Ken Follett, THE EVENING AND THE MORNING

Zibby Owens: I was so honored to interview Ken Follett who is one of the world's best-loved authors, selling more than 170 million copies of his 32 books. Follett's first best seller was Eye of the Needle, a spy story set in the second world war. In 1989, The Pillars of the Earth was published and has since become Follett's most popular novel. It reached number one on best-seller lists around the world and was an Oprah's Book Club pick. Its sequels, World Without End and A Column of Fire, proved equally popular. The Kingsbridge series has sold more than forty million copies worldwide. Follet lives in Hertfordshire, England, with his wife Barbara. Between them they have five children, six grandchildren, and two Labradors. His new book is called The Evening and the Morning.

Ken Follett: Hello, Zibby.

Zibby: Hi, how are you?

Ken: I'm good. How are you?

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

Ken: It's a pleasure.

Zibby: I have to tell you that I grew up with your books all over my house. I called my dad. I was like, "Dad, guess who I'm interviewing?" He was like, "Those are amazing." He read almost all your books and thought they were fast paced and thrilling and amazing. Now that I have your new one, I can't wait to give it to him. I'm thrilled.

Ken: That’s great.

Zibby: How do you do it? How do you keep creating these new worlds and writing for decade after decade in such a powerful way? How do you come up with all these ideas?

Ken: Well, I don't have to do anything else. [laughter] I sit here all day and come up with ideas. It's not like I'm trying to fit this in. It's been my job for forty-five years. Of course, like all authors, I was born with a vivid imagination. Nobody becomes an author without that. It's sometimes hard for people to understand. You asked me the question that we're always asked. Where do you get your ideas? It's hard. The point is that they come to us all the time. When I was a boy, I was never myself. I was always a pirate or a cowboy or the captain of a spaceship. I spent my childhood pretending to be somebody else. Now I've spent most of my working life imagining stuff. It comes. These ideas come sometimes when you don't want them. You're having a nice conversation with somebody and you think to yourself, what would happen if there was an earthquake now? What would we do? Where would we go? The answer is, they come easily. Of course, the trick is, the more difficult thing is to share them with people. That's important. That's the craft. That's the skill of what we do, to write things down in such a way that when people are reading them, they can enter into what we've imagined and it will be vivid for them and they’ll care about it.

Zibby: Wow. How do you do that? [laughs] How did you hone your craft? When you started at the very beginning of your career and you tried doing this, did it come out like this? Do you feel yourself getting better over time? Did it all come naturally, or did you have other tricks and tools in your toolbox that made it what it is today?

Ken: I think for all authors, you learn nearly everything that you need to know by reading. All of us, I never met an author who wasn't a voracious reader from a very young age. I learned to read when I was four years old. I made my mother teach me to read because I loved stories. I was always pestering people to read to me. I can remember this. It's my earliest memory, actually. Both of my parents, all four grandparents would read to me. Both my parents come from big families. I had lots of uncles and aunts. There were loads of people to read to me, and it was never enough. I'd say, "Read me another one." They'd say, "No, that's enough for today, Ken." I'd say, "Please, please." You can imagine, can't you? I desperately, desperately wanted to learn to read. I learned to read young. I've been doing it ever since. By the time you get to your early twenties and you sit down to try and write some fiction, you know a heck of a lot. You know what a sentence is and a paragraph and a chapter. You know about dialogue. You know about describing landscape and describing people because you read so much of that. Of course, it's not enough, but it's most of what you need to know.

If anybody ever says to me, "I'd really like to be a writer. What advice can you give me?" I always say, "Do you read much?" If they say, "No, not really," I say, "I'm sorry." If you want to be a concert violinist, you cannot start at the age of twenty-one. Something similar is true of being an author. If you haven't read a few hundred novels by the time you get to your early twenties, it's too late. That's a big thing. On top of that, I could do action. I could do dialogue. There were some things I had to learn. When I started, I wrote ten unsuccessful books, by the way, before Eye of the Needle. Even though I knew a lot, I clearly did not know enough at that point in my life. I had to learn to emphasize the emotion. I could do two people having an argument, a quarrel. I could write their dialogue, but I wasn't good at saying how they were feeling about it. That was something that I had to consciously concentrate on. Don't just tell the reader what happened. Tell the reader how it feels.

Are they angry, indignant, scared, resentful, all of these emotions? Of course, I now know, but I had to learn it, for the book to be successful, the reader has to share the emotions of the characters in the story. When a character is scared, the reader is like this. Something sad happens in the story, there's a tear in the reader's eye. This is a miracle, of course, because the reader knows that this story was made up. Follett made it up sitting in this chair in this room, but it doesn't make any difference, does it? If the scene is well-written, the fact that you know it never happened makes no difference. If somebody's bullied in the story, you feel indignant. You want to bang the table and say, hey, that's not fair. The reader's emotional reaction to the story is paramount. If you can do that, you've got a successful book. If you can't do that, it won't be a best seller. It might still be a good book. It might be clever. It might be witty. It might be brilliantly well-written. It might be informative. But it won't be a best-selling novel if readers aren't moved emotionally by it.

Zibby: Interesting. Here's the whole secret. This is great.

Ken: I think so. I think that's the basic secret.

Zibby: I'm a little discouraged because only one of my four kids seems to be really into reading. Now I feel like I have no shot at having perhaps one author among them. That's it. [laughs]

Ken: It's like that, though, isn't it? I've got some grandchildren who are absolutely, as I was, fascinated by stories from a very young age, and others who would rather watch TV. I've got a son actually, a stepson, who never read at all as a boy. He is a very successful film editor. All that time he spent in front of the TV, I thought he was wasting his time. I thought he should be reading a book. I was wrong. [laughs] He got to the age of twenty-one and he understood the grammar of television the way I understood the grammar of language. It's the joy of genetics, I suppose, that your kids aren't necessarily like you.

Zibby: It's true. I feel that way when my kids say they want to watch TV, this and that. I hear about people like Simone Biles, the Olympic gymnast, who would watch hour after hour of gymnastics on TV. That's really how she was teaching herself. Then I'm like, oh, no, thirty minutes today. What if? What if they could be Simone Biles if I just let them watch more gymnastics or something? You never know. My husband is stepdad to my four kids. I know he's always looking for advice or a friendly ear for other stepdads. Since you referenced your stepchildren, I was wondering what you think some of the hallmarks of success of being a good stepdad might be so I can give him some pointers?

Ken: My philosophy was, you don't need your stepchildren to like you, but you want them to trust you. You want them to see you as the person they can go to and say, "I've got a problem." You don't want to be their friend. Of course, they become hugely important in your life and you love them and they love you, but you don't try to be their friend. You don't say, "We're going to be pals, son, aren't we?" That's crap. You need to have the Advil. "Ken, I've got a headache." "Try taking a couple of these. Then if it doesn't go away in about half an hour, we'll think again." That’s the kind of thing you've got to -- you’ve got to have the cold remedy. You've got to have the tampons, actually. When they're teenage girls, things happen suddenly or they’ve forgot to bring any. "What am I going to --" "Okay, I happen to have some in my suitcase." [laughs] All of that, condoms, I'm afraid. You’ve got to be the go-to person when mom isn't there. Of course, they’ll go to mom. You've got to be the go-to person for a problem. You’ve got to be equipped for that. Anticipate. Make sure that anything that's likely to go wrong and they come to you with a problem, you're going to be able to help. Without even thinking about you, that's how you sort of grow into the parental role with your stepchildren, which isn't about being liked. It's about being trusted.

Zibby: Who knew? Wow. I feel like as a mom I'm a total failure. I don't always have all those things on hand. Well, certainly not the latter. I guess it's good to defer that to somebody else's responsibility tree, if you will. I had a question, actually, about the beginning. It's not even technically the book. In the beginning of The Evening and the Morning, you say, "In memoriam: EF." I was just wondering, who is EF? Why dedicate this book to this person?

Ken: He was my son. He died. He died two years ago at the age of forty-nine. He had leukemia. This is the first book that I've published since his death. That's why it's dedicated to him. It is the worst thing that can happen to you, to have a child die. You know your parents are going to die. You expect that. It's sad when it happens, but it's not a shock. When a child dies, it's an absolutely terrible thing. I didn't want to make a big fuss about it, but I did want to dedicate the book to his memory.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. That's terrible. I'm so sorry. Did you find it hard to get back into writing? Is it more that you're so used to doing it, this is just what you do? Was it an escape for you? Did it help?

