Mikki Daughtry and Rachael Lippincott, ALL THIS TIME

Zibby Owens: I had such a great time getting to know Mikki Daughtry and Rachael Lippincott who are the number-one New York Times best-selling team of Five Feet Apart which was made into a hit movie. Now they’ve come back with their second joint novel called All This Time which was absolutely beautiful and a tearjerker -- I didn't see the twists coming, which always makes me feel like a dufus -- but is fantastic. Mikki is a really well-renowned screenwriter and is actually writing the new Dirty Dancing movie which is super exciting because I think Dirty Dancing -- I saw it in the theaters like twelve times when it came out. I'm pretty much obsessed. Rachel is hard at work on her third novel and used to be an athlete and just got married to her wife. Her pictures are on Instagram and they're beautiful, as we talked about. Anyway, I hope you enjoy our episode.

It's so great to be talking to you, ladies. Thank you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Mikki Daughtry: Thanks for having us. Zibby, I wanted to say I'm sorry about your -- I follow you, and I'm sorry about your mother-in-law. That is a shame.

Rachael Lippincott: I saw that as well. I'm so sorry to hear that.

Zibby: Thank you. It's been a crazy time. I just started doing podcasts again. Now I feel like I can at least have my old shred of my personality back and life goes on type of thing, not that I don't think about them all the time and write about them all the time. At least I can put on a happy face and chat and all the rest. Thank you. I appreciate your saying something. On to your book, All This Time. First of all, so good. Did not see any of the twists and turns coming. I hate when I have to admit that because I feel like I read so many books that I should know. I should be prepared. Oh, my gosh, what a heart-rendering story. I'm so glad I got to read it early.

Mikki: Thank you for reading it.

Zibby: For people who don't know what All This Time is about, can you just tell them a little more about the story and also, following your huge success with Five Feet Apart, what it was like embarking on another project?

Mikki: I'm hesitant to say what it's about. You know why. It's about love and loss and how we overcome that and the people we find to help us through and how dreams play into that and how the things that we want can become reality or reality may not be what it seems in the sense that when we lose something, we're caught in this maelstrom of pain and sorrow and guilt sometimes. It really sometimes takes a helping hand to get out of that. On occasion, that helping hand becomes the person you were always meant to be with. That's really all I can say without grenade-ing most of it.

Rachael: That was something that really drew me to this story, and also Five Feet Apart in a way, was the exploration of grief and the twists and turns that that journey in particular takes. I absolutely loved that bit when I read the screenplay for Mikki.

Mikki: The way it came about in this sense was -- Five Feet Apart, it was really the strangest, the way that we got the book written. It was exact opposite of what normally happens, which is there's a book and then they buy the movie rights and there's a movie. In this case, there was a movie that was being made. They were like, this would probably make a really good YA novel. Let's reverse engineer it. That's how that came about. When Rachael came on board, she adapted the screenplay from Five Feet Apart. We were already filming. In this case, it all happened -- Justin Baldoni, the director of Five Feet Apart, had a friend, Claire Wineland, who had CF. She told him, "I can't ever be with someone with CF, someone who would understand me, because we're not allowed to touch each other or even get within six feet of each other." That really sparked with him, an idea for a story. Then I wrote the screen for that. Rachael adapted it. Justin found me through the screenplay I had written, this story. That's what happened.

When Five Feet Apart was such a success, we were like, what would be a really good sister book to this? What would be a good companion piece kind of thing? I really feel like the tone is the same. It's a similar feel. It's definitely a similar genre. It's got all the same hallmarks as Five Feet Apart, but it's totally different. It's like your cousin who looks just like you but is nothing like you. It's kind of like that. This is the script that he read of mine that made him want to hire me to write Five Feet Apart and to come up with that story. It felt like the perfect companion piece, and so Rachael and I -- I was like, "Hey, you want to do another one? Here's another script. Do you want to take it?" The funny thing about this one is, honestly, it was an adult script. The original piece, my original work, was an adult script. It wasn't a YA. It was a pretty easy shift, though, to rejigger it and to rebreak it to fit a YA format. You just age them down. Their concerns are different. I can tell you a lot about the original. It’s heavier. It's much more painful. You can see, Zibby, having read this, where if you age that up and give them a family, where it goes from there.

Zibby: I don't think I can handle that. [laughs]

Mikki: Right. It's a whole different -- oh, we can't talk about it. If it were out, I could be, this is everything that happened. It came from there. Then I aged it down. I went back through the script and said, let's take some of this drama, not the drama, but let's take some of this adultness out of it and go for what are important to young people just starting their lives instead of people who are in their lives. That's how it came about. I am a chatty chatter, so you have to shut me down.

Zibby: No, it's good. The thing about this book that really hit me too is that I felt I could relate not only to the main characters, but also the mom.

Mikki: Oh, my god, I love her.

Zibby: That ages me somewhat. I'm forty-four, not like I'm ancient.

Mikki: I'm right there with you.

Zibby: I felt like her pain and the fact that she had lost her husband and her trying to -- your child's pain is almost worse than your own pain. Probably, it is worse than your own. It actually is, I should say. Her watching the pain that Kyle has to go through -- Kyle's my husband's name too, by the way.

Mikki: I saw that.

Zibby: That really got me too. You didn't go into it too much. You could just see by her actions, how she was feeling. It just broke my heart, the whole thing.

Mikki: Thanks. I really wanted there to be a family situation that wasn't the, oh, I hate my mother. That is a reality for a lot of people where they're constantly in that battle with their mother. I wasn't. There are relationships with teenagers who have really great relationships with their parents. I wanted to speak to that. His mother is not his problem. I didn't want that to be some kind of situation there where we're focused more on, he's fighting with her and he's trying to break away from her. He's lost what he thinks is the love of his life at the beginning of the book. I think I can say. It's on page three.

Rachael: I also think another element of that that really spoke to me was the fact that she is a single mother. They have this really deep connection because for so long it's just been the two of them, in a lot of ways, against the world, similar to Will in Five Feet Apart. I just loved that. He was suffering so much. You would see her at the door trying to connect to him, trying to find a way to open the dialogue back up like it used to be. I really just loved the portrayal of the single mother like my mom, fighting it out. You guys go through everything together. You always have her. You always have that connection, that person that is always in your court, always trying to think of your best interests, to help heal your heart however they can. That was really a cool part of the story for me too.

Zibby: It's so true. By the way, Rachael, I was looking at your Instagram. Your wedding pictures were so [indiscernible/laughter]. I just had to say, those dresses, oh, my gosh.

Rachael: Oh, gosh. Thank you so much. I'm still in a state of [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Zibby: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] that you can research somebody and know the most private moments.

Rachael: It's like I was there. No, I'm kidding. Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

Zibby: I also really liked how Kyle is getting over a football injury. At one point, that's the worst thing he could ever possibly imagine could happen. Then life, what you think is the worst thing ever suddenly gets put into perspective and something even worse comes along. You're like, oh, gosh.

Rachael: You're like, this is rock bottom. Then it is not.

Zibby: Now this is a really big deal. I thought that was a big deal. I feel like injured athletes -- actually, my husband Kyle was an athlete as well. I guess he is an athlete, but he was in the professional tennis world for a long time. He used to play football and all this stuff. When he stopped, it was a whole big thing. What does an athlete do who's not really doing their thing anymore? I think there's not that much. I remember at the time I was like, "Let me find you some articles. Let me find you some books." I was googling. Come on. There are so many athletes out there this happens to. There must be a ton of literature. Of course, I'm more into fiction. It was just nice to see that here. I know it's just one injury, but just what happens when your dreams stop and it involves your body instead of just your mind. Tell me a little bit about choosing that.

Mikki: That was part of the aging down, actually, to turning it into a YA. What would be important to this guy? It's exactly like you said. I wanted to give him something that he thought was his life. He'd think, this is going to be it. This is forever. I've got it planned out. It's everything. He hinges every part of his personality and his worth on that. When that taken away from him, he turns to his girlfriend and kind of puts all that weight on her. We get to see, at the very beginning, what that weight has done to them. It was a big part of the aging it down for YA, to give him something that he thought was his whole world that he could lose in a shattering way and think, oh, my god, it's the end, it's over. We're like, oh, buddy, no. Oh, hun, no, no, no. There's a bigger world out there, and it gets a lot worse.

Rachael: That particular aspect spoke to me on two levels. One was on a very personal level. I was a huge athlete growing up. My freshman year of high school, I played three varsity sports. It was my thing. Then I had spinal fusion surgery going into my sophomore year. In my head, I was like, I can heal up. I could play junior year, maybe still get into college. Then I just had this huge crisis of conscience where I just could not play sports. I was healing. I was recovering. All of a sudden, I wasn't an athlete. My body wasn't necessarily my temple anymore. I kind of had to look around at my life and see what was still there, what was important to me, what I liked doing, when this huge aspect of my personality that was so big when I was thirteen, fourteen years old, what else there still was. Another element was back when I was in college, I wrote part of a manuscript that was about a boy who was in a really bad accident.

Mikki: Oh, you did? I didn't know that.

Rachael: Really? Yeah. He played football. We're just surprising everybody today.

Mikki: We say that, that things cross over sometimes. It's really weird. I didn't know that. I didn't know you wrote anything like that.

Rachael: I started writing a manuscript about a boy who was a football player who got into an accident. His entire life changed. He could no longer play the sport he loved.

Mikki: Totally [indiscernible] out of your head, then.

Rachael: When I read the manuscript, I was like, oh, this is it but way better. It panned out. It kind of felt like it was a character that I knew and a scenario that I understood a little bit of, so it was cool.

Zibby: Why did you originally have spinal fusion surgery?

Rachael: I had scoliosis. My spine was just not doing the thing it should've been doing. Just straightened it out.

Zibby: I guess with writing at least, unless your fingers are -- it's so different.

Mikki: Just don't break your fingers.

Zibby: Yeah, just don't break your fingers.

Mikki: Break everything else. Just don't break [indiscernible].

Zibby: How do you two work? How do you do it? Tell me your process, how the magic happened.

Mikki: This one is different. I have a full-time writing partner, Tobias Iaconis. I always want to call him eye-ack-onis now because my phone pronounces his name phonetically. One of these days, I'm going to literally say his name wrong. It's Tobias Iaconis. We write our screenplays together, not necessarily this one, but we do a lot of writing together. Rachael and I have worked, so far, only in the sense that I have given her a fully formed, fully fleshed-out screenplay with the dialogue and a lot of the prose. She adapts that. She's adapted that with Five Feet Apart and with this one. She's adapted those stories into the books. It's a little bit of a different process where we don't -- oh, sorry.

Zibby: Are you a part of the adaption, or do you just hand it off?

Rachael: She's a part, especially with this one, with All This Time, a huge part. With Five Feet Apart, it had just gone into production. I think a lot of that was her reshaping that screenplay. I would keep getting emails like blue edition or purple edition or pink edition as they started going into production. I think a lot more of that was her sending it to me. We obviously had long phone calls, especially at the beginning where she was telling me everything in detail. I would ask questions. I could always bounce everything off of her. Especially with All This Time, we had a conversation about it a couple days ago, actually, just talking about how she felt that the scenes were super detailed. It was almost already in book form at a lot of parts.

Mikki: Oh, I know what you're saying. I was like, what are you talking about? We were talking about when you get a production script, it's very lean on details. It's mostly dialogue because all of the set design, all that stuff, is taken out of it because they’ve done the work already. What I gave Rachael for All This Time was a very meaty -- I knew it was going to her and not into production. I knew it was going to her, so I was able to really give her a beefy, beefy script. It was kind of a quasi-script-novel-y thing.

Rachael: Somewhere in the middle, for sure. It isn't just a complete handover. I always have Mikki on call. She's looking through everything, commenting, changing, revising.

Mikki: Rachael does not get any sleep. It's just like, oh, my god, there she is again.

