Brittany Barnett, A KNOCK AT MIDNIGHT

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

Brittany K. Barnett: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: I am embarrassed to say that I did not know about your book until it won the Amazon number-one book of the year. I don't know how that's possible. I must be under a rock. I try to be on top of all the great books. Until then, I hadn’t even heard about your book. I am so glad I did because it is so good. A Knock at Midnight, oh, my gosh, amazing. I have a bazillion questions for you. First, I just have to say I am so impressed by you, by not just your writing, but everything that happened in this book, your work ethic, your determination. You're just amazing. You're a total rockstar. I am delighted to talk to you today.

Brittany: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, truly.

Zibby: For listeners who might not know what your book is about, would you mind telling them a little bit about the backstory and how it's led to your becoming the advocate you are today for so many people?

Brittany: I grew up in rural East Texas, one of those doors unlocked, windows wide open pieces of rural Texas, and truly had a happy childhood. Unfortunately, during my childhood, my mom was also suffering with a drug addiction. Her addiction ultimately led to her going to prison. Having a mom in prison, it really brought me close and made me very conscious of this issue of mass incarceration that our country faces. During this time and being so close, I got really interested in the criminal legal system, began representing people who were fundamentally set to die in prison under these outdated federal drug laws. The book follows that journey. It follows my journey growing up in rural East Texas. It follows the events surrounding my mother's incarceration and that experience of having a mom in prison. The book is truly a memoir that shows how I came to understand injustice in the courts, how I discovered genius behind bars, and how this journey caused my definition of freedom to evolve.

Zibby: Wow. How did you remember all of this, first of all? This is a such minor point, but the detail in your book is so great. Did you record everything as you went along? The way you wrote it, it was like we were literally standing on your shoulder watching everything you went through from the time you were little to when you then even show us into Sharanda's family and her mother and the accident. Every detail is so vivid. In fact, when I went on your Instagram and saw a picture of your mom and then your Mama Lena, I was like, oh, yeah, totally. That's totally what they look like because that's exactly how you described them.

Brittany: It was a long journey for me to write that book. It took me over two years to write the book. I was just very intentional with every piece of it from every word to every punctuation mark. With each section, I became very intimate with it. I made sure that I went back into time in that way. That really helped. Once you're there and present and conscious about a particular moment, it's very surprising how much memory does come back.

Zibby: Did you have any -- I know you didn't, but I was going to ask if you had any idea about the injustices of all the drug laws because I definitely did not realize how unfair -- and even the hundred-to-one sentencing for the difference between crack cocaine and cocaine and when you're part of conspiracy versus if you're not and how biased it was towards black people. It's just insane. I couldn't believe all the data that you discovered. As you show the reader, you seemed really surprised by a lot of it too. Tell me about that.

Brittany: Oh, yeah, I had no idea. I am in law school and truly wanting to be a corporate lawyer. I was going to follow my path for that. I had a job lined up after law school in corporate law. During this time, I took a critical race theory course. It's a course that analyzes the intersection between race and the law. I was writing my paper about this disparity in sentencing you mentioned between powder cocaine and crack cocaine and how it was disproportionately impacting people of color, in particular, black people. I was shocked by what I learned. I was shocked at how little to no legislative history was there surrounding this law, which was the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. I was shocked at how arbitrary the disparity in sentencing was with this one hundred-to-one ratio, which means that you could have five hundred grams of powder cocaine, I could have only five grams of crack, and we would receive the same sentence in prison. It's not lost on anyone then, especially now, that in the late eighties, more affluent white people were using powder cocaine. Crack cocaine was running rampant through communities of color, in particular, black communities. This caused such a wide disparity in sentencing to the extent that even today, over eighty percent of the people in federal prison for drug offenses are black and brown people. It was shocking to me as a law student to learn that, especially learning it based on just how unfounded these assumptions were that crack cocaine was more severe than powder. What was also shocking to me was after the law passed, the sentencing commission and members of congress and courts, they all began to see just how unjust these laws were. To see how the laws were put into place, to see this change of heart, if you will, surrounding the laws but to know that people are still in prison serving these draconian sentences, it was quite eye-opening for me.

Zibby: Even as the laws started to change and you would get so excited, then you would realize that a lot of them weren’t retroactive. I feel like you were wringing your hands a lot of the time. How could you change it? Then finally, you were able to figure out your path.

Brittany: Absolutely. It was totally just the way it reads in the book, trial and error, for sure. Even learning that, I'm getting so excited because I see how minds are evolving and this country's evolving as it relates to crack cocaine. I'm seeing the laws change. Then I'm like, oh, it's not retroactive. Another law changed. Oh, it's not retroactive either. It was just unconscionable to me that we have people serving life sentences today under these outdated federal drug laws. To me, and I would think to any reasonable person, if the law is wrong today, it was wrong yesterday.

Zibby: Right. Now, of course, you've started all these different nonprofits to help people escape from these sentences and overturn what had been going on before. Your Buried Alive Project, on the website it said something like there was still three or four thousand people, 3,400 maybe -- I don't know. I can't remember. Something awful, all these people. The laws have changed. They shouldn't have been in there. They shouldn't be serving life sentences. Yet there they are. What can we do about it? Tell me about the nonprofit that you've built up around it and how those people can get out.

Brittany: I cofounded the Buried Alive Project with two of my clients, Sharanda Jones and Corey Jacobs. They were both sentenced to life for federal drug cases. Both had never had any convictions before, felony or otherwise. We were able to secure clemency for them from President Barack Obama. Once they were freed, they felt a survivor's remorse, if you will, because they knew they had left so many people behind who were just as deserving of freedom as they were. I linked arms with my clients, and we cofounded the Buried Alive Project to provide legal representation, pro bono, for people serving life for federal drug offenses. To date, we've helped free dozens of men and women who were set to die in prison who are now living their life after life, as we like to call it. Still, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more. We're doing what we can to build a super team of lawyers to help litigate cases through the courts and also working on clemencies and working through congress, quite frankly, to ensure that we have laws that are changed.

Zibby: What was that like? What's the feeling like when you've literally been able through your hard work and dedication, given someone their entire life back? Tell me about that moment.

Brittany: It never gets old. It is a feeling that words can't even begin to touch. It's such a joy and elation. People have to understand and remember that life without parole is the second-most severe penalty permitted by law in America other than the death penalty. This sentence, it screams a person is beyond hope. It screams a person is beyond redemption. It truly suffocates mass potential as it buries people alive. To know that my clients, people like Sharanda Jones and Corey Jacobs and Chris Young who you read about in the book, are set to die in prison, they're literally serving the same amount of time as the Unabomber. It's heartbreaking for me. To be able to tell them that we've given that life sentence back, as we like to say, and they are free, I get chills just thinking about it.

Zibby: You are an angel, truly, that this has become your life's work and that you're so smart and dedicated that you can do it. It's amazing. It's just amazing. It's amazing to watch from the outside and to have read about it. Even when your name was in my inbox, I was like, oh, my gosh. [laughs] You're just such a hero. It's truly amazing. I feel like it would be so great if other people would follow in your footsteps, other people who have your brains and your potential who could work towards helping people get their lives back. I know in the beginning you wanted to be like Clair Huxtable and be a big corporate lawyer, and you were and everything. Wow, the value you've added to society by having all these people come back in people's lives and even reducing the sentence for your one family friend. You were like, I got him from life to something like thirty-two years. How they were all celebrating, it's just a huge deal. This sounds so obvious. I'm just heaping praise.

Brittany: Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciated it so much. It's an honor and a true privilege for me to do this work. I am grateful to my clients for trusting me with their lives, literally trusting me with their lives. It’s a task that I don't take lightly. I always say I fight for my clients' lives as if it were my own because it is. We are all one. What impacts one directly impacts us all indirectly. There is so much untapped genius in this population of people, people who are incarcerated, who were formerly incarcerated. I've seen it firsthand. It's true ingenuity our nation needs to thrive. The human potential there keeps me going. My clients' prayers and strength and empowerment keeps me going. I agree with you. I truly hope that more people join us to help push and drive for impactful change.

Zibby: Tell me about GEM and Milena Reign and XVI Cap. How are you running four different nonprofits at the same time? This is insane. How are you sleeping? When are you doing everything?

Brittany: Only two of them are nonprofits.

Zibby: Okay, sorry. Businesses.

Brittany: I totally believe we can't nonprofit ourselves to a better and just society. I do have two nonprofits, Buried Alive Project and Girls Embracing Mothers. Girls Embracing Mothers is a nonprofit that empowers young girls with mothers in prison. We partner with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and every single month, take a group of girls to visit their moms in prison. We're truly working to break the cycle and build a bond. That organization is so near and dear to my heart. It stems solely from my own experience of having a mother in prison. We've been operating for seven years now. I have amazing teams. That's one of the reasons I'm able to carry it all. At our program, Girls Embracing Mothers, our program director, Angelica, she was formerly incarcerated. In fact, her and her daughter were in our program just a few years ago. That's so important to me that directly impacted people are centered, they're amplified, and they're leading the way on any movement and any work surrounding them. Linking arms with Sharanda and Corey with the Buried Alive Project and having Angelica lead Girls Embracing Mothers, it's truly my life's work, to ensure that they are at the table, for sure. Milena Reign is a company named after my Grandma Lena. There, I just want to cultivate talent from the South, help writers from the South showcase their talents, break through to get opportunity.

XVI Capital Partners is similar. I'm working with that company to bridge the gap, to provide resources and capital to formerly incarcerated entrepreneurs. One thing I realize doing the work -- writing the book really helped me reflect on this. We have to change the laws. We have to continue our work to get people out of prison. I realize, also, that we can't keep rescuing people from prison and restoring them to poverty. I'm holding this vision of creating sustainable liberation which includes economic liberation. It includes equity. It includes ensuring that directly impacted people have access to resources and capital not just so they can survive, but so they can thrive and flourish. That's why I'm working with XVI Capital Partners. We've invested in a couple of companies so far that are ran by formerly incarcerated people including Sharanda Jones who is recently in the process of opening a food truck. She'll hire directly impacted people to work in her food truck. It's about paying it forward and realizing, too, that systemic change doesn't always have to come from Capitol Hill. We need the laws to change for sure, but the people that we are freeing, they're pushing forward a movement of such power and dignity that they're going to create systemic change. They're going to have a positive impact on anyone that they encounter in the future. It all just keeps me so hopeful.

Zibby: That's amazing. How has your life changed, if at all, since this book came out and your story became a much more widely known phenomenon?

Brittany: It's been amazing. I'm truly grateful at just the public's reception of the book. I'm so thankful to Amazon editors for choosing my book as the best book of 2020. Never in a million years did this small-town country girl think that this would be the case. It's been great. It's really helped to elevate what's important for me, and that's this issue of mass incarceration, and help raise awareness for causes I'm very passionate about. That's always a win.

Zibby: Do you find any time for yourself where you're not working? Do you have any time when you're not emailing or doing stuff or fighting? Even when you would talk about going to work and then you'd come home and then you'd have these buckets of cases and files and transcripts, I'm like, did she get dinner? What is this girl eating? [laughter]

Brittany: I would eat and work. I do. It is something that I'm working to center, this self-care practice, and self-care taking it back to its radical roots, not self-care as this form of escapism, but self-care in order to rest so that I can be fully restored to continue the work. The amazing poet Audre Lorde says self-care isn't an act of self-indulgence. It's an act of self-preservation. It's a radical act. That's what I try to practice. I'm practicing, which means I'm getting better. I'm not all the way there yet, but I definitely try to work to take that time to focus on me.

Zibby: Is this going to be a movie? Has this been optioned? It must have been.

Brittany: We're in a lot of talks. Hopefully, there's some news I can share soon.

Zibby: I bet. I can't wait to watch it. I feel like I watched it because I read it. It's so cinematic, the whole thing. You're such a visual writer. Everything is just so clear. I want to follow up on all the characters. What's up with your sister? How's she doing? Is she good?

Brittany: My sister, Jazz, she's doing amazing. She's actually in law enforcement now. She's doing really well. I'm so proud of her.

Zibby: That's amazing. Tell me a little bit about what is next. You have so many projects, so many good deeds you're doing. Do you want to write any more? Do you want to just solider on with all of your mission-driven activities? What does your next five years look like for you?

Brittany: I won't rule out writing another book. I definitely won't rule that out. I'm definitely going to keep moving forward with what I'm calling this liberation heist, getting people out of prison, making sure we're serving women and girls who are directly impacted as well. Then I'm going to continue the work to ensure that resources and capital are allocated to formerly incarcerated people and injustice-impacted people, for sure.

Zibby: Do you have any ambition to run for office?

Brittany: I don't.

Zibby: You say it in a -- it's no failure. I'm just asking.

Brittany: No, I don't. It's not my thing.

Zibby: I get it. I totally get it. Back to the writing for two seconds, you said it took two years which you said was a long time, which, PS, is not a long time for a book from all the things I've heard. [laughs] Where and when did you write this? When did you fit this into life? Then do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Brittany: I'll first start with my advice to aspiring authors. That's to do it. Share your story. The world needs your story. No one can tell your story or any fictional story you're dreaming up better than you. The world needs it. That is motivation that I received from people. I want to definitely pass that along. I found time in between the work, honestly. I had hoped to set aside a period of time to just focus solely on the book, but freedom calls. As my shirt says, there's nothing more urgent than freedom. I was still able to set aside blocks of time to write and blocks of time to work. For me, it was a process that was, in a way, therapeutic as I talked so much about my childhood experiences and having a mother who was incarcerated. I had to really be gentle with myself during the writing of that. Also, ensuring that whatever time I set aside that I was solely focused on the work, especially related to my clients' stories. I was so intentional there. I wanted to really show their heartbeats on the page in hopes that their lives and stories could impact the reader on the page the way it impacted me in real life. I knew because we were dealing with such a vulnerable population and mass incarceration still has all these stigmas and stereotypes that if I chose one wrong word, it could help perpetuate these stigmas and biases. I was really intentional with my clients' stories. I really held them close to heart. I'm so hopeful that people see their brilliance and genius and just truly how amazing, amazing they are. I say all the time, many, many people in prison, they're not bad people. They just made bad choices. We all make bad choices every day. Really having a chance at redemption is something truly powerful.