Ken: Work is an escape for me. It's always been like that. If anything is going wrong in my life, then I can lose myself in the imaginary world. It's some kind of relief and consolation. Of course, you never get over the death of a child. It's with you. It's always with you. I was nineteen when my son was born. I was a very young father. He's still in my life. I think about him every day. I hear a pop song on the radio and I think, he'd like that. He and I would talk about what the chords were, that kind of thing. All the time, that happens. He's still in my life even though he's passed.

Zibby: I'm sorry. I recently lost -- not to compare in any way, but just grief in general. From COVID, I recently lost my mother-law-in and grandmother-in-law both this summer. My husband, whose mother it is, and his sister, they keep reaching for their phones and trying to call her. It's only been a couple weeks for us. Everything he thinks of, he wants to tell her. That's the most frustrating, maybe not, but it's not high on the list of frustrations for him, the not being able to reach her anymore and just thinking of her constantly. Losing a child, I'm sorry. Do you feel like your personal things going on in your personal life, do you have that seep into your characters in some way? Do you channel those emotions? You said that was something you struggled with earlier. Obviously as life has progressed, you've developed more and more experiences and emotions yourself. Do you feel like you now infuse your characters with even more of that just because of life experience in a way?

Ken: I think that does happen. I don't do it consciously. I don't consciously use things that have happened to me. I find that almost without my noticing it, parts of my life do creep into the story. For example, when I first married Barbara, which is now thirty-five years ago, I had never before been in what we now call a blended family. I married Barbara and she brought along with her, three children: two teenage girls and a little boy. This was a new experience for me. Soon afterwards, I wrote The Pillars of the Earth. Tom Builder has a blended family. It wouldn't have occurred to me to do that earlier until it had happened to me. I suppose I could've made it up, but it just didn't cross my mind that that would be an interesting thing to do and an interesting kind of family to have at the heart of a story. Once that had happened and I knew about some of the challenges and joys and disappointments of that kind of family, then I could put one in a book. Yes, they do. These things creep in. Eventually, every major thing that happens to you will end up in some form in a book, maybe heavily disguised and quite possibly in a form that nobody else will recognize. As the author, you'll think to yourself, I know why that occurred to me. It's because something similar happened to me.

Zibby: I know that there are a lot of authors who have a lot of success at the beginning of their careers and then feel this pressure to continue churning out just as great product as in the start. Sometimes that anxiety, I feel like, gets in the way, even from a big successful first book to a second book. How do you manage all of that? Do you ever have a morning where you're like, that's it, my talent has run out, this book's going to be terrible? Do you ever have that self-doubt inside?

Ken: Touch wood, not yet. Certainly after Eye of the Needle, my first success, I thought about that a lot. I really wanted to have another success. I was aware, of course, that quite a lot of people write one good book. I knew that Eye of the Needle might have been my one good book. I really didn't want it to be the one. I wanted to spend my life doing this. I liked it so much. I was aware of that danger. Then Triple was a best seller, but I thought, yeah, but people bought that because they liked Eye of the Needle. I thought, I'll believe it if the third book is a best seller. The Key to Rebecca was very successful. At that point, I said, okay, I am going to be a writer now for the rest of my life. That's going to be my career. It's going to be my life. I was very glad because that was what I wanted. There is a certain amount of pressure. I don't mind it. It's good pressure. It's the thought that occurs to me if I'm tempted ever to be a bit of a slacker, to say, that seems not really very good, but it's good enough, if I'm tempted to think that, then I think of all the people who really liked my last book and are looking forward to the next one.

I think, am I going to risk disappointing them? No. It makes me be more of a perfectionist than I might otherwise be. I'm never oppressed by it. It takes a lot to discourage me. I'm an optimist. My inclination, always, is to say, oh, let's not worry about that. That’ll be okay. Don't worry. With my stepchildren, they soon learned. They came to me and said, "I don't feel good. I think I should go to the doctor." I would say, "You'll feel better in the morning." Of course, they would then go to Barbara and she would say, "I'll take you to the doctor." [laughs] My inclination was always to say, no, it can't be that bad, it can't be that bad. The idea that I've got this responsibility, which I do have, all those readers looking forward to the book, all those people in the publishing houses all over the world in all the different countries, all of those people, all those booksellers who are thinking, great, we've got a Ken Follett to sell this Autumn, that’ll help, all of those people, to let them down would indeed be terrible. What I think is, yes, that would be absolutely terrible, so I must make sure that this is a good story.

Zibby: Wow. What would you have done, do you think, if the books hadn’t taken off? What career might you have had? What was your fallback?

Ken: Before Eye of the Needle was published, for a while I was a sort of jobbing writer. For example, I turned a movie script into a novel for a publisher. It was quite well-paid. I think I got two thousand pounds for turning Capricorn One into a novel. That would pay the bills for three or four months. I knew I could do that and I could do it well. I thought I may have to go back to that having taken my shot and written one best seller and unable to do it anymore. Then I could probably still make a living as a writer, I thought. That was plan B anyway, which fortunately never got tested by reality.

Zibby: I know The Pillars of the Earth became this eight-part miniseries and everything. How involved are you in adapting your work? How much would you like to be doing that in the future?

Ken: I'm not very closely involved. They invite me to the set, which I enjoy. It's wonderful, meet the actors. Of course, Pillars of the Earth, I arrived in Budapest, this lot, and there is this medieval English village with a half-built cathedral in the middle of it and all these guys with hammer and chisel pretending to build a cathedral. It was marvelous. It was absolutely marvelous. I loved it. It was a thrill. It was a real thrill. It is that. It's a thrill. You're also very nervous. I've had some bad shows made out of my books, but not many, mostly good. I think there are good authors and not-so-good authors. There are good filmmakers and not-so-good filmmakers. I've got to trust these people because one thing's for sure, I don't know as much about making a television drama as they do, so I shouldn't try and tell them what to do. I should let them do their best and I should just cross my fingers. I tell stories in words. They tell stories in pictures. It is a different skill. That's been my practice, is to say, great, over to you. I'll come and see how you're doing, but it'll just be a social visit. I won't say, no, you can't do it that way. By and large, that has worked for me.

Zibby: That's great. Are you already at work on your next book? How long do these take to write? This is almost a thousand pages. How long does each book take you?

Ken: Three years is the norm. Actually, The Evening and the Morning was a little bit shorter than that. I spend a year planning, a year on the first draft, and a year on the rewrite. That's my normal timetable. People think it's a long time. It seems a bit short to me. It's a lot of work to get into three years.

Zibby: Are you at the beginning stage of the next one?

Ken: Yes. Well, more past that. I finished The Evening and the Morning about a year ago. I've been working on a new story since then. I don't stop. I'm not ready to talk about the new book yet. That's partly because it may well change. The story I think it is now may be something different in a year's time.

Zibby: Have you ever thought about writing some sort of life advice book? You have such great advice and such a wit about you and all that. Maybe you should do a little advice to graduates or to parents, I don't know, something.

Ken: I don't think that's my talent, I must tell you. [laughs]

Zibby: I think it's a hidden talent. You never know. When you're procrastinating from your main work.

Ken: If the novels ever become unpopular and I can't sell them, then I may think about your advice.

Zibby: If you need a backup plan in the next two decades or something. Thank you. Thank you so much for talking to me on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and for sharing more about The Evening and the Morning which, I know, I'm sorry, we barely even talked about, but readers of yours who are huge fans will undoubtedly enjoy just as much as every other, especially because it's the prequel to one of your most popular books ever, The Pillars of the Earth. Thank you. Thanks for all the advice, even if you don't write a book about it. [laughs]

Ken: It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I hope I'll see you again.

Zibby: Sounds great. Thank you, Ken.

Ken: Buh-bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Liz Fenton & Lisa Steinke, HOW TO SAVE A LIFE

Zibby Owens: Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke have been best friends for over thirty years. They are the coauthors of seven novels including the Amazon Charts best seller, The Good Widow. Their most recent book, How to Save a Life, is a dark, heart-pounding love story with a Groundhog Day twist. Liz and Lisa host the popular podcast "We Fight So You Don’t Have To" and are monthly on-air contributors on their local news with Liz & Lisa’s Book Club. In their former lives, Liz worked in the pharmaceutical industry and Lisa was a talk show producer. They both reside with their families and several rescue dogs in Southern California.

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

Lisa Steinke: Thanks for having us.

Liz Fenton: Thank you.

Zibby: Maybe just announce who you are. I can see because I'm watching you. Whose voice is whose?

Liz: This is Liz.

Lisa: This is Lisa. Thanks for having us. Excited to be here.

Zibby: How to Save a Life is your latest novel. Can you tell listeners, please, what it's about?

Liz: It's a dark, heart-pounding love story. It's about Dom and Mia. Ten years ago, Dom and Mia were engaged and they broke up. Fast-forward a decade. Dom runs into Mia at a coffee shop. He's never really gotten over her. He always regretted breaking up with her. He hasn’t really moved on. He asks her out on a date. It's Tuesday. He asks her out for Thursday. They go out Thursday night to the San Diego County Fair, and she dies on a ride. Obviously, he's devastated. He wakes up the next day. It's still Thursday. He has another opportunity. He's not quite sure what's going on. They have their date, but obviously he plans something else. He doesn't take her to the carnival. He's like, maybe we shouldn't go. She dies again. What happens after that is he's stuck in a time loop trying to save her life, trying to save what they had together. Then there's also different pieces of his life in that day that he's trying to figure out almost like a puzzle he's trying to put back together.

Zibby: How did you come up with this? It's Sliding Doors-ish. It's the same bad news over and over again and wanting to have a different outcome. Isn't that what they say the definition of craziness is? I feel like my therapist might have told me this at one point, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Lisa: Expecting a different outcome, yeah. Our last book, The Two Lila Bennetts, was a Sliding Doors concept. We had already tried that. We were on vacation. We were in the pool. We were drinking cocktails. We were trying to figure out what to do. We first were going to do a Groundhog Day twist but with more of a suspense angle like our previous books. Then Liz got to talking about The 7½ Lives of...

Liz: Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, one of my favorite books. I had brought it on vacation. I had just finished it.

Lisa: That book is a man who wakes up every day in a different person's body at a party. We were talking about that and just tossing it around. We eventually came to this just as a brainstorm goes. We wanted it to be lighter and more of a love story that we could play out in it as well.

Zibby: I was sort of struck, I feel like it's been a long time since I read a novel by two women from the point of view of a man. When it started about the bulge in his pants, I was like, wait a minute. [laughter] Who's telling this story? What's going on?

Lisa: That was Liz's line. She's notorious for the opening line in a book, I have to say.

Liz: Thank you, Lisa. Our debut novel, the opening line is "My mouth tastes like ass." You'll have to read to find out why. That was actually from a rewrite. That wasn't the original first line. Then when it went to edits with our publisher, we ended up restructuring the first one-third of the way we were telling the story. We had to jump off from their engagement. You know as a reader and also an author, the first page is so important to pull people in.

Lisa: We're hoping that pulls people in. It was also fun to write from a male point of view for the first time. I don't know if we were just shying away from it because we're not men and it's not as comfortable, but we just wanted to get out of our comfort zone and give it try. Then we both kind of ended up falling in love with him a little bit.

Liz: I have a major crush on him. It was fun. We get bored. I think it's why our first three books were magical realism. Then we went to suspense. Now we're back. We pivot a lot, for good or bad of our career. We pivot. With us, you never really know what you're going to get in a book because we always want to write what we love. We've just found when we don't do that, there's problems. We just write what we want to read and what we love in that moment. We hope our audience will come along for the ride.

Zibby: I feel like it's so easy to tell when somebody's not passionate about what they're writing about. You can feel the lack of fire behind it, really, even though it's sort of intangible. How did the two of you originally get together? What's your whole story? How did you decide to start becoming coauthors?

Lisa: We've known each other a very long time, thirty-four years or something. We're losing track at this point. Went to high school together and college together and roommates afterward and through the course of all that, just talked about it, but not really thinking it was ever going to actually happen. Just one of those things because we've always been voracious readers since we were very young. These authors inspired us. We never thought it was going to happen. Then one day out of the blue like fifteen years into our friendship, I brought it up again. I had written something. I sent it to her. The rest is history. We did not expect it, but we're so happy it actually ended up taking off.

Zibby: That's amazing. Talk about all of your external support for the book community at large and how you're on the San Diego show and all the rest of it, the original influencers essentially.

Liz: As Lisa mentioned, we're huge readers. We're huge fangirls of authors. We were championing books before we got our first book deal. Now we continue that. We're lucky enough to have, on our local news, we have a monthly book club segment every month where we get to talk about books. We have a podcast, "We Fight So You Don't Have To," which is about us, but we also talk about books. We bicker. We're like sisters. We're hoping people can learn from our mistakes. We're also partnering with Warwick’s bookstore in La Jolla who's our local independent bookstore for Couch Surfing Book Tour. We connected with them right when COVID happened. We're like, "How can we help? What can we do?" Twice a week, we have authors on and talk about their books. That's been really rewarding and really fun. It's fun to help the authors who have their books coming out. They're disappointed. It's been great to partner with Warwick's who we adore and hopefully drive some book sales for them, right Lis? It's been really rewarding in this dark time.

Lisa: It's kind of nice to be in the other seat sometimes because there's so many bookstagramers and people like you that are just so supportive of us. We're always thinking about what we can do to give back so it's a reciprocal situation because we wouldn't be where we are without the Instagram, bookstagram community, for sure. It is nice to give back a little bit too.

Zibby: Tell me about your fighting. [laughter] Let me hear some of these fights. Give me a few examples. How down and dirty are these fights? What are we talking here?

Liz: We've gotten a lot better. This is evolution. I think we've been writing together at this point about ten years. We've been friends for thirty-four. We're really like family. Lisa, I'll let you speak to this, but I think transitioning from a friendship to running a business together is a really interesting thing, especially with something creative like writing. Lis, you always do a good job.

Lisa: Thank you, Liz. That's a perfect example of how far we've come. There's been some door slamming. There's been a lot of emotions that we can't control over the years. It was never really in regard to what we were going to write about or anything like that. It was just other stuff. It's kind of like a marriage when you're fighting about the toilet paper, but it's not really about the toilet paper. It took us many, many years to figure out that this wasn't just a friendship. It was a business relationship too. We'd never sat down and had a conversation about how different we are and how that was going to play into our writing process. A few years ago, everything kind of came to a head. We talked about maybe not continuing because we couldn't figure out what the problem was. There had been so much tension. We'd had a really rough edit. Some other things had happened in our personal lives at the same time. It just all came together. We had to step back and just start talking about our business and our roles in that. Once we ironed all that out, we've gotten to a much better place. I'm not saying we don't ever have an argument, but we definitely have avoided many as a result.

Liz: I think too, if I could add Lisa, I think one thing --

Lisa: -- You can.

Liz: Thank you. I think one thing we've gotten better at is -- I think it's like a seesaw and we lose the balance. Sometimes we're just all business all the time, and we kind of forget that we're best friends who like having a good time together. I think we've gotten better at balancing those things. It just became all business. We're still friends that need each other and need that support and need to talk about our teenagers being idiots or whatever. Sorry, teenagers, if you're listening.

Lisa: They're not listening. They do not care what we're doing.

Liz: They're not listening. They are idiots, at least mine are. [laughter] I think the best thing we've done -- honestly, probably just in the last six months I think we've gotten better. That's how we're always evolving, is getting better at that balance of friendship versus business. I think we're both a lot more fulfilled with each other. We sound like we're married and we're in therapy right now, Lisa.

Lisa: I know we do, or in couple's counseling or something.

Zibby: Tell me more about that. No, I'm kidding.

Lisa: Let's move on. Let's talk more about the fights.

Zibby: I had the lovely ladies who wrote the book called Work Wife on my show, Claire and Erica. You should maybe just pick that book up because it's all about this. It's about how to navigate the complexity of female friendship at the same time as running a business together.

Liz: I'm going to.

Lisa: That's going to be helpful because we're always learning.

Zibby: I also feel that creating, being creative together, is different. It's not like you guys are producing sweaters or something. It's stuff that usually lives in somebody's head. To make that a joint production, that's tricky. I'm in such awe of all coauthors. Who writes what? How do you do it? How do you actually do it? Do you use Google Docs? Do you get together in person? Do you split chapters? How did you do How to Save a Life?

Lisa: We do not get together in person. The Nanny Diaries girls told us once that they sit at a computer together and write every line together. Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen are on a call all the time doing their lines together. We're very different than that. We separately will write. I'll write a chapter. This is what we came up with years ago. It's just never changed. I open a Word document. I write a chapter. I send it to Liz. She'll edit it and send it back. We do keep passing it back and forth until we feel like it's in a good place. Then Liz will write a chapter. We'll just do the whole book that way. As far as what we're going to put in each chapter, we do sit and map out maybe five or six chapters at a time, but it's still very loose. It's up to the person writing the chapter. There's a goal to accomplish within it, but it's up to them how to get to that goal. It just works for us. I know there's fancy writing tools online and things like that, but we're old-school Word doc girls, until the very end and then we do move over to Google Docs.

Liz: I do use Dropbox.

Lisa: That's new, yes. That's new. Then we do Google Doc at the end because during edits -- we used to edit separately and send it back and forth. Then one day someone was like, there's something called Google Docs. We're like, oh, my god, that's great. I think it was one of our kids.

