Brit Bennett, THE VANISHING HALF

Deborah: It gives me great pleasure to introduce Brit Bennett. Born and raised in Southern California, Brit graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where she won a Hopwood Award in graduate short fiction. In 2014, she received the Hurston-Wright Award for college writers. She's a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Her debut novel, The Mothers, was a New York Times best seller. Her second novel, The Vanishing Half, was recently selected for this year's National Book Award longlist. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. Welcome, Brit. Additionally, I would like to introduce our very special guest host tonight, Zibby Owens. Zibby is the creator and host of award-winning podcast "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Zibby, named New York City's most powerful book influencer by Vulture, conducts warm, inquisitive conversations with authors as wide-ranging as Alicia Keys, Lena Dunham, to Delia Owens and Jennifer Weiner. I leave it to you, Zibby.

Zibby Owens: Thank you, Deborah. Thank you so much for having me here tonight. This is such a thrill. Brit, I am so excited to be interviewing you tonight. Just bear with my glee as I ask you questions. [laughs]

Brit Bennett: Thank you. Thanks for being here.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I snooped on you earlier today doing your Instagram Live with Shondaland to get a little preview of what's been on your mind. Thanks for that today too. I read about how your mother had told you about this small town which really was the inspiration for this book. Maybe you could share that story with everybody here and go into more how you took that germ of an idea and translated it into what became one of the most sensational novels I've read in my entire life.

Brit: Thank you. Thank you for having me tonight. Thank you, everyone, for watching. I honestly don't really remember the context of the conversation I was even having with my mother. I just remember her very offhandedly mentioning this town that she remembered from her childhood where everyone was so obsessed with skin color that they just married within the community in hopes that their children would get lighter from generation to generation. She said it to me very offhandedly like it was something that everyone just kind of knows. It immediately struck me. All I remember is being like, wait, slow down, slow down. Let's go back to that thing that you just said. That's crazy. It immediately struck me. I wrote it down in my phone. I have it in my notes. I just jotted down that basic idea. Then at the time, I was still finishing up The Mothers, so I didn't really go back to it right away. It immediately struck me as something that was potentially the setting for a novel. It was an idea of a town that's oriented around this really troubling idea. When you're thinking about a novel, the idea of having something that immediately presents itself as a problem -- immediately, this town presented itself to me as a problem. From there, I thought about, what would it be like to be a light-skinned person in this town that has this really horrific ideology? What would it be like to be a dark-skinned person in this town? That was the basis of the idea of these twin sisters whose lives take them in very different directions.

Zibby: It's one thing to have a little note in your phone and start noodling on a concept, but it's another to then blow it out into all these different interwoven stories across timelines and all the rest. What happened between the idea and now? How did you craft it to become what it was in terms of process? Did you outline it? How did you get it from there to here?

Brit: I talk about it as if this was a straightforward journey. Of course, it totally wasn't. I don't really outline. I know that it took me many, many drafts and many years of trying to figure it out. I knew immediately that I was interested in these twin sisters, one who you see at the beginning of the book when she has returned to this town with her dark-skinned child, and the other one who's kind of vanished off into the wind and you don't know what happened to her. I knew that that was the opening of the book. From there, it was a lot of trying different things out. I didn't realize originally that I was interested in the lives of the twin sisters' children. I thought originally it would just be, one half of the book would be one sister and the other half of the book would be the other sister, and that would be really nice and neat. Then I realized I was really interested in their children. I was interested in the men in their lives. I was interested in all these other minor characters that gripped me because of their own stories about reinvention and transformation that really appealed to me. It took a lot of trial and error to try to weave all of those stories in a way that was even coherent, let alone hopefully moving and interesting to the reader.

Zibby: Did you use flashcards? Paint me a picture here. I have to know how you did it because it looks so seamless when you read it. Of course, it's not when you do it. Did you keep it all in your head? Were you cutting and pasting like crazy?

Brit: Eventually, there were some flashcards. As far as the beat by beat of it, honestly, again, it was trial and error. At first, I thought, is the first chapter Desiree and then immediately you see Stella? Am I going to delay when you see Stella? That became something I was trying to modulate. Then as far as the daughters, I originally thought the book was going to be chronological. I thought, I'm just going to be moving through time. Then there was always something to me that didn't feel -- it felt disjointed, the lives of these women. It didn't feel like they existed in the same timeline, really. Then once I realized that, that kind of freed me to play around with that timeline and make some other bigger imaginative leaps. There was not a streamlined process at all. There was a lot of frustration, a lot of banging my head against the wall, and fortunately, a lot of really great help from my editor who was just in the trenches with me the whole time trying to help me figure this thing out.

Zibby: Wow. Your editor, then, deserves some sort of medal or something. One thing I was struck by in the beginning was how all the characters had left home in a pretty dramatic way. Desiree and Stella both left. When you go through generations, Jude eventually leaves. Kennedy eventually leaves. Reese has left his family. Early has left his family. They do so, in part, to find themselves, but also just to escape and begin again. I was wondering why you incorporated that theme. What did you yourself ever leave behind that might have amplified this message in your personal life?

Brit: I have never had as dramatic a departure as all those characters that you just described. All of my leavings have just been going somewhere for school or just wanting to move or wanting to do something new. I've always been drawn to that idea of leaving home. I think it's inherently pretty interesting. I also do associate it so much with change. I think that it can be really hard to change who you are when you're around the same people who have always known you to be one certain way versus once you get a little bit of distance and then you can kind of try out different people. You can play around with who you are in a little bit of a different way. All of these characters experience that similarly. When Stella is growing up in this town, she dabbles with passing. She's tried it before, but it's not something she can really get away with because she still lives at her mother's house. She can't truly commit to this life as a white woman in a way that she finds herself -- she starts to ease into it more once she and her sister go to New Orleans. She can ease more into that life but then fully commits once she has left her sister behind. That's true of a lot of these characters. Once they gain that physical separation, you can make that mental and emotional separation that is required in order to become a different person or to become the person that you want to be.

Zibby: Is there a piece of yourself that you wanted to change and reinvent in a new place? Is there half of yourself you would like to have vanished?

Brit: [laughs] I don't know about that. I do know that in writing this book, I kept thinking about my relationship with my family, which is very close. At the same time, I think sometimes that closeness can feel sort of claustrophobic. You can feel sometimes kind of trapped into the person. For example, I'm the youngest child in my family. There is a sense of always being the baby when you're at home, which can be nice sometimes in ways and other times can be a little bit frustrating. There are things like that or having these roles that you can be hemmed into. I'm talking about this in a very low-stakes way. The stakes for all these characters are so much higher of the types of roles that they're trapped into and the ways in which they're trying to break free from them.

Zibby: The way that they transform is so dramatic. Everything that you would think is static becomes fluid, from race to gender to names. Everything is in flux constantly in this book. I think that's what's so unique because you never know who you're getting to know as they get to know themselves. I wondered if you could talk a little more about that sense of fluidity that nothing is stable except, perhaps, love.

Brit: That was one of the things that really drew me into writing this book. I knew I wanted to write this story that was going to be about passing, but I wanted to write into this literature of passing from my perspective as a twenty-first century writer. From my perspective, I think sometimes the most famous passing literature, it kind of essentializes identity in this way. Sometimes there's something inherently contradictory about those stories because you have a character who's moving from one category to another which kind of destabilizes those categories. At the same time, there's often a way in which, if they are exposed, it's because somebody senses that you are black. They sense an essentialized blackness within you that you cannot rid yourself of. That is what makes you black, because there is something essentially black inside you. There are those types of understandings of race. There are ways in which I think a lot of passing stories can actually be, they can be sort of transgressive in one way, but also this very regressive way of thinking about identity where identity is essentially fixed within you. For myself, I wanted to write against that. I wanted to write against that idea that there's anything essential about these identities, the idea that there's anything stable about them, or that there's anything even clear.

Stella's experience of passing when she finally commits to it is that she goes in to get a job and somebody mistakens her for white, and she just goes with it. There's something so absurd about that because she walked into this office building as a black woman and she left as a white woman. How is that possible? But it is. There was always something, to me, very, absurd is one of the words that I was thinking about this, about these identity categories. Again, they determine so much about our lives. The fact that whether Stella is black or white determines whether she can get this job or not, but she becomes white because somebody believes her to be white and she just says, yeah, I am, so what does that mean that her racial identity determines this very real fact of, can she pay her rent and can she feed herself? At the same time, it's so flimsy that she can just easily slip into one category. To me, it was that contradiction between those two things of the very real implications of all of those categories of race or gender but also just the flimsiness between them and the way in which they are permeable in ways that we may not easily assume, but in ways that at least I believe to be true.

Zibby: You must be asked all these questions about identity and all this stuff all the time. This must be your bread and butter. You must talk about this forever. Does it make you turn a lens onto yourself to think, how do I feel about my own identity? How important is your race, your gender, your sexuality to you as an author and to you as a person? How did that play into the writing? Is it that you want all that to be fluid? Is it that it's so central to your core of your soul? Tell me about your relationship to your own identity.

Brit: That's a really huge question. I guess it's fluid. It's something that I don't have an easy answer towards. There's a lot of ways within this book I was thinking about ways in which identity and labelling identity can be really important for community formation. For example, when Jude arrives in LA, she becomes friends with a group of drag queens who have all found community with each other and welcome her into this community. There are ways in which forming those types of spaces around identity can be really lifesaving and really important. On the flip side, there are also ways in which labels for certain types of identities can be restrictive. They can feel like they box you in in some way. I was thinking about that a lot for the book too, that moving between ways in which any type of labeling can be really liberating and also ways in which it can make you feel trapped, and these characters moving between in a lot of those different ways.

In a lot of ways, writing the book, I think more than anything, it's caused me to take a step back, one, when I'm speaking. One of the things that I thought about in this book is the way in which identity is so much more complicated than our language allows. A good example of that is Stella's daughter. I still have not really decided a way to racially identify her. I don't really know is the accurate way to describe this person who is a daughter of a black/white-passing mother and has a white father and believes herself to be white. There's not a succinct way to describe her. Part of it has made me take a step back and be critical of the language that I use in thinking about identity and also in the ways in which I make snap judgements about other people's identities. Part of the book is that you just have no way of knowing. Identities are not as clear as we believe them to be.

Zibby: I think that it's true for people too. You don't know the core of people's identity on the surface. You don't know what people are going through on the surface. You could pass by them on the street. It's like how the drag queens who you reference literally could be somebody completely different. You could just be going through something really challenging. You just might not know. It's almost like shining an X-ray machine onto everybody. What would that do to society if we all could actually see inside, what was really going on? Maybe everything would be a little better, I hope. I don't know.

Brit: Maybe. [laughs]

Zibby: Maybe. Or much worse. Maybe sometimes I don't want to see inside. In terms of going back to your craft a little bit, even what you were saying with language, the way that you were able to tap into different ways of speaking based on all the different characters and even in so few words paint such a picture of what was going on and what someone's personality was like and then how you had all these cliffhangers. The scene where the wine bottle drops, that's going to be a Jeopardy question in fifty years. What's the biggest cliffhanger? In terms of things like that, did you pick those up in your MFA program, voice and language, I know we already talked about structure, but cliffhangers and building that suspense? That's something in this book that, it's so propulsive, not to use an overused word.

Brit: I don't know. For this book, when I started to realize the structure of it was going to be these pieces, that it wasn't necessarily this one continuous narrative, that you were going to have these starts and stops, then I did become interested in the idea of those types of cliffhangers. For that section in particular, that's dead center of the book. Thinking about that middle point of the book or the movie or whatever you're looking at is usually when something big happens, so the idea of that being the moment where the stories start to converge. Something about the dark red wine on that white carpet was really memorable to me at least when I was thinking about this moment that would convey the shock that this character's experiencing. I thought about it in that way. In general, thinking about the suspense, I think of this kind of as a fake mystery story because the mystery is not really, where's Stella? That's what feels like the mystery at first, maybe, is, we've got to find Stella. Where did she go? I tell you where she went. That's not really the journey.

The journey is more, what has become of Stella or what's Stella in a more existential way of what happened to Stella? That's more the question pulling you through. For me, for both of my books, the thing that I did take away from my MFA program was this idea of creating suspense by revealing information instead of withholding it. For me, in The Vanishing Half, from the opening section I tell you, this is Desiree. This is Stella. This is kind of what happened to Desiree. This is kind of what happened to Stella. Here is the setup for the whole town. I didn't want the question reading the book to just be, what happened to Stella? I just wanted to tell you right away. She's living as a white woman somewhere. We're going to go on after giving you that information.

Zibby: What has this been like for you? I know you already had a New York Times best seller with The Mothers which I have to go back and read. Now I'm so excited to have a new thing on my shelf that I can't wait to get into. You've had such success. This was such a blowout hit during such a crazy time of the world. Your life must be somewhat different even if you're in the exact same place. How does it feel to you to have had all this happen? You're only thirty or something like that. That's crazy. What does it feel like that you've been set on this trajectory and to have seventeen studios bidding over your movie rights? That’s just nuts. What does it feel like to you?

Brit: I think exactly what you just described. It's been the weirdest year of anybody's life. Certainly been the weirdest year of my life. For me, it was just very strange to swing between these poles of being really excited about things happening with the book, being really horrified by everything else. Also, the weirdness of experiencing all of this in isolation has been really strange, talking the TV rights for the book and having these really intense Hollywood conversations just being by myself in my apartment dealing with all of it. It's been a weird feeling of feeling both really exposed but also very alone and also really excited about the book and also really devasted by everything else happening in the world. It's been a weird year of swinging between those poles in a lot of different ways.

Zibby: Do you have some amazing work of fiction that's going to come out of this time of this vacillation between the two poles?

Brit: I don't know how amazing it will be, but I've been writing because, again, I'm by myself. I'm like, what else am I -- when it was earlier in the lockdown, I was teaching a class. The class went on Zoom. Then eventually, the class ended in May. I had this five weeks or whatever in between when the class ended and when the book came out. I was basically just working on this next book because I had so much anxiety about what was going to happen with The Vanishing Half. I'm publishing in a pandemic. Is anyone going to care? Then all of the other just normal anxiety of being in New York at the time. I've been able to try to pour some of my energy into working on something else. It's been great to be able to start a new project and think about a whole different new fictional world and give me at least some place to put all of my energy that is just being contained in my apartment right now.

Zibby: Can you tell us any more about that book?

Brit: It's still very early. It's about music. It's about singers who have a lifelong feud. It's a really different project for me, but one that I've been really excited about.

Zibby: Wow. Did you have an eye to make this into something cinematic when you were writing The Vanishing Half, or was that just not even in your consciousness?

Brit: I think that you're always influenced by watching TV or films or these other things. I'm sure those elements kind of creep in as you're writing, but I don't think about casting it or anything like that. I never think that far about anything. I don't think about it, but I am excited to see what the adaptation will look like.

Zibby: Have you been able to see your family or friends at all, or have you been walled off completely this whole time?

Brit: I got to go back to California for the summer. I saw my family. I've been able to see friends at the park and everything while the weather's still nice, so hoping that we'll hold out for a few more weeks of nice weather before we all retreat into our winters of solitude.

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

Brit: My advice is very basic advice, which is just read everything. You learn from things that you like and also from things that you hate, so I think reading widely. That's not to say read everything, like, you have to read everything that's ever been in print. That's just to say read widely. That's one of my pieces of advice. Just be patient with yourself because the work will be bad for far longer than it will ever be good. That's if you ever feel that your work is good. Most writers I know never feel that way. You have to just learn how to be patient with yourself. Trust that that's part of the process, is kind of hating your work. The difference is being able just to stick through it and to believe that you can make it better throughout all of the challenges of wresting with the work.

Zibby: What type of books do you like? What are some of your biggest influences? What do you like to read even when you're tired?

Brit: Different things. I'm sort of a slow reader. I've been balancing a lot more nonfiction and fiction these days. I've been reading a lot of biographies because of the new book, so lots of music biographies that I've been reading. I generally love fiction. The book that I've read recently that I loved the most was Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg which came out, I think, last year. The structure of the book is like an art catalog where she is describing photographs, but you don't actually see the pictures as you're reading the book. You're just reading descriptions of them. I love that. I've been thinking a lot about, how do you write about art that the reader does not get to actually experience? I'm writing about music that doesn't exist, so it was really cool to see how somebody is doing that with describing pictures that you never get to see.

Zibby: Very cool. Thank you. I know everybody else is going to have a lot of questions, so I don't want to monopolize you. Thanks for letting me probe into your inner psyche for a few minutes and find out more of the backstory. Thanks.

Brit: Thanks.

Zibby: Deborah, if you want to...

Deborah: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you, Brit, for that.

Elizabeth Berg, I'LL BE SEEING YOU

Zibby Owens: Hi.

Elizabeth Berg: Hi. How are you?

Zibby: I'm good. How are you?

Elizabeth: I'm fine. Thank you. I want to tell you thank you for what you do. [Indiscernible] about you. Especially now, it's so important. It's so impressive. Thank you for including me.

Zibby: I'm delighted to include you. Thank you for thanking me. I love what I do. Every day is so amazing. I get to talk to women like you, but women from all over the world with so many interesting stories, novelists, nonfiction. It is so intellectually and emotionally engaging. I just love it. It's like a dream come true.

Elizabeth: You give back to so many others. It's such a good thing. Especially now, again, those good things mean a lot.

Zibby: Thank you for saying all that. I'll Be Seeing You is so beautiful, your memoir. I was crying at times. It made me so sentimental, the way you write about your parents. It was absolutely beautiful, as I'm sure you know. Maybe it doesn't hurt to hear again. It was just a sensational memoir about aging and caregiving and all the rest. Bravo. I loved it.

Elizabeth: I appreciate that on lots of levels, not least of which is the fact that writing something this honest is scary. You wonder if you're betraying people in presenting them this way. Of course, there's a section in the book about that. In the end, I thought it was probably worth it. From what I've been able to see so far, it really has helped people. I think there's something about making yourself vulnerable about a complex issue that opens up a lot of things for people. I'm very much gratified by that.

Zibby: I'm grateful to your writing group who I know you discussed this with early to see what they thought about it. I'm glad they encouraged you to get over the line and actually put it out into the world because it's true, sometimes you need a guide from other people. We all are going through this for the first time. We don't know what to do. Having a guidebook like yours or just knowing someone else's experience is so encouraging. It's, of course, an issue for so many people, having aging parents. I was wondering, though, because you wrote it in a diary style -- of course, it started in 2010. Did you write it at that time and then just leave it and wait until now? What happened? Tell me about the writing of this.

