a lot. I think enough writers, or enough people, don't read. We do need to read more. [laughs] I know that your podcast is about that.

Zibby: I would agree with you. I agree with you. I agree. Not enough people read. I actually read some crazy statistic recently how the average American reads one book every two years. I probably just botched that statistic, so nobody quote me on this or write it down. Just pretend you didn't hear me say that, but it's something like that. A lot of people hardly ever read. A lot of people don't even own a lot of books or any books. I just donated some books to this school in Texas. None of the kids had ever owned a book before and were writing me all these thank-you notes. "Oh, my gosh, I get to take it home. I get to keep it." I get more notes every day from this school. I'm surrounded by books. They're how I stay sane. They’ve helped me through everything that I've ever gone through in my life. I think, wow, I have these talismans of stories and experiences. I just look and I remember them. Now I'll have yours. Then it just brings it all back. Anyway, yes, I think people should make time for books and find ways to get books in everybody's hands.

Fariha: I love that sentiment. Reading is how I survived. If I couldn't have gone into different universes, I don't know what I would've done with myself. Absolutely, it breaks my heart that young kids don't have access to that.

Zibby: By the way, I was going to say this earlier, not that it's any of my business, but you should go to schools. I don't know if you're doing that or not. You should put yourself on the school circuit and go in and have talks and go to middle schools. You never know what's going on with people during that time. They might really need to hear it in the moment. I know it's a lot, this book, but I think you should do it. I think you should try a few schools and see what happens. I think you'll be surprised at how much you'll be able to affect change at that level.

Fariha: Okay, thank you. I'm going to listen to that.

Zibby: Just my two cents for what it's worth.

Fariha: Thank you.

Zibby: This has been unexpectedly fun. I thought this would be so deep and disturbing and intense. I think I had to lighten it up a bit as self-protection or something for both of us. Thank you. This book was beautiful. Your writing style is beautiful. When you said you weren’t sure if people were going to read it or whatever, I found your writing style to be something that was so captivating and a little bit different and a unique voice. I just kept reading and reading. I really liked it. There you have it.

Fariha: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

Zibby: Thanks for coming.

Fariha: I'll talk to you soon.

Zibby: Yes, keep me posted on the meaning of life and everything.

Fariha: [laughs] Bye.

Zibby: 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.

Bryan Washington, MEMORIAL

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

Bryan Washington: Thanks so much for having me, Zibby.

Zibby: Congratulations on Memorial, your debut novel. I know you already have Lot, which was a collection of stories. Now your debut novel making a big, big splash in the world, congratulations.

Bryan: Thanks so much. It's all very surreal. I feel like anytime someone's interested in the thing that you're trying to do, it's deeply surreal.

Zibby: I bet.

Bryan: Massively surreal, but very grateful.

Zibby: I heard from your publicist that you are the next GMA Book Club pick, which I am so thrilled about. That's amazing.

Bryan: That comment about things being surreal, it would've been surreal just to have the book come out. To see it on that scale, on that platform, you can only be grateful because it's just such an unexpected thing.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I'm almost sorry I'm not talking to you after because I would've wanted to hear what it was like to have your book in Times Square and all the rest. Just DM me or something because you won't be busy or anything. [laughs]

Bryan: I'll reach out.

Zibby: Aside from the success of your endeavors, let's talk about your actual endeavors and all of your writing. I read so many of your amazing essays in all sort of different publications like BuzzFeed and The New York Times and just everywhere, New Yorker, fiction, nonfiction, all your stories. Let's start with your roots going back to Jamaica. Can we talk about that a little bit? You wrote a few really beautiful pieces about that and having different cultures in different countries and going back and everybody clapping on the plane on the way to Jamaica, which, by the way, is one of my favorite places in the world. I think that's why I want to talk about it.

Bryan: Anytime that you land. It's just like, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. [laughs]

Zibby: It's one of the only places we regularly travelled to growing up. I just thought that's what you did on planes.

Bryan: Oh, my god, can you imagine? I feel like that's all we should do on planes. It's so beautiful that we've landed in a lot of ways.

Zibby: Until I read what you wrote, it didn't even occur to me it was only there. Then I had to go back in my head. I'm like, no way, was it really only to Jamaica? Anyway, you taught me something about my own life.

Bryan: When you fly to New York, no one seems terribly excited to be there. It's just like, let's get off the plane. I was born in Kentucky, but my mom's Jamaican. Pretty early on, I had the opportunity to go back a handful of times. I think that with every piece that I've written, in some capacity, a lot of it has come down to the generosity of the editors that I've been able to work with because I've been able to work with a lot of folks who are so great at their jobs like Nicole Chung over at Catapult and Rachel Sanders who used to be at BuzzFeed and now Racheal Arons at the New Yorker. They’ve been super receptive to me writing about a lot of different stuff and not really siloing me into one particular beat. It's made for a lot of opportunities to spread myself around as far as interests are concerned.

Zibby: I feel like this theme of travel and negotiating different relationships is very present in Memorial in many ways, and also the search for family and what that really means and all of that. Maybe you could start by telling people who don't know what Memorial is about, what it's about and how you ended up writing that novel.

Bryan: It really has depended on who I'm talking to. Sometimes I'll call it a gay psycho-dramedy. I've called it a lowercase love story. My editor started saying a rom-com with teeth a few months ago. I actually really like that. It really does depend on what headspace I'm in. I just use one of them. I think that at its base, it's a love story. I wanted to write a love story about characters that I wanted to read and that I hadn’t seen on the page. I wanted it to be a love story featuring characters in communities that were in conversation with one another as opposed to a reaction to trauma or a reaction to the obstacles, whether infrastructural or personal, that they may have been facing. Trying to write a love story that allowed room for each partner to grow into both that relationship but also the relationships around them and themselves was the overarching goal.