Zibby: The other day, I accidentally deleted my whole team's Google Doc with the entire schedule of every podcast and every everything because I had deleted someone who left our business. I didn't know that it was attached. Mental note, if you ever change your email address or something, save that document. You can get it back after the mistake for a little bit. Just heads up on the Google Docs. In terms of when you generate new ideas, I know you said this one, you were hanging in the pool and it just came to, is it always like that? It seems like you guys have an easy rapport that things just bubble up. Do you ever get stuck on one of you wants to write something really badly and the other is like, no, I don't want to write that book?

Lisa: The cruise ship idea, you could tell her about the dueling piano people. Anyway, I'll let you.

Liz: Typically, we'll throw out a lot of ideas. I think at this point she knows if I'm into an idea and I know she's -- she's mentioning the cruise ship. We went on a trip to Europe two years ago with our family. We were on a cruise ship. There was these dueling piano people. The guy and the girl, clearly there was something going on. I was really into it. Maybe I was just drunk every night when we were there. I could tell she wasn't into it, so I dropped it. She wanted to do this weird Blake Crouch rip-off book because I was in the pharmaceutical industry for twenty years. She knew I wasn't into it. We don't argue. We kind of just move on because when the right idea -- I'm getting goosebumps as I say this. When the right idea comes, we both know. It's something that intangible. I don't even know how to explain it, but we both know. It's like, yes, we're writing that. Let's go. Lisa mentioned earlier, the creative is not what we fight about. We fight about someone sending an eyeball emoji in a text. You're like, what are you trying to say? The eyeball emoji? We're dumb. We fight about stupid stuff when we're cranky or frustrated with our kids or something. We take it out on each other.

Zibby: I love how in this book your character Dom is always wondering what people are thinking, analyzing the relationships between everybody else. I'm always doing that myself. If I'm on vacation, you're like, ooh, is that the nanny? Who could that be?

Liz: We do that all the time.

Lisa: I was just on vacation. I had that exact "Is that the nanny?" situation. My husband and I, it was five days and we still don't know. Was it the nanny or was it the mom? We do not know.

Zibby: Sometimes I even do that to myself. What must people think? I wonder if other people are wondering if this is my nanny or if this is my sister and if they would ever be able to guess that it's actually my sister-in-law or whatever it is. It's so great to give a trait like that to the character as a journalistic tool for how he sees the world and everything, just very relatable.

Lisa: Thanks for noticing that. That was a fun little thing to put in for him.

Zibby: I know this is a bigger fate-based question, but do you believe that things are meant to happen, like, Mia's going to die every day no matter what happens and that's just fate, or that we are actually in control of what's going on on a fundamental level?

Lisa: I feel like this is more your wheelhouse, Liz.

Liz: Yeah, I knew. I was watching your eyes. I knew you were going to pass this one to me. I think it's both. I think that sometimes things are meant to be. I also think our energy and our attitude determines what we're attracting to ourselves. I tell my kids this all the time. If you say, I'm going to fail, or I'm going to do this, you're sending all that energy to there. I think it's a little bit of both. I think sometimes things are fated, but I do think we have control over attracting positive energy for positive results in our own life. It's something that we try to do a lot. You should see, we have a whole manifestation board. I'm pointing here because mine's right here. Really try to attract that positive energy and bring it to other people and situations because who knows, right? You might as well just be positive because we don't really know.

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

Lisa: I would say write what you want to write, first and foremost. Do not try to chase the market. Do not try to write what the latest hit book was. That was a mistake we made very early on. That's why it took us three manuscripts to eventually get there. That would be my advice. I'll throw it to Liz now.

Liz: I would say just keep writing. As Lisa mentioned, we got our book deal with Simon & Schuster on our third manuscript. It had been five years. We both were pretty successful in our own careers, Lisa in TV and I mentioned myself in pharma. I was done. Lisa really pushed that she wanted to write one more book. Had we not done that, we wouldn't be here. I was like, hey, I'm really good at this. This is a great job. I have two kids. I don't know if I need to do this. I think you have to push through that. I'm mentoring someone right now who's in their third manuscript. I'm really pushing her because she's talented. It just reminds me so much of us. I think people forget too that even as published authors, we're dealing with rejection all the time. I think they think once they get on this path of being a published writer they never get rejected again and it's amazing. No, no, no. You're going to still get rejected all the time in all these little ways. That's just part of life and part of this business. I think that aspiring writers need to remember that. You're always being rejected. It's just you've got to push through it.

Zibby: Very true. I've actually decided that I think I'm going to start taking a survey because it seems like everybody who sells a novel has had two rejected first. It just seems that way.

Lisa: Or a bunch of rejections before they ultimately finally got there, but it was fifty, sixty like a JK Rowling or whatever. It's true. You just have to keep pushing forward. I'm sure there's a lot of us who have manuscripts sitting in the drawer.

Zibby: What's your next project? What are you working on next? What's it about?

Lisa: We can't talk about it too much because we're just finishing it up and we're not sure what's going to happen with it. It is in the same vein as How to Save a Life. We don't even have a set title. It's in the same vein. We write a lot about regret and fate. Actually, to your question that you asked, it kind of asks that question. That's really the narrative question of the book. I hadn’t thought about it that way, so thank you. It's really, is something fated or can you control it? That’s the premise of the entire book.

Zibby: Ooh, I can't wait to read that one.

Lisa: We're excited for you to read it.

Zibby: Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for all the stuff you also do for authors. I am so glad to be joined by people who enjoy interviewing other authors as much as I do. I think it's super fun.

Lisa: Thank you for all that you do.

Liz: Thank you.

Lisa: It's amazing. We're so appreciative. Thank you for having us today.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care. Thanks, ladies. Bye.

Liz: Bye.

Lisa: Bye.

Rachel Friedman, AND THEN WE GREW UP

Zibby Owens: I'm including Rachel Friedman on Advice Monday because her advice is about creativity, but her book is also memoir as well. Anyway, that's where I put her. Rachel is the author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure, that was from 2011, and was a Target Breakout Book and selected by Goodreads’ readers as one of the best travel books of 2011. Now she's come out with her second book which is called And Then We Grew Up: On Creativity, Potential, and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals, The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the creative nonfiction program at Rutgers-Newark with her MFA, she has taught literature, journalism, and writing at Columbia University, New York University, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her son.

How are you?

Rachel Friedman: Hi. Good. How are you?

Zibby: I'm good. I'm glad we're finally connecting.

Rachel: Me too. I can't believe I have to follow Marian Keyes, but I'm very glad [distorted audio].

Zibby: Perhaps I should've put her at the end, but whatever. No, I'm kidding. [laughs] Thank you. Your book was so interesting. I didn't have a big idea of what it would be about other than the cover when I started it. I did not realize you had been this virtuoso viola player and that you had to give away -- not give away, that you had to pivot so in early in life. When most people are just getting upwards on the trajectory, you had already reached a peak and had to regroup while everyone was at college bars or whatever. Tell me about this whole experience and how it informed your book.

Rachel: In many ways, I think I had to regroup because I wasn't a virtuoso. [laughs] I was very good from a young age. I played, first, guitar and then piano and then viola. Viola was the instrument that really hooked me. From a young age, I became quite obsessed with becoming a professional musician. I went to a very intense performing acts camp called Interlochen, which is the setting for the book because I reconnect with eight former campmates of mine. I was a small fish in a big pond growing up. I'm sure a lot of people have this experience, maybe not with music, but with debate or with a sport where they're very, very, very good to the point where you can start to think about professionalizing what you love. Then somewhere along the way, you hit a ceiling and you realize, okay, I was pretty good, but I'm actually either not good enough to make it doing what I want to do, or in order to make it doing what I want to do I'm going to have to give up everything else to such exclusion of the rest of my life that maybe I actually don't want the thing I thought I wanted. Both of those things happened to me. I hit a talent ceiling and I hit kind of an ambition ceiling with music.

Zibby: I feel like I saw that a lot in college with the athletes who had been training all their life. Then suddenly, that was not the be-all, end-all anymore and it was time to regroup.

Rachel: I think a lot of us have images of what our grown-up life is going to look like, even if it's not a specific thing we're pursuing. A lot of us, when we grow up, are facing this gap between the fantasy of our adult life and what it actually looks like. That's really what the book is about.

Zibby: Then after this transition, you regroup. Suddenly by age twenty-six, you've published a book and gotten married. You were on cloud nine. This is amazing. Then again, you have to realize that that was another peak and a valley was coming.