Zibby: Sorry if I'm a little slow on this. I'm sorry for the sirens also. This book, you said you started with the screenplay. Is this already in production?

Mikki: No. Lionsgate has bought the rights to the book for the movie. This started, like I said, from the original screenplay that was the adult version. Then I aged it down. When I aged it down, I filled in a lot of the stuff about what it would be. It was in chunks. I would be writing. The editor, Alexa, would come back and say, "Maybe there's some scenes that this could happen." I would write the screenplay scenes and then give them to Rachael, and she would adapt them. It's how we had our little wheels greased the way we worked together like two little cogs with Alexa cranking it.

Rachael: Definitely. I would get a draft back that would have notes from Alexa. Then I would also get additional scenes from Mikki as well that would just be additional parts of the story to fill out certain scenes, certain characters, certain backstories. It would be both at the same time and then integrating them together into the next draft that I would turn into both of them.

Zibby: Got it. Now that I finally have gotten this process down, so then when Five Feet Apart became a movie, were you a part of that, Mikki? You had written that screenplay.

Mikki: Oh, yes. I was on set. The funniest thing is when -- it was really close to production when they said, "Simon & Schuster wants to turn this into a book." As Rachael was saying, she got a script. Then I was on set. I would be like, oh, we're changing this scene right now. I wonder if Rachael has gotten to this scene yet. I would quickly text her and be like, "Rachael, Rachael, have you done this yet?" She's like, "I'm working on it right now." I'm like, "Stop! We're changing it." We get a lot of comments. They're like, oh, my god, the movie is so close to the book. We're like, well, yeah.

Rachael: For a reason.

Mikki: I was like, "Don't write that yet. Here's what happening." I would shoot her off some pages.

Rachael: I think that answered your question.

Zibby: I have it all straight. [laughs] I saw that you're already working on a third one. Are you doing that together?

Mikki: Rachael. Nope.

Rachael: I'm working on a third book. I can't talk about it as of yet. I'm currently working on it. I'm in my second draft of it. I'm deep in the edits. Deadline is coming up. That one's just a solo one. Mikki is also working on --

Mikki: -- I'm back in movie world.

Rachael: Many a thing.

Zibby: What are you working on in the movie world?

Mikki: Dirty Dancing.

Zibby: No way!

Mikki: Yeah, the sequel with Jennifer Grey. I can't say anything, obviously, about it. That's really exciting. Then Tobias and I have a children's horror movie at Netflix that's going into production in about a month. They're setting up in Toronto right now, building the sets and hiring everyone. That’ll go, hopefully. You never know what's going to happen. Hopefully, that keeps trucking along. I shifted seamlessly right back into my movie writing, screenwriting. I'm like, what is that word? [laughter]

Rachael: What's that thing that I do?

Mikki: Screenwriting. Maybe another novel for me at some point that I write. We'll see. Right now, I'm firmly entrenched in making movies.

Zibby: That's so neat. Did you already finish writing Dirty Dancing too?

Mikki: Working on the second draft right now.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, wow.

Mikki: I don't know if I'm supposed to say that. I don't think it's any secret that we're writing. We're writing.

Zibby: They announced it was going to be a movie. Someone has to write it. I'm sure they probably linked to you somewhere. Jennifer Grey has become a friend of Kyle's and mine.

Mikki: She's amazing.

Zibby: I met her through another friend. Then we've all gotten together in LA. This is so great. Not close friend, obviously, but I'm going to have to find a way to barge myself onto that set. I've never really been on a movie set before.

Mikki: Oh, my god. Do it. Do it. Do it. It'll be a little bit. I'm not sure when they're planning on shooting. There's a ton still to do. Yes, you should get your ticket now.

Zibby: If people ever are out and about and on sets again.

Mikki: If that happens. I know. They're doing it. I don't know how much you know about it. In Toronto, and rightfully so, they're being very, very careful. They fly you in. They're not letting many people in. You have to stay in strict quarantine for two weeks. If you're in a hotel, you can't come out of your hotel room. The police come by every day to check if you're still there. This is what I've heard. I know that it's true because they're working on [indiscernible] up there. If you're caught out at all, it's a $750,000 fine per incident.

Zibby: What?

Mikki: Per incident. Don't fuck around. Canada's not playing, but they're filming up there.

Rachael: $750,000. Ooh, I'm sorry.

Mikki: Per incident.

Rachael: Oh, my gosh.

Zibby: [Indiscernible] the people who made that up. They're sitting there. How did we make?

Rachael: That's a scary amount.

Mikki: Let's make it prohibitive. Don't you dare walk out. It's like if you walk out of your room to get a soda in those two weeks. Then once your two-week quarantine is up -- like I said, this is what I've heard from them setting up for [indiscernible]. When your two-week quarantine is up, you're out. You're out and about. You're part of the community. You wear your mask, but it's more lenient. You go about work and your life and stuff.

Zibby: That's amazing. Good luck with that.

Mikki: I'm not going. We're staying home for this one. We're skipping this one. Normally, we would go. It's very prohibitive when we're working on this other -- we're working on Dirty Dancing. It's a lot of restrictions to not be able to move freely and do the work that we need to do otherwise.

Zibby: What kind of books do you two like to read in your spare time? Maybe you don't like to read.

Mikki: No, I'm totally a reader.

Zibby: I don't want to make any assumptions.

Mikki: I'm a writer who doesn't read. I'm sure they are there. I love British novels. I find that I really tend to lean toward Australia. I love Liane Moriarty. She's so much fun. Anything she writes, I'm in it for a fun little romp. Then I love Kazuo Ishiguro. He's probably my favorite, and Julian Barnes. Those two British guys, I can't. I can't even. It feels so small, but it's so huge. The fact that they are able to have such an impact in such a realistically grounded world that they write about, it's like you're there. Remains of the Day, just stop. I love Gabriel García Márquez, obviously. One Hundred Years of Solitude, how are you a writer and not married to that book? That's the epic masterpiece of all time. Those are the kind of things I read when I read. Then I read a lot of 1930s and '40s novels. It's really fun because it's of the time. The World's Illusion is a really good one. It's very political. I really love it, set in the times of industry workers and how they were treated. It's a narrative. I like stuff like that. I'm kind of a weirdo. I live in the past, for sure.

Rachael: I read all different kinds of things. I'm a huge fan of Nina LaCour. She's probably my favorite YA author. I talk about her a lot. Her book, We Are Okay, is absolutely my favorite. I really love it. A lot of times there's a conversation between plot-based and character-based stories. I just love that. It's essentially just a book of a girl alone in her room drinking tea and reflecting on life and grief and all these other things. It's a very quiet book, but so much happens. She's just so talented at saying exactly what needs to be said and nothing more and nothing less. I just love that. Oh, man, other books that I really love. I love Laura Taylor Namey's book coming out later this year, A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow. Absolutely fell in love with that. It's wonderful. It's also set in the UK, in Britain. That's a really great read. I'm also a huge fan of mysteries. My favorite is Agatha Christie. You turned my brain on to the British thing, so I'm going to just keep going on it. I really love the Miss Marple mysteries. That's classic, feel-good read, especially during the craziness of the past few months. I've been checking into a couple of my favorite ones of those. I also really love the BBC episodes that they did on them. Those are probably my favorite.

Zibby: What advice would you guys have for aspiring authors or screenwriters?

Mikki: That's the question. Work your ass off. Don't expect any favors. If you get a favor, be grateful. I always say this, once you start getting there, please don't buy your own hype. It's easy to think that you did it by yourself and to think that it's all you and you're so important, you're so vital. Yeah, maybe, but a lot of cooks go into the kitchen. A lot of cooks are in the kitchen. A lot of the flavor, whether -- I can only speak for myself. I hate saying that ubiquitous you. I can speak for myself that at the end of the day, I've done the work, but it's everybody around me and their opinions that I trust and respect and love. They're all in there. The stew is better with a lot of flavor, if that makes sense. I take everybody's salt and pepper, and I throw it in there. I'm like, let's see what happens. I definitely would say, and I say this pretty much every time I'm asked, if you're doing it alone, don't be afraid to reach out and let people help you. Even a bad note is a good note in a way because it's going to expose something that may be missing. They may not be telling you in the right way. It's something that we call in the business, the note behind the note, which is, I really wish he did this here. That's not really the issue. The issue is something's missing in that moment that makes them wish for something different. That's what you have to get to. Without that bad note, you wouldn't look at yourself and say, oh, there's a hole here. Rambling again. I write much better than I speak, just let me say.

Zibby: So do I.

Rachael: That was perfect. I feel like I shouldn't even go know after that, honestly.

Mikki: What do you have for new and up-and-coming writers? That's kind of where we're different. I'm in my thing. You're just getting in.

Rachael: That's a really good question. Something that was really big was just -- you aspire to be a writer. You always dream of it. It was really hard for me to prioritize, especially when you don't have a book deal or you don't have a screenplay that's been optioned by film or something. It's really hard to find time and give yourself the time to devote yourself to this passion and devote yourself to sitting down and putting words on the page. I think it's so important that you carve out that time and that space if this is what you love to do. Really, just let yourself have the freedom to write. Let yourself have the freedom to put things on a page and explore the stories that you really want to tell. That was always really hard, especially when I was starting out, just giving myself the time and what I loved doing, the opportunity to really work.

Mikki: I can speak to that, what you're saying, Rachael, just a bit for screenwriters. If you're just coming up and you're trying to, like Rachael said, find the time and find the motivation to stick with it, find a screenwriting group. I was in a screenwriting group, Twin Bridges. It was everything to be held accountable for pages. We'd go and we read our pages. We read each other's work. We're commenting and critiquing and helping and giving notes and learning very much about the craft. Joe Bratcher ran the class, Joe and Judy, his wife. They taught at UCLA. A very, very integral part of my getting started professionally was to have the motivation and the responsibility of showing up with the pages I said I would show up with, and then learning. That's where I got that whole "it takes a village" kind of thing because everybody piles on and tells you what they think. You're fielding ideas. Do it. For screenwriters, that would be. I would say if you are looking for something to hold your feet to the fire, get yourself in a writing group.

Rachael: I would agree totally a hundred percent with that. Also, you have this space. Forming a writing group is really important because then you not only have somebody to bounce your ideas off of and grow from, but you also have this accountability, like what you just talked about. If you show up for one of your weekly get-togethers and you don't have anything on the page, you're going to look a little foolish.

Mikki: You're the asshole.

Rachael: That's really sound advice.

Zibby: Amazing. Thank you, ladies, so much.

Mikki: Thank you, Zibby.

Zibby: I can't wait until your next book and, Mikki, your movie. I, embarrassingly, have not watched Five Feet Apart. I am going to do that.

Mikki: You should.

Rachael: Something to do today.

Zibby: I'm so excited. Kyle and I are going to do that. That's my plan. I'll just call him and let him know. [laughter] I should've done it before we talked.

Mikki: We weren’t talking about that one. This one was more important today.

Zibby: It was so good. I'm so excited for you guys, All This Time.

Mikki: Thank you. Thank you so much, Zibby.

Zibby: It was great to talk to you.

Rachael: Thank you so much for having us on.

Mikki: Nice to meet you. Thank you so much.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Mikki: Bye.

Rachael: Bye.

Cat Deeley, THE JOY IN YOU

Cat Deeley: Yay! I did it. Hello.

Zibby Owens: Hi. How's it going?

Cat: Really good. How are you doing?

Zibby: I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for doing this podcast with me.

Cat: Oh, my god, you're more than welcome. Are those all your books?

Zibby: Yes. Well, these are part of my books. They go all the way up and over. I have more in the closet.

Cat: You've color coded them.

Zibby: Yes, I have.

Cat: That's very, very, very organized. I'm slightly jealous of your organizational skills.

Zibby: I must say, I didn't do it all myself. My husband and his business partner and his girlfriend, they were here for July 4th weekend. I was in the process of redoing the whole thing. They're like, let's all do it together. Everybody was here picking up books. It was a team effort.