Zibby: Wow. Amazing. We didn't even get to the abuse. There's so much in this book. I see all these books behind you by all these amazing authors, so I'm guessing you love to read as well.

Brittany: I love to read.

Zibby: Behind your shoulder, I'm seeing both Obama books. There we go. You just read everything? What's your favorite kind of book to read?

Brittany: I read everything. I really am hooked on reading books by black authors from the South, as you see; Jesmyn Ward behind me; Kiese Laymon behind me with Heavy; Sarah Broom, The Yellow House. I recently read Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half. She's from the South as well.

Zibby: That was so good.

Brittany: It is so good.

Zibby: I had her on this podcast. You should listen.

Brittany: Really? I would love to meet her one day. I had been reading so many memoirs and nonfiction. To dive into her book that's fiction, oh, my god. It was so good. Then I mix it with other books. I'm reading a book on the business of venture capital right now as I'm trying to break into that space to create access for directly impacted people. It's all a mix. I've definitely been finding myself drawn more to fiction lately.

Zibby: That's a great example of amazing fiction. I feel like your book and her book were two of the best of this whole year. If you ever need a moderator, I'm happy to moderate that conversation.

Brittany: Thank you. That would be amazing to do that.

Zibby: If this were real life, I'd invite you over and have a salon.

Brittany: That would be beautiful.

Zibby: Also, I have a book club called Zibby's Virtual Book Club. If you have any interest, I would love to have my whole book club read your book. Then you come talk and do some Q&A for half an hour. I don't know if you'd be interested.

Brittany: I would love to. Let's do it.

Zibby: Let's do it. Great. I'm going to email you about times in the new year. Awesome. Brittany, thank you. Thank you so much for all that you do for people in the world and all you do to uplift others and open everybody's eyes to the injustices that are there and do it in such a classy way. It's just really awesome.

Brittany: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me today. It's been a pleasure to start my day off. You are a true gem. Thank you.

Zibby: Thank you. Stay in touch. Book club coming up. Bye.

Brittany: Bye.

Gabriel Byrne, WALKING WITH GHOSTS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Gabriel. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss your beautiful memoir, Walking with Ghosts.

Gabriel Byrne: Thank you so much, Zibby. It's lovely to talk to you. Thank you.

Zibby: Your memoir was absolutely gorgeous. I loved every word. You are a phenomenal writer. When did you even realize you could write in addition to act and everything else that you do?

Gabriel: My mother was the one who encouraged me to read. She would read out loud to us at nighttime. She would also tell us the stories about -- I knew Oliver Twist and Pip and all those Dickens characters long before I came to read the books. She read Jane Eyre to us over six months and then Rebecca. She was really reading them for herself. We just happened to be sitting there listening in on it. I was introduced to the world of gothic Victorian romance at a very early age. Then she read us Little Women, which was a really interesting experience for me because in Little Women -- there was a time when people used to say, who's your favorite Beatle? Then it was like, who's your favorite of the Little Women? Of course, I fell in love with Beth and was devastated when she died of a fever at ten years of age.

Zibby: You had said your mom read books for herself, which is hilarious, and you were an unexpected beneficiary of her just reading for herself. That's how you developed this love of literature. Tell me a little bit about how your love of reading turned into a love of writing.

Gabriel: I had always admired writers. It always seemed to me to be an inaccessible magical kind of process. The few writers that I had known, I asked them, how did they go about writing? Most of them were unable to describe how or why. It seemed to be some kind of strangle alchemy that happened between the brain and the page. I had written little bits of things here and there. I wrote a little book of love poems to my first girlfriend which would make me shiver if I looked at them now. In fact, I think I remember one small little one. There was a place where we went to. I can't believe I remember this. Secondly, I'm can't believe I'm telling you this. [laughs] Look, I was eighteen or nineteen at the time. It's a place called Delgany. "On Delgany's day with my dear one I lay. Glad to be near one who loved me well and would not tell that I loved her once with all the innocence my guilt could [indiscernible]."

Zibby: Aw, I love that.

Gabriel: Then I stopped after that. Then I went to university. I wrote academic kind of stuff. I'd always read. My taste in literature became wider after I left Ireland. In the beginning, like a lot of people, I was looking in literature for myself. I was looking for answers to who I was, looking for answers to what the world was about. That's why I began with Irish literature because it was a world I felt I could understand. Nobody was writing about the kind of place that I came from. I broadened out into British and American literature after that. When it came to the writing of this, I thought I would just experiment a little bit and see how it went. Finding a voice -- is this a goat in the background here? A goat has just jumped up on the back of the car.

Zibby: You're kidding. Oh, my gosh.

Gabriel: No, I'm not kidding. They're crazy goats. They like to get in and do whatever you're doing. Can you see?

Zibby: Oh, yes. I can see the vague outline of a goat. Now it's gone.

Gabriel: Anyway, you experiment and just see because finding a voice is difficult when you're writing memoir especially, trying to find a voice that's authentic to you. I did about ten or fifteen pages. Then I sent them to a friend. I said, "Have a look at this and see what you think." He said, "I think you should do more." Then I did about forty pages. I sent it to an agent not expecting very much. She said, "Look, I think I can do something with this." It was a total shock to me because I didn't expect this to happen at all. I had written something years ago, an experimental kind of memoir. I wrote it in three weeks, so I didn't really put much store by that. I suppose it was a combination of trying to find my writing voice and not being intimidated by all the great writers that I had read.

Zibby: The thing about your memoir is that not only do you go into the most painful areas of your life, which immediately connections the reader to you, you reveal so much and so much pain over the years in all these different ways from losing your childhood friend to your parents to your addiction, alcoholism, the abuse. It's a gift to the reader to share all of this. Also, it's the form in which you did it. Even the dashes instead of quotes marks and the lyrical quality of writing, just the format, it combines to make a very intimate, powerful memoir. For celebrity memoir, you have to overcome the fact that you're a celebrity. It's almost like people's expectations might not be for literature, but this is true literature. This is a work of art versus, this is how I got into acting. You, of course, include that. It's almost like you have to work against what people might think. Did you feel that when you started writing it? Did you feel like you had to sort of overcome what people might think, or was this just a natural thing? What do you think about that?

Gabriel: That's interesting. The first thing is that I don't think of myself as a celebrity in any shape or form. I don't. Some people might think so. I didn't want to write one of those things of, I did this movie, I did that movie. If there's a movie mentioned, it's for a reason. If there's an actor mentioned, and there are very, very few, it's for a specific reason. I didn't want to write a kiss and tell, an intimate "you'll never eat lunch in this town again." I could've done one of those because I do know where the bodies are buried, so to speak. That didn't interest me. What interested me is I think what almost everybody can do. It's an exercise to look at oneself and to say, what were the influences that formed the person I am today? Were they familial? Of course. Societal? Of course. Cultural? Of course. Geographically? Of course. Religious. All these things go to combine a huge influence that determines the kind of person you're going to be. I wanted to look at that and see how much I was the result of it. I think anybody can trace their development in that way.

The next biggest thing in terms of writing a memoir is that you can't bullshit. You're faced on every page with, is this the truth? Do I tell it? Fiction, on the other hand, if you're writing a novel, you can farm out all these characters and ideas. They're fictional characters. You can hide all your perspectives behind them. Memoir requires the truth because it's a disservice to the reader if you're bullshitting and you're not telling the truth. The point you make there is that we are all fragile creatures. We all hunger for the same things. We all fear the same things. Some of us are better equipped psychologically or emotionally to deal with them. What unites us and I think what makes us empathize with a great novel or a poem or a painting is that we feel that it's speaking to us about us. I thought two things. If I can write the truth about myself, then somebody else will read this and say, that rings true to me and I can perhaps learn something from this. Not that I was out to teach anything. I would just like you to hear this, and what you think about it is up to you.

The second thing I thought was that by telling my own story I was also telling the story of a particular time and particular place. Rather than do a book of essays or a novel, I found that this was the most potent way, to see it through the lens of my own emotion. There were many times when I thought, I don't want to put this down. I don't want to be going around have to answer questions about this. That's the very thing that keeps us trapped. Silence and shame are bedfellows. The things that we're most ashamed of or the things that we're the most silent about are the things that need to be brought out into the open. By doing that, we find freedom. There's no freedom in silence. There's certainly no freedom in shame. The liberation of the self through having the courage to reveal oneself honestly, it's not that there's a resolution where there's a big orchestra playing and everybody gives each other a big hug, and that was that problem. Life goes on. Life goes on being tough and unpredictable and joyful and beautiful, but also unexpectedly sorrowful. That is life. My biggest battle, I've found, is that I find it hard to stay in the reality of now, this. There's always a thing in me that wants to do something else, to get out of the is-ness of the moment, whether it's alcohol or drugs, I don't shop, but all those cigarettes, food, all those things that we think, this will take me out of the moment. The moment doesn't have to be particularly traumatic. It can be just the boringness, the grayness, the predictability of now that seems like a weight and we need to escape from it.

That's the biggest battle I have, is remaining in the present and not wanting or wishing to be anywhere else, to be with anybody else, to have some kind of other career. To accept the way it is now, out of that's come a contentment. I don't believe in happiness as a permanent state. I think it's a huge delusion. There's a footballer who died a few days ago, an Italian footballer called Paolo Rossi, great footballer. I was watching a little interview with him. He talked about winning the World Cup in 1982, the summit of his childhood dreams, beyond telling. He said, "It made me think as I held that cup up before the world, is this happiness? Is this what it is?" He said, "Because if it is, it was gone in two seconds." Happiness is only glimpsed. It's like something you see roaming between trees. You see it. Then it's gone. Then you see a little bit of it again. What's much more worth striving for is contentment. Contentment comes out of an acceptance of the way life is. That's why in the memoir I just said, this is the way it was. This is the way it is. People would love you to say everything's great now. It's wonderful you've got all these problems behind you. That isn't life.

I don't regard myself as being courageous. I'm lucky that I survived. I'm very lucky that people who loved me said, "Stop this. You got to take care of yourself," but I didn't listen to them for a long time. I don't drink anymore. One of the things I wanted to take on in the book was the notion of fame and success. What is success? It's actually very like the notion of happiness. I've been around enough people who have mega, mega fame. They can't even go out the door for a coffee. There's an avalanche of people saying the same things that they’ve been told for twenty years. It's really difficult for those people. People think, if I got to be that famous, everything would be cool. I'd have loads of money. I'd have loads of friends and so forth. The little bit that I've had has allowed me to see that I don't want any more of it and that it's actually not something that I want to pursue in any serious way at all. I'd like to do my work, of course, but I don't want anything more than beyond that. The things that we are led to believe -- I was talking to somebody yesterday. It was a woman who was saying to me, "God, the COVID thing, I've put on so much weight." She said, "Feel that." She offered her little wadge to be felt. I gave it a bit of a squeeze and I said, "That's nothing." She said, "No, it is. I'm bursting out of these jeans."

I said, "Listen, I've worked with some of the greatest, most beautiful actresses of the last thirty years. Every single one of them has a problem with their body. Every one of them." I thought to myself, what is that? It's because there's some ideal out there like happiness that if you get to that ideal place and you get that ideal body -- there's no such thing. It's a delusion. Men get caught up in it. Men think that's what women should look like because that's what she looks like on the cover of a magazine. Women don't look like that for the most part. Why is it that those beautiful women adored by millions and millions and millions of people still look in the mirror and say, yeah, but one of my knees is a bit knobble-y? You say, I would never even notice that. This idea that we're all culturally impelled towards of what beauty is, of what success is, of what happiness is, these are things that we really have to look at for ourselves and answer honestly what they mean to us because none of these things are the answer to contentment.

Zibby: Wow, that was amazing. You have such wisdom. That was incredibly inspiring. Although, I'm not sure if that makes me feel better about the wadge I could have you poke. I'll just leave that be. [laughter] When you said you were lucky, I feel like that's what I kept thinking reading this book. Wow, how did he turn this whole thing around? When you were washing dishes and you were getting fired from every job, I was thinking, how is this story going to turn itself around? Just because you were sitting wearing a leather jacket one day in a restaurant and someone spotted you and put you on a soap opera and all this stuff, it would've been so easy for you to have remained in this state of trying to find yourself and trying to figure out your path when your childhood dream of being a priest fell apart and you were trying to pick up the pieces and then again when you were passed out in a doorway with your tooth hanging out. When I heard you had dental work, I'm like, maybe it's because of that tooth. I don't know. How did you keep the faith inside yourself to keep going and to keep waiting for the turnaround, whether it came internally or externally?