Rachel: Yes, that's a really lovely way of putting it. I had this precocious start to writing. Publishing my first book felt a little bit like a fluke in some ways. Although, I'm very proud of that book. I was young when I published it, for better and for worse. I thought, now I've published a book, now I'm writer. Now everything just goes uphill from here. I'm going to be able to make my full living as a writer. I'm going to have famous author friends. I'm going to get awards. It was the whole fantasy of the writers. I realized that with music I had developed this whole ideal of what it meant to be a writer and these very rigid definitions of success that weren’t really based on what I wanted or what was important to me, but what I had absorbed from external voices. With music, I was at this moment where I felt like if I didn't grapple with that artist mythology and what it meant to make an artistic life and what was important to me -- I didn't think I was going to give up writing because writing has already proved to be something that had endured, unlike music.

I thought, I'm going to be really bitter if I don't get a grip on this at some point, if I don't really take stock of what matters to me. What do I really need to feel content as a writer and to endure? I went to track down all these people from this camp. This was a time when everyone I knew at this camp had very specific ideas about who they wanted to be when they grew up. Interlochen, which is a camp in Michigan, is just full of so much incredible talent. It felt to me kind of like the last place when I had really been so sure of what I wanted to be and what that would look like. I was really curious to see if other people had grappled with this gap and what had become of them. This was pre-Facebook, so you didn't have updates on everyone in the same way. When I went to camp, it was pre-Facebook. Even if you do, you don't really have any idea what's going on with someone when you see their social media posts.

Zibby: I love how it all came back to you and you drowning your sorrows about taxes by going to a movie and seeing one of your fellow Interlochen friends having success like that. I think everyone can relate. Although, we don't all say it out loud. There's always something when you're happy for someone else, like, oh, my gosh, how did they do that? What have I done? It's just like, look at that.

Rachel: Yeah, this comparison issue, we all have. We went to camp with Ben Foster who's a very well-known actor. He's not in the book. Although, interestingly, as I was working on this book, at many points people encouraged me to try and interview him. I always felt like that's not the point of the book. I want to hear from people who are not famous, not at either end of the spectrum, haven't completely felt like they’ve failed at what they're doing, or maybe they have, or kind of middle of the road and they're trying to figure out how to endure. Ben Foster, you can read about it any magazine you pick up. That was the impetus behind the book. I was feeling very depressed about my financial situation as a freelance writer. I went to a movie, and there he was larger than life starring in it. That was quite a reckoning.

Zibby: I'm sorry. I've been there. Those are not fun feelings, oh, my gosh. What was your main takeaway? You went and you found all of these people. Then you end up actually dating somebody who's friends with Adam. All these fun things just start happening as you retrace your steps. Everybody has different things to share. What do you think were some of the main findings?

Rachel: It's a very interesting journey tracking down people who knew you when you were young. I do recommend it. It can be a winding journey full of many surprises. Everyone in the book really gave me another framework from which to view the issues that I was dealing with. The book breaks down the mythologies that I had about what it means to succeed, what it means to feel ordinary, what it means to compromise, what ambition looks like, what freedom looks like, all these very amorphous terms. We have this obsession with perseverance in this country, and I'm sure many other countries, where it's like, you only fail when you quit. That's really not true. If you have a quitting problem, that's one thing. Most of us work really hard. Then at some point often, at least some goal at some point we're pursuing, we do hit a ceiling and we have to refocus our energies. That's really good for us. I think the main takeaway of the book is that our lives, we have to design them. There's no expert out there. There's no internet article that is going to teach you what success is or tell you if you do X, Y, and Z, this will happen. We love formulas. We love this idea that you put in the work and then you reap the rewards. I think it's really important to dismantle the clichés and mythologies and really ask yourself the hard questions about what your fulfilling life would look like.

Zibby: That's awesome. By the way, you had probably my favorite expression I've ever heard, the art-nership. That is so perfect. Sometimes I feel like my husband and I, we're both very creative and whatever. That's such a nice way. I was like, oh, we have an art-nership. That's so great. Tell me about that.

Rachel: That's not my phrase.

Zibby: Oh. Well, I'm going to credit you anyway.

Rachel: The idea of the art-nership is your partner, the person that you end up making a life with, is also an artist. It's that romantic ideal of what that looks like. That too is a complicated reality, of course, but that's one of the many things I thought about my life. I need to end up with a person who does X because I do Y. That's the term of art-nership.

Zibby: I loved it. That was so great. Then your Washington Post article recently was great about teaching your son -- well, about evaluating the current theory that people should not allow their kids to quit anything, that we should teach all of them to persevere. You're not good at the piano? Just keep going. You said you also have to teach kids the flipside of that, which is not every extracurricular is for everybody. You have to be ready to cope when things don't work out, which I loved as such great parenting advice and also just life advice. Tell me a little more about that.

Rachel: I think we're really focused on resilience as it relates to perseverance, but there's also resilience in terms of being able to be disappointed that something didn't work out, not to wallow in that disappointment, but to understand that there are real setbacks. The experience of not getting what you want is such a common human experience, but we don't talk a lot about it, this idea of disappointment or longing or quitting, in a way that is not rebranding it as opportunity or turning it into some other narrative, but just, I wanted this thing, I tried really hard, it sucks. Again, it's not about wallowing in that disappointment, but I think giving it a little bit of space to say, I didn't turn out to be an astronaut, or whatever it is.

Zibby: I did notice in your book, and maybe I missed where you explained it or something, but I feel like you talked a lot about your dad. He was a retired film critic. He came up a lot and what he would think and what you would say to him. There wasn't a lot of mention of your mom. I was just wondering about that.

Rachel: My dad was probably just a stronger influence, to be totally honest, in terms of the way I thought about my grown-up life. My mom was very practical. My mom supports my writing and supported my music, but I think for her, she grew up poor and became a lawyer and really felt like her focus, understandably, was on financial security. Financial security is very important. I talk about in the book, kind of reckoning with that. My dad, who is a professor and has a different background, grew up in a more comfortable middle-class background, for me, the message was always, do what you love. You have to be passionate about what you do. There's no such thing as just as job. I think he's wrong about that ultimately, of course. Plenty of people have work-life balance where their job is not the thing that drives them and they derive their fulfilment in other ways. For me, he was just a very powerful influence. I saw his life too, this life of the professor, the life of the mind. He writes books. All of that really was influential for me as a kid.

Zibby: Interesting. I was wondering if you had advice for aspiring authors. Maybe you could weave in the fact that after you sold your first book, your second book didn't sell and you had to regroup and find the way back, which obviously you did because now we have this amazing book and we're sitting here talking.

Rachel: I think it's important to say you have that book nine years after the first one. That's a good amount of time. It took me a long time to write the second book. I did get pregnant in the middle of the writing process, which will slow things down a little bit. I couldn't figure out the right framing for that second book. It didn't get a contract. I was really disappointed, obviously. I think too, after a first book, you feel a lot of pressure to have this momentum. It's a very common experience for the second book not to work out. That's just one of the kinds of examples of enduring through disappointment that I think is useful and that we should talk about more. Marian Keyes had great advice for writers, which is essentially, you write. You sit down and you do it. Try to get out of your own way. I think a lot of times people who want to write, who aspire to write, they need permission. I'm not sure who we're looking for permission from, but we are the ones who need to give it to ourselves. You are entitled to write. You are entitled to self-expression. You are entitled to that space. To try to quiet those inner voices -- she was saying, we're all writing, as Anne Lamott would put it in Bird by Bird, which is a brilliant book if people are looking for inspiration on the writing life.

We all write shitty first drafts. Maybe some people don't, but we'll just consider them outliers. Most of us, the way you endure as a writer is through rewriting. You have to have a tolerance for repetition and for revision because what comes out first is messy and often incoherent and not very good. You can't edit, I think, out that part of it. You have to go through that part of it. There's a different part of your brain -- this the like the write drunk, edit sober expression which doesn't actually mean drunk-drunk, but I think means writing -- for some people, it does; not me -- writing without that inner critic telling you that something is no good. You just have to get it out. You have to take time to do it. Writing is a job like anything else. You put your hours in. I think sometimes people think, and Marian Keyes was saying this too, that it's sort of magical. Of course, there are magic moments, but I don't think that you have the space for those magic moments unless you're doing the disciplined work of carving out time regularly. I'm not even saying every day, but consistently to words on a page.

Zibby: Thank you, Rachel. Thanks for coming on. It was so nice to connect with you and hear your thoughts. I felt such pride for you when you were detailing your journey. Then knowing that because I was reading the book that you eventually got to success again, it was this wonderful thing that you could be holding the answer to what happens to the main character in your hands sort of like a meta -- anyway.

Rachel: Thank you so much. This was lovely [indiscernible].

Zibby: You too. Take care, Rachel.