Cat: I hope you served margaritas or something like that or did something to get it done faster.

Zibby: We did. We had a proper celebration, so not to worry.

Cat: Good. [laughter] How are you doing?

Zibby: Good. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Your children's book is so precious. I love it. The Joy in You, it is so adorable and heartfelt, oh, my gosh. Congratulations on the children's book.

Cat: It was always an ambition of mine to write a book. I loved English literature at school. I had the most amazing teacher. If I had gone to university and life hadn’t taken the turns that it did, I probably would've studied English literature at university. It was always something that was in the back of my mind. I'd love to write more, actually. I have two sons, Milo and James; Milo, who's four; James, who is two. Like any other mom, by the time it reaches the end of the day, I am frazzled, worn out, tired, completely inarticulate. I can't really string a sentence together. I know what I want to say, but I can't actually get it out. The idea behind the book was if I could say everything that I wanted to say to them in the most eloquent way possible, so have all the thoughts and feelings and emotions and ideas [indiscernible] and then top and tail it with love, that what was essentially what I was trying to create and have a book that you could talk about and you could discuss. It would open up conversations between you and your child too.

I think it's so important to engage with them and any ideas that they have or thoughts that have, actually talk to them and be as honest as possible, obviously within what's appropriate for their age and things like that. How I find my own boys anyway is that they are very resilient. They can cope with anything as long as you tell them the truth and you're honest with them. The minute you aren't or you hide things, it's the unknown that scares them, children. That suddenly becomes the boogeyman under the bed. They get the vibe from you too when you're doing that. The more we can be open and honest and engage in conversations about our kids, whether that's about emotions or life or situations or whatever they are, I think the more it gives them their chance to be able to be empathetic when they get older and also reach their full potential as an adult too. That's what you want. Essentially, it doesn't matter where you come from or what your background is, you want your children to be happy and kind. We all want the same thing, happy and kind. That's what we want. We want them to be able to empathize with other people because I think that will create a better world than what we're living in right now. I think everybody wants the same. When I first started doing the book, it was actually just going to be about boys to begin with. Then I started playing with ideas and talking to Random House. They were like, "This is silly. It doesn't matter who you are or what your gender is. These are big ideas that everybody should talk about."

Zibby: I couldn't agree more. I have four kids of my own. They're a little older, five to thirteen. Yes, happy and kind.

Cat: Four?

Zibby: Yeah, four. [laughs] So I'm well-versed in the children's book world. I'm very reliant on them and grateful to great children's books. Like you, at the end of the day I'm a mess. When I find a book that both I want to read and they say, "Read it again. Read it again," and I don't mind, then that's amazing.

Cat: It's so weird. As parents, we've all got those books that touch us as well. That was the other thing as well. I wanted to write something that I loved reading. The Giving Tree and The Wonderful Things You Will Be and all of those type of books, How Much Do I Love You? I'm a weepy mess by the end of them.

Zibby: Me too. I pull it out. They're like, "Read this one." I'm like, "Oh, no. This is the one that makes me cry." They're like, "Really? Let's try." I'm like, "No. Every time I read this book, I cry." Then I cry. They can't believe that a simple book can elicit the same huge reaction every time even though I know what's coming. [laughs]

Cat: I know. You know exactly what's happening. Listen, I think that that is a really important thing for children to see too. I was not a big crier. I was not hugely emotional, actually, before I had my babies. It's this weird thing where -- you know how they say the day your baby's born the mom is born too? There's a definite almost palpable switch that happens to you, I think. It's definitely changed me, but in ways that I actually really like. It's definitely made me much more patient and actually much more loving towards other people as well. It's interesting how much it changes you.

Zibby: Do you think it pervades your work life too, like every interaction, or mostly in the personal sphere?

Cat: No, I think every single interaction, actually. I always feel a bit like even when I'm just out and about, you just never know what's happening in somebody else's life at that specific moment or time when you interact with them. I think it's very important that we approach people with just a little bit of kindness. By the way, I think ourselves too. So often as women, we're the care-ers. We're the sorters. We're the people who organize. We make things happen. We get things done. We split up fights. We feed people. We cook for people. I think that we could do with being just a little bit kinder on ourselves too.

Zibby: That is definitely, definitely true.

Cat: Sometimes I juggle and I'm like, oh, my goodness, what have I done with my day today? You think about it and you're like, we should be running this country. [laughter]

Zibby: Sometimes, though, at the end of the day, I'm like, ugh, I didn't spend enough time with this kid or that kid. What did I really get done on my list to do? I didn't do enough of this. I feel like you can easily have those metrics not live up to your expectations. It's a matter, I think, of picking the right ones.

Cat: Agreed. I think the kinder you are to yourself, actually, the more you get done. Whatever your moment is -- for me, I love yoga. That's my thing where I move my body. I would probably have the body of a seventy-six-year-old. I'm very stiff. I'm not flexible at all. I've been doing yoga for twenty-five years. Still, I'm just like a regular person. I'm not like Madonna or anything like that. It makes me feel good. It makes my body feel good. It reminds me to breathe. It just gives my head a bit of space. Whether yours is shopping, reading a book, watching a movie, praying, meditating, whatever you want to do, you find your thing. Even if you take twenty minutes when you need to, take twenty minutes.

Zibby: I think that's exactly what your book is teaching kids. Find your thing, whether it's dancing or wandering or anything they want. You can't do it wrong, painting, dreaming. The line I loved the most in your book was right at the end when you said, "If you ever lose your way or you don't believe you can, just look beside you. That’s where I'll always be cheering you on and believing forever in the wonder that's you." That's so sweet. I love that.

Cat: It's even better when James sits on my lap. He calls himself Jamesy. I said, "Who's this?" He's like, "Jamesy." He's like, "Who's that?" I'm like, "Mama." I just dissolve into an emotional puddle of a mess. My thing, when I think about it, I think that small people, they're like little seeds that just need feeding and watering and light on them. Then their brains kind of explode almost like trees and branches going off them. I feel like the more we can stimulate them and try all different things with them, the better they are. Either they’ll find something that they really do love or they won't, but that's a life skill that they’ll learn too, learning to cope with something, A, you're not very good at, or B, you don't really like. That's perfectly okay as well. I just always think, what if Stevie Wonder had never played the piano? What if Tiger Woods had never picked up a set of golf clubs? What if Picasso had never picked up -- there are millions of people out there that have not reached their full potential just because they haven't tried what they want to do.

Zibby: That's why sometimes I'm like, what if I was supposed to be the most amazing sculptor but I still have not tried to do -- what if? How would I know? [laughs]

Cat: Totally, or knitting or [indiscernible] or whatever. There are plenty of things. What if you'd never tried it? I feel the more we can throw at them -- I don't mean exhausting them or anything like that, but try this, it's something new. Let's try this. They don't have to be Stephen Hawking. I remember being a kid and a moment of joy that I remember was I was bodyboarding in the ocean, not surfing because I wasn't big enough. I was probably about eight. I remember being in the ocean. The ocean's a little bit scary when you're eight because you can't quite tell what's coming where and how it's going to -- that almost adds to the excitement of it. That's what made it so great. Either the wave that comes is going to tip you off and throw you down to the bottom and roll you around or it's going to send you hurtling into shore. You're going to squeal with delight, and I'm going to race my brother back and it's going to be amazing. I remember staying in the ocean until my feet were blue. I loved it so much. Even simple things like that, I think that's one thing that we're all learning from being in the situation that we're in right now with the global pandemic. It's about finding the simple things that bring you so much joy. It doesn't have to be -- yeah, you can learn a new language. You can learn a musical instrument or whatever you want. It can be a simple as making the perfect cup of coffee or going to the ocean or making the perfect Victoria sponge cake, whatever it is. There are so many lovely things that you can do. It doesn't have to be brain surgery. It can be small but really scrumptious at the same time.

Zibby: I totally agree with that. I think people who might not know you would argue that you did find your thing. You've been a host of a major TV show. You've gotten these all primetime Emmy nominations. By any objective standards, you're a success at work. You have that. How did you find that? How did you figure out, oh, I would be such a good host for a reality TV dance competition show? I wonder if other people would be really good at that. How would they even know? [laughs]

Cat: I do get what you mean. It was never that specific. You know you have those books when you're little where you have to write what you want to be and how tall you are and then you do different pages? It said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I said I wanted to be Julie Andrews. That was what I wrote at eight. Unfortunately, Julie Andrews has Julie Andrews covered. [laughs] That was kind of what I wanted to do. Then I was quite academic at school. I quite enjoyed school. I liked studying and stuff. I did have someone ask me a question, you're so lucky, you do what you do. But I grew up in a very small town from working-class parents. Entertainment wasn't the family business. There is no reason why I should be doing what I'm doing apart for the fact that I really like people. I don't care whether you're Beyoncé or Meryl Streep. I just like people. I love chatting with people. It's my thing. I like working out how they tick. I like conversations. I like how it's formed their life and where they’ve gone and how their journeys happen. That's part of the reason why I love the dance show too. Some of the stories you hear, you would think, oh, my goodness, that would be enough to crush the human spirit. Yet somehow these kids not only survive and thrive and move on with their lives, but they also channel the negativity and spin it around and make it positive. They put it all into doing this thing that they love that they have this amazing talent for. Don't get me wrong, they have to train. They work. They do all that. I think that you can find it. You don't necessarily have to be born into it. It's what I said. There is no reason why I should be doing what I'm doing, but I am. You know what? There will always be people who are doing better than me and driving Rolls-Royces. That's fine too.

Zibby: Who wants a Rolls-Royce anyway?

Cat: Exactly, unless you're going to drive it into a swimming pool.

Zibby: In a music video or something. [laughs]

Cat: That would be fun.

Zibby: That's amazing. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors, particularly people trying to write a children's book?

Cat: Oh, my goodness, no. I don't have any. This is my very first one. I would love to write more, actually, maybe a little bit older next time. I have an idea for another book that's based on a little girl who's a tomboy. Then I also have a very dark one which is to do with babies and baby monitors which is a bit Gone Girl. I'm not going there yet, but I have that idea too. My next book that I've got to read is Normal People. Have you read that?

Zibby: I'm embarrassed to say that I have not read it, but I have watched the show.

Cat: And?

Zibby: So good.

Cat: See, I don't want to watch the show until I've read the book. I'm going to read the book first. The show is sitting there waiting to go for me. I want to read the book. I'm always like, book first, then show.

Zibby: I know. I usually am too, but my husband wanted to watch the show. I was like, I'd rather do something with him.

Cat: Let's blame him. Blame him.

Zibby: I'm going to blame him, yes. I've had the book for a very long time. I'm embarrassed that I'm the only one in the world who hasn’t read it.

Cat: I haven't either, though. What's his name? What's your husband's name?

Zibby: My husband? His name's Kyle.

Cat: Blame Kyle. Let's namecheck him and blame him.

Zibby: Yes, I blame him for everything. [laughter] Did it take a long time for you to write the children's book? Did you just pound it out in one day? What was it like?

Cat: There was lots of backwards and forwards. There's lots of backwards and forwards. Sometimes I also disappear down the hole a little bit where I've got an idea. For instance, there's a line in the book which is, "Dream as big as the night full of stars." I started to then research what the biggest thing in the universe is. It's called the borealis blah, blah, blah. I disappeared down this hole. Random House said to me, "You do know you could just say a night full of stars and that would bring you back to where you started to begin with? But you disappeared into the abyss of the most enormous thing in the universe." I was like, yeah, fine. You know what it is? There's so much backwards and forwards because sometimes you need to be accountable to people. I think it always helps to get people's opinions too. You think that writing a children's book is so easy, but there's so many layers to it on what you're trying to say and how you want to say it and where we're going next. It's quite tricky. It was a lovely, lovely experience too, lovely experience.