Gabriel: That's a good question too. I would say it doesn't come externally. Everything has to come from inside. There were all the signs around saying, don't do this. Don't do that. You don't pay any attention to things like that. It has to come from inside. Eventually, you get sick and tired of being sick and tired. You say, is a better life possible for me? What does a better life mean? In my case, I traced it back to the fact that I was drinking just way too much. I never liked the taste of it. You could hand me a bottle of Budweiser or a three-thousand-dollar bottle of wine with dust on it. It wouldn't make any difference to me. That wasn't the point. The point was oblivion. The point was escape, removal from the present. The simplest thing stuck in my brain. I had read this thing once about -- I had leafed through a Buddhist book looking for some kind of hope of something. One of the things that stuck with me was every journey begins with a step. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a step. My problem was that I had been trying to go to the thousand miles and saying, how do I get there? What can I do to be in that place? What I didn't realize is that you have to take the first step and the second step. Two steps is better than no steps. Ten steps is much better than one. Bit by bit by bit, I [indiscernible].

I've used that in many ways like, for example, with children. The fact about it is that children leaving is a terribly traumatic thing, when children decide to go. The signs are there all along. I remember when my daughter was very young and she used to be in the car seat. Every morning, I would put her in the car seat. One day she said to me, "Dad, I don't need the car seat anymore. I can buckle myself in." I looked in the garage, and I saw the car seat. I said, this is one of these invisible markers. This is the end of a time in my life and in her life. Life is full of those invisible little markers. Going back to this Buddhist thing of a step at a time, one of the things -- I'm not a Buddhist, by the way, but I'll steal from any place I can get it. The Buddhists say a child's first step is a step away from you. That's a tremendously powerful notion to contemplate because they are going to leave. It's inevitable that they will leave us behind. How do we cope with that, with the sadness of that? That little piece of Buddhism helped me deal with that too, and one last one which is the idea that your lot is harder than somebody else's and this is happening to me and it's not fair and why? etc. It was the story of two monks walking along. One of them had a big bag of rocks on his back. He said, "You know what, if you had to carry these -- honest to god, I'm worn out carrying these things. Now we have to go up the mountain. Now we have to cross the bridge. How am I going to get across the river with this bag of rocks?" They get to the other side. The first monk says to him, "Why don't you just leave down the bag of rocks?"

It sounds like that it's not really a powerful thing, but it is sometimes to just say, you know what, I don't want to do that anymore. I'm tired of carrying around this baggage. I'm not going to do it. I try to do that with stuff now. I just say, do I really need to be thinking about this or dealing with this crap? I just want to put it down. To go to Seneca, the Roman philosopher, who said life is short, but the days, if you live them properly, are long, they're my little bits of wisdom that I hang onto and try to make part of life. When I came to write the memoir, I said, I'm going to be honest. I'm going to be truthful in this. If people run away from me and say, god almighty, I'm going to say, you know what, that was my choice. In the book, I talk about where people think that people act or that actors are always acting and they're not truthful. That's a stereotype. It's a false idea because the job of the actor is to tell the truth. The job of the writer is to tell the truth. The job of the artist, full stop, is to be the dog that barks before the earthquake. He's the one that says, this is happening. Here's the truth. I'm holding up the mirror. Look into it. That's what the function of an artist is. By telling the truth in performance and on the page, you're helping somebody else to look into a mirror. By me seeing where I went wrong in my life, hopefully, there'll be some guy sitting on a chair somewhere who will say, well, I'm not making that mistake.

Zibby: I'm sure there will be a lot of people on chairs nodding their head and being inspired. There are a lot of theories about trauma and the way it affects our development. I feel like you had so much trauma in especially growing up. I go back to losing your friend, Jimmy. That alone could've set somebody off on a different page, or your relationship with your sister, Marion, and what ended up happening to her and just all these things that you had to go through. The priest and when you called him back, oh, my gosh, that was insane, that moment. What do you think about the presence of trauma and how carrying that through your life affects you? Some people get tons of therapy for things like that. I didn't get the sense that that's the way you approached -- that you didn't approach it that way. What do you do with all this trauma that collectively builds up? How do you come to a point where you're sitting in a car at your age looking back and having such wisdom about everything? How do you go from there to here?

Gabriel: I don't honestly know the answer in relation to myself because I don't know if trauma ever leaves the system. The idea that you deal with the trauma and move on -- move on is a word that I -- anytime somebody says to me, and move on, I don't trust that. I think it's always there in some form or another. The thing about abuse, it's not just about sexual abuse. It's domestic violence. It's emotional abuse. It's anytime somebody abuses their power over another person. I had to work a lot to get trust back because trust is broken with abuse. I still find trust a difficult thing. I trust the people I love, of course, but I have areas where I think to myself, why do I distrust that? There's absolutely no reason to distrust that particular thing. I don't know that it ever goes away. I don't know that you ever completely resolve it. It's like the idea of forgiveness. What is forgiveness? Forgiving yourself and those things that have passed into the common culture to -- I remember meeting a Jewish couple in New York. She had survived Auschwitz with her mother. That alone is a story that -- it's hard to comprehend how somebody -- the father was the man who had met her in the transit camp in Marseille in 1945 or '46.

I said to the woman, "Do you believe in forgiveness?" She said, "I forgive the German people. I forgive the people that were the cause of the Holocaust. I forgive them because I have no choice except to forgive them. If I don't forgive them, I'll be eaten up with incredible anger nonstop. I have forgiven the German people." Her husband hit the table so hard that the crockery jumped up into the air. He said, "There is no such thing as forgiveness." Right there is the dichotomy. It's a dilemma that I still can't solve. Can you absolutely forgive? Can you absolutely rid yourself of trauma? I think the answer is no. I'm suspicious of absolutism. I believe in the relative examination of things. I can forgive, but I don't. I've dealt with the trauma, but I really don't know whether I have. I've given up alcohol. I haven't drank for twenty-three or four years, but I could start again in five minutes. I could be dead tomorrow. Have I given that up absolutely? I like to think so, but there's vestiges of all the experiences of our life in who we are. That's why I wanted to look at that. What bits are left inside me from then? How do they go to make me the man that I am today? I don't regard myself as wise or anything like that. I just felt that I had to hunt around for scraps of things that made sense to me and taking one step at a time and that I've gotten to this place where not that terribly much impresses me anymore, to be honest.

Zibby: Wow. I feel like I could listen to you talk all day. You have a way of putting things into perspective. In my own little life, knowing your theory, it makes it easier to forgive and to put down the bag of bricks knowing that you've done so before me, whatever everybody's bag of bricks on their back happens to be at this very time. Your words are inspiring to me. I loved your book. I'm so impressed with your ability to put it out there and be open and help other people. That's the most human thing you could do. That's it. It's connecting to other people. That's the most beautiful thing someone can do for somebody else. I just wanted to thank you for that. I truly loved your book. Thank you for talking to me today.

Gabriel: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to talk to you. I thought we were going to be talking about literature and Dostoevsky and Philip Roth and everything. I sounded a bit more like an Oprah than somebody who was going on to talk about -- but I think it's all connected. Literature, it's all connected. We got going on that jag. It was a good one.

Zibby: Good. I'm sure you could've talked the whole time about Dostoevsky. Maybe we'll pick that up. Next time I need a good dose of Dostoevsky, I'll try to get in touch with you. This was much more interesting to me. [laughs]

Gabriel: Thank you so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Thank you. Take care.

Gabriel: Bye-bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Rachel Bloom, I WANT TO BE WHERE THE NORMAL PEOPLE ARE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Rachel. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about your book, I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are, which I feel like I should sing in The Little Mermaid-esque.

Rachel Bloom: Feel free to.

Zibby: [laughs] I won't subject you to that. Thanks for coming on.

Rachel: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Rachel, can you tell listeners what I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are is about, what inspired you to write this memoir about your life, and why you did it? Why now?

Rachel: It's really a collection of stories and essays and comedic pieces about my relationship with normalcy. Personal stories are the jumping-off point of each part. Then I extrapolate based on the emotions of those stories to do comedic pieces, comedic essays. For instance, there's the story of the night I won a Golden Globe, but as described by my dog. Even winning a Golden Globe, which is such a societal marker of, you fit in, I want to have some perspective and remember that a dog doesn't care. It goes through my relationship with normalcy through childhood up until now, basically.

Zibby: I appreciated the picture of the dog with the Golden Globe that you included. That was also a nice touch to really ground us in the normalcy, question mark, of that. [laughs] I have to say, your middle school experience gave me PTSD from my own middle school experience. I'm sure everybody has had something happen in middle school where they have felt like they didn't fit in. Everybody has had a moment in middle school where they feel like they don't fit in or they're not part of the group. The boyfriend that you had, or not even really a boyfriend, but the guy you followed around all the time -- this is going to sound terrible. I think his name was Ethan.

Rachel: Yeah.

Zibby: Maybe just tell me the story again from the horse's mouth, as it were, and how experiences like that where you're wanting so much just to have a normal relationship and it backfires -- tell me a little bit more about that.

Rachel: It was the first crush I ever had. I remember my feelings for Ethan being just as real and passionate as any feelings of love or infatuation I had as an adult. I was a dork. He didn't really fit in either. The more I tried to be around him, the lower it made his social standing. He started insulting me to try to just get me to go away and also fit in with the other kids who also thought I wasn't cool. That made me love him more. I can't tell if it made me love him more or if I loved him regardless and I loved him despite the insulting. Either way, it set a pattern for later relationships. [laughs] He was quite mean because I was clearly in love with him at an age when no one was having these intense feelings of infatuation.

Zibby: Where is Ethan now? Do we know? Have you looked him up?

Rachel: Yeah. I had a conversation with Ethan for using his real name for this Vulture Fest. Vulture has this festival of arts and entertainment. We had a conversation. He actually became one of my really good friends in high school. There just wasn't time to write about that in the book.

Zibby: I feel like the dramatic stories are better, sometimes, to read than, and now we're good friends. To fast-forward from your middle school antics to let's just say a section like An Apologetic Ode to my Former Roommates and all of the unresolved issues, which, by the way, I love -- it's like a poem to yourself. You're so funny. I really love how you use lists and different formats and scripts. You're using the book in a whole new way. It is a book, but it's an art project at the same time.

Rachel: I try to vary it up. I don't really love reading. It has to be a really, really famous person or someone I really admire to read just a straightforward memoir. I like reading personal stories or especially books that are very personal where the format is varied up. I wrote the book that I would want to read. Also, I wrote in a way that I would still enjoy writing it. I didn't want to sit down and just write a bunch of personal essays. One of the chapters is a full musical that you'll actually be able to listen along to on my website when the books comes out if you want to listen along and read. That was my way of keeping myself entertained. Then the ode to my roommates, which is this apology, I wanted to elevate my apology. I wanted to make it feel almost mythic because I really was a terrible roommate. I feel like most people come from the vantage point of, I had this terrible roommate, but no, that was me. I feel terrible about it.

Zibby: You are one of the most, I want to say self-critical, but it's beyond that. It's like self-flagellating. You're always so hard on yourself in a funny way, but there's always a little truth to every joke.

Rachel: It's a glass houses thing because I definitely bitch about other people in the book. I don't want to get off scot-free. I, perhaps, at times in the book, overcompensate by being pretty self-flagellating just to make sure. I know that I'm making fun of other people, but I'm not perfect. I always want to play that other side to cover my bases.

Zibby: Is the book reflective of how you think? Is this the way you think? You're always onto this and then another thing, and this is the creative interpretation of that? It's not as linear, like what you were saying, I don't want to just sit down and write a bunch of essays.

Rachel: That is how I think.

Zibby: That's how you think.

Rachel: Yes. There is a smidgeon of ADHD in there, as my psychiatrist has told me. Although, he's like, "Don't get excited. I know you'll get off on a diagnosis tangent." Yes, that is just how my mind works. I think it also comes from writing sketch comedy for so long and coming from that sketch brain of, okay, what's a sketch I could do based on this? is the feeling that I'm having.

Zibby: Speaking of your therapist, would you mind if we talked a little about the OCD and the [indiscernible/crosstalk]?

Rachel: Please.

Zibby: I feel like that OCD has been branded all wrong. People think it has to do only with washing your hands and turning things on and off. Actually, the intrusive thoughts are a huge element of OCD. It would be very easy to misdiagnose someone who's having that symptom as something completely different or not to worry about or even annoying. I want parents out there who might be listening also to know that sometimes the intrusive thoughts that your child is having could be this. Tell me a little more about your experience with it.

Rachel: Especially now as a parent, I'm thinking about it a lot. What happened was basically, in fourth grade, I started getting these intrusive guilty thoughts. I started fixating on things I thought I did that were bad, that I should feel guilty about. It was this gnawing darkness that I'd never felt before. This is around nine and a half, ten. I thought that the only way I could relieve myself of this guilt was to tell my parents everything. It was this series of obsessions, obsessive thoughts, and compulsions to tell my parents everything. At the time, my parents, they just thought it was some sort of quirk of adolescence because OCD was, yeah, you wash your hands or you check the burners to make sure the stove isn't on. It was this very specific thing that we thought OCD was. It's only now as an adult and now consciously that we are starting to realize -- when I say consciously, I think non-therapists are starting to understand, oh, no, no, obsessive thoughts and compulsions come in many, many forms. No one around me understood or could see that I was suffering because it just seemed like I was quirky. I'll hear stories like this in other kids. My kid's having trouble sleeping. They keep bringing this up. It's not just a quirk of childhood or of adolescence. They're suffering. Writing this book when I was pregnant right before I was becoming a parent was a nice reminder that my child's feelings are valid. I can't just brush them away with, they're just a kid, or even, they're just a baby. No, these feelings are real. Just because the person feeling them is little doesn't make them less valid.