Elizabeth: It was a mix. For me as a writer, the way that I process things, the way I come to understand them is by writing about it. I wasn't sure that I would publish it, but I wanted to remember. I wanted to just get it out. It can feel like an incredible emotional load that you're carrying around going through these things. It struck me oddly that it's a kind of parallel for what we're going through right now in that you're stuck in the middle. You don't know when it's going to end. You don't know how it's going to turn out. There are so many sad and fearful things about it. The pandemic's a little bigger than this, of course, because aging is a natural part of life. In the same way that what helped me go through this experience was to, as I say, get small and take it day by day, that kind of philosophy is also helping me get through what we're all enduring now.

Zibby: Are you writing about it? I know you have a big Facebook blog and everything. Are you writing every day to record how you feel in the moment now so you don't forget?

Elizabeth: No. With regard to the pandemic, no. I do post occasionally. Whoa, I've really been struck by how people need that too, not just from me of course, but from all kinds of sources where people are talking about it, getting it out there, expressing their fears, expressing their anxieties and their sorrows, but also expressing what is still joyful, the things that remain that can really nourish and sustain us and support us. People need that too. For example, the last post I did was about trying to formalize some of the things that I do that bring me joy like reading, like listening to music. I'm a person, like so many others, that says, I'm going to do that, and then I don't do it. It helps if I formalize it. I say every Tuesday, you're going to concert in your own house. I had on Benny Goodman the other day. I'm telling you, I am telling you, it is joyful music. I could just see those women standing at the big square microphone in their formals and swaying and singing these songs. It was a moment. It can be hard at a time of such crisis to take it in and have it. For me, it's a matter of compartmentalization and saying, look, it's okay if you have this moment of joy. You're not taking away anything from anyone else. In fact, you're building yourself up so that you can help yourself and others better, like a mom. If the mom doesn't care of herself, forget about it.

Zibby: Yes. I know that all too well. [laughs] Going back to what you were saying about music, you had such a beautiful scene in your book about going to the concert by yourself and sitting there and seeing an older couple in front of you, the man, I think his name was Walter, and the wife trying to help him down the aisle and how when everybody applauded for the beautiful symphony, you felt like you were taking that as applause for Walter and the wife and the little steps nudging up the aisle to get out and on their way. It was just such a precious moment. Of course, in your imagination, as you did throughout the book, you're wondering what it's like for them at home as you did for one of the nurses who gave a weary glance. Then you imagined her putting an afghan on her husband. I can just see your mind working. Tell me about that, first of all, music, and second of all, how your brain just seems to wonder. It seems like you're always wondering about what comes after what you've seen.

Elizabeth: That evening was one of those times when you never know where inspiration or comfort is going to come. I admired that couple so much. I don't know their ages exactly, of course, but I think they were approaching ninety. They were quite frail, but by god, they went out to the symphony. Not only did they go out to it, but they heard it. They felt it. It was so difficult for the husband especially. The wife was in a little bit better shape. He had his walker. He moved so slowly, but he came. To the second part of your question, I guess if you're a writer, if you're a novelist in particular, that is the way that your mind works. You're incredibly curious and always wondering things and making stuff up. I've done that since I was a child. It could be a ladybug. Well, where's she going home to? What's her little house look like? That's something that's been with me all my life. Honestly, I hope it always will be because it makes life very rich.

Zibby: I do that too. I wonder if I see a family, what has just happened. What must people think of my family? Do they have it right? Do they know that this is my sister-in-law? It keeps it interesting, I guess.

Elizabeth: The gears are always turning for certain kinds of people. It sounds like you're one of us. [laughter]

Zibby: I noticed on your website -- I could've read a book in the amount of time just to read the descriptions of all your books and motivation. You've written so many amazing books and so many best-sellers. They all seem to have a little piece of your own experience, even just a smidge, or the inspiration came from something inside you. I just wanted to hear a little more about that and how you embark on book projects.

Elizabeth: I think it's inevitable that pieces of writers show up in their work. I'll keep it to myself. I'll talk about me because I don't want to speak for other writers who might say, no, that's not true for me at all. For me, I have to draw on my own life predilections and experiences in order to enrich the material I'm writing. What becomes the fiction part is the overarching theme of what it is that I'm trying to get at in this particular book or in this particular case. I do think, though, that writers write about the same thing over and over in different ways. For me, it's love, loss, longing, and the search for home over and over and over again. Maybe everybody has those themes a little bit in their work. That's because of the way I am, the way I turned out to be. It's manifested in everything I write. Even though the stories are different, those themes are always there in all those books. Oh, my goodness, you had to do so much research. [laughs]

Zibby: I loved it because I haven't read most of your books. I've read some, of course. I was like, this one looks good. The one that looked really great that I was like, I have to order this right away, I think it's called The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted.

Elizabeth: That's a good one. That's a fun one. That will be a good antidote to a sad one. That's short stories. They all have to do in some way or another with food. It was so much fun writing them. I will tell you that there's a couple in there that are sad. I think there's two that are sad, but the others are pretty funny.

Zibby: I like reading about sad stuff too. I like all of that. Actually, I just started a new group and a new podcast called "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Elizabeth: [laughs] Moms don't have time for that.

Zibby: I feel like maybe that we should have a book club for that podcast or something. That seems like a good place to start.

Elizabeth: Who doesn't like to talk about food?

Zibby: I know. I know. We could talk about it all day. When you think about your longing for home -- I know you grew up an army brat and all the rest. A lot of your writing in this book was about growing up and your dad and how your relationship with him changed over time. Tell me about how your constant relocation has affected that search for you and that need for belonging.

Elizabeth: It really does have an impact, particularly on sensitive children. I went to one high school reunion in my life. I went two years of high school in Germany and two years in St. Louis, Missouri. In Germany, it was a bunch of army kids all going to this actually quite good school there. It was they who wanted to have the reunion only because we're so small. They said, if you went to Ludwigsburg American High School between the years of this and this, come to a reunion. It wasn't the typical 1966 reunion. One of the things that happened at that reunion is that a large group of us got together and talked about that notion of what it feels like to be uprooted all the time. How does that impact your personality? We all agreed that, here's what it does. You become a fake. You seem gregarious. You seem like you're wide open and ready for friendship, but you're always holding back because you know you're going to have to leave. I think that that can bleed into relationships in general. You have that kind of reserve against -- you can't invest fully in everything around you because you're going to be pulled away from it. It's just too devastating, so you invest a little bit. I was really struck with how every single person in that rather large group agreed with that.

Zibby: That's very interesting. Is that why you mentioned in the book how you feel like you fail at your relationships, like with your partner now even and that he's very patient with you but that you failed in your first marriage? I was wondering because you didn't elaborate on that. I found myself thinking, what does she mean? How did she fail? How is she failing now? Can you give us a little more?

Elizabeth: Okay, we're just going to deliver the goods here. Because I'm always one step away from saying, fine, the end, we're done. It's very easy for me. I'm sorry to say. It's a real character flaw. It's very easy for me to get to that place of saying, forget it, we're done. I've been there so many times with a place. We're done with this place. We're leaving. Then the other part is it really is true that my parents had what my agent calls a Reagan marriage. They really laid the gauntlet down. I don't expect in my lifetime to see that kind of love and loyalty again. Boy, as you know having read the book, it was tough for a while. Holy moly, it was really tough for a while. I think the redeeming part of reading this book is to see how it got worked out, that it ended, and it ended as well as it could have.

Zibby: Wow. That was part of the power of it, watching the changes that go on with somebody else and how that love still manifests itself even in the smallest of gestures. That's one of those things that made my cry, the little lunches, just these little moments at the table.

Elizabeth: You know what got me the most out of all of those moments? The flyswatter. My dad who was this mighty army guy who scared the hell out of everybody mellowed in his older years. Then at the end when he went to what was essentially a daycare center, although we called it the VA center, he made a flyswatter decorated with a daisy. Now flyswatters have a whole other meaning, but never mind. We won't talk about that. Here she has this essentially useless flyswatter all decorated with flowers. Who would want to keep that? She said, "Your father made that for me." She set it aside. Oh, man, I had to stand really still for a moment after that one. There were lots of those.

Zibby: When he was trying to change the battery in the hearing aid and you and your sister, you were rooting for him to do it. It's not just these moments. It's somehow the way that you're writing about them, how you're so in the moment. The fact that you and your sister -- that moment from the outside might not have been so noticeable that he's in the kitchen and you guys are waiting, but there's actually all that unspoken stuff, is what you write about. You capture it. It's so powerful.

Elizabeth: We were both watching him so intently. Please let him have at least this. Let him be able to change his own hearing aid battery, but nope.

Zibby: Are you working on another book now? How can you follow that up with something? It's so personal.

Elizabeth: I think in part because of the situation in which we find ourselves, I'm uncharacteristically scattered. I wrote another Mason book. I wrote these books that take place in a fictional town. There are now three of them. The first one is The Story of Arthur Truluv. I wrote two more. I wrote another one of those. I'm very taken with nonfiction suddenly. After having written ten thousand novels, I'm very taken with nonfiction. I thought about doing a collection about old boyfriends. If there were a party and if there were a group of women talking about old boyfriends, I would so be there. I think that whenever we reveal things about the relationships we had with old boyfriends, there's a commonality, but there are also delicious differences. I've written three. I wanted to do, in essence, a life in boyfriends, how I was at the time, how they were at the time, how these relationships shaped me. In at least two instances, I went back after many, many years and had conversations with these guys. One was a musician. The other, the one who took my heart, ran over it with a tank, and then stepped on it, that guy -- we all have one of those. Many of us do anyway. Boy, that was an interesting conversation. [laughs] That's another thought. Then I have a lot of ideas that I haven't fleshed out. I guess I'm happy at this age that I still have ideas.

I am interested, too, in paying it forward in a way. I do writing workshops, not lately of course. What I want to do, my legacy in a way -- here's a big secret, not that secret, but kind of secret. What I would like to do is provide a writing retreat house where a group of women could come and know that all they were going to hear is support and all they were going to do is have time for themselves. Each woman gets a room. I want to put fresh flowers in there. I want to have books everywhere and a big dining room table that they can gather around and share the day's work with. I did share some of this. In large, to become not just a writing retreat, but a gathering place for women who could disconnect for a few days and come back to themselves and be offered cooking classes, painting classes, just a place to enrich themselves. I kind of want to do this. I like to rescue houses because you know, search for home, search for home. I find these wrecks and transform them into what they used to be. There's a little one I got that's, oh, my god. My partner, who's the guy who does construction, said, "Don't go in there. Do not go inside there." It's really bad, but it's a cute little house. I want to turn that into a cottage. I'm really taken with cottages. That's a place where I want to provide this. I guess it would be my legacy, this place for women. No men allowed, only women. [laughs]

Zibby: I think that's amazing. I would love to stay there in a peaceful room with fresh flowers and nothing but connection and dialogue and time for self. That's a dream. I don't think I could extricate myself from my life, but boy, that sounds heavenly. By the way, on your last book idea, there's a memoir called Five Men Who Broke My Heart by an author named Susan Shapiro who actually taught me a class at The New School was I was twenty-something. It's sort of the same way. She goes back and talks to her five loves of her life and sees what happened to them.

Elizabeth: Is this an older book or a newer?

Zibby: It's older.

Elizabeth: I'm so [indiscernible], Five Men Who Broke My Heart.

Zibby: I think I have it behind me. I can find it in a minute. You should check that out. It's good. Also then, Laura Munson is an author, I don't know if you know her, but she just had a book come out called Willa's Grove. In it, the women go to a retreat similar to what you're talking about, but it's fictionalized. She actually runs retreats. They're not in a cottage. They're in Montana, I think. It's the same kind of idea where she has women come and connect, but not only a couple. She has bigger groups, I think. Anyway, you might want to just, in your comp, research.

Elizabeth: That is so interesting. See, there's no new ideas. It's just the execution.

Zibby: That's not true. It's not true.

Elizabeth: In a way, it is. It's all in the execution. One of the most interesting things I ever did as a writer was to be given a sentence that someone else came up with. The sentence was, "It wasn't until she got outside that she realized her socks didn't match, but somehow that didn't surprise her." When I was given this sentence, I thought, I don't like that sentence. I don't want to write using that. Three different authors got that sentence and were told, write a story using that as the first sentence. They were so remarkably different, so remarkably different, all incredibly different directions that we went. In the same respect, for a woman to write about five men who broke my heart, if you wrote that book, if I wrote that book, she writes that book, they would all be so different.

Zibby: Very true. I would probably want to read all of them.

Elizabeth: Me too.

Zibby: What advice would you have to aspiring authors? You've done every genre. You've been a successful, prolific author for years. What is the secretly, truly? How do you do it? What advice can you give?

Elizabeth: In a way, I had an advantage in that I never took a writing class. I didn't do the literary journals, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, or any of that. I didn't know anything about that stuff. I read a lot. I read a lot. I had always written from the time I was a little kid. I entered into this whole publishing world with a great deal of naïveté which I think, in the end, helped me. As to your point about it, a succinct piece of advice -- this really is straight. It's absolute truth. Don't try to imitate anyone else. Your voice is so valuable. Your point of view has its merit. Your way of expressing that point of view should come from you. That's what's interesting, is to really know a person. I can't abide small talk because to me, it's a lot of noise. I don't want to engage in it. I don't want to hear it. The same thing in writing. I don't want to see somebody being manipulative or calculating. I want to see inside them, truly, even if they're talking about other characters.

I'm standing here at my desk. I have these little quotes around. One thing that I put on here is truth, love, and risk. Those elements are something I always want to be in whatever work I do. If you want to write and you're a little nervous about it, remember that nobody has to see it at first. It can be just for you. The truth is that when most of us write, we get to the point pretty early on when we think, oh, boy, this is great, I want to show everybody this. If you're afraid of that, don't worry about that. It's okay. You can be afraid. In fact, if you're nervous about it, it's probably a good sign. If you're taking a risk in whatever form that takes and you're a little nervous about it because you're thinking, I don't know if this is any good, it's kind of strange, it's probably pretty good. Be yourself first and foremost. Understand, too, that the Nobel committee is not going to come and knock at your door and say, have you finished your book yet? You have to get it out there if you want to be published. You have to take that chance of submitting and being rejected. If you're rejected, you have to remember that reading other people's work is subjective.

If you get rejected, it might have nothing to do with how good your work is. It might have to do with -- let's say you submitted a novel. It could be that they just bought a novel on this theme and yours is even better, but they can't buy it now because they just bought that. You have to keep it church and state. You have to concentrate on your writing and what it is that you're trying to do. When you're all done and if you want to be publishing, you want to submit, at that point, think about marketing and all that other stuff. Frankly, I think it's better to let other people think about that entirely. I can't tell you how many people have told me, "I have this great idea," and they're already thinking about marketing and how much money they're going to make and that they ride in the beautiful car to go to the signings, and they haven't written it yet. The joy is always in the writing. That's always the best part, is getting from what's in here out there. The other stuff, it's nice. It's wonderful to be on the best-seller list. Who wouldn't want to do that? But it doesn't top that feeling of having gotten something out that you needed to get out. Blah, blah, blah, that was a long answer.

Zibby: I loved it. I'm hanging on your every word. Thank you. That was great advice. I'm sure that there's somebody out there who just heard that who really needed to hear it today, so thank you.

Elizabeth: I'm glad. The other thing, of course, as you know, is read. Read, read, read.

Zibby: Yes, I do. [laughs]

Elizabeth: Not only do you read, do you know how many interviews are done -- can I just say this? -- how many interviews are done where the interviewer obviously has not read the book? You understand that right away as an interviewee. You glean that information pretty quickly. Then you know how you're going to have to structure everything. You actually read the book. Not only did you read the book, but you remember everything about it. I know you do that with all your books. That's an incredible talent.

Zibby: I try. I can't get through every book I have on the show. Sometimes I haven't read more than fifty pages. When I love a book, as I did yours, I love it. I can't remember anything about my life. College, forget it. If you want to ask me something about your book in five years, I'm going to remember it. It's the weird twist of memory. At least I can use it now. [laughs] Anyway, thank you. This has been so nice. Thank you again for your book. I'm going to give it to so many people and recommend it and whatever. Thanks for spending your time with me today.

Elizabeth: I truly appreciate it. Thank you. Again, thank you generally for all you're doing.

Zibby: Keep me posted on the cottage. Maybe by the time you have it rolled out into the world I'll have older kids and can get there.

Elizabeth: Vintage quilts in every room, I'm just saying.

Zibby: All right. [laughs] Thanks so much. Buh-bye.

Elizabeth: Bye.

Sophie Blackall, IF YOU COME TO EARTH

Zibby Owens: Why don't we talk about your beautiful new book which is just amazing with your characteristic beautiful illustrations and all the rest, these positive world messages and everything. Tell me a little about, what made you write this book? Why now?

Sophie Blackall: I happen to have it right here.

Zibby: Amazing.

Sophie: I know. I prepared. It's called If You Come to Earth. I have been incredibly fortunate to work with UNICEF and Save the Children and had traveled with them to various countries over the years, to Bhutan and Rwanda and Congo and India. Meeting children in all of these countries was something I think about every day. It was just an incredible privilege. On some level, it was frustrating because I couldn't talk to them for the most part. Often, they would have very little English. I ranted some French, and that's about it. Shamefully, I couldn't communicate with them. I would leave these tiny village schools on the top of a mountain where there had been maybe five or ten kids. We'd spent the day together. We'd giggle and draw pictures because that is the way that I communicate with anyone if I can't talk to them. I would leave thinking, there's so many things I want to ask you. I want to ask you about your lives. I want to ask you what you dream about, what makes you laugh. I could do as much as I could do with the drawing, but I vowed to make a book that would be for all kids in the world about all of us and the planet we share and the things that are familiar to us so that kids might see something they recognize in a book, and also the things that we don't know about each other and the things that are surprising and unfamiliar. That was the goal. I had no idea it would take so long. Essentially, it is a book about everything in the world. [laughter] Every time you put something in, you're leaving something out. It was helpful to find a narrator so I could blame the child. Well, it's this child's view of the world. Everybody has their own view. The omissions are theirs and not mine. It did take seven years. It did take a village, as most books do, but especially this one.

Zibby: Which part of the village was most helpful to you?

Sophie: Somebody asked me recently, what was the best part about making this book? I said without hesitation it was the village. People are extraordinarily helpful when you ask them questions. I'd always been a little bit shy. I would kind of avoid talking to a stranger. With this book, I talked to so many strangers because I wanted to know the people I was putting in the book. Almost everybody in the book is somebody I met or saw with my own eyes or chatted to on the subway or in Central Park or on a ferry in Bhutan, a little tiny putt putt boat, or just along the way. All of these people have cameos in this book. To me, it was putting real people in there. Even if they look like a clichéd representation of somebody, that person was real. I saw them. I spoke to them. Those people's stories are intertwined on every page of this book. To me, when I open it, it's this rich tapestry of humanity. With every interaction, I felt more grateful that I'm alive and part of that. For all our differences, and especially now, almost everybody has a smile and a story to tell you if you're open. That was a big blessing for me.