Zibby: What's coming next in terms of -- then I'll leave you alone. I know I've taken a lot of your time. What's coming next in terms of your regular life versus your book life? Do you know with the whole pandemic what's even on the [indiscernible/crosstalk]?

Cat: No, I don't really. Essentially, what's happened is Milo has been off school since March, so that's six months of homeschooling. I'm lucky. Milo is four, so I don't have to teach him algebra and Latin. I've taught him to read in the time that we've had at home, which is lovely. I would never get the chance to do that normally, ever. It's really special. Then James is two. He's got all these cute little -- he's gabbling. He's got all these weird little picadilloes with his language where he's like, "Mom, mom, mom, [child noises]," which is the cutest thing too. Normally, I would never get the chance to hang out as much. They're at that age where they want to hang out with me. It's not like I've got two teenagers at home where I'm thinking, they’ve not seen their friends. I've actually been really lucky. Then Milo goes back to school in September. We do all the press for the book. We're doing worldwide press as well. Then when the pandemic hit, I was shooting a new show for Disney. We shot about five of them. We've got to wait and see when we can go back into the studio and protocols and all that kind of stuff. Basically, it's just a big wait and see, I think like everybody, right?

Zibby: Pretty much.

Cat: How have you been? Have you been okay?

Zibby: That's a whole nother podcast. You don't want to know my whole story.

Cat: How old are your children?

Zibby: Five, seven, and I have two thirteen-year-olds.

Cat: Twins?

Zibby: Twins, yes.

Cat: Wow, that's a very full house with no school.

Zibby: It's a very full house. They are going back to school. I know that's happening for at least a month or two until they cancel it again. At least, I'll take those mornings that they go back.

Cat: By the way, I think they're going to do the same here too. My four-year-old doesn't understand social distancing. They're going to go back and it's going to be flu season. They're all going to get runny noses.

Zibby: We just got our flu shots today, actually, because our pediatrician was like, getting COVID and the flu, forget about it. Got our flu shots done. I am not overly optimistic about the schoolyear, but at least for a little bit. Like you, I love talking to people and finding out what makes people tick, and so I'm glad to have been able to do that with you and get to know you better and all the rest. Thank you so much for all of your time.

Cat: Lovely to talk to you too. Thank you so much. Lovely to chat to you. I'm so jealous of your books on your wall.

Zibby: Just --

Cat: -- Invite some friends over and give them margaritas.

Zibby: Invite some friends, and you'll get it done in no time. [laughter]

Cat: Thank you.

Zibby: Thanks, Cat. I wish you all the best. Buh-bye.

Cat: Bye, darling. Stay safe.

Zibby: Thanks. You too. Bye-bye.

Cat: Bye.

Lisa Donovan, OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER

Lisa Donovan: I'm glad to meet you.

Zibby Owens: I'm glad to meet you too.

Lisa: I admittedly have been so far up my own ass with this book for the last three or four years. [laughs] I am just finding spaces where I'm like, I can't wait to read this blog. I can't wait to watch this. I'm just glad to know of you now. All of the connections that get made when you come out with a book are really special, so I'm glad to know that you're out there.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. I feel like I've gotten to know so many people. I used to be a big reader anyway, but not like this. Now every memoir, every book I open, I get to know so much about people that our paths might not have crossed in life. Now look, it's like magic. I love it.

Lisa: It feels like a really special time in that arena. I was just talking with someone. We were having a little pre-interview. He happens to be a really good friend of mine. We were just talking. I said, one of the really great things about this has been making connections with other writers. There have been so many women writers who've written memoirs this year. They're all so different. Phyllis Grant is a really great example of someone who came out with memoirs that are very parallel. We've never met, but we've kind of looked at each other like, how have we -- obviously, we know. We were both doing what you just did this morning, which is juggling it all and creating this career and creating these lives for ourselves and our families. We kind of are all coming out of the woods at the same time like, there you are. I knew you were out here. I was just too busy to find you. Now we're telling similar stories, but in really different ways. It's really special. It's a really neat time.

Zibby: That's awesome. Even earlier today, I did podcast with an author, Alyssa Shelasky, who wrote a book called Apron Anxiety. It intersperses recipes and stories. Then Phyllis Grant also has been on my podcast, and you. I'm loving all these food, memoir, growing up, and experience. If this were real life, I would say let's all get together. I'm going to do an event with you guys, but you know.

Lisa: That would be great.

Zibby: Someday.

Lisa: I really hope that we can put a pin in all of those things and really make them happen next year. It's been very nice and relaxing to be able to do this from my desk and my bedroom. [laughter] That's been a nice energy restorative experience. Whereas the traveling, I used to travel a lot as a chef, it really starts to take its toll on you when you're traveling four and five times a month, especially when you're flying. I was definitely getting a little threadbare in that way. I really want next year to be -- I'm trying to keep a little ledger of every time I say that or someone says that to me, like, event with Zibby and Phyllis.

Zibby: Will you please put it in? We could something now. I just feel like it's not as great. It's not the same as when you get a group together. I love pairing people who have so much to discuss. Please write it down.

Lisa: An energy in a room is so nice. I'm really starting to miss that zeitgeist of people talking together and an audience listening. Admittedly, at the beginning of this, I was like, phew, I don't have to sit on a stage and talk about myself. Now I'm kind of like, but look at all these people that I can sit on the stage with and talk about what our work is. It's going to be a great opportunity. I'm keeping notes. I'm trying to remember all of the plans that we're dreaming of now and make them happen next year.

Zibby: Put me at the top of the list. Once the floodgates have opened and we can all come rushing forward and planning stuff, can't wait. Tell me more about writing your book. Tell me about when you decided your life would be a book. Then how did you take everything that happened and put it on the page?

Lisa: As cliché as it sounds, I think I'm one of those weird people that always was a writer even when I was a kid. That's how I processed things. I'm just a writer. Whether I'm good or bad is to be determined, but that's how I process my experiences. Did I ever think I was going to write a memoir of this caliber as far as personal exposure goes? No, not even close. I think that there was a time in the world that changed and became available where I started to realize that I knew I was going to use -- there are plenty of stories in my life that are great material for storytelling and that are good stories in and of themselves. In my head, I thought, that’ll be for a novel. That’ll be for short stories. That’ll be for screenplays. That’ll be for my creative process later in life. I'll use all these interesting characters in different ways as a writer. Then the world sort of changed. I left the restaurant industry and had a real significant experience, a personal experience, with myself of, the word is getting so overused, but a reckoning with myself of the ways in which I tried to maneuver the world and the ways in which that was effective and then the ways in which I know it was damaging to me and other women around me and the acquiescences that we make and the stories we don't tell, the stories we don't even share amongst ourselves as women and how private and shamefully secret a lot of these stories become for us as we move through the world.

Really started to take apart what the parallels were between the acquiescences and this very patriarchal infrastructure, patriarchal and racist system out in the world that we all try to ladder-climb in with this self-accountability of what I was doing to bring power to that world by keeping these things so private and carrying all of these things as if it were some sort of burden. My own life was a burden to the world. The space that I was going to take up with my stories was burdensome for the world. We get these ideas of the ways in which women are supposed to be accommodating. I really started to get frustrated by the boundaries that I had to live in because I was playing that game of not being burdensome to the world. I wrote the essay about the restaurant industry. It got categorized as a sort of Me Too essay in the larger zeitgeist of the conversation that was happening at the time. That was a moment for me where not only did I realize how good it felt to get all of that language out of me, the response was really interesting to me. How much people seemed to need to hear those small stories that were contained within that essay was a real awakening for me.

It was a real moment for me to realize that there's power in telling our stories. There's power in talking about sexual assault at a time when it takes forty women to bring one man down in our culture. That problem in our culture and society rests solely on the fact that we acquiescence and keep these stories to ourselves for so long. There's no space for us to have the conversations about rape and abortion and about what it means to be a woman in all the ways, beautiful ways, connective ways. It just felt like a really great opportunity to finally share what was a very true experience for one woman in the world. The more we can start opening up those spaces, I think that's how we can create societal change about how we treat women in this country. I didn't realize I was going to ever write a memoir in this capacity, but it happened. Here we are. [laughs] I look really forward to writing some fiction and some things that are a little less making me feel completely exposed to the world. There's that level of it too. I do understand, for me, why this was important. It's also difficult to lay it all out there bare.

Zibby: There's a lot in there. Some of the scenes, I was just like, oh, my gosh, Lisa, I can't believe it. The one with your ex and the baby on the bed, I won't go into it, but my heart was breaking for you, and then the way that his mother even handled your relationship after and just all of it.

Lisa: The trick of those kinds of stories is how frequent and common they are for women out in the world. Here I was, this figure of note in my arena, in my industry, and viewed as someone was no nonsense and strong and independent and hardworking and created my own -- all of the strong, independent woman tropes surrounded me. I thought, it's really kind of messed up that no one truly understands how a strong woman is built. They think that we just appear. I really wanted to give some language to what creates and builds these strong women out in the world. It's oftentimes, in fact, probably never ease and because they just plowed their way through. No, there was definitely something to build that strength and that power and that ability to manage greater circumstances that I think people just assume you were born with.

Zibby: It's like people working out in the gym. I'm envisioning this muscle man type of weight area of a gym. You can walk in. People have different baselines. You have to go through the pain of lifting for anybody to get stronger. You can be relatively strong, but in order to really get strong, you have to put in some sort of tissue-breaking hard work. For emotional strength, it's exactly the same. It has to come out of somewhere. You have to break something down to build it back up again, unfortunately. I wish it hadn’t have happened to you that way and all the rest. I have to say, when I started reading your book, your table of contents and the way that you structured each chapter, the title and the accompanying food, was so brilliant that I took a picture of that page. I have been meaning to post it, but of course I haven't remembered to do so. I get such a kick out of well-structured and creative, clever formats. I really loved how you did that.

Lisa: Thanks. I wasn't sure if I was going to have chapter titles. Then it just started happening really naturally where each chapter sort of became an essay in and of itself. The two words that had each chapter became for me almost like an outline. It just helped me stay on both a thematic structure as well as a feeling of that time. I'm glad you said that. Thank you. It just came about naturally. I was like, well, I'll just keep it.

Zibby: I loved it. When you were writing, take me through the writing process. You had these titles. Did you have a list of all of them first and then you filled in it, or as each one came? What was the writing process like? Were you sitting right there? Where did you write all this?

Lisa: This is where I did it all, and sometimes on the ground in a puddle. [laughs] The writing process was -- it's the first time I've ever done anything this big. I've written a lot of essays. I've written a lot of larger format sort of things, but I've never written a book. Obviously, it's my first book. It was an interesting process because I had to learn to be messy, and that's not something I'm good at. I can be. I am messy in my creative efforts, but I oftentimes don't share that. The part that was so hard about the writing process for me was presenting disastrous work to my editor so that we could work out of it. I spent a lot of time in those early months of starting this book being really cloistered and really trying to edit myself before I gave it to my editor. It took me some time. That's just a result, I'm pretty sure, of working in a pretty high-stress kitchen being a pastry chef. My standards for what I'm willing to present are very high. I hold myself to a very high standard when I'm engaging with another professional. In a kitchen, for example, if you're the pastry chef -- if you're a cook or a sous chef, it's a little different. As the pastry chef, as the chef of my department, I would get ideas and I would do all of that messy work very privately. I would figure it out and do the math and make all the equations work. Then when I had something that felt as close to finished as possible, that's when I would say, hey, I need you guys to taste this. It's going on the menu soon. I would take notes. Then I would tweak and do that kind of stuff.