It started as a short story that I wrote for a zine. I was in the middle of writing another project that I will never turn back to. I keep turning back to this short story because it was easier to write, partly, but also because it was one that I wanted to see the ending of. Friends would tell me, "Hey, that's actually a big clue that you need to just do that." I was like, "No, no, no, no one would read this. It's not marketable." I pitched it to my agent. She was super receptive, but I was still a bit tentative. Then I pitched it to my editor, Laura Perciasepe. She was super receptive when she really didn't have to be. At that point, I sat down and really seriously started drafting it. It took about three years or so and about eleven-ish drafts or so. It was a little bit of work trying to get it to come together and trying to get the different threads in the place that I wanted them to be. Really, it was just reaching toward the sort of thing that I wanted to read and the sort of book that I thought that I might enjoy if it existed that got me to finish it.

Zibby: Wow. Your writing style is very unique. Rough around the edge is not -- I don't mean that in a bad way. Maybe raw around the edges. It's just so -- I used to have a good vocabulary. Today, it's failing me. Now I feel like I insulted you, which I obviously did not mean to do. I don't mean rough around the edges.

Bryan: No, rough around the edges, that's amazing as a description. [laughs]

Zibby: It's just so raw. I don't know how else to say it, bold. You don't mess around with words you don't need. You don't use flowery language that has no use. You just say it. It's in such a sparse way that's even more powerful, especially the dialogue and your use of punctuation. I was really into it.

Bryan: I so appreciate that. I'm really interested in the silences between characters and the spaces between what characters say to one another and also the spaces between what's actually said by someone and what they understand and what they internalize and how the context in which they're in when they hear the thing can impact what they actually take with them and how when that context changes, perhaps, their memory or their internalization of the thing that they heard could change as well. Really playing with the space between what's said and what's understood is always in the back of my head. Also, I'm hyperconscious of accessibility when it comes to language. That might have to do with the fact that I wasn't the most prodigious reader growing up. What's most impressive to me or what's really most amazing to me as far as fiction is concerned is folks who use a simplicity of language in order to get five, six, seven, eight, nine different themes across at the same time. Really striving for that is important to me generally, but also for Memorial too.

Zibby: Oh, good. Okay, great. [laughter] Good, you tried to do that. That's awesome.

Bryan: There was a little bit of tension on it, so it's been nice to hear -- I feel like you try to do a thing and then it's like, did I do the thing? Then other people tell you, you did the thing. I can talk about it now. [laughs]

Zibby: You did the thing. That's awesome. Wait, go back to not being a big reader growing up. Did you not like to read at all? Were you a late reader? Tell me about your reading in childhood and maybe just your childhood. You said you grew up in Kentucky, but now you're in Houston. What happened in between? Where'd you go? Tell me about growing up. We only have a little bit of time. [laughs] I'm like, tell me your life story.

Bryan: Oh, my god, who are you? I was born in Kentucky, moved to Texas when I was three or so. The first house we lived in was just outside of Houston proper. It was a very white neighborhood, a very white subdivision. The street itself was deeply diverse. My parents' friends, and there are a cohort of folks who moved to that area at the same time, was deeply diverse. I was really fortunate to be privy to a lot of different folks coming from a lot of different communities, cooking a number of different cuisines. I think that my earliest reading ventures were cookbooks, partly because of the fact that my parents worked. If I wanted to eat, I had to cook. I didn't know how to do that, so really just bugging friends and bugging friends' parents. Reading cookbooks was how I passed my time pretty early on. I did all of the Texas cis-boy things. I was really into football for a time. Then I was no longer. Once I stopped playing football, it left my brain. It entirely evaporated.

Zibby: What position did you play?

Bryan: I played fullback, which was an experience. I was pretty slow, so it really didn't make sense structurally for me to be doing that. What I really fell into narratively was film. It's a boon now. It's something that I can appreciate now. I watched a lot of foreign film, or foreign from the States in either case, so the ways in which you could tell a story both structurally and also narratively. The kind of stories that you could tell always seemed really wide open to me. We had a local Blockbuster. They had everything. You can travel the world at Blockbuster. A lot of my early narrative edification was through film. Then I went to the University of Houston for undergrad. I took a class with a guy named Matt Johnson. He was incredibly generous with his time and deeply kind as far as what I was trying to do on the page. It was encouragement to just keep going. It was really fortuitous to meet him. Then I did an MFA after undergrad. I met Joanna Leake who was also deeply generous with her time and deeply encouraging, so being really lucky to meet folks who were into what I was trying to do and receptive to it.

Zibby: Amazing. Why didn't you give up? What made you keep going? This is the thing I'm always most curious about. Eleven drafts of Memorial, why not just put it aside? What drove you to keep working on it?

Bryan: I've gotten to think a lot about it now. At this point, it seems like a bit much. [laughs] When I wrote Memorial, it wasn't a book that I wrote on contract. If I hadn’t finished it, then no one would've cared because there was no financial obligation one way or the other. I really wanted to see how it would end. I was teaching ESL at the time, which is a job that I loved. I would teach and then I would write on the weekends or write during lunch. If I had a day off, I would go to the coffee shop and work on it. I just wanted to see how it would end. For the longest time, I thought that I would finish an iteration of it, and then I would show it to my friends and then they would read it or not read, and that would be the story of Memorial. I was quite all right with that. I was quite happy with it. Really, just wanting to see what a narrative where there isn't really a clear antagonist and where there are characters that are hopefully approaching one another from a place of love and from a place of growth could end up and what that would look like, it was and is really important to me. Just trying to see if it was a thing that I could do was the driver in a lot of ways.

Zibby: Interesting. Was there anything in your life that happened, particularly I'm referring to not especially the mother-in-law, but the mother-in-law-ish person coming to stay from Tokyo and the boyfriend jetting off and leaving the -- I'm not explaining this well -- leaving the new person there so that he doesn't have to deal with his mother. It'd be like I start dating someone and I'm like, see ya, you hang out with my mom. That would not play probably even now, and I'm married. What inspired that? Where did that piece of it come from?