Zibby: It's true. Now that you have sort of united everybody through this book, I feel that the world is so fractured right now. I feel like this is the most divisive time I've certainly lived through, not that I'm so ancient. In recent history, I feel like it just keeps getting worse. You've been this little soldier going around the world collecting little -- more like a mail lady or something. You're getting missives from everybody and mixing it all. With that unique point of view, what can we do? How can we highlight the fact that we're all just human and we're all going through the same stuff, love and loss and what we put in our mouths for breakfast and all the same stuff? How do we make that message rise to the fore?

Sophie: There are two ways that became clear to me with this book, for me at least. It's a macro and micro kind of thing. The one is to talk to people. I think when you actually hear somebody else's story -- again, the cliché is of walking in someone else's shoes, which you can't ever really do. To hear somebody else's story makes them real to you. I always think that with curiosity comes a certain empathy if you're curious enough to ask another person instead of to make assumptions. How are you feeling? What do you feel about that? I can imagine what your response might be, but I don't know, and so I should ask you. If you're willing to tell me, then that is a gift. Then I will learn something. That goes for people who have very different political views to me. They have signs in their backyard that I vehemently disagree with. Yet they all come and help me fix a flat tire. In Congo, I met some of the most wonderful, generous, warm people who felt that being gay was a terrible sin. Two of our four kids are gay.

There are so many things like that that I think we just see things so differently, and yet there's this warmth and generosity to you. I think maybe if you met my kids you might think differently. Maybe if I listened to your stories, I might be able to see more clearly what it's like to be a farmer and how difficult that has been. That's the micro. Then I think the macro is whenever there's something global -- a pandemic is one of those things, but also a comet or an eclipse -- when we, instead of looking down at our feet or inside our own heads, we actually look out and up and realize that we are this one tiny planet in a vast, vast universe. I think about the Pale Blue Dot and Carl Sagan, I'm a big Carl Sagan fan, and him saying in that picture that was taken from Voyager 1 four billion miles from Earth, this spec, that's us. That's here. That's everyone we know, everyone we love, everyone we've never met suspended on a moat of dust in the sunbeam. That's all we are. If we can't learn to live together on this planet, there's no hope for us. Just try with the daily conversations, I think.

Zibby: Wow. You should be a Mother Teresa-type world icon, I feel like. [laughter] I mean it. We need voices like yours to drown out the other voices, honestly. This just so speaks to my beliefs in my heart and what I think is important too. You say it in such a beautiful way and literally illustrate it. It's amazing. Have you always been this, holistic's the wrong word, but globally minded and a uniting type of force? Has this been in your DNA forever? Is it something that's grown out of you in adulthood?

Sophie: I don't know. I've always been really conflict-averse. I was one of those kids, oh, no, let's not fight, have it your way. [laughs] I really think having had the opportunity to work with UNICEF and Save the Children opened the world to me in a way that I'll be forever grateful for. To walk into a village in the jungle in Congo where children had never seen anyone they didn't know before, it was extraordinary. To spend this day with them and then to walk away and think, I will remember this for the rest of my life, I don't know what you all think, but I think about those kids all the time and wonder what they're up to. I hope they're well and surviving.

Zibby: Had you always been an illustrator? Did you love to draw from a young age? Tell me about the progression of that part of your life.

Sophie: I did. I was very fortunate that my mother was a single mother, but she really worked hard to make sure we always had art supplies. Even in my case, I would go -- I lived in a country town in Australia. After school, I was allowed to walk home because that was the seventies and that's what you did. I would walk home past the butcher shop and stop in and ask them for some of the big sheets of paper that they'd roll sausages up in. They knew me. They were very kind. They'd roll up paper and give me a couple slices of baloney into the bargain. It was a fantastic deal for me. I always, always drew. My brother and I lived most of our lives up trees with books. We had a rope strung between the trees, and a basket. We would send books back and forth to each other. He was older. Really, I just wanted to read anything he was reading, The Hardy Boys and all those kinds of adventure stories and Winnie the Pooh. We were very lucky to grow up with books. So many kids don't. It's this privilege that I completely took for granted as a kid. My father is a publisher in Australia. Not only did we have books in every room of the house, but he was making books as well. I got to see that, which was thrilling to turn a story and then put it into paper and ink and bind it into this beautiful physical object. I can't imagine not having books around me. We just downsized as empty nesters from a four-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn into a cozy one bedroom which we thought was just this delightful corner building filled with light, but it is the noisiest corner in Brooklyn, so you can probably hear. Soon you'll hear a fire engine and a garbage truck.

Zibby: I'm in Manhattan. Usually, there are sirens back and forth here too. I get it. No worries. Then how did you get your start illustrating professionally?

Sophie: It was what I always wanted to do. I was one of those kids who were, yep, that's what I'm going to do. I think it was Winnie the Pooh. I would look at E.H. Shepard's drawings and trace them onto this butcher paper and break it down. How did he make those lines? How did he put so much character into those tiny sketches? Then I just set about doggedly getting to do that. I remember being sent my first manuscript and just getting goosebumps. It was a book called Ruby's Wish written by Shirin Yim Bridges. It's the true story of her grandmother who grew up in China. She was one of the first girls to go university. It fed into all of my feminist, "girls can do anything" principles. It was this wonderful story. I had just spent time in China, and so everything kind of came together. It was just thrilling. Most days, it's almost too lovely to consider that this thing that I do is work. I actually get to do this and call it work. Traveling and books and drawing and books and children, all my favorite things, and they're all combined. I'm very lucky.

Zibby: I have four kids as well. My older daughter was so excited that I was talking to you because she's read all the Ivy and Beans. We have walls of Ivy and Bean. I'm just waiting for my next kids to get interested. Of course, we've read so many of your beautiful picture books and all the rest.

Sophie: That's lovely.

Zibby: It's really rewarding to be able to hear from you. Are you remarried now? Not to keep prying into [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Sophie: We were actually going to get married this summer, but we decided we couldn't have a wedding if we couldn't hug our friends and family. We're going to try and do it again next year. We are building a retreat for children's book writers and illustrators.

Zibby: Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that. What's it called again? Wait, I wrote it down. Milkwood Farm?

Sophie: It's called Milkwood, yes, from Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. This is this great big project that we're doing. We thought we would get married there at the same time. With COVID, everything has slowed down a little bit. It will happen. In the meantime, we're building this thing that I'm thinking of more and more as a kind of ark for people to come and to be together and to eat and drink and walk and talk and draw and write and think in lovely wildflower meadows in the Catskills. I think it's going to be, I hope, some kind of sanctuary where we can stop and be quiet and then be noisy and be all the things in the same place that we haven't been able to do. To gather together I think is something that people are yearning for. I know I am.

Zibby: How do I sign up? Where's the form? Save me a bed or whatever. How is it going to work, seriously?

Sophie: We'll probably sleep ten to twelve people, so they’ll be quite intimate things. There'll be a lot of different ways that it will work. There'll be long weekends for peers to get together. That's something that we don't get to do much in the industry. We meet for conferences. We gather in grim hotel bars and begin conversations that we can never finish. I share a studio in Brooklyn with three other picture book makers, which is an everyday joy where's there's family. We have this in-built community. We've been together for years. We work together. We're invested in each other's books. We throw our ideas around and are inspired by the way each other works. Most people don't have that, I've realized. Most writers and illustrators work in relative isolation. To be able to share this kind of thing, you could come for a long weekend and get a little taste of this and be fed really well and with a wonderful bar. All those things are very important for being creative, I've found. Cocktails are very good. [laughs] Then there will be longer week-long workshops for people who are thinking about getting into publishing or writing books for children or illustrating. Then hopefully there will be industry gathering, so agents and editors and librarians and educators and then things for community groups for school visits and all those sorts of things. It's a hugely far-ranging, ambitious, organic project. We'll start slowly and see what happens.

Zibby: I love that. I have a two-book deal with Penguin Random House for children's books myself.

Sophie: Congratulations.

Zibby: I wrote one of them. Lord knows when it's coming out. Then I still have to write the second one. That doesn't make me a peer, but maybe I can sneak in on one of your long weekends.

Sophie: Absolutely.

Zibby: If you need any help with that project or support or anything, let me know because that sounds so amazing.

Sophie: Thank you. Careful what you [indiscernible/laughter].

Zibby: I'm serious. I wouldn't say that if I didn't mean it. You're basically doing Yaddo for children's books, right?

Sophie: Yep, that's the idea.

Zibby: I love that. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors or aspiring children's book writers or illustrators or really anybody? I could just sit and listen to your advice, whatever you have to say.

Sophie: You're way too kind. I was talking to some people who have been wanting to get published for a long time. I think there's often this sense of there's this track and you have to stay on it. If you don't meet these goals by a certain time, then you're failing at that. I just don't think it should be like that at all. I think that -- I was talking -- I cannot stay on a single linear train of thought.

Zibby: That's okay. Take them all.

Sophie: I had a brain scan recently for these rotten migraines. I got a picture of the inside of my brain. It was so thrilling to see all of these wiggly lines because that's exactly how my thoughts work. I love maps. There's a map called a meander map. I don't know if you’ve ever seen these. It's the map of the course that a river takes over centuries. You can look at a meander map of the Mississippi, and it looks like the inside of a person's brain. I love that idea of the way that thoughts move and intertwine. I think that, in our daily lives, is how we get our ideas and how we should be inspired and how we should work. For me anyway, I work on twelve different things at once. While I'm working, there are different compartments of my brain that are dedicated to different things. The book that I'm close to finishing is right up front. That's almost just busywork at this point. Then the one that's waiting in the wings is a little bit behind. That's where I'm doing heavy research and going down dead ends and rabbit holes.

Then way at the back are all the books that are just bouncing around in this great cacophony of jumbled ideas and ricocheting. That's the most fun place back there because anything can happen. The advice would be just to encourage everybody to keep their ears and eyes open and to walk around thinking not, this is this one track I'm on, but I could go this way or I could go this way. There's something to be gained from all of these detours even if it's not readily evident. Down the track you will think, oh, my goodness, that note that I wrote four years ago has just suddenly crystalized into an idea, or the thing I bought at a flea market because I didn't quite know why but I couldn't walk past it that I stuck in a drawer suddenly has opened some key to something that was locked. I'm all about the scrapbooks of the brain and any excuse, really, to go to flea markets. I think that's really what I'm advocating, which is something we're not doing right now but hopefully will again.

Zibby: What are some of the twelve projects you might be working on right now? What's coming next? What can we expect?

Sophie: This was such a gargantuan thing, seven years, and really illustrating the world and thinking about -- I involved so many people in it. I'm going to show you a page now. There's a page in here of colors, how to paint all the colors in the world. It's this page. I asked the internet for color names. I had all of these paint tubes. I thought it would fun to give them names. I love going into paint stores and looking at the paint chip names. My partner, Ed, and I play a game where we pocket a bunch of the paint swatches and then we fold the names back and we have to make the other person guess which names go with which colors. It's good on car trips when you're coming back from the hardware store. The internet gave me, there were about 1,500 submissions. They were just so wonderful. One of them was "Don't get me started, Jen" for the color pink, which is brilliant, and "Vacuum bag dirt." They're so good. Right now, I'm writing to all the people two years later to thank them for their color names. This was another one, the page that's about birds. I asked people their favorite birds around the world. They all came in, and I formed a giant bird with all of them. This is front and center.

One of the other books I'm working on is a book for grown-ups. It's called Proust's Bedroom. This painting you might be able to see behind me, it's a little bit of a story. The book, Proust's Bedroom, is going to be about my favorite writers' houses which I am visiting around the world. It's been suspended for a minute. It's part memoir and part biography of these writers and little bits of travel going to all these places. It's Herman Melville and Dylan Thomas and Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen and Beatrix Potter and a bunch of writers. When I was eighteen, I was in Paris thinking I had discovered it, as all eighteen-year-olds do, I found myself at the Musée Carnavalet, the history of Paris museum. I'd been up all night. It was just so wonderful to wander Paris at dawn and then to arrive at this museum. I found Proust's bedroom. I had never read a word of Proust, but I thought it was just impossibly romantic. I took a snapshot which, when I got home to Australia much later, printed and put on my wall. All through college and when I moved to the States, I brought this photograph with me. It's always been on my studio wall. Then one day, I thought I'd make a painting of this bedroom because there was something monastic about this bedroom. I loved the cell-like room and then the decadent gold dragon scales sort of quilt. I made the painting.

Then a couple of years later we were in Paris around New Year's Eve with my partner Ed and our four kids. We found ourselves outside the museum. I said, "Kids, let's go and see Proust's bedroom." We went in there. My son ran ahead. We turned the corner. There it was. Except it wasn't Proust's bedroom. It was somebody else's bedroom. My eighteen-year-old self had seen the label on the wall and taken a photograph, but the label actually referred to the next bedroom which I didn't like the look of at all. It was quite dour. There was a lot of ugly furniture in it. I thought, that can't possibly be Proust's bedroom. It must be this one. I've been living under this painting and dining out on it for years. In fact, someone at the French consulate said, "I hear you did a painting of Proust's bedroom. Can we use it for the anniversary of Swann's Way?" Thankfully, I was out of the country. Otherwise, it would've been my everlasting humility and shame. They would've had to gently say, um, this is actually Paul [indiscernible]'s bedroom and not Proust's bedroom at all. That is the introduction to this book. I thought after that the least I could do would be to read Swann's Way. I've read Swann's Way now. I'm slowly working my through Remembrance of Things Past. It's an interesting sleepy read with beautiful -- have you ever read Proust?

Zibby: I did. I read Swann's Way in college.

Sophie: I think I have to read it about six times before it's maybe all in there. There are bits that made me laugh out loud. Then there were bits that I just read the same page five times and couldn't retain it at all.

Zibby: I should probably go back. That's a wonderful story. I love the yellow bedspread. Congratulations on your book release and getting it out, this book about the world out into the world. It's really exciting and I'm sure makes you feel so accomplished to have that sort of closure on such a giant project that's gone on for so long. Enjoy the success that follows. Let's stay in touch. You know, I'm not far away. I already started following the Milkwood Farm Instagram account. I'm very interested. I will be tracking the progress.

Sophie: Thank you. It's been lovely to talk to you.

Zibby: You too. Have a great day.

Sophie: Thank you. Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Victoria Montgomery-Brown, DIGITAL GODDESS

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

Victoria Montgomery Brown: Thanks, Zibby. This is a great pleasure.

Zibby: This is so nice. I think you are my third classmate from HBS to be on my podcast. I had Lea Carpenter and Charles Duhigg and now you. Look at this. It's great.

Victoria: Charles interviewed me maybe three weeks ago on Big Think, actually, for the book. I was like, who could be a great interviewer? Charles.

Zibby: He was awesome. That's great. You all are just so accomplished. It's a pleasure to be able to talk to you. Now you've written this great book, Digital Goddess: The Unfiltered Lessons of a Female Entrepreneur, which is amazing. You were just telling me I'm seeing this before you even saw it. I'm seeing this before you. This is the copy of your book, at least the advance copy, which looks great. Congratulations. Victoria, you've already founded this amazing company, Big Think. Why also write a book? What made you want to sit down and share all your lessons with the rest of us? By the way, thank you. I appreciate it.

Victoria: You're welcome. I think it was because, essentially, over the years, probably mostly in the last five years, I've received lots of emails from young women who are aspiring entrepreneurs. Obviously, it takes a while to build a successful business. Big Think is doing well now. We reach about forty million people a month. I think because of that, women started to reach out to me and ask, I have an interest in being an entrepreneur too, how did you do it? My business partner, actually, Peter Hopkins, was the one who really encouraged me to do it. He's like, "You have a unique perspective. There are female entrepreneurs, but not a ton of them. A lot of them don't become the CEO. I think it would be good for you to write a book and explain how you did it or how we did it, especially for young women," but it's really for entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs at any stage or age.

Zibby: As you were talking, by the way, I realized I also had Jeff Norton on my podcast who was also in our class. Anyway, okay, enough. [laughs] Thank you for women CEOs and entrepreneurs. Could you share the story that you wrote about in the book, which was hilarious, I mean, scary in its own right as well, but when you were called into the police department and had to share with your investors all the craziness of what happened after your prior job incident?

Victoria: Yes. I say in the book that I was arrested, but I actually was talking to my criminal defense attorney who is my friend now from years ago. He corrected me and said I was not actually arrested because there's no record of it. All of it was expunged. In the moment, I was arrested, but not legally. In any case, it was November or December of 2007, so literally a few weeks before Big Think was about to launch. A big story was coming out in The New York Times I think on January 7th with Larry Summers who was the former president of Harvard and former treasury secretary talking about why he had decided to be an initial investor in Big Think. This was a huge deal. It was maybe the second page of The New York Times Business section. I was walking out of Union Square subway station. It was the era of flip phones, unbelievably. I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. Typically, I don't answer phone calls from numbers I don't recognize, but something told me to answer this call. I did.

I picked up the phone. There was a guy's voice with a strong New York accent and sounded kind of laughing, like a laughing tone. He introduced himself as a senior detective from the NYPD and told me that I needed to come into a specific precinct. Me being naïve or something, I had never had any dealings the police or anything like that, and so I just put on my good girl hat and was like, oh, my gosh, I've got to get into a car. I went directly to the police station. I called my dad on the way. He said, "What are you doing? You don't even know why you're going. Get out of the car." But I kept going. I arrived at the precinct. There was a man there dressed in civilian clothes, I guess you'd call them, waiting for me. He was just totally laughing, but it was a big deal. I was arrested; again, whatever, expunged later. I sat in a room with a one-way mirror for maybe three hours. I think it was just intimidation tactics of some kind. Somebody that I had previously worked for was not pleased that I had left and called into a flurry of activity, basically, the New York justice system. It was terrifying.

As I say in the book, I could have basically just hidden this from our investors or denied it, pretend that it didn't happen. As soon as I came out, my business partner and I started calling our investors. I called the majority of them -- Peter actually called Larry because he knew him better at that stage than I did -- and just fessed up to what happened. One of our classmates is actually the lead investor in Big Think, David Frankel. He was the first person I called. I had no idea what to expect from any of these people. Would they be mad? Would they disavow me? Would they want to divest? They had no idea what the outcome was going to be, nor did I. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised. They all supported me. It taught me a lesson that has been fundamental for the entire duration of Big Think and being an entrepreneur. Get out in front of the bad news as quickly as you can. Be as honest and as blunt as possible. People will support you. I mention in the book at some stage, the story of Elizabeth Holmes. Once you start digging into yourself a hole, it's really difficult to get out. You actually have to dig deeper. I learned immediately that you have to be honest. As much as it's painful, that's the thing to do.