Zibby: It might not necessitate the decibel level of screaming that accompanies it as a child, I might say.

Rachel: That's fair. It applies more to the future of when my child is -- my child's seven and a half months old.

Zibby: That's what I mean, the loud, bloodcurdling screams.

Rachel: Look, at a certain point, I have to put a sweatshirt on her. I have to put sleeves on. The bloodcurdling screams are, yes, going to happen. I can't not ever put clothes on her. Yes, true.

Zibby: I think anybody who has had any sort of mental health anything and struggled for a diagnosis and then felt a sense of relief once it had been like, oh, wait, this constellation of behaviors or thoughts or feelings actually falls into this rubric and there's a treatment for it, that's a very great feeling, not to keep harping on this. I'm on the board the Child Mind Institute. I don't know if you've heard of that.

Rachel: I have.

Zibby: Which is great, if you have any interest in getting involved or whatever. It's all about reversing the stigma on childhood mental illness and raising awareness for things like this, like OCD and selective mutism and just all these things that maybe people don't know as much about, and also finding treatments and biomarkers and all the rest. Anyway, not to bring that into it. I just wanted you to know I'm so on the same page in terms of wanting to raise awareness and helping families get through something that can be challenging both for the child and the parents.

Rachel: That's so cool that you're on the board of that. I would actually love to learn more information about that. I wish that had been around or I'd been aware of that when I was a kid.

Zibby: It wasn't around, so don't worry. [laughter] I know that having a child often brings up old stuff in your brain, in your mind, and issues and all of that. How have you adjusted to being a parent? Has it raised any unexpected reactions in you in that way?

Rachel: First of all, there's something freeing about putting her needs and her happiness above my own. It's actually quite freeing. It actually really helps with things like cognitive behavioral therapy when you're trying to just focus on the present and not engaging in anxious thoughts as much. It really helps with that. Around the time I'd finished the first draft of the book, I gave birth. Around the time I was getting induced and giving birth, among everything else that was happening, I was having some intrusive thoughts again. They were kind of unspecific. The thought and the gut feeling at this point are one in the same. My anxiety was amped up, and so it latches onto these little thoughts. It was weird to be writing about that while going through that again during a big life event. Coming out the other side of this one, because I had to be present for a baby but because I was also writing about it, it helped me realize, oh, yep, this is just a part of how my mind works sometimes. I have to be there for her. That’s what matters. I'll just ride this wave. Being a mom is more important.

Zibby: Wow. That's amazing. In terms of writing this book, how long did it take to do? When did you do it? How did you fit it in with all of your other stuff? What other big projects do you have in the hopper? This is like fifteen questions in one question.

Rachel: No, it's fine. I had had a book deal since, it was like 2017. I got it when I was filming Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I started brainstorming and slowly writing the book for the next year or so, but I didn't really get started earnestly until August, September of last year right when I was pregnant because that's when I had time. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was done. We'd performed at Radio City Music Hall. I'd toured in London. Finally, I was back and ready to write the book. Then I got pregnant. Definitely, the first part of writing the book was also a good distraction from nausea. I wrote it from about September of 2019 until March 2020 with then some significant changes done April, May.

Zibby: Would you do it again? Did you enjoy any of it?

Rachel: Yeah, I did. It was hard. It's hard. It's scary because it's just you. I can't hide behind a character. At least, I chose not to. It's nonfiction. My only cowriter was my editor. Editors are really the unofficial cowriters of every book. Still, it's putting so much of yourself out there. I chose to be so vulnerable. It's putting myself out there in a way no one asked me to do or expected me to do. Plus, it's a lot of words. There were pieces that were cut. When a song was cut from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, that was still a lot of work, but that was maybe fifty words, a hundred words. I don't know. I can't think of how many words were in a song. When you're talking about cutting five hundred to a thousand words, there's a lot of stuff that I worked on that's not in the book. It's hard. Writing a book is really hard. Then as far as other things, working on movies and TV. No more books coming in the near future. Honestly, doing press for a book, especially when I'm not doing a book tour, takes a lot of time. That's what's in the hopper, is doing press for the book. I'm working on a musical using songs from the late nineties, early two thousands to explore nostalgia of that time. I'm pitching a sketch show. Still figuring out this new normal that is both COVID and having a new baby.

Zibby: It's actually, probably -- not that there's ever anything good about the COVID era, but I feel like anytime I had -- I have four kids.

Rachel: Whoa.

Zibby: Yeah, and I'm still standing, sort of. I'm sitting now, but you know what I mean.

Rachel: You look great. Your house looks immaculate.

Zibby: Thank you. Yes, I try not to let them in here. [laughs] No, I'm kidding. You're only seeing this little sliver. Normally, they're walking on top of the couch around there. The shelves don't get touched that much. Why was I saying that? Something about after every kid.

Rachel: Oh, the silver lining. I completely agree.

Zibby: I was completely isolated from the world. My schedule was so different. Everyone else was zoom, zoom, zooming around. I shouldn't have used that word. Everybody else was running around super busy. I was at home. Your being at home, obviously, everybody's at home, so I guess there's some synergies in everybody else's lifestyle.

Rachel: I gave birth in late March, which is when quarantine started. As we went into having a newborn, it felt like the rest of the world also had a newborn. People were talking about how time made no sense anymore. Everything was upside down. That's what having a newborn is. As far as timing, yes, very stressful to have a child during a pandemic, but the aftermath as far as just the schedule of having a newborn worked out very well.

Zibby: I'm sure everybody asks you about this, and so I hate to ask. Just because I don't know a ton of people who have won Golden Globes, I'm just curious.

Rachel: Ooh, ask.

Zibby: I know you wrote about it, thanks to your dog and everything like that. I'm really curious, what happened the next day? What happens the day after you win a Golden Globe? Do you get a thousand emails? Do you feel like life is exploding? Was there any point when you were like, I kind of miss not having all this attention? I know you already had attention because of your career. Do you ever just wish you didn't, or not?

Rachel: The day after is so cool. I've gone through that day after a couple times now with the Golden Globe and then the day after my Emmy win last September. I got a big brunch because I'd been up late the night before. You're hungover. There's always a big brunch, a ton of emails. The good thing is I don't feel like I have to get back to every one of those emails the day of. The day after the Golden Globes specifically, I wasn't filming, but work was still happening. Me getting the Golden Globe essentially saved the show. I needed to at least get nominated, if not win, to save Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I went to work and I let everyone hold the Golden Globe and take pictures with the Golden Globe and celebrated with everyone at work because it was, in a way, job security for 250 people as well as myself. A lot of gifts, a lot of flowers. It's great. It's overwhelming. I was really psyched. I had two major awards bookending the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend experience.

The Golden Globe happened the middle of season one. It was in the middle of filming. I had filmed not the day before, but two days before. I had to go back to filming two days after. Then I had to fly to New York. There was all this stuff happening. It was all so soon because the show -- I talk about this in the book. The show, I thought it was a dead pilot with Showtime. Then it suddenly got ordered to series. The whole thing was just whiplash in a way for which no one could've been fully prepared and didn't fully sink in. It took like a year for all of it to sink in. Then the Emmy win last September, it was the opposite. I was done with the show. I was pregnant, so I was at home just being nauseous, sleeping a lot. I really had the time to fully soak it in. That was, as opposed to getting the Golden Globe for after the Hollywood Foreign Press seeing eight episodes of the show, the Golden Globe for songwriting was after writing 157 songs. They were actually two very different experiences. The day after is awesome.

Zibby: Wow. By the way, thank you for the layman's interpretation of how to sell a show and the timeline of that. To show people why your timeline was so different, you're like, here's how it was supposed to happen, and here's how it happened for me. It was like two days.

Rachel: My pleasure. I'm still confused by the whole process, so it was good to lay it out for myself.

Zibby: Do you have any advice both for authors and also for anyone who wants to get into your field of songwriting, creating, acting, all of it? People are dying to do that.

Rachel: The only real advice I have involves other people. Find likeminded people. You want to be around people who are doing what you're doing. Try to find people who are better at it than you so that you can watch them do what they do and then also get feedback on your work. I think that's where a writing circle helps. You're around other people doing what you're doing, so you're not writing in a vacuum. You're getting feedback. It gives you a deadline. If you're in some sort of writer's group or writing circle and you say, we're all going to read aloud what we wrote on this date or, hey, I'm going to have a table read of this screenplay I wrote, it gives you a deadline. I cannot finish anything if I don't have something holding me accountable even if it's a little thing like, I promised so-and-so I'd get them the script by this day. Anything you can do where you are forced to write, that is my number-one tip.

Zibby: We'll have to think of ways to bind people to their chairs and not let them up until --

Rachel: -- At least, it works for me because it's the fear of letting people down.

Zibby: Accountability. That's one of those Gretchen Rubin -- you know The Four Tendencies? Have you heard of this book?

Rachel: No.

Zibby: There's the obligers. You're probably an obliger. Anyway, this is ridiculous I'm talking about this.

Rachel: No, I'm going to look this up.

Zibby: There are all these different personality types. I am the same way. I try to finish everything so I would never let anybody down. The thought of missing a deadline for me is like, are you kidding? Of course not. That's one of the personality types. You should check it out. It's fun. Just google it or something.

Rachel: I will.

Zibby: What about getting into being a performer and a songwriter and all the rest?

Rachel: God, there are so many ways to do it. It depends what you want to do. There are so many hubs of entertainment now. Five years ago, I would've said New York, LA, or Chicago. Now there's Atlanta. There's Vancouver. I think first finding a place where you have the freedom to experiment and fail is really important. That's not starting out online because there's no freedom to fail. Once you put something online, it's there forever. I had a college sketch comedy group where we would do shows once a month. A sketch would bomb, and then no one would ever talk about it again. Finding a safe place to stumble and realizing that you're supposed to stumble and you're supposed to fail at first and you're supposed to make a lot of mistakes and you'll always make mistakes, that's really important. Then as far as turning it into a career, everyone's trajectory is so different. That's why I think the community of it all is important on multiple levels. Then you start to see people get agents or sell scripts and you start to figure out how that happens depending on what avenue you want to go down.

Zibby: Just to circle back here to middle school as my last question, do you ever -- I know Ethan and you hung out in high school and everything. The people that you felt sort of alienated from or who were stuffing you in a locker or whatever else crazy stories, whatever happened to your relationship with them? Do you ever want to be like, look, I'm not -- you know. [laughs]

Rachel: Middle school was really, really rough. That was after Ethan. I talk about, in the book, one of the girls who was my main tormentor in middle school. She came to one of my live shows about nine years ago. She took me out for coffee after. We had a really, really vulnerable conversation about how she was just as miserable in middle school. She was afraid of losing her popularity. That's the one really vulnerable, probing conversation I've had with a bully other than Ethan. Ethan became my friend, so it almost doesn't count even though it does, obviously. That's the one other conversation I've had. Then short of that, I posted on my Facebook around the time of this Vulture Fest. I said, hey, did you bully me in middle school or were you popular? I'd love to talk to you. Ethan was the only one who got back to me because we were friends in high school. No actual middle school bully got back to me. I like to think it's because they were afraid. Bullies are scared, yes, but I also think a huge percentage of people who were bullies aren't terribly introspective people. They don't think a lot about the past. A bad part of this country is sometimes we forget history. I think they are those types of people a lot of times, people who just, they don't really think about stuff in context. They're just kind of living their lives, not even in a bad way. They’ve matured since middle school. They’ve grown up, but they don't think about their past a lot.

Zibby: That's probably very true. They probably had their own stuff going on, which is why they were bullies in the first place.

Rachel: Yeah. They should be in therapy to talk about that and process it, but they probably haven't.

Zibby: Not that it excuses it. I'm just saying they probably --

Rachel: -- No, no. I think it's introspective people and not. This woman had been through a lot, that I talked to. She was really introspective and had really looked within. I think that's rarer for bullies.

Zibby: Yeah, you're right. I'm sure you're right. Rachel, thank you. Thanks for taking the time. I know you have so many press obligations, so thanks for stopping in here. I wish you all the best of luck in getting a sweater on your baby and all the things to come. If you do want to follow up about Child Mind, I'm happy to send you information or hook you up with the head of it there. No pressure, just if you happen to be interested.

Rachel: Awesome. That is so great to know. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care.

Rachel: You too.

Zibby: Bye.

Rachel: Bye.

Michelle Buteau, SURVIVAL OF THE THICKEST

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Michelle. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Survival of the Thickest. I'm so excited to be talking to you.

Michelle Buteau: I'm excited to be talked to.

Zibby: [laughs] Oh, my gosh. For people who aren't familiar with your work, could you give us a little background on why you wrote this book and what it's essentially about?

Michelle: What a loaded question. I've been doing stand-up damn near twenty years. I know I age really well. I've sort of made the jump into acting and hosting and TV and film and all this really fun stuff, but my true love is stand-up. I've been doing a lot of podcasts and storytelling shows. I realized, wow, there's other things I could share with people besides these funny, ha-ha, sassy-girl moments. Especially after going through a five-year battle of IVF to try and have children, it was really hard being the happy clown with big titties and freckles. As I quietly was going through these really painful experiences, I was also out and about probably working the most I've ever worked. Now that I feel like I am healed and on the other side of the mountain, I can look back at my experiences and my pain and my grief and properly write about it and share it because I'm realizing it's not about me. It's not about, how long can I talk about myself? I'm not some reality show. No shade to reality show hoes, lol.