Bryan: That scenario arrived for me intact. There isn't really a one-to-one correlation between any of the characters and any of their arcs and things that I've experienced. The most tangible one might be that I worked at an aftercare place for five years. It was a job that I really loved. Aside from that, there's not a lot where you could draw a direct line. At the same time, I wanted to read something featuring the kinds of relationships that I'd had, the kind of relationships that my friends had had. Trying to put that on the page was really important to me. I knew that if I wanted to write a story in which the ending was open for the characters, not necessarily structurally open, but open as far as a possibility for them, I would need to at least create a stable foundation in the intro, a sort of bait and switch. If you're going to read the narrative about one particular thing, like a very strange [indiscernible], and then it becomes something else or it becomes many different things. I was really lucky in that that scenario arrived mostly intact from the very outset. At the same time, I think that was one of the very few things about the book that from the beginning I knew that this will probably stay. Everything else changed a handful of times, at least, over the course of writing it.

Zibby: I was struck in one of your essays about the experience with your uncle in Jamaica where you saw a group of gay men around a boat. You were like, oh, look, great. Before you knew it, your uncle was hurling stones at them. You were just standing there. Then you all just paddled off or something like that and left the men. You were like, well, I'm not coming out to this crew. Forget that. How did everybody in your family then react to this book which is very open and graphic? I don't know if that's the right word, but very graphic, as many sexual scenes are no matter what. You're right in that it doesn't happen as often in literature between two men. What does your family think about that?

Bryan: The family members that I know have read it have been overwhelmingly positive. I gave a galley of it to my mom once I had a solidified galley back in December. She would send updates every few weeks just sort of like USPS telling me, it's here right now, not whether they liked it or not whether they finished. [laughs]

Zibby: Just her page number?

Bryan: Like, the galley is in Atlanta. That galley's in New York. This is the person who has it. Everyone that I've heard from has been really supportive of the story and really just overwhelmingly positive toward what I was trying to do. I feel like if everyone is positive that also makes me a bit weary because I'm like, what am I not seeing? I'm grateful for it, but it also comes back to this idea of what I wanted to try to do with the book is not operate in binaries and not silo characters into archetypes that don't give them room to change or room to grow or room to expand their language or to silo them into one position or another. They may not have the language or the lexicon to have the conversations that the folks around them, whether it's family, whether it's lovers, whether it's friends, want them to have, and just putting every character in a position to be able to move toward goodness. So far, everyone has been overwhelmingly supportive, which is also a bit concerning. I'm waiting for the other shoe to fall. It's very strange.

Zibby: Holding your breath a little bit.

Bryan: Not too long. As soon as I say this, I'm going to get a text, so-and-so is [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Zibby: You're like, oh, good, I was waiting for that one.

Bryan: Exactly. Confirmed.

Zibby: Are you working on anything new now?

Bryan: Yeah. I have a project that I'm trying to get into shape. I don't know if it'll stick or if it's just a hiccup and then it'll go away. The biggest thing on the horizon is that I'm adapting this series for television. A24 is producing it. Rudin Productions is assisting in the production. A big thing for me during the option process was that if it was going to end up on screen, I wanted to be a person to adapt it because it just seemed like a really cool opportunity, for one thing. Also, there was a certain way that I wanted it done or a certain way that I wanted to see it. I'm really fortunate that A24 was super receptive to that. They're such great folks. The Rutin Production folks are such great folks. Trying to figure out what the iteration on screen will look like will probably keep me busy for a while.

Zibby: I would think.

Bryan: [laughs] Yeah, just a little bit.

Zibby: That sounds like a big job to do.

Bryan: It'll be an undertaking. I'm working with really cool folks. I think that everyone is approaching it from the standpoint of, we just want to make a cool thing, a really solid thing. I think it'll be a good experience.

Zibby: I didn't mean job in a negative way. I meant an exciting, fulfilling, wonderful project.

Bryan: No, it is work. It is certainly work. I'm in the midst of all of this work. I'm like, oh, my god, more work. I have to cast a positive light on the amount of work it is because otherwise it would be untenable.

Zibby: I feel like it actually might be easier than most to adapt just because I feel like your scenes are so visual. I can see it all, like the taxi or whatever, the car pulling up to the curb at the airport and the kitchen scene with waking up late and having the mother-in-law character be there. I see it. I don't know if that's what's in your head, but I have a clear vision of those scenes.

Bryan: When I'm writing, I pull a lot from film because so many of my narrative reference points and so many of my structural reference points are from things that I've seen. Trying to paint as clear a picture of the world and of the characters and of their interactions as possible is really important to me and something that I really set out to do. That probably comes through more in the editing process once the story is actually there, trying to hone it and cut away all of the unnecessary bits so that you just have story. You have the reader, and they're able to, ideally, have a relationship with that story. It becomes their own.

Zibby: I feel like I have to use what you keep referring to as -- what do you say? Your narrative creative process or something through film? I feel like I need to use that to justify the amount of TV I let my kids watch. I'll be like, no, no, no, they're just bolstering their film narrative of storytelling.

Bryan: That's exactly what it is. They're expanding the canon.

Zibby: Expanding the canon, thank you. That's even better. They're expanding the canon. I'm just going to leave them in front of the TV. [laughs] Do you have any advice to aspiring authors other than perhaps watching lots of TV?

Bryan: Watch as much TV as you can. Other than that, one thing that I would say is not to take too much heed of the market, which can be an incredible temptation, especially when you're first starting out or if you feel as though you don't have connections or if you feel like you don't have a byline or if you feel like you need to add more to your byline. The market really doesn't know what the market wants until the market wants it. For Memorial, a difficulty when it came to initially drafting it and then editing it was that there weren’t too many direct comps that I could pull from. There really weren’t very many total comps that I could pull from. It wasn't until, really, probably early March of this year that I was convinced that like six people would not read it. [laughs] I would just try to tell the story that you're trying to tell to the best of your ability and really create a world on the page, which is going to be difficult regardless of what your narrative looks like or what you set out to do. If you're able to achieve that, I think that that's the biggest boon in a lot of ways.