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Leah Franqui, MOTHER LAND

Zibby Owens: Leah Franqui is the author of Mother Land: A Novel. Leah is a graduate of Yale University and received an MFA at NYU-Tisch. Her first novel, America for Beginners, was an Indie Next pick. A Puerto Rican Jewish native of Philadelphia, Franqui now lives with her Kolkata-born husband in Mumbai.

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

Leah Franqui: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited.

Zibby: I'm so excited to talk to you about Mother Land, which was so well-written by the way. I loved how you did it, the immediacy of everything, how you're in her brain from the minute the novel opens. You're immediately relating. Anybody who's had a mother-in-law can relate, not to say anything ill about my mother-in-law. I've now had two mother-in-laws. They're both great. I love how you just threw the reader right in there and immediately related. I just love books that start like that.

Leah: Thanks so much.

Zibby: Will you please tell listeners what Mother Land is about and then what inspired you to write it?

Leah: Mother Land is about a young woman, Rachel, who moves to India with her Indian-born husband. She's hoping that the experience will give her life a new start and an adventure. She's lost in her life and hoping this big change to a country she's never been to will spark something for her. When she moves to India, she's pretty overwhelmed. She's even more overwhelmed when her mother-in-law decides to leave her father-in-law and her life in Kolkata and comes and moves in with Rachel and her husband in Mumbai. She's even more thrown when her husband has to go away for work and she's stuck with this woman she doesn't know very well in a city she doesn't know, in a country and a culture she doesn't know. The clash between them about how to live life in Mumbai and how to be in the world eventually turns into a friendship that benefits them both.

Zibby: I love how in the beginning, when the mother-in-law shows up on the stoop and she takes the suitcase inside for her mother-in-law and she thinks, maybe this was it. Maybe this was the moment. What if I hadn’t brough the suitcase inside? I feel like that's something that I always do in my head. What if that one thing had been different?

Leah: I know. The spirit of looking back and being like, that was the moment. I could've changed it all. I do that too. I think I put that in that character because I do that too.

Zibby: I figured. How did you come up with this story? What made you write this?

Leah: This story came out of a lot of life experience and a lot of imagination, so it's both in equal measure. I live in Mumbai. I moved to Mumbai with my Indian-born husband, who also happens to be from Kolkata, in 2015. Before that, my mother-in-law had come to stay with us for about a month right when we got married and moved in together. We did both at the same time. I'd never been to India before I moved to India. I didn't know a lot about India before I met my in-laws. The whole process was condensed by being an international family. I did have this incident where I had a moment of incredible anxiety, which is where a lot of my work comes from, where I was in my tiny Brooklyn apartment and my mother-in-law had this fight with my father-in-law over the phone. My husband, in Hindi, was talking to her. I didn't understand what they were saying. Then he turned to me and he was like, "Mom's going to stay another month." [laughter] I was like, um, what's that? It was sort of a joke. They were kind of trolling my father-in-law. I had this moment of, what if she just stays forever? What if my mother-in-law just moves in with me and lives with me forever and this is my life now?

Then I moved to Mumbai and got to know my in-laws better by visiting them in Kolkata and had this whole life experience of moving to Mumbai for similar-but-different reasons than my protagonist in this novel, but faced a lot of the dislocation and isolation and culture shock and trying to figure out how to navigate my needs, my identity, all the me in this new collective country filled with so many cultures, so many things that were so unfamiliar. I had so many anxieties about what this international move would do to my marriage, what it would do to me. I have had incredible experiences in India. I've had difficult experiences in India. It's challenging. It's been wonderful for me. It's been wonderful for my marriage. I do write a lot from the what-if. What if it hadn’t been? What if it hadn’t made my relationship stronger? What if had kind of defeated me in these other ways? What if my mother-in-law lived with me forever? Spinning out those anxieties into fantasies, into new characters and new people is kind of where the novel came from. This is not my life. This woman is not my mother-in-law. I'm not Rachel. There are elements of the real experience of living in Mumbai, integrating into an Indian family who have been nothing but incredibly wonderful and accepting of me, and also being challenging in terms of what I thought the world was living in one country versus the wonderful perspective-breaking thing living in another country does. It comes from all of that and more.

Zibby: In Mumbai, do you live in the area where you can smell the fish and have a view of the fish?

Leah: Actually, I do. I live in a neighborhood above the neighborhood I set it in. This whole area is along part of the coast. There's these fishermen who dry the fish out along that coastline. If you live anywhere near the coast, there's fishermen along it in Mumbai. You'll smell that at some point.

Zibby: I love how that becomes your character's alarm clock that it's five o'clock, basically, the smells.

Leah: That's real. I work from home a lot. I would lose track of time and then suddenly be like, oh, I guess it's five o'clock.

Zibby: There's this neighborhood ice cream truck where we are right now that comes by between five and five thirty every day. It's the same thing. I'm like, oh, my gosh. I have to get up. I have to get off of my desk chair. Time to go for a walk because it's going to be dark. I better move for the day. I love those external markers of time. You have a really interesting background. You're half Jewish and half Puerto Rican. How did your identity, combining those two pieces, combining your parents essentially, how did they inform your own sense of identity in the world?

Leah: My father, his parents migrated from Puerto Rico in '49, '50, which was part of this wave of migration from Puerto Rico. Then my mom's parents are a mix of first and third generation immigrants from what is now Russia. My grandmother was directly from Russia, but she grew up in [indiscernible]. I think that growing up, that didn't seem that crazy of a mix, I think because I grew up on the East Coast in a school, in an environment where a lot of people were some kind of mix. I think that I didn't know too many people who had a Jewish/Latino mix, but I have met them over the years. Mixture where I grew up in the United States seemed more normal than being of one thing. I do think that the negotiation of identity as I got older, as I got into high school and college, and the idea of what it meant to be enough of anything became a big part of how I got into writing, actually. I think that the idea of being Puerto Rican enough or what enough meant or being Latina and what that meant to me and also being Jewish and what that meant to me, deciding that I needed to start taking more responsibility for my own religious philosophy -- if I was going to perpetuate a belief in Judaism, it couldn't just be because I'd grown up going to synagogue, I'd grown up with my mother telling me to go to synagogue. It had to be something I started choosing or not choosing as an adult. I think that college was a time when I really decided that that was important for me to explore what either of these two things meant for me and how I was going to deal with them.

Writing became a great way to do that. I came into fiction as a dramatic writer. A lot of the work that I wrote before and during graduate school talked about a relationship to Puerto Rico, a relationship to being Latina, the way I understood my family, trying to come to terms with my large Puerto Rican family and the life I'd spent visiting them and connecting with them but being separate from them, and also coming to terms with my family history on all sides. I think that the interesting thing about moving to a third-party country that has no context for either of those things is that then your identity gets reimagined again by the people you meet. When I first met my in-laws, they had no context for Jewish, certainly. They had no context for Puerto Rican. I definitely live as white. I come from fairly European Puerto Rican stock. Although, of course there's a ton of mixing. I present as white. I am white. All of those things that had made up my identity in the States then became, not erased, but totally not as contextualized in India. Then I had a whole new identity being a white person in India, which has added a third layer of information about myself and how I operate in the world. It's been a journey. It continues to be a journey. [laughs] I guess it taught me that no matter how much you self-define, there's so much about how other people see you that you can't really control. You just have to recognize what you've come to terms with as yourself and do your best to be that.

Zibby: You have to have a really strong fundamental sense of who you are regardless of your background and your parents and the shade of your skin and all the rest. I am who I am whether I'm dropped down in the middle of a vegetable market in Mumbai or I'm on the subway in New York or whatever else. Otherwise, it's just so confusing.

Leah: Yeah, and you'll let the world tell you what to be. I think that's something that we think about a lot in the US, what I carry with me and what's important for me to bring everywhere I go. That's a great thing about immigrant countries. You have to personally decide what matters to you and what you want to carry with you rather than let your environment decide that for you. I've hosted a seder every year I've been in Mumbai for Passover because I realize, wow, that's really important to me. That’s an important thing for me to do, for me celebrate, even though there's no resources for that. There's no structure around that. It's just something that matters to me. You learn who you are.

Zibby: Is there a Jewish community in Mumbai?

Leah: There used to be larger Jewish communities in a lot of major Indian cities, including Mumbai. There's a couple really beautiful historic synagogues. It's really decreased since independence for many reasons. There are still a couple active synagogues. There is a Chabad house. I have been to services at one of the really beautiful historic synagogues in Mumbai. It was historically a Baghdadi Jewish population. That's really interesting, really interesting migration pattern, real interesting food. They speak Ladino not Yiddish. They're Sephardic. It's really tiny. I've met maybe one or two Indian Jews in Mumbai.