Zibby: It's so true. Even with my kids, it's like, "I'm not even that upset that you stole the cookie. I'm more upset that you lied about stealing the cookie." It's the same thing. Somehow, the lies themselves make whatever it was almost pale in comparison to the fact that you then can't trust the person. Once you don't have trust in your relationship, what else is left? Usually, you don't have to learn it in such a dramatic Law & Order-type way, but I'm glad that you lived this for the rest of us. That's crazy. Just for the people who aren't familiar with Big Think, do you want to explain what it is and why you founded it to begin with and what people can get out of it?

Victoria: Big Think is a global knowledge forum with leading thinkers and influencers. We say to be on Big Think you have to be at the top of your field or disrupting it, everybody from Nobel laureates to business leaders, politics, artists, academics. We've had everybody on from the likes of Elon Musk to Richard Branson, Larry Summer. It's global. It's international. We reach around forty million people a month. The large majority of it is free. It's short-form video and also articles. Then we also have a subscription side of it which is much more focused on professional and personal growth and development. We've been around since 2008. It's growing. It's something I'm very proud of. When we started it, the dearth of thoughtful content on the internet -- we pitched it to our investors as Davos, democratized. For people who don't know, Davos is thing which is probably not happening this year, but that happens next year in January in Switzerland where notable business leaders and world leaders, and Bono, get together. [laughter] I think he's always there. I don't know. I've never been. They get together in the Alps. They talk about global issues.

All of these incredible people get exposed to other incredible, notable people, but the likes of me and other people don't get to go and participate. We thought, why don't we create a scenario where regular people have access to the minds of incredible thought leaders? We created Big Think. We pitched it to initial investors as Davos, democratized. It's grown from there. The fundamental principle of it hasn’t changed. We really do want to expose incredible people to our audience and in ways that is not of the moment. It's not about what's happening politically today, yesterday, tomorrow. It's really, what can this person, whether they be a politician or a business leader or an artist, teach you or I that we can put it into our own work or lives and make ourselves and our lives better and those around us? We say that it has to stand the test of time. Now, are there moments when we do do something that's of the moment? Yes, but ninety to ninety-five percent of the content we create is evergreen.

Zibby: Excellent. Do you go on it and tune up on certain topics yourself?

Victoria: I absolutely do. For instance, we had recently, I suppose it was one of our last in-studio interviews before COVID, with Robin DiAngelo who wrote White Fragility, the book, she gave a masterclass for Big Think on confronting racism. That, to me, was really profound and interesting. Yes, I do go on and learn about topics that I didn't know about all the time. At the moment, it's interesting for us because we're doing a lot of this type of interviewing where before, we'd had people come into our studio. What's been interesting, and I don't know if you've found this, it's been much easier for us to have access to guests. I interviewed Penn Jillette, the magician, about six weeks ago. Typically, it would take maybe six months to book him. He lives in Las Vegas. Getting a plane to come to New York or us going to Las Vegas, big barriers to entry. Now doing things like this, it's been so much easier. Next week, we're interviewing Malcom Gladwell. We've done him. We've interviewed him maybe three times before. Again, it's typically a six-month or so booking process. This was a week or two. This has changed things, not that you asked, but it has.

Zibby: Well, now I'm just going to call Malcom Gladwell next. It sounds like he has plenty of spare time. I have noticed that, actually. My access to authors, of course, has expanded because it doesn't matter where they are. I used to really insist that people, not insist, but I used to request that people come over. That was so nice. I really got to know people really well one on one. We would sit right here. Now this is so much more efficient. I can fit in more interviews. There are pros and cons to everything. I would still, if I had my druthers, sit here next to you instead of on the computer. It's lovely this way too. You had so many great tips in your book. I'll just pick out a few that I thought were pretty great. Here's one. This is from HBS. I'm not even sure I learned this. You said, "Here's something major that HBS taught me. You don't need to know how to do things. You need to know how to ask people to do things for you. This is something at which I excel." [laughs]

Victoria: It's true. I was thinking back to this a few weeks ago. I was in a study group, actually, with our classmate and friend Lea Carpenter. I helped organize the study group with Lea. There were probably eight of us in the study group. I was the only one who was not a Baker Scholar. Maybe Lea wasn't. I'm not sure. Everybody else was. I managed to assemble this incredible group where I probably contributed, academically, the least, but I managed to learn from incredibly bright people around me. I think that is something to not be ashamed of. People have different skills. When we were putting together the business model and the plan for Big Think and Excel spreadsheets, I suck at Excel, I was like, why do I have to do this? I can find somebody who knows how to do it. It's going to be a whole lot better than anything I put together. That's the approach I've taken. It's definitely been humbling over the years to realize how little I do know. Then it's also freeing to understand that there are people out there who can help you and not to be ashamed to ask. HBS really did teach me that because I did feel oftentimes, I think there is an expression, the diversity admit. I came from an artsy background. I was seated next to a banker, first year, from Goldman Sachs and a Navy Seal. It's like, how do I belong in this situation? That did teach me that I did bring something to the table different than these people. It's not shameful to ask for help.

Zibby: We were there just to make their experience better. [laughter] I actually have a really hard time delegating anything. That's probably one of my weaknesses. I just feel like by the time I find the right person to do something, I could've done it fifty times over myself. It's my own issue.

Victoria: I do feel that sometimes myself. I feel if it takes me longer to ask somebody for help or do something, I'll just do it. Over the years, I've realized so many people I work with can do things far better than I. I have a company that focuses on video production. Do I know how to set up the camera? No, I do not. Do I do any of the editing? No. CEOs of most companies, they should understand the process of what they're building or the product, but they don't need to have to build it themselves.

Zibby: That's true. You can't do everything. You had another great idea here where somebody took a thousand sticky notes with tasks that had to be accomplished, put them all over, and then each day just pulled down one to take off the to-do list, so to speak. I was putting that on my sticky notes. Tell me about that and if you've actually tried it yourself.

Victoria: I have tried it myself. I should be doing it more these days, actually. I think it can be really overwhelming when you think to yourself, I have to build a business or I have to build this product or something. The finality of it is really overwhelming. Versus, if I just call this person today or do one little thing, it feels like you're moving forward. The building of momentum is fundamental to achieving whatever it is you want to achieve. It's so easy to just say, I want to run a marathon or something. If I just go out and walk a hundred feet today and then tomorrow I run five hundred feet or something, you're building the momentum for it. Taking those sticky notes off the wall really does feel like you're like accomplishing something and I think pushes you forward versus, just as I said, the finality of the overwhelmingness of the large project or whatever it is you're trying to do, seems insurmountable versus one little thing at a time.

Zibby: Although, I feel like I would take one down and then think of five other things that I had to do. We'd have to start another wall. I feel like you'd have the first wall, and then you'd have to tackle the second wall [indiscernible/laughter] or something while things just keep building up. I love that visual element of it. I feel like crossing it off the to-do list is sometimes not as rewarding as if you were to pull it down.

Victoria: There's actually a book that a friend of mine, Kate Millican, suggested for me which I bought a couple of weeks ago which is called Best Self. Do you know that?

Zibby: No.

Victoria: This is something which I think is really amazing. It's a thirteen-week plan for a goal or three goals that you want to achieve. It's very, very direct. I started it yesterday. It's called Best Self. It's a very good book.

Zibby: You started the book, or you started the thirteen weeks to achieving something?

Victoria: It's a book that is thirteen weeks to achieving something. It's not like you read this book. It's activities every day to get to a goal.

Zibby: Oh, I see. What are you trying to achieve?

Victoria: I'm trying to achieve, basically, how to be in my -- I'm a very anxious person. I've been through a lot to cause anxiety and stress. For me, it's living in the moment and appreciating the daily things in life versus constantly striving. My achievement is actually being about less achievement at the moment and just being in the moment and calm.

Zibby: This is what it's like going to Harvard Business School. Our goals are to achieve less than we're capable of. [laughter] We're just that amazing that we have to slow ourselves down. It's just too much, oh, my gosh. You kind of slipped in there that you had been through a lot to create anxiety. What are some of the things? Is there anything you were thinking of in particular? Was there some sort of experience in general that you feel like has caused a lot of anxiety in your life? Or was that just a lot meaning the business and all the rest of it?

Victoria: Overwhelmingly, for the past thirteen years it's been the business. I do want to say that it's given me a profound amount of joy and happiness too. I think my tendency is to revert to an anxious state of being and a stressed state of being, hoping for the best but planning for the worst. My go-to is always, this positive thing that happened, and then I think of ten negative things that could derail it. That's a real challenge for me. Over the years, I've gone into many downward spirals when positive things are happening around me. All I see is doom. It was maybe 2013 or '14 that I was in San Francisco with Peter, my business partner. We were seated at Yerba Buena, this coffee place. I started talking about all the problem things that were potentially going to happen to the business and what the investors were going to say and our clients and our employees. He sat there with no joking at all and said, "If this is all going to happen, why are we doing this? Why don't we just quit? What's the point?" Then he pulled himself together and said, "You know Victoria, it's been really difficult to be around you for the past six months. It's all negative all the time. I know that your role as CEO is to see the negative things in potential, but you're also supposed to see the positive and be encouraging people and being a cheerleader versus planning for the doom scenario. You really need to go and get help. I'm not going to just sit back and observe this any longer."

At that stage, I had been seeing, casually, a therapist to just talk about the daily ins and outs. I found that in therapy I tended to be a comedian and my job was to essentially make the therapist laugh. I would emerge from these sessions being like, what was the use of that, really? I wasn't very honest. [laughs] I was about comedy. Anyway, I ended up going to see a psychiatrist. I was placed on or put myself -- I don't know. He placed me on antidepressants and antianxiety medication, one in the same. I think it's Wellbutrin. That really helped me and kind of broke the cycle of the downward doom scenarios. Now, has it made me be the life of the party and the joy and light and airy all the time? No, but it certainly did break a cycle of doom. I would encourage anybody to do that. That was kind of the end of the road for Peter that really helped me. I suppose it's like addiction. Somebody has to do an intervention sometimes for you to take the steps.

Zibby: That's great. How great that he did that and that you were open and receptive to that feedback as opposed to storming away from the table, which I could maybe see myself doing in a similar situation, like, what do you mean?

Victoria: It wasn't easy. I could also know in myself that I wasn't happy. That feeling, it was inward panic that was twenty-four hours or whenever I was awake and the feeling of something bad is about to happen in your stomach that just wouldn't leave. It was really unpleasant for me in my own body as well.

Zibby: I'm really sorry. That's no fun at all. I'm glad you found a way to manage it. Yes, I think therapy is the greatest thing. I wish I had been a therapist myself. Instead, I get to hear about other people's therapy journeys and not have to do all the work, so I get some perks. What was it like for you going back and reflecting on all your time and then sitting down to write this book? What did that feel like? How long did it take for you to write the book? What was that process like?

Victoria: It was actually much quicker than I thought because obviously -- well, not obviously. I've never written a novel. I think that requires way, way, way more effort. What I was writing was what I'd experienced and what I know. The most difficult part for me was figuring out the structure of it. As I began writing, I was like, is this even interesting? It's my story. I was in some ways thinking, who is going to care about this? The most challenging part for me was the structure of it, kind of like in high school or college or whatever, writing an essay, getting down the parts that you want to talk about and then figuring out the order that you're going to tell them in and then the parts that you need to cut. I put together a proposal in June of 2019, oh, my gosh, and didn't think anything about it. I submitted to around ten agents, cold. I finally got one. As they say, and it is true -- I'll encourage anybody who wants to write a book. It just takes one. Nine of ten publishers rejected it. The tenth selected it. It took me three months to write the whole thing.

Zibby: That's fast.

Victoria: Because of the election coming up, it was either going to be pre-election released or post-election released. I didn't know this before writing a book, but the editorial and publishing process is very long. The whole thing was finished by December of last year. Then obviously, there have been tweaks and things to it and then choosing the book cover and things like that. The bulk of the work and all the writing was done by December because they needed it done by that. It was a very, very quick writing process. I will say that I think had I been given a year or something, I might not have done it. It's kind of like cramming for a test or something. The fact that I had to do it in such a short timeframe meant that I actually did it.

Zibby: It's like that saying, if you give a busy person something to do, they’ll do it fast. If I have a thousand things to do, then throw it in. I'll make that call. I'll send that email. On a lazy Sunday, if I'm not doing anything, I can't even send one email sometimes.

Victoria: I remember graduating from HBS in 2003. As I wrote in the book, I didn't have a job until November or something of that year. I was staying at my sister's house in New York, or apartment. I remember in the morning, getting out of bed and having been at HBS being busy all the time, I found it a struggle to even plan to go to the gym. It seemed like a huge effort and ridiculous.

Zibby: Yes, I felt the same way. I still sometimes feel like that. Going to the gym is hard. [laughter] I see what you're saying. So what's coming next for you? You have this book coming out which is so exciting. You're running your business. What else? What else is coming up?

Victoria: In this book, Best Self, there's this thirteen-week bucket list which I'm trying to put my mind to about things I want to do. I really do want to expand into other areas personally as well. I'd love to learn Spanish, which I have never done. I grew up in Canada and studied French for twelve years. I'm in no way fluent in French, which tells you about learning languages in schools. [laughs] I have to go and immerse myself somewhere. At some point in the next year when the whole COVID thing hopefully ends, I'd like to go to Spain and learn Spanish and also just be much more open to things other than work. That doesn't mean that work isn't going to be front and center, but it will be alongside other things. That's really it.

Zibby: This is great. I feel like I caught you at this major self-improvement moment in your life. You're trying to do all these different things. It's amazing. It's so great. You mentioned already, it only takes one as advice to aspiring authors. What other advice would you share?

Victoria: Just keep going. The hardest part, even for me, is getting the first few words down. Then once you start writing, it's easier. The blank page, I know much better writers than I even struggle with that. It's just literally starting. That's even what I said with a business. It's just taking the leap and saying you're going to do it. That's something else I write about in the book. If you tell people that you're going to do it, it's really hard to not do it. If I said to you, I'm about to start writing my second book, and in two months you called me and asked how it was going, I'd be slightly abashed if I hadn’t even started it. I'm not writing a second book at the moment. [laughs]

Zibby: I do that too. I'm like, I'm going on this eating plan. I'm telling everybody I know about it. Then maybe it will work or something. The more you can get it out loud, the more there's a shot at it. It's good to apply to this. I feel like so many of your tips apply not just to the workplace, but to every aspect of life. It's really user-friendly. I feel like women are entrepreneurs even who don't work in the workplace. Just running our lives and for people who have lots of kids, everything can be like a business. All the tips are super relevant in any context, so thank you. Thanks for the book. Thanks for chatting today.

Victoria: Thanks so much, Zibby. This has been wonderful.

Zibby: Thank you. Take care.

Victoria: Bye.

Zibby: Bye, Victoria.

Dr. Jill Biden, WHERE THE LIGHT ENTERS

Zibby Owens: I did an Instagram Live with Jill Biden this week, which was so amazing. I hope that you all really enjoy this episode because I had the best time getting to know her. Jill Biden is a community college professor and served as Second Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. For those of you who have picked on who she is, she's Joe Biden's wife and perhaps will be the next first lady. We'll see what happens. During the Obama-Biden administration, she advocated for military families, community colleges, the fight against cancer, and the education of women and girls around the world. She continues this work today through the Biden Foundation, the Biden Cancer Initiative, and the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children. Dr. Biden is married to former Vice President Joe Biden. Her book is called Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself. It's a memoir, a New York Times best seller, and just came out in paperback. Definitely read it. I read it. I half read it and half listened to the audiobook of it. I interchanged them. That was also really neat because she reads it herself. Enjoy.

Hi.

Jill Biden: Hi. Hello. We are in the middle of a gigantic storm. We've had a tornado watch all weekend. We've lost our power. All morning, we lost our power three times. That's why we're a little bit late.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, don't worry. We have a tornado warning here too. I'm like, don't go out at one o'clock. I can't lose my Wi-Fi. [laughs]

Jill: Where are you? In DC or in New York?

Zibby: We're out on Long Island in New York.

Jill: Gosh, yeah, it's crazy.

Zibby: How about you? Where are you today?

Jill: Delaware, at our Wilmington home.

Zibby: Thanks so much for taking the time. Congratulations on your paperback release. Do you see I'm wearing your matching sweater today?

Jill: Oh, yes. I should've worn it. We could've been twins.

Zibby: Could've been twins. This is such an amazing book. What a story. What a life you have led. It's truly remarkable. You can just tell how, this sounds so trite, but you're such a good person. It comes through in every story that you tell. It's just so nice to get to know you now in person as well, or this way. [laughs]

Jill: It's nice to meet you. Thanks for doing this.

Zibby: Of course. So much to discuss. First, I just wanted to hear a little more about how much you love being a teacher. That's one of the things that came through so clear in the book. You wrote, "I realized early on that teaching was more than a job for me. It goes much deeper than that. Being a teacher is not what I do, but who I am." Tell me a little about your love of teaching. What about it gets you so fired up?

Jill: I've been teaching, I think this is year thirty-six. It's my career. It's what I love doing. My grandmother was a teacher. For me, it's this sense of community that I feel in my classroom. They're like a family to me. I try to create that. That first week of school, I get to know everybody's names. I have them get to know one another. I teach writing. Writing is so personal that I think that they have to feel that they know somebody else in the classroom to read what they’ve written. They have to know their stories. Writing creates a vulnerability. I get to know my students really well. I hear from my students all the time. They're texting me and emailing me even though we're not back in school yet this semester. I have to tell you, Zibby, I'm taking certification so that I can teach online should I become first lady.

Zibby: That's exciting.

Jill: That's my dream. I did that all the eight years that I was second lady. I loved every minute of it. We made it work. I'm hoping we can make it work again.

Zibby: Would the online component be because schools might not open or because the first lady can't teach in a public place? What would the impetus be?

Jill: We're in such a precarious time right now. Every day, my phone is going crazy with my friends, and my friends who are teachers saying, "What should we do? What should we do?" We have to listen to the scientists and the doctors. When they tell us it's safe to go back, then I think that's okay to go back. Right now, the public schools, a lot of them don't have the funding. Maybe they don't have extra masks. You know yourself, kids forget everything. You know that they're going to forget their mask. We need to have a supply of masks in every classroom. We need to socially distance. You know how many kids are in a classroom, twenty-five to thirty-five. It's hard to do that, to move these desks and then address all the students' needs. That's the big thing. We're in August and school is about to start. I think that's the thing on everybody's mind. What do we do?