Zibby: Awesome. Great. Thank you, Bryan. Thanks for our little chat today. I hope I didn't offend you. [laughs]

Bryan: No, no, not at all. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: Thanks for coming on. I'll be watching Good Morning America to see when everything's announced. I'm so excited for you. That's awesome.

Bryan: Thanks so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Take care.

Bryan: Likewise. Please take care.

Zibby: Bye.

Alice Hoffman, MAGIC LESSONS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Alice. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I feel like I should call you Mrs. Hoffman. I have so much respect for you. I feel bad just calling you Alice.

Alice Hoffman: Please call me Alice.

Zibby: I'm delighted to have you on my podcast. I was actually secretly thrilled when you followed me on Instagram. I was like, oh, my gosh, Alice Hoffman's following me. It's a thrill. Welcome.

Alice: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Congratulations on your latest book, Magic Lessons. At this point in your career, do you even get excited when a new book comes out? What's it like when a book comes out when you've already written so many books?

Alice: I more get anxious than I get excited. You're with the book by yourself for so long. Then it goes out into the world. It's kind of like sending your kid to school or something like that. You lose control. You don't know how people are going to like that kid of yours. Then once it's out, then it's fine. It's just more like the week before, the week of its first being out there, it's anxiety-provoking.

Zibby: Do you feel any better at this point? Are you calming?

Alice: Yeah.

Zibby: I'm glad I caught you on the down. [laughs] Would you mind just telling listeners a little more about Magic Lessons and why you chose to write a prequel to Practical Magic at this point?

Alice: I wrote Practical Magic, the original book, twenty-five years ago. I never intended to write any more about that family, but I kept getting notes and letters from readers that they really felt like it wasn't enough. They wanted to know more. Instead of going forward in time, I'm more interested in going back in time. The first thing I did was write a book called Rules of Magic which took place in the 1960s because that's my era. It was a pleasure to write about it. Then when I thought about writing another book because I kept getting letters, I thought I really wanted to see how the family originated. I'm always interested in, there's a theory of ghosts in the nursery, those relatives that you've never even met that influence everything about you and your life. I wanted to go backward in time and see who the first Owens woman was.

Zibby: Wow. By the way, my husband and I listened to this. We started listening to it in the car together. Our last name is Owens. It started the narration, and we were looking at each other like, [gasp]. [laughs]

Alice: I don't know, maybe you're related.

Zibby: Maybe.

Alice: I have to say, the recording is great. It's Sutton Foster. I'm a big fan of hers. She was in Younger. She's a great theater actress. It's a wonderful recording.

Zibby: I just had Pamela Redmond on my podcast who wrote Younger. It's all coming full circle.

Alice: Really?

Zibby: Yes. It was an amazing recording and very captivating. The drive flew by. Why write it now? Why at this point? You could write any book. What's it like when you sit down and you're like, what's my next project going to be? How come you arrived at this today?

Alice: I don't know if I think about it that way because I have a list of projects, things that I'm interested in doing, books that I think I'm going to write. It was sitting here. I just thought, I had a lot of fun writing Rules of Magic, so I wanted to get back to that. I kind of wanted to escape. I felt like this book could be an escape for me as a writer. I think it is in some ways for readers. This is such a difficult time. I felt like I wanted to go back to this other time and escape into magic and escape into this family. As it turned out, a lot of things that had happened in the seventeenth century had a correlation to what is happening right now in terms of how women are treated and the idea of strong, independent women being feared. Also, I didn't realize it took place during and after the plague in England. As I was writing it, it was just very strange that the world seemed not that different.

Zibby: I was helping my daughter study for an American history test last night. I was reading through the things. I was like, "Actually, this is very similar to the Black Lives Matter movement that's going on right now. You know how there are protests across the street? This is what they did then." It's funny how things sort of ebb and flow in cycles.

Alice: They really do. It was really interesting to me. Also, the whole idea of the puritan mentality -- puritans were the ones that started the witchcraft trials here. Although, there were witchcraft trials all over Europe. The idea that women were kind of at the root of all evil, it's the idea of Eve bringing evil into the world. It was really shocking, their whole philosophy, and a little bit scary because there's a little some of that happening right now.

Zibby: I was going to say, that's not completely gone, I would think, from some people's imaginations or whatever you want to call it. Why do you think witchcraft? I understand what you're saying about women in general, but what is it about the sorcery, the witchcraft-y-ness of it? You have lists of ingredients and what all of these things do, which you must have researched, I'm assuming.

Alice: Oh, yeah.

Zibby: What is your fascination with it?

Alice: I have always been fascinated with witches. I was a fairy tale fanatic as a kid. At that point when I was a kid, I felt like it was the literature that spoke the truth in a very deep way, an emotional truth that other children's literature didn't at that time. I still think it's the deepest psychological literature, especially when you're a child. I feel like witches, they are the only female mythic creature. They're the only mythic creature with power. I think that's why as a little girl I always wanted to dress up as a witch. I always wanted to read about witches. I just felt like they had power.

Zibby: There you go. It's funny because I never really thought of witches in such a positive way until this whole experience with you.

Alice: Good. [laughs] The idea of midwives and healers, I think that's all kind of under the same label as witch, women who do things they're not supposed to do. I thought it was so interesting that during the plague that women who did herbal remedies had a bigger success rate than doctors, mostly because they washed their hands. That was so interesting to me.

Zibby: That is interesting. That's the thing I try over and over to teach the kids. This is of the moment, the most important thing. What about mediums today? Do you feel like they're in the same family as the witch, or you think it's witch-adjacent?

Alice: I think witch is more mythic, more nature. It has more to do with green magic, nature, herbs, healing. That's how I perceive it. I have to say, in fairy tales, I can't remember the exact statistic, but over ninety percent of fairy tales have girl heroes, which is very unusual in folk tales or in any story, really. In fairy tales, the girls are the ones that figure things out. The girls are the ones who are at risk. I always feel like they're cautionary tales, the stories your grandmother would tell you to beware of certain things and to know certain things.

Zibby: Speaking of at risk, let's go back in time to your career trajectory here. First of all, can you tell me a little more about how you got started? I know I've read about it, but if you could just tell me the story of how your passion for writing translated in such a unique way into becoming a writer.