Zibby: It's so interesting. The seder is such a special moment because you're forced to always think about all the people around the world doing the exact same thing. Now when I have my next seder, I can think about you in India. It really is all over the place. It's very special in that way. Tell me a little more about the process of writing Mother Land. How long did it take you to write? Where? Were you over there? Tell me when and where you wrote it and all of that good stuff.

Leah: I'm a big drafter. I've realized that over time. I have come to terms with that. That's my process. I'm a fast writer who writes many drafts. So far, that's what's served me. I was already living in Mumbai when I started writing Mother Land. I started writing it about six months before my first novel, America for Beginners, was released. I worked on the first draft in Mumbai. Then I was really lucky. I got a writer's residency in Italy, which was an incredible experience. I worked on the second draft there, which was also very interesting to work on this novel that's very much set in and embedded in Mumbai in an idyllic vineyard in Italy. That was real cognitive dissonance there, but incredible. Then I worked subsequent drafts with the help of my incredible agent, Julia Kardon, who's always just so great at really seeing the things that I'm trying to do and failing at doing in my novels and helping me actually do them. Then eventually we sent this to my editor. Of course, she had incredible feedback, incredible edits, as Rachel always does. By the time it finally sold, it had been about a year that I'd been working on it. Then of course, there are subsequent drafts after my editor agreed to publish it with her. I think that it probably, all told, the first time I put fingers to computer versus final copy, probably around a year and nine, ten months, about two years.

Zibby: That's not bad.

Leah: No.

Zibby: That's fairly fast on the continuum.

Leah: This is a book that really came out of me fairly quickly. I knew these two characters really well. I had an idea of the story. It's really about these two people. The intricate plotting that you sometimes do was not as much of the labor as, how do I most authentically really layer these people such that they both feel complete and total and really true?

Zibby: Now that it's out in the world, are you already attacking a new project? Are you focused mostly on publicity and all the rest that comes with releasing a book into the world, especially during this time?

Leah: Boy, during this time is a whole other -- I think that all of us in the world are like, what are we doing during this time? I think that all of us creatively are, we're all having parallel experiences of, has this made us incredibly productive? Is this a creatively rich time? Is this a creatively draining time where that's just not possible? Those are both totally fair responses. There's no right way to be an artist. There's certainly no right way to be an artist or person right now. I'm always working on a lot of news things. My husband likes to joke -- I met my husband in graduate school for dramatic writing. One of the arts of dramatic writing is distillation. When I got into fiction, it was such an incredible release because you don't have to be as distilled in fiction. My husband jokes that of course I've become a novelist because I have so much to say. He's right in many ways. I do, I have so many stories I'm interested in. I have so many things that I love writing. Right now, I am working on a new novel. I'm working on several TV scripts. I finished the first draft of a new play I'd been working on for a long time. I think that I'm really motivated by having multiple stories happening at once. They lift the weight of wanting to say everything in one place on the other. Actually, for me, spreading it out frees the work up to be what it wants to be rather than me trying to cram everything I'm thinking into one place at one time. I'm always working on a lot of things.

Zibby: That's awesome. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Leah: Oh, boy, so much. Then also, who am I to give advice? I feel both things very strongly. [laughs]

Zibby: It's okay. You are completely in the right to give advice. I am holding your novel in my hand. That means that you can give advice.

Leah: One of the things I often credit pursuing training in dramatic writing doing for me as a novelist is that, whether you do a program for it or not, I think the act of pursuing dramatic writing pushes you very hard to be un-precious because you write a lot of things into the void. You are encouraged in that field to write a lot of things and then discard them and write something news. Often in a dramatic writer's portfolio, they might have anywhere from five to ten scripts that they’ve worked on. Say you're a TV writer. One of those might get you onto a writers' room, and none of them will ever actually be made. They're the samples you made that you hoped would go somewhere but they didn't. Then you move on and you move on. There's a lot of throwing things out and moving on, throwing and moving. I think that that's especially in more commercial programs. I would say NYU is both an artistic and a commercial program. That's the graduate school I went to. There is this push towards anti-preciousness. I think that there's a time in your process to fall in love with what you have to say. I do it every time. There's also a time to throw a lot out the door, especially if you're a writer like me. I think the best advice I have is, there's this impulse to write one thing and put so much weight and love into it that the idea of writing another thing feels like a horrible waste or incredible pain. What you might end up with is one very beautiful thing that nobody wants to publish or serves you at a certain point in time and doesn't serve you later.

I think that the best advice I have is just to write lots of things. Write lots of stories. Yes, of course treasure that big novel inside of you that takes ten years to write. One of the things that writers who spend a lot more time on a project than maybe I have right now is that they also had ten other things they were writing in that time. When we talk about a writer who's spent ten years on a book, they’ve often written and done so many other things that kept fueling that, kept fueling that one big thing. The myth of, I worked on a novel for fifteen years and then it was Swann's Way, I think it tricks people into feeling that all of their mental energy should be spent on this one thing, and then it'll be perfect. Maybe there are people who work like that, and that's incredible. For me, the most fruitful thing to keep myself writing, keep myself excited, because you want to fall in love, you want to be excited about the work, is to write multiple things at once and let yourself remember that you have more than one story in you.

Zibby: I love that. Leah, thank you so much. I love the fact that we can talk across the entire planet, basically, about your book and that words can unite so much. It's so great. It just feels so neat to be able to do this from where you are and have your words here in my home and you're so far away. It's very cool.

Leah: I love that. I love that about story. When I first met my husband, we were talking about this. He had this anxiety about the kind of stories he wanted to tell. Who's going to care? Who's going to care about this story set in Kolkata? We're in a grad school in New York. Who's going to care? I asked him, "What are some of the stories that you've loved the best? Do they all come from exactly your life perspective?" He was like, "No. I love the Blue, White, and Red trilogy. I love Oldboy. I love all of these things that come out of my context but helped me see something in my context." I think that's the incredible thing about story.

Zibby: That's awesome. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Leah: Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

Zibby: I can't wait to read what you have coming up. I never read America for Beginners. I'm going to go back and read that. Looking forward to your next batch.

Leah: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's been an incredible pleasure.

Zibby: Bye.

Brooke Fossey, THE BIG FINISH

Zibby Owens: Brooke Fossey was once an aerospace engineer with a secret clearance before she traded it all in for motherhood and writing. She's a past president and an honorary lifetime member of DFW Writers' Workshop. Her work can be found in numerous publications including Ruminate Magazine and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut novel, The Big Finish, was published from Penguin/Berkley. When she’s not writing, you can find her in Dallas, Texas, with her husband, four kids, and their dog Rufus. She still occasionally does math.

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

Brooke Fossey: I'm so excited to be here.

Zibby: Can you please tell listeners what The Big Finish is about? Congratulations on your debut novel. It's really exciting.

Brooke: Thank you. The Big Finish is about an eighty-eight-year-old named Duffy Sinclair. He's living his last days in peace at Centennial Assisted Living except it's all disrupted when his roommate's troubled granddaughter climbs through their bedroom window. He has to reassess his legacy and his past and make some decisions as chaos ensues.

Zibby: I was so interested that you would choose to tell a story from the point of view of an eighty-eight-year-old man. Tell me about that. How did you come up with the idea for this book?

Brooke: I always say I have an eighty-eight-year-old man living inside of me somewhere. I'm like an old [indiscernible/laughter]. Truly, I came up with the idea when I was visiting my grandpa at the assisted living. I would bring all of my kids. Like you, I have four children. It was chaos. It was controlled chaos. I did a lot of just collecting them, trying to make sure they didn't run away. I was inspired because everyone there, despite their age, had such rich histories and such fantastic personalities. I decided they all deserved a book. More than that, they deserved to be the heroes of the book. That was the seed. I loosely based my main character off of my grandpa. Josie, who's troubled but also brings a lot of joy, is kind of my kids, basically, is how it happened.

Zibby: I feel like a lot of trouble and a lot of joy is a good description of basically any kid. [laughs]

Brooke: A hundred percent.

Zibby: I saw the picture of you with your four kids seeing your book in a bookstore for the first time on Instagram. That was so great. How exciting.

Brooke: I had one teenager that was underwhelmed by it all, but what are you going to do? [laughs]

Zibby: I have two almost thirteen-year-olds. I relate to that montage. Did you give your grandfather the book? Did he get a chance to read it?

Brooke: You know what? He passed before I had finished. In fact, I think I may have finished a draft, but he did not get to see it published. I know he's smiling down on me. He's probably pretty proud.

Zibby: What was the process like writing this novel? Why write a novel now? Where did that come from in your life?