I feel like the more I share, the more people feel less alone or just simply educated. There's a lot of, that would never happen to me, and then it does. I was like, wow, what would happen if I actually wrote a book? And so I did. It was wild. I never want to read or write a book again. It is so much work. I just remember taking care of teething twins who were about ten months old, still had them in the same room, didn't separate them yet, didn't even realize that was a thing I could do. Then I would go to set to work on a movie called Marry Me with J Lo and just be in awe of Owen Wilson and Sarah Silverman and be like, this is crazy, and then go to my trailer and try to get an essay done. I'm just like, what is this life? Then go home and go to the store to pick up baby Tylenol and just keep it moving and write this book until I would fall asleep. Then I remember one night, I even realized I had shit stuck in my nail. I'm like, god, why does it smell? Checking under my shoes. It was so dumb. Anyway, I don't even remember the question, but thank you so much for having me. [laughs]

Zibby: It was great. I have twins, by the way, who are now thirteen. Yes, it's true.

Michelle: I can't wait.

Zibby: Well, pros and cons of every age. [laughs] I also did not realize that I should separate my twins. I kept them in the same room for a really long time. Once they were napping in beds, essentially, I was like, oh, okay, maybe I should split them up. One of these million things you learn as you go.

Michelle: Are they boy/girl? Who are they?

Zibby: They're boy/girl. They're thirteen. The boy was first by a couple minutes and lords that over her head constantly. In reading and seeing your Instagram, it's taking me back to the very beginning. It does get easier in some ways, a lot less physically demanding at least.

Michelle: I do feel like that I Love Lucy episode where I'm trying to keep all the chocolate on the conveyer belt. I'm just like, get the diapers! I want to say I'm looking forward to them talking, but from what I hear... [laughs]

Zibby: Talking is good. Walking is good. There's a lot of great things coming up. I feel like by the time you're here, it's more like psychological warfare that we have going on. Being a twin mom, people would be like, but my kids are really close in age, so I get it. I'm like, no, you don't. Sorry, it's different. [laughs] Just a little different.

Michelle: Puerto Rican twins, Irish twins, yes, yes, yes.

Zibby: Different.

Michelle: It's not the same.

Zibby: Anyway, go back to the IVF part and the pain and having to sort of mask the pain and keep on keeping on. This is something I find so fascinating. How do you keep all of that emotion inside and just come out of the trailer, as you were saying, or head to work when all of that stuff is brewing inside? Did you always talk to your colleagues about it? How did you process it? Did you write personal journals? How did you get through that period of time?

Michelle: That's a good question. Now that you are talking about it, maybe I should've journaled. Maybe I should've talked to more people. I felt I couldn't, though, because no one really knew what I was going through. They're like, what do you mean hormones? What do you mean shots? What do you mean? That doesn't sound right. They would get defensive. Why are you doing that? You know what you should do is just eat clean. Maybe lose weight. Maybe don't work as much. I felt sort of attacked and shamed from people that I love who just simply didn't know or understand. It felt like I was in a marathon of an emotional cardio wind tunnel where I'm just like, get the fuck through. Get the fuck through. You will be a mom. This will happen. Get through. After the first miscarriage, I was heartbroken. I'm like, let's go again. I realize that was normal for my other friends who are talking to me about their miscarriages. Then by the third one, you're like, okay, let's just wait a second. Let's take a beat and really figure out what's going on because it's something other than a nature takes care of itself type situation. I think because I was so busy and had such a huge to-do list workwise, I was able to compartmentalize all that was going on. I'm like, okay, I'm going to LA to pitch the show I just wrote. They're interested in it. Fly yourself out. Get a doctor's note. Get the needles. Get the this. Get the progesterone suppositories. It became my life and my to-do list.

Then I would cry over the weirdest things. Somebody would cut me off on the road or my Uber driver didn't feel comfortable with me putting my window down, and I would just cry. My husband would leave crumbs from his sandwich on the countertop. I'd be like, I want a divorce. I'm like, oh, or maybe it's the hormones. It was crazy. Then as I started working more, I started giving zero fucks. That's when I really started to book, when people are like, wow, she's so edgy. I'm just like, no, I'm broken, but I will definitely wear the statement lip. When I would improve a scene, it would be ridiculous. Then I would just start crying. I'd be saying the most dumb things but crying because I didn't know how to manage all that was going on. It really resonated with people. Even my First Wives Club audition which was over Skype because Tracy Oliver, the creator and producer, was in LA and I was in New York, she was like, "Look, your husband who you've known since college has cheated on you, finally. You are coming to terms with it now. You guys are going to therapy. You feel broken. You're trying to put yourself together every day for your two kids." I'm just like, oh, my god, that's all she needs to say. Then waterworks. She's like, "Phenomenal acting." I'm just like, I got to go to the bathroom. And so on and so forth. To be honest, I don't know how I managed. In life anyway, I'm day by day. Now with toddling twins during quarantine and still working, I'm hour by hour.

Zibby: Yes, that's all you can do. Go back to what you said about being edgy versus being broken. Tell me more about that. How do you know which one you are? What causes what? Tell me about them.

Michelle: Again, it's a case-by-case basis. Everyone has their opinion of you. You could walk in a room and feel ugly, but people see a confident person. You never know what you're giving off or what people see. People are like, whoa, I can't believe you said that. I'm like, yeah, because I don't care if you like me or not. I just don't care if you like me or not. I know that I'm actually better than this and this project and this material. It did help me in a way where I'm like, I just want to go home and cry right now, so let's get this shit over with. I was also so happy to have things to go to because that gave me a sense of normalcy. Life is still going on. If I didn't have anywhere to go, I don't even know what I would be like. It also gave me a sense of, damn, bitch, you can get stuff done, which is probably why I decided to write a book. So stupid, so stupid.

Zibby: A lot of the book, though, goes all the way back. You take us all through your life and being raised by your parents and all the little things that happened to make you, you. You go into that in a lot of depth. I don't want to mislead that the book is all about IVF or anything like that. You have a lot, also, about your body in this book and your relationship to your body and your family's relationship. There was this one passage I wanted to read with your dad. You said, "There was this one time when I was about fifteen and my father said to me, 'Stop eating pasta in front of your boyfriend. You should lose twenty pounds because then you'd be so beautiful.' I stopped right there. I told him off. I said, 'I'm beautiful no matter what, twenty pounds or not. If someone is going to love me, they are going to love me for me.' His look changed immediately, and he said, 'That's my girl.'" [laughs]

Michelle: Ugh. Isn't there a better way? Do we have to be GI Jane right now at the dinner table, Dad? It's too much.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. You're very open about your relationship with your body. Tell me how you feel about it now, especially after having twins.

Michelle: I didn't have twins. I had a surrogate. For me, I was like, how am I going to feel taking care of these babies if I didn't carry them? That lasted for like five minutes because I'm like, oh, no, they are mine. I am theirs. She is a part of our village and extended family, chosen family, which is amazing.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. I totally knew that. I remember reading all that. I don't know why I said that. I apologize, but I did know that. Keep going.

Michelle: No, that's okay. I still feel like a warrior princess because I went through five years of fucking crazy rigid hormone taking, spreading your legs three times a week to get tested, blood three times -- I feel like I've done it all. To get back to what you were saying, I did gain weight during IVF. I was so used to it by then, fluctuating, because I have been since I was eleven that I'm like, it is what it is. I'll do what I can. I didn't get that overnight. I developed quite quickly. I talk about wanting a banana seat bike for my twelfth birthday, and I ended up with woman-size tits. To get unwanted attention from older men is gross. To be shamed by older women is also really disgusting. I feel like we have to help kids shape who they are in a positive way. Our bodies are all different. There isn't one way to look or be. That's okay. Also, how to speak up for themselves. Yes, definitely respect your elders. Say please and thank you, but you don't have to take people's criticism. That's wild. I think that was the hardest part, actually, writing the book, was trying not to make it sound like I was mad at my parents because there was a lot of shame from them to not stick out my chest. I'm like, I'm standing up straight. You told me to stand up straight my whole life. Why are you wearing that? I'm still wearing the same thing I've always worn. It's just, this is how my body is. By the way, everyone in my family looks like this. Why all of a sudden is it a thing? For me, it definitely is survival of the thickest in terms of having a thick body, but also not shaming people for who they are or what they want in life. That is, I hope, a takeaway, whether it's wanting to be with multiple partners to figure out -- like they're Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride, how they like their eggs.

Zibby: I refer to that scene all the time.

Michelle: Thank you!

Zibby: All the time. I'm so glad you said that. I think about that all the time. I mention it to people. Yes, so true.

Michelle: Thank you. Nobody ever understands.

Zibby: What? No. It's one of my favorite scenes.

Michelle: Thank you. Where are they now, her and -- is it Richard? What's his name again, with the gray hair?

Zibby: Yeah. Richard Gere? No.

Michelle: Oh, my god, I was going to say Richard Marx. That's where my brain is at. It is Richard Gere. They should get together and do something else. They're going to be cool grandparents.

Zibby: Yeah, the grandparents. They’ll be the new Diane Keaton and [indiscernible/laughter].

Michelle: Exactly, without the white, ripped turtlenecks, but yes.

Zibby: I do think, though, that girls developing early is something that not enough is said about. Not that I should be revealing this, but I was definitely wearing a bra by the time I was ten. I've never felt comfortable in that regard ever since. My mom took me to buy a bra. I hid between all the robes in the store. I was like, I don't want anyone to see me. With you too, age twelve, you're not necessarily ready for that. How do you then deal with your body the rest of your life when something -- it's almost as if there's this something that's out of your control from the minute you get going, and you're struggling to catch up after ever since.

Michelle: Yeah. Not only are you struggling to catch up, but you also want to fit in because you're at that age where you don't want to be different. Then you become a teenager, young adult. Everyone has a different relationship with sexuality. Because we were religious, it was just shame on shame on shame. I knew deep down inside that I wanted to be this happy, vivacious, sassy, let's see what it looks like naked person, but those people sounded like mean and bad people. Then when I finally moved away and had sex, I was like, no, this is great. This is amazing. There's nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, it was a great lesson in speaking up for what I wanted, whether it was dating somebody casual or we were serious or whatever it was. There's no classes in school that will tell you how to speak up for yourself, at least when I was going to school. I don't know about now. There's a class for everything. I think it's a wonderful lesson. In comedy, they always tell you to learn from the good and the bad. Learn from when someone's killing on stage and when someone's just dying, which is very violent now that I'm saying that out loud. I feel like the same could be said from your childhood experiences.

Zibby: Do you feel like, when you were writing the book, that it always had to be funny? As a comedian, do you feel like, I better make this section funny, or how do I turn this piece -- a lot of it was very funny, but there was pain beneath some of the humor. How did you [indiscernible/crosstalk] in terms of tone?

Michelle: I couldn't answer that. I was just truly, these are the stories I want to share, get it done on paper. It's easier to do a show or host a dinner party or a storytelling show and just talk it out. To put it in print, I'm all over the place, as I am on stage. I'm just like, what's the beginning, middle, and end? I never thought about being funny because I feel like that's there no matter what. Even the way I describe something, everyone's like, who the fuck? I was like, me. That's how I describe it. Emotional cardio's the only cardio I'll be doing. Everyone's like, who says that? Me, bitch. I already knew it'd be funny, but I also knew that I want to share these more painful, more sincere moments. I was just like, get it done. That's been a big thing for me. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it's just got to get done.

Zibby: Why did you say that this is the worst thing you've ever done and that you would never want to write [indiscernible/crosstalk]?

Michelle: The hours, the sheer hours, that it takes to write something is crazy. For me at least, I have every hour booked in my life, in my day. I even have an hour to relax, if I do. I will say, I'm going to go in this dark room. It's usually my closet. Let me do my thing. It was just an added thing that I had to put in the schedule of already crazy. Then also, be vulnerable in a way that I never had before. What if I just made an album, a singing album, and I'm like, okay, Christina Aguilera, listen to this? I'm not a writer. I've written. TV and punch-ups is so much different than an author. I can't even say author. Then the edits where you have to go back and read it. Then the notes where someone had read it, it's so crazy. It does feel like you are fully frontally naked and getting a pap smear in Times Square.

Zibby: Wow, that would not be on my list of things to do. I can see why you wouldn't want to do it again. I know how busy you must be because we scheduled this at ten fifteen. I'm like, that is a really busy person who's scheduling things on the quarter hour. [laughs]

Michelle: I'm in England right now.

Zibby: Oh, my goodness.

Michelle: I'm in Manchester. Off the record -- is that how you say it?

Zibby: Sure.

Michelle: Filming The Circle, which is the show I host on Netflix. It films in England. I managed to bring the kids and our nanny with us because I'm here for six weeks. Well, two more weeks. Four weeks down. Can't wait to go home.

Zibby: At least you got to travel. I feel like there's been no travel allowed for so long. Anyway, what is coming next? You're always doing a million things. Now you've got this book launch on top of everything. What is your next year? Do you have any idea? What's it looking like for you?

Michelle: What's next? I feel like something is next, but I don't remember. I'm also, for once in a long time, not living in the, what's next? What's next? I'm just like, this is dope. Let's just enjoy this. I'm not hooked up to a ventilator. I've just dropped some really important black joy content that I've worked really hard to put together. Sucks that there's a quarantine, but also amazing that people are enjoying it within a pandemic and a race revolution. Fuckin' bananas. For me, I really enjoy acting and hosting and all of the above. I really also enjoying being the bridesmaid, but I can't wait to be the bride.

Zibby: Amazing. What advice would you have to aspiring authors? Don't say, don't write the book. It has to be a little more positive than that.

Michelle: Oh, my goodness. I said it already. Don't worry about it being perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be done. You can always go back and edit. That, and also, don't do whatever you think people want to hear. That's whack. Do what you are passionate about. That could be anything. It could be knitting or snails or beaches or whatever time in your life or just a collection of essays and short stories. No one is Stephen King out the damn gate.

Zibby: Very true.

Michelle: Start somewhere. That was more than one piece of advice, but here we are.

Zibby: People need all the advice they can get. I think that's awesome. Thank you. Thank you for talking about your book. It was so good and so funny and a really refreshing style. You just tell it like it is.

Michelle: I know. I'm trying to go through the essays and figure out what I want to do as a promo video. If your relationship stinks like fish, it's probably extra pussy; that's something I wrote. I'm someone's mom. I'm a good person. Nice to meet you.

Zibby: [laughs] Nice to meet you. Best of luck with the launch and everything else. It was so nice to share some time with you today.

Michelle: Likewise. Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Julie Buxbaum, ADMISSION

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

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

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

Julie: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: See, so it all worked out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Yeah, just getting through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Yeah, I get your point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie: I saw. That's awesome.

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

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

Zibby: Yeah, which is super interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie: That's really smart.

Zibby: What advice do you have to aspiring authors?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie: Thank you so much, Zibby. Bye.

Kim Brooks, SMALL ANIMALS

Zibby Owens: Hi.

Kim Brooks: Hello.

Zibby: I listened to your book. I listened to most of it in the car on a few drives, so I feel like you're my friend. [laughs] I'm so used to your voice. It's all I've been listening to.

Kim: Thank you. It was fun to record. I'd never done anything like that before. By the time we got to the end, I was like, wow, acting is really work. Actors work. I guess I did kind of think they didn't work. It's hard to read something that long.

Zibby: I bet, but fun to listen to. Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear, this was so great. The first chapter, I was like, wow, this person gets it like nobody else. I'm sure people tell you this all the time. I have four kids myself. I hadn’t even read your book. I don't know how I had missed it. I read your fantastic New York Times article about divorce in the corona era. I was like, I have to talk to you. Then I read your book and I was like -- [laughs]. Anyway, here we are. Would you mind telling people who have not read Small Animals what this book is about and what inspired you to write it, particularly the incident?

Kim: The incident that kind of sparked the book took place quite a while ago now. It was about nine years ago now. I was home visiting my parents in Virginia. I live in Chicago. I was with my kids. My son who was about four and a half at the time -- the day that we were leaving I ran to a store about a mile from my parents' house. This is a very rural, suburban area where I grew up. When we got to the store, he asked if he could wait in the car. I was just going in to get one thing. I let him wait in the car for about five minutes, which was something that I honestly always remembered doing as a kid in this same area. I remembered waiting in the car while my parents ran into the store or went to look at furniture at Sears or whatever. I just always remember sitting in the car. It was a pleasurable memory. I thought, this is just a quick, five-minute thing. I pulled up in front. When I got back to the car, everything was fine. He was playing with my mom's iPad. We headed back to Chicago. It was only later I found out that someone who I would never meet and never see had seen me run into the store and let him wait there and had called the police.

The police had then showed up at my parents' house. They were looking for me and wanted to press charges because they viewed that I had done something dangerous. It was just this one incident that kind of snowballed into a year and a half of various types of difficulty, legal and otherwise, in my life, but that's not really what the book is about. That's the narrative backbone of the book. What the book is really about is me examining our notions of what it means to be a good parent and what it means to protect our children and thinking about why those ideas have changed so radically in the course of a generation or two. It was really the first point in my life when this happened that I started to think -- until then, I was very much going with the pack, running with the herd of anxious parents. That was the first moment when I was like, you know, this is kind of strange how obsessed everybody is with protecting and safety and fear of public spaces in a way that is so different from just thirty years ago. Why have things changed? Is the world more dangerous for kids? If not, which is what I found out, then what's happening? What's happening to the culture of parenthood?

Zibby: I agree. I think that's what your book's about too. [laughs] It was so interesting to get that lens. I don't know exactly how old you are. I'm forty-four now. I grew up in a time where I sat in the back of the station wagon all the time while my mom went in. Okay, one time I crawled in the front and smashed into a dumpster. For the most part, I was left and I was fine. That's just what happened. I watch even home videos. My brother and I are playing about to fall in the pool all the time. She's sunbathing. That is the way it was. In your scene when you visited your family and your mom was playing mahjong or something in the other room with her friends and talking about how crazy we all are as a generation of parents and how they hadn’t done it, I just so related to that. There is, even within families, a sort of culture shock in parenthood that has everybody scratching their heads. You tried to explain it. I shouldn't say tried to. You tried to unearth what the root cause of all of that was. I just so appreciated you trying to unlock the key to all of that because it affects me on a daily basis, and I'm sure so many other people.

Kim: I'm about the same age. I'm forty-two. It's interesting that you bring up your childhood. I think about it a lot. I should say that there's many strands to the mystery that I tried to tease out in the book. I do think that one of those strands is a reaction in people, our generation, against maybe some of the permissiveness of the eighties culture. Not all of us, but I think a lot of us feel like our parents were very distracted or very focused on themselves. It was a time where there was a lot of divorce. Women, on the one hand, were going back into the workforce, which was wonderful, but our country didn't really step up to provide any kind of system for support, national daycare or leave or anything like that. There was this frantic sense of nobody's watching the kids. That was a cultural anxiety. From the kids' perspective, I think there was sometimes a feeling that there was a lack of adult presence in our lives. Some of that, I think people have very nostalgic, positive memories of that kind of independence in childhood. I also think have some of us have negative memories too. I think what's happened with our generation is there's been kind of an overcorrection. It's funny, this is a slight digression. I was watching Big with my daughter a few nights ago. She's ten now. We've gotten on this eighties movie kick. One thing I noticed that I thought was so funny was -- have you seen Big?

Zibby: I saw it with my kids recently. Keep going, yes.

Kim: Obviously, there's tons of things, you're like, oh, my god. The lead woman character is smoking, a really funny thing. My daughter's like, "Why is she smoking?" I'm like, "People did it." The funny thing that I caught was that scene where Tom Hanks and the girlfriend are at the dinner party. The guy's kid comes in, the guy who's hosting the dinner party, and says, "Dad, I need help with my homework." The guy's kind of like, "Not now, son. I'm doing something adult." I just thought that would never even be in a movie. It would be so unimaginable to show that scene where a parent says, "I'm doing an adult thing. Go deal with this yourself." I thought, if they shot that movie now, everything would stop. The parent would have this very public display of, "I'm going to help my son." It just was one of those small details about how much the culture has changed.

Zibby: I was thinking when I watched that movie, I couldn't believe the kids were just wandering around the neighborhood by themselves all the time and biking and wandering. I'm like, what? They just go in and out of the house whenever they want. That was the part that I was like, wow. They were so little, too, in the movie.

Kim: Especially the friend. The whole premise is his friend keeps coming into New York City.

Zibby: Yes, that too.

Kim: He's like, "I just got to be home by ten." There were no cell phones. There were no GPS tracking devices. The two alternatives were either you kept your kid literally locked inside the house until they were eighteen or you gave them some independence and you tried to teach them skills. You gave them some freedom. I think now, maybe somewhat, it is caused by technology. There's this sense that we can be watching our kids all the time and we can be connected to our kids all the time. Then there's the question of, should we? What happens if we accept that?

Zibby: I have this confession which I haven't even thought about in a while. I was so on top of my twins from the moment they were born. Now my last two kids, I'm much, much better. I'm not so crazy. My twins, I stayed home with them. It was my job. I was going to not let them out of my sight. Then when they went to school, for their first field trip, I was like, what do you mean you're just going to take them on a two-and-a-half-hour drive? What if something happens? What if there's an accident? What if? What if? What if? I got them these little GPS things. I hid them in their backpacks. [laughs] Then all day, I was like, are they okay? It's kind of raining. I don't know. What if the road's slippery? This is obviously my own issue. As I said, I'm better now. As a first-time parent, it's crazy. I would go away with friends for entire weekends, and they'd be fine. Goodbye. Have fun in Woodstock.

Kim: Exactly. The technology has changed our notions of what is possible in a way that --

Zibby: -- Not to jump around too much, but I loved your chapter on moms competing against each other and why everyone is so quick to put down each other's choices and why, when we should all be lifting each other up and being one big community, moms are so quick to put down other people's choices, which basically stems, of course, from not feeling confident, essentially, in your own choices and that so much of the time it's not even really a choice. It's where you just had to end up. Instead of being upset or something, you have to just own it, and so you double-down on it and are like, I picked this, so shame on you for not picking the same thing. That was a summary. [laughs]

Kim: I should say, I feel like when I wrote the book, which was a number of years ago now, I was in maybe a moment of feeling a little bit disenchanted by that kind of competitive mom culture. As the years have passed and I've reflected on it more, I really wany to say that I don't blame moms at all for feeling competitive or insecure or comparing themselves to other mothers. I think that we live in this culture that undermines women and undermines mothers in so many different ways both subtle and overt. We get the message that women don't know what's best for their own children. You have to defer to some authority figure. It's things as outrageous as women being arrested for making reasonable parenting choices to small things, small condescensions that take place, or the culture that tells us the answer is in a book we need to buy, a product we need to buy, or a blog we need to subscribe to or whatever when really, most women know what's best for their children. One of the good things that will come, I hope, from the pandemic in the aftermath is that I do think there's been more and more women who are taking ownership of their choices and taking control of it and saying, maybe how my kid does on the standardized test in the context of a worldwide plague isn't the most important thing. Maybe we can have different values. Maybe sitting in front of the computer all day isn't the best way. I'm going to homeschool. I'm going to work with my neighbors or do things that a year or two ago would've seemed really radical and unconventional choices. Now we've been given an opportunity to do that.

Zibby: Very true. You also point out how there is no such thing as basically harassment of a mom. There's sexual harassment suits and all these other ways. Other groups are protected, but not really for moms. Anyone can poke their nose in your business. A policeman can feel like he has a right to interrupt somebody at Starbucks like you wrote about or any of that. The moms kind of just have to take it. Whereas if it was a dad, you'd be like, oh, he must have had something really important to do. It's no biggie. I found that very interesting.

Kim: Unfortunately, I think it's true. I think it's still very true. I think that there's kind of a sense that if we can pose something as being an issue of child safety, then mothers have no rights. Then that priority takes away any kind of rights of a mother and any kind of rights of a child. The children don't have rights to do things either if there's any risk to their safety. The problem is being alive is risky. Being a person in the world is risky. In the book, there's a point where I interview this social scientist at UC Irvine. She makes that point where she says if some politician -- I won't name any in particular. If some politician got on TV and said, "I love women so much. We just need to protect them from something terrible happening to them. Women are abducted by strangers or assaulted, so women need to not be out in public by themselves just because I want to protect them," we would say, thanks but no thanks. We'll take that risk because we want to be people who move through the world. What this woman said, this social scientist, was that people will say that that same principle doesn't apply to children. She said, "I don't think that's exactly right." Obviously, it's not the same, but children do have some rights. Children have some rights to some amount of risk.

Zibby: It's so interesting, wow. Now the most recent article you wrote for The Times, which was so good -- I am divorced. It's been five years. I'm remarried. COVID has elevated some issues under the surface, as most stressful things are want to do, and so I found myself particularly relating to your essay. You almost point out that -- why don't you say more about it? There are so many different pieces of it that I found so interesting, not the least of which is that you had to do all the court stuff and finalize everything with your lawyers on Zoom, which is crazy. I also felt like having just finished this book, I was like, oh, no, they broke up. [laughs]

Kim: That’s the thing. We did break up. As I say in the essay, he lives across the street. I live here with my partner who's hiding upstairs. He lives with his partner. I should say, we were separated for a long time before we divorced. Some people have written to me. They were like, "How did you find another partner in the middle of a pandemic?" We were separated for some time. I think that there's this idea that divorce sort of has to be a tragedy for children and for family and that if you get divorced from someone it means that you hate them and you blame them and there's all this conflict and animosity. I'm not going to say that there haven't been any moments of conflict. Obviously, there's conflict when you're dealing with a big change. Overall, I think that we both chose to take the view that this was something that was good for both of us and that the fact that we were moving from being husband and wife to be coparents and friends and next-door neighbors for the time being, that that didn't have to be a tragic thing. It might be hard. It might be a transition. We were married for sixteen years. We didn't kill each other. We brought two amazing kids into the world. We could cherish that and still say, this is the best thing for both us, and see it as a kind of growth and restructuring of our family as opposed to a destruction of our family, which is, I think, the traditional way we think about divorce.

Zibby: I love that the divorce lawyer said she was in family restructuring. That's so genius. I loved it.

Kim: Can I ask you, though -- I'm just curious.

Zibby: Yeah, sure.

Kim: You've been divorced for five years. Were your kids pretty young when that was...?

Zibby: Yes. They were very, very young. I have four kids. We separated when my youngest was about nine months old.

Kim: Oh, wow. Stressful.

Zibby: I'm not supposed to talk about it publicly. It had been brewing.

Kim: I just was curious more about, did you find in the years that followed that there was still a lot of stigma to being a divorced person with small children? That's the thing that I found interesting. I guess I thought both things. I've internalized the stigma, but then I was also conscious of it. It is funny that it's 2020, but that it's still sort of stigmatized to have kids and to say, no, I'm getting a divorce and this is for the best. There were still so many people who sort of viewed it that it has to be a horrible thing. Did you have a similar experience?

Zibby: Yes, I did. I was shocked, actually, by the responses when I started telling people about it. By the time I finished telling and everything, I realized it has all to do with their own marriages. People's responses, it's all about how they feel. It has nothing to do with me and my kids and my kids' lives or anything, but I didn't know that at the time. I've tried to tell people who I know who are newly getting divorced, take all the responses with a grain of salt. I had people bursting into tears and being like, "But your kids." I'm like, yeah, I know, but I actually believe strongly this decision is the best thing for my kids. I still believe that. It sucks. It's hard. It's not to say I don't cry still a lot when they leave or if they get sad. Now my youngest is almost six. This has been their whole lives, my two youngest. My oldest are twins. They're thirteen. They're used to it. A lot of people were, "Are you sure? The poor kids." I'm like, you don't know what it was or what it will be. You just don't know.

Kim: I think you're right that it has more to do with people's own insecurities. There's a lot of people who don't want divorce to be a reasonable choice. Obviously, people like you and I aren't going around saying everybody should get divorced.

Zibby: No, no. It's terrible. I wish I weren’t.

Kim: Of course. When people say, "But for me, for us, for our family, this was the best choice," to some people who have put up with a lot or who have accepted really unsatisfying relationships, it's like, oh, that's a choice? That's a reasonable choice you can make? It can be very destabilizing.

Zibby: Yes. So many people feel so trapped. They want to leave, but they can't or they can't afford to leave. There's so many reasons why people stay. Even yesterday, I just saw this ad for Purina Dog Chow that said there's this new initiative because forty-seven percent of domestic abuse victims don't leave because they don't want to leave their pets, which I thought was so interesting. Okay, so now there's another wrinkle. It's very hard. If you can and you need to and you're able to, that's one thing. So many people aren't able to. You're just a mirror. You're just a mirror for their failings or their feelings of failure or their sadness at what they don't have and whatever.

Kim: It circles back to the issues in the book about when -- it's true that it's very hard for a lot of people to leave. Some of that, I think, has to do with our lack of autonomy as parents and our lack of a support system, our lack of wider community of social safety nets. People feel trapped sometimes in unhealthy marriages because women literally are trapped. They're financially dependent, dependent in other ways. That's something that hopefully will start to change.

Zibby: The only times that I really feel like I'm in a community -- not to say I don't have a lot of friends and people I love and people who are great with my kids, but it's only when something absolutely terrible happens where I cannot move when I actually feel that. "Hey, can you pick up the kids today? Would you mind taking so-and-so home with you?" or something. Then people, "Of course." I would love to help other people. I hope that this is different in some other communities where people -- I feel like in your experience and mine, that's not what it has been like, which is a shame.

Kim: It is a shame. I think it's very much due to this culture of the nuclear family and this idea that it's every mom for herself. It's every nuclear family for themselves. To ask for help or to reach out is to sort of --

Zibby: -- Impose.

Kim: Impose on people instead of, no, this is what humans do. They help each other out. One of the saddest parts of writing Small Animals was when I talked to this woman, Debra Harrell, who's an African American woman. She was charged with endangerment or neglect for letting her daughter play unsupervised in a park while she went to work one day at McDonald's because she didn't have childcare. Her childcare fell through. The daughter was completely fine. It was a very busy park with tons of adults. There was a camp running there. There were a lot of kids. When I was doing that part of the book, I watched online -- they since took it down. There was a video of her being interrogated by this police officer after she was arrested. He just kept belittling her and saying, "This is your daughter. She's your responsibility, nobody else's. Nobody else is responsible for this girl." She was crying as he said this. It just was so heartbreaking. On the one hand, this woman knows that no one else is looking out for her kid. This is a single mom who's taking care of her kid on her own. Second of all, I thought, it's true, and isn't that a tragedy? Isn't that so heartbreaking that we live in a country where nobody cares about other people's kids and that the expectation is that you look out for your kid and no one else is? No one's going to do it for you. It's really sad. Again, I hope that that's something that we'll change as we reexamine everything.

Zibby: What's coming next for you? What are you up to and all that now?

Kim: I am actually working on a new book about marriage and divorce and female friendship and a bunch of other things. I think it's going to be called Nobody's Okay: On Marriage, Madness, and Rebellion. It's a memoir and general nonfiction. It kind of takes up where Small Animals leaves off. It's the last six years of my life in navigating all of these things. I'm very excited about it. My agent was going to send it out to publishers about a week ago, but we decided that everyone was too distracted by the election. Literally, I went to Starbucks, and the woman giving me my coffee wanted to talk about the debate with me. Everyone's very anxious and focused right now. We said that we're going to send it out after the election. That hopefully will be my next project.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Kim: Gosh. My advice is to just be compassionate with yourself and to see writing or whatever you're trying to do as -- to look at the long game. I write a little bit about this in Small Animals and more so in this new book. I think about the many years of feeling like I wasn't a real writer because I hadn’t published a book and feeling like even though I was writing all the time, it didn't count somehow. Of course, that just made everything worse. This is not very original. A writer is somebody who writes. Just because you haven't reached the milestone you might want to yet doesn't mean you're not going to get there eventually.

Zibby: Love it. Thank you, Kim. Thanks for talking today. Thanks for your book and your article and all the rest. I can't wait for your next book. That's awesome.

Kim: Thank you. It was great talking to you.

Zibby: You too. Take care. Buh-bye.

Kim: Bye.

Matthew John Bocchi, SWAY

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

Matthew John Bocchi: Morning, Zibby. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Zibby: Your book was so good. I loved it. I could not put it down. I read all the way to the end, every word. I was like, don't even talk to me, when I was reading it. Congratulations on writing this beautiful memoir.

Matthew: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Zibby: Can you please tell listeners what Sway is about?

Matthew: The quick synopsis and the easiest way to put it, in terms of themes and messages, I think that my story encapsulates resilience, inspiration, hope. My story is, really, it starts off as a 9/11 story, but it shifts drastically. My dad worked at [indiscernible] on the 105th floor of the north tower and passed away on 9/11. The reason why I think 9/11 is such an integral part of the story is because it's the catalyst to everything else that happened in my life. Not only that, but it's really when my life changed. All of our lives really changed. For someone who was personally affected by it, it had a really long-lasting effect on me. The early years after 9/11 I spent trying to figure out how my dad died. Hearing what I was told from family wasn't enough and didn't suffice for me. I wanted to have every single minute and second of those last moments outlined and figured out. I really wasn't going to stop until I got to that point. As the years went on, I was really, really direct and poignant with my questions. I had facts and data and research to back up all the things that I was asking. This inquisitiveness really was what was my initial downfall that led to me being sexually abused by an uncle through marriage. As that transpired, the feelings that I started to accumulate of guilt and shame -- embarrassment was a big one. All those feelings led me to start using drugs and alcohol as a way to cope with my feelings and emotions. I went down a path of drug addiction for many years and by the grace of god was able to pull myself out of it. I've maintained my sobriety since. My story, it's a continual downfall as it progresses. Of course, there's a happy ending. There's a rising at the end.

Zibby: Wow. As I was reading it, just one thing after another, I wanted to reach out and hug you and be like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this is happening. Now this is happening. Yet you kept -- I guess you just keep on keeping on. That's what you have to do. You just did it. Your resilience is amazing, I guess is all I'm trying to say.

Matthew: Thank you.

Zibby: Can we talk first about 9/11? You're one of the first people, if not the very first person, to write a memoir from the experience of a child of someone who had died that day. My best friend actually also worked in the north tower, and roommate. It's so crazy for me to think that just a few floors up your dad was there and was my friend was there. What happened that day? Like you, your obsession with or what you later called an addiction to watching the footage religiously, almost, is something I shared at the beginning just watching all of the jumpers as so many people probably did to see if they could spy their loved one. What were they wearing? That's such a unique phenomenon to this event, I feel like, that need to understand what happened. Tell me a little more about your compulsion to research and that need you had to understand the end and why it felt so important to you to know.

Matthew: If you look at 9/11 itself from a third-person, third-party point of view, especially someone who grew up in the tri-state area, people who knew the World Trade Center, to be witnessing what was going on with obviously the planes, but then watching people voluntarily jump to their deaths as a way out, as a way to not have to deal with what was going on inside, it was so baffling and perplexing to me that I was amazed by it. On some sort of philosophical level, I think I was looking for myself in also trying to figure out my dad's story. I am the oldest of four boys. Being a nine-year-old kid at the time, I think that there was just a need to figure out who I would become as a person in a sense too. Really, by watching these last moments to try to figure out my dad's story, I was trying to figure out who he was as a person. Although, you can't figure that out in someone's final moments in something so tragic and horrible as what was going on in there. I was extremely naïve, and I thought I could.

What I started to realize through time and watching certain documentaries was people, they at least claimed that they were getting some sort of closure by finding out, good chance my loved one was a jumper. This picture pretty much looks like them. They knew. They had their answers, and that was that. For me, I thought maybe I would have my closure and my peace and know, okay, my dad made a few phone calls after the plane hit and then he realized there wasn't a way out, and that was that. But I didn't have that, so I held onto that. I held onto the belief that maybe he was able to figure out something. Maybe it wasn't so bad for him in there. As I continued to watch those videos and stuff and look at the pictures, seeing the tragedy unfold, it's just a horrible thing to witness, obviously. Knowing that my dad was in there and that's where he spent his final moments, it just really overwhelmed me to a degree. I'm at a point now where I know the answers. I know what I'm going to know and what I will forever know. I also know that I will not be able to find out every little detail. That is something I'm okay with today, but it took me a long time to get to that point to really be at peace, so to speak.

Zibby: Wow. The intensity of the search and all of the ways that you wrote about it were just so moving, and even how you described the fact that he was able to call and that you do have a record. You knew that he knew, and then as all these details emerged, how you had to make sense of that yourself.

Matthew: I think too, he really did know. That's the thing that's fascinating to me too, is the fact that he called two minutes after the plane hit. I think that there was already a level of uncertainty inside the tower. I have a feeling that things got bad pretty quickly just given the fact that he faced that head on. It would only get worse, obviously, as time would progressed. Also hearing that, too, from my family -- I didn't get to witness that myself. I didn't get to go through that myself. I didn't get to speak to him. I wanted something for myself. I wanted something greater that I could hold onto, that I could cherish. There's so many positive stories. There's good Samaritan stories like the guy with the red bandana and stories like that where there's a happy ending for the family. I was so determined to find that happy ending story. Even though my dad didn't make it out, maybe he did something miraculous or heroic before he passed. That was something I was really trying to figure out and search for. All it did was bring up more anger and sadness and confusion.

Zibby: Also, for you, exposing yourself at such a young age to that graphic, awful, violent, just disturbing imagery, that is a lot for anybody to take on. That in and of itself, it's like watching a trillion R-rated movies at the wrong age over and over. The trauma of that, how do you even get over that part?

Matthew: And it's real life. That's the thing. I'm twenty-eight years old. I have a lot of friends who live in Manhattan. You go in there, and you look at the skyscrapers. Even the skyscrapers that are forty stories high, that are not big, big buildings, that don't overcome the skyline, and you realize that the World Trade Center was nearly triple that, and that's what people were watching. People on the outside were watching that. Twenty-eight years old now. I've had friends who finished my book and they told me, "Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I actually started looking at some of that stuff. After reading what you said and wrote and how you wrote it, I was curious to see for myself." I don't know to what degree they looked at it. I didn't really ask. I think for so many people it was so easy to try to forget back then, especially around my age. I was obviously relatively young. For people like myself to be doing what I was doing and searching what I was searching, it got to a point where it was completely voluntary. I wanted to try to find something.

I think that people realize how almost heartbreaking my story is, or what I went through as a child. Many of my friends who also lost their dads on 9/11 did not go through that. They didn't want to know. They didn't want to look at that. Maybe they just accepted it for what it was worth. Their dad died, and he's not coming back. That's that. For me, I wanted something more. That's just the story of my life. Nothing was ever enough for me. I always, always, always wanted something greater. Even with writing my book, I can't even tell you the amount of rewrites I've done. Now the book's in hardcover out for everyone to read. I haven't even read it back to back yet. I've read it on the PDF and stuff. If I read that book -- I opened up to the epilogue. I'm searching through it. I'm finding words that I would change. This is what I do. I over-critique myself. I'm just trying to grow as a writer, but I look for things that I wish I wrote differently or maybe had a different change on a certain way to express something. There's certain things that I wish I did differently. I guess I could for the paperback.

Zibby: There's always the paperback. I want to talk about your writing, but just one story which will probably make me sound crazy. I had always believed that my friend Stacey had died instantly because the plane hit right at her floor. Her mom said the phone rang once right at that time. Stacey always used to get to her desk and call her mom. Our belief collectively was that she had gotten to the office, sat down, started to call her mother, the plane hit, and she died instantly. That's our theory because nothing ever turned up. Then I had a session with this medium. This sounds so hokey. Until this session, I didn't really believe in mediums. She said all this stuff about other people that I just thought there was no way. Anyway, she told me that that is not what happened to Stacey and that she heard a loud explosion, so she must have been elsewhere in the building, and that she was with a nice older man. The two of them were trying to find their way out, and then it happened. I don't know if I believe that or not.

Matthew: She was trying to find her way out and then the building collapsed?

Zibby: Yeah, or something. I don't know. The thing is about these things, we'll never know, but now I have two theories in my head.

Matthew: With mediums, I've had one experience with them. Actually, I take that back. My mom has had one experience, or at least that I know of. I never have. I did a psychic. It wasn't the same. Those, I don't maybe believe to a certain degree. If I really believed in them, my book would've been a best seller three years ago. My mom had an experience with a medium that was -- she said what you just voiced, that there was no way of knowing some of these things. I've been kind of curious myself to check that out and see. It’s one of those things where it's like, do you believe it? Do you want to believe it?

Zibby: I know. I don't know. It gave me some sort of sense of peace.

Matthew: I think it should.

Zibby: Hearing it from someone else, like, I know what happened, but she's okay now. Anyway, whatever. Let's go back to your writing of this book. [laughs] The writing itself is amazing. Some memoirs, along the way they might say how much they loved writing or something. I didn't get anywhere in here that you had turned to writing as a coping technique at all. The drugs and all the other stuff you did were very spelled out. I was wondering, when did the writing start? Have you always loved to write? It just didn't come through in the text. How did you do this? The crafting of it is exceptional, all of it, the time, the way you go back and forth in time, the language, the immediacy. Tell me about that part.

Matthew: First of all, thank you for that. I, like I said, critique my writing. I'm really overly critical too. I do probably what authors and writers should not do 101, read people's reviews of your book. A lot of people -- not a lot of people. I focus on the minority. That's the way it always goes. I have a lot of good reviews. Then I have a couple reviews that have said where I either skipped out on parts on maybe fast-forwarded through parts or something. I briefly mentioned it towards the end about how I used to journal as a kid. I'm not sure if you remember that part. What it came down to was -- my mom's brother is a music journalist. He gave me my first journal when I was ten years old. He wrote a little note on Christmas morning. He said, "I've gone through hundreds of these journals in my life. Write whatever comes to your mind. Don't overthink it." In the beginning, I did that. I wrote. Whatever came to my mind, I wrote. Then I started treating it sort of like homework. I kind of strayed away from it because I didn't really like that. I would go to bed and write, "School was good." There was nothing deeper.

I was talking about this, actually, with one of my friends from Villanova. One of my biggest regrets in college is that I didn't pursue creative writing the way I should have, or writing in general. I didn't pursue my goals and dreams because, obviously, I was going through addiction. I think I was fixated on continuing the story that people wanted for me, which was go into finance or whatever. When I got sober, I started speaking at schools. As time went on in my speaking -- I started off as the basic 9/11 story, into drugs, now recovered. Then I started going a little bit deeper. Then when I got deeper and I talked about the abuse and my obsession with my dad's death and all that stuff, people were really blown away by that and said to me, "You should write a book." For me, the journaling started to continue in sobriety. I shouldn't say started to continue. It remerged in sobriety. I started writing just basic things. It was just whatever was coming to my mind, and the pain, physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain, all the things I was feeling. Then in 2016, I said, you know what, I'm going to do this. It was the tail end of 2016. I started writing. The way I did it initially was -- I didn't even have a laptop at the time. I had nothing. I borrowed my brother's laptop.

I started dating stories. I still have that original document. I started dating the stories. It was like, December 2014, then I would just write out the story. I finished about fifty thousand words in three months. Then I went to an editor. He was like, "I think you need to do this, do this." We worked on it. I wrote another thirty or forty thousand words but then cut out fifteen. Finished the first draft in 2017 and then started pitching it to agents. Nothing was happening. Then I started rewriting it. That's where I think I started to find my voice big time because I really had to get vulnerable. There was a lot of things that weren’t there in the beginning. It was very surface level. I got really deep and basically just said my whole entire story in graphic detail. I think that's what people are amazed by, is the honesty, especially as a heterosexual male, saying some of the things that I said, that I admitted to happening. Most people don't want to talk about that stuff. I think that vulnerability was important for me in order to grow as a person too. Then I continued rewriting stuff. The first ending that I had was not well-rounded. It was strictly chronological in the beginning. I didn't want that. I was viewing it almost as a movie. I wanted it to be a little creative. I wanted parts to move around. That's when I started moving segments around. I had to find the right spots for them. I finally had these clicking moments where it was like, all right, here it is.

For instance, my dad's car, that scene with my uncle going to get the car was initially way in the beginning. I changed that to move it to the end and then finished the story with us driving the car. As time went on, I found my voice. I did. Now I write every day. One of the issues that I ran into, not issues but sort of a dilemma, was I was writing the way I write now for my nine-year-old voice. I had to go back in time to not reflect. It had to be in the moment. What were you feeling in the moment? For me, to remember some of those details was really, really hard. I had to put myself back there to do that. Same thing with fourteen-year-old. I know what I look back at now and how I reflect on these moments. That can't be laid out for the reader. It has to be in the moment and as it progresses. What's a beautiful thing now is that I can write now. I'm twenty-eight years old. This is my writing now. It's a little bit slower with dragging out imagery a little bit more. I'm trying to really slow it down for a reader like describing the cardigan, things like that, whereas I felt at times I had to condense certain things, certain parts of the story where maybe I would like to have expanded a little bit more or gone into a lot more detail. It gets to a point too, as you know, with the editing process where, does it need to be there? Is it really going to move the reader one way or the other? I'll be honest with you, as a kid and as time went on, did I envision myself to be writing? Absolutely not. There's days that I don't want to do it, of course. There's days that it feels like a job in that sense. Then there's a day like today, a muggy day, where all I want to do is read and write. It has its perks and benefits sometimes.

Zibby: I literally posted a picture yesterday of me reading a book because it's so disgusting outside. I'm like, that is all I want to do. That is not what I am doing. Reading, writing, cozy, maybe under the covers, oh, my gosh, that would be a dream day. That's one of the perks of writing. Are you working on another big project? What are you up to?

Matthew: There's a couple things. I was approached by a couple screenwriters about adapting it to a movie. I would like to have some sort of say in the writing process for that. There's been discussions of that. That's sort of where I'm going. The thing is, writing a memoir versus a screenplay, it's a totally different type of writing. I'm a little hesitant in a way if I want to put both feet into that fully. The thing with my story is, I knew this going into it, I could've split it up into three books, essentially. I didn't want to do that at the end because what I felt was especially 9/11 and the sexual abuse led into everything else that I did. I don't blame them. I don't use them as reasons for doing what I did. I know I have an addictive personality. It's just who I am as a person. I felt that it would be remiss if I didn't include it all because these all played into each other. It was just a domino effect.

People were saying, "Maybe you should split it up." I didn't want just a story of me, 9/11, and all that. I wanted it to be different. I think it certainly is. Now where the book ends versus where I am today is about four years. Besides the epilogue where I fill the readers in on where I am, where it ends was four years ago. I have four years of, in sobriety, struggles and other things that I went through. I'm debating about taking an Augusten Burroughs type of spin on it and continuing. Then maybe in continuing the story, I can also really touch back on things from my childhood that are not in Sway where it's not going to be repetitive. Obviously, there has to be a creative and artistic approach to do that. I don't want it to be repetitive. I think that there's a lot of stuff that has transpired in the last four years that people who were really into my story and wanted to know more about where I am today and all that stuff will definitely -- I think they’ll find it maybe somewhat satisfying and see a little bit more growth in the last four years.

Zibby: I also really wanted the continuation of how everything that happens towards the end affected your family. You had one sentence about it, like, this destroyed my family, or whatever. I was like, wait, what? What happened?

Matthew: That's the big thing. It was really tough because I could've continued writing and writing and writing.

Zibby: You ended in a good place. I'm just saying now talking to you. I don't want you to give away the ending to other people.

Matthew: To answer your question, yes, there's a lot that I could fill in for that. There was a lot of things that -- we could take it offline -- that happened that I think I could tie it back creatively to when it happened originally and some of the feelings that came.

Zibby: So you are definitely never going back to finance? Is that it?

Matthew: Unless some place wants to pay me some great money to sit on a board and do nothing. Look, I said this about two and a half years ago. I was working at the company my dad would be working at now if he was still alive. I was there for about four months. Then I didn't pass one of my financial series exams. I was presented with the opportunity to leave or basically drive myself to insanity by staying there. I was like, all right, I'm leaving. Back then, I was like, I'm going to take my dad's death and the feelings that he had leading into his job and that day of wanting to quit and not having the chance to do it and finding his true passion in life, I'm going to do that. I didn't do it. Now after finally getting the story out there -- the publication's there. It's out. Everyone can read it. A couple of my dad's colleagues reached out to me, one of which was in the book. I changed his name, but he's in the book. Peter is his name in the book. He's very proud of me. He's like, "Your dad would be very proud of you. Your dad would be really proud of the fact that you're not trying to go down this road." He's still in finance. He was trying to get me to come work for him. This was recently. This was right before COVID. He's like, "I'm not going to even offer you a job if you beg. You're good at this. You should pursue this. This is what is your path." I think I found my path, so I'm sticking with this. I'm sticking with it.

Zibby: Good for you. That's the best ending to any story, is finding your purpose in life. I think the only perk, perhaps, of 9/11 is that it caused so many people to switch gears and say, this is important to me. Life is short. This is what I'm going to do.

Matthew: Life is short.

Zibby: It just took you a little bit longer, maybe. One question I just have to ask is -- I know we're almost out of time. I want to know how your brothers and your mom are doing and how they felt with the book coming out.

Matthew: They're all doing well. My mom, as time went on, I'd print out, old-fashioned, print out a chapter at a time. She got to chapter five or six around the time where the abuse starts. We had to put it on pause for a little bit. Then when I got my complimentary copies from the publisher, she was like -- I got them about a month or so prior to it coming out. I was like, "Here's your book." She's like, "I'm not going to read it. I'm not going to read. I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it." She didn't know what to do. Then she got to her own answer of, you lived it, I can read it. She read it. My mom is not a quick reader, but she breezed through it. She loved it. It's difficult for her to read, obviously. My brothers, they're very proud of me. They're very proud of me for getting my story out there and being diligent with it and determined and persistent to get it done and get it out. To my knowledge, I don't know if they’ve read it in full. It's hard for them. It's hard for them because they didn't have the same effect with 9/11 that I did. They didn't go through the other things that I went through. They know about it, but to read it on paper I think makes it a little bit more real. It certainly is the same for a lot of my family too. My mom and dad, both of sides of my family, for them to read it just makes it more real. This is not some random author. This is not some fiction piece. This is their nephew or their grandson, whatever. I think in some ways it makes it a lot harder to swallow too because how crazy that this all happened under everyone's eyes? No one was expecting that.

It was really cool for them seeing me on TV and stuff. I hit a couple of my brother's favorite spots, so he was really happy about that. It was important to be up front and address this and be okay with who I am. To say that on national TV -- my mom was saying to me during the release -- that was the one thing that they were asking me a lot about. How are you feeling? How are you doing? It's just so surreal as you're going through it that it almost doesn't feel real. Four years ago, I was writing this book. I was thinking at first, I'm going to write it, I'll get an agent in probably like three months, maybe a month. I'll reach out to ten agents, and one of them is going to grab it. You know the process. It's hard. To think that it actually happened is, to me, the biggest success that I could have. If it does really well, the best-seller list, obviously I'll be happy, but that wasn't my end goal from day one. The little messages I'm receiving on Instagram and stuff like that are, to me, what I did this for. Parents of sons or daughters with addiction, people who went through 9/11, that's why I did this, people to be like, thank you for telling your story, and that they can get something out of it.

Zibby: That's the true gift that you leave. It's a true gift. Last question. What is your advice to aspiring authors?

Matthew: It sounds very cliché, but just don't ever give up. Look, I think it was really easy at some points in the writing life -- not that self-publishing is a sign of failure. It's not, but I was very close to either just saying, I'm not going to get this book out there ever and I'm not going to even self-publish it, or I'm going to self-publish it and then we'll see what happens. I didn't go the traditional way either. I don't have an agent right now. I was able to get in contact with my publisher who's a little bit smaller. We worked out a great deal and everything that was okay with me and definitely has its perks for sure. It was not an easy step. The rejection is what I think adheres a lot of writers and prevents them from really continuing to pursue it. You get a couple rejections from agents and you think, my story's not good enough or my writing's not good enough. It's really hard to hear it, but you have to just keep going. You'll find your right fit finally. One day, you'll find that fit. I remember there was one time I had an agent who lost their uncle on 9/11. I'm reading her response. I'm like, oh, my god, this is it. I finally found the one. Then she's like, "But it's too close of a story for me. I can't do this." It was really hard for me as someone who has insecurity issues to begin with and self-confidence and self-esteem issues to get those rejections. Sometimes they're just so bland that it's like, my story sucks. My writing's not good. It's very easy to get in your head. You really have to stay persistent and know that your writing is good in whatever way. Someone's going to find something from your story, whether it's nonfiction or fiction. That would be my advice. Keep going. Don't give up.

Zibby: That's excellent advice. Matt, thank you. It was so nice to talk to you.

Matthew: Thank you. Likewise. It was awesome.

Zibby: I had a few more questions. [laughs] Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for this beautiful book complete with this amazing cover, by the way. I didn't even really pick up on what this was until halfway through the book. I was like, oh. Well done.

Matthew: Thank you so much. We'll certainly be in touch. I'll keep you posted. By the way, thank you. I have to thank you again for nominating my book for the GMA list.

Zibby: Of course.

Matthew: It was so funny. When I found out the connection to that, I was like, oh, my god, I have to reach out to her. I have to try to get on her podcast.

Zibby: I actually had meant to reach out to you. Then things got crazy. I'm so glad that you did. It's perfect. I wanted to have you on from when I first got ahold of it.

Matthew: Thank you so much. Bye.

Zibby: Bye, Matt.