Alice: I never thought I'd be a writer. I was a reader. I was a fanatical reader. I was a secret writer, as I think many people are, especially girls. I had stories and notebooks that I never showed anyone. Then when I was about sixteen, for some reason I wrote a story and I sent it to Esquire magazine. I had never seen Esquire magazine. I'd just heard of it. I'd never read it. I sent them a terrible story about the end of the world. I didn't use any capital letters. I got back a handwritten note from somebody who said to me, "You should use capital letters and grammar. Also, if you have another story sometime and you're not kidding around, send it to us." I was in shock. It was this thing where suddenly I was in touch with the outside world, and somewhere, someone at this mythical magazine thought I was a writer. That stayed with me. I kept writing. I never intended to go to college. I lived in a very working-class world. I started going to college. I went to night school. My brother lived in California and said there was a really good school out there, I should apply, and then I could move to California. I had never heard of this school, but I applied.

It was Stanford. They gave me a fellowship. I had a great mentor. It just totally changed my life. I feel like sometimes you have this one teacher that just changes everything. My teacher was Albert Guerard. He sent my first story to City College, to a magazine that they had called Fiction. A friend of his was the editor. It was published, which was a shock. There's no money involved. I don't think people became writers to make money or anything back then. After the story was published, I got a letter from a very famous editor named Ted Solotaroff. He said, "Do you have a novel?" I wrote back. I said, "I do." I started writing it that day really fast. I think that's why I'm a fast writer. I just felt, I don't know if this guy's going to keep his job or what's going to happen. I better write this novel fast because no one's ever going to ask me this again.

Zibby: Wow. How long did that book take you?

Alice: Six months, but it was terrible. It was terrible. He helped me with it. In the end, he didn't take it, but he sent it to my agent. I feel like it was luck. Also, every time somebody opened the door, I walked through. I didn't say, I don't know, I don't have a novel, or it might take me two years. I just felt like, this is my chance and I'm taking it.

Zibby: That's great. You don't have the same agent, do you?

Alice: She was my agent until she passed away.

Zibby: I'm sorry.

Alice: She was my agent for, I think, forty years.

Zibby: I'm so sorry.

Alice: I was lucky. I was really lucky. She was great. Her name was Elaine Markson. She was an amazing agent.

Zibby: I also noticed you started the Hoffman Center for Breast Cancer Research. Is that right?

Alice: Yeah.

Zibby: I wanted to find out more about why you started that and what that whole initiative is about.

Alice: I'm a breast cancer survivor of twenty-five years. When I was being treated at Mount Auburn Hospital, which is a Harvard teaching hospital, this small hospital, they didn't have a breast center. While you were waiting for radiation, you'd be sitting next to someone who had broken his arm. Once I sat next to Gina, my wonderful dog groomer. There was no privacy. I think when you're going through treatment for that, you need something special. When I finished my treatment, I asked some of the doctors over there, what could I do? They said, "Let's start a center here. That's what you can do." For twenty-five years almost, maybe it's more like twenty years, we've been doing an event every spring where writers come and read. We've had incredible writers, everyone from Amy Tan to Celeste Ng to just so many amazing people who have given so generously of their time and created this state-of-the-art breast cancer center. I'm really proud of being involved with them.

Zibby: I want to get on the list. Put me on the list for the benefit. That sounds great. Obviously, as we've discussed with my love of books, I'm a sucker for hearing authors talk. I never seem to get tired of it, which is sort of shocking even to me. Of course, to support a great cause is also wonderful.

Alice: I will. I don't know what we're doing this year because everything is different this year.

Zibby: Everything is different everywhere. I'm beginning to think it's just never going back. I've given up. I've given up hope. [laughs]

Alice: I think Zoom is here to stay, don't you think?

Zibby: I do.

Alice: I think podcasts are here to stay. Certain things I think are not going back.

Zibby: It is nice not to have to move around as much throughout the world to see all these different people, which is nice. That's the only perk I've found. A lot your books have been adapted to movies, TV. How does that process fit into your thinking when you're writing the book? Do you visualize scenes at all, movie-wise, or does it not even come into your consciousness?

Alice: The truth is, I was a screenwriter for twenty-five years, some with my own books, but mostly for other people's books. I learned a lot from being a screenwriter. I learned a lot about telling a story. When I'm writing, I don't think of it as a movie. I feel like it's something I'm living. I feel like I'm in the book. I'm living it. I am the characters. I don't really think of it as a movie, like, would this make a good movie? That's not really the way I think about it.

Zibby: I'm sorry. I did know that because you wrote Independence Day, right, the screenplay for that?

Alice: Mm-hmm.

Zibby: Anyway, I'm sorry. I have heard from other authors how critical a skill it is to be able to screenwrite and then turn -- I feel like there's so many people who write fiction primarily and they're like, now I'm going to try screenwriting. I think there's something in the reverse that's very powerful.

Alice: I think it does teach you something about telling a story. It's really different. They're very different things. It teaches you to know what the heart of your story is. I think when you're writing a novel, this happens to me, you can just really get lost in these offshoots and tangents. Sometimes they're really interesting. Basically, with a screenplay, you're pretty much telling a straight-on story. That’s helpful.

Zibby: Which of your many projects are you going to pick up next?

Alice: I'm working on the fourth Magic book. I thought I was finished until I talked to my editor, but it turns out I'm not finished. [laughs] I have some more work on it. That's been both really fun and really sad because I feel like it's the last book. It's the end of twenty-five-year relationship with the Owens family. It's been both things. It's also been a great escape during this time during that's such a sad, terrible time.

Zibby: Which period of the world? What timeline are you writing that book in?

Alice: It's modern times.

Zibby: Wow, how great. Then you can have a whole box set, sell it at Halloween.

Alice: They're not all published by the same publisher.

Zibby: So you can't do that?

Alice: I can't do that with all of them.

Zibby: Well, that's okay. You can make your own. [laughter]

Alice: That's a good idea.