Brooke: It's really funny. I was an engineer by profession. I got two degrees in it. I worked at Lockheed on the joint strike fighter which is a [indiscernible] thirty-five plane. Then I started having a bunch of kids. After four of them, I decided I was going to stay home. I really am glad that I made that decision. At the same time, I was slowly going insane because I had four kids in five years. It was a little bit of luck here. During a naptime, I opened up my computer and I started writing. I couldn't stop. I would look forward to these naptimes because I would start going into a different world. I finished a couple books. I started to practice the craft and really get serious. It took me about ten years to get here, but it's been fun. It's basically a very late-in-life passion that I discovered.

Zibby: Wow, that's amazing. I feel like such a waste of space when I talk to so many authors like you who use their kids' naptimes to write books. I emailed. Why did I waste all those naps? I tried to catch up on thank you notes or whatever else I was doing, bills. Everybody else is sitting around writing beautiful novels or practicing the craft. [laughs]

Brooke: Well, you should see my house during that. I could've been doing something else also productive. That was my outlet. It was fun for me.

Zibby: That's awesome. How has it been? I know this is such a crazy time in the world, A, and to have a book come out, B. What has this whole process been at this stage having worked for so long to get this out into the world?

Brooke: There's been an expectation gap, obviously. I'm glad that my family and I are very adaptable. We've just kind of rolled with it. I mean, what are you going to do? You just have to accept it and keep moving. It was disappointing. We canceled the parties. We canceled all sorts of event. Then I learned how to use a lot of technology. I did more online stuff than I ever imagined. I'm well-equipped now at the house. Although, you couldn't tell it by looking at me at the moment.

Zibby: I know. I'm like, if we ever do go back to real life, now I have all these skills. Throw me on a platform and let me find my way out. Oh, my gosh. After working on that book, are you working on another novel? Are you constantly thinking of new ideas? How does the writing process look for you?

Brooke: I am working on another novel. It's cooking. I'm what they call a pantser. I don't like to plot. I just like to explore and surprise myself as I write. I hope that shows up in my writing because as you read, you might be surprised a time or two. I can't say too much about it because I'm not a plotter. I can say that there are some soap operas involved. I think it's an homage to soap operas in a way because I'm Greek American, and my great-grandmother, she learned how to speak English by watching soap operas. I've just taken that and ran with it. Very little has to do my family besides that.

Zibby: How did your family end up in Texas from Greece?

Brooke: I'm third generation, so my family has been here for a while.

Zibby: Got it. Sorry, random question.

Brooke: No, you're fine.

Zibby: I was just thinking, if I was coming from Greece, how would you end up in Texas? I don't know.

Brooke: The American melting pot is an amazing thing.

Zibby: Yes. So what kind of books do you like to read? Do you like to read fiction like this? Who are some of your role model authors or books that you've read lately that you've really enjoyed?

Brooke: I love all books, basically. Every book I read, because I never took a proper writing class, I underline a lot when I see something that's interesting. Basically, every author that I'm reading at the moment is my favorite because they're teaching me. I love Peace like a River by Leif Enger. It's one of my favorite books. I'm a Dave Eggers fan, Ann Patchett. I love Tana French. I like a lot of literary-ish novels that are accessible, is how I would put it.

Zibby: That's a good way to put it. I might steal that to describe categories of books.

Brooke: Once you add ish to something, the umbrella gets bigger.

Zibby: When you write, so you're a pantser without any outlines or anything, where do you like to write? Do you like to write at home? Are you the type of person who can write anywhere? Are you very much like, I have to be in this corner of my house? What's it like? What's your process like?

Brooke: I'm like a dog that was trained. As I was writing during naptime, it was basically quiet and it didn't matter where I was. I just had to have some time by myself. That's what it's turned into for me. I will drive a kid to practice, and I will sit in my car and do it then. I will get everyone into bed, and I will sit and do it then. My only requirement is honestly that it's quiet and that nobody's bothering me because as I write, I have a tendency to talk out loud like a crazy person. I can't go to bookstores or coffee shops. Some of my friends will invite me for little writing dates. I'm like, I can't. I look like a crazy person.

Zibby: What are you saying out loud? Are you writing it and then reading it out loud to see how it sounds?

Brooke: Yes, I do a lot of audible stuff. In the writing workshop that I belong to, we do a lot of read-alouds. I think that's also trained me just to listen to what it sounds like, what it's going to sound like to the reader, basically. To be fair, I also do a little acting, I think. [laughs]

Zibby: A little acting?

Brooke: Sure. Why not? So you can get their gestures and their tone and how they're going to say something.

Zibby: Did you end up narrating the audiobook for your own book?

Brooke: No. A really excellent voice actor did it named Mark Bramhall. He did a fantastic job.

Zibby: Probably better to be a man. [laughter] I was just thinking that you could use that skill. I actually just interviewed a voiceover actor. I was like, wow, it never occurred to me. I should've tried out for that job. There's so many jobs out there that you don't even know. It's silly.

Brooke: It's fascinating. I agree. I think I explore that a lot in my writing because my career choice has kind of taken a left turn. I do, I see so many jobs out there where I'm like, that would be interesting. Now, that would be interesting. So I feel that.

Zibby: How do you think your engineering mind works well with fiction? Do you feel like any of the strengths of that apply when you're crafting narratives? Do you think this is just another skill set and you just have different parts of your brain that jump in at different times?

Brooke: I think it's twofold. I think it helps me because I think a book is just a really long equation or a big puzzle that you're trying to put together. In that way, I feel like I'm solving a problem. On the flip side, I feel like my engineering does me a disservice because in math there's always a right answer. I can get to the end of a scene or the end of a book even and think, is this right? There's no way to know, really, because it's art. It just depends on which side of my brain is dominant at the moment.

Zibby: Wow. How great to be able to have them both. So many people are like, I'm only this type of thinker. How involved are your kids in your writing? Have they read your book? Are they really excited? Do they not really care?

Brooke: They haven't read it. I told them I would prefer them to wait only because I want them to appreciate it. I don't know that they will right now. It's not that it's inappropriate or anything like that. There's some themes that have to do with life and death. When you are a kid, you are invincible. I think that you need a little perspective to appreciate it. Generally speaking, I don't think they care. [laughs] Oh, well.

Zibby: I know. If only there was a way to get the kids to really -- I'm like, hey, guess what guys? They're like, yeah, do we have any more milk? All right, whatever.

Brooke: You're talking to a famous person? Who cares?

Zibby: [laughs] That's awesome. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Brooke: I think my only advice is to give yourself permission to write. This is from my own personal experience. All by itself, it feels like a very silly endeavor to sit and write made-up stuff. It does. I think that our adult brains kind of can stop us from just going there. If you want to write something and you have a story on your heart, all you have to do is give yourself permission to go ahead and start writing it. Don't worry about the critics or your inner critic saying this is silly. I have a good friend that always tell me when I'm like, "My story feels silly," or my short story, he's like, "Describe the Wizard of Oz to me." I'll say, "It's about a girl that gets sucked in a tornado and lands in a weird world." It sounds so silly if you really think about it. I think that's it. Just make your adult mind be quiet and go for it.

Zibby: You did just offhandedly mention that you wrote many novels as you were on your way to this one. You didn't even say it in a way like, it was hard, these novels didn't sell, or whatever. It sounded like you viewed them as practice. Those were just the things you had to do to get to where you were. Is that the attitude you took all the way through it?

Brooke: The writing workshop that I belong to was very informative as far as that goes. They celebrate rejection because it means you're putting yourself out there. I liken to if you pick up the violin and decide you want to play in an orchestra. You don't get to be in the pit. You have to put in the time and earn your stripes before you play. I think writing's a strange thing because everybody can write. Everybody can write a sentence. In a way, people are like, well, I could write a story, but there's a craft to it that you actually have to learn and practice before you can metaphorically play in the pit. Yeah, I wrote a bunch of books, but some of them are really terrible. They won't see the light of day, and that's okay.

Zibby: What makes a book not a terrible book in your mind? How did you fix whatever it was you felt you were doing wrong?

Brooke: I think that as you move along you start learning different parts of the craft. One book, I got really good at dialogue. Then the next book, I got really great at characterization. For me, my most difficult thing is plotting. Obviously, my pantser tendencies don't help. You just build on your skill set every time you write.

Zibby: That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your process and your book and all the rest.

Brooke: Likewise, Zibby. I'm so pleased to be here. When I saw you had four kids, I thought, we are kin. We're secret kin that we don't even know each other, but now we do.

Zibby: I know. I felt the same way when I read that about you. I was like, ah, okay. There's a lot we understand without even having to say.

Brooke: Yes. I love it.

Zibby: Have a great day. Thanks for coming on the show.

Brooke: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.