I think I went into this book with that idea of, I have to get this right before I show it to her. It took me some time to get out of that training that my brain was used to. Once, she brought me closer and she was like, "You just got to brain dump, brain dump, brain dump." There was a lot of stories that just came out. I just let them come out. Then we found our structure from there of, look, what's our overall conversation here? For me, it was really important to make sure that the conversation was significantly and nearly entirely about how women engage and find and love and care for each other and all of the complexities of that. I'm really intrigued by the ways in which women move around this world together. It feels like we are all part of this -- it makes me think of, what's in the ocean? The channel that moves through the Gulf Coast, the Gulf Stream. It kind of feels like we all have this similar movement around this world and we all are tethered to this way of experiencing and communicating. There's something really powerful about that. There's also something very painful about that because of these shared experiences and traumas and things that we experience as women that, frankly, men I think can't understand on some level. It's not like men do not experience trauma, but I think women have very different experiences in the world. We're tethered together in all of these ways. That, to me, I really wanted to talk about the complexities in which women move through this world together and alone.

Everything became, is it useful to have this? Is this story useful to that bigger picture of talking about the complexities of how women engage with one another and also what I'm hoping to pass to my own daughter and how I'm hoping to leave her with less of all of this generational undoing and unlearning? That is a huge priority for me. That was a huge priority for the book. Also, just keeping to those themes. Then structurally, what happened was I just started taking each chapter like it was its own short story or a short essay, its own essay. Then after we compartmentalized it that way, we started to do a little bit of weaving so that they didn't feel so chopped, like it didn't feel, hopefully, like a short story collection. What we wanted was to weave them together. It was an evolution of how we could best get all of these things to work as a whole. It was a really beautiful experience. I have two editors. They're both women. It was just this really special, really truly wonderful experience. Penguin Press has been one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. I hope I can write for them forever. It's a really, really special house. I'm very proud to be one of their writers. They have taken such good care of this book. I can't even tell you. It's amazing to me.

Zibby: I'm so glad. That's wonderful. Has your daughter read this book?

Lisa: Parts. She's fifteen. She'll be sixteen in a few weeks. She's picking it up and putting it down, picking it up and putting it down. I think they're nervous. Both of my kids are a little nervous. My son is twenty. He's like, "Mom, I love you." We had a lot of talks before as I was writing these stories just about his comfort level and what he was comfortable with me sharing. For a while, it was mine and his experience. He's like, "No, I don't feel like that was my experience. I feel like this is wholly your experience. You worked really hard to make this not a thing I even have to recall. I feel so incredibly removed from any of these stories." He was fully supportive, but he's also not quite ready to read the book. He's like, "I think there are just some things I'm not ready to know." I'm like, "That is totally fair." Maggie has read, I don't think she's read it all the way through, but she's cherrypicked some chapters. I actually don't think she's made it to the last chapter, which is interesting because that's the part that when my husband read it, he just was sobbing.

I'm going to cry. He was like, "This is such a gift for her. It's going to be something that she keeps. She can revisit her whole life. It exists forever now. She can look at this when she's seventy and know this was something you felt when she was growing up. It's the best gift." I was like, oh, my god. You don't really think about that. You're not really thinking about your audience. There was a lot of retroactive -- if you think about your audience too much, you'll never write the book. You'll just be obsessed with, who's going to think what of what? It was really important to me to not blame anybody or indict anyone, even people that deserved blaming and indictment. It was really important for me for this to be about my own work, my own internalized undoing and unlearning and really taking some things apart that, yes, I can assign blame to. I think my grandfather takes the biggest hit here. It was really important to me to make this about what I learned and how I moved forward from these experiences. I hope that the messaging makes its way with ease. There's always more time to write books.

Zibby: Are you already thinking about your next book?

Lisa: Oh, yeah.

Zibby: Yeah? Memoir? Fiction?

Lisa: No. [laughs] One memoir is enough. I shouldn't say that. The next memoir doesn't have to be quite so guttural. When I think about Ruth Reichl and Nora Ephron, I think everything will always be a little obviously reflective of my own life. I value that so much in how women tell stories. I have plenty of material to use. I'm working on some other projects that are not nonfiction. It's exciting for me to take these stories and have a little bit of freedom. There's lots of rules with memoir. You have to really hold yourself accountable in every -- well, you hold yourself accountable, hopefully, as a writer anyway, but you're holding yourself accountable to truth and fact and data. You worry about, am I getting this right? Am I remembering? I was talking with Dave Chang on his podcast last week. He wrote a beautiful memoir. He sent it to her sister. His sister emails him saying, "David, I love you. I don't remember it this way at all, but I'm glad that you had a space to write it." There's that experience of what truth lives in each experience for each individual. You're faced with that reality of everyone's having their own personal moment that is very different than the person standing next to you. Memoir keeps you in these really rigid boundaries of making sure you're holding accountability to truth. Whereas if you're doing nonfiction, you have a lot more freedom. You get to play a little bit more. It was a good first exercise. Eventually, maybe I'll write more memoir. I would love that. I've gotten all the hard stuff out of the way, hopefully, knock on wood. Right now, it feels really good to be in a space where the creative part of my brain really gets to play and create character profiles.

Zibby: What is your relationship like these days to baking and chef-dom and creating and cooking and all of that?

Lisa: It's always going to be my first love. Writing is so much a part of who I am that it doesn't even feel like a vocation or a hobby. It feels so much a part of, again, just how I process and move through the world. Baking is really truly one of the first vocations and crafts and tactical work that I fell so in love with. That, I recognize in my husband. He's a ceramicist. His affinity and his education and his passion for the material is so familiar to me in the way that baking feels for me. It will always be that for me. I will always have a very deep visceral response and connectivity to baking. The food world is in a hard place right now, in a great place in some ways. They're having really important conversations about food justice. All of these things are incredibly important and timely and necessary. Not to say I'm peace-ing out because it's getting hard. That's not what I'm saying. I feel like it's a good time to let some younger people have the space in that world. There's a lot of really great energy happening from the twenty to thirty-five-year-olds coming up. They’ve got a lot to say. I am so happy to sit and hear what they are bringing to the table. I don't know that you ever age out of a conversation like that, but I am also self-aware enough to know that I'm learning a lot from these younger writers in the food space.

This quarantine has been a really great opportunity to chill out and listen and read and learn. Some of it, I'm really excited about. Some of it I think still needs some work. [laughs] I am really glad to be in a space where I've earned the opportunity to do work in a different way. I was always out in the streets. I was always front line of the hard conversations. I'm not scared of those things. I'm also getting to an age now where I want to do something that's a little bit more dedicated to something that builds and cultivates, and even in a really private way. I'm getting really comfortable with wholly being a writer, not a chef writer. It's been a real joy and partially a relief to hear people say, "This shouldn't even be in a food memoir category. It's hard to even call you a chef now because your writing seems to be so much your focus." That's been really nice to hear because that's sort of been my goal. You can't cook in a kitchen forever. I never made sense with the banks or the investors of how to open my own space. In this time, I'm really glad that I'm not saddled with trying to -- so many of my best friends are trying to keep things from just completely falling apart right now. It's a really hard time to be a chef and a restauranteur.

This lockdown, this quarantine time has given, I think, a lot of people the space to really refocus what their intentions might have been before life carried them away. I feel like I'm in that space. I don't think I ever would've given myself permission to stop cooking as a private chef or doing consulting or developing recipes unless the world had sort of made me stop. Just this little amount of time away from my perpetual insecurity of not losing potential income, I will never not have that. This time's even turned that on its head. You realize we don't need as much as we thought. We actually need a lot less than we're working so hard for. If the tradeoff is getting to work in my yard ten hours a week or getting to go on long walks with my husband or cuddling up with the dog for an hour a day, okay, I'm down. That's a good trade. I'll do it. I think my relationship to the food world is one that will always exist, but I definitely can actively say I'm working hard so that I can just write full time. Again, I'll probably always write about food in some way or my experiences as a chef because I think that's the well from which I draw my writing material. I want it to transcend this food media conversation. I'm growing less interested in that and more interested in making something beautiful out of the same kinds of conversations and making more cultural experiences for people than hardnosed, fuck it all. [laughter] That's starting to feel less useful to me than it once did.

Zibby: Lisa, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thank you for sharing all of your amazing thoughts. You have such a soothing, centered voice. I feel like I could just sit here and listen to you forever. Maybe a podcast is in your future. I feel like you should take it on the road. That could be really fun for you.

Lisa: The world is all of our oysters now. We can make [indiscernible] happen. Why not?

Zibby: Why not? Have a great day.

Lisa: It was nice to talk with you.

Zibby: It was so nice to talk to you. Please keep our event on the top of your list.

Lisa: I will.

Zibby: We will do it. Now it will be one of my post-quarantine goals.

Lisa: Good. Take care of yourself.

Zibby: Thank you. You too.

Lisa: Talk to you soon.

Zibby: Okay, buh-bye.

Jennifer Dahlberg, LAGGING INDICATORS

Zibby Owens: Jennifer Dahlberg was born in Rockland County, New York, and currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden. She is the author of two novels, Uptown & Down as well as her latest book, Lagging Indicators.

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

Jennifer Dahlberg: Thanks so much for having me. It's such a pleasure.

Zibby: We had so much fun on the comedy of errors book club that you joined where my sound stopped working and my husband ended up hosting and all the rest, so thanks for rolling --

Jennifer: -- I thought he saved the day.

Zibby: He did.

Jennifer: He did. I think he's hilarious. I actually watched when you did your Kyle and Zibby thing together. I think you guys are a great team.

Zibby: Thank you. I know. I have so much fun doing it with him. He kind of misses doing a show together. I think that's why he was so happy to hop onto our book club.

Jennifer: I love how supportive and how he's really invested in what you're doing. I think that's fantastic.

Zibby: It's so nice. It is. It's really awesome. I love what he's doing. It's just this whole creative whirlwind. It's really fun.

Jennifer: Absolutely. That's nice, kind of feeding off of each other, which is great.

Zibby: Yes, it's true, which is awesome. Speaking of creativity, tell me about your really interesting way of gaining research and writing Lagging Indicators. I had the mistaken assumption that you had been in this financial world. Really, you're just an awesome researcher. Tell listeners more about what Lagging Indicators is about. Then tell the story again from book club about how you put it all together.

Jennifer: Basically, I was inspired by the financial crisis of 2008. Prior to that, I had been surrounded by people that worked in finance. We were living in Greenwich, Connecticut, for my husband's job. We were there on a five-year ex-pat assignment. I live in Stockholm, Sweden now. I'm from New York, but I live in Stockholm, Sweden. I was just surrounded by all these finance people. I was used to much more diversity in terms of different careers. I just was like, okay, everybody works in finance here. That's interesting. Everyone's kind of a guy working in finance. I'm not meeting so many career women. Like myself, I had taken an offramp to raise my kids like a lot of the other women did that were living in Greenwich at the time. Then when the financial crisis occurred, it was horrible from an economic standpoint, of course, but I felt like I was watching drama in real time. You couldn't make some of this stuff up. All the different personalities and all the earth-shattering things that occurred, I have to say, I found it very intriguing.

I thought, let's see if I can maybe craft a story around that but from a female's perspective. I didn't want to dive into the 2008 crisis. I wanted to do it a year later, someone who had survived the financial crisis and thought that her job was secure but only to discover, not really. There was still barbarians at the gate that were out to get her. I didn't have any financial background whatsoever, but I did work as an executive recruiter for many years. I'd been exposed to the corporate arena and the different finance types. My husband is a banker. I just did extensive research. I enjoyed it. I think sometimes when you have been a stay-at-home parent, any opportunity to learn something new, you totally dive into it, which is what I did. I composed all these questionnaires. I gave it to female friends that I knew who worked on Wall Street. I just bombarded my husband with questions. I read every article I could find. I think the thing that really helped me the most is I would watch CNBC every day, every day. I felt like I knew them. [laughs] That's basically how I taught myself as much as I could. It's still very difficult because I don't have this innate ability in the financial world. To hear you say that you felt it sounded authentic actually means a lot to me. Thank you. I've had some other women tell me as well that they felt that I kind of captured the essence of that industry from a female perspective.

Zibby: I do think it sounded super authentic. That said, I've never actually worked in any firms like that. I've only read other books about firms like that.