Zibby: Little gift bags. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Alice: I really think the best advice is to do it every day. My life is a little complicated right now, but I always would get up really early before anybody else was awake, before the phone's ringing, and work for at least two hours so that you get that two hours in. If you get up at five thirty and start working from six or whatever time it is, for me, that always was really helpful. When I had other jobs, I'd get up before that other job and write then. I feel like if you write every day, it's not so hard to go back to it. For me, I always feel like if I stop writing, I'm never going to be able to remember how to do it again. That's my tip. You have to write in order to write.

Zibby: It's so funny that you've been such an established literary figure and you still are afraid that if you take too long a vacation, you'll lose it.

Alice: I am afraid I'm going to lose it. Every time I start a book I feel like I don't know who wrote the other books. I don't know how they did it. I don't know how to do it. I have to relearn, how do you write a book?

Zibby: [laughs] How do you do it? Do you get it all out? Do you ever outline your stories?

Alice: I do. I'll outline. I make a lot of notes. What's fun for me is world-building. I write down lists of plants and lists of places and if I'm writing about the sixties in New York, all the different music clubs and all the different bookstores that were there, just starting to build the world for the characters to move in.

Zibby: Wow, that's beautiful. It's amazing that there's a job that allows you to just recreate the universe in which you live every time you open your laptop.

Alice: It's a good job. You know, it's kind of what you do as a reader. You leave this world behind. You go into a book. You escape. I feel like it's the same thing when you're writing. You're creating this other world using things that you knew, who you are and how you see the world. It's just creating something brand new.

Zibby: I know the world has changed so much from when you first went to Stanford until now. Is there anything that you miss from the way the publishing industry used to work? Is there anything you long for?

Alice: When I started, nobody talked about getting published. Nobody talked about money. It was right after the Ken Kesey era. Yes, you wanted to write a perfect story or something like that. There were no book tours except for people like Norman Mailer or something like that. There were no book tours. It wasn't about the outside things. It was about the inside, about wanting to be a writer, wanting to tell a story. I think there's a lot more pressure on people right now. I think it's harder to get published. The publishing houses are conglomerates. There were a lot more publishing houses. Now there are also different options about publishing in different ways, online or with small presses. I kind of miss that freedom to just do whatever you wanted to. It was about what you wanted to write, not about what's publishable. Now for people starting out, they have to think about both things.

Zibby: That's true. That's where the commercialization of even fiction writing -- but I often hear that the best advice is to ignore all of that, as I'm sure you would agree, and just do what's fun for you and what you need to write or else you can kind of tell when there's no passion in it.

Alice: Absolutely. You have to have passion. If you want to be published, it also can't be, like, a diary. I always feel like I'm writing for myself and I'm writing the book for myself. Somebody else has to read it and have it mean what it means to them.

Zibby: Is there any innovations that you've particularly adapted well to that you're like, I love X, Y, or Z? I don't even know why I'm asking you these questions. I'm just curious.

Alice: I love Google because if I don't know what year something happened and I'm in the middle of writing, I don't have to go through all my books. I can just find out what year the Salem witch trials ended real quick. It's very helpful. Also, when I started, people were typing. It took a long time. Every time you rewrote, you rewrote the whole manuscript, really. I think it was kind of good practice, actually, but it just was time-consuming.

Zibby: I am old enough that I used to use a typewriter for my school assignments and have my mother help me and have to restart and the Wite-Out, and oh, my gosh.

Alice: Wite-Out, yeah.

Zibby: The idea that you can even produce as clear a thought when there's so much on the line, when you have to start over again as opposed to now, it's like, I'll change that.

Alice: I actually think that's good for writers. I tend to still do that. When you start at the beginning again instead of moving things around the way we can do now, it gives it different rhythm. It makes for a different kind of revision. Sometimes when I talk to -- I'm involved in a program for young writers at Adelphi University out on Long Island every summer. Sometimes I think they really think that writers just write it down, and that's it. That's not it at all. Most people have to do lots of revisions and lots of changes. I think that's just a good thing to know when you're starting out, that everybody does it.

Zibby: Yes, wait for those comments in Google Docs. Then everything melds together, your love of Google. There you go. [laughs] Thank you so much. Thanks for chatting with me today. I'm sorry I had such random questions, but I was really curious about the lifespan of being an author for so many different periods of time as the industry has changed. You've stayed just as current. It's really awesome. It was a unique vantage point, so thanks.

Alice: Thank you. Thanks for chatting with me today.

Zibby: Thank you. Have a great day.

Alice: Take care. Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Susie Yang, WHITE IVY

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

Susie Yang: Hi. It's good to be here. Hello again.

Zibby: Hello again. I know. We've just been chatting. Now it's official, though. We can officially make it sound very polished and awesome. [laughs]

Susie: It's very fun to be here.

Zibby: White Ivy, congratulations on this amazing novel. So great, so captivating from the very beginning. This main character you've created, I feel like I could spot her on the sidewalk at this point. You made her so real. Even the way you describe her posture, the way she walks, everything about her seems so real. Now of course, I have to keep my belongings close so she doesn't swipe anything. First of all, tell listeners what White Ivy is about, please.

Susie: White Ivy follows the characters of Ivy Lin from when she's fourteen to twenty-seven. She falls in love with the son of a state senator when she's a child. They reconnect again as an adult. The entire arc of the story is Ivy trying to capture Gideon's heart and marry into his very patrician, WASP family. It's mostly set in Boston, but there are parts of her life where she goes to New Jersey. She spends a summer in China. All of these experiences inform her worldview and leads her to make the decisions that she makes in the book as she strives to get what she wants in life.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, the scene where you have her entire family storm into Gideon's house on that first sleepover and they're all waiting on the couch and her brother's eating pancakes, it was so awkward and tense. I just was recoiling inside myself. It was like, oh, my gosh, this poor girl.

Susie: I think awkwardness is an underused emotion in books. [laughs] It's such a common emotion in real life, secondhand emotion. It's very visceral.

Zibby: It's so true. How did you come up with this story idea?

Susie: When I decided to write the novel, I gave myself a year to finish the complete draft. The first thing I had to decide was, what kind of book did I want to write? I've always been drawn to anti-hero characters, so think Becky Sharp or Scarlet O'Hara or Tom Ripley. I knew that I wanted to create a pretty unique, strong, female character who would go to great lengths to get what she wanted. That would obviously involve moral compromises and manipulation. Then the first sentence of the book, "Ivy Lin was a thief, but you would never know it to look at her," that came to me out of the blue. Then once I had that, the entire arc of her story came to me at once. That hasn’t changed from the very first sentence. I always kind of saw the whole vision of the book. A lot of the revisions and the different drafts was just making sure that it was a pleasurable read and getting all of the details correct and the sequence of events correct.

Zibby: Wow. Go back to when you decided to take a year to write a novel. How did that fit into your life? Where did that come from?

Susie: My life plan. [laughs] The short story is that I've always written for fun. It was always a hobby of mine. I come from a Chinese American background. My parents wanted me to be one of three professions: a doctor, a lawyer, maybe an engineer. I always thought of writing as a hobby. I never thought of it as a career path. I was running my own tech startup in San Francisco for around three years at that point. Something in me just changed. I call it my quarter-life crisis. Wait a second, is this really what I want to be doing for the rest of my life? I'd always been trying to write a novel just in my free time. Classic problem is I couldn't ever finish one. I have a hundred chapter ones on my computer. I thought if I don't give myself that pressure to say, let me just put an arbitrary deadline on this to prove to myself I could do it, then I'll never ever do this. I just decided to make that time to do it to see if I could.

Zibby: So you're very young, then?

Susie: I'm thirty-two. At that time, I was twenty-six, twenty-seven, something like that.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, that's amazing. That's particularly amazing because this book is so good. I feel like sometimes you need more life experience to really inform a book, but maybe that's what I just fool myself to think. [laughs]

Susie: I think it's a vivid imagination.

Zibby: Maybe. Okay, maybe that's part of it. Ivy grew up at first with her grandmother in China and then tragically, almost, got sent across the world in an airplane by herself to reunite with her parents who she didn't even remember and who she was raised by until her grandmother eventually meets them there. A lot of this is about a sense of place and identity and belonging and how out of place she feels in America. Even with her own family, she never really ever feels comfortable. Tell me about that sense. Is that something you are familiar with? Do you have family who's first -- does that come from a personal place or just a societal, imaginative place?

Susie: That's super personal. I was born in China. I came to the US when I was five. Even despite that, I've moved around so much growing up. My dad changed jobs a lot. I was talking to somebody about this, and I think I've gone to eight different schools before college even. That feeling of always entering a new environment and observing people or adapting and always looking at the scene through an outsider's point of view, that's something that's very natural to me. I'm really drawn to that in books as well. I love books that always examine a group or a club or a society from the point of view of somebody who doesn't belong there because that's the point of view that I'm most comfortable with. It was really natural for me to structure the story of Ivy around that perspective. Ivy's experiences also inform her feeling of being an outsider. She goes to this very private school that's full of very wealthy people, but she's not wealthy herself. Then there's the fact that she's an immigrant. All these factors also contribute to her feeling of wanting to belong and wanting to understand what values her classmates have and trying to absorb them as her own.

Zibby: The way that you wrote about her first immersion into this new lifestyle when she was walking around Gideon's house, not to keep coming back to this scene, and just looking as he is casually like, that's our summer cottage, and her just being like, what? [laughs] It's neat to see her. You could feel her eyes widening and all of that. What does it feel like to have this book coming out into the world? Are you so excited about it? How does it feel?

Susie: Honestly, it's just been such a strange year. I feel like at normal times it would be very much, you'd be out and about in the world. I could hold the book and see people in real life. This year has been so strange. Even all the feedback I'm getting, it really is just through the internet or Zoom calls and things like that. It feels, in a way, I'm isolated from the effects of it having come out. It hasn’t come out yet, but just from the early readers and early reviewers. In a way, I'm glad because of that because I feel like it makes it feel less distracting. There's people who are like, I read it, I really liked it, and that's been amazing. In a sense, my life is still very much me going in my pajamas to write book two and taking these calls with you to talk about the book.

Zibby: Wait, tell me -- sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. I wanted to hear about book two right away, so I had to interrupt you.

Susie: [laughs] I'm two-thirds in, so I feel like I'm not going to describe it really well. I'm still in the weeds. Essentially, it kind of talks about the same themes. I realize I'm still really interested in the theme of reinvention. It's about a couple. It also spans around a decade. It's set between US and Beijing. It tackles the Chinese entertainment industry. It talks about people's different agendas. Those are themes I find myself drawn to, this constant identity politics and comedy of manners and observing a strange society with an outsider's eye. That's the most big-picture I can think about it right now.

Zibby: Now you're an American living in the UK and also temporarily in Florence. You've continued to put yourself in these situations where you are not --

Susie: -- I know. It's a disease. [laughs]

Zibby: Might I point out to you that you have this issue. Just saying.

Susie: Yes. I always tell myself, I'm going to settle. I'm so tired of moving. I'm so tired of moving. I just want to settle down. I seem unable to do that.

Zibby: At least you've come to a fragile peace with it, and it's good material if that's your central theme. You're just getting more material.

Susie: I tell myself that. It's all good for the experiences.

Zibby: Wait, go back for a second to after you finished writing White Ivy and finished tinkering. How long did that process take? Then I want to hear about how you sold it, the publishing part of it.

Susie: I feel like that was really where I learned to become a writer. When I wrote the first draft, I truly had no idea about -- I didn't get an MFA. I don't have writer friends. It felt like I was writing it for myself to see if I could do it. I had no idea how it worked, even. When I look back now, I'm like, oh god, that first draft was horrible. I went to this conference called Tin House. It was in July. Around that time, it was in the year of me writing the first draft. I had around probably seventy, eighty percent of the first draft done. They had agents come to Tin House. I actually sat down next to Jenny who is now my agent, but it was completely coincidental. She was like, "What are you working on?" I think I pitched my book as an Asian American Edith Wharton-type book or something like that. She's like, "Great, send it to me when you're done." That really lit the fire under my butt. I was like, wow, there is somebody waiting to read it, and she's an agent. Around October -- actually, it was Halloween. A few months later, I sent her the complete first draft. I had done my research. It was what to expect. I assumed that we'd go back and forth in revisions. She read it in one day. She emailed me back the next day and was basically like, "Oh, my god, can we meet up?" I was living in New York at the time. She's in Brooklyn. She's like, "I'd love to represent you. I think it's ready to be sold."

Zibby: What?

Susie: I was like, I don't know about this. [laughs] Are you lying to me? Can I trust you? She was basically like, "I think it's ready. I can't think of any revisions that I would want you to make." I trusted her. That was November. Then she sold the book in December one month later.

Zibby: Wow, that's awesome.

Susie: That's how it was sold. The next part is where I actually learned how to become a real writer. I went through six drafts of edits with my editor, Marysue at Simon & Schuster. Wow, I learned, essentially, craft. Everything before that was just almost instinct and fumbling my way, kind of throwing words at the wall and seeing what stuck. Through the different drafts, I feel like I actually learned why something was working, how to make something more compelling. My writing got better. It felt like I wrote it very quickly if I say one year. Actually, I consider it, really, a three-project because it took two years of edits after with my editor.

Zibby: So now we don't feel as shamed that you just whipped this thing out.

Susie: I'm ashamed. I look at my draft, I'm like, okay. [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, stop.

Susie: No, really.

Zibby: How do your parents who wanted you to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer feel about having a novelist as a daughter?

Susie: It's so funny. When I decided to do the one year to write the book, I actually didn't tell anyone about it except for my husband. I was like, "I'm going to do this." He's like, "I support you," obviously. I didn't tell my friends. I didn't tell my family. We were still running the company. It wasn't until I got my agent that I told my family. I was like, "Guys, I signed with an agent." They were like, "What does that mean?" I explained everything to them. Then when the book sold, I think that's when it became real. I remember my dad -- of course, they were like, "Can we read it? Can we read it?" I was like, "No, not until it's totally done." I think his first question was something like, "Are you going to write more books, or is this just a one-time thing that you wanted to try out?" That was really funny. Then when I actually had the production copy everybody's reading now, I sent it over to him. He was giving me real-time feedback on all the chapters and things like that. That was definitely an experience. Never thought I'd have my parents read a sex scene that I wrote. [laughter]

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, not high on the list when you're growing up of imagined activities. Is your husband a senator's son? Did you have to do some research into depicting that character?

Susie: I definitely did research. I actually hate research, so I'm an extremely lazy researcher. My copy editor had a lot of work. [laughs] She would fact-check things for me. I think that was actually one of the issues. There was a difference between a state senator versus just a senator, and so had to change a lot of the details, a lot of googling.

Zibby: What was your tech company? What did it do?

Susie: It was called [indiscernible]. It actually taught people how to build web apps. When I graduated from pharmacy school, I was like, I hate pharmacy school. I don't want to be a pharmacist. I actually moved out to San Francisco at the time to work in tech. I ended up starting a company. I taught myself how to code, and then I understood the resources that were available. Then I thought, these aren't that great, at the time. I started a company that, essentially, they do videos. We did videos that teaches people how to build things like Etsy or Yelp so that people could launch them as startups.

Zibby: That’s so cool. Now I'll have to go and see that on the side. I always am frustrated. My website is on Squarespace, and so I've learned how to use that. Sometimes I'm like, oh, but I'd really rather -- if only I knew how to do this, I wouldn't have to wait for someone else. I like to do everything myself. My daughter does coding classes now. I've missed the coding boat, I think, but maybe a site like yours would've helped.

Susie: Not anymore. There's way better ones now than the site. It's still up, but it's so out of date.

Zibby: All right. Well, I'll put that on the backburner of things I'm going to teach myself to do these days. What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

Susie: My gosh, I don't know that I'm qualified to give advice to aspiring authors.

Zibby: You're qualified. You count. You are an author. You sold a book.

Susie: I'm trying to think about what really helped me get through the slumps. One thing that really helped me get through -- I'm the sort of person where I always need to understand the vision of what I'm writing because that's what pulls me through the bad writing and also when you get tired of certain things. The advice was, I've read it somewhere, which is, write something only you can write. That was such a touchstone for me because I'd always think, is this the most interesting thing? Is this worth writing? Is this going to be interesting to anyone but me? During all those times of doubts, I would always think, at least nobody else can write this specific book with this specific vision. That made it worthwhile for me personally. I would say that one really got me through a lot of the hard times. The other advice actually came from my agent, which is just to think about writing as the long term, as a marathon, not a sprint. I tend to work in really intense spurts where I just want to get it done. I have a really impatient personality. For me, it's like, [distorted audio] this finished. It was calming down looking at it from a long-term point of view. What kind of stories am I going to be interested in writing? What ideas do I have? and jotting those down. So not being in such a rush and not giving myself so much pressure to have it perfect the first draft or the first time around and to look at it like a marathon.

Zibby: Good advice. Excellent. Awesome. Thank you so much for chatting about your book and for the great book and the great read. I half-expected you to look like your character, but you don't at all. You're very pretty. [laughs]

Susie: Thank you. One of the questions I always get from my friends is always, "Is that you on the cover of the book?" [laughs] I'm like, no, clearly, you don't know me that well.

Zibby: I actually haven't seen the cover yet because I read it online.

Susie: When you see it, it's not me.

Zibby: All right. I'll tell you. Now I have inside information as to what you really look like. I hope next time we see you -- you'll probably be living in five other countries. Maybe if you ever breeze through New York, I'll cross paths with you.

Susie: Hopefully when all this is over.

Zibby: Yes, exactly.

Susie: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Thanks for coming. Good luck with launch. Buh-bye.

Susie: Bye.