Melissa Gould, WIDOWISH

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Melissa. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I am so excited to be talking to you.

 

Melissa Gould: I am so excited to be talking to you.

 

Zibby: As I think you know because I kept posting about it on social media and we were emailing and all the rest, I read your book at the most emotional moment, probably, in my adult life when I was literally flying down to Duke to say goodbye to my mother-in-law. I read it that whole two days down there which will be forever etched in my mind as just traumatic and awful. Except, I got escape into your book. I feel this special bond with you which you're not even a part of. It's me and your book, or your book and me, I should say. Thank you for providing me the solace that I needed during that time. I'm really grateful.

 

Melissa: I am so flattered that my story resonated for you. That it helped you at all just means so much to me. I am so sorry for your losses.

 

Zibby: I'm so sorry for your loss. Thank you for writing so beautifully about all of it. Why don't you tell listeners what your memoir is about? It's called Widowish. Give us more context and tell us how this became a book.

 

Melissa: I'll tell you, I really believe that Widowish is a love story. It's a modern love story that's wrapped up in a grief story and a little bit more of a love story. It's also about expectations. Let me just start by saying, my husband, Joel, died unexpectedly and suddenly of West Nile virus. It was something none of us saw coming. Joel was my person. He was my everything. We had been together, married for sixteen years, probably together for twenty. We had a thirteen-year-old daughter. She was thirteen at the time, Sophie. When he died, obviously my world was completely upended. Widowish, in some ways, it's about the title. I was young. I was in my forties. I didn't look like a widow. I didn't act like a widow. Plot twist, I found love again, also completely unexpectedly and suddenly. I felt like a widow. I still feel like a widow. It's been several years now. So much of my story is about how all of these feelings of feeling so bereft and so grief-stricken and so sad and so in love with my husband and yet the tingling sensations of a new love and the excitement that that brought into my life, all of these feelings were coexisting. People didn't know that about me. I became the town widow. I live in Los Angeles. In our community, everybody knows each other. Our kids all go to the same school. They all go to the same doctors. They all have the same guitar teacher. We all knew each other. I felt very self-conscious. People would see me picking up Sophie from school or going to yoga or going to Trader Joe's because life moved forward whether I wanted it to or not. Having a young daughter, she became my focus. Widowish is really about all of these things, these coexisting feelings, the sudden loss, only parenting. Our small little family trio became this dynamic duo of Sophie and I. Widowish really explores all of those things.

 

Zibby: Can you share the story of how Joel got West Nile or how you believe he got it? Just an abridged version if it's not too painful to summarize that period of time, what exactly happened.

 

Melissa: It was so crazy. Joel had multiple sclerosis. He had MS. He was diagnosed when Sophie was around eight years old. Prior to that, Joel really was a mix of athleticism and music. He worked in the music business. Music was so important to us as a family. We went to concerts all the time. He would go out several nights a week to see bands and live music. He also was on a softball team. He was on a basketball team. He would go to the gym every day. He was an extremely athletic person, loved the Dodgers, I have to say. He came home from a basketball game one night like ten minutes after he had left. He just said, "Something is really wrong. I see the ball going down the court. I tell my body, go, but I can't." It was devastating. After a series of tests, he got the MS diagnosis. We thought, okay, we're going to manage this. We knew about MS. Some family members, ironically, had it. It was something we knew about. Joel got on the right medication. It really worked for a number of years. He was living his life with MS. Certain things started to affect him years into the diagnosis because what we realized was a lot of these medications have a lifespan, and they stop working.

 

It was around the time of Sophie's bat mitzvah. 2013 was really a seminal year for us in our family. Sophie was turning thirteen and having her bat mitzvah. Joel was turning fifty. Later that year, he died unexpectedly. We had these milestones. It's so funny how life works. Because of the bat mitzvah, because of his fiftieth birthday, we saw everybody in our lives who was important to us and who mattered that year. I don't know if that makes sense. There were people who were coming in and out of our lives throughout the year that wouldn't necessarily have been there if not for the bat mitzvah, if not for his fiftieth birthday. Anyway, that year of all of these things, Joel really was suffering with the MS. We went from living with it and having a full life with a few modifications -- he eventually had to stop playing basketball, but then he found yoga. Yoga was everything. He started riding his bike more. Again, he was a very athletic guy who liked to move. The new meds that he had started were just not kicking in. He really was starting to suffer. Protocol with MS is you would take steroids. The doctor would prescribe steroids that would sort of bridge the gap between the old medication and the new medication just to keep Joel moving forward every day. The steroids which he was getting -- a nurse was coming to our house every day for week administering these steroids through an IV.

 

We were told, similar to, in a way, what we're dealing with now with COVID, is that because of his suppressed immune system, the steroids might make him susceptible to a cold or something that he wouldn't be able to fight off so easily. We were on lockdown for a week. Sophie was still going to school. We weren’t having friends over. We weren’t going out to dinner. Joel was taking these steroids. He would hang out in our backyard, which was his happy place. He loved to garden. He loved to cut some flowers, pick the lemons from our lemon tree. He was an outdoor guy. We never thought that that would be dangerous. What I mean by that is -- about two months after the steroid treatment, the MS was not getting any better. Actually, I'm a little off on the timeline, Zibby, but you got the idea. He was having these different treatments. Then at some point, he got very sick with symptoms that did not seem like MS. He had an extremely high fever. He would take Tylenol, and the fever would go down. He became very fatigued. We thought he had the flu. We were sort of on high alert with his MS doctors because new medication can go either way. We weren’t sure, is this a reaction to the new meds? Is this the flu? After a few days, we were like, this is crazy.

 

Joel and I made the decision together to take him to the hospital, to go to the hospital. He walked himself in. Yes, we were dealing with MS, but we were not hospital people. I didn't know protocol. We went to the emergency room. They eventually moved him into a room. Me, thinking he had the flu, couldn't wait to get home and wash everything and disinfect everything. I didn't want to catch it. I didn't want Sophie to. I never thought that this was dire. He very quickly, in the hospital, fell into a coma. I had to move him from one hospital which, to me, was the go-to hospital. People go there for cancer treatments and to have their babies and whatever. We moved him from that hospital to the hospital where his MS doctors were, another fantastic facility. At that point, we were like, this could be a deathly reaction to the MS meds, but it never really presented like a reaction to the meds. There was medical confusion for two and a half, three weeks. Joel was in a coma this whole time. The doctors were telling me, "Your husband is critically ill." In my mind, I kept thinking, well, make him better. That's what you did. None of this occurred to me, that he would die.

 

That's when I really learned about viruses. A series of tests were done from the very first hospital to the second hospital. Results kept coming back negative, but they kept circling the idea that this was a virus. One of the very first infectious disease doctors was examining Joel from head to toe when we first admitted him and kept asking me, "Are you sure he wasn't bit by something? Was he bit by a mosquito? Did he have a --" I was like, "I have no idea." Turns out, he was bitten by a mosquito. That's how he contracted West Nile virus. Really, that is the cause of his death. There are a few things listed on his death certificate, but West Nile virus is number one. Complications from MS is another one. It was horrifying and completely unexpected. The doctors, every day, were coming to me with something new. "We think he has brain damage. He seems to be paralyzed from the waist down." Even though they were telling me these things, again, I kept thinking, okay, once we know what it is, you'll give him the meds and he'll be better. Viruses don't work that way. West Nile virus did its job. Meaning, all of the things that a virus can do to a person, cause brain damage, cause paralysis, that's what happened to Joel. These viruses just have to run their course. Because of the MS, he was susceptible to a lethal mosquito bite.

 

Zibby: I am so sorry. I can't believe that happened. I can't believe that a mosquito, in today's day and age, can actually be the cause of this. I'm just so sorry. It's awful.

 

Melissa: Thank you. It's shocking even when I tell the story, Zibby. That's what I mean. Really, a lot of that is in the book. My life became so surreal and continues to be in so many ways.

 

Zibby: It's the shock of it. When you kept saying, "I just kept thinking, okay, fine, he's critically ill. Make it better. That's good. Onto the next. Let's keep going," it's the shock. It's the shock that doctors don't have the answers to all these things. You can be in the best hospital. It shouldn't be this way, but it is. Then you can't go back. You can't be like, oh, we should've done this. Let's do this next time. You can't. That's it. It's the last straw.

 

Melissa: I'm sure this is similar to what you guys were going through also. It is shocking because of what you just said also. You think these doctors, they're miracle workers. Okay, do something. That's what you're here for. This is your language, not mine. You must know what's going on.

 

Zibby: First of all, when did you decide to make your experience into a book? How did that end up happening?

 

Melissa: That's kind of crazy also. I've been a writer my whole life. I was a screenwriter and made my living as a TV writer. I was very content working in television. When Joel died, of course, as I've said, my life was turned upside down. I really was living a life of grief but acting as if everything was okay because I wanted to keep Sophie on track. I was really suffering in my grief. A very close friend of mine invited me to join her writing group. It was really just a baby step of me getting back to a part of myself that I had sort of let go, which was writing. I joined this group. I was the only professional writer in there. All my worst qualities came out. I just was going with it. It's almost like somebody pointed me in the direction and said, go, and I went. The direction this time was, join a writing group. I joined this writing group. After five minutes, I loved it. I just thought, oh, my god, this is it. This is going to save me. I started writing a novel. I loved it. I loved the characters and the world I was creating. It was such an escape for me. For those few hours once a week, I'd go to my writing group. I was so happy. My friend who had invited me into the group -- we were leaving one night. I think I said, "I just signed up for the next six-week session." I had started seeing this guy who became my boyfriend. I was telling her about him. She looked at me.

 

She's like, "You know, I love the novel. I love it. I love what you're writing. But Joel just died. You're raising Sophie on your own. You're now seeing Marcos. You're not writing about any of it. I really think you should." I was stunned. I was actually very angry. How dare she? How dare anybody tell me what to write? It felt so personal. Because I was a screenwriter and had done that my whole life, the thought of writing about myself or writing anything that personal, I could not wrap my head around. I was like, why in the world would I write something so personal? I was so angry at my friend. I was so incensed, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. I kept thinking, what would I write about? What would I say? I had so much to say. I had so much to say about being widowed in my forties, about becoming an only parent, about falling in love again while I was deeply grieving my husband. The whole week leading up to the next class I just kept having these thoughts. When I got to class the following week, I decided, I'm just going to do it. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. I have not stopped writing about myself since. [laughs] How Widowish came about was -- first of all, that was most healing thing for myself. I don't know that I would've come to that. Maybe eventually I would’ve realized, oh, maybe I should write about this. It was a close friend who knew me so well putting that suggestion in my mind. Changed my life, really.

 

I started writing these essays. Then I started publishing the essays. I couldn't believe that people were interested in my story. I kept hearing from people. A lot of them were widows. A lot of them weren’t. What I was writing really resonated for them. Then I got my essays in the -- I got one in the LA Times and The Washington Post and then The New York Times. I had a column on the Huffington Post. I just kept going. It's funny. When I got my first TV writing job, I was so thrilled to be at the table. I was so excited. I couldn't believe it. I really felt the same. I feel the same way now. I know as a young kid, I always wanted to be an author, and I ended up being a screenwriter. That's just also so surreal. I now have this book out. I am now a bona fide author, but it's because my husband died. That's the other thing, Zibby. That is the greatest gift in all of this. You and I are sitting here now. We're having a conversation about Joel. That keeps him alive. That is everything. I didn't see that coming. I think that's the point with my essays, to keep going and writing Widowish, and finding an agent and then having a publisher. A friend and I, another writer, we call it the divine download. Writing this book, yes, it was difficult, of course. I'm writing about some difficult things. The process was very easy for me because it was right there. It was just under the surface. I feel like it all just needed to come out. It did. That's Widowish.

 

Zibby: That's such an amazing story. It's amazing, also, just the power of connection and how -- I was thinking as you were talking earlier. You were like, I'm in this neighborhood in LA. I was thinking to myself, I wonder where she is. Maybe we can meet up sometime in LA. Then I was just thinking, this is so crazy. If I met you on the street, we wouldn't be able to have this in-depth conversation immediately. I know this is a podcast about your book and everything. You put yourself out there so much. Then you open yourself up to other people being like, let's continue this conversation. I want to hear more. It's just amazing. It's so nice that you keep him alive that way.

 

Melissa: Thank you so much.

 

Zibby: I think one of the big misconceptions about loss is that people will be sad if you bring up the person who has died. Oh, I shouldn't bring up the fact that her dad died, so I'm not going to say, how are you? I wouldn't want to set her off. As if the person is not always thinking about that person who was lost.

 

Melissa: Yeah. I have to say, I feel like there is a healthy amount of self-consciousness about being, like I said, the town widow even now. It's been several years since Joel died. I know that is the first thing people think of when they see me. I could be out with my boyfriend. If I'm out with Sophie, I feel it even more. I feel them thinking, oh, poor Melissa, poor Sophie. I can't stand it. I wish I could tell you, here's what you say to somebody who just lost -- I don't know. I think grief is so personal. There's no right or wrong way to do it. I know so many people talk about the things you should say, things you shouldn't say. I feel like I should know what you should and shouldn't say, and I really don't. [laughs]

 

Zibby: That's okay.

 

Melissa: I'm thinking of you, typically, for me, that's enough, to have somebody say, I'm thinking of you. I'm so sorry. I don't need to get into the whole, how are you?

 

Zibby: I get it. Wait, can we go to the falling in love with the guitar teacher part of the story? [laughs]

 

Melissa: What do you want to know?

 

Zibby: I know you wrote about it and everything. Is that ongoing? Are you guys still together?

 

Melissa: Yes, we're still together.

 

Zibby: Amazing.

 

Melissa: Again, Zibby, that's also about when I talk about these expectations of -- there was an expectation people had of me as the young widow. I had my own expectations about what grief should look like. My daughter has -- all of her grandparents are still alive, which is such a gift, but her dad isn't here. It's crazy. This is a roundabout way of saying what happened with Marcos, who was Sophie's guitar teacher, is that he really was one of the very few people who did not make me feel self-conscious about having lost my husband. If I just back up from that, I always thought he was attractive. Guitar lessons fell under Joel's jurisdiction because he was the musician and the music guy, so he would take Sophie to her guitar lessons. I would hear about Marcos. Everybody in the neighborhood knew him. Everybody whose kids took guitar took it from him. I knew who he was, but I had never met him. There was a time when Joel couldn't take Sophie to guitar, so I ended up taking her. I remember the first time I saw him. I was like, nobody told me the guitar teacher was so hot. I said it to Joel. I was like, "Honey, come on." I even called the friend who recommended him to us. She was like, "Oh, get in line. We all have a crush on Marcos," which is the matter of fact. It was nothing. Then I ran into him shortly after Joel died. Like everybody at the time, he offered to help in any way he could. Like so many people, "Can I bring you some food? Do you need me to pick Sophie up?" whatever it is. I always appreciated it.

 

Joel had a ton of music equipment. He had guitars and amplifiers and all this stuff. Joel had been gone maybe six months. I started cleaning out the garage. I was kind of tiptoeing around the idea of getting rid of some things. The stuff that was in the garage, I was like, how important could it be? I forgot we even had it. When I ran into Marcos and he said to me, "If you need help with anything..." I was like, oh, my god, the stuff in the -- he can help me. Slowly but surely, he came over. He helped me one day. He was very matter of fact. He talked about Joel very easily. I felt very much myself when I was with him even though our interactions were brief. He would come. He would look through the stuff. He would call me and say, "I gave so-and-so this guitar. I'm going to use this for my lessons." Then one day, I had to go with him -- there was one guitar that was actually worth something. I had to go with him to a consignment shop. I was so deep in my grief that I just -- again, pointed me in the direction I would go. He was like, "You need to go with me to the guitar thing." I was like, okay.

 

It was so different than I how I felt in my real life. I felt like I was on vacation when I was with him. I wasn't thinking. I just was with him. Again, he talked easily about Joel. He didn't look at me the way I felt every else was looking at me. I knew he wasn't pitying me, poor Melissa. Then just one thing led to another. I thought, I'm going to continue to not think about this. I'm just going to go with it. I'm feeling attracted to him, which was also shocking. I also wanted to tell Joel. It's such a bizarre -- I told Joel everything. Why wouldn’t I tell him? Oh, my god, honey, I'm hooking up with the guitar teacher. Again, it was all of these feelings coexisting at the same time. I was trying to manage it. Then when it came to Marcos, I just thought, it'll be a fling. It'll be good for me. I'm just going to go with it. Here we are so many years later still very much together. We're an odd pairing. We don't make sense to everybody. I don't mind. [laughs]

 

Zibby: Did I tell you in our emails that my husband now used to be my tennis teacher? Did I mention that?

 

Melissa: I did know that, yeah.

 

Zibby: I'm very familiar with the -- I had moms coming up to me and being like, "Oh, Zibby, I get it." [laughs] It was so cute. It was so funny. Anyway, we're super happy. It's been five years or something crazy. It can happen.

 

Melissa: It is funny, though.

 

Zibby: It's the people who cut through all the stuff. They don't need the pretense, not to generalize. I don't know if these guys are even remotely similar. I found myself relating when you said how he saw you and you could just be you. That's the greatest thing in any relationship, is taking all the stuff down, taking down all the scaffolding and just getting underneath and seeing what's under there.

 

Melissa: I have to tell you a few things. I feel so lucky in love. I had Joel who completely got me. We met when I was a teenager, I think. We didn't get together until years after that. I knew Joel my whole adult life. I felt so loved and adored. I have to say, I feel the same but different with Marcos. He totally gets me. I'm a hundred percent myself. I feel those are gifts of love. I'm so happy to be the recipient of that. It sounds a little obnoxious, but it is meaningful to me. I also feel like Marcos continues to accept that Joel is my husband. I'm still to married to Joel. That's how I feel. I am still married to Joel. He's still my person, and now there's Marcos as well. It is weird. [laughs]

 

Zibby: No one said that grief makes sense.

 

Melissa: No, it doesn't.

 

Zibby: No one said that life makes any sense. I think your attitude, though, is -- not that I'm in any position to judge. No one should judge. It seems very empowering and inspiring. You're just like, you know what, whatever. If it doesn't make sense, this is what I'm doing. This makes me happy. If there's anything that you are owed, it's some happiness after having your husband just cruelly snatched away from you. Anyone who begrudges you happiness in any way, shape, or form, just forget it.

 

Melissa: I agree. I'll tell you something else that really helped me. This is in the book. All of this is in the book. A friend of mine said to me early on, "Everything you do should be easy." It's such simple advice. I don't even think she realized she was giving me advice. When she said that, it really was transformative because I thought, everything is so hard. She said something like this. She's like, "Your husband just died, and you're surviving. There is nothing harder than that. Everything you do, choose easy." I kind of did that with Marcos. I wasn't in this headspace of, oh, my god, we live on different sides of the boulevard. He's the guitar teacher. All of those things, I did not have the capacity to analyze it the way I would have if things were not so surreal. That advice of, just make things easy, I decided with him, whatever happens, happens. He was not saving me from my grief. He coexisted with my grief. That's the point I wanted to make too. I think I spell this out pretty clearly in the book. It's not like because I have a boyfriend and a man in my life, I'm better. Oh, Melissa's fine, she's got a boyfriend. No, it's what I just said a minute ago. The grief coexists with the love which coexists with this new life. It's complicated. I think happy is my baseline. I'm happy to be back at happy, but still grieving. That's why I say the book is really a love story. Again, it's not like Marcos came in and saved me. I didn't need saving. I'm not better because I have love in my life again, but it is a nice -- life just moves forward whether I wanted it to or not. Here we are.

 

Zibby: Amazing. I love that. Having written the book, do you have advice to aspiring authors?

 

Melissa: My advice is to keep writing. I really believe that everybody has a story to tell. I don't necessarily mean memoir. We all have life experiences. We've all been witness to things. Things have happened to us. If somebody is inspired to write, just write. Really believe in yourself. Believe in what you're saying. There are so many voices that, oh, that's terrible. That's such a bad idea. Don't do that. There's a lot of no starting with ourselves. Just be kind to yourself. Keep writing. You could be writing a journal. That's plenty. I just encourage people to tell whatever story they feel compelled to tell.

 

Zibby: Love it. Melissa, thank you. I hope we can continue offline in some form because I'd love to stay in touch. I'm so rooting for you and so invested in your story and all the rest. That sounds creepy or something. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and sharing your grief and your happiness and the tangled mess that it really all is all together.

 

Melissa: I know. [laughs] Thank you so much, Zibby. This was really fantastic to talk with you.

 

Zibby: You too. I'll talk to you soon. Buh-bye.

 

Melissa: Bye.

Melissa Gould.jpg

Caroline Gertler, MANY POINTS OF ME

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Zibby: Sorry about that. [laughs]

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Caroline: Not at all.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Caroline: I did that class with Elizabeth, actually.

 

Zibby: There you go, for years.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Caroline: Thank you.

 

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

 

Caroline: Thank you so much.

 

Zibby: Bye.

 

Caroline: Bye.

Caroline Gertler.jpg

Kara Goldin, UNDAUNTED

Kara Goldin: Thank you for connecting. I'm really excited to do this, very, very, very excited.

 

Zibby Owens: I'm excited too.

 

Kara: Did you get a copy of my book, by any chance?

 

Zibby: I did.

 

Kara: Yay! Awesome. I just wanted to make sure that you got it.

 

Zibby: Oh, yeah, I devoured it. I read every word. I loved it. I love a good business story memoir. So many of them are by men. This was so great. I just loved it. It was awesome. I can't wait to talk about it.