Jennifer: But you have an MBA.

Zibby: I have an MBA, but I was in marketing and brand management. They would slam the door in my face at a finance firm if they saw my spreadsheet ability.

Jennifer: That's how I feel. I'm just not wired that way. I'm so not wired that way, which was what was fun to inhabit this other character because it wasn't me. Then when you don't have anything about a certain character that's similar to you, you can just go to the races with them.

Zibby: Totally. It's like you use all your observational prowess and just turn it into a story. You don't have to learn how to calculate -- now I can't even think of a single term to even say as a joke. [laughter]

Jennifer: You don't censor yourself because you're like, I'm just going for it, which is what I did.

Zibby: That's awesome. Having this glimpse, this analytical, observation glimpse into this world so you could create your character who then exited the world and tried to figure out what to do, and I won't give anything away, but what are your thoughts on women who actually are in this industry? What do you make of it now? What would you tell them?

Jennifer: I do definitely believe that if a woman is interested and passionate about this industry, the financial world, she should absolutely go for it and work to get a seat at the table because that's really the only way we're going to make any kind of change. Through some of my research, as women, we are perceived to be less risk aversive than men. A lot of research show that perhaps if more women had been in positions of power during the financial crisis that we would've had less exposure. Women have different kind of risk assessment and decision-making processes. I just think that you need the diversity of voices in every aspect. I definitely encourage women to go into that field. I wish I could've had like five different careers. I would've loved to work on Wall Street for a couple years just to dip your toe in different things and get a sense of what it's about.

Zibby: Tell me more about your story. You're from New York.

Jennifer: I'm from New York.

Zibby: Which part of New York? Then what happened? Pretend I'm interviewing you for a job at a finance firm. Take me through your bio here. No, I'm kidding.

Jennifer: I grew up in Rockland County, New York. I'm actually a first-generation American. My parents are Haitian immigrants. They came to the United States in the late sixties. My sister and I were both born in New York. I grew up in Rockland County, but I always wanted to leave. I always wanted to go to New York City. I got into college in the city, had a fantastic experience. Then I started working, as I mentioned, for a search firm. I also met my husband, a Swed. We met through mutual friends. We dated for several years. Then he proposed and asked if I would want to move to Stockholm. Although I enjoyed my job, I wasn't passionate about it. I always knew I wanted to write. When I was an executive recruiter, my favorite part was writing the candidate profiles. More and more partners would give me their scribbly notes and were like, "Jen, do something with this." That was actually my favorite part of the job. I felt that writing was something I definitely wanted to explore. I had the opportunity to do that when I moved to Stockholm. My husband, being super Swedish and very strong work ethic, said to me, "You can write, but you have to treat it like a job. You have to do it from nine to five every day." I was like, okay, I guess I will. I have to do that.

I sat for two years working on my first novel. Uptown & Down is what it eventually became. Then I, the old-fashioned way back then, the late nineties, early two thousands, I queried agents. I went through that book, the Literary Market Place book and everything just trying to do the whole thing. I think probably the last agent I queried agreed to take me on. Then within a year and half she sold the manuscript to Penguin, NAL. They had a division called New American Library. The book came out in 2005. It was a dream come true, want to write and then to be published. I had children, small kids. It was hard to write another book. They had an option for a second story. I didn't really deliver. Thank god they didn't take it because I think I would've been embarrassed by it now. I found it really hard to write when I had small kids. I admire every writer, so many who come on your show. I don't even understand how they do it. I listened to J. Courtney Sullivan. I don't even understood how she wrote her book [indiscernible/laughter].

Zibby: Right? I know.

Jennifer: She would write in the middle of the night. I could not do that when I had small kids. I could not do that.

Zibby: When I opened her book, I'm like, oh, this woman is in it. She is living this right now. You could just tell. It wasn't an observational situation. This is someone who's holding a baby as she's typing this at this second.

Jennifer: Exactly. I have that book. I have the book on my Kindle. I can't wait to read it. When you said that, I thought to myself, my gosh, I was not even in that frame of mind whatsoever. I just wanted to sleep.

Zibby: I know. People are like, I wrote it while my baby napped. I was like, oh, my gosh, I did a thousand other things. I couldn't nap when my baby napped. I was like, why do I always have so many emails? I always have stuff. There's always stuff.

Jennifer: I was the same exact way. As a result, my writing suffered. When I was ready to tell another story, I feel like the publishing world had kind of passed me by. I had written this story. I felt really strongly about it. I thought it was timely, but it couldn't find a home. My agent couldn't sell it. I kind of gave up. A number of things happened at 2016, everyone was saying it was going to be the year of the woman, and 2017 with the whole Me Too movement. It just convinced me that this story could resonate with an audience and maybe I should consider releasing it myself, which is what I ended up doing.

Zibby: Wow. What was that experience like?

Jennifer: It was fantastic. Imagine being in a total creative drought where your self-esteem is at the bottom because nobody wants to publish your book. I used a self-publishing service. I worked with an advisor. He totally got what I was trying to accomplish. It was suddenly from riding a low to having a collaboration with somebody. I was just so eager to be part of the process. I learned so much. I have absolutely no regrets doing it. I've met so many fantastic people, both in real life and online, on your community for example. I started following you soon after my book came out. I kept seeing your name on different people I followed in the bookstagram world. I was like, who is Zibby Owens? [laughter] Then I started following you. Then I started following "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." It's literally been a fantastic experience, just having that connection. On top of that, my living in Stockholm makes it so that I don't come in contact with anybody in the American publishing world, so it's been fantastic.

Zibby: I'm so glad you came to my book fair. That was so awesome.

Jennifer: Yes, that was wonderful. It was so great.

Zibby: I long for days where we can get rooms of people and friends and authors and everybody. Hopefully, soon.

Jennifer: I know. You were so generous opening your home to all the writers and readers and book enthusiasts. I don't know what it's going to be.

Zibby: Now I look back and I'm like, germs, germs. Germs everywhere. [laughs]

Jennifer: I know, which I can totally understand. I almost don't want to hold my kids. I'm like, wait a minute, what have you been doing? [laughs]

Zibby: That's a good point.

Jennifer: Here in Sweden, we've been much more open than you guys have been in the United States. My kids have, potentially, much more opportunity to come in contact with germs.

Zibby: What is it like being a Rockland County transplant in Stockholm?

Jennifer: It's been fun, I have to say. It's been fun. I was definitely one of those people who wanted to try the Europe thing, but I always thought it would be London or Paris. I'm really grateful that my husband introduced me to Stockholm because it's a beautiful country. It just has the right amount of edginess. It's far, though. It's far. The climate gets to you after a while, cold and dark. Now it's summer and gorgeous.

Zibby: More time to write, I guess.

Jennifer: Exactly, more time to write, extending the day.

Zibby: Are you working on any new books now?

Jennifer: I am, actually. I'm working on a new novel. It's a mother-daughter story that takes place in the Swedish archipelago. We have place out on one of the islands. The Stockholm archipelago, it's thirty thousand different islands and [indiscernible] and all these different little small communities. We have a place in one of the islands. In the book, it's a fictional place, but it's very similar to where we have a house. My daughter went off to college last year. That's got me thinking a lot about motherhood and that relationship. I just wanted to tap into that. It felt much more genuine in terms of where I was in life. It is a fictional story, though.

Zibby: Fiction in quotes? [laughs]

Jennifer: I try to keep these as fictional as possible because otherwise I find that I censor myself. Then you're always worried people will think I'm talking about myself. I have to say, no, it's not me. It's a character.

Zibby: People are quick to jump to that conclusion. Who just said to me yesterday -- someone just said recently their agent's advice was to just quickly write a second book as fast as possible so that they would realize that the first book wasn’t autobiographical.

Jennifer: Oh, my gosh, that's really good advice. That's probably what my problem was. I didn't jump on it as quickly as I should have. I think there's definitely elements of who you are and where you are in life in whatever you write. I had a friend who's a documentary filmmaker say to me, "I think that writing is us trying to sort through whatever issues that are going on in our head or something that is just on our mind." I think that to some degree all of my books have been that. With Lagging Indicators, my issue was I've been a stay-at-home parent all these years, what does that mean? What's next for me? Will I be able to do anything else? Whereas this new book is about, my first-born is fleeing the nest, what does that mean?

Zibby: Totally. I think that's why I love interviewing authors so much. People are really just writing about what they're feeling. It's just a ruse to talk to people about what's going on in their lives. Books are just the intermediary between us to talk about our experiences to people we don't know, really.

Jennifer: I think so too. That's what makes it even more special when it resonates and when someone connects to it. Somebody who you least expected can connect to something that you've written and you're like, really, you saw that? Wow. It is very special.

Zibby: I wrote this one silly article on HuffPost a number of years ago called "A Mother's Right to Sanity." I sent it around. I was just basically, not complaining, but the management of kids takes so much time that I had no time to even be with my kids and certainly be with my husband and all the rest of it. This mom at my kid's school sent me email. She had read it online somewhere or whatever. Maybe I sent it to her. I don't know. Anyway, she was like, "I didn't think I had anything in common with you." It was actually a little bit antagonistic now that I think about it, but whatever. She was just like, "I didn't think I had anything in common with you and your life. Your experience is different from mine. When I read your article, I laughed out loud because I was doing that same thing too with my husband, and all the same stuff." We never would've necessarily realized that. She wouldn't have known that inside -- if you write it down, then people can say, me too, I've already done that, or I feel the same way.

Jennifer: Definitely. That's how I felt a little bit about Lagging Indicators. Here I was writing about a black woman working in finance in New York City. The bulk of my readership has been other Swedish women. I thought to myself, how would they relate? What about this story? First of all, I was just so happy they were interested in reading it, and then how they connected to so many of the themes even though on the surface Mia is so different and her life story is so different. There were still so many parallels and areas where they saw common ground in this character who I thought was completely different from any of these women. That's what I like about it, the universality of writing and how people can just relate and that empathetic quality. That's why I think it's so important.

Zibby: Totally. You're absolutely right. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Jennifer: Definitely, to read a lot. I know that that's always one that other writers say, but you gain so much from reading and exploring the different styles out there. I also think to just be really disciplined as well. I think that there are so many distractions nowadays. That's what I've struggled with. Even during lockdown when there was nothing else to do, it was hard to concentrate. I think that just being really disciplined and believing in yourself. For me, I had so many moments of doubt when I felt that other publishers or just the industry as a whole didn't want what I had to say. It took a lot for me to build my confidence back up again. I really think it's important to believe in yourself and believe in what you have to say. There are other avenues out there. I'm still a big proponent of traditional publishing, for sure. But if you have something to say, don't be afraid to explore other avenues.

Zibby: It's so true. What was the name, by the way, of the service you used to self-publish that came with an advisor?

Jennifer: It's called IndieBookLauncher. They're actually based out of Canada. I really connected with one of the guys. He was just fantastic in terms of really guiding me along.

Zibby: Amazing. IndieBookLauncher in Canada. You're in Sweden. People are everywhere. This is an international novel.

Jennifer: People are everywhere. We're back to the online community. You just click on something and you don't know where people are coming from, which is pretty cool.

Zibby: It is pretty cool. Good luck. I know you're locked away in this shed trying to finish this book. It's a beautiful shed. [laughs]

Jennifer: Thank you. It's a nice wall happening.

Zibby: It's lovely. Anyway, good luck finishing. I don't know if you still are being held to the nine-to-five restrictions that your husband sort of set into place, but good luck cranking it out and all the rest.

Jennifer: Thank you so much. I think the day is much longer now. I feel like I'm breastfeeding again. I'm waking up in the middle of the night. I'm on a different rhythm right now.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I have PTSD from that whole period of time in my life, I can't even, when the nights were not my own and I felt like I was the only one in the world. Anyway, thanks so much. Have a great weekend.

Jennifer: Thank you so much, Zibby. Thank you so much for all you do. I look forward to continuing to follow your success. It's awesome.

Zibby: And yours. Bye.

Jennifer: Thank you. Bye.

Sonali Dev, RECIPE FOR PERSUASIAN

Zibby Owens: Sonali Dev is the author of Recipe for Persuasion as well as several other books. She is a USA Today best-selling author who writes Bollywood-style love stories that let her explore issues faced by women around the world while still indulging her faith in a happily ever after. Her novels have been on Library Journal, NPR, Washington Post, Kirkus Best Book of the Year list, and she's won the American Library Association's Award for Best Romance, the RT Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Contemporary Romance, multiple RT Seals of Excellence, and is a RITA Finalist. She's been listed for the Dublin Literary Award. Shelf Awareness calls her “not only one of the best, but one of the bravest romance novelists working today.” She lives in Chicagoland with her very patient and often-amused husband and two teens who demand both patience and humor, plus the world’s most perfect dog.

Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about your latest book.

Sonali Dev: Yay, thank you for having me. This is very exciting.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. You are a Bollywood, passionate -- you're just obsessed with the Bollywood theme. Tell me about how you started writing about all of it. Just tell me everything. Tell me about Recipe for Persuasion and everything.

Sonali: Great, my favorite thing to talk about. I grew up in India. I moved here many, many, many years ago, but I grew up in India and basically was raised watching Bollywood and Hollywood both. There's this concept that we have in India about being film-y, which means basically treating your real life like it's a film or a movie. [laughs] It fits the Indian state of mind very well because it essentially means being very dramatic and, as my kids say, extra. Bollywood films definitely are very much woven into who I am as a person, but not only in terms of being dramatic. I think that it's really a way of looking at the world or dealing with relationships. It's where the emotional lens is just a little bit more aware and dialed up. I say a little bit, by which I mean very. Of course, I'm being facetious here. Bollywood films, over time, have been such a great way to trap the Indian psyche. They're always community set. The families are always huge influences. No human stands alone in terms of being part of a community.

Stylistically, I think in terms of storytelling. I very much consider my style of storytelling a Bollywood style. By that, I don't mean ridiculous. There is one kind of melodramatic, ridiculous component to it. What I mean is just seeing story through a lens of emotion and seeing story always through a lens of community and every character being individual, but their individuality being entirely wrapped up in family and community. That's the impact it's had on me, and then of course seeing your world as ridiculous, wanting to really feel things. I think a lot of people who watch Bollywood films, the most fun part of it is that you actually feel things. I don't mean even that you're forced to feel things, but you're just in there. Even the musicality is just these songs bursting in your head when something terrible or something fabulous happens. It's almost a way of processing stories and a way of processing life. For sure, my books are very much that.

As for Recipe for Persuasion, it is my homage to Jane Austen's Persuasion. Of course, it stands completely alone. I use the term homage because it's not a retelling, really. You won't be able to find scenes that directly translate. It's not Jane Austen's Persuasion set in the Indian community. It's its own story that pays homage to what I learned from that story as a young girl. That was that you can make mistakes and there's always a second chance, that mistakes are not absolute, that hope is a real thing, which I don't think until I read Austen I was seeing a whole lot of in classic literature. It's my homage to what I learned as a little girl from her. As a story, it's the story of this chef in Palo Alto who is trying to save her father's fine dining Indian restaurant. For twelve years since her father died, she's been trying to rescue this restaurant. As a last-ditch effort, she goes on a Food Network show called Cooking with the Stars. Of course, since it is Persuasion, the celebrity she gets stuck with is the man whose heart she broke back in high school. He believed it was under familial pressure. He's back for closure. She needs her own closure with her issues with her family. All of that gets tangled up.

While it's a love story between her and this man who's gone on to become a World Cup-winning soccer player, it's also a love story between her and her mother. It's these two parallel stories of second chances that are entangled because who Ashna is and what she allows into her life has to do with these two relationships which have been almost the stone around her neck, so to speak. It's a fun story, but it really also is a story that explores familial relationships and especially mother-daughter relationships when a mother is a woman who refuses to do what society expected of her. We are, as women, continuously taught that if we slip up, if we're not good mothers, if we're not good wives, then we destroy the family structure. We destroy our children's lives. It actually happens because that's the situation we're put in by society. When a woman stands up and says, no, I'm going to put my own desires before everything else, then there's collateral damage. Ashna, who's the chef and our protagonist, is the collateral damage. It's these two women navigating that distance.

Zibby: Wow. There's a lot in there to discuss. [laughs] You keep coming back to this idea of second chances. Is there a time in your life that you really wanted or needed a second chance? Does that come from something personal, or not?

Sonali: Growing up in India at that time, there was this sense of absolutes. One mistake could throw -- at least, this is what we were told. I think it was a completely nonsense narrative. What we were told is that if you slip up, then your entire life is going to go off the rails. Say you get involved with the wrong man, your honor is gone forever. If you don't get the right grades and get into the right college, then your career is gone forever. You do the right thing at the right time was this overarching motto that we were raised with. It was all around us. Somewhere in my heart, I knew that was not true. Books and stories which focused on reinforcing that, I gravitated towards. Yes, absolutely, I feel like the one truth in life is that there is always a second chance no matter how much it feels like there isn't. That's why we say things like everything happens for the best. It's a stupid thing to say when really awful things happen, but it's really not because something good is going to always come, maybe not from that one thing. You always have the ability to make something good happen again no matter how badly you mess up. So yes, it's very personal.

Zibby: Sonali, when did you start writing? When did you know you wanted to be a novelist? Have you always loved to write? How did you embark on this part of the career and the business of writing?

Sonali: I always loved to write since I was a very little girl. In fact, there's a story in my family where I was doing my math homework. This was back in kindergarten. Instead of doing my worksheets, I was writing couplets about the cover of the worksheet, the plus and minus signs. I was making up these little poems based on that. Instead of yelling at me for not doing my homework, my mom got on the phone with her sister and raved about how, "You should read these cute poems Sonali wrote," which explains a lot. I think one of my oldest memories and a lot of my coping mechanisms as a child were always related to writing. I always kind of identified as a writer. Growing up, it wasn't something that was deemed a career that you could use to feed yourself. It was very sensibly not deemed so because it is a hard career to use to feed yourself. It takes blood, sweat, and tears. Even then, it doesn't happen for a lot of people. So that was wise. I went to architecture school. I have several degrees in things. I have worked as many things.

This was the overriding dream. I really got obsessed about it or it became a thing that I thought I really wanted to do after -- [laughs] This is the drama that I was talking to you about, the Bollywood-style drama. About ten years ago, I got TB. I was quarantined. It was for six weeks, ten weeks. I was basically stuck in the home for a very long time and feeling very sorry for myself. I had been trying to write. I had already gotten into the whole, I'm going to write a novel someday. I was trying to write a very complicated novel and really failing at it. It had become this big thing that I didn't know how to do. Then when I got sick, a close friend said to me, "Why don't you write something you love? Why don't you write something you'd love to read?" I had this love story sitting in my head. It just poured right out of me. Those three months when I was stuck at home, I fell in love with the story and wrote it. From that point on, I became obsessed with publishing it. Of course, the publishing journey is a different beast from the writing journey. It took me a good two years to finish that novel, another two years to sell it. That's basically where it started. Once you have created a world and a character and been part of that magic, I think it's impossible to back away from it. That was how I felt.

Zibby: What advice do you have, then, to aspiring authors who don't have TB and can't dedicate themselves for -- although, I feel like as a society now we have all been through, in part, the experience that must have been so unique to you and so awful and isolating at the time.

Sonali: Unfortunately, yes. Of course, when it becomes a community experience, it's a whole different thing. [laughs] Let's talk about the writing advice. I do want to stop and say those three months were just the time I vomited that story out. It was not anywhere near ready for public consumption. It wasn't like I got those three months, I wrote that story, and I was done. I did have, at the time, two children who were in elementary and middle school, a husband who traveled five days a week, a large extended family, so a very full life. If you love to do this thing, you have to start becoming very focused on what you're willing to drop off your plate because you do have to. We're not going to be quarantined forever, and none of us want to be. Time in isolation is never going to be handed to you. It is something that you have to choose and curate your life to make space for that. That's the first thing.

Then one of my favorite quotes is if you can stop writing, you should. I do believe that the only reason anyone should really be doing this is -- because it's such a heart-wrenching and hard thing to do in the first place, if you're doing it for any reason other than the fact that you really simply cannot not do it, then it's going to be that much more of an uphill battle. Why would you want to do that? My advice is learning how to distribute your energy and learning how to focus your time and making space for this thing which needs a huge amount of emotional energy, even more than time. One thing that these past months have taught me is that isolation and solitude don't equal productivity. Productivity is a factor of how you manage your mental and emotional energy for a creative endeavor. We all also live our lives. Without lives, you can't create meaningful story. You have to find that balance of what you're willing to let go of in terms of your time and energy and what you're willing to focus on. I think once you have learned that, then most everything else follows, is what I want to say.

Zibby: All right, I definitely need to be a little more conscious of how I'm expending my energy. That's my main takeaway here.

Sonali: It's not like I'm great at it either. It's a day-to-day struggle. I sound like I've got this, but I don't. [laughter]

Zibby: At least you know what you're working on. That always makes it better. Sonali, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for sharing Recipe for Persuasion and all of your great stuff. Thank you.

Sonali: Thank you so much, Zibby. It's a great show. Thanks so much for all the support. Stay safe and healthy.

Zibby: You too.

Sonali: Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Caroline de Maigret, OLDER, BUT BETTER, BUT OLDER

Zibby Owens: I'm here today with Caroline de Maigret who is the author, with Sophie Mas, of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are from 2014 and most recently, Older, but Better, but Older. She is an international model and has been a Chanel ambassador since 2013. Caroline is also a music producer at Bonus Track Records and a fashion video producer. She is a children's and women's rights activist. Caroline currently lives in Paris with her twelve-year-old son.

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

Caroline de Maigret: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Caroline just got off the flight from Paris, through an hour-and-a-half line at immigration, and has landed at my desk. This is major bonus points for you for doing this. I am so impressed.

Caroline: I didn't want to miss the opportunity to see you. You have to be nice to me because my mind is a bit in the clouds still.

Zibby: I will go very easy on you. I just like listening to your beautiful accent. That's the best part. I don't think anybody else from France has been on my show. Sorry for whoever I just offended. [laughs]

Caroline: You know what? I thought the writer from The School of Life.

Zibby: Oh, Alain de Botton.

Caroline: Alain de Botton, he's not French?

Zibby: He's British.

Caroline: He is?

Zibby: Yeah.

Caroline: He just has a French name.

Zibby: Maybe his family was from France. He definitely lives in London now.

Caroline: He went to Cambridge or studied in Cambridge or teach.

Zibby: He identifies as British. Let's go with that. Anyway, please tell listeners about your latest book, Older, but Better, but Older. This is your latest book. What is it about?

Caroline: It's about how you're just living your life. You're in your thirties. Then suddenly you have little surprises one after the other of the dark signs of age, might it be from people around you or society, but also just you and your body. The idea was to give an honest and fun way of seeing it. There are some great sides about aging. There are some not-so-fun sides. We are always aware of what it is when you become old, like in your sixties, you know biologically. You learn about it at school. People tell you what happens, but not the forties. It's a strange feeling that's not always very nice.

Zibby: I agree. I'm forty-three.

Caroline: I'm forty-four.

Zibby: There you go. In reading this, basically everything I was agreeing with in the whole book. I'm like, oh gosh, oh yes, oh this too. There were so many funny things. I want to talk about how you decided on the format. I found that super interesting about your book. It's almost a multimedia type of book in that you have, not multimedia, but a range of formats. You have poetry. You have essays. You have lists. You have photos. You have guidebook options to Paris and back. You have all sorts of different things. Then you have pictures almost like Instagram Story-ish posts. It's the perfect book for an attention-starved busy person, which is part of why I liked it so much. How did you come up with this idea and this way of telling this story?

Caroline: I think I know no other way to do it. That's how my life is. I'm a music producer. I write books. I won't say I'm a writer, but I write books. I'm a Chanel ambassador. I'm a mother. I direct videos. I do all these things. I love to play with formats and do long things and short things and having ideas and put them down. That's why sometimes I want to tell a long story and sometimes I just want to make you laugh with really short poems. I don't know. [laughs] That's how I am.

Zibby: How was the collaboration? This is your second book that you wrote with Sophie Mas. How does that work? Do you sit in a room with her and write it all down? Do you email each other? What's the actual process the two of you go through to write these books together?

Caroline: What we do is we meet each other. We start talking about life, what happened last week and then the months before, stories, love stories, stories at work. Little by little, you realize that lots of things you're going through, like neuroses and fears, are often linked to your age. That's why it was very interesting. When you talk, you realize that sometimes most of your actions will be dependent on your age. For example, you've learned how to live with your neuroses, but sometimes you don't. It's a process. We do this. Then she'll go, "I want to write about [indiscernible]," because she went through it. I'll give her anecdotes I have from friends, stories. That's how we do. She's going to go and write it at her house, then send it by email. I correct it. She does the same for my text. It becomes like one voice.

Zibby: That sounds great.

Caroline: What's good is when you talk about a subject that's so large, the age, it's nice to have different voices to make it a bit more round.

Zibby: To have a sense of humor about it is also really helpful.

Caroline: That's the only thing I've found to make it okay. It's life. It's the pass of life. It's completely fine. You just have to get used to all the new surprises all the time. If you learn how to laugh about it, then it makes it easier.

Zibby: Do you think that because you were this international modeling superstar, that your aging has been harder? Nobody's looking at me or most people, I would argue, critically about their looks as intensely as they might somebody who had made a profession out of how they look. Do you think it affects people who are more forward-facing in their appearance?

Caroline: I don't think so. I think it affects the teenager in me. Suddenly, I'm not part of the youth club anymore while I still think I am. The fact that I'm still being taken, my photo, and do Chanel campaigns and stuff actually helps me. I'm like, I'm still okay. If they still want me, I'm still okay. At the same time, it makes me proud as well to be -- I'm still really young, I think, to myself. That's how I feel. It makes me proud to keep on going and to still be a woman that other women can look up to as an example, like, you're still okay when you're forty-five because you're still in fashion and your pictures are being taken.

Zibby: What's been the hardest part of aging for you aside from not being in the club?

Caroline: While I was writing the book, I had a midlife crisis. It was a few different things. The main thing was I felt one day that it was the last chance for me to change everything, to change of boyfriend. I've been with my man for fifteen years. We have a son. I was like, oh, my god, I'm going to be with the same man all my life. I can it be the goal of some people, but to me it was so frightening. It's my last years of being sexy, of being able to do whatever I want or whatever, to change jobs, to change everything. Then it took me a year to went through it with anxiety attacks and all this. It was all crazy. I was going out every night. Then I was like, wow, actually I'm fine. [laughs] It's fine to be with the same person. I can change if I want to. I realized how it was all cuckoo. It was almost like a hypochondriac. It was very megalomaniac. I understood it was something, I was going from a woman to the next woman. I do that every ten years. I always have a little burnout every ten years.

Zibby: Did you decide to stay with him, or you broke up?

Caroline: Yes.

Zibby: You did? You're still together?

Caroline: Yeah, we're still together. He's amazing. He's been so nice. I feel so much more alive since all those questions I went through. It was very interesting.

Zibby: You started the book with the section, which was hilarious, called "You know things aren't the way they used to be." Then you add all these things. Some of my favorites were, "You no longer know who the hip singers and actors are." I read Us Weekly. I basically stopped reading it because I don't know who anybody is. I feel terrible. My twelve-year-old daughter is telling me who the people are.

Caroline: I have to say, I kind of lie to my son sometimes.

Zibby: That you know?

Caroline: Yeah. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Zibby: I should do that. She sees right through me, though. I'm the worst liar.

Caroline: I don't think we should. I'll get over it at one point and I'll be completely [indiscernible/laughter]. It's just strange because age is a number. It's your bones and your cells aging. Your mind, your mind is aging. I learn so much. I love where I am. The serenity of it is amazing. Knowledge is the key of everything. I love where I am, but it's just so strange when your body is aging to someone else while your mind is still, it's not aging. It's getting knowledge, but it's not really aging. That’s the problem.

Zibby: My dad is in his seventies. He says he looks in the mirror sometimes and is like, "Ah! What's with the white hair?" Inside, he feels like he's twenty-five. Then sometimes he looks at me and he's like, "How can I have a daughter your age? I feel so young." It's true. Some days I'm like, aren't I still twenty-two?

Caroline: It's completely fine. It's just to have to get used to it, to all those ideas of not being a youngster anymore. It's fine. That's what the book is about, is taking a fun look of it.

Zibby: You also had this whole section which I think was my favorite, "All the times you tell yourself you're exercising when you're actually not." Today, I was literally at the Natural History Museum with my five-year-old son.

Caroline: I love this place.

Zibby: I was like, this is great. I'm getting a little workout here walking around to the cafeteria to buy animal crackers. [laughs] This is not a workout. I used to work out all the time. Oh, my gosh, it's amazing what you can convince yourself to do. Do you still work out? You must.

Caroline: No, I've never worked out. I started now because I understood I had to just to be healthy, and healthy in my mind as well. It feels good to the brain and just for the body to be not too stuck. No, I've never done it before. I hate it. I take no pleasure whatsoever in exercising. People tell you with time it will come. It never did.

Zibby: Was it you or Sophie in the book who's the one doing the yoga? Is it you? One of you said that in one of the tradeoffs -- there were all these catch-22s. The tradeoff is the pain of having to do yoga and the boredom that comes with it.

Caroline: It was me. I did a lot of yoga when I had my burnout ten years ago. Oh, god, I sound like a crazy woman. I did it. It was so good. I felt so good and so relieved. Every time, it was hell to go there. I hated it. I was so bored.

Zibby: Not for everybody. It's not for everybody. I also found it really interesting, your chapter on owning your insecurities. Maybe this was Sophie, about her butt. Was that you?

Caroline: No, it's me. That's how I found my style.

Zibby: You opened the chapter by saying, "I don't like my butt. I just don't. I've disliked it since the summer I was seventeen when a guy accosted me at the club to inform me that my ass hung low."

Caroline: [laughs] It's true.

Zibby: Some random guy just came up to you?

Caroline: Yeah, I think he was flirting. You know how you take the power over someone by saying something not nice, so then they're actually cool people because they're nice enough to talk to you while you're not that good? They break you to take the power. That was his strike.

Zibby: I was going through this whole essay thinking, oh, my gosh, if she hates her butt, the rest of us are just doomed.

Caroline: No, no, I hide it really well. It's fine. It's actually a section in the book on style and how you grow from flaws to find yourself. You hear what people say to you. You should not listen to guys in clubs who say stupid shit.

Zibby: You pretty much probably should not listen to guys in clubs, period, full stop. [laughter] Go on.

Caroline: It's more about how you listen to how people react. It's a style section. This guy who told me about my butt -- I had never looked in the mirror. I've never really looked at myself in the mirror. It was more about seeing if I had toothpaste around my mouth after brushing my teeth. Then I realized, oh, my god, it's true. Then I became really aware of that. I started making a whole masculine androgynous look. People reacted so well on it that I was like, wow. It was actually quite a good idea to go on that look, just to find bigger pants but that was not baggy pants. I went men's pants. It went really well. People were all excited. I was like, okay, that could be a look. It's fun that it went from a flirt line in a club to actually my style that I kept for the last twenty-five years.

Zibby: You have a whole philosophy of the difference between fashion and style which your first book dealt with more, correct?

Caroline: Mm-hmm.

Zibby: What's the difference, fashion and style? How do you keep your own style?

Caroline: I think style is about who you are and how you want to be perceived. It's part of the knowledge you have, I reckon that the books you read and how you feed yourself, watching movies and the exhibitions you go to or the painting you see. It feeds, probably unconsciously, your taste and your knowledge. I know that quite early, Katharine Hepburn had an impact in me aesthetically, style-wise with her high-waisted pants and her white shirts, always a little bit masculine actually but yet super sexy but very empowering. It's funny how it just melts on you. Knowledge melts on your taste. You understand better, who you are and how you want to look like. I would say that's the difference. It would be knowledge and being true to yourself and who you are.

Zibby: Okay, I'll try to do that more. Are there any items that you can't live without, either clothing items, makeup items? What do you depend on the most?

Caroline: Oh, god. Is my son an item? [laughs]

Zibby: Sure.

Caroline: I guess my leather jacket is like an armor. I always feel invincible when I wear that. Usually when I wear it, you know I'm not in a super good mood. It feels like nobody can hurt me or something. I'm not very attached to material things, to be honest.

Zibby: I like the insight into the jacket. I wonder if other people have those things, like big red flags to people who know them well. I'm trying to think if I have anything.

Caroline: I do have a few pieces. I think you do without knowing. You have the few pieces that when you are not feeling so good in the morning, you know those pieces will be okay. You know they're comfortable. You know they’ll fit you. A white shirt, I know is always --

Zibby: -- This is like my extra-large pajama pants and my son's extra-large school sweatshirt. That's my "I'm in a bad mood. Stay away" type of thing, which is not half as chic as your outfit. What's coming next for you? You're so busy. You have so many different things. What are you most excited about that's coming up?

Caroline: Directing. It fulfils everything I like, image and telling stories and people. I love it. I've never felt so at the right place than when I direct. I've done fashion films for now, for Chanel and other friends. Now I'm writing my first short movie. I'm producing it. I'm directing it quite soon. That's really exciting. It's a fiction. I'm very excited and very excited as well for future.

Zibby: What advice do you have for aging women who may not be supermodels? We're all going through the same thing at the same time, like you say in your book, finding the stray white hairs and all these little things that are creeping up, the wrinkles and all these very unpleasant, annoying, getting in the way of daily life things that are starting to happen. Do you have any advice?

Caroline: I'd say that first of all, perfection doesn't exist. Don't run after it. Take the pressure off. If not, you're just frustrated all the time. Get used to the idea of aging. Feed yourself with other things than looking at yourself in the mirror. When your centers of interest are stronger, physically doesn't become as important. Also, I say that a sense of humor in that always helps. First of all, it makes you shine. I think that's how you gain everybody in the room. I always say that, at least in fashion, all the biggest muses were never the most beautiful girls. They were the witty or the most [indiscernible] women. It's more into what you have to say and behave than your age, really. It's just a number. Also when you have a sense of humor, people can't talk about it because you talk about it first. When you laugh about your white hair or whatever, your diet, if you make jokes before everyone, they can't use it, which is a good trick.

Zibby: That is a good trick. I use that trick too. That's a good one. How about any parting advice to aspiring authors, somebody who's looking to undertake a project like yours?

Caroline: Parting advice?

Zibby: Any advice to aspiring authors?

Caroline: Sorry, I thought partying. I was like, whoa. Vodka. [laughs]

Zibby: No, parting like at the end of our -- we are about to part. Oh, partying advice. Do I need partying advice? No, I think I'm good. I'll read you this question. Do you have advice to aspiring authors who want to take on a book project like the one that you just did?

Caroline: I have never been, in my life, scared of failure. It doesn't do anything on me. What I love to do is create and do. I always do, do, do. There are lots of stuff that never went through, or that went through but that didn't work out. Just go for it. Do your things. When I lived in the nineties in New York, that's where I got that energy from, which is not French at all, which is just do. You can do it. Whatever happens, we'll see. You're allowed to do it. That's the biggest trick. Then you just put your ideas down and you go from that.

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

Caroline: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: I really appreciate it.

Caroline: Thank you.