Zibby: This is literally all I talk about. [laughs]

Jill: There we go. See?

Zibby: I have four kids. They're at three different schools. They all have different plans. I don't know what I agree with, what I don't. It's so hard. Every parent has to not only listen to the national advice, but the actual individual school advice, and then listen to your heart. It is so hard. This is a tough time, and for teacher too, educators as well.

Jill: I agree. That's why I say I'm hearing from a lot of teachers who are saying, gosh, we think right now, unless the doctors say it's okay to go back, should we really go back? Then we have to go back into our own homes and take care of our family. There are a lot of decisions. That's why leadership is so important to know what to do, to give us advice, and tell us the path to follow, somebody we trust.

Zibby: Somebody in the comments is saying that you should be the secretary of education.

Jill: [laughs] Oh, no.

Zibby: Perhaps VP. I hear it's still an open slot at this point.

Jill: Nope. I love the classroom. That's where I want to be.

Zibby: Okay, fine. You wrote so beautifully in the book about parenting your way through uncertainty and through sorrow. I feel like uncertainty in particular at this time is what basically everybody is going through in every which way. You said, "Parents are supposed to be the ones with the answers, the ones who can tell you that everything is going to be okay. But how do you make your children believe that things will work out when you aren't so sure that they will, when you have no answers, only sadness and confusion?" Where have you come out on this? What are we supposed to do? What do you think about it?

Jill: My mother was always so strong for me, always. I always went to her with whatever problem I had or if I was trying to sort things out. She always gave me such great advice. I depended so much on her. My mother was such a great role model for me that I want to be that for my children. I try very hard to take the lessons from her book and be strong and try to be resilient and try to just love them, just love them through the tough times. I think that’s the role of a good mom.

Zibby: Another thing that came through in your book is, just buy a lot of candles to decorate your table. Clearly, I want to go to your Thanksgiving and your dinners.

Jill: Yes, come. [laughter]

Zibby: You would probably say that because you have such an open-door policy. The importance of the small rituals too and all the traditions of family was something that came up over and over and how little things like having a catalog in the backseat of the car driving to Nantucket, sometimes the sum total of all these traditions make up a family, right?

Jill: Yes. Don't kids love that? They love the things that you do over and over again year after year. At Easter, I get the clear jars and I fill them with jellybeans. Then I put the candles in the jellybeans and I put them down the table, or just things that they always look forward to. Even if they're a little bit corny, the kids still love them. I don't know about you, I still do stockings at Christmas. They still love the really funny stuff, the candy bars you stick in. We have a tradition where we always stick an orange, my grandmom did this, always stick an orange in the toe. The kids kind of laugh at it, but if I didn't have that orange in there, they would be the first ones to tell me. I think kids just love that kind of -- I think it provides structure. It provides comfort, the things that they're used to.

Zibby: I totally agree, yes, when everything around you changes even down to the stores in your neighborhood. Everything is changing.

Jill: Give me an example of something you do for your kids.

Zibby: We always do birthday breakfasts which is something that my parents used to do for me. In fact, my husband is like, "What's up with everybody eating cake for breakfast?" [laughs] I'm like, I don't know.

Jill: I love that.

Zibby: We always do that. We have a cake at breakfast. I decorate the whole kitchen. I have all the gifts waiting. When you come down in the morning, it's a whole big thing. There's a banner. In fact, in the next room, they're so into these celebrations now with so little else that goes on these days that we're celebrating the end of their pretend camp, which was just one friend each. We have a cake. My son now has put party hats all over the table. After this, we're going to have a celebration for that. I should support the paper goods industry. I should invest or something.

Jill: It's funny because today is Natalie's sixteenth birthday. She's Beau's oldest. Every year, I have a pool party for her. Of course, Joe and I had to stay away. She brought some friends over and they went swimming. I do the same thing. We have cake. We have balloons. It doesn't matter if your kids are sixteen or they're thirty-six. If you don't have those balloons, they're so disappointed. [laughs] I love that. I love that birthday cake idea because what difference does it make if they -- that's one of the beauties of being a grandmother, is when they come over and I have dessert for dinner. I say, I don't care, eat your dessert first. What do I care? They're going to eat all the dinner anyway, so what difference does the order make? That's the beauty of being a grandmother. I don't think I'd ever do that as a mother.

Zibby: I feel like this pandemic has made me act more like a grandmother to my own kids. Rules that were so strict, now I'm like, I don't know, is it a big deal?

Jill: Yeah. You have to be fun and creative because it's tough for them. This pandemic is really tough for our kids. They don't really understand a lot about it. Everything is upside down. It's really tough on them.

Zibby: Absolutely. How do you maintain this sense of closeness and family and tradition while your life is also on such a public stage? You're out there everywhere. Your husband is out there everywhere. How do you come back? What do you do at night to stay normal? Do you sit around and watch TV? How do you go back and forth from such a public to the private?

Jill: You have to make your family and your private life, you have to maintain that. You have to make it a priority. When I'm at school, my head's at school. When I'm doing something as second lady, my head was totally there. You have to be very conscious as a mom to make sure that you do all the things that your kids expect, calling them or sending a card or sending a quote. I sent a quote to Natalie this morning. Walt Whitman said that some people are full of sunshine to the very last inch. I said, "Natalie, that's you. That's who you are." It is who she is. That's who her dad was. That's who my son Beau was. I wanted to send that to her. She sent me back a very sweet email. You have to make time. You have to really think about it. You can't just let time go by or a day go by. You have to be vigilant at being a good mom and a grandmom, right? Not that you're a grandmom, but being a good mom, you have to be conscious about it.

Zibby: It's true. Oh, my gosh, honestly, my heart broke when you wrote about losing Beau and just how open, authentic, honest, I'm so sorry that you've gone through this. Your whole family's loss, my heart just breaks for you. The way you wrote about it in the book and that there is nothing you can say, you're like, I don't have the words for this. All I can say is, to other people that have been through it, that you're not alone. Sometimes that is all you can say. It was just absolutely beautiful and so heartbreaking. I just wanted to extend my --

Jill: -- You know what, Zibby, I really feel that because you love your children so much, I think you know or you can imagine how painful it is to lose a child. You can't even let your mind go there. You can't even let your head go there. The thing that I found that Joe and I did was we tried to find purpose. After we were in the administration, we started the Biden Cancer Initiative because every American family is going through -- many American families, most have someone who is experiencing cancer. It's so tough to go through it. I went through it with my mother, my sister had a stem cell transplant, and then Beau. I can't even tell you how many people that I connect with weekly, a lot of people who have gone through the same thing. I have to tell them, you just have to find purpose to be able to go on. You have to make something of the life that you've lost, and in Beau's case, brain cancer. I'll keep going. I'll keep going with this no matter what happens in our future. I will still be in the fight against cancer.

Zibby: It's just so awful. I'm so sorry. In fact, one of the things that really struck me in your book too was how you talked about your requirement, essentially, to compartmentalize and how you had to just put it aside. I felt like that resonated so much because everybody has to do that to some degree or another, not necessarily through the awful things that you've been through, but even something smaller that's really on their minds. Yet you have to do it. Your point in particular was, "I wasn't disingenuous when I smiled at rallies or campaign stops. I just had to teach myself to forget for a little while the parts of me that were hurting. So many us, public figures or not, have to learn how to lead these double lives. Work doesn't stop because your father is sick. Deadlines don't go away because your friend is dying. We never know what's behind someone's smile, what hardships they are balancing with their day-to-day responsibilities."

Jill: That's so true.

Zibby: Tell me about your ability to compartmentalize and how we all do this, how we all can just step it up when we have to. How can people do it when they're feeling so lousy?

Jill: As moms, you have to do that. In my professional life, I had to walk into that classroom every single day, a smile on my face, because as you walk into the classroom, that instant that I walk in there, that's so important. It sets the tone for the class. If I walked in and I was upset or grouchy, that would permeate. Every day, I would walk in positive and with a smile on my face knowing that my students were going through some pretty tough times. I teach a lot of refugees. I teach a lot of immigrants. A lot of my students are in the United States by themselves because they’ve lost their entire families due to wars or circumstances in other countries. I had to be there for them. Like I said, my classroom is my sense of community. I owe them that as a professional, as a friend, as their teacher. As a professional, I think I owe them that.

Zibby: It goes back to your saying you have to have a purpose. This whole sense of purpose and doing things for others and just making it all matter requires that level of stepping it up to such a degree, oh, my gosh. Writing a book, is this something that -- I know you've written children's books as well. Is a memoir something that you always thought you would do? Has it been in the back of your mind? Did you ever write a novel? Tell me about writing.

Jill: After we were in the administration, I met so many amazing people and did so many amazing things that I thought, I have to write about that because I have to tell these stories. When I talked to publisher and presented the book, they said, "No, we don't want that. We want a book that only you can write," and so they said, "Tell us about your family." There's so many blended families now. That's what I decided that only I could write about, how I married Joe and he had two children and how I became a mother to Beau and Hunter, and then later on we had our daughter Ashley, and how I used my own family as a roadmap to sort of navigate what I valued in my growing up to guide me to being a mother, an instant mother by the way, an instant mother to two little boys. I grew up with four sisters. I was so used to girls and fighting over makeup and who has the comb and the hairbrush, all the things girls do. Boys were totally different for me. I write in the book about the snake story where the kids came in -- I'll never forget it. "Mom, mom! Come here, come here!" I go running down the steps. They're holding this net. I look in the net, and it's a snake. I screamed and I ran back upstairs. They were so proud that they had caught this snake. They wanted to show it to me, those sort of things that I really had to get used to as a new mother. There were a lot of fun, fun stories. I don't know if you have boys or girls.

Zibby: I have two of each.

Jill: Then do you think boys and girls, raising them is a lot different?

Zibby: I feel like just all my kids are so different even within the genders. Yes, there are some things that are just so -- yeah. [laughs]

Jill: It's just funny and different. They were a lot of fun, raising them. I went through some really interesting times.

Zibby: I'm sure you could've written many more books just about that. Is it something that you would want to do again? Would you want to write about what it's like to be on the campaign trail? Would you want to write more about being a grandmother? I could just see you doing so many books because your voice is so amazing.

Jill: I love writing. I journal every day, most days. That's what I suggest to people that I meet, to my students, to other friends because we are in such a different time in this pandemic. I try to tell my grandchildren I want them to journal because I never want them to forget what they went through during this time, in good ways and in bad times. Write reflections of, how did you feel? How did this pandemic change you? How did it change your view of the world? What do you want to see in the future because of having been through this pandemic? I hope your kids are. They don't even have to write it. If they want to do it through art, some of my grandchildren are very artistic, or they want to do a video and record it, but I don't think we should lose the essence of this experience. Even though this illness is so horrible, I think we have to think of ourselves and what we went through and how it changed us as who we are or who we were.

Zibby: I think my daughter is chronicling this through TikTok, which might now go away. I think we need some different outlets. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors, aside from journaling of course?

Jill: I say write from your heart. I read so many memoirs. When I finished a lot of them, I thought, I don't really know that person. When I thought about writing my own memoir, I thought, my readers are going to expect me to expose my heart and get to know me for the woman I am. I hope that came through in the book because I didn't want it to be superficial. I wanted people to get to know me. I just wrote my children's book, Joey, about my husband. I'd love to write another book because look what we're going through. There's so many things happening in the world right now, just so many things that are challenging yet interesting, sad yet you find joy. You feel joy, so much more than you ever allowed yourself to feel it before because we've seen such loss. I'm writing every day, so who knows?

Zibby: Who knows? You might have a much bigger thing on your plate.

Jill: Maybe. Hopefully.

Zibby: Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on my show. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to wear this sweater again. [laughs] No, I'm kidding. Seriously, I read a lot of memoirs too and this is really one of my favorites because of just what you're saying. It was so open. You're just the way that you seem from the book, talking to you one on one. That's just amazing. That's all we have, is being who we are. It sounds so stupid, but anyway.

Jill: That's right. I've loved getting to know you. Thanks for doing this.

Zibby: You too. Thank you so much.

Jill: Thanks. Take care.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

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Natascha Biebow, THE CRAYON MAN

Zibby Owens: Natascha Biebow was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she went to an American school. She studied developmental psychology at Smith College and completed a degree in early childhood education and an International Diploma in Montessori Pedagogy in 2013. She wrote, as an editor, Is this My Nose?, illustrated by Georgie Birkett, which won the Booktrust Best Book for Babes. She's also written many other books including the recent story The Crayon Man: The True Story of the Invention of Crayola Crayons, which is really fantastic. I've now read it like fifty times to my kids. You should too.

Hi.

Natascha Biebow: Hello.

Zibby: How are you?

Natascha: I'm good. Thanks. It's so fun to see you live.

Zibby: Thanks. I'm really excited to talk to you. I've read The Crayon Man now like five times to my kids in the last week or so. They love it. I'm really excited to talk to you.

Natascha: How old are your kids?

Zibby: I have four kids, but I read it to my five-and-a-half-year-old and almost-seven-year-old. I have twins that are about to be thirteen. They are kind of past this, but I love reading children's books. What inspired you to write this story? Tell me more about The Crayon Man.

Natascha: I was looking for a topic to write for a nonfiction picture book course that I was taking. I needed a topic really fast and was watching an episode of Sesame Street with my son who was four then. We saw this great video about how the Crayola crayons are made in the factory. I remembered how much I liked them from my childhood. I hadn’t really thought about Crayola crayons in a little while. I saw the collating machine that has all the colors stacked up. When you see them, they're this amazing rainbow of colors. It's just such a vivid picture. Then I started thinking, maybe that would make a good topic. The more I started looking into it, the more a really cool story emerged. I discovered that no one had told this story quite the way I wanted to tell it, which was about Edwin Binney the man as opposed to just the historical, very old-fashioned, dry nonfiction approaches that were out there about just Crayola and a very liner history, shall we say, of how the crayons had been made and invented which talked about Edwin Binney and his company. I just got digging. The more I dug, the more interesting things that I found.

Zibby: What brought you to take that class in the first place?

Natascha: I've been writing picture books for a really long time. I'm also a picture book and young fiction editor. When I needed to make some money, I was focusing more on my editing, and when my son came along, on parenting and so on. Then I just got to a point where I thought, I need a new direction. I need some deadlines. I need someone to get me unstuck from the balancing act that is trying to cram too many things in your life. I decided to take this class. It would be eight weeks. By the end of it, you'd have written a book. I just thought, that's what I need. I need to be accountable in some way. It worked.

Zibby: Was it an online or actual-person class?

Natascha: It was an online class with Kristin Fulton who unfortunately isn't offering the class anymore. It was really great. She talked us through the whole genre of nonfiction picture books and the different aspects of writing in that particular area. It was an area that I'd explored a little bit but hadn’t focused as much on. I started remembering how much I like true stories because sometimes the true stories are quirkier than stuff that you can imagine. I like that about it. Through the course, we had weekly meetings and assignments. Kristin talked us through different aspects of the craft and different parts of writing a nonfiction book. We got some feedback from her as well, which was really great, and also from our classmates.

Zibby: That's so neat. It's so funny how you can get something done in such a finite period of time when you have goals and regular accountability and all of that as opposed to having a goal that's just so vague and maybe you'll get it done, maybe you won't. I feel like I'm the type of person who needs that level of structure to get stuff done regularly, or at least a self-imposed structure, if not in class.

Natascha: Absolutely. Kristin was like, by this week, you need to have started your research. By this week, you need your ten key facts about whatever topic so that we can see if it's going to make a book or if you need to go and look into stuff. By this point, you've got to collect enough information, but stop. One of the things about researching is you could go on. You find interesting things. You go down a little rabbit hole here. You realize, oh, I'm way off topic. You have to know when you've got enough to write the book. Then once you write the first draft, you can go back and ask further questions and find further verification for certain things that are still not clear, but at least you've got something that's starting to look like a story with a beginning, middle, and an end kind of thing.

Zibby: My son was wondering, though, why they got so many different colors all over their faces and their clothing every time. [laughs]

Natascha: Someone asked me that in a recent school visit. I said if you imagine it's like you're making a cake and you are baking and the flour goes everywhere and you mix it with a lot of vigor. I think part of that is slightly artistic license from the illustrator's point of view to convey the point. I do imagine they were in this lab with all kinds of materials and it got messy.

Zibby: I answered something similar to that, but your answer was better. Tell me about some of your other books. What's the first picture book you worked on?

Natascha: My first picture book was called Eleonora or Elephants Never Forget. It was inspired by a trip to Africa with my parents. My parents lived in South Africa when I was very little. We went back a few times as I grew up. We were staying on a game reserve and talking about elephants. I learned that when an elephant dies, and often unfortunately through poaching, the other elephants from far and wide will come and pay their respects to the elephant that died. It just struck me as such a moving phenomenon. Elephants are almost like people in that respect. They seem to sense that somebody from their tribe had left. I wrote this book. It’s not a hundred percent nonfiction. It's more an inspired story based on the story the game people had told me. I just love elephants. I think they're such majestic creatures. I wrote that book. That was published quite a long time ago. In my work as an editor, I've done a lot of writing as well. I have written some nonfiction and fiction. The one that I really like a lot was called Is This My Nose? It's a baby board book, very simple text about different parts of your face. It's fun, illustrated by Georgie Birkett.

Zibby: Awesome. What's coming next? Are you working on another book? Do you always have a lot of projects at once? How do you work?

Natascha: Authors always have lots of books in their bottom drawer, I'd say, or on submission in various stages. I've written a chapter book in a chapter book series proposal that's out on submission. It's inspired by teachers because I'm always fascinated by the hugely important role that teachers play in our lives. I've also written some other nonfiction books, picture books like The Crayon Man, that are at various stages. A couple are out on submission. Others, I'm researching more. Partly, it's a question of having the right story at the right time because publishers' lists are very busy. They're always trying to find a balance between all the different topics they're publishing and the different voices they want to hear from and what's timely for kids right now. Part of it is also just having enough time to research everything and get the book written. Again, it comes back to the juggling of paid work versus trying to be a working author and live just off that.

Zibby: As an author and an editor, what do you think makes a great children's book?

Natascha: For me, it's got to be child centered. It's got to be a book that speaks to kids. I think a great picture book has to have wonderful art that's inspiring but also that isn't too lofty, shall we say. We don't want it to be the coffee table book that looks beautiful but is just too grown up for them to really access. I think the story has to be from the heart. It has to be a story that is relevant to children in their everyday lives. They’ve got to be able to find a way into the story that moves them or that speaks to them in terms of their experience and it sparks curiosity, perhaps. Also, I love a text that has a good rhythm to it. The parent has to read it hundreds of time. Maybe also some levels of jokes or humor to draw in the grown-ups. That always helps. It's such a multilayered piece of art. Picture books are full of different aspects that draw in different readers. Ideally, one that endures is one that has a real sense of wonder, perhaps, or it speaks to you emotionally in some way. I'm sure as a parent you read loads of picture books, don't you?

Zibby: I do. I do. I read picture books all the time. I really do love nonfiction picture books. I was going to say historical picture books. I think those are really great because then kids -- I'm such a visual person. It really helps me to see the factory and the brothers and all of the stuff. Now I understand. I can look at the Crayon box and I'll feel very differently from now on and have a different set of images going through my head. I love humor. I love when books use the book form in a different way. I love in the Elephant & Piggie books how sometimes they talk to the reader. We Are in a Book! by Mo Willems is probably my favorite picture book ever. We are in a book. The book ends? [laughs] It's so funny. It's so self-referential. It's so clever and brilliant. Picture books are great. They're great to read as parents and such a bonding thing to do with your children and fostering that love of reading early. Having great options is super important, so thank you for contributing to the great options.

Natascha: Thank you. I was also going to say the interesting thing about the nonfiction that we're seeing more recently is that there's lots of different kinds of nonfiction. It's drawing in those readers who really like facts but maybe haven't accessed story in the same way. Maybe because they're so drawn in by the facts, they're now going to be compelled by the story to read different things, we hope. Or the other way around, the kids who really like the narrative, maybe they’ll start looking at nonfiction differently. It's a nice genre that way too.

Zibby: Totally. Do you have final advice for aspiring picture book or children's book authors?

Natascha: My advice is to persevere and bum on seat. You’ve got to have your butt in your chair. You got to put in the hours. You really have to be prepared for the journey that is being a writer. The many drafts, the whole process of getting published is not for the fainthearted. It requires a lot of perseverance. Also, just literally getting up and spending the time to write or illustrate and to further your craft and always be open to learning from other people, looking to inspiration, reading a lot of other books, and just to keep your mind open for new possibilities. You really need to be prepared to not give up because it's a tough genre to get published in. It's also a really wonderful community of people working in this area who are very supportive and open to sharing their advice and supporting you on your journey as a published or pre-published author or illustrator, as we like to call people on their journey.

Zibby: Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for entertaining my kids and me for lots of bedtimes.

Natascha: That's amazing. I'm so glad you liked The Crayon Man. It's been really fun to connect with you. Thanks, Zibby.

Zibby: You too. Thanks a lot. Buh-bye.

Natascha: Bye.

George Brescia, CHANGE YOUR CLOTHES, CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Zibby Owens: George Brescia is the author of Change Your Clothes, Change Your Life. He is a style expert and has appeared NBC's Today Show. His other television includes regular red-carpet commentary and fashion and trend reporting for CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX. As Playbill.com’s “Best Dressed” columnist, he covered the Tony Awards and several seasons of Broadway openings and galas. His award-winning web series, Dress Up!, featured George working with Broadway’s top stars preparing them for their opening nights and premieres. He travels the country doing guest lecturing, special events, and regional television shows about current fashion trends and personal styling, and has also been featured on NPR’s Marketplace. George is currently the brand ambassador for LOGO by Lori Goldstein on the QVC Network. His background includes twenty-five years working closely with top fashion leaders Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Tommy Hilfiger, and with the fashion directors at Bloomingdales, Bergdorfs, and Lord & Taylor. He's also a top-tier New York City-based stylist and image consultant with tons of clients. Listen to all of his advice here. As he says, your clothing has the potential to enhance your personal brilliance.

Welcome, George. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

George Brescia: Oh, my god, Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

Zibby: I was really nervous, to be honest. I know this is an audio recording, but you and I are over Skype right now. I was like, I wonder what I should wear to this Skype interview because you are the master. I just put on a coverup, so sorry. [laughs]

George: You look great. Listen, you know what, it's not even about that. It's never about feeling bad. That's the last thing we want. We want you feeling good. That's what my book is all about. It's all about you feeling good and feeling confident and just having the clothes in your closet that do that for you so that you don't really have to think about it. You look terrific.

Zibby: Well, thank you. Give listeners the broader picture of your book, which by the way has probably the best cover I've seen in my entire life. I want to frame your cover and put it on my wall. I'm obsessed with color. It is so awesome.

George: Thank you. I appreciate that. The book has a very colorful cover. That is no mistake because I'm all about color and what colors people wear and to have them in colors that make them look really good. Listen, this is the deal, you have to get dressed every day. No matter what your life is, no matter what's going on in the world, we cover our body with clothes no matter what. My goal is to have you put clothes on your body that, A, make you feel amazing; B, give you the response that you want from people in terms of the way that you want to be seen. It's not so much about a compliment. It's more about, how do you want the world to see you? They do see you whether you like it or not no matter what, whether it's on a Skype call, a Zoom call, in person. No matter what's happening in the world and what your life is, you are seen at some point. You want to make sure that you're being thought of in the way that you want to. Clothes do that. I really got that from dressing celebrities. I'm a stylist.

I have a whole background. I was at Ralph Lauren for ten-plus years. I was a vice president in Tommy Hilfiger. I've worked at Donna Karan. I've worked with Jay Z at Rocawear, and Beyoncé. I've dressed all kinds of Broadway actresses to all kinds of Oscar-winning actresses in Los Angeles, movie actresses. What I realized was dressing them for auditions -- they would say to me, "I'm going in for this role. What do you think I should wear that speaks to the role?" We realized that when the door opened and they walked in, immediately they were sort of cast or not cast in a role based on what they brought in the door with their presentation of themselves. I was like, you know, this happens in real life. I do it. You do it. Everyone does it. People don't talk about it, but they do it. You walk by someone on the street. You see someone maybe on one of your Zoom calls and you're like, huh, she's this, he's that, based on what you see them wearing. It's an instinctive human response. I just want you to win at that response and become more present to it. When you become more present to it, what ends up happening is you connect to yourself. It's a connection to yourself because you have to take the time to think about yourself, think about what you want to present to the world, think about the fact that you're putting something on that's going to make you feel good.

It's self-care, is what it really is. I think we're in a time right now in this country and the world where it really is about self-care. If we don't take care of ourselves, then we're not better for others in any way. When we take care of ourselves, we're a better mother. We're a better sister. We're a better wife. We're a better friend. We're a better husband. We're a better boyfriend. It's just self-care. It really is. This book really talks about how to do that and how to -- all the clothes that you have in your closet, I call it the window to your soul because it is. What are you holding onto? What won't you let go of? Why won't you bring new in? You want new in your life. Maybe you want the new love of your life. Maybe you want the new job. Maybe you want the new home. If you don't get rid of things that aren't serving you, how do you become an open vessel for all good? It's funny. I'm watching the expression on your face as I speak. I think people are surprised when I speak this way about this book because this isn't about, if you wear this skirt, it makes you have a smaller waist, or if you wear this color, you will look younger. It's not that kind of a book. There is that information in there, but it all comes from a very spiritual place because that's really what it is. It's how you connect to yourself and how to present yourself in the world. Your clothing is a tool that you have that can help you to do that.

Zibby: I didn't mean to suggest anything by my expression other than I was just listening intently. I read your book, so I know what's in there. I think it's great. It's almost like a clothing empowerment movement in a way, right? It's more like that.

George: Yes, exactly. I loved your expression. I love it because it makes me know that what is in the book can be powerful. That's what I'm seeing in your face. That's what I love. People will say to me, "George, what's one of your favorite things about what you do? What do you love?" I always answer with, I love the moment when I put something on someone and she looks in the mirror and she's like, oh, yeah, there I am. There's that person I want to be or I hope I am, or that's what I want to say. That moment of self-discovery, that is my favorite part of what I do. It always happens. When people hire me to dress them for, whether it's an opening of a Broadway show or a movie premiere -- sometimes I have women who just want to hire me because they want their closets filled with clothes that really can reflect who they are and who they want to be, but they don't know how to do it. We do that kind of work together. That's my favorite moment because that’s when they discover, I can do this. I can be this. I can have this.

I think that especially for women, it's so hard. I really feel for women. I do. All they do is take care of, take care of their kids, take care of their husband. They're just constantly give, give, give, giving. Then do they have any time for themselves? Do they have any moment where it can be just about them? When I usually come to someone, that is one of their moments that they get to have. I get to experience that with them. I love it. Then they’ll call me in a month or two weeks and they’ll say, "Oh, my god, I just feel so much better. Every time I walk out the door I don't have to think, do I look okay? Am I okay? Am I enough?" It's funny. With my book, when it first came out it was Change Your Clothes, Change Your Life: Because You Can't Go Naked. That was the subtitle because you really can't. That's why I did it. I wanted to be funny and fun. You are required to wear clothing by law. People always say, what about a nude beach? I'm like, okay, I'll give you that, but do you live your life on a nude beach? No, you don't. What we did was -- it's been some years since the book has come out. As you know, we're relaunching in paperback on August 25th. We rewrote the forward. It's all the things that I've learned since the book has come out.

I have been on the road traveling all over the country doing style events in all kinds of places: Fargo; Minnesota; Ponte Vedra, Florida; Minneapolis; Wisconsin; the heartland of the country; Springfield, Missouri. I've been everywhere. I have been dressing these women, doing style events and book signings and also doing some local television. I've learned so much from all of these women. It's been such an education for me, one that I have loved and treasured. It's been a wealth of knowledge of what women go through and also how it's a little different in different parts of the country, different kinds of challenges. Yes, we are America, but we do have different regions that have different little cultural things. The Midwest is different from the East Coast, from the West Coast, from the South, from New England. It's fascinating. I've tried to impart some of these things that I've learned in the forward. Then we have changed the subtitle. The reason that we changed the subtitle, I wanted to say Change Your Clothes, Change Your Life: Because You're Worth It because you are worth it. You're worth that moment every day of self-care and a little bit of self-reflection to say, what do I want to say today to the world? How do I want to feel? To take that moment to connect to yourself is very powerful.

Zibby: It's almost like you're doing your own branding exercise. I don't think that everybody necessarily pauses the way you're suggesting to think deeply about what they're wearing, their style versus who they are. It's a whole nother level. There's one thing, what looks good on my body? I feel like most women have kind of figured out through trial and error the kinds of things they can pull off and the kinds of things they can't. I'm not going to wear a skintight -- [laughs]. I know A-line is my thing. I'm just going to stick to that. However, to think more deeply about it the way you suggest, what does it say about me? Who do I want to be? What do I want to show when I go out the door like when I do this? It's a really interesting concept that I feel like people are not really talking about. That's why I think it's so interesting.

George: Thank you so much. They're not talking about it. That's what is so bizarre to me. When the stakes are high, we know how to do it. When you have to go to the PTA meeting and you know you're going to see all those other moms, you'll take time to give yourself a blowout, put on a little mascara, put on a little lip, make sure you're wearing the A-line dress that you feel really good in because you know you're going to see those other women. But why don't you do that all the time? Here's the thing. People will say to me, because I'm running around. Yeah, but here's the deal. This is what really defines it. How about when you don't do it, you throw on anything, you don't even know what you have on, you go to the grocery store because you're going to get groceries for dinner that night, and you bump into your husband's boss for some weird reason? He happens to be there, or his wife. You're like, oh, god, don't look at me, don't look at me. I just ran to the store because I needed to get some fennel for this delicious thing I'm making for the dinner tonight. Don't look at me. What do you mean don't look at me? We see you. You're not invisible. How the hell do you want us not to look at you? Of course we're looking at you. You don't have to have those experiences. How many times have you bumped into someone where you've been so mortified because you just feel so disheveled, you hate what you have on, and you feel horrible?

My thing is if you have clothes in your closet that always are the great colors for you -- in other words, if you have to buy a T-shirt because you like T-shirts in the summer, nice cotton lightweight T-shirts, and you're going to Target to get the three-dollar T-shirt, just get it in the color you look good in. What's the difference? You're buying one anyway. Then when you are at the grocery store and you have on a little T-shirt and you've got those pretty blue eyes and you're wearing it with a pair of just khaki shorts and just a flip-flop, but at least it's the blue T-shirt that highlights your eyes and your hair's in a ponytail. You still look great. You're not all dolled up. You're running around casual, and you look great. That's the other thing. I think that women have a very -- they all know how to get dressed up. They all know what to wear to clean the house or to do some yardwork or do some gardening or whatever, but they don't know how to run around and be causal, running around, errands, dropping the kids off the school, going to the grocery store, meeting a girlfriend for lunch, going to maybe some club that you're in, a meeting, or whatever it is. They don't know how to do that. Even the girls that work, which is so many, what if you're in a casual job? What do I wear to work? How do I look professional but still feel casual, but still feel relevant, but still feel modern?

It's overwhelming. When you know what colors you look good in, when you know what silhouettes look good on your body, what's flattering, what's camouflaging your challenges, accentuating your assets, and you know all of these things, it all becomes a very different experience because you have a much stronger point of view. You also know what you want to say. My look is, fill in the blank. My look is classic but casual. My look is modern and cool. My look is edgy and sophisticated, whatever it is. If you start to pay attention to it, it becomes a different thing. The other thing I love to tell is that I'll clean out someone's closet, we'll go through things, and she'll say to me, "I just wear that to walk the dog." I'm like, "Are you single?" "Yeah." "Did you want to say single? Did you want a Friday night date?" Girl, who's coming up to you in that? Put on the cute jeans that fit you great. If you're wearing a little sweatshirt, maybe it's the sweatshirt that makes your eyes look great or lights up your skin. When you start talking to someone on the street and you meet this guy or whatever, you're feeling good. You're presenting a different part of yourself. You're not apologizing for yourself. I have found that in spades across the country.

Women apologize for themselves so much subconsciously because they just threw on clothes. They feel horrible inside. They don't feel like they look good. They don't feel confident. Not just running around in their lives, but how about when they go to the cocktail party in the neighborhood and they see the girl walk in and they're like, why does she always look cute? She always looks cute. She always has the cute dress on. She always has a cute top on. I'm sitting over here like a big shlunk. I hate the way I look. That is horrible. That's not good to yourself. That's not being good to who you are. That's what I love about empowering women. People use that word so much. I hate to even use it myself because it's gotten so overused. When you hear it in this context, that's what it really means. Give yourself that moment of confidence and self-care and self-love. That's what empowerment is, so that you don't feel less than in a situation. The school pickup line, oh, my god, that is just the worst. They're feeling horrible. They’ve got the baseball hat on to cover their hair. They don't even know what they're wearing. I like to set people up for success. That's so much of what this book does.

Zibby: That's awesome. It's so true. I think you're talking about two different things, how you seem to other people and the shame when you're not as put together as you could be, but also how you feel when you present a certain way. Actually, I feel like I've been thinking about clothing more than usual because of the quarantine. When I left home, I brought two weeks of clothes. I was like, that's all. I'm going to be gone for two weeks. Let me just grab a few things. I don't usually sit around in my sweatpants or my pajamas all day, but like most people during quarantine, there has been a lot more of that than usual when I'm busy running around like everybody else. It's amazing to me how much even what you wear affects your mood. If you don't get dressed or you don't brush your hair, you don't get out of the jammies or whatever, I think over time it really wears away at your energy level, even.

George: That's so true. Yes, thank you for bringing it up. With the quarantine and the fact that this is happening, that's absolutely true. What happens there is the reason that you feel bad, and I've talked to so many women, is that you start to disconnect from yourself. The way that you know this is that when you do have that Zoom call, whether it's for work or it's a virtual birthday, which I've been to so many -- I've seen more people in the last three months on camera communicating than I have seen in the last three years. What happens, you hear women say, "I had a Zoom call. I did my hair. I did my makeup. I put on the cute top. I feel so much better." Why? Why is that? Ask yourself. You know why that is? Because you took the time to connect to yourself. It's not because you look prettier. There's no pretension in what I'm saying. That's where people get sometimes, when they first hear me talk, "I don't care what other people think." No, darling, it's not for the other people. It's for you. It's for you. There's no pretension. As a matter of fact, it's the dead opposite. It's the dead opposite of the fact that is for other people. It's for yourself. What do you want in your life? How do you want to be seen? How good do you want to feel? That's what this is about. This isn't about anyone else. Once they understand that, they're like, oh, yes, that makes so much sense.

With this quarantine, listen, wear the sweats, but wear the ones that make you feel good. If the ones that you have don't make you feel good, go online and find an inexpensive pair. There's tons of them. Now that we're into summer, it's all about the tank tops and the T-shirts and the shorts. There's so many places to go to shop for clothing that's inexpensive. Clothing does not have to be expensive at all. I am not a proponent of that. That's the other thing where I love talking because there's nothing pretentious about this. This is not about glamour. This is not a Pretty Woman situation, the movie. This is about you and self-care. You can get clothing at any price point. You can get it very inexpensively that makes you feel good and look good. It's up to you. When people work with me, I always say you're your own banker. I don't know what your situation is. You decide. I can take you anywhere and shop. As a matter of fact, when I referenced being all over the country doing these style events, I did them in these boutiques that were very inexpensive. Most of the items in the boutique were under a hundred dollars. A lot of them were under fifty. It wasn't like I was at these glamourous, very expensive boutiques all over the country dealing with women. No, no, no. I was dealing with women at every price point, and I do. Here's the other thing. I'm on QVC. I work for a brand called LOGO by Lori Goldstein. Her clothes are so inexpensive, but they're fantastic and wonderful fabrics and amazing comfort. She knows a woman's body. It's fabulous. I love working with these clothes because it's another tool that I can give people for their closet. I call it a closet full of tens. If it's not a ten, get rid of it.

Zibby: I loved that. That was actually one of the best lines in the book, I thought. I was like, yeah, why do I keep all these clothes around that they're like, eh? I don't know. Then I feel bad because I bought them.

George: Right. That's a whole thing. That's where I want to help. When you go shopping, when you kind of know what you look good in -- by the way, all of this comes from -- people are probably like, where does he get his information from? How does he know what looks good? It all comes from film and television, meaning that when you see someone in a movie or on any television show -- by the way, even the political debates, do you know the hours of conversation that go into the color of the tie, the color of the jacket, the dress color, what these people are wearing and what it says and what it's going to invoke? It's huge. This is what I realized. If you look at your favorite sitcom, really start to look at what people with your coloring are wearing. How are they going to pop the eyes on camera? How are they going to illuminate the skin? How are they going to bring out the hair color for everyone? That’s where I get all, we call them tricks of the trade or hacks, if you will. It comes from a structured place. I just think that it's so important for you to take the time to give yourself self-care. You are worth it. You really are worth it.

Zibby: Love it. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors now that you've survived the process of writing this book?

George: I think that you have to be passionate about what you say. I'm sure that that's the obvious. I don't think that you can be overwhelmed. I think if you concentrate on the fact of the how -- how am I going to get this book published? How am I going to write a book? How is it going to happen? -- you're focusing on the wrong thing. You have to focus on what you want to say, and say it. I know this might sound a little woo-woo, if you will, but the universe does take over. You don't have to worry about the how. You just have to be really clear about what you want to say and how you want to say it, and do that. Then you'll start to align yourself with the right people. You'll get to it. You'll get to a publisher. You'll get to an agent. You'll get to all of those things that you're supposed to go there. This is a time where we want to hear from you. One of my favorite books is, Brené Brown, Daring Greatly. I'm obsessed with her. The reason that I'm obsessed with her, she talks about how to be vulnerable and how that affects you in your life and how great it is. She talks to us in a way where it's like a best friend that sat down and had coffee with us. She's like, okay, here's the deal. I love that. I love people. I love making people feel good in any way that I can, whether it's dressing them and help them to discover who they are or what they want to be and how they want to be seen, or being on television and inspiring them, doing a wonderful podcast like this and being able to just let people know that they do matter. By the way, here's the other thing, you have to look in the mirror every day and just look at yourself and say, I'm enough. I am enough, because you are.

Zibby: I love it. You're like a wardrobe therapist. It's great.

George: It's funny. You said no one's really talking about this. I don't think people are. I really don't. One of my goals is -- I love Oprah Winfrey. I loved Super Soul Sunday. I love what she talks about. She's talked about every aspect of life and this kind of work. She talks about it with food. She talks about it with money. She talks about it with love. But she has never talked about this part of it with the clothing. I just want to get to her and say, I want to talk to you about this. I know from watching her with all of the interviews that she does and all of the work that she does, she subscribes to this. I know she does because I see it. I think it's easier for people when you do subscribe to it. It's something I'm so excited to have out there and to really help women and let them know you are enough, this is self-care, and then give them all the fun tricks of the trade. I will tell you one other story because I know we probably have to stop. You know me, I'll go on forever.

Zibby: After this. [laughs] I'm putting the hook or whatever that expression is, giving you the hook.

George: This is really funny. I got this woman. She came to me through a friend of a friend of a friend. She called me. I never met her. I went up to her house. We started doing her closet. She was in relationship. They were not engaged. She had been married. He had been married. She was in a job where she was having her own business, but it wasn't going the way she wanted and all of these things. We were going through her closet. We started pulling out things. It was Eddie Bauer, Eddie Bauer skirts, Eddie Bauer dresses, Eddie Bauer jackets. I was like, what is all this stuff? We were laughing. She said, "I know. It's Eddie Bauer." I said, "I didn't even know they made all this stuff. Why do you have all this in your closet?" She goes, "Because when I get off the subway at night from work, there's an Eddie Bauer store." I said, "Walk the other way. Don't go to that store." In our working together, she got married. I did her wedding dress. Her business totally became amazing, all of these changes because she just became such a different person once she had clothes that made her feel incredible and let her say what she wanted to say to the world. She was an entrepreneur. It was wonderful to watch.

Zibby: That's awesome. It's so great what you do. Your way of making people feel good about themselves, it's just super honorable, really. It's a service that you do. It's really amazing, what you do for making people feel good about themselves. That's one of the keys to happiness, really, that inner sense of confidence. Anyway, so it's really great what you do. I'm glad you shoved it all into the book so that we can all have a little piece of it to take along with us.

George: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Zibby: It was my pleasure. Thanks, George. Bye.

George: Bye-bye.

Karma Brown, RECIPE FOR A PERFECT WIFE

Zibby Owens: Karma Brown is the best-selling author of four novels. Her debut novel, Come Away with Me, was a Globe & Mail Best 100 Books of 2015. A National Magazine Award-winning journalist, Karma has been published in a variety of publications including Self, Redbook, Today’s Parent, Best Health, Canadian Living, and Chatelaine. Her latest book is Recipe for a Perfect Wife: A Novel. Karma lives just outside Toronto, Canada, with her husband, daughter, and a labradoodle named Fred. When not crafting copy or mulling plot lines, she is typically working out, making a mess in the kitchen, and checking items off her bucket list with her family. Her nonfiction project out early '21 is called Time Change.

Welcome, Karma. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Karma Brown: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: I'm sorry it took us so long.

Karma: You know what? It's been crazy.

Zibby: It's true. There have been some world events that got in the way, some changes and everything. Anyway, here we are. I'm delighted to be talking to you, finally.

Karma: Me too. Me too.

Zibby: Your most recent book, Recipe for a Perfect Wife, for listeners who might not know what it's about, would you mind giving a quick synopsis?

Karma: It is a dual narrative book. It takes place in the 1950s. The other character, you visit her in 2018. The book takes place in the same house. These two women live in this house, but sixty years apart. There is a cookbook that the modern-day woman discovers that had belonged to the 1950s housewife. Within those pages, she finds some secrets about the life that this 1950s housewife lived in this house that she's now living in somewhat reluctantly as she was dragged from Manhattan to the suburbs. Their lives intersect through this cookbook. It really is an exploration of women and marriage and being a wife and looking at how far we've come from the fifties, if we really have come that far. It was a really fun, interesting book for me to write.

Zibby: I had one of those cookbooks from my mother when was a little girl, the Betty Crocker old-fashioned one.

Karma: Yes, I have that one.

Zibby: I have it. It had my grandmother's notes in it and all the rest. I treasured that growing up. Every so often I would pull it out and look at the pages and all the pictures of what moms used to look like. [laughs]

Karma: I know. I still have those books. I actually have this thing for vintage cookbooks. That was one of the inspirations to write this book in the first place. I also loved all those notations. My mom puts notations in her cookbooks. My grandmother has done that. Some of these cookbooks I have that are not family cookbooks, also looking at the notations in those books and imagining what those women's lives were like way back when. It's sort of like you're panning for gold, information about these women and how they lived back in the fifties and sixties.

Zibby: It's so crazy when there's an object that passes through time. My engagement ring was a vintage piece I found in this shop in Charleston, South Carolina. I wear this ring. Actually, I copied it. At first, it was the actual ring until we found out it was cracked. Anyway, I had it and I was like, so who is this woman? Who was she? She wore the same exact ring. What was her life like? It all feels like a movie or something. Speaking of movies by the way, congratulations. I saw that your film and TV rights were acquired for this book. That's amazing. Congratulations.

Karma: Thank you. It's exciting to imagine them having a life outside of the pages. I'm often asked, who would you cast these characters as if you were casting the movie? Honestly, it's the worst question to ever ask me because for all of my books, I never know. I don't see them that way. I see them very clearly, but not as celebrities. I like to always ask, if anyone has an ideas, let me know because I am terrible at this game.

Zibby: I'm wondering maybe -- now I'm blanking on her name. Who's the one who's married to Ashton Kutcher?

Karma: See, this is why I'm terrible at it.

Zibby: I'm not good at it either.

Karma: I'm not a celebrity follower. What is her name?

Zibby: It'll come to me.

Karma: She was on the '70s Show with him, right?

Zibby: Yeah, somebody like that because the PR job ahead of time, I view her as being all put together and running around. Then wanting to shift gears and become a novelist, it has to be somebody cosmopolitan enough, worldly enough. That was my first instinct, but I am really bad at casting too.

Karma: We're both bad at this. We just won't play that game.

Zibby: Sorry, I'll stop the game right now.

Karma: It's not our job anyway, so it's okay.

Zibby: No, it's not our job. [laughs] I loved, by the way, there was such a perfect, relatable moment, at least for me, when the main character -- why do I always blank on the names of all the main characters? I can remember all the details.

Karma: Nellie and Alice.

Zibby: Alice. When Alice relocates to Greenville and leaves her job and her mom is like, "How's your vacation going?" and she's like, "No, I'm going to be a novelist," that is just so classic. It's a little passive-aggressive, what's up with you? I just loved that detail, by the way.

Karma: For Alice, she had this big career in Manhattan that was really important to her. Things fall apart for reasons that I won't talk about now because it gives away some stuff in the book. She ends up holding that secret about what's happened with her career. Everyone's thinking, then, that she's quite content to go and become this housewife in the suburbs and let her husband go to work. She's going to stay home and take care of this really old house that hasn’t changed much since the fifties and have babies and do her thing, that next part of her life. But really, she's hanging onto this huge ambition that she has. It doesn't go away. It doesn't just leave because she has this thing happen with her job and ends up moving. That's really part of the theme through the story too. What do women do with this ambition? How can you have that huge career ambition and also have a family? Can you make those two things work? I don't believe you can have them at the same time. That is my personal feeling. Sometimes something has to take the top position, and they just switch back and forth. For me, that's personally what has been true for me in my life. I think this idea of trying to have it all at once puts a lot of pressure. It's really hard to do. I'm sure there are people making that work. Good for them. I personally have found that a really tricky balance.

Zibby: Yes. I'm sure a zillion women will agree with that statement, the complexity of that. I think your book also, though, not only the role as a wife or a mother eventually or whatever, but I think it's also how these two women handle pain, physical and emotional, and how that shifts in terms of how much they share with their spouse, how much they take on themselves, and how that looks across generations too. Maybe talk a little more about that or if that was intentional.

Karma: I think that they are living very different lives. Really, Nellie, who's the 1950's character, is quite confined by her generation. For her, independence is something she desperately craves but is very difficult to get because of the nature of the way that things were within marriages back then. Her journey through the story is getting that independence and figuring out how to do that for herself in 1956 when nobody is really figuring that out, women anyway. For Alice in 2018, she's a very independent woman who is in a relationship with someone and has a marriage. How do you keep that part of yourself when you couple up with someone, when you merge your lives together? How do you keep that independence? In a lot of ways, I think that Nellie is sort of the talisman for Alice around that idea of figuring out how to maintain your sense of self and how to maintain that independence and cope with, as you said, both physical and mental pain through that, but as an individual. That was a big lesson for both of the women through the story.

Zibby: Let's now pivot to your personal life, if you don't mind. Now that we've had five minutes, I feel like I'm entitled to ask you your innermost secrets. [laughs]

Karma: Oh, you can ask me anything, anything at all. No secrets here.

Zibby: It's so funny. Well, it's not funny. I was reviewing all your different novels and all the different themes. I was like, why are all her books somehow about either car crashes or losing babies or intersecting lives? What is it? Something must have happened to her that this is the theme that she keeps coming back to over and over and over again. Then I went into your personal essays and I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm a moron. Here it is right here. It explains everything. Your essay for Self magazine about your being one month into a relationship with the man who became your husband and finding out that you had a rare form of Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cervical cancer and having to figure out how to cope with that and eventually what happened with your sister, oh, my gosh. I know you're working on some sort of nonfiction book. I'm really interested in hearing what that is. I was like, I want a whole book on this experience. I left that article being like, tell me more. Tell listeners about what happened to you, and then start writing that book.

Karma: [laughs] Okay. I have written elements of that book. In my second novel, The Choices We Make, it is about two best friends. One of them ends up carrying a baby for the other one. Before Recipe for a Perfect Wife, I wrote tearjerker books. It is a tearjerker book. Not everything goes according to plan. For me in my personal life, my sister was our surrogate. We had a much happier outcome in a sense that we had no major traumas as we were going through that. Just to back up a little bit about how that happened, when I was thirty, I had just met my husband. Well, he wasn't my husband then, obviously. I just met this new guy. He was very young. He was only twenty-six at the time, which I thought was far too young to be serious about. Then a month into our relationship, I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the cervix, which is a very rare place for them to find it. What that meant is that I wouldn't be able to have children naturally. We had to do a quickie IVF cycle. It was funny because I had been dating him for probably a month and a half at this point. I was at the fertility doctor. They were asking me all these questions and giving me my options about where to get the sperm from because you need sperm to make embryos. They said, "We have a book you can flip through and choose sperm, or you can get some from someone you know."

I was like, hey, I have this new boyfriend. [laughs] Maybe we can make this work. It wasn't casual. It was fast, but we were really quite in love already. They were asking me questions about him and his birthday and his middle name. I didn't know his middle name. I called him and I said, "This is the deal. I need to figure out what I'm going to do." He was like, "Okay, let's do it. Let's just do it and have faith that we stay together and this all works out. If we don't, I want you to have the opportunity to have, genetically, your own children." Anyway, it all worked out. I couldn't carry a baby, but my sister stepped in. One of those embryos which was frozen for five years was put in my sister's uterus. She became our oven for nine months. My daughter, when she was younger, she used to like to say that she was five years older. She would say, "I'm not eight. I'm thirteen," very all-knowing because she technically was conceived in 2003 but was born in 2008. We have our one little miracle baby. My sister was our surrogate. I have been cancer-free for a long time, since 2003, so seventeen years. It did all work out in the end.

Zibby: Wow. It was just so amazing how your sister, you said in one of the articles how immediately she was like, "I'll be the uterus for you. I'm stepping in." She already had two little kids of her own. She was just like, "I'm in." Then she did it.

Karma: She's quite bossy, actually. She was quite determined to do that. It's an amazing gift for someone to do that for you because I wouldn't be a mother. I mean, I might be a mother in a different way, but I wouldn't be a mother to this child. For me, it's a really special thing. As for the themes of my book, I had this life where I had all these plans. I was thirty. I was young. I had just finished journalism school. I was in a new relationship. I am a very motived, ambitious person. I was clear about what I wanted to do. Then I got cancer, and my whole life flipped upside down. My books are all really about women who are in situations that are challenging, perhaps the most challenging. We meet them on the most challenging day of their lives. Then they not only survive, but they thrive through that experience. That has been an ongoing theme for me through all my books. That's what I'm interested most in exploring in my novels anyway.

Zibby: Wow, that's just amazing. I thought it was so neat, you said something like how you used to be so much less anxious. Then you had such a great expression. You once dreamed of being a war correspondent, but now you're someone who sticks to the speed limit.

Karma: It's true.

Zibby: That's so interesting, just this idea that now you take on all the anxiety that the situation brought. Some people are born more anxious. Then they get through something like this and they're less anxious because they realize, okay, I've been worrying my whole life something bad's going to happen. It did. Now I'm okay. They become more fortified. You went into it already totally confident and rah-rah and then had this setback. Now you're more cautious. It's just sort of interesting how people deal with a trauma, essentially.

Karma: I think when you have a trauma like that, it never goes away. I'm cancer-free, but that experience lives me. It has shaped who I am from that time. It shapes all my decisions because life is precious. Everyone knows this. When you have been a through life-threatening experience, does it become more precious? I don't know. You suddenly realize the whole why-me thing. Everyone, I think, has a moment of thinking that, but then very quickly you're like, well, why not me? Why wouldn't it be me? Once you have that happen, the realization that it could happen again, bad things happen even when you do everything right. That is a very unsettling thing to live through and really understand deep in your core. I spend a lot of time now trying not to be anxious about things and to enjoy life. I had once gone to a therapist who was like, what do you think about this fact that you're going to worry about your precious life for the next ten years and worry about all these ways that it could be turned upside again? Then you're okay because the reality is you probably are going to be okay. You will have spent this decade worrying and marinating in this anxiety. Are you really enjoying your life when you're doing that? That did resonate with me. I try to remember that. The worry does fade. It does get easier. As you said, someone people are natural worriers. I just came to that place a little bit later in my life. [laughs] Maybe I'll flip back the other way and I'll be skydiving when I'm seventy. I doubt it, but you never know.

Zibby: These why-me moments and these traumas and the things that happen that make you aware of the fact, not just intellectually, but feel that life is short, they make you into different much more feeling-type people. You don't wish this upon anybody. I wouldn't wish a cancer diagnosis or anything like that. However, I think the aftermath of some of those experiences makes the rest of life so much richer. It sharpens the colors. That sounds so cheesy. I just feel like it changes the tune. It's like on a piano, the two different things start playing versus just one hand playing. I don't know.

Karma: I think it does do that. You're not naïve about things anymore. I think you can bury in your head in the sand a little bit, especially when you're young, and think that bad things don't happen, people don't get cancer. It allows me to also be more empathetic with other people and to understand what to say and what not to say and how to sit with someone in a tough time instead of trying to just brush it away or make it better somehow by not talking about it. I have learned how to be more empathetic towards what other people are going through. It doesn't have to be cancer. It can be anything. People have lots of different experiences that can be quite traumatic. I am not a silver linings person. I don't know that I ever have been. While there have been things that I have learned because of this, I would always have rather not had it happen. I don't say that my cancer was a good thing because I just don't see it like that. It would've been nice not to have to go through it. However, there are lessons and learning in that that I now have that I'm grateful for and appreciative of.

Zibby: I hope I didn't make it sound like it was a good thing that you had gone through that.

Karma: No, you didn't.

Zibby: Okay. I did not mean to suggest anybody actively look for bad experiences to happen them.

Karma: No. I do think some of that silver lining stuff -- people say that to me all the time. You wouldn't have this, that, and the next thing if you didn't go through that. I'm like, yeah, but I might have other things that I lost because of that. Cancer takes a lot away. Any terminal, not terminal, but potentially life-threatening condition or experience, it takes stuff away. I don't think you said that at all. That's not how I heard what you were saying.

Zibby: Okay. Phew. [laughs]

Karma: I just like to do the, yeah, I'm not a silver linings person. Maybe, again, when I'm seventy. Maybe then when I'm sky diving, I'll be a silver linings person. We'll see.

Zibby: Maybe so. We'll wait. I'll look up and see what I can see. The one quote I just had to read, and this is from your Self article, you said, "I would not be a mother to this child who with her arrival took the hell of our experience leading up to her, crushing it into a tiny ball and dropped it down a deep, dark well where it can no longer break my heart." That is beautiful. That's just a beautiful sentiment, a beautiful sentence. I just had to read it.

Karma: It's true. I was quite sad not to be able to carry my own child. I think for people who want to have children, they would understand that, or who have children and have been able to have -- I know pregnancy is not amazing for a lot of women, but I always was sad that I couldn't do that. My mom had said to me, "Don't worry. Once the baby's here, you won't care how she got here. You won't miss that part because this is the best part." She was wrong, but I can tuck that away. I think that's what that quote is. I have her and all the amazing things of being a mother that I can now experience, but it doesn't mean there aren't still heartbreaks that have to be just put down that well and left there. They don't go away. They just maybe go to a dark place where you leave them buried.

Zibby: Or you take little sprinkles of that and put it in novel after novel after novel, which is another way of getting through and coping and making sense of experiences like that that don't really have a good place to go.

Karma: It's true. It's sort of like therapy to some degree. It's cathartic to be able to do that.

Zibby: Tell me about your writing process and how you come up with ideas for your books and then how long they each take. You've written five novels already?

Karma: Five, yep.

Zibby: Amazing. That's a lot. Tell me about your process a little more and how you maintain this level of output.

Karma: I maintain the level of output because my daughter didn't sleep. The truth is that she used to get up at three thirty, four in the morning for years and years. I finally got to the place where I could no longer watch Dora the Explorer at four o'clock in the morning. I thought, I need to do something with this time. She's okay. I don't need to really be with her for every moment of that morning time. I started writing in the early morning. It's a habit I still have now. She sleep trained me. Now I can't sleep in. She sleeps in, but I can't. I get up around five, between five and six every day, and I write. It's quiet and peaceful. No one needs anything from me. The rest of the world has not woken up yet. That's when I do the majority of my really creative writing. I save the emails and the other busywork that authors have to do for later in the day when she's at school even though she's not at school right now. COVID time is like, who knows what's happening and how I'm actually ever going to write another book. That's really been my process from the beginning.

I never wanted to be a writer. When I went to journalism school, I wanted to be a news broadcaster. That was what I was planning to do. Then I was diagnosed with cancer on my very last day of journalism school, and everything switched. At some point, I thought, maybe I can write. It's a career that I have and be home. I don't have to move to Northern Ontario and try to get a job in a small town and live up there away from my family. It just became a job that I thought I could do. I one day thought, maybe I'll try writing a novel. I wrote it. It was awful. Then I wrote another one. That one was not good either. My debut was actually my third book written. I guess I've actually written seven, no, wait, eight novels. Just two of them will never see the light of day.

Zibby: Seven, right?

Karma: Wait, seven? You're right.

Zibby: Two unpublished, five -- [laughs].

Karma: This is why I am not a mathematician or a scientist. I can't do math, even simple math. Yes, seven. It feels like twelve some days. As for where the stories come from, I read a lot. Because I'm a journalist also, I spend a lot of time scrolling through news stories and looking for interesting human stories that way. That's how I have found or had an idea perk up for my stories. Recipe for a Perfect Wife was different, though. It came out of those cookbooks. I just had this vision of, what was life like for these women? These cookbooks were really a legacy. They were often given to women at their wedding showers. Then those cookbooks would get passed down through the generations. At a time where women really didn't have much of a voice outside of their home, it felt like this really interesting legacy of what mattered to them and what they were doing and how they were really using their voice through their cooking and through these recipes. I just had this image of Nellie in the 1950s trying to choose a recipe. She's this quintessential housewife. On the surface, she looks very much like the housewife we would imagine from the fifties, but what did her life look like underneath that? That's where it started.

Zibby: I feel like there's an undercurrent of feminist message to the book as well. I know in the introduction, or maybe it was a dedication or something, you were saying to your daughter, you haven't finished doing the work for her yet. This is a step. Was that conscious? Tell me about that angle of it.

Karma: People have asked, wow, this book is really timely, why this book now? I'd been writing this book for five years before it was published. The realities of what women are going through now were true five years ago and ten years ago. We have come far from the fifties in a lot of ways, but we still have a long way to go. It was important for me in doing -- I could've written the whole book from 1950s perspective and from Nellie's perspective and just had that story be the story, but what I wanted to do is to look at the difference between those generations because we think we're so progressive now. In some ways we are, but in a lot of ways, we are not. I wanted to take Alice's character in particular -- it's much murkier than it is with Nellie's character. I've had a lot of hate mail about Alice, which I'm not surprised by. I knew that going in because, as I said, her story is murkier. She can come across as more selfish and self-centered. I feel like with her, she's going through this dilemma. She's young. She's making mistakes. She deserves to make mistakes. It takes two to tango, as they say. Her husband in the story, I get messages about how amazing her husband is and how she's so selfish. I want to say, no, he's not perfect. He's manipulating things as well and keeping secrets as well. I don't know why Alice is the one who always gets -- she's viewed as the enemy in the story versus him. I find that really interesting. Every time I get a message about that, I don't respond because that’s the rule, but I do want to say, why do you villainize her and not him for doing things that are quite similar?

I felt that while I was writing it. I do think that that is where we are in society still, where women don't get to make the same mistakes that men do. They don't get away with it the same way. I wanted to put that in the book. I'm a wife. I stay home. I work from home. I do more of the traditional, stereotypical things. I do most of the childcare, the doctors' appointments, the grocery shopping because logistically it's easier for me because I'm home. It's important for me with my daughter especially because she has commented before, "You're the dinner-maker. What's for dinner?" I always say, "Look, just because I'm female does not make me especially qualified to cook a meal." I need her to understand that being a wife and being a mother and being a woman, they are all really different things that all live within the same person. That's what I was trying to do with Alice and looking at Nellie. I get it. She's a little bit confronting for people. I have other people who love her. They really resonate with what she's going through. I find that the older generations, like the seventies-plus, and the younger ones, like the thirty-five and under, really resonate with Alice. It's that middle-age time where people are just like, her husband is so nice. Why is she being so mean to him? It's fascinating. It has been fascinating.

Zibby: Aside from not responding to hate mail, what is your advice to aspiring authors?

Karma: I read a lot. I think if you don't read and read a lot of different things like fiction, nonfiction, different genres that maybe are not totally your thing but you should give it a try, I think you have to read all the time, a lot, as an author. Write as much as you can. Be clear about why you're writing. There are some people who want to write because they really desperately want to be published on the shelves with a traditional publisher. There's other people who write to maybe work through a trauma or work through a part of their life, and perhaps publication is not the most important thing to them. It's to really understand why you're writing. To stay connected to your story, you need to write regularly. Also then, know when to give up and start something new. There are people who will say never give up, never give up on anything you're working on. I think sometimes you have to give up. That's why I have two books in a drawer that will never see the light of day. They weren’t the right story. They were practice books for me. They were helping me hone the craft and learn how to write a book that was going to get all the pieces I wanted in but also would be really great for the reader too, that reading experience. It's just, you've got to practice. It's like anything. You have to practice your craft and know why you're doing it.

Zibby: Love it. Thank you, Karma. I'm so glad we finally got together. I wish I could sit and talk to you for a lot longer.

Karma: I know. It went by so fast.

Zibby: I know. I looked. I was like, oh, no, it's been too long.

Karma: Thank you so much. Great questions. It was really nice chatting with you today.

Zibby: You too. I hope we can find a way to keep this up or meet in person or something.

Karma: Me too. Yes, one day let's meet in person. We'll have a nice drink somewhere and chat not through our screens. That sounds wonderful.

Zibby: I would love that. Yes, that would be nice.

Karma: Take care.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Karma: Thanks so much.

Zibby: Bye.

Amy Jo Burns, SHINER

Zibby Owens: Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland, and Shiner, a novel which just came out this summer. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Gay Magazine, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad.

Welcome Amy Jo. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Amy Jo Burns: Thank you so much for having me. So happy to be here.

Zibby: You have written not only Shiner and a memoir and so much else, but your personal essays, we have to talk about because they are so good. I just kept reading one after another. I know that Shiner is your latest book, so let's talk about that first. Can you tell listeners, please, what Shiner is about?

Amy Jo: Shiner is the story of a fifteen-year-old girl. Her name is Wren. She lives secluded in the mountains of West Virginia with her parents. Her dad became this local legend when he got struck by lightning when he was young. He became a snake-handling preacher. One summer, Wren witnesses her father perform this really strange miracle that goes terribly wrong. As a result of that, all of her family secrets that she had no idea about start to unravel. The book is told from three different perspectives. One is hers, of course. Another is a lovelorn moonshiner. Then the last is a reclusive housewife. Those voices all work together to tell this story that is the true story behind this mountain legend.

Zibby: Wow. What inspired you to write it?

Amy Jo: A lot of different things. I think that this story has been growing inside of me for such a long time. I grew up in Northern Appalachia. The landscape has always been incredibly special to me and inspiring. I think the actual roots of the story started, and it really started to feel alive to me, was after I finished publishing my memoir which is called Cinderland. It's a story about what it's like to be a young woman who has to keep a secret. As a result of publishing it, I had so many people come forward and just share with me these stories that they had been keeping for decades. It was such a moving experience that I realized that I wanted to tell the second half of the story. I wanted to talk about what it's like to be a woman who has a story that has gone unheard. I also wanted to write about what a great act of compassion it is to bear witness to someone else's story. That's where the seeds of this story with all these different histories and winding trails came together for me, was how you can find the bravery within yourself to tell that secret that you thought you never could.

Zibby: Now that I've read all your personal essays, I know your secrets.

Amy Jo: You do. They're all in there. [laughs]

Zibby: Are you comfortable talking about some of this stuff from your past that may have informed this book and everything?

Amy Jo: Absolutely. Happy to.

Zibby: You wrote really honestly and beautifully about what happened when, not even so much in the moment of what happened with the abuse of your piano teacher, but then how you kept it a secret. When it came out that you had not been the only one -- maybe I shouldn't tell your story. When you were not the only one and then your parents confronted you about it, how you handled it and how that experience impacted your life, can you talk a little about that and even your decision to share what happened with you?

Amy Jo: What happened when I was ten was this really beloved piano teacher in my hometown was accused by, it started with one girl and then another and then another for assaulting them during their lessons. I like to use that word, assault, because I think it's something that only came into play within the past few years. I'm really grateful to be able to use it because I feel like it's an accurate description. Basically, a few girls started to come forward about what he'd done during their lessons. A lot of the people in the town chose to support the piano teacher instead of these young women. I was somebody who saw all this happening. These young girls, we were ten, eleven, twelve years old, they were vilified by the town, accused of conspiracy and a bunch of other ridiculous things, not by everybody, but by a lot of people. What ended up happening after that is that it was put in this vault and nobody talked about it. I grew up having this huge secret. I saw what had happened. I decided to lie about it to the police. I just held that secret.

I didn't really remember it, actually, until I'd left home and was in college. I was out in the woods one day and it just slammed me in the face. I thought, oh, my gosh. It was one of those moments you have where you just feel like everything changes in your life. I remembered. To tie it back to what I ended up writing about was I realized that it wasn't only the event itself that had caused a lot of harm. It was the silence around it and the weight of keeping a secret. I wanted to write about what it was like to hold it and the cost that came not only to me as a young woman, but to my whole hometown and also this generation of young women that felt like we couldn't talk about it. That was the basis of the book. I did not see Cinderland coming. I always had dreamed of myself as a novelist, but every time I sat down to write, everything I wrote, it was just not very good. Sure, that's normal. Everybody's got a learning curve and things like that.

I came to point personally where I realized if I didn't tell the truth about what had happened firstly to myself, that I was going to be writing around it for the rest of my life and that everything I wrote was just going to have a huge blind spot because there were a few things that I was really afraid to be honest about in my life. I thought it was going to cost me everything. That's what I had been taught when I was ten, was that if you tell the truth about this, you will lose everything that you have. What ended up happening is that I just started to try to tell one true thing after another true thing after another true thing. Then eventually, I had a book. I couldn't believe that my first book was going to be a memoir. Now that it's been out for about five years, I'm so grateful that it was my first book because I feel like it's such a foundation that reminds me of what's at stake when you sit down to write, whether it's a story you're imagining or if it's something that happened to you. There's real stakes about putting your story out there and inviting other people to kind of sit in it with you, you know?

Zibby: Totally. I have to go back now and read your memoir, seriously. I also am just so struck, I've talked to so many people who talk about the damage that keeping secrets really does to somebody, especially a child. There seems to be no worse thing than telling a child to not own up to something that's happened in any context, not just sexual abuse. I feel like there should be some sort of deep dive into the damage of keeping secrets. I'm sure it has been done.

Amy Jo: Absolutely. You know what one of the saddest things for me was? Was when I was an adult and I realized that keeping that secret made me feel like I was this guy's accomplice and not his victim. That was something that I really had to work through. Part of writing Cinderland was me saying, you know what, it is okay for this man to be held accountable for what he did. It's not wrong. It's not the "Christian thing" of me or the "female thing" of me to let it slide and to offer forgiveness. There's a real importance to say, no, he can be held accountable for what he did. That's a lot of what that book is about. It's also about a longing for home and all those things that I thought I had lost as a result of what had happened. Some of the things ended up coming back to me. A lot of friendships I thought I had lost actually returned to me after I published the book. That was a really wonderful thing too.

Zibby: When the pandemic ends and if this ever can work out, I would love to have a conversation between you and Adrienne Brodeur who wrote a book called Wild Game. She had to keep a secret from about the same age as you. Although, it was the fact that her mother was having an affair. She became an accomplice to that. I feel like you guys would have a really interesting chat about secrets.

Amy Jo: [Indiscernible] conversation. I would love to.

Zibby: Anyway, as an aside. Also, I wanted to talk about your love of ballet and how you called yourself a Rust Belt ballerina, which was so great and I feel like should be a children's book, by the way, Rust Belt Ballerina. You can start working on that. [laughs]

Amy Jo: I'll add it to my list.

Zibby: Okay, good. Tell me about that and how you found your love of ballet and what that did for you growing up.

Amy Jo: It's funny. My first ballet lesson, I think I was maybe six or seven. My mom took me. It was in an old community center. I didn't even have a pair of ballet slippers. I think I had an orange pair of Chuck Taylors. I went. We didn't even have a barre. It was just a row of folding chairs. We listening to a recording on an old boombox that was a recording of a recording of a recording to this piano music. It was very static-y and things like that. Yet even in all of that, I just found such a grace and beauty about the art form of ballet. What it became for me was, it was a way for me to express myself that I couldn't find through words. I couldn't find it through anything else. Now of course looking back, I can see this young girl and this young woman who was wrestling with all these things she couldn't articulate. Ballet became that weekly thing I did where it was like my body was just able to speak for itself. That was why I loved practicing ballet, but I never wanted to perform it. It didn't hold that draw. Typically, you hear about ballerinas loving the lights and the stage and all that. For me, I loved that solitary practice at the barre, up and down, the predictable rhythm of it. It became something that was a real anchor for me when I was young. Please know I'm five-foot-tall, never a professional ballerina. It was one of those things that, it was so lifegiving to me at such an important time.

When I think about it now, I see myself performing ballet in the middle of this town that was literally in the midst of a steel collapse. The building we had it in I think was next door to this empty steel mill. The only reason we were able to practice was because nobody could use the building anymore. When you're a kid, you don't pick up on all that stuff. Then when you're an adult, you think, oh, my gosh. There's a sadness to that, but there's a real beauty to it too. That is one of many things that I loved about growing up there even though the rest of the world looked at it and thought, this town is past its prime. To me, I thought it was beautiful. I still think it's beautiful. I think that also shows up in Shiner, this idea of what the rest of the world thinks is true about the mountains in West Virginia and if it's cautionary tale. The people who live there say, we refuse to be written off. We're living very complicated, very vibrant lives regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.

Zibby: You said somewhere that the expressions that people used to describe you, I can't remember exactly what they were, you had never even heard until you left home. They were somehow derogatory. You're like, what do you mean? Why are you describing me that way?

Amy Jo: Yeah. My name's Amy Jo, obviously. I never realized it, but when I went to college, people wanted me to explain my name, and that was how I realized having a middle name like Jo or going by a first and middle name at all signifies maybe that you're from a certain region of the country or that maybe you're a hillbilly or a redneck. That was some of the questions I got asked. I would be in class and they would talk about this area that's known as the Rust Belt or this area that's known as Appalachia. I'd be looking at a map. I was like, oh. [laughter] It just was such an interesting thing how people academically try to slot you in some category. If nothing else, it was fascinating to me, but then also like, oh, when you realize that doesn't really match what I felt or what I experienced. I think that, probably more than anything else, is a common thread throughout everything I write. You think you know the real story, but I don't think you do.

Zibby: Tell me a little about your process and how you tackled both the memoir and the novel, if you do outlines or how you organize yourself and how long it took to write those books.

Amy Jo: Lord, it is a mess. [Distorted audio] books that I have written, it just was such a mess. I had to learn to just be okay with that because anytime I tried to organize my mess, it would sort of circumvent the whole process and I would have to start again. I think that when I start writing something, whether it's an essay or the memoir or a novel or something like that, my subconscious is my best friend. It's trying to work something out on the page. If my inner editor comes in and tries to have an opinion about it too soon, then it just sort of goes off the rails. Logistically, my process for everything, whether it's something long, something short, true, not true, it's pretty much the same. I will have a notebook. I will write down a bunch of just -- they're not even sentences. It's just phrase, images, things. I will fill up an entire notebook that does not make any sense to anybody but me. I realize at this point that that's my first draft. It's sort of like getting a bunch of patchwork pieces all together. Then you step back and look at it. Then you can make a quilt from it. My second draft is usually trying to match up all the quilt pieces. Then I go from there. It takes me a long time. Cinderland, the difference with writing that, that probably took me two or three years. The big difference with that was that I did not have kids when I wrote that book. I was able to sit down and just work for five, six, seven hours straight. I felt like I had gone into that material so deep. I was so in it in a really interesting way. Then I had two kids. As you know, you don't even get an hour. [laughs]

Zibby: I know. You don't get a minute.

Amy Jo: No, you don't. Much of Shiner was me sitting down, I would get my laptop all set up, and my pen and my paper, then I would run and try to get my son in his crib and cross my fingers and then run downstairs and maybe get forty-five minutes where I would write something. I thought every day, I was like, I am never going to finish this. Then I would just let myself say it. Then I would write two hundred words. Then all of a sudden -- I say all of a sudden, but it was a lot of rewrites and things like that and having another baby. [laughs] But then it was done. It was done in these very forty-five minutes here, maybe an hour and a half there. That's how that book was done. I feel like that's so important to mention. I think it's scary for a lot of people to think, how do I make this creative life with kids? It does change. I won't lie and tell you I don't miss those deep dives into the material that I had before, but I'm so happy with how Shiner came out. I think there's something special about it that I probably wouldn't have been able to capture if I didn't have kids. I see a lot of evolution of myself as a person in Shiner that came about because I couldn't work the way I once did. I just had to roll with it and let my creative energy figure it out.

Zibby: That's amazing. Amy Jo, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing about Shiner. Thanks for sharing your deepest, darkest secrets with us and just glibly talking about them in the middle of the day.

Amy Jo: I'm so happy to do it because I think that it's really important to say it's not the secrets themselves that should cause us any kind of shame. It's something I'm always happy to dive into in the middle of day. Thank you for asking me and hearing me out.

Zibby: Of course. Great talking to you.

Amy Jo: You too.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Amy Jo: Bye.