 

Kara: It's funny because I didn't know when I wrote this book that there really aren't women's books like this. It's typically women who are no longer CEOs anymore or something horrible happened with their company. There's a horrible story versus saying, yeah, I had some crap that went on in the midst of it, but at the end of the day, if you want to succeed and you want to move forward and you want to learn some lessons -- also, it's funny. So many people who have known me didn't even know I was going through some of those things. It's interesting. It's not like when you bet your company on your life. You've now just made this deal. I think it's more likely that people sort of go into hibernation. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want to have a lot of these conversations. Then they're like, okay, I've just got to resurface and deal with some of this stuff. Even John Legend, who's one of our investors, said, "There were so many things in here that I just have more respect for you saying you were trying and you were busy. We all knew that you were busy, but we just had no idea some of the stuff that you were really dealing with along the way." That is really my hope for this book too, not just to explain myself, but also to share with people that if I can do it, you can do it too. It just got The Wall Street Journal best-sellers list too.

 

Zibby: Yay!

 

Kara: I know. Everybody was saying to me, don't count on any of those because during this time, you're not doing big book talks. It's an election. There's a million reasons why it wasn't going to be able to get it. Then it got number seven. I was like, oh, my god. It's crazy. I'm really, really excited.

 

Zibby: You deserve it. It's a great book, seriously. It's a narrative. It feels like you're watching a movie about it. You're telling it as it comes, but then you have these little tips called out. It's not so much about balancing your life and your work. It's literally the story of building a business, which I find fascinating. I went to business school. I just love entrepreneurial stuff in general, personally. When I hear about some of the things and some of the times you had to regroup like when you started out and there was the mold in the water and you had to figure out what to do about it and when you were having your c-section and how you had to load up the Jeep and you refused to stay home -- you were sneaking out of the house to work. It's awesome. [laughs]

 

Kara: I still laugh about that. We live in Marin County now, but when we lived in San Francisco, we had this private school right across the street from us. It's called Town School. It was all boys. I knew a bunch of those mothers who were dropping their kids off. I knew that their drop-off was at 8:15. Literally, in the beginning, I would go over there with bottles. I'd be like, oh, my god, I have to get across the street to get to the drop-off because I'm going to give them a bottle and see what they think of this flavor. People were like, uh, okay. I said, because they won't expect it. You'll hand it to them. I'll be like, give me your honest opinion. Oh, my god, this is amazing. The more that I got of, this is amazing, then I would be like, okay, let's move forward with it. Entrepreneurs laugh at that because they're like, oh, my god. The mold story too, like I said, don't get me wrong -- we had this lab in South San Francisco called Anresco. I used to drive down there. It's not in a great neighborhood. It's in the Bayview neighborhood. My husband would never let me go by myself. I'd lock my doors. I'd never bring my kids in the car. I'd drive really fast, little scared. Then I'd drop off these samples just to make sure that there wasn't botulism. We never wanted to kill anybody.

 

Zibby: Which is nice. [laughs]

 

Kara: I always say to entrepreneurs, especially in food and beverages, it's amazing how people do not take those steps. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I knew -- there was definitely mold, but we were testing it. There's mold in cheese and kombucha. There's lots of stuff, but you have to make sure that it's not the bad stuff that's going to kill you.

 

Zibby: And how your husband would drink it in front of your buyers to be like, no, no, no, I'm good. Look at me drink it. The dedication of the two of you and the fact that you could do it together, all of it.

 

Kara: I know. We're still laughing. We still laugh. Over the years when I've been out public speaking on this too, people are like -- he's from Scarsdale. He's like a Seinfeld episode. He talks, but he's typically not the one speaking on the brand. A couple of times, the two of us have been together and talking. They're like, "What's it like to work for your wife?" I remember when Inc. asked me the first time on this panel. I was like, oh, my god, where is this going to go? He was like, "Don't we all work for women? I have two daughters. If they're not happy, I'm not happy." He'll say these things somewhat tongue in cheek, but he's pretty serious about it. He was like, "Look, we have sixty percent women in our company right now. Like Kara always says, it's because the guys don't want to work for women. She might be right." The people don't show up for the interviews because they're like, I don't want to work for a female-founded company. I'm like, good, don't apply for the job. I'd rather you not show up and apply for this stuff.

 

He's always like, "But then it leaves the cool guys here that actually want to work with women. They enjoy the thought process." He's hysterical. He just makes me laugh every single day. That was the other thing. He did a lot of the editing on the book too. He was this awesome and still is an awesome intellectual property lawyer in Silicon Valley. All of his friends were like, "What are you doing?" He was like, "Kara is writing $50,000, $100,000 checks off our bank account like it's water. It is water. She can spend money like I've never seen in my life. She made money." Still, he's like, "I don't want to go bankrupt over this whole project. I got to stay close to this and really understand where she's going with this." He's so funny. He was the general council. He's the chief operating officer. He always says, "I can always go back to being a lawyer if I really want to." He realized that he didn't like law. He loves the operations side. He loves the science side of things.

 

He's automated our whole supply chain. We don't have any people in the room when the bottles are being filled. That was a four-year project for him. He said when we don't have any preservatives in our product, that's where stuff actually happens. That's where bacteria happens. He was working on this project. As of December of 2019, he got all the people out of the room. Again, I would look at that saying, that sounds good, but I'm not going to work on it. You can go work on it. He went and did it. Now with the pandemic, when the FDA was running around the plants trying to figure out, where was COVID in the food supply and the drink supply? we were so happy that we had done so much work around automation. That's the way his brain thinks about things. While he's excited to be working for a beverage company, he does so much other stuff that is so important but so way beyond what a Coke or a Pepsi -- he loves what he does. You can't discount that at all.

 

Zibby: I think that's something that comes through for both of you and how you keep innovating. One of the parts of the book that stayed with me the most is when you approached somebody who was high up in your company at the time and you were like, "You're doing a good job. You must be bored. Time to change it up. Let's go." He was like, "What?" You were like, "Aren't you bored? You've mastered your job. If you've mastered your job, it means it's time to step up and do something else." That's just so anathema. People don't view it that way. I got good at this; I'm going to stay good at this. You're like, no, no, what else can you do? Even you saying that you don't want to be bored and you want to keep innovating, that's how all the great stuff happens.

 

Kara: That's the thing. We just developed a hand sanitizer. I don't know if we sent you any.

 

Zibby: You didn't send me any of this. I went online and bought out your website after reading this book. I was like, I have to try everything that they make. Yes, I have all the hand sanitizers. I have the deodorant. I have the sun lotion. I got everything to try it all.

 

Kara: It was so funny because I just kept smelling all this hand sanitizer in the beginning. First of all, it was really hard to get in the beginning of the pandemic. Then I started smelling stuff that just smelled rancid. It ended up that a lot of it was. There was a lot of stuff that was recalled. I just started thinking, god, there has to be some better ones out there. Finally one day, I guess this was the beginning of May, a girlfriend and I were hiking. She lives up in Sonoma. She knew this whiskey brand that was really struggling. They were doing hand sanitizers. She was like, "Maybe you guys want to do a hand sanitizer. Can you just talk to them and talk to them about maybe some ideas around direct to consumer and whatever?" I got talking. I kind of did it as just a favor to them to help them. Then all of a sudden, now we're almost sold out of the product. We're trying to figure out how to make more of it.

 

People were so surprised that the CEO was jumping in on it. I was like, really, I don't want to bog the rest of my team down on this stuff. Then selfishly, that's the stuff that I love to do. I love getting scrappy and roll up my sleeves and try and figure out, could this actually be a big business? It's a lot of what I speak at on that topic, even on college campuses. I used to think that becoming a manager, the important thing was really getting a bigger title. Now the more that I talk to CEOs, they're like, oh, yeah, I got this little project here. It's super fun. Don't tell anybody. It's the secret, but it's the best thing I do in the company. Sometimes it's been philanthropy. Sometimes it's other stuff. I think the more you can do these little things where you are learning -- that's the other thing that I've realized about really smart people. The mecca is not being this boring CEO that is just sitting here looking at a spreadsheet and watching the numbers. Instead, it's, how do we innovate? How do we do other things? That goes at every single level of the company that I've really tried to push on. What else can you be doing that really gets your head thinking about stuff?

 

Zibby: I feel like I share that. I'm obviously on a much tinier, tinier scale here. Even with this podcast, I've been doing it now for almost three years, so I know how to do it. I love it. I love everything about it. Recently, I started another thing called "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight." I'm like, I'm cheating on my company. I'm cheating on my number-one priority by doing this thing on the side. Here's my other Instagram account. [laughs] It's so silly. I'm like, let's try this. Let's try that. I love trying new stuff because I'm like, well, I don't know. Okay, looks like that's not working. Let's go with something else. I love that. It's the tinkering and experimenting and finding out what people respond to. It's so fun.

 

Kara: I think that's so true. It's funny. I've spoken on so many college campuses and business school classes about this. I think I sort of disrupt the learning a little bit. I was speaking to a whole group of engineers at Berkeley. I'm like, look, if you want to be like Mark Zuckerberg, it's not going to happen if you don't actually go and take classes outside or try and figure out what other people do. Always be learning. It's not a linear thing. The goal isn't to get to the top of the heap and then manage a bunch of people. Yes, you'll do that, but then can you go horizontally? Can you actually come back with creative ideas? Can you actually understand a basic business plan? Can you understand these different things along the way horizontally? That, to me, is the key to the kingdom because it keeps you energized. It keeps you learning. That guy is still at Hint. I point to him all the time as one of our best managers. He's gunning for my husband's job. He is, which is great. He keeps taking more and more off of his plate.

 

Eventually, if it's not at Hint, he'll go somewhere else and go be an amazing operating officer because he's done exactly that. He knows enough to get him in trouble in all these different -- you get it. People talk about this at business school. A lot of these learnings are there, but it's clearly not how we're teaching people in regular college campuses today. It's not what we're teaching people. If you're a manager, you're great with people, you know your stuff, and then you can teach people. I'm like, okay, but what about that person? There's so many people who just get angry at their company or they get depressed or whatever. I really think it has a lot to do with the fact that they're no longer learning. It's the spice of life too, with marriage too and your personal life. It's part of the reason why I think COVID is so hard for people. You got to switch it up. You got to go find new hiking trails. You got to get out of town every once in a while. You got to do things that are going to allow your brain to create and have new.

 

Zibby: I think that's sort of an under-discussed contributing factor to depression. People don't talk about how much we crave learning. I used to always say, I miss school. I really loved school. I'm such a nerd. I really loved it. I loved all the stuff I was learning. When I got out into the real world, I felt very rootless. Where is the structure? What am I building if I'm just showing up at work? Anyway, I totally agree with you.

 

Kara: It really is. Should we just continue on this? Do you want to ask me specifically about stuff?

 

Zibby: Yeah, let me just ask you a little bit more about your book. What made you decide to take all your experience and turn it into a book, first of all? Why a book? Why now? Why did you do it now?

 

Kara: It's crazy. I was out speaking about founding Hint over the years at lots and lots of events. Then about four years ago, I started journaling. I was primarily doing it because I felt like I would tell these stories when I was out speaking and then I kind of wanted to hone them in and also think about, if somebody talks about, how do you get started? then I would have, what are the three stories that come to mind that are good examples of that? Then I just kept going. Every time somebody would ask me something kind of hard, I would think about, here's my examples that I can go back to, or whatever. Then I started really hearing more and more from people not just in audiences. Also, they would write to me on LinkedIn and say, things are really hard. I can't raise money. I have so many doubts. This is so much not like you. I'm sure you've never had any fears or failure. You're relentless. You're this. You're this. I'm like, no, I totally had lots of examples of -- I move forward, but I also have doubts, etc. The journal was like six hundred pages about a year and a half ago.

 

I have friends that are authors. I was like, maybe I should put this in a book because I could actually help a lot more people who are feeling this way that maybe aren't going to reach out to me or who aren't in an audience hearing me talk about this. I got an agent. Then the agent was like, "This is going to take a long time. These publishers are going to want you to write a certain book." There was definitely that, but it got sold in like two weeks. It was really unusual, and I think primarily because I didn't know how to write a book. I wasn't this person saying, one day I'm going to be an author. I'm not going to lie. It feels pretty great to have a published book and be an author and a Wall Street Journal best seller and all that stuff, but I did it differently than most people. Today, so many people are journaling too and trying to feel like, how do I find happiness? How do I be a better leader? or whatever it is. They're writing, but they don't know where this goes. That's another thing that I like to share with people.

 

This book, my hope is that people will read it and be inspired and put it into their own storyline to figure out where it fits. Even Jamie Dimon, who's kind of been a mentor to me over the years, it's funny, he read the book and he said, "Your story in the Grand Canyon really got me thinking about, what are those really hard things in business that I faced where when I was facing something in my personal life that was super hard, what did I think about? How did I have the relentlessness to just keep going on?" He had throat cancer. He talked about all of these challenging times that he had in business and how he loves what he does. He loves his work, but he was really feeling like that was a challenging time for him. He was able to automatically set his mindset to think, I got this. I can do this stuff. Yes, of course, he remembered his family and all of those things. In addition, he remembered all of the hard stuff that he had been through as lessons to be able to tackle other hard stuff. I think it's fascinating that that's what he picked up on in the book.

 

Incredibly smart people are picking up things and placing it in their own life, which is helping them to figure out, what did that mean? I'm excited because I wanted to get it out there. Like I said, it got picked up by a publisher pretty quickly. I didn't really know what that meant. I also realize women don't really talk about this. This clearly is not a book about how I was shunned in some way. There's moments in there. I also, hopefully, give people hope to say that there's people like them. I clearly had some tough, tough times. Also, my kids are older now. They look at me and they're like, my mom's a badass. She just goes. She's crazy. Right in the middle of my launch and Sheryl Sandberg's interviewing me, my son's texting me saying, "Can I get those shoes?" Crazy town, right? I'm like, "Stop it," yelling. That's real. It never stops. That's okay that that stuff goes on. I think people think, is this just my life, or is this everyone's life? Anyway, that was really why I decided to ultimately get it out there.

 

Zibby: That's great. It's a book I want to give to my daughters, when they're older I mean. One of my daughters is seven. It's an example. Look, you can do all this. You don't have to write a book about things you're complaining about, essentially. I think a lot of books right now are what has worked against us as opposed to, yeah, these things were hard, but I got through them. Here's how you innovate. I thought that was really awesome. Once you sold the book, tell me about the writing process. When did you ever find time to do this?

 

Kara: Because I had really written so much of it, it was a lot easier for a publisher to actually say, let's do this part of the book and these sections. Then I got this editor who's on the inside cover of the book, John Butman. Then my husband, actually, he would remember other parts of the stories and stuff, and so he became sort of like the co-editor. What was so sad is that my publisher -- we turned in everything at the end of January. It was pretty fast. It was from the end of June until the end of January. We talked four days a week, blocked three hours four days a week. We were on it. We just went back and forth on emails. I was doing weekends and nights. I'm still the CEO of the company. I'm still trying to do both of the things. Then actually on March 13th -- do you know who Platon is? He's a photographer in New York. He shot the cover of the book. He had shot me for this Verizon commercial. Just loved him. He's shot Kobe Bryant, that picture that was so powerful. He's done every president. He's just this amazing guy.

 

Of course, the city was shutting down when all this was going on. I said, "Are you going to cancel on me, on the photoshoot?" He was like, "No, no, no. Let's just do it. Then let's both get out of here." That's what happened. Then I got the pictures back that weekend while we were out of stock on shelves everywhere. There was a lot going on at this time. I remember talking to John on that Monday saying, "What do you think about the cover?" In the meantime, we're trying to figure out, do we close down our San Francisco office? We already closed down our New York office. He was like, "Oh, my god, I love the cover." We put a period on the end of Undaunted. He was like, "I love it. It's exactly how you talk," all of the stuff. Then I get a phone call from my agent a few days later. She's like, "I have something critical to tell you." I thought, oh, god. What else is critical going on in the world? She's like, "John died."

 

Zibby: What?

 

Kara: I know. I was like, what? This is somebody that I talked to more than my husband for the last six months. He had a massive heart attack.

 

Zibby: No!

 

Kara: I know. It was so sad. He had just bought a house in Portland, Maine. He was super healthy. He was sixty-five years old. I'm convinced that COVID is -- we'll find out years later that -- he didn't have it that he knew of. It was really, really sad. I hadn’t gotten my manuscript back from the publisher. In many ways, because I had time sitting at home and was able to dig through it, and John did such an amazing job to really get it where it needed to be, there wasn't that much editing even that was needed. John, in many ways, I felt like for the process of getting it out there, I could just feel his presence, as crazy as that was, like, you got this. It's going to get out there. It was very, very sad, though, along the way.

 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry that that happened. It's terrible.

 

Kara: I know. Really sad.

 

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and aspiring authors? Now you're both. You can show that off. [laughs]

 

Kara: The main thing that I've signed up for over the years that wasn't as clear to me maybe earlier on in life is that if you don't try, then you actually won't succeed. I always share with people that no idea is crazy, especially if you just keep thinking about it. If you keep thinking, oh, gosh, I should go write a book or I want to launch this company, you can just take baby steps to actually go and do these things. People are like, I don't know how to write a business plan. I'm like, you just google business plan. You can start to figure this stuff out. It might not be the best business plan in the whole world, but stop putting these walls up in front of yourself that actually prevent you from moving forward. I think that that's the biggest thing. Frankly, that's the biggest thing that I find for entrepreneurs. They think, I haven't worked in a couple of years. I've never worked in that industry. I didn't go to the right school or business school or whatever it is. I'm like, just go. Just go try. If nothing else, you can actually say, I thought about it. I looked at the industry. I wrote a business plan. I talked to some people. That's actually succeeding. That's doing something. You got a little bit further than you were six months ago or whatever it is. That's my biggest advice to people.

 

When you look at successful people today, they didn't have all the answers. They actually had a lot of failures. They had a lot of doubts. You have to go and just take these little steps and figure out, what are those steps that I can go even figure out whether or not this is worth doing? Really, just live your life undaunted. If you do that, I do believe too that, while it can be stressful at times, it's also really rewarding. Today, we're the largest nonalcoholic private beverage company in the world that doesn't have a relationship with Coke, Pepsi, or Dr Pepper Snapple. That was never supposed to happen. I didn't have the experience. I was just this mom with four kids under the age of six walking into Whole Foods. I was just driving in my Jeep Grand Cherokee. None of this was supposed to happen, but I just kept trying. I was getting educated. I was really intrigued by the fact that originally, I thought these little things were caps, and they're actually called closures. I was like, that's so cool. There's this whole secret, hidden vocabulary out there for these things. I don't know why I geeked out on the fact that those were the things. You have to get confident in yourself that you can go and accomplish a lot. Most people actually can do a lot more than they allow themselves to do. Again, if you don't want to do something, that's a whole other topic. It's really, do you want to get up and actually move forward? That's the biggest question that I think people need to answer.

 

Zibby: Wow. I feel less daunted, maybe not un. [laughs]

 

Kara: You are definitely. You're doing lots of amazing stuff too.

 

Zibby: Thank you. I feel like your book is so inspiring. It's just so important. I think that entrepreneurship right now is sort of the greatest thing we have left in this country. During this pandemic, watching people innovate has been the most encouraging thing that's happened, with your hand sanitizer. There's this company that sent me all these things. What were they called? Something like Scenties, scented masks. You should actually talk to this company. Maybe you should talk to this girl. It's this random entrepreneur. She's making scented masks.

 

Kara: So fun.

 

Zibby: All these little things, that's what it's all about. That's how our country can really get better. Anyway, I feel like I could talk to you all day and ask you a million other questions. I'm so glad to have met you, to have read your book. Now I'm drinking all this extra water, which is amazing.

 

Kara: And getting super healthy. I love it.

 

Zibby: And getting super healthy. Thank you so much for our very informal chat today. I hope to stay in touch.

 

Kara: Definitely. I love it. If anybody wants to reach out to me too, I'm on social, @KaraGoldin. Again, the book is Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters. It'd make a great holiday gift too. I've been talking to a lot of people who are reaching out to me saying, how do I buy fifty of these? I know a lot of girlfriends or high school kids or college kids that need this book. It's very applicable.

 

Zibby: Perfect holiday gift. I'm holding it up now. Thank you. Stay in touch. Have a great day.

 

Kara: Have a great rest of the week.

 

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

 

Kara: Buh-bye.

Kara Goldin.jpg

Sarah Gelman, DIRECTOR OF BOOKS, PR, AND EDITORIAL, AMAZON

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Sarah. Thanks so much for doing this special webinar, Facebook, podcast, triple threat.

 

Sarah Gelman: I'm so excited. I personally can talk about books for forever. I feel like you can too. The fact we only have thirty minutes is very dangerous. [laughs]

 

Zibby: I know. There's so much I could talk to you about. It's ridiculous, your whole background, everything. Today is such an exciting day for Amazon to have come out with their Best Books of 2020. I've gone through every category. It's so exciting. There were so many books that I had on my podcast, so I'm feeling really excited about that. Wait, tell me a little bit about your role in Amazon and also how this whole Best Books came to be and how you decide on these best books.

 

Sarah: So many things to unpack. To take a step back, I've been at Amazon for eleven years. I came to Amazon, I moved from New York where I worked at Random House. It was just Random House then, no Penguin. I have just been a passionate reader my whole life. I feel so lucky that this is what I get to do for my job and I've always gotten to do it. When my kids are college age, maybe I wouldn't say, "Be an English major," but it has worked out for me. That's been great. At Amazon, I have been on the PR side for a long time, but I've always worked with the books org. Even when I was working with different orgs, I was always working with books and with the editorial team there. About a year and a half ago, I came back from my last maternity leave, last in a lot of different ways. I was approached about this job to lead the books editorial team which is a team that I worked with for eleven years and I admire. I always felt like they were my people. It's really just a dream. We're a team of passionate readers. There are six editors and myself. We all have different backgrounds in the business. One editor is an author herself. Someone is an editor from Random House. We used to work together way back. There are people that have worked at different booksellers, people on the sale side. We all basically are bringing our own background in books and our own expertise and genre knowledge to this team.

 

We come up with a list every month called the Best Books of the Month. Right now, we're reading for February 2021. We read a few months in advance. We're reading books that publishers and independent authors present to us. We all read in different genres. Then once we find something we love, we have someone else read it. Occasionally, there's a book we all read because we're so excited about it. We come up with a list of our top ten books every month. Very rarely, we come up with the top twelve when we can't decide on just ten. This year, we've had five months of top twelve, which is the most top twelves we've ever had. It made choosing the best books of the year that much harder because there were more top ten books to look at. We're doing best books, so top ten or twelve, every month and then top books in every different category, so everything from all the different ages for children, zero to two, three to five, on up to young adult. We also look at cooking, food and wine, literature and fiction, mystery and thriller, nonfiction, memoir. Literally every category, we are reading those books and trying to pick the best books for people so they don't have to do that themselves.

 

It's all based on our taste. It's not based on sales or co-op dollars from publishers. It is one hundred percent the books that we read and are excited about. We're reading every single one of them. You have to love reading to do this job because there is a lot of reading. I love it. I would read all day if I could. Then we do Best Books of the Year So Far in June. That's books from, we start January to June. We look at those six months. What's the best book so far? The best book of the year so far was The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré. She's amazing. I got to interview her in June. It's such a great book and really an uplifting book too which I felt like we really needed in June. Then we look at the Best Books of the Year, which we release every year around this time period. We look at all the books from the first six months and then everything else. We also ask ourselves, did we miss a book? We never want to miss anything. Sometimes when a pub date changes, we will miss a book because we've already had our top ten list and we can't put it in. Another case would be like the Obama book, for instance. We weren’t able to read that until it came out on Tuesday, so we couldn't consider it because we already had our best books of November.

 

Then we decide on the top twenty the old-fashioned way. We basically sit around. Normally, we sit around a table. This year, we sat around a video call. We argue. We fight about our favorites. This year, we had some very, very passionate discussions that ended with people leaving the call angry, but we all agreed at the end on the top ten list which is, to us, the most important, then the top twenty. Then we work our way up to one hundred. We all come in and we're sort of fighting for our own favorites. Someone on the team once told me when I just joined the team, "You can't fight for every book that you love. Really be strategic about it." You're basically making your case to the other members of the team. We really aim to have something for everyone too. They're not all fiction. They're not all nonfiction. We always have a debut book every month in our top two. We take this curation really seriously because people just don't have that much time to read. We want to help them discover the very best books.

 

Zibby: I'm glad that you are reading now for February because my anthology is coming out in February. [laughs]

 

Sarah: I actually have it digitally. I think that an advance copy is on its way to me. I'm so excited to read it.

 

Zibby: Good. Awesome. Let's talk about the winners if you don't mind. Can we go through?

 

Sarah: Yes.

 

Zibby: You have one overall winner, but then you have the top twenty books in general. Before I go through the whole list, I just wanted to tell you which ones from all the categories I've had on my podcast in case people want to go back and listen and maybe so you know which ones I thought were really awesome too. In addition to the twenty you picked per category, Good Morning Monster, The Beauty in Breaking, Wandering in Strange Lands -- I should probably say the authors. Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper; Good Morning Monster by Catherine Gildiner; Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins; All Because You Matter, the children's book by Tami Charles; Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes. I wonder if no one can remember all these while I'm rattling them out. I'm going to publish these somewhere. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, I'm about to interview her; Memorial by Bryan Washington; Writers & Lovers by Lily King; The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner; Luster: A Novel by Raven Leilani; Oona Out of Order, Margarita Montimore; The Last Flight by Julie Clark; Pretty Things, Janelle Brown; Long Bright River, Liz Moore; Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, Emmanuel Acho; Wine Girl; Can't Even; Beach Read; Party of Two; Dragon Hoops. Those are my category. I just had to get those out there.

 

Sarah: You were listing those books and they feel like my friends. I wanted to jump in. I love the book Oona Out of Order. It's one of my favorite books of the year. I love that idea of no matter what you do, you sort of end up in the same place. I feel like we saw a lot of books with that theme this year, whether it was Rebecca Serle, the In Five Years book; also, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which is another book I love that's in the top twenty. I love that trend. Sliding Doors is my favorite movie.

 

Zibby: Me too.

 

Sarah: No way! Oh, my gosh.

 

Zibby: Yes. I say that all the time.

 

Sarah: The best movie.

 

Zibby: I always think, is this one little, tiny decision I'm making going to affect my entire life? That movie was like, yes, it will. [laughs]

 

Sarah: I don't know if you've interviewed Jay Shetty, the author. He wrote this book, Think Like a Monk. He was amazing. That book gives me chills. It literally changed my life. He talks about trying to find the silver lining or the positive in things. Honestly, since I've read that book, I am always looking for the reason behind something and trying to put a positive spin on it, whether it's something really tragic -- I know that you have kids that are sick at home right now. What is the good that is coming from this right now? That book has helped me a ton this year.

 

Zibby: I'm trying to find the meaning behind all of it. I actually said to my husband the other day, I was like, "You know, maybe all this is happening, you losing your mom and your grandma and the kids all getting sick, I feel like I'm meant to be a messenger to let people know." He was like, "Everyone on the planet knows about this. I hate to break it to you, but anyone in the world already heard about it. That can't be it." Who knows? Who knows why things happen? The top twenty that you guys picked including the number one -- I should do this backwards. Number twenty, Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer; nineteen, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, you just discussed, V.E. Schwab; Deacon King Kong by James McBride; Pretty Things by Janelle Brown, I already said that; Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In by Phuc Tran; Oona Out of Order, which we were just talking about; Luster, Raven Leilani; A Burning, Megha Majumdar; Dear Child, Romy Hausmann; Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia; Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker; Memorial by Bryan Washington, which I had on; The Girl with the Louding Voice, Abi Daré; Caste, Isabel Wilkerson; Fifty Words for Rain, Asha Lemmie; The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennet, I've had her on; Group by Christie Tate, her too; Blacktop Wasteland: A Novel, S.A. Cosby; Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy, I had her on. I haven't read this book and I'm now so excited to because it's your number one, A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom by Brittany Barnett. Oh, my gosh, tell me about this book. I don't even know about this book.

 

Sarah: First, before I tell you about it, I will say that last year's number one pick was Margaret Atwood's The Testaments. That is an amazing book. It was a moment in publishing, sort of like the Barack Obama book -- yes, I just compared Margaret Atwood to Barack Obama. It's a thing, a moment. The New York Times are writing trend pieces about it. It definitely deserved to be number one, but it was, I don't want to say an obvious pick. This is a little less obvious. You are a reader that reads a ton, and you haven't read this book. It makes me really happy that we picked a book that we can help people discover for the first time, I hope. This book is a memoir. Brittany Barnett is an incredible person that I'm talking to later today. I'm absolutely in awe of her. She grew up in Texas. Her mother was a drug addict. Her mother was a nurse, I should say. She was also a drug addict. She was incarcerated when Brittany was young. Brittany then, I think she saw -- obviously, she saw people that were incarcerated as people and not just as statistics. When she was a little bit older and was studying to be a lawyer, she came upon the case of a woman named Sharanda Jones. Sharanda reminded her so much of her own mother and her family. She was a young woman who was given a life sentence based on the war on drugs, this harsh life sentence for doing something that was not worthy of a life sentence. It was driving drugs down the highway, essentially. She wasn't expecting to get this sentence. She even left her purse in the car when she went in for her final sentencing.

 

Brittany basically, while she's being a lawyer at a corporate firm and working in tax law, she dedicates the rest of her life to helping these people that were served life sentences because of the war on drugs and the disproportionate amount of black Americans that were given life sentences. She changes the world. It's absolutely amazing. It's a heartbreaking story. For me, I grew up in the eighties and when I hear the war on drugs, I thought, yeah, war on drugs. Now I feel ashamed when I think about what that meant for so many families and black families in America. It was really eye-opening for me. Even for people who it's not eye-opening for, you cannot walk away from this book not being affected by it. It's also hopeful. Yes, it's incredibly sad in places, but it's a really helpful book. It just felt like it came at the right time. There was no other book that we read this year that we felt like really captured what was going on in the country, what we felt like we needed to learn, and what was important to read about.

 

I don't want to say it's a hard book to read. At times, it's hard to read it because it's really true. It's really sad at times. Read it because she's an amazing person. She writes about this idea of representation for children, black children. When she was growing up, there were no models of black female lawyers. Even though she thought she would become a lawyer, she kind of thought black women don't become lawyers. Then she met her first black lawyer. Basically, it changed her life. She has changed so many lives. It's really just an amazing story. Even for people that don't follow this prison reform or criminal reform -- most recently, President Trump pardoned someone through Kim Kardashian. That woman is in this book. You don't realize it until the very end, but she's someone that Brittany becomes friends with through her visits to these prisons. For me, that was like, oh, my gosh, I remember watching this on the news. It's really timely. It's really important. It's incredibly inspiring. It made me want to go back to my twenties and say, what else should I be doing with my life? It's really, really remarkable. I'm so in awe of her.

 

Zibby: As soon as we finish this, I'm going to email her publicist to try to get her on my podcast. Thank you for that.

 

Sarah: Beyond doing all of this and being a lawyer, she also started all of these foundations. One of them is called the Buried Alive Project. We're interviewing her later today. People that watch the interview can actually donate to it. I was looking at the website yesterday. She has these videos of people coming out of prison and seeing their families for the first time. One of them is so recent they're actually wearing masks. Whoever is filming it is filming it from inside of a car. You know that they can't get out because they can't get too close to the people that are coming out of the prison. I told my son, my four-year-old, "Mommy cried happy tears." I'm sitting in my office, tears streaming down my face. Knowing that I was getting on a conference call in five minutes, I was like, what's my mascara doing? That idea of taking what you think of as statistics of just nameless people and putting this human face on them, it's so important.

 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Speaking of your son, by the way, I love that in your bio you mention jumping on the trampoline with your sons is one of your biggest pastimes. I feel like if there's any hope for the muscles in my legs, it is because of that. [laughs]

 

Sarah: It is hard work.

 

Zibby: I know.

 

Sarah: We got the trampoline during quarantine. We were lucky to get one. I remember one of our neighbors stopping by our yard. I was jumping on the trampoline. It was like I had done a HIIT workout. I was pouring sweat. I was so embarrassed. I was like, this is really hard work. Yes, we bounce a lot.

 

Zibby: Just had to get that out there. In terms of for authors out there who are like, I really want to get on this list, what can they do? What are the exact criteria? I know it has to come out in the calendar year 2020. You all have to like it and respond it to and find it relevant and timely and everything, but what else?

 

Sarah: That's really it. That's it. It sounds sort of unscientific. It's really books that we love and we want to share with people. We all do have genres that we sort of specialize in or tend to read in. Really, the aim of the list every month, and then I think a little less so at the end of the year because obviously top one hundred is a little different than a top ten, is that if you are someone that says, I only read mysteries and thrillers, that you could pick up this book and still find something in it and still think it's great. The crossover appeal that people talk about in the industry or genre bending, we look for that too. One of the books that we had talked about that I loved, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, she has a really hardcore fanbase of fantasy fans. This book crossed over to this general reader. I'm actually not a fantasy reader, and I loved this book. It's also such a physically beautiful book. I read it on Kindle. I was like, I have to buy this book to have on my shelf. It's a great gift.

 

That sort of thing, it's just a book that you could give to anyone, someone that loves fantasy, someone that loves mysteries and thrillers, someone that loves nonfiction. It's funny. We were talking about A Knock at Midnight on the team. There are times that you forget that it's actually nonfiction. It reminds me of another one of our number-one picks, Educated by Tara Westover. I recommended that to my stepmother. She came back and she said, "That was an amazing novel." I said, "That's not a novel. That's nonfiction. That is her life." You forget. I think the best books sometimes make you feel sort of disoriented. You're not sure, are you reading nonfiction? Are you reading fiction? The number-two pick, Migrations, is a novel that at times reads like it's nonfiction, and not in an overly cerebral or dry way. It's so lifelike. She's a videographer, filmmaker, so she has that visual attention to detail. That's a whole other incredible book.

 

Zibby: That was also a great book. I interviewed her as well. That was great.

 

Sarah: That was one of the hardest books to describe, I find. It is very hard to come up with the succinct -- you don't want to say it's a novel about climate change. I don't think that that hooks people. This is a good example. The package of the book, I think, is a little unassuming too. I have it here. I can hold it up. This doesn't, maybe, scream the next huge book, but it's so good.

 

Zibby: I don't know if I have it here or another shelf. I love the cover, though. That's my favorite color. I try to get rid of my bias to blue when I look at books. I'm like, stop, you're only liking this cover because you like the color blue.

 

Sarah: All of my boys' clothes are blue. People are like, wow, they love blue a lot. I'm like, yeah, they sure do love blue. I'm the one that buys all their clothes.

 

Zibby: [laughs] What is your go-to genre? I love memoir. I love fiction too, but memoir is my go-to. What's yours?

 

Sarah: I love fiction. I love, I guess I would say, book club-type fiction. I love a good family saga. I want to get in with these characters. I want to live with them for like two hundred years. I want to meet everyone in their family. I want to know about every issue they’ve had. Who's an alcoholic? Who had an affair? Who said what to whom? That, to me, is why I love reading so much. I just want to get out of my life and go into this other place and just be absorbed by these characters. I love stories. I love good TV too, a good TV story. I just watched The Queen's Gambit. I know that's a novel too. That sort of character development and surprises, stories are so amazing. One of my friends just had a baby. I gave him three books for his baby. I gave him The Going to Bed Book. I gave him Giraffes Can't Dance. I love that book so much. I gave him Little Blue Truck. I wrote the note from my children to this baby. I said, "These are books. When you learn to read, you'll never be lonely." That's how I feel. You can never be bored and lonely when you're surrounded by all of these people and all these stories.

 

Zibby: I feel like we are sharing a brain or personality or something. Some of the things you're saying, I'm like, I say that all the time. That's my favorite movie. I feel the same way. I even had a therapist say to me at one point, you will never be lonely if you have a good book. I'm like, I know, I've been reading my -- I'm sure, like me, you were a bookworm as a kid, right? Reading is something that you just always go to.

 

Sarah: The idea of being bored is not -- I mean, I wish I were bored right now, frankly, but that's not something that I've ever -- I don't think I've ever felt. I obsessively plan books for -- I was even going through my journal. It's like, books to read on the long weekend. I read workbooks. They're for pleasure too. Conversation with Friends by Sally Rooney, I have never read that book. I love Normal People. I love that book. The show was incredible.

 

Zibby: The show was incredible.

 

Sarah: It's not something I want to watch with my mom or anything, but it's an incredible show. I've never read her second book. It's a ten-dollar book. I should just buy it. I keep saving it for, I'm not sure, vacation that I'm not going on. There's just always something to read. It's amazing.

 

Zibby: Are you a Kindle person, or are you more a hardcopy person?

 

Sarah: I'm both. I really like the convenience on reading on Kindle. When I used to on vacation back in the -- I was going to say back in the nineties. Not in the nineties. In the early otts when I was in my twenties, I would go on vacation and I would literally take one bag that was all books, all hardcovers too because I worked in publishing. We would trade hardcovers with each other. I love the convenience of going on vacation and just bringing my Kindle. Like a lot of parents, I wake up frequently in the middle of the night. Being able to read my Kindle and having the light built into it that's not the bad light is amazing. I love the sensation of a physical book too. Like I mentioned, I love the beauty of the Addie LaRue book. I got my Obama book in the mail yesterday. That's a book that I bought in hardcover and then I bought on Audible too because I love listening to books, mostly memoirs, read by the people that wrote them. I had such a profound experience listening to Michelle Obama's book. I had just had my second baby. It was winter. We were going on a lot of walks outside. I just listened to that book while I was pushing him in the stroller. I felt like I was absorbing her wisdom. She seems like such an amazing mother and person. I was like, this is making me a better mother as I listen to this. I really want to listen to his book too. Then the other night, I started Kristin Hannah's new book.

 

Zibby: I did too. I started reading that a week ago or something, two weeks ago, something.

 

Sarah: We need to talk about it. I don't want to ruin it for people.

 

Zibby: I know. I was so excited when it came. I felt like a kid in a candy shop. I'm like, I cannot wait.

 

Sarah: We have a blog called the Amazon Book Review that's on Amazon. I wrote about this on the blog. It was my weekend reading last week. I started it last Friday. My colleague, Erin, who manages the Best Book program and keeps us all on task, she knows how much I love Kristin Hannah. She would not let me read the book when I received it a month or so ago. She was like, "You're not caught up on your December reading yet." I actually listened to her. I'm such a rule-follower. I caught up on all my reading so that I could start it. On Friday nights my older son sleeps with my husband in our playroom. They have campouts. He's a terrible sleeper. He normally ends up in our bed. Our baby sleeps through the night, thankfully. Friday nights are the most exciting night for me. I get to watch my shows and read and do whatever I want. Friday night, I opened up the advance copy. I just had that feeling that washes over you of the feeling of opening the new book when it's really big and it's a big fall book or something like that. I feel that way about Jonathan Franzen's books. They're moments. It's just so satisfying. I was like, I'm so happy right now. That's great. I'm very happy that all it takes to make me happy is opening a book. I like all formats. It really depends. I love listening to audiobooks when I walk. I do podcasts when I drive. I'm not driving that much these days. It sort of depends on the format. I only do cookbooks in print. I'm not a digital cookbook person. I love style, wellness books. I usually like those in print because, A, they tend to be beautiful, and B, I want to be able to reference them easily. I'm probably more a visual person that way. I would say I probably mostly read digitally. That was a very long answer to your question.

 

Zibby: I loved it. By the way, if you're looking for a new -- I listened to Jodie Patterson's A Bold World on audio. You should try that. I did a lot of car rides back and forth. I interviewed her, and I felt I completely knew her. I think that probably creeped her out a little bit. I love listening to memoir in Audible. I'm just curious, with independent bookstores struggling -- you're working for Amazon. Obviously, Amazon is amazing. Everybody shops there. How could you not? What about all the independent bookstores out there right now who are going through a really hard time? Some, I would say, maybe blame Amazon for their demise. As such a huge book lover like I am, how do you deal with that issue?

 

Sarah: I have two different responses. One is a story. I was at BookExpo a couple years ago, which is, for those that don't know, it used to be the big American publishing conference of the year. I was at a party at night with some of my colleagues. No one's wearing nametags at that point. It's a party at night. I ended up in a conversation with a bookseller from Rainy Day Books, actually, in Kansas City. She said, "I'm so-and-so." I said, "Hi, I'm Sarah Gelman from Amazon." She kind of said, "Oh. I'm not going to talk to you." I can't believe I'm forgetting her name. I'm not going to say it anyway. I said, "I'm Sarah Gelman. We worked together when I was at Knopf. I helped bring Anne Rice to you." She was like, "Oh, Sarah!" I am the same book lover I was twenty years ago, but I work for a different company. What I see at Amazon is a group of people that care so much about reading. My team especially, again, when I say we're passionate, we fight like family. I always say that they're my dysfunctional family, my other dysfunctional family. The things that people are going through now with the pandemic are just unprecedented. It feels like the only word that I can say.

 

Independent bookstores do so much good, whether it's their staff picks and people being able to have the serendipity of walking in and seeing a beautiful book in person and wanting to pick it up, being a place for community, a place where they can have book clubs, have different kinds of meetings, and readings of course. They add so much value. I think they're incredibly important to support. It's funny. I just sent emails from some of my local stores -- my local store where I live right now is called Island Books. It's an awesome bookstore. I'm on Mercer Island in Washington outside of Seattle. Then actually, a former Amazon editor from this team that I'm on now, Tom Nissley, owns a bookstore in Seattle called Phinney Books. Then there's one now in a neighborhood. I think it's called Madison Park Books. I just sent their newsletters out to some people on my team because I just love how they're still -- Island Books, they're amazing. They have always had a program where if you order a book either online or by phone, they will deliver it to anyone on the island. For people that are older and can't actually get to their store so easily, they get in their car and they drive it to you. They have a box outside where you can, again, order online or call and order, and they have a no-contact pickup box outside. They're doing an amazing job.

 

Zibby: I feel like you should do a reality show of your group of editors sitting around talking about books.

 

Sarah: You have no idea.

 

Zibby: Seriously, that would be so fun to watch.

 

Sarah: I think we're endlessly fascinating, but I'm also a total book nerd. There are book jokes. There are a lot of book jokes.

 

Zibby: Someone in the comments here asks, where was Dear Edward? That was one of my best reads. Was that on there?

 

Sarah: That was top one hundred. I love that book.

 

Zibby: Maybe I missed it in the category when I went through one by one. Maybe I missed it. Anyway, good. I'm glad it's on there. That was really good.

 

Sarah: I really love that book. It's funny. I don't know if you had this experience. I loved the when they're on the plane part better than the part that took place when he's growing up. It reminded me of that book, The Fall. Is it Noah Hawley? I loved that book so much. It's sort of like that and Lost put together. That's a great book. This is so subjective. There are books that were huge books that aren't on this list and books that people might not have heard of. It's not necessarily about name recognition. It's an imperfect, unscientific process.

 

Zibby: The thing I like about books, airplane-type things or crowds, why people randomly get thrown together and then all their backstories. I always wonder when I'm in a trapped situation like on a plane or somewhere, what's everybody else going through? Or in a spinning room even or something. Everyone has so many stories going on. If only we knew when we saw them or could press play and watch them.

 

Sarah: That book and, not to bring up another TV show, Lost, perfect example of that. It's been a while since I read Dear Edward. Someone is reflecting on this woman that seems like they're not feeling well. Then you learn later that she's pregnant. It's like, yes, you have no idea what these people are going through and what their morning was like. That's a pretty important lesson to take through life right now in general. You never know what the person behind you at the grocery store just experienced. They might be being nasty, but...

 

Zibby: My dream is one day people walk around with shirts that say, going through infertility treatments; my mother just died; having horrible stomach pain for six months, what's going on with me? or just all these things that you wouldn't know and nobody would tell you, but as soon as you saw that, you would have immediate empathy and compassion for the person. Maybe if they were in line in front of you, you wouldn't be so annoyed and rude about it.

 

Sarah: I feel like reading sort of teaches you to look for that in people. You're getting into someone else's thoughts in a way that you can't even -- for people that are big TV watchers -- again, I love TV. I feel like -- I don't want to say nosey. That feels like a bad thing to say. I'm a very curious person. I want to know everyone's backstory and all of that stuff that you only want to talk to your therapist about. That's one of the reasons why I love reading and why I love those big family sagas.

 

Zibby: If we weren’t talking so much about books, I would be trying to find out all of your sorted past and your personal life. [laughs] No, I'm kidding.

 

Sarah: We're going to do that over a glass of wine another time.

 

Zibby: We'll have to do it another time. I don't want to run over. I know you have a big interview coming up.

 

Sarah: Can I answer one more question? Do you mind?

 

Zibby: Do I mind? No, of course.

 

Sarah: [laughs] I saw the question come in, when do you read?

 

Zibby: Oh, where is that question? Sorry, I missed it.

 

Sarah: Oh, no, I saw a couple questions coming in.

 

Zibby: Sorry, yes, in the chat.

 

Sarah: I was an English major. When do you read? This is something that I love to talk about because much like the name of your podcast, people are always like, I never have time to read. I am here to tell you that you do have time to read. I feel like I have a pretty full life. I have two little kids. I have two dogs and two cats and a job and everything. My secret is I read every night before I go to bed. That's when I do all my work reading. I don't, unfortunately, sit around during the workday and read all day. I am at my computer and in meetings. I make it a point to read every night. I can capture an hour of reading. Sometimes I read for five minutes. Then I literally fall asleep with the book waking me up when it hits my face. I don't feel guilty about the amount of time that I spend. When you say something like, I can only work out for five minutes, you're still working out for five minutes.

 

Just make it a habit. You'll start seeing that you can do it. Also, you'll start seeing that you will fall in love with that story and want to spend more time doing it. So often, people that say they don't have time to read are scrolling their phones before they go to bed. Put your phone away. It is a drug. It is giving you the effects of a drug. Just pick up a book, whatever it is. Then also, the idea of recapturing time in your day -- I know that you listen to audiobooks when you walk your dog. That's a perfect time. You mentioned you interviewed the author of Can't Even. I interviewed her over email. I asked her what she does to avoid burnout. She said that she doesn't like to multitask. She likes to singularly focus on one thing. Now I do feel a little guilty because I'll walk our dogs and I'll listen to a book at the same time. I'm listening to The Chiffon Trenches, the André Leon Talley book, right now.

 

Zibby: I had him on.

 

Sarah: Oh, my gosh, if anyone's looking for an audiobook. I want him to read everything to me, his French accent. I want to meet him. I don't know what I would wear.

 

Zibby: I'm going to send you the link. I have it on YouTube also. I'll send it to you. He's so funny. It was great.

 

Sarah: I take back that walk time. I'm spending time with myself, exercising my dogs, exercising my body, and reading. It's just really all about that. My other easy tip -- I have so many more too. I am a huge Goodreads Reading Challenge person. I set a goal at the beginning of the year. I log every single book that I read. My secrets are, I only log books that I know I'm going to finish. With my job, sometimes I start a book that I -- I hate this, but sometimes I don't finish them. If I don't love them, I just don't finish them. Once I start reading enough that I know I'll finish it, then I will put it on "currently reading" and then "read." I also have a rule that I don't log parenting books or relationship books because I know that other people follow my book picks. I feel like that's private. You don't need to know my issues with my children and my husband. Other than that, I log all my books there. It keeps me accountable. It's just like having any sort of goal and answering to it. I have done very well this year on my reading goal. Just setting that goal and working towards something, it's accountability, the same as anything else.

 

Zibby: Do you include children's books? One of the questions.

 

Sarah: I don't, actually. I would include a young adult book that I'm reading for myself. Black Brother, Black Brother, a book that you mentioned, I loved that book.

 

Zibby: So good.

 

Sarah: I find myself bringing that book up, weirdly, all the time and talking about fencing and how there's something so poetic about, in fencing, everyone looks like same. I interviewed Chelsea Clinton earlier this year. She writes about the female Muslim Olympian who is the fencing athlete. That idea that fencing was something that she could do and still be in the dress that she needed to wear for her beliefs but also be athletic and be the best in her field, I just think there's something so beautiful about that. That book, I would record. When I read my kids -- I'm trying to think what they're super into right now. Oh, my gosh, one of my sons is really into The Nightmare Before Christmas. I think other people are horrified by this, but we keep reading the book that is sort of the kids' version of it. I don't log those. Thankfully, my kids both love to read. I think part of it is they see me doing it, and so they want to model. They also, frankly, see me on my phone. They’ll pick up my phone and say, "Hello?" which I think is cute but also sort of sad. They also just pick up books. They want to read. I'll say, "Time for dinner." My little baby will say, "Jaime reading." I love that.

 

Zibby: That's amazing. I was reading a book, Danny and the Dinosaur, to my littler guy. My seven-year-old daughter was like, "Wait, I missed the beginning." She grabs it out of our hands. She's like, "I'm just going to take that and read it. Bye. I'm reading." I'm like, you know what, you stay up as long as you want if you want to read. That's fine by me. Just one other question if you have two more seconds. Other than bookstore newsletters, what are other ways you get books on your radar?

 

Sarah: Amazon is one of them. Obviously, through work, publishers are sharing books with us and pitching us, probably the same way they pitch you, Zibby. I learn about a lot of the books that I want to read then. Literally, my job is then to share that wealth with other readers. Like everyone else, I listen to recommendations from people I trust. Actually, all three of the top three of these books are books that I read later than the rest of the team, and especially Migrations. My teammate, Al Woodworth, she's such a great reader. She has amazing taste. She told us early in the year when she read this, "This is my favorite book of the year." I feel like that's something I listen to, when someone whose recommendations I trust and who reads -- I don't even know how she reads so much. So much. When she says, "This is my favorite book of the year," I listen to that. Same thing with Blacktop Wasteland. Actually, when I started it, I didn't love the first twenty pages or so. I told my team that. They were like, "You got to keep reading this." I got to a point in this book where -- I'm usually literally correctly here -- I literally stayed up until I finished it. I could not put it down. My heart was racing. I'll hold it up just so you can see the jacket, Blacktop Wasteland. People always say, what should I bring on the plane? This is the book that you want to bring on a plane when you're in planes again. You pick it up. You open it. Then you'll look up, and you'll be across the country. No time has passed, except you'll be dripping sweat because it's a crazy ride. Those are all books that, they're our top three of the year. They're books that I learned about because my colleagues, whom I trust, were telling me that they thought they were amazing. I listen to recommendations.

 

Zibby: I felt the same way about The Vanishing Half and also Writers & Lovers by Lily King. Both those books, it got dark out or I stayed up late at night. I just couldn't stop. I could not stop reading. It's the best feeling.

 

Sarah: I love both of those books. I saw that Writers & Lovers was on your list of books to help you through grief. I love that book because it's sort of like her mother's death is there the whole time and is arguably the biggest theme in the book, yet it's talked about the least. It shows how something like that just seeps into your entire life and takes it over even if it's not what you're seeing every day. I just love that book.

 

Zibby: It's like grief goes with you. It's how to integrate grief into your life, not what you do when you're sitting crying at the very beginning. Anyway, Sarah, thank you so much for all of your time. Please, let's continue this. I could talk about a thousand other books with you. Oh, my gosh, please. This was so fun. Thank you. Thanks for all your time.

 

Sarah: Thank you so much. This was really fun. I can't wait to talk again.

 

Zibby: Me too. Bye.

 

Sarah: Bye.

Sarah Gelman.jpg

Max Gross, THE LOST SHTETL

Zibby Owens: We are live on Facebook. It took me ten whole minutes to figure out what I was doing wrong, but I finally figured it out. Thank you for your patience. Now I can finally say hello. Hi, Max. How are you?

 

Max Gross: Hi, Zibby. I'm well.

 

Zibby: Max was smart to get to our conversation early. Then I messed everything up. Now, of course, I can't really even see him that well. Are you still there, Max?

 

Max: You can't see me?

 

Zibby: Yes. Okay, there you are. You just froze a little bit. You're back.

 

Max: Can you hear me or see me?

 

Zibby: Yes. You froze for just a second. So we're here today to talk about The Lost Shtetl by Max Gross, which is you. That's the cover, but I have the advance version. This is in conjunction with the JCC's Florida Jewish Book Fest which you will be attending. You'll be a panelist for their fiction forum. That's really exciting. This is a kickoff to that. I'm excited to be with you. Let's talk about your book. Welcome.

 

Max: Thank you so much. I really hope I don't have any more frozen moments. I'm sorry about that unstable connection.

 

Zibby: Who knows? It could be mine.

 

Max: Here is the actual book. This is the actual book. You have the -- there's the actual book.

 

Zibby: That's excellent. Very exciting. Please tell listeners what it's about.

 

Max: The Lost Shtetl, it's about a Jewish village [distorted audio]. It's so isolated that it is completely overlooked by the Nazis during World War II. It's completely overlooked by the Soviet Cold War. It is basically rediscovered in the here and now. I've been describing it as a Yiddish Brigadoon, just reappearing after many years of anonymity. Or you could think of it as an Amazonian tribe of Jews in the middle of the Polish forest. That's basically the plot. It gets all sorts of [distorted audio] clash of civilization when they are reintroduced into the modern world.

 

Zibby: How did you come up with this idea?

 

Max: Actually, I'm a big history buff. I was reading a book about World War II. In this book, I just had this very weird thought. I was like, there were so many shtetls in Eastern Europe prior to World War II. How is that they all fell to this horrible war? Why weren’t there any that sort of slipped through, some middle-of-nowhere village? Why did they all succumb to this? This thought occurred to me. Maybe one did. It was an interesting idea, but it took a long time. How would it realistically happen [distorted audio] assemble that whole little [audio cuts outs]?

 

Zibby: Max, it keeps freezing a little bit.

 

Max: Oh, no.

 

Zibby: Just a little, so if I'm not answering. I heard how you were a big history buff and you had to wonder what if. What if something had survived? How could one not have made it? and your research. Did you do any traveling to the actual places and have a site that you imagined it to have been?

 

Max: I sort of created the province. It was a fictional province. Like in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, I have my own little fake province in Poland. I did visit Poland. I used to be a writer for the New York Post. I was on the [indiscernible] beat, which is a great beat if you can get it. I convinced my editor, David Kaufman, to send me to Poland for just a travel story. I was pretty deep into the book when I went. I got to [audio cuts outs]. I did visit Auschwitz. I did see a little bit of the countryside. It was definitely a very interesting experience.

 

Zibby: I've been to Auschwitz. It's really just haunting to even step foot there and think of everything that happened and all the rest. I think your creativity is so great to reimagine what would happen. I love that novelists in general are always like, what if, what if, what if? Then all of a sudden, we have these amazing stories. Now I can just get lost in your story of your wondering what if, what if, especially for this horrific period of time. What if more had lived? It begs the question, what if everybody had survived? What would the world be like? My mind goes there.

 

Max: Absolutely. It still is sort of crazy to think that it was such an [distorted audio] everybody's life back then. You don't see too many events like that that do that. Actually, a friend of mine who just heard about the book told me about these Russians who had still been living under the auspices of communism years later. He just sent me this story. I haven't looked at it yet. I was like, this is a case of unbeknownst to me of life imitating art imitating life imitating art and all that stuff. [laughs]

 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. How long did it take for you to write this book? What was your process like? Did you outline it first? What was it like?

 

Max: It's funny. When I first thought of the idea, I thought that it was going to take place in the forties. I thought it was going to be something that, okay, they got missed, almost like they'd come out of the bomb shelter. What the hell happened while we were gone? I thought more, why would they have just, in 1946 or 1947, why then would they have all of a sudden woken up? Why in the fifties? I was like, you know what, it should take place now. It was just the lightbulb that went off in my head. It could really grapple with all of the contemporary problems that people face and that are very much on my mind and very much on, I hope, a lot of my readers' minds, stuff like that. I really started going with the book when I started thinking about the characters. The main character, Pesha and Yankel, when they started forming in my eyes, I was just like, let's follow the whole story. What would happen? The town gets rediscovered. The idea of them being missed by the Holocaust, that's almost the starting point.

 

The real bones of the story should be, what's happening now when they are suddenly introduced to all of this history that just plops down in front of them? I had an outline, but I definitely strayed from it a lot over the course of writing it. I wrote the first draft a while ago. I finished the first draft in something like late 2014. Selling a book is a long process. There was a couple of years of that. Also, there was a period where I was reworking it and rewriting it. I also had a son who's now five. There were just a lot of interruptions in the finishing of the book. The process was, I thought of the idea in 2008, 2009. Really started working on it in 2010, '11. Finished a draft in 2014 and then sat for two years. In 2017, I was like, all right, I have to finish this. Worked on the revised version. I had a very lovely lady named Michelle Brower who's an agent read a version of it, gave me her notes. Her notes were very, very smart. I basically worked around those. In 2017, I started pitching it to other -- long story. Michelle switched agencies, all these other things. I found David Vigliano, Nick Gianni, and Tom Flannery, my agents now. Nick is no longer with the agency. We wound up selling it. That's the whole saga, more than you probably wanted to know.

 

Zibby: No, I find that process so interesting. I really do. How great that you stuck with it and didn't let it just stay as a file in your computer or whatever, to bring it out. I'm sure every experience like having -- I have a five-year-old son too. I have four kids, but he's my baby. Having kids changes, also, your perspective and adds, I feel, some depth to your writing. You just have a new perspective as if you did anything, if you had a new job or if you adopted a puppy or something. I'm sure that all these experiences can only help, in other words. For anybody feeling bad that they have a thing on their desktop, it might get better with time. Who knows? [laughs]

 

Max: Absolutely, for sure. If you have four kids, you know what it's like. My god, you can [distorted audio] you have some crisis that has to be addressed right away with your child. I think it was Janet Malcom who called it an infinitely postpone-able act, writing. I'm glad that I finally got back to it.

 

Zibby: That's so funny. Yes, my kids' urgent thing today is putting things on the wish list for Hanukkah. Mind you, it's obviously still October. Why this is urgent now -- we don't even know when Hanukkah is. I had to look it up today. Yes, the urgency of kids' needs always trumps a beautiful paragraph that needs to be crafted carefully and all the rest. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

 

Max: Pretty much. Since I was a kid, I was always writing stories. My parents were both writers. My father was a mystery writer. His most famous book does not have his name on it. His most famous book is The Verdict which became a movie with Paul Newman, the early 1980s. He wrote true crime. He wrote mysteries. He was a columnist for New York Newsday for sixteen years, wrote for People magazine. My mother was a writer and editor as well. She was one of the editors for T magazine, the Times style magazine. There were books everywhere in my house growing up. If you wanted to keep up, you really had to do your reading. You had to do your homework. You had to know what you were talking about. My parents were just not going to tolerate cruddy conversation. That was just not going to be. I grew up a bit of a bookworm.

 

Zibby: Did you grow up in New York? Where did you grow up?

 

Max: I grew up in Brooklyn Heights, which was sort of Brooklyn, but it's kind of Manhattan.

 

Zibby: It's not Manhattan. [laughs]

 

Max: Look, I feel like I have great street cred saying that I'm from Brooklyn.

 

Zibby: You do. It's super cool. You have major street cred in the literary universe. You are born and bred in the heart of the New Yorker. I give you credit for that.

 

Max: [laughs] I grew up in Brooklyn Heights. Went to Saint Ann's School. I don't know if you --

 

Zibby: -- Yeah, of course.

 

Max: Even though it's called Saint Ann's School and it was a very, very hippy-dippy place, I was surrounded by Jewish people. Everybody from the headmaster on down was Jewish. It was always sort of a fascination for my parents as well as me, was Jewish history, the Holocaust, but also Jewish literature. I remember as a kid going to this friend of my parents house for weekend -- they lived in Cape Cod or something like that; I was about twelve years old at the time -- and finding Gimpel the Fool on this person's shelf in the little room that was my room for the weekend. I took it off. It definitely was this love-at-first-sight moment. It was a moment where I was like, oh, my gosh. To a certain extent, The Lost Shtetl is my tribute to Isaac Bashevis Singer. There were books everywhere. We were very interested in Jewish topics and Jewish books. We were interested in all sort of books too. I think The Lost Shtetl is also my tribute to Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite books. Macondo, the town there, was very much a model for Kreskol in a lot of ways.

 

Zibby: Your parents must be very proud of you. They must be kvelling and excited.

 

Max: I don't think that they will have figured out how to get on Facebook. [laughter] Maybe they’ll watch it afterwards.

 

Zibby: I'm sure this is one of many appearances you will be doing, so I'm sure they’ll catch something along the way. When you were saying, I grew up and there were books everywhere, how could I not be a writer? I'm just crossing my fingers that one of my four kids might actually want to write someday. I'm imagining Zoom 2030 when one of them says, I grew up with a lot of books around. I'll be like, yes! I did something good.

 

Max: I think it's the best way. Just put them in the room with the books. They’ll get it. They’ll take it up by osmosis or something.

 

Zibby: Exactly. I'm hoping that happens. It doesn't seem to be working, but whatever. I won't give up. So what happened between Saint Ann's and the New York Post and the book? What else in your day-job life? What happened writing-wise aside from those things? Or was that it? Was it college to the...?

 

Max: No, actually, after college, I went to Israel for a year. I went to a very not-Jewish college. I went to Dartmouth College, which is a wonderful school. Actually, I was talking about this to a reporter, Emily [indiscernible], last week. I definitely think that there are traces of being left alone in the wilderness that sort of gave me some inspiration for this book. When I graduated, I applied for graduate school. As I said, I always wanted to be a writer. Applied for graduate school. I got into an MFA program in Columbia for film, actually. I was going to do screenwriting. I think I was sort of sick of academia. I had been in school my whole life. I was a little exhausted with that whole structure. I thought, [distorted audio] more interesting with the next year. I don't know what it'll be. Then I decided, you know what -- there was this program in Israel, and I don't think it exists anymore, called the Arad Arts Project. Basically, you sit and you work on your art, whether it's painting or music or writing. It's out in Arad which is near Beersheba in the desert in Israel. I went for a year. It was supposed to be seven months. Then I wound up spending an extra five months there.

 

It was a very formative experience just because I was on my own in a completely different country talking to people who had completely different experiences from me and very, very sharp perspectives. When you're in Israel, you can speak to Arabs. You can speak to Jews. They live together. They live under the same tent. It's so starkly different. That was a great experience despite the fact that -- I was there during the intifada. [Distorted audio] a lot of pain, but it was nevertheless something that I feel very much formed me. Then when I came back, I worked at The Forward newspaper for about three or four years. It used to be The Yiddish Forward. Then about twenty years ago or so, maybe a little bit longer than that, they had an English version of it that they formed. That was a great experience. I was actually talking about this recently as well. When you work at one of these local newspapers, first off, there are so many people who call you because you're the only person that they can call to tell their stories. I had the lowest job on the totem pole in the sense that I was answering the phone. I was getting all the phone calls from every disgruntled person who just wanted to tell me about their evil landlord or about the implants that their dentist was putting into their teeth, real stories. Somebody did call me to tell me that.

 

I used to actually get calls from the widow of Chaim Grade who was a Yiddish poet who was one of the real luminaries in the world of Yiddish literature. She called me to yell at me every time The Forward mentioned Isaac Bashevis Singer who she regarded as the worst writer who ever lived and who had done such shame onto the Jewish people. It was really right out of a Cynthia Ozick story, this whole experience. It was a great experience. I was talking to people who had a lot to say and who had great stories. That was also [distorted audio]. Then I went to the New York Post which was a great gig. I was working at the home section, the real estate section. I was also just writing a lot food stories. Then because the travel desk was right next to the real estate desk, whenever the travel editor would go on trips, he would ask us to write his headlines and his captions. To thank us, he would send us places. He'd be like, "We have this trip to Italy coming up that we need written about. Do you want to go, Max?" Terrific, that's wonderful. [laughs] Then when he left -- this was an editor named David Landsel -- the powers that be at the Post were just like, "We have to figure out who we're going to hire to be the new travel editor. Until we figure that out, you guys take care of it." We were like, okay, fine, we know what we're doing. After a couple months, they were like, "You guys are doing fine. We don't need another travel editor." It became travel and real estate and food, which was a great job.

 

Zibby: Do you have a day job now, or are you mostly committed to being a novelist, or what?

 

Max: I'm definitely committed to being a novelist. The thing that I learned when my son was born, that I could only really get away with doing it if I am committed to waking up before six AM every day to actually get a few pages out there. I'm actually the editor of a commercial real estate magazine called the Commercial Observer, which is, in its way, also an extremely interesting gig just in the sense of the real estate community is almost this shtetl of billionaires to a certain extent. [laughs] The people who own New York, there are so many crazy people in that list. I've met most of them. They’ve all got these incredibly strange, bizarre stories that go with them. I don't know what my next book will be, but I think that’ll be influencing it.

 

Zibby: Wow, the shtetl of billionaires. That's a cool title too.

 

Max: The shtetl of billionaires, I'm going to trademark that right now.

 

Zibby: I have my little team getting the trademark while you're here. No, I'm kidding. I don't even really have a team. I have a tiny team. Anyway, so what are you working on next? Do you have another novel in the works?

 

Max: I don't know if I'm allowed to really talk about it because I think Harper owns me, body and soul, for the next sixty days or something like that. I'm not sure that I'm allowed to speak of that. One of the things that the long process has allowed me to do has been to just get onto the next thing. I have been working this whole time on new things. I definitely don't want to wait so long before the next thing comes out. There are a couple of different things that could be the next thing. I'm working on all of them at the moment.

 

Zibby: I feel like this is just the beginning for you of your lifetime of talent in this area. It's very exciting to see someone's debut and where it's going to go from here. It's just very cool. Now I love knowing that this green cover is all about Dartmouth. Who knew?

 

Max: You're not an alumnus, are you Zibby?

 

Zibby: No. I went to Yale. Although, I did spend a week at Dartmouth doing a tennis camp when I was in high school, so I feel like I can say I went to Dartmouth, right? No. [laughs]

 

Max: I feel like I can say I went to Yale because before I went to Dartmouth, [distorted audio].

 

Zibby: Great. So actually, we did all our schooling together as it turns out.

 

Max: Schooled together. [laughs]

 

Zibby: I had tons of friends who went to Dartmouth, my former sister-in-law. I've spent a lot of time there. Then my ex. Anyway, whatever, I won't go into it. Yes, I've spent a lot of time up at Dartmouth. I know that feeling of being in the woods. I could imagine being lost there in a community all unto yourself. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

 

Max: One of the things that I will say was I made a resolution in late 2016. I am going to finish this. I don't know what is going to happen to it, but this is going to be as good a piece of work as I can do. I am going to not stop every day until this thing is finished. I would wake up at five AM when my [distorted audio]. I feel like there's [distorted audio]. I am going to take something to completion. I'm not going to just have a good idea. I'm not just going to throw some things on the page. I am really going to think about it as a complete thing. I am going to work at it every day. It took a lot of time, but it paid off. My advice would be, get up early. People work better at night, but I personally work better in the morning.

 

Zibby: Me too. Yes, those morning hours before the kids wake up are sacred.

 

Max: Me time.

 

Zibby: Congratulations again on your book. I hope you have a great time at the JCC Book Fest, the Jewish Book Fest. It's so great you're going to be there. For all your upcoming stuff, I'll be rooting for you. Good luck.

 

Max: Thank you, Zibby. I hope it was just that one thing that I was frozen. I apologize.

 

Zibby: It's not your fault. It's technology. This happens all the time. There was in and out. This will be a podcast on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" as well eventually, not too long, but not today. I will take out all the bits and pieces that were not perfect. We will make it sound like we had no trouble at all when it's on the podcast.

 

Max: I love it.

 

Zibby: So there's that.

 

Max: There's that. Great. Zibby, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

 

Zibby: No problem. Sorry again for the beginning introduction of stress.

 

Max: No worries.

 

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Max Gross.jpg

Ann Garvin on the secret to why losing weight is tough

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Ann. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Ann Garvin: It's so nice to be here. That phrase, I could feel that in my heart.


Zibby: You have a such a unique background. There are so many reasons I wanted to talk to you on this show. Can you start by telling everybody both -- I want to know your personal journey and also your professional one because you're a professor and an expert and all the rest. Lots to discuss.


Ann: There's so much. I know. I'll try to keep it short and not start with my childhood.


Zibby: No, start with your childhood. Tell me when it all started and your own experience with your weight and body. Then we'll go into your professional life, if you don't mind. It's a little intrusive of me.


Ann: No, I don't mind at all. It's great. I was always a stick-thin kid growing up. Puberty took a really long time to hit me. My mother was very, very small and very tiny until she had babies. Then she changed. I experienced how much she disliked that change. When I was young, I got the message. God, I love my mom. She died in the last couple years. She was my best friend. Nobody does it exactly right, so I just have to explain all that.


Zibby: I'm sorry.


Ann: She did have an us-versus-them theory about her body. I got that message that it's not okay to have a soft belly and aging is not the greatest thing. I think I internalized that. It took me many years to come around from that. In college, I lived with a lot of girls who had, for sure, eating disorders that went undiagnosed. I probably had one too just in terms of not really being able to see my body in the way that it was actually and then also thinking that you can manipulate your body in a way that maybe you can't. I think we all go through things like that. Maybe all is a little bit of an umbrella term, but I think people do. For many years, I had a push/pull with this ideal of what the cultural idea of a body is and what a women's actual body is and what it's for and how it's really our best friend and if our bodies are the greatest that it can only be, then that's the only way we live the way we really want to live. Your body is really your best friend, but it took me a long time and a lot of thinking to come around to that idea. 


Probably if someone were to ask me what the key to weight and weight management is, it's really understanding that your body is on your side and that it only wants to do the best for you. I think of my body like I think of my dog. I love my dog so much. I would never push on my dog's soft belly and say, do some sit-ups. It's brutal. I would never do that. I always think, why would I do that to my body which I really love as much as or more than I love my dog? If my body falls out of whack, then I'm not able to do any of the things that I want to do. Anyway, took me a while to get there. After babies, your body changes. You have to understand that after menopause, your body changes. Through menopause, your body changes. Instead of really hating your body for that, I think we have to understand that those things are fantastic and they offer all kinds of benefits. I started working as a nurse right out of college. I didn't work with women. I mostly worked with men because I worked at the VA hospital. I got fascinated with how to get people moving in the hospital to make them feel better. I went and got a master's in exercise physiology and a PhD in exercise psychology. That's where my thinking came in terms of weight. I'm meshing my personal story and my professional story together, but I don't think I can keep that apart.


Zibby: No, this is great. Keep going.


Ann: Once I started studied health psychology, I had a focus primarily in weight and body and how it changes based on both exercise, but also mood and anxiety and depression. That was where all my research was. I started to understand that the way that we feel about our bodies and the understanding of our cultural influence on our bodies is the first step to understanding where we should be in terms of our body weight. Then I started talking to students about it. I found that the current-day students were really no different than I was thirty years ago in terms of my thinking about the body. Certainly, the culture is better about a wider range of body. We're getting there, but we're certainly not there now. Now people are feeling better if they do have a booty. Whereas in my day and age, it was stick thin, flat stomach, fourteen-year-old boy, no hips. We are just pushing women back and forth into this idea that their body is for external consumption and not for loving your kids, doing the things you want to do, reading books, writing books, traveling, experiencing the world. 


If we can tease out those two things, then we can start to think about, what we do that would care for our bodies in the best way? How do we love it? I think loving your body in this day and age is one of the hardest things to do because we've removed ourselves from our bodies. Our bodies are this annoying thing that doesn't pull its weight in terms of thinness. Then we have our bodies over here who are getting us to bring our kids to soccer and do all of the things that we enjoy. We haven't put those two things together. I have really strong ideas about how to do that. I certainly have talked about that in a major way. I do think that that's our first step. People are always saying to me, what do you think about weight loss? What's the first step for weight loss? I would say the first step for weight loss is the hardest step, which is trying to get around your thinking about your body and what it's for and what works the best. For me, here's the other thing. I don't compete with other women and their bodies. I look at other people's bodies, and I admire them. I wonder about their struggles. I think about them all the time. You know who I compete with? My younger self. 


That's the hardest competition of all because with every ticking moment, that self is farther away. That younger self didn't have babies and didn't have a million things to do and could exercise whenever I wanted, etc. That competition is particularly poisonous. However, I look at those pictures and I think, oh, my gosh, I was in such good shape. Then I look at myself now and I kind of bully myself about it. I have a softer belly. I look different. I had to understand a couple of things about bodies. One of the things I had to understand is, as a scientist, we know that everything falls on a normal curve. There are always going to be people with a percentage of body fat that's higher for their health. There's always people that have a percentage of body fat that are very low, and that's perfectly okay. Everybody else falls here. If we think everybody should be up here, very thin, I guess it's down here, very thin, then we are even falling in the face of science that says to us everybody's genetic determines what is the correct body fat percentage. 


That's another thing that we have to fight with, this idea that there's this ideal body shape and it's the shape that we see on the Oscars or it's the shape that we see in all the catalogues with women who have no breasts, no hips, and the clothes hang on them like a hanger. It's so hard for us to see those continuous images and then look at us and reconcile our own bodies. So here I am. I got my PhD in health psychology with a fundamental focus on nutrition. I taught nutrition for thirty years. Yet what I'm talking about is psychology before we even get into food stuff, carbohydrates, fat, whatever. It's also, even knowing all that, I want everyone to hear me say I struggle with the same thing, even with all of the good information, all of the right information. I live in the same poisonous culture that everyone else does about weight. I think what we have to understand, too, is that, how much are we willing to give up for the culture to pursue a certain kind of weight? That, I think, is a really big thing. I want to say a couple more things.


Zibby: Great. This is the best interview I've ever done. I can just relax and listen to you. This is great. Keep going.


Ann: [laughs] I talk too much. Always on my report card.


Zibby: No, it's perfect.


Ann: Now I lost my train of thought because I got embarrassed because I was talking too much. What I was going to say about that is that I think one of the things that we are very afraid of is to walk back on the culture and say, I'm going to be a little softer, and that’s probably okay. We're worried a little bit about how we're going to feel about ourselves and how people are looking at us and what it means. What it means is, when you get a little softer, what people see is a lack of control because a perfectly controlled self is one that can control all of your behaviors and all your passions and not feed them with your mouth. I just think that that's one of the most toxic kinds of things. Here's something else. We're supposed to love food. Food is our sustenance. It's not the enemy. If we don't get enough food, then that's the end of us. What happened all of a sudden in our culture that we became, food is sort of the enemy? which is the worst possible give and take because at that give and take we're saying food is the enemy, stay away from food, but also, food is the thing that keeps you alive and you should only eat good food. Then you have that tongue that tastes everything so acutely and is such a pleasure center, but we’re like, ignore that. You need to ignore that. That's really a tough thing to ask people to do on a regular basis. 


I remember what I was going to say. That is this. This is fascinating. We don't know how to healthfully -- when I say healthfully, I mean psychologically, bone health, heart health, everything. We do not know how to healthfully help women who are very close to their ideal weight lose weight. We don't know how to do it. You know why we don't know how to do it? It's unethical to study it. You are not allowed, as a scientist, to take a person who is at their ideal weight or close to it -- not cultural ideal; physiological ideal -- and study it because to reduce their weight would make them unhealthy. As scientists, we have the Nuremberg trials that show us that we are not allowed to hurt our subjects. Reducing their weight past what would be considered ideal is unethical and not allowed. That means all of the information you're reading about weight loss has been made for people, for men mostly, but also women or people that are extremely overweight, not in a normal range of overweight. When you try to do those things and it doesn't work, you think you're weak. In fact, they weren’t meant for you. We don't know how to help people lose weight who are close to their weight because it's not a healthy thing to do. We don't want you to look good in a swimsuit. We want your bones to be dense. We want you to be psychologically healthy and not thinking about food all the time and searching for food, which is exactly what happens when we reduce your calorie intake to the point where you become a person who's constantly thinking in the back of their head, so when are we going to eat again? 


We do know a little bit about behavioral. We know how to ask people not to eat snacks and that kind of thing. If you are in a calorie deficit and your body knows that you're in a calorie deficit, all your body knows -- it's like your dog -- is, I'm a little hungry. When you should be thinking about this book that you're reading or this podcast that you're doing or this other thing that you're working on, there is this niggling constant tap on your shoulder saying, you know what, you're kind of hungry. You're a little bit hungry. Eventually, when you stop doing whatever it is that's distracting you and you start to get tired, that's when the Doritos come out. You're like, I'm tired. I'm hungry. You don't know why you can't stop eating. That's the psychological drive. There's, in fact, a super great study that was done in the fifties that we couldn't even do anymore, on men, called the Minnesota Keys Study. 


They calorie restricted men. Then they watched their behavior. What they did, they became what we normally consider a woman's behavior or an eating disorder behavior, eating disorder. They searched for food. They ate too much food. They drank too much coffee. They drank too much water. They chewed too much gum. All because they were in a deficit. Then they became eating disordered in a true sense. They were psychologically healthy, very lean men, but they put them on a calorie restriction, which is what we do with women all the time. We're like, you have a tiny little body fat. Stop eating. Exercise more. Now we're in a deficit. Then we have this tap on our shoulder. You put that on top of being fatigued all the time -- what woman is not fatigued? If you go on Twitter or on Facebook, there is eight million coffee jokes about how we all need coffee. We need coffee. I need coffee. I just said to my daughter today, "Oh, my god, my best friend is coffee." 


Zibby: I'm holding a -- I'm trying not to drink as we talk. Yes, I know.


Ann: After saying all that about the psychology of eating, I would say the number-one tip I tell people, the number-one thing you have to do before you ever change any other thing in your life is you have to get enough sleep. Here's why you have to get enough sleep. If you're tired, you're not going to chop vegetables. You're not going to grocery shop. If you're tired, you're not going to sauté something. If you're tired and you're starving, which most of us are if we're in a diet situation and we're living an American life, you are absolutely not going to be searching things and making food prep and doing all these things that we're asking you to do because we're reducing your calories. You're too tired to do that. You're too tired to hold back any kind of normal, healthy, mammal behavior, which is to go look for food. The other thing is, if you're tired -- when I say tired, I kind of mean sleep deprived because most people are a little bit sleep deprived. What happens when you're sleep deprived is you became an abnormal carbohydrate metabolizer, which means you act a little bit like you're diabetic. You know that feeling because two things happen. You get a little lightheaded. That’s what ketosis is. Don't even get me started on ketosis and eating the high-fat diets and keto diets. If you become ketosis and you go into the hospital, they will fix that because it's an abnormal state. It is not a good state. There are so many problems with it. Having said that, you start to feel a little dizzy. That's one thing. 


You start to carve carbohydrates in a way that doesn't make sense to you. All of a sudden, you want sugar, honestly. It's the end of the day and you're like, god, I could really use some sugar. That is sleep deprivation. That also means that as an abnormal carbohydrate metabolizer, you're going to store fat faster. Even when you're sleeping, you're doing that. Because your body needs to be fully rested to metabolize in the way that it needs to metabolize food, sleep is the number-one health behavior. In fact, I'm like a sleep evangelist. I'm a sleepy person anyway. I sleep a lot. I think I was sort of forced into that. There is never a day that I don't get eight to nine hours of sleep, ever. That changed my life in the best of ways. That right there is enough for people to go, I'm not doing that. I can't do that. I'm going to drop my calories. I'm going to do keto. I'm going to do whatever it is I have to do, but I'm not getting enough sleep. I get that. What I would say is, absolutely without fail I became more productive when I got more sleep. Then with a fully slept mind, I can focus and do more work. For god's sake, I get a lot done in a day. The reason that happens is because I get enough sleep. And I nap. That's the other thing. I always nap every day no matter what. I nap every day. I'm not saying everybody needs my amount of sleep. Nine hours is average. Whatever it is, whatever you think it is -- oh, I can even tell you whether you need more or not. Do you want to hear this?


Zibby: Yes.


Ann: Here's how you know, if you do it without caffeine. You have to do it without a stimulant. You can't take your Adderall. You can't take your caffeine for the day that you're going to check this out. Here's what happens. If you sleep a normal week period when you're normally in and out, and then on the day that you're not having caffeine or whatever, you sit and do something boring, usually driving -- if you're in the Midwest, it's driving. It could be something other that's really dull. I'm sorry, but I think church can be very dull. If I'm sitting in church or if I'm driving and the sun is hitting me and I fall asleep, then I'm sleep deprived. Here's why. Whenever the attention in the room goes down, your body that's sleep deprived goes, things are quieting down. This is a good time to take a nap. I don't need my full attention right now. I'm going to fall asleep. If, though, you don't fall asleep and you fidget and you haven't been on caffeine, then your body says, I'm kind of bored. I need a little stimulation. I don't need any sleep. I need stimulation. That's how you can tell. When the activity level goes down and you start to fall asleep, chances are you're sleep deprived.


Zibby: That makes sense.


Ann: It does, right? It does make sense, but I had to read the research on it to really understand it. I just thought that maybe I was oversleeping. I thought a lot of things. I thought, oh, just go have another cup of coffee or whatever.


Zibby: Ann, there was so much in there that I found totally interesting. I could have a hundred conversations with you now. The part I want to go back to is women who don't necessarily have to lose, say, a hundred pounds, but want to lose twenty pounds or ten pounds or five pounds. They still want to do that. It doesn't mean they're going to starve. Sometimes you could say it's weight you don't necessarily need to have on you. You might feel better. Your knees might feel better. There are reasons to get rid of that even though it's not a significant amount. Even though science hasn’t studied it, what do you do then to get rid of those pounds versus without the voice saying you're hungry all the time or having to rely on all those things? What should we do? How should we do it?


Ann: It's a perfect question. You asked the perfect question. How do you do it? There's a couple things that you can do. The first thing is sleep. You have to sleep because your body will hang onto that body weight if you're sleep deprived. It won't give you a hand. It will fight you the whole way because it needs to. That's the first thing. I know that's not a thing that people really like to hear, but that's the first thing. The next thing is, we have to start thinking about our bodies as our best friends and stop thinking about it like it's fighting us. We have to give it the nutrition that it needs without overnutrition. You know what? Putting on weight is just overnutrition. You don't need all of those things. The other thing is, drink enough the water. The reason you need to drink enough water is because often, we interpret hunger as thirst. It's a hard one because you're also having to go to the bathroom all the time, which is really a pain. I'm not going to say anything new to you about, how do you do it? Really, we know what we have to do. We have to sleep. We have to drink water. We have to move every day. We have to move more than we don't move. I'm not saying you have to do Pilates or yoga or run a triathlon. I would say, in fact, you probably don't need to do those things to the extent that you think you need to do those things. The exercise isn't going to save you unless you do so much that there isn't time for anything else, so that doesn't really make sense. Exercise is something that we do for our health but not necessarily for weight loss. Although, it does work because it is a calorie deficit, but it doesn't work like it can. I have stuff on my blog that specifically does the math on that. 


I would say that you have to be very careful about getting the right kind of nutrients. There is so much misinformation out there like keto diets and the coffee with butter and so many, so much misinformation. I know Weight Watchers is something that you talked about before. Weight Watchers is actually the best program. Without a doubt, it is the best program. The only issue that I have with it is that is requires you to be very diligent. Then when you're not so diligent, you put it back on. I think that that's really the only place where it can be a problem. With that diligence comes deprivation. With deprivation, we fall off the wagon all the time. When we're doing it, we have to be less diligent on the program so that it's easier to maintain as we move forward, which also means that ten pounds is going to take longer to lose. That's okay. You have an interesting life. Nobody can see it on you anyway. You just have to allow yourself the time it takes to do it. What you're doing is you're changing the course of the Titanic. You're changing your health behaviors as you move differently. I can tell you, when I've gained weight, I've moved the Titanic in the wrong direction. I've changed all my healthy behaviors. I've stopped doing those things. Now I have to move myself back to the way that I was before. It's so easy to slip moving the Titanic in that direction because we're inundated so much with misinformation about food and there's so much delicious food out there. Does that help?


Zibby: Yes, but -- I get it. I'm loving my body, blah, blah, blah. I'm pretending I'm having a good night's sleep, which of course I'm not, but let's just pretend. Now it comes time to eat. I'm not going to do a crazy -- personally, I don't eat a crazy diet. I'm trying really hard to eat regular whole food, anti-inflammatory, Mediterranean, whatever. I'm trying. Once you get in that and you get rid of the sugar all the time, I've found my cravings to be almost gone, whereas they were constant before. My mood is actually much more stable now that I'm not having huge sugar highs and lows all the time. But how do you just stay eating the right foods? What is overnutrition? Is it just eating too much? Is it too much salmon? Too many grapes? Can I really feel guilty about that? I don't think so.


Ann: No. Here's what you need to do. You need to figure out what your weakness is when you get weak. What is it?


Zibby: Sugar. Anything with sugar.


Ann: Me too. It's those lapses that are stopping you from moving forward. That's not to say you always need to get rid of it. This is what I do. This is my rule. I am not allowed to eat sugar until seven o'clock at night, period. I have adopted that rule for years. I actually don't break that rule because it's been that rule for so many years. I find that after seven o'clock, I don't usually want it. It's really close to my bedtime. [laughs] That may not be the rule that works for you. You have to figure out, when is it that you do the thing that’s hurting your diet the most? whatever that is. If you're mostly doing what you say you're doing, which I totally believe that's really most of us --


Zibby: -- It is now that I'm focusing on it, but I certainly wasn't doing it before. Yes, I am doing it now, but I won't do it forever, I'm sure. Anyway, sorry.


Ann: It's all the same. It doesn't matter whether it was before or after. You still probably had the same weakness before as you do now, right?


Zibby: Yes.


Ann: This is the best news ever. You don't have to problem solve your whole diet. You only have to problem solve that weakness because that's the thing that's putting you over the edge. I know I have to problem solve sugar like nobody's business because I love sugar more than I love anything in the world. It's so satisfying and so wonderful in so many ways that it can come to me. I have to think about it every single time and whether I'm going to do it or not. A lot of times when I'm weak about sugar, it's when I'm tired or it's when something's happening in my life that's hard. I use it for that. I have to see when I'm weak, what I'm eating, if it's worth it. I have to problem solve that and only that. I love that that's the thing because I would say that most of us kind of know what we're supposed to be doing. We are constantly like, should I eat this salmon? Should I have another bite of this salmon? Is the salmon the problem? The salmon is never the problem. The grapes are never the problem. Nobody got fat eating too much salmon and grapes. No one ever did. Our issues are whatever it is that we keep falling down on. If you look back at your behavior before you focused, what were those things? You're going to fall back into those. What you should do is make a list of those and then problem solve those and get super creative about them. 


I can give you some examples. I said that I don't sugar at seven o'clock night because seven o'clock at night is when I want them. What I find is that I fall asleep. Sugar makes me tired. It’s got this inherent reasoning why I do it that way. It's helpful that way. The benefits outweigh the negatives. Other things that I'll do is, if I say to myself, Ann, life is too short, you need to have some sugar sometimes, don't laugh, but I put it in the trunk of my car so that if I'm in bed and I want sugar, I have to go outside to the trunk of my car to get it. I almost never will. I know that sounds silly, but that's really a useful thing for me. Other things that I'll do is I won't go get it at all. If I'm having a really hard time, I will have no sugar in the house except for a bag of sugar, but I'm not really interested in a bag of sugar. I make it really hard on me to get it. If my kids want sugar or something like that, again, it goes out in the car or in the basement. What we've found is it doesn't matter -- this is really good research. If you have sugar on your table or in your cupboards in the kitchen, piece of cake, it's easy to get. If you just move it to the basement or down one floor from you, you can reduce your eating of that sugar by fifty percent. If you put it in a brown bag where you can't see the label, you will reduce it by another ten percent. It's amazing what you can do by not looking at it. All the sugar manufacturers know it. Everything's in a pink box. A chocolate kiss is wrapped in a silver container with a friendly little flag. We have to look at what marketers do to get us to eat, and eat too much of it, and do the opposite. We have to understand that.


Zibby: Ann, this is amazing. I feel like I've gotten so many specific actionable tips that everybody can use in different ways and the insight and science behind it all in a little half-hour package. Thank you. This was perfect. Thank you so much. It makes it feel like the work is not so massive. There's one thing, and you fix one part of it. That's not to say it’s not a challenge to give things up, but also, it's achievable. Thank you.


Ann: You're welcome. Anytime you want to talk about it, just call me up. We don't have to do it on a podcast either. We can do it on the phone. That'd be fine.


Zibby: Cool. All right, I might. [laughs] 


Ann: That'd be fine. So good to talk to you.


Zibby: So good to talk to you too. Thank you so much.


Ann: You're welcome. Buh-bye.


Zibby: Buh-bye.



Ann Garvin.png

Kathie Lee Gifford, HELLO LITTLE DREAMER

Kathie Lee Gifford: Thank you for having me today.

 

Zibby Owens: Thanks for coming on. I'm so excited to talk to you about your many exciting projects you have going on starting with Hello, Little Dreamer which I read out loud to my two littlest kids. They just loved it. Thank you for that entertainment for my family.

 

Kathie Lee: I am so happy to hear that. It's been a long time since I had little ones, but I'm still a little kid at heart. I'm grateful to hear that from you because that's the whole point. We wait too long with our children to instill extraordinarily important values, the most important things, the most important truths. We wait too long. Frank and I rarely fought over things. The one thing we disagreed on was how long we should wait for our little ones to learn how to say please and thank you and I love you and I'm sorry and all those things that you're going to need in life many times. He'd say, "Kathie, he's only two. Cody's two." I'd say, "Yeah, and pretty soon he'll be twelve and it'll be too late." [laughs]

 

Zibby: I know. That's the thing.

 

Kathie Lee: Now I have the most polite children. Cassidy was terrible because she just took it so to heart. I'd say to both of them, "You say please or you do not get it. You say thank you or I take it back. Then we start all over again." They believed me. Cass was better at it. Cody was really good. In the middle of the night when he would go potty, I didn't care if he hit the toilet or not. I just wanted him to say thank you after I got back with him. [laughter] He'd wake up and he'd go, "Mommy, potty peas. Potty peas." Potty please. I'd go, "Yes, I gotcha." Then I'd put him back to sleep. He'd go, "Thank you. Thank you." Frank came to believe that it was true, but Cassidy took it way further than that. We'd be a restaurant or something. She’d give her order. She’d go, "Thank you." The waitress wouldn't respond, or the waiter. Cassidy would go, "Thank you." She’d just be yelling it until finally the waiter or waitress, they'd go, "You're welcome, kid. Geesh." Or they'd walk away and Cassidy would look at me and go, "They didn't say you're welcome." She was insane about it. I guess I did go a little overboard.

 

Zibby: No, at least you did your job well. Check-plus on that.

 

Kathie Lee: I was raised that way. Little brats grow into bratty adults. They just do if nobody takes them aside and teaches them what's right. I'm not saying how to vote and how to believe in your whatever. I'm just talking about the basic decency courtesy things. Kids today just have not been taught them from what I see. Some have. It's so rare that I go, gee, somebody raised you right. It's been lost in our culture like so many other things.

 

Zibby: It takes a relentless focus on it. You can't just say, all right, say please and thank you. It's every single interaction. When they say it, you have to catch it and say, thanks for saying please, or whatever. Then you have to catch it when they don't. It's constant.

 

Kathie Lee: That's right. You've got to reinforce it. Reinforcement, I call it resent-less.

 

Zibby: I love that.

 

Kathie Lee: Because they're going to resent you, but you got to be relentless about it.

 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I'm coming to you for all my parenting advice from now on. When I'm feeling all my reinforcement is making no difference, I'll remember that it actually works over time. [laughs]

 

Kathie Lee: It totally will. It's a guarantee. The Bible says raise up your children in the way they should go. When they're older, they will not depart from it. I've seen that with my children. One of them's thirty. One's twenty-seven now. My son's getting married in two weeks. My daughter got married two months ago. It's a whole new world. If they don't teach their children these common courtesies, grandma will. Glam-ma, I want to be called. Glam-ma will teach them gladly. [laughter]

 

Zibby: That's exciting to have so many huge milestones happening in your life all at the same time. That's great. Congratulations.

 

Kathie Lee: Thank you. I think people tend to believe that because of the COVID the world has come to a standstill. That’s not true at all. Certain things have, of course. God's spirit has never stopped moving. The Holy Spirit's never stopped moving in our own lives. There's lots of good stuff to be seen and to be experienced if we have our spiritual antenna out for it. God is doing great and mighty things in spite of it all just as he has through all of time. He never changes. It's the world that changes and people that change, but never, never God himself.

 

Zibby: My mother-in-law right now -- I know this will air later when who knows what will have happened, but my mother-in-law is in the ICU with COVID and has been suffering for a while.

 

Kathie Lee: I'm sorry.

 

Zibby: Thank you. She's only sixty-three and all the rest.

 

Kathie Lee: That's too young.

 

Zibby: I have been asking so many people to pray and to reach out. It doesn't matter what religion and whatever. When I was reading Hello, Little Dreamer and on your Instagram and your whole faith and even in the book how your neighbor sold you the house because they just felt it from God, anyway, I was like, there's a reason why I'm talking to Kathie Lee Gifford today when I have so much God in my life at the moment.

 

Kathie Lee: I'm sitting on that same porch right now. I was talking to her yesterday because she's just now moving into the home that they recently built. They could've moved in April, but the COVID kept them at their lake place. A great friendship came from that. I'm literally five feet from the spot where she yelled out to me on my little balcony across the way. I didn't put this in the book because it was too much, but really what happened, as soon as I bought the house from them, I was walking home to my brownstone to call my real estate guy to say I've got to put mine on the market now when my dear friend Angie, whom you've read that book obviously, said, "Kathie, don't call your real estate agent." I said, "Why?" She says, "I think I have a buyer for yours." I went, "I just bought the other one five seconds ago." She goes, "No, no, no. Can they come buy this afternoon?" I went, "Yeah." These people came by and bought it immediately for a hundred thousand dollars more than I had bought it the six months before. God knows it's a miracle. Nobody would believe that. I don't want to make people feel bad like their prayers aren't answered or something. I thought it was enough of a miracle that these people sold me their home just because God said sell it, sell it to Kathie Lee. The blessing it has been since, it's just extraordinary.

 

When I'm tempted to have a pity party, which we all are in this world, I just look around and I go, really, Kathie Lee? You're going to have a pity party? Are you forgetting all of God's faithfulness to you through sixty-seven years of life, really, so you can have a pity party right now? No, Lord, I'm not going to do that. Look at the Israelites. They weren’t the Israelites then. They were the Hebrews. Then no sooner had the miracle of the parting the Red Sea -- then they get across. Pharaoh's chariots are deep in the water. They’ve been redeemed from slavery. They want to go back. They want the food they miss. I go, Lord, I'm no different from them. I want my husband back. I want my youth back. I want stuff back. I want all these things back. God goes, are you not going to finish this race with me? Are you not going to go forward Kathie? I don't go backwards. I go forward. You going with me or not? I feel so ashamed of myself at times, not condemned, but just reminded, no, I am the God of forward. He is with us presently. He's always leading us forward by his council. He leads us ultimately to the glory, the word says. I don't want to go back, really. It's just at times when we're weak. We never stop being weak at times. That never ever happens.

 

As we perish outwardly in our bodies and our world decays and everything else, we are being renewed on a daily basis for eternity's sake. It's just easy to forget that, especially when everybody's facing so many hard times today. They really are. That's the other thing the Lord reminds me of, Zibby, all the time, that, Kathie, some people are truly suffering. Let's remember them. Cry out for them. I see you. I see your needs. I know them without you speaking them. Trust me with those, as you have in the past, and really lift up those who are desperate for my help. I've got more friends right now, I don't know if it's because of my age, but more friends that are on life support or needing an operation or going into chemo. I think it's the most at one time. I've got the longest prayer list of people that truly need healing. There's always one or two in our lives that are facing those things, but it’s a much longer list now. A lot of it is because of COVID. Although, I have not lost a friend to it yet. I praise God for that. I know people who have been lost to it, but none of my dear friends have been lost to it. I'm grateful for that. I'm sorry for your -- it's your mother-in-law, you said? Is she going to be all right?

 

Zibby: I don't know. I hope so. I pray that she will, but we'll see. I'm sorry to have -- you're right. So many people are suffering. I'm sorry your list is so long on your prayer list right now. I know that there's so many people.

 

Kathie Lee: That's okay. God is there for them.

 

Zibby: One of the things I found with your book It's Never Too Late and even Hello, Little Dreamer is all of your emphasis on what's coming next. It's Never Too Late, it's perfect. You left the fourth hour of Today Show to pursue your dreams now. It's so inspiring. You want to go off in a whole different direction. Tell me a little bit about why it's never too late to dream and how much life is left, your whole theory on life. Tell me a little more about it.

 

Kathie Lee: Life is left until we run out of it. If I wake up in the morning and I have a pulse, that means I still have a purpose that God wants me to fulfil. I think a lot of people give up on life when they think that nobody needs them anymore. There is no reason to get up in the morning or they don't have the energy for it anymore. I was just praying to the Lord the other day. I said, Lord, if you're done with me, then take me home. I'm ready. I get very exhausted from things and discouraged and disappointed like everyone does. Even if somebody looks at my life and it looks like it's full and it's vibrant, and it often, often, is, I still have those moments where I just go, okay, I'm done, Lord. I'm done. Take me home. I'm ready. I have a beautiful home. I've been blessed with beautiful homes for a long, long time, but this is not my ultimate home. I'm a widow now. There's always that ever-present gnawing at your soul that you're alone and that I'm not alone. It's a constant, yes, you are; no, I'm not. Which little voice are you going to listen to? I could look around and say, my husband is not here with me. My children have moved on to their lives. But I'm not alone. I have the Holy Spirit present within me. I have his presence all around me in my friends and in my work.

 

I'm doing more important work now, I believe, than I've ever done in life with the encouragement I'm trying to be to others in terms of especially the word of God with the books that I'm writing, The Rock, Road, and Rabbi series. We're signed for two more of those. That is meeting a deep hunger in the world. Nobody's more surprised than I am. I thought there was complete, not complete, but almost complete total illiteracy about the scriptures and that people just weren’t interested in growing in their faith. That book has been a surprise super best seller much to my delight because it shows that people are hungry for the word of God. You can't fly to Israel anymore, but right before COVID it was the most-purchased and most-read book on all the planes going into Israel. People of every faith, they were reading it in anticipation of going to the Holy Land and studying, which just is such a blessing. My faith was lukewarm for many years because I wasn't being fed either in church or through the word of God. Why wasn't I? Because I wasn't reading the true word of God because I was reading bad translations and I was going to churches where they weren’t preaching the true word of God. It's just so simple. Go to the source. The source is what's going to refresh you. The source is what's going to empower you. The source is the Old Testament in the Hebrew and the New Testament in the Greek. If you're not learning that and not memorizing that and not quoting that and not building your life on that, you're building it on sinking sand your whole life. I need a solid rock under my feet because I will go astray without it. I will. I'm just like anybody else that's human. The fire that that lit in me when I started studying rabbinically was profound.

 

I wrote the first oratorio "The God Who Sees" with my friend, the beautiful and talented Nicole C. Mullen. That led to three more oratorios which I'm now about to start filming next week. I film the first new scenes from the new oratorios. We hope to have them done by the end of the year. That will be one and a half hours of symphonic oratorios, they're called "The Way," that we hope to give as a gift to the world next Easter. That’ll be two years, basically, after I left The Today Show. I've got two more books, I told you, that we're signing for, the two books coming out. My movie that I did with Craig Ferguson, Then Came You, is finally coming out in a month from now in theaters. If theaters are open, it'll be in theaters. If they aren't open, it'll be being streamed. That's been in my rearview mirror for too long. It's been two years since we wrapped it. Finding the right distributor, especially in the world of COVID, has been challenging. That's happening. I almost feel like I was singing "On the First Day of Christmas" because it's like, four duh-duh-duh, three duh-duh-duh, two duh-duh-duh, and a partridge in a pear tree. It's overwhelming. I woke up this morning. I said, okay, I know I have three interviews today. What are they for? What are they for, Lord? Remind me which project. [laughs] It's fun.

 

Zibby: It all just speaks to your whole point which is that there's so much more to come in life. I just wanted to read this one little passage from your book because it's so inspiring. You said, "If you're my age or getting close, it's probably been a long time since you last thought back to those days when you had dreams of what or who you wanted to be when you grew up. But it's time, friend. It's time to ask yourself, what would I do if I could? Toss out the phrases I can't and I don't know how, and start dreaming about the what-if that might get you off that couch and back into something you want to do. Maybe me sharing my story will give you some perspective and do that for you." Then you say, "Are you ready? It's never too late to dream." It's so awesome. I love it.

 

Kathie Lee: Thank you, but it's because it's true. When you study the scripture, you realize that dreams are an intricate part of your inner being. I believe that the scripture is flawless and God used people dreaming and their dreams all throughout history to impact culture and to impact lives, millions of lives. God has not stopped placing dreams in people's hearts. As we said before, he doesn't change. Women who are pregnant right now with their children, God is at work in that secret place the Bible talks about, in the darkness of the inner womb, which is a sacred place. I wish our culture and our world understand how sacred that is. God is, at the moment of conception, through -- there's a line in my new oratorio, "The God of the [Indiscernible]," when it says, oh Lord, you were there before the world began. You created everything, each woman, every man. You wrote their stories in their mother's wombs, and then you carried them from their cradles to their tombs. It's true. The God of creation, Jehovah Elohim, never stops creating. Every morning of every human being's life, whether they are just being born or they're dying, is an act of creation by Father God Jehovah Elohim, which in Hebrew means creator God.

 

If we can look at our lives with that perspective, it gives each moment purpose. Every moment has purpose because the great -- think about it. The greatest day of a believer's life is the day that God calls them home, the greatest day. It's not a tragedy. It's a triumph. That's why I could hold my dead husband in my arms and cry tears of joy and rejoicing, not because I was glad my husband was dead. I was thrilled to know where my husband was now and who he was with. You can't do anything but rejoice when you truly understand that scriptural truth. He will lead us on to glory. We either believe that or we don't. Grief is an important thing, but I don't allow myself to stay in grief. I allow myself to grieve appropriately. Then I make myself move on in the promise of the future. I have to because the evil one would keep us there. The evil one would love to keep us in grief because we're paralyzed. He comes to steal and kill and destroy. Jesus came that we might have life, and life abundantly. The word in the Greek for that word, abundantly, is the word zoe, Z-O-E, which means beyond. It cannot be contained. It overflows. It cannot be withheld. That's what I want for my life as long as I am alive, zoe. When it's not there, it's because I've moved away from God, not the other way around. My life is about God's faithfulness to me, not my faithfulness to God because I have failed him way too many times. I'll fail him today in one way or another, but I don't stay there. I stay there in the promise of, yes, but that's why you still need me, Kathie. You still need me. As Paul did, that in my weakness he is made strong. Even Paul was the greatest apostle ever. I think a close second would be Billy Graham in terms of the impact of one life on the world. There was Martin Luther. There are Billy Graham. There were those who truly changed the course of history. We could all change the course of somebody's history. We can do it right now. Today is the day of salvation.

 

Zibby: Come back to the book for two seconds here. Let me just ask about writing for you. I wanted to know what the writing process was like. You write children's books. You've written memoirs. You’ve done advice. You've done so many things. What's your process like when you write? Then what advice would you have for aspiring authors?

 

Kathie Lee: I think everybody's process is different. I wrote my first book when I was eighteen years old. I'd forgotten that I'd written it. It had been a best seller. That's how much I didn't think I was a writer. I'd remind myself. Oh, my gosh, that's right, my first book was called The Quiet Riot and it had three printings. I forgot. I was so busy being an actress and a singer and pursuing those dreams. I literally forgot about it. Now that's twenty books ago. Everybody's got a book in them because everyone has a story. Whether they write it down or journal it, whatever, everyone's story is precious to God. He wrote our stories in our mother's wombs. Then he carries us from our cradles to our tombs. He never stops writing our story. My process is letting the Holy Spirit move and not trying to control it. I often wake up at two o'clock or three o'clock in the morning and the Holy Spirit speaks to me and says, get up. Go down and let the process begin. Be a channel. Be a channel for my creative energy and my creative juices to flow through you. I can't do anything on my own, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I sit down not knowing what the Lord has for me. Then I thrill to it.

 

Sometimes it's a Broadway show. Sometimes it's a lyric, just a lyric. I write a song or a half a song of the lyrics to thousands of songs. Or it's part of a book. It becomes a book. I've written jingles for commercials. I write constantly. My friend gave me a placard in my office that says eighty percent of the words in my brain are lyrics. [laughs] Life is a song. All of creation sings out to the creator. I'm just part of creation. I try to get out of God's way. I truly do. There are many, many times, I can't even count them, that I have written a lyric and I write it down and I can't get it out fast enough. I stop. I look up. I go, you are unbelievable. It's a perfect lyric. It's a perfect rhyme. It's a perfect lyric. It says perfectly what I need my character to say or I want to say in whatever I'm writing. I know a good song when I write one, but I know an anointed one when God writes one. More and more and more, I want the anointing. I want the anointing.

 

I'm writing with the finest writers in the world now down here in Nashville. It's a tremendous privilege that they’ve embraced me the way they have because I certainly have never been known as a songwriter, but I've been writing songs since I was twenty years old. I just never did it in a professional way until I started writing for theater. My Broadway show, even though it was certainly not a hit by far, not at all -- it was a disaster, basically, on Broadway. It was Tony nominated. I don't know how to write Broadway shows. I don't know how to write oratorios. I don't know how to write books, but God knows how. If I just put myself in his hands, he uses me to do those things. I left college. I left college before I graduated. I sat there for three weeks and wrote my first book waiting on God to see where he would lead me. He led me straight to Hollywood right after I finished that book thinking that nobody would ever read it except my daughter if I was blessed to have one one day. Look at what the Lord has done in the ensuing years. That was in 1975.

 

Zibby: What would you tell someone else who's just starting out? What would you tell an aspiring author?

 

Kathie Lee: I would say go back to your earliest memories and ask the Lord to show you what your dreams were if you've forgotten them. Show him. He'll restore those. He will redeem it all. He wants to. He is the redeemer of all things. He wants to make all things fresh and new. He says, look what I do. Behold, do you not see what I'm doing? Open your eyes, basically. I am making a garden from the wastelands, streams in the desert. All of those things are still inside you no matter what the world has thrown at you. He says, I have overcome the world, take courage. The word for courage, what he says -- let not your heart be troubled. Take courage. The word is [indiscernible], meaning Cana. That town of Cana is known as the place where Jesus performed his first miracle. He demonstrated his glory in a way that was profoundly human, to supply a human need for a glorious celebration of two people becoming one in God's sight. God still celebrates. I'm celebrating two weddings right now in my children's lives. We don't have as many people at them, but we're celebrating. We're serving my wine now, my family wine. I have a line of wine. I just think, how glorious of the Lord. The dreams that I as a mother -- as I was carrying these children to birth, God was doing a great and profound work of creation in my children's inner beings that will continue long after I am gone. I praise God for that. I don't worry about my children's future because God holds their futures in his hands long after my hands have gone on to embrace him. My God will be there for my children and their future generations. That's a promise straight from the word of God. I cling to his promises.

 

Zibby: Wow, this has been such an interesting conversation. I've loved hearing you talk about all your beliefs and passions and convictions and experiences. Thank you for sharing them with me and my listeners. I look forward to everything you have coming ahead. Thank you.

 

Kathie Lee: You're a dear. Thank you so much. Bless those sweet little ones of yours in Jesus' name.

 

Zibby: Thank you.

 

Kathie Lee: God bless, and your mother-in-law, sweetie, and your mother-in-law. Please, Lord, heal her.

 

Zibby: Thank you so much. Enjoy the weddings. Buh-bye.

 

Kathie Lee: Good talking with you. Buh-bye.

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Catherine Gildiner, GOOD MORNING, MONSTER

Zibby Owens: Catherine Gildiner is the author of Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery. Catherine was a clinical psychologist in private practice for twenty-five years. Her best-selling memoir, Too Close to the Falls, was published to international acclaim. She currently lives in Toronto.

 

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

 

Dr. Catherine Gildiner: Thank you for inviting me.

 

Zibby: Good Morning, Monster, this book captivated me, interested me, horrified me. Wow. I'm particularly interested in Laura and Madeline. I can't stop thinking about their stories and all the stuff they went through as kids. I have so many questions. First of all, can you just tell listeners what your book, Good Morning, Monster, is really about? What inspired you to write this?

 

Catherine: Good Morning, Monster is following five patients who've had a really traumatic life. I got sick of reading all these sad cases all the time about how people just bottomed out. I thought, wow, I've had people who've lived through absolute hell and they've managed to cling and maintain their sanity. I wanted to write about psychological heroes. Heroes are always these action figures. I wanted to write about how these people -- to be a hero, you have to fight against something that's much bigger than you. Otherwise, you're not a hero. These people managed to do that. They managed to come out with their sanity. I wanted to say, you know what, this is heroic. I think it was when Alana said to me one day, "I'm such a screwup," and I wanted to say -- she said, "I taught this guy computer science. Now everyone knows him, but I'm the one that taught him." I said, "You know what? He had two parents who sent him to Harvard. He had all these opportunities. If you lined up everybody who had been treated the way you've been treated, they'd be in back rooms of mental hospitals. You aren't seeing people that have been treated the way you have. You would see that you're a real hero." I wanted them to see. People compare themselves to other people who've had advantages or normal parents. They say, "What's wrong with me?" I wanted people to see a lot can go wrong and you can still pull it out.

 

Zibby: Wow. This is not your first book. In fact, you talk in this book about how you left your practice for a while, you wrote, and then were dragged back in by a very persuasive Duncan. You couldn't take no for an answer. Tell me about the intersection in your life between therapy and writing. What made you stop therapy for a while, start writing, and now meld the two like this?

 

Catherine: I joke that at age fifty I ran out of empathy. I had just worked too hard. I also wrote a column for Chatelaine, which is kind of like Redbook or Good Housekeeping in the US. I wrote it in Canada. It's giving unwanted advice to people that haven't asked for it. I wrote that for fifteen years. People said, "You have a turn of phrase. You should do this or that or the other thing." Then I was at a dinner party once and someone said, "I was sixteen years old and I was so terrified to go to camp," and blah, blah, blah. I thought, wow. I said, "Didn't your parents ever have you get a job?" They said no. She said, "Never, because they liked me to take courses in the summer." I said, "I don't understand that because I worked full time for the age of four." Then people said, "Oh, my god. You should write that up." So I wrote my first memoir. I was shocked. It was on the best-seller list for a hundred and fifty weeks or something. Then I wrote the second and the third. Then my life ended at twenty-five when I married, so I didn't write any more. [laughs] Life is over when you have children and marry, as the title of your blog says.

 

Then I wrote a novel about my PhD because I was interested in the philosophy of science on Darwin's influence on Freud. I think I was so burned out from being a therapist that after twenty-five years I started thinking about all these people. They kept coming into my mind. I was walking down the street one day with a friend. There was a guy, a very sad man, lying on a grate trying to get warm, homeless. She said, "Look at him. He's able-bodied. He's twenty-five years old. Why can't he walk in and ask somebody for a job?" I just thought, you have no idea what this person has gone through. If they didn't have arms and legs, you'd feel sorry for them. You don't see what's going on in somebody who's had a horribly difficult life. If you could see their brain or you could see all their memories, you'd say, oh, that poor thing, but people don't. I thought, I am going to write that book. People like Alana kept coming back to my mind, so I wanted to write it. I needed a long break before I wrote.

 

Zibby: How did you pick these patients? I know you said some are composites and you didn't use real names. How did you come up with these five for Good Morning, Monster?

 

Catherine: It's really ridiculous. I'm a quantitative person, so what I did was I said, I have to go over every patient that I've had. First of all, I sat down and made a list of these five when I thought of writing the book. Then I went and went over every file, said, maybe I should do this. Maybe the demographic would be better if I did that. I went through all this stuff. Then I just did the first five that were still in my heart. I went through all the marketing stuff and all that. I thought, it doesn't matter. If I don't write about people that are still in my psyche after twenty-five years, it's not going to work. Those were the five people that I came up with.

 

Zibby: I thought it was really interesting that you said that good therapy, there has to be some sort of connection. You can't not like your patient. Like is the wrong word, but you have to feel that bond with them in some way to go through it. Tell me a little more about that.

 

Catherine: When I say you have to like your patient, you have to bond in some way to that patient. For a number of years, I worked in a psychiatric hospital in forensic. Those are psychiatric problems, but also criminals. Even if they said, I killed my mother, I couldn't take another second of my stepmother, I had to sort of empathize with that. I had to say, oh, okay. I had to see it totally from his perspective. Sometimes you can't see other people's perspective. For example, I don't see obsessive compulsives because I just don't relate. They obsessively talk about the same thing. I try to not to see people where there's something a little bit wrong with their brain. With obsessives, they usually are born that way. I would much rather see somebody who is perfectly okay and then just got off the path. Then I like to work together to bring them back. There are people that you just don't click with. Actually, I was saying this the other day. Sorry, they cut the grass today and I think they put napalm on it or something. [laughter] It's killing me. What my editor pointed out, which is silly because I'm a psychologist and I should've seen this myself, is that every single one of those women in the book were raised by their father. I was too. I thought, oh, my gosh. I didn't see that, ever. I thought, how could I not have seen that? It's true of all the women. The mothers are distant figures or troubled figures. The father is the major parent. I think unconsciously, I related to that.

 

Zibby: I feel like this book is also one of those truth is stranger than fiction examples. If you had made this up, it would've been too farfetched that, for instance, that a father could leave his three kids in a cabin in the woods and have a nine-year-old take care of them and even that a couple could go off to Russia and leave their eleven-year-old daughter alone in the house for months. Some of these things, I'm like, could this really happen? Yet it did, and you have to deal with the aftermath. I thought another really interesting part of this story was that some of the things that seem so obvious to us as, not to call myself normal in any way, but as a regular reader of this could obviously see huge holes in the parenting and the detriment done. Yet the patients themselves saw it as just life. They didn't know any different.

 

Catherine: Absolutely. Look at Laura. When the father left her, she said, "What is the problem? I was already eight years old. I could handle that." I had to spend a lot of time explaining what an eight-year-old could do. I took her to see eight-year-olds.

 

Zibby: That was so great. I loved that.

 

Catherine: She saw all of them. She's kind of funny in her own way, amusing I mean. When we got in the car, I said, "Well...?" She said, "They were immature." It took her a long time. The father was like, "I need you to be an adult." She said, "Okay. If you love me, I'll be an adult." That was their deal. He never criticized her, but she had to be the adult. Her childhood wasn't that hard. What was hard was when she was an adult and she began looking for men to be with. She always picked people that she had to take care of because she was bonded to that behavior. She misunderstood bonding for love.

 

Zibby: I feel like you're so good, obviously, at seeing all these patterns that the patients themselves can't even see, even Madeline in terms of how she staffed her company, that you can recreate -- which is something I had never really thought about before. You hear about people marrying spouses that have some of the characteristics of their parents that they're still sort of wrestling with. It hadn’t occurred to me that people do this in the workplace, that you could have people work for you who have the same thing. Tell me a little about that.

 

Catherine: That was something that Madeline and I worked on all the time. She always made the point that they -- she was in a very specialized field. She said, "He's the only person in the world that can do this." I would say, "That's ridiculous. He's rude all the time." If he would see me, he'd say, "Oh, are you here again?" This is ridiculous behavior. She said, "No, we all have to put up with it." I said, "No, you had to put up with your mother because you didn't have a choice. Yes, he is the only Hungarian that can understand fourteenth century religious iconography, but I'm sure there are others." She surrounded herself with incredibly difficult clients like people that were in the mafia in other countries, etc. It was just awful. Who has millions and millions of dollars? Some very good people and some people that are bad. They would then not pay their bill. I left all of that out because I didn't want to be killed myself. [laughter] She recreated her family.

 

Zibby: Her family, the insanity that happened with her biological mother, and then Kathy, who her father ends up with next, it's unthinkable that her stepmother would essentially break all of the antiques in her childhood home, not let her back in, and that this went on.

 

Catherine: And that the father would tolerate it.

 

Zibby: Yeah, that it just kept going on. He's like, "Sorry." [laughs]

 

Catherine: That's when she had her huge collapse, was after that antique thing. Then I think he felt so guilty that he actually followed me to a coffee shop every day and said, "Please be her therapist." I said, "I'm retired." He's a successful businessman. He wore me down. I finally said, "Okay, I will do it." I wanted to include Madeline because people think people that have a lot of wealth are happy and that money really makes you happy. It's so trite. What they don't realize is that very often -- he was from a very independently wealthy family, goes back generations in Canada. His name is a very common name in the newspapers and everything. There were gold-diggers after him. It's an old-fashioned term. This in the thirties. This is before women had a chance to be what they wanted to be. Your only chance in life was, marry this wealthy guy.

 

Her mother sent her to the Hamptons and said, "Don't come home unless you're engaged to him." You can say, why would you marry someone so awful? She put on a really good act for about four or five months. Then she recognized that he wasn't the type to get a divorce. "We don't divorce in our family," that sort of thing. Also, wealth covers a lot of pathology. The editor pointed this out to me. That's when I included it in the book. Laura was abandoned in a tiny cabin, but Madeline was abandoned too. Her parents went to Russia. Then the alarms went off, the alarm from a storm. The police came. The police were terrified of the family because they lived in a huge estate. They said, "I guess you'll be okay." If they lived in a housing project, they would've immediately called CAS and gotten help for her. They were insulated by this wealth. Then neurosis didn't appear as neurosis.

 

Zibby: It's so interesting, oh, my gosh. I couldn't believe that whole scene and that the neighbor had to get her housekeeper's daughter to come visit.

 

Catherine: That housekeeper's daughter is still with her.

 

Zibby: No way. Wow.

 

Catherine: She's made several moves with her. That is an interesting bond.

 

Zibby: It was also funny to me that you admitted several times, mistakes that you felt like you had made in your treatment. I guess you know that therapists must make mistakes, but I had never really thought through how much that would stay with you or what you would view as a mistake and why. Tell me about some of that and the regret of some of the ways you've handled things versus all the great things.

 

Catherine: When I wrote the book, I wanted to show how much I had grown as a therapist. When you first start out, you don't know anything. You know everything in books. You can get straight A's and feel really competent. My first patient was Laura who walked in and said, "I'm not giving a history. Forget it. Those are the village idiots. I'm not giving a history." I thought, oh, my god, this isn't like school at all. Every single case I saw, you'd say, I'm collecting a history. Even if they were psychotic and said they were the Virgin Mary, they gave a history. I thought, I'm the one that has to make this happen during the hour that it's happening. It's only fifty percent academic. The rest of it is finding a way to deal with people's defenses. I thought the whole thing would be, I'm going to show how I learned with each case. Then by the end, I'll be a pretty good therapist. The opposite happened. I made the majority of mistakes in my last case, which was the Madeline case. I just couldn't figure out what I had done wrong.

 

Then I realized everybody has transference. Duncan was like my dad, starch shirt, vest every day, tie. He ran a business as well. She was an only child. They never ate at home. We never ate at home. Sometimes the mother would be so bad that both the father and the daughter would run into each other in the basement and they would eat Cheerio's together. My mother wasn't bad at all, but I recognized all of these things that were similar. I never held him responsible. I'd say, well, he can't do it. I guess he just can't get his second wife to -- I never really laid into him about that. He brought me into this chaotic scene of flying to New York with all of these distractions all around me. I shouldn't have allowed any of that. Then when I went and examined it, I realized he was like my dad. My dad had a brain tumor and lost his mind at forty-five or fifty. He was my father before everything fell apart. I was protecting him. One time, somebody was looking at the paper and they looked at the picture of Duncan and said, "Gee, that looks like your dad." It wasn't just me that thought that. I did finally go and get my own therapy and said, "What's going on here?" He said, "It's so obvious. It's psych 101. Father attachment." You have to be really careful of making those kinds of mistakes.

 

For the Danny thing, Danny is -- I don't know if you know that in -- you probably do. In the US, everything is a black-white race problem. That's the big problem. In Canada, it's native-white issues. That's the news every night. We have way more natives. There's been a huge amount of residential schools where everybody hasn’t been parented. That is sort of Canada's national problem, Canada's national disgrace. With Danny, the hard part for me was actually learning everything that I had to know about native culture, not that I learned everything. I had to then really hit the wall and not let my ego get the better of me and say, you know what, I can't cure him. I can take him to a certain spot. Then he has to go to a healer. He has to go and deal with all of this stuff with natives. I had to say, "This is as far as I can take you." I don't think I would've taken him anywhere if I hadn’t had help from a native psychiatrist at Harvard who really helped me. I'd say, "Why won't he talk?" He said, "He's getting to know you." I thought, really? Two months and this guy has not said a thing. I joked about it five years later when we were a lot closer. I said, "Yeah, like not talking for months." He said, "That didn't bother me." He said just what the guy told me. He said, "I was getting to know you. I wasn't going to talk to somebody until I knew them." I said, "How did you know me without talking to me?" He said, "That's just one way to know people."

 

Zibby: Wow. That's crazy. It's amazing, the way you've been able to get at all these people and get them past their circumstances and get them out of their own heads and get them to see. It's really like magic. What do you think it is about the people who have become heroes in your practice, and even sometimes in their own families, the other people, like in the case of Laura with her younger brother and sister whose lives did not follow her same trajectory? What is it that makes somebody able to withstand horrific circumstances whereas somebody in the same family might not? There's probably not an answer to this.

 

Catherine: Look at Laura. Her brother and sister really didn't do well. They did what you would expect from a life like that. Remember, her father, even though he was neglectful, he was always singing her praises. When she worked on the chip truck with him, he always praised her. He was like, "I knew you'd take care of things." "You're my number-one man," he always said. She was loved in a conditional way, like, if you do this for me. She thought he was kind of exciting and that that's what a man was. She thought, what is the big problem here? Why is everybody all upset about him? It wasn't as though he ever put her down. I think he did once when he was in jail and she wore jeans that he didn't like. I said, "Wow, your father criticized you one time in your whole life?" He didn't like the other two kids because they didn't have guts. She was born with a type A personality. He needed that. He reinforced that for his own needs. Her ego was built. It looks like she was neglected, and she was, but neglect is just one thing. Look at Danny, the next case. What about Danny? First five years were fine. Father was fine. Mother was fine. They lived in a happy home. They were hunters and gatherers. They lived out in the woods. They were a functioning unit. There was no alcoholism. They were a perfectly happy unit until he was taken, put in residential school, sexually abused. Parents lost their way of living. They said they couldn't live out in the woods anymore. They had to come into a reserve. Then there was no job he could do because he was a hunter. Then he became an alcoholic. Everything fell apart. The first five years, everything worked.

 

When you look at someone like Madeline, Madeline really saw the father, she finally recognized in the end that he loved her. He had some sort of weakness with psychopathic women. That was his weakness. He couldn't stand up to them. It's shocking that he would have a second one after the hell of the first one. Then saying, okay, that's his weakness. Can I forgive him? That was part of her issue. With the mother, I said, "It's not important to forgive your mother. What's important is to see that she was a very damaged person. She was so damaged, she couldn't love anyone." She said, "Then why is she so mean to me? I could live with not being loved." She went to private school. She was on the tennis team and on the debating team. She's gorgeous. She just couldn't be perfect enough. I said, "You know what it's like to be a mother and not be able to do the job?" You're watching all these other mothers, which she called mother hens and overprotective when they were really just being mothers. Naturally, you become hostile to this child who has needs and you have no idea how to fulfil them.

 

Zibby: You had one quote. I don't know if I can find it or not. You said something about how at one point you realized that you can stop being angry and upset with your mother and just feel sorry for your mother. That transition is such a key point in the therapy too.

 

Catherine: Yes, absolutely. It's because your mother no longer has power over you. When you say, she's just a sad case -- it used to be like when she would do this stuff of going to Florida to visit her and the mother would forget to pick her up, all that kind of stuff. She just stopped doing it. She just said, "I don't have to do that anymore." Then she started going out with a very nice person, a nice man who was kind and good. She married a very wealthy guy who she thought would be just like the dad, and he wasn't. She married her mother. He turned out to be awful. Toward the end of the therapy, she finally realized, oh, I can love this nice person. I didn't realize that I could love him. I thought I just could be friends with him.

 

Zibby: The way that you told these stories was so great. Each on was un-put-down-able in its own right, the unexpected twists and turns that actually happened and then the way you handled it. It was so interesting. Tell me a little more about the writing of it, the way that you crafted the stories. Did you use all your notes? How did you make them into these great standalone stories?

 

Catherine: I went back and looked at my notes. I thought they would be completely organized. I thought, fantastic, I'll just put these notes in a book form and it'll be perfect. I hadn’t said anything. It said things like, "Very upset." I just thought, these notes aren't helpful at all. Then once in a while I would look at the notes and say, oh, my god, I forgot that the father killed the cat. I forgot that. I repressed some of the awful stuff. The conversations had to come back to me. That's why you have to be kind of attached and bonded to those patients to remember those things. When you see somebody for five years, you can pretty well predict what they would say in different situations.

 

Zibby: You must have enough stories to fill a hundred more books. Are you going to write any more books? What's your plan?

 

Catherine: My plan now is I'm writing -- I grew up in a house in Lewiston, New York, which is on the Niagara River connecting to Canada. I grew up in the New York side. My family's home was involved in the Underground Railroad. Then the house next door has seven basements that go down to the river. I'm writing from the white abolitionist point of view. I hope that works in this time. I'm doing that now. The publisher wants me to write a book like Good Morning, Monster but with more cases and lighter.

 

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

 

Catherine: Write. I have people all the time saying to me, "What's a good topic? What's hot today?" You go into your heart and just write for two hours a day, at least. If you have another job, just write for two hours a day. Everybody starts writing when they have another job. They have to support themselves, usually. I wrote for two hours before I went into my office. Just write and don't worry about any of it. Don't reread it. Don't do anything. Just let stream of consciousness take you. Then go back and you can read it. Don't stop yourself at the end of each sentence and do all that. The most important stuff comes from your unconscious. Most of it pours out. That's the only thing that we all have in common. We all have a collective unconscious somewhere, so says Jung, so says Freud. Why would people relate to a memoir of my four-year-old delivery girl delivering stuff with a black delivery car driver? Who cares? Only because the thoughts I had are the same thoughts they had when they were four. Just get all of that out. Don't try to polish it. Then later, come back. I find a lot of people, they write two pages and then for four weeks they try to make it perfect. By then, you've lost it. You've lost all of your creative juices.

 

Zibby: That's great advice. Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Gildiner. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your treatment stories with these incredible patients and for showing us what heroes really can look like. Thank you.

 

Catherine: Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye, Zibby.

 

Zibby: Bye.

Catherine Gildener.jpg

Sheila Grinell, THE CONTRACT

Zibby Owens: Writing is a second act for author Sheila Grinell. She led the team that opened the Arizona Science Center as the CEO, which welcomed nearly 400,000 visitors a year, and by the way, is one of my favorite places to take my kids when we go out and visit my mom and stepdad during the winter months. A graduate of Bronx Science High School and Harvard University as well as the University of California at Berkeley, she currently lives in Phoenix and has written two books, The Contract and Appetite.

 

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

 

Sheila Grinell: My pleasure.

 

Zibby: I have to ask first, I read that you were born in a taxi. Is that true?

 

Sheila: That is true. It even says so on my birth certificate.

 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Tell me the story behind that.

 

Sheila: It's the end of the World War II. My father, who was stationed in the United States, was not present. My grandfather took my mother downstairs into a taxicab. I was the first child. My mother said, "The baby's coming. The baby's coming." Oh, no, no, no. He took her downstairs. It was New York City. They called a taxi. The taxi's moving to the hospital. My mother says, "The baby's here." Evidently, my head emerged. My mother had the presence of mind to reach down and close my nose because she didn't want me to breathe. The taxi pulls up into the hospital yard. My grandpa runs out, gets a nurse. The nurse runs back and completes the delivery in the backseat. Then when I was old enough to understand all this, I said to my grandpa, "Grandpa, what did you do?" He said, "I gave the driver a big tip." [laughter] It wasn't good for my mom because this is a long time ago and since I was contaminated, they put me in a separate room. My mother went to the maternity ward. She wasn't allowed to see me for almost a week.

 

Zibby: Oh, no. That must have been so hard.

 

Sheila: Right. I know when I had my baby, I was out of the hospital in two days.

 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. That's quite a story. I also just read your piece about how you feel now that you're in, I don't know what to call it, assisted living or continuing care.

 

Sheila: Continuing care retirement community.

 

Zibby: Continuing care retirement -- oh, right, CCRC, because your husband has Parkinson's, which I was so sorry to read about. Tell me about writing this piece and what it's been like for you having to transition to this type of living arrangement to help with his care.

 

Sheila: Parkinson's is a very slow, nasty disease. It's not only movement. It's also cognitive and emotional. It affects your seeing and your hearing and your speech, everything, but it is slow. My husband was diagnosed in 2011. It's been creeping up. I got to the point where I knew that something's going to have to change. Everyone says if you're going to move into one of these places, move early so you can enjoy it together before you can't enjoy it together anymore, so we did just about a year ago. At first, it was really wonderful because my husband had some blessings that he hadn’t had before. He hadn’t driven in three years. Here, he could just walk to the bistro and get a burger when he wanted. He could take the exercise classes and chat with the ladies. There are far more women here than men. A lot of them are widows. My husband is charming. He has a great time. We walk together and they all go, "Hi, Tom. Hi, Tom." No "Hi, Sheila." They said, "Hi, Tom." He felt invigorated. I was relieved because there's always somebody around. He has a little alarm button. He presses the button, somebody's here's in five minutes. They have it set up to take care of people who are old and infirm. In the future, I know I'm going to need more help. I'm not going to be able to wash him and move him around. I'm not big, but he's bigger. We're set up. I was enjoying it. Then COVID came. Even though we're an independent living, we're not in a nursing home, there is a nursing home on the campus. They use the nursing home rules for all of us, which meant no visitors at all, no more communal dining. They bring a meal to our door. Somebody drops it off at our door and rings the bell and runs away. They're keeping the disease away, so we have to deal with it. I'm okay. When everything got quiet, I was actually able to concentrate on the next book. I'm writing my next book.

 

Zibby: Let's talk about your writing. Tell me, now that you’ve mentioned it, what is the next book about? Then let's go back and talk about the previous two books.

 

Sheila: The next one is a story about a pioneer young woman who comes west, contemporary pioneer. She comes west to find a better life. She winds up in Phoenix where I am. It's post-pandemic. I'm writing it as if it's three years from now. Hallelujah, I hope it's post-pandemic then. People's lives will have been changed. They’ll be expecting different things. My young woman falls in with a real estate developer. That's the name of the game here. For the last twenty years, thirty years, forty years, the whole metro area has grown tremendously. It's real estate developers who have a vision of the future. They decide where you're going to live, what you're going to want, where the transportation is, where the schools are, where the parks are. Are there any other amenities? They decide all that. Some of them do it with a great deal of vision and respect. Some of them are unethical. Some just want to make the buck. Some are cheats. I'm plopping this young pioneer woman into this post-pandemic environment where people are designing the future. We'll see what happens.

 

Zibby: Wow. Even just the exercise of imagining a post-pandemic world again and how this will have affected things is an interesting exercise in and of itself.

 

Sheila: Yes. That's why I'm only going three years out because I think beyond that is beyond me.

 

Zibby: Now let's go back to The Contract. Tell everybody the plot of that book as well. What inspired you to write that story?

 

Sheila: It's about a bunch of children's museum designers, Jo and Ev, man and wife. Jo is around forty-eight. She says, I've got to make my mark now. She thinks that if they're invited to bid on a contract in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh, she thinks, this is it. I'm going to go for this. It's going to make my name. He is a different kind of person. She's got all the balls. He's got the soft side. He just wants to stay home and make things. They go. It doesn't turn out the way she thought. She learns a lot about her culture, about her work, about her marriage, and about herself and what she can tolerate and what she can't. That's why I wrote the book. In this day and age, I was mulling over, how do people become tolerant? Shouldn't they? When? What makes it happen? What are the impediments? This was in my back of my mind. I wasn't even quite aware that it was in the back of my mind. Then I met my friend, name not to be announced. I met a friend, wonderful woman. She's a professional, kind, generous, very thoughtful. Her sister came to visit. The way she talked to her sister shocked me. She was completely contemptuous. I said to myself, wouldn't you have learned by now to tolerate her? Then I realized, oh, I can use my experience in Saudi Arabia. If I'm going to write about tolerance, that's one extreme. Jo and Ev, my designer couple, they live in Oakland, California, so I have both extremes.

 

Zibby: You've had a whole career in museums and a whole museum life. You were able to bring that in to inform all the details of this book. What made you start writing to begin with? I know you have another book as well. How did you transition or how did you incorporate this element of creativity into your professional life?

 

Sheila: The Contract had to be set in the museum world because my own experience in Saudi Arabia was the museum world, and I had to make it real. You can't make up stuff about Saudi Arabia. It's just too far out. Back to, how did I become a writer? Well, I didn't. [laughter] I have to take you back to the beginning. I had a whole other life for forty years.

 

Zibby: Let's go back.

 

Sheila: The beginning is in high school. I had a marvelous teacher. I hope you had the one teacher who changes your life. A lot of people have them. There's one math teacher, Dr. Dotti, I had him for three years. I went to college thinking I'd be a mathematician. I got there and they had made me take physics. Mechanics was okay. Then when they got to electricity and magnetism, I didn't know what was going on. I said, I can't do this. I have a scholarship. I have to do well. I'm going to have to go home. A friend of mine said, "What do you like?" I said, "I like my English composition class." She said, "So major in English." So I did, not being so intellectually greedy. Then I went to graduate school and I got a master's degree in social science and sociology. After my education, I was prepared for everything and nothing practical. I was in Berkeley, California, at the time. This is 1969, which is a time of great social unrest like now, only very positive. It was free speech and anti-war and the beginning of women's liberation. It was an exciting time. Alternatives were big. I ran into a physicist who was starting a science museum. He wanted it to be an alternative, not telescopes and steam engines behind glass cases, but light and sound that you could actually play with. I thought, sounds great. It's math and science. It's humanities. It's an alternative social institution. I'm going to do this.

 

I started my first job. I joined Frank Oppenheimer. We built the Exploratorium, which has been widely emulated around the world. My first job turned into a career. I worked in it for forty years. It was fabulous. I helped start museums in different places. I wrote a book about museums. I instructed people all over the world. Then I moved to Phoenix in 1993 for one last shot. It was really going to be from scratch. I really liked the from scratch, starting things up. I moved here, got the Arizona Science Center up and running, made it a little bigger, mentored my successor, thought about things. Then suddenly, it was forty years and I was done. It was like a little switch. I'm done. This institution still needs to change and become even more contemporary, but it doesn't need to be changed by me. It needs to be changed by a digital native. I'm done. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I needed to change. I started consulting. Then the universe intervened.

 

My mother had a stroke. She was living back east with my sister. I went to visit her. I saw her first in April. I said, "Mom, you don't seem to really know who you are anymore." As the stroke multiplies, she was really losing her personality. "Mom, you don't know who you are anymore. Do you want me to tell you your story?" She said yes. I said, "Okay." So I told her her life story in forty-five minutes. I cleaned it up. I finished. She said, "That was interesting." I said, "You won't remember, but I'll tell you again." In May, I go to see her. "Mom, would you like to hear your story?" "Yes, I would." I started to tell her story, but she couldn't pay attention for forty-five minutes, so I told her a few chunks. She said, "That was interesting." I said, "If you won't remember, I'll tell you again." I go to see her in June. I start to tell her her story. She couldn't even put the chunks together. She was out of it. I took a walk. It was like somebody stabbed me in the belly. I said, I have to write her story. In retrospect, I was mourning her in advance. I was trying to keep her because she was going away. I came back to Phoenix. I wrote her story. I went to the Piper Center here and got an editor. I finished it. I shared it with a few friends. Then I realized I wanted to write more. I think the old English major came back.

 

I enrolled in community college here. It was such fun. It was so different from everything else I had done for my business life. There were sad, lost twenty-year-olds and a bunch of other older people trying to recharge their batteries. I had a wonderful time. I kept taking classes. I'm in my third short story class. I'm looking at the story in my hands. I say, "It's too big. It's not going to fit in twenty pages." The guy sitting next to me said, "So write a novel." I went, "Okay." That started me on the journey on my first novel, Appetite. I didn't have writer's block, which was a tremendous blessing. I think it's because I already had a successful life here. I was already an asset to the community. So if I screwed up, it wouldn't matter. At least, that's what I told myself. It worked. I worked away at it. It took quite some time because I was still consulting. Then got it going and realized this is really what I want to do and I'm continuing to do. There's a bunch of advantages to having another career besides just having the freedom to fail. I realized that a lot of the skills from my past lives still pertained. I know how to commit myself to a five-year project with an uncertain outcome. I know how to stick to a schedule and budget. I know how to stop second-guessing myself all the time. I knew how, when I was in over my head, to go get some expert help. All of this was kosher. I used all those skills in my writer life too. The big disadvantage about my second life is that it's going to be shorter than the first one. I've got to hurry up and get more books under my belt. I don't think that way. Every project, every book is its own thing. You just live in that book for the years that you're in it. Then the next one comes up.

 

Zibby: That's amazing. How did it feel to publish a novel? How old were you, if I may ask? You don't have to answer, but when Appetite came out. You don't have to say it. You don't want to say it. It's fine.

 

Sheila: Very old.

 

Zibby: Very old, okay.

 

Sheila: Zibby, I could be your mom. I started writing in my sixties.

 

Zibby: That's fine. Started writing in your sixties. Then you had a novel published. What did that feel like? I know, as you've said, you've accomplished so much professionally in other areas. By the way, I love the Arizona Science Center and have been there many, many times. Love it. How did it feel when it first came out or you first saw it on a shelf? To have that happen and feel that, what was it like? I can only imagine.

 

Sheila: I was living in a different world. When you're writing, you're writing. I'll give you an example. If you know Phoenix, maybe you know Changing Hands, wonderful independent bookstore. I had the launch there. Just before the launch, I was so nervous. I had called a friend of mine who's a personal trainer. I said, "Work me out." In my other life, I would stand up in front of a room full of 1,500 people and by force of will, make them shut up. It’s not possible in the new life because it's different. When you're standing up talking about science museums, you have the museum, you have the board and the donors and the staff and the visitors. You have all these people behind you. When you're standing up to talk about your book, it's just you. Art is so much more personal. I had to make a shift from a more public persona into a private one and revealing that private one. That was different, exciting, and a little scary. Now I'm much more used to it. I think it's a privilege to be able to plumb your own depths in a way that makes sense for other people.

 

Zibby: That's amazing. I love that. Having gone through this journey, what advice would you have for aspiring authors at any age?

 

Sheila: Most people, when they start something, think about the reasons not to. There are reasons not to. They're probably valid, but ignore them. There are reasons to. The main reason is because you don't lose your old skills and your old personality, but you can exercise it differently. I feel like I'm still engaged with the world, but I'm exploring it in a different dimension. That's how it feels. My advice would be, go for it. Whenever I give talks or readings, people come up to me afterwards. You can tell by the look on their face that they're want-to-be writers and they're looking for help. They say, "I had this great story. I had this wonderful and fantastic experience. I just can't seem to get to it." I say, "Make yourself a promise, twenty-one days. One hour a day for twenty-one days." Science says that twenty-one days is what it takes to form a habit. Also, my other piece of advice is to work on your craft. If you can't massage a sentence into what you want it to be, you won't really be able to tell whether you're expressing your story or not. Work on your craft. You can take classes at a community college if you have one. I was lucky enough to have one right by. You can find a critique group. Go online. There's tons of them. Do whatever you do, but write. Work on craft. Then see what you have to say.

 

Zibby: Wow, that's so inspiring. I love this. It's so encouraging. It's just so encouraging. You take everything, every skill in your brain, and you melded it all together. Now you're producing in little installments, novels and delight and entertainment for so many other people. It's really neat. I'm very impressed.

 

Sheila: I hope when you read the next one that I've got it right, that it is accurate post-pandemic, but also, delightful.

 

Zibby: I can't wait. Thank you for sharing all your stories and for coming on my podcast and for all your great writing. Thank you.

 

Sheila: Thank you so much. Zibby, I have to tell you, you must be the nicest person in the world. What you do for books and readers and writers and stories is just splendid. Thank you.

 

Zibby: Aw, you're welcome. Thanks for saying that. Take care, Sheila.

 

Sheila: Bye.

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Erin Gardner, PROCRASTIBAKING

Zibby Owens: I interviewed Erin Gardner twice during quarantine. Once was on my Instagram Live show. Another time was for this podcast which you're going to listen to now. Erin's book, Procrastibaking: 100 Recipes for Getting Nothing Done in the Most Delicious Way Possible, is just fantastic. I thought it was a perfect quarantine read. I even included it in my Next Chapter Please bundle on Page 1 Books, which I think they might even still be selling. Go check out page1books.com. Erin is fantastic and personable and has been on cooking shows and was one of the leading cake bakers in the world when she owned Wild Orchid Baking Company. She wrote for The Cake Blog and wrote Erin Bakes Cakes in 2017. She is the consummate baker. Yet this book, as you'll hear, is when she learned to bake all these other things while procrastinating from making the cakes that she had been contracted to make. Even the most accomplished baker feels badly about how they're delaying the chores they need to do. I hope you enjoy our conversation and that you pick up her cookbook and make some of these delicious desserts.

 

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

 

Erin Gardner: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

 

Zibby: As I was saying to you, I loved doing an Instagram Live with you in the midst of the quarantine, but had so many more questions and just didn't want to stop talking, so I thought we could do a whole podcast.

 

Erin: That's great. I really appreciated you having me on your IG Live. This is super fun too. It's so nice to have adult contact in any, way, shape, or form. This is great. [laughs]

 

Zibby: Before I did this, my two little kids and I were literally in the street waiting for the UPS person, not that we were expecting anything. After an hour, he came. That was the highlight of the day. Good times over here. [laughs]

 

Erin: Life is a lot simpler now.

 

Zibby: Your latest cookbook, Procrastibaking, you're the master baker. You've helped coin this term, procrastibaking. Now you have a whole cookbook about it. First, backtrack a little and talk about how you got started in the professional baking world to get to this point.

 

Erin: Wow, okay.

 

Zibby: Go back. Let's go way back.

 

Erin: I actually -- how far back? [laughs]

 

Zibby: You always loved baking as a kid?

 

Erin: I always loved baking as a kid, but I never, never saw it as a profession. Actually, my first major in college was aviation. That's how I met my husband. My husband's a pilot.

 

Zibby: Wow, no way.

 

Erin: I learned through doing that for about a year or so that I am not a pilot. That's a good thing to learn about yourself if you think you're a pilot. [laughter] I enjoyed it, but like my husband says, it's eight hours of boredom bookended by thirty seconds of terror.

 

Zibby: It's like parenting.

 

Erin: It really is. A lot of it is just sitting there.

 

Zibby: Aviation, so interesting. So you ruled that out.

 

Erin: Ruled that out. I wrapped up my degree in business management/marketing. I worked in advertising for a very brief period of time. I was selling ads to a restaurant. They were looking for a nighttime dessert plater. I said, I think I could do that. That seems awesome. I didn't even realize that these were jobs that I could do. It really piqued my interest. To the chagrin of all adults around me at the time, I quit my office job and I took a job plating desserts at night. Then the rest was history. I worked my way up through -- that was in Hartford, Connecticut. Moved to Boston. Worked through a bunch of restaurants in Boston and then into New Hampshire. Then I opened my bakery. I had a wedding cake shop for about seven years and made wedding cakes all over New England. That was the big moment in my career. Then while I was doing that, I was approached to start doing other things like teaching classes on a couple online platforms and doing some writing and creating tutorials. That sort of opened up the next phase of what I do now.

 

Zibby: Amazing. What was it like being at the top of your field and making wedding cakes and being a part of the most special night for so many people in their lives?

 

Erin: I loved it. I really did truly love it. I loved working with the couples. I loved learning about them and their story and seeing all the different styles, the things that really meant something to people, but it was terrifying. Like we said, the terrifying side of aviation, there's a terrifying side to cake decorating. That is that every wedding is the big night. It's never not the most important day of someone's life. There's no do-over. That side of it could be fun also because there was an excitement to it. Bringing a cake to a venue, of course you get to know all the other vendors like the florists and the wedding planners and the banquet hall staffs and things like that. Getting in at the time everyone's setting up and it's kind of this team and you're all dispersed and move to the next one, that part, it was exciting. Then also, I should name an ulcer [indiscernible/laughter]. I'm sure that they're in there.

 

Zibby: So then what made you close the bakery and move on to other things?

 

Erin: I had my first child, Max. He's my oldest, my son. He's nine now. He spent the first year of his life in a pack 'n play at the end of my worktable in the bakery. Then once he got mobile, we had to move on to daycare. Then when my second was born, and she's going to be five at the end of this month, I decided that it was time to put all of my efforts into those other things that had started popping up like writing opportunities and teaching opportunities and things along those lines so that I could really be there for my kids. With a husband who's a pilot, I go through stretches of time where I'm the only parent. Having the ultimate deadline of a wedding isn't always the best thing to have when you have two very small children. Max came on lots of wedding cake deliveries with me. He was strapped to me. I'd bring the cake in. I'm glad that I had enough energy to get through that point of my life. Once number two came along, I was like, I think it's time to move on to the next phase. I miss things about it, but I love the things I get to do now like sharing with people and being able to look back on my experiences and help people with technique and recipe and the things that they can do at home to enhance their own celebrations.

 

Zibby: We were looking at some of your recipes online, or I was with the kids before we talked. Your funfetti recipe is on our to-do list now tomorrow.

 

Erin: That's a great one. One bowl. You don't need a mixer, super easy.

 

Zibby: Thank you. That's the perfect -- [laughs].

 

Erin: They're the words you need to hear.

 

Zibby: Yes, exactly. One bowl, not too messy, very simple, full of sugar, check.

 

Erin: You throw a handful of sprinkles in there, and boom, everyone's happy.

 

Zibby: It's so easy. As long as you don't mind throwing sprinkles at your kids all day, they would just be thrilled.

 

Erin: Actually, funny story. My youngest one day -- I work from home now, so I have a lot of supplies in my kitchen. My oldest, he could care less about sweets. He'll walk past them. My youngest is a cookie monster, like a hardcore sugar addict. One morning, we woke up and Max was in my room. We're hanging out. I was like, "Where's your sister? I haven't heard from her. It's way too quiet." She was downstairs and had poured herself a bowl of sprinkles and was sitting at the kitchen table just spooning them into her mouth. [laughs]

 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, that's awesome. That's a dream breakfast. Did you take a picture, I hope?

 

Erin: I did take a picture. I think she was two and a half, three at the time. I was like, "What are you doing?" She was just like, "Ha, ha, ha."

 

Zibby: That's perfect.

 

Erin: She thought she had figured out the perfect thing.

 

Zibby: Tell me about how you ended up doing your first cookbook and how that led now to Procrastibaking, your next cookbook.

 

Erin: I had written -- I'm on number three now.

 

Zibby: I'm sorry.

 

Erin: Oh, no, because the first one was more like an author-for-hire kind of situation where I was writing to fulfill a need for a publisher. Then Erin Bakes Cake came from my experiences and heart and soul kind of deal and had the opportunity to that put that together. That book embodied where I've taken cake decorating from the high-end wedding cake world to home. I was using a lot of those classic techniques and ideas and recipes and flavors and then translating them to, still kind of over-the-top stuff, but stuff that you could accomplish at home and that you don't need special tools for. That's something I've prided myself on with the kinds of tutorials and recipes that I write for people now and the different publications and what not. I will never do anything that requires you to purchase anything that isn't already in your kitchen. I use toothpicks, foils, spoons, stuff like that. I have moved away from the traditional wedding cake elements like fondant and gum paste and that kind of stuff. I will only use now, like, chocolate cookies and candy to create decorative elements. That book was in the spirit of that.

 

Then this book, Procrastibaking, actually was born from that book. I had no idea that that was happening at the time. One of the things that I do, and now everyone knows, is when I have these big projects that I'm working on, I will bake something else, something not on the script to kind of warm up. If I'm not feeling whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing, I'll just make something fun. I did that one of the days that I was supposed to be writing for Erin Bakes Cake. I posted a picture of it on Instagram, #procrastibaking, the baking I'm doing when I'm supposed to be doing other baking. It wasn't even that big of a post. A couple of my baker friends were like, ha, ha, ha, I do this too. Literally, just life moved on. That was a very basic post. Then about a year and a half after that, around that, I get a message on Instagram, a DM from Julia Moskin from The New York Times saying that she's writing an article on procrastibaking, and would I want to be interviewed. Of course. [laughs] Spoke with her. I said some silly things because it's a silly topic. I ended up being in the article.

 

Then my literary agent, my wonderful, wonderful, literary agent, Alison Fargis, she called me. She was like, "Erin, this is a book." I said, "Yeah, it probably is. This could be really good." Then it was just really fortuitous. The publisher that I ended up with, Atria, the publisher who was on staff then was a procrastibaker himself. He felt a strong connection to the book. My editor Sarah was just so enthusiastic about the project. Books are hard because there's so much work that goes into them, but it was such an enjoyable process. It was so, I don't want to say easy because it's not easy, but it came so naturally because it was literally just, okay, wow, I have to just open up the floodgates. This is what I do when no one's looking. When my husband read the first draft of it, he was like, "Wow, this is the most you-thing that you've ever done." I was like, "Yeah, this is what this is."

 

Zibby: But that's so great. That's what all the advice is. Write what you know. Write what no one else can write. This is your thing that you do behind closed doors. It benefits everybody for you to tell us about it.

 

Erin: Writing in your voice, it's challenging. My career was never to be a writer. That's just kind of happened in a way. That part has been interesting for me, just practicing writing and practicing really saying what I want to say and not saying it in a way that you think people want to hear it kind of thing. It's been a learning process, but one that I'm grateful for. It's been really great.

 

Zibby: What are your biggest go-to procrastibaking recipes? If you have a huge deadline, what will we find you mostly likely in the kitchen baking furtively and feeling guilty about? [laughs]

 

Erin: Cookies. Because cake is my life, I turn cookies when I'm looking to get away. Cookies, scones, biscuits, things like that, they're easy. They're easily sharable. My butter crunch cookies are hands-down my favorite cookies in the whole world. They're just so yummy. That's why also in the book there's a hundred recipes and the chapters are primarily broken up into about ten recipes each except for cookies which is like twenty percent of the book. I think it's a common thread through all kinds of people who procrastibake that cookies are a go-to. No one will turn down a cookie. In the before time and going forward, at some point I'm sure, they're sharable. You can bring them into the office. You can bring them into school. It's just a real easy bake to blow off some steam.

 

Zibby: Do you have any secrets to making the best chocolate chip cookies? That's my favorite food I think in the planet, is a chocolate chip cookie. What are your secrets?

 

Erin: Chocolate chip cookies are very personal. It's probably one of the most personal baked goods, I think. You can agree on, that's a good eclair or that's a nice something. Chocolate chip cookie, some people like thin and crispy. Some people like chewy. Some people like cakey. With any style of chocolate chip cookies, I always to under-bake a little bit, like a hair. Obviously, you don't want something that's gross or unsafe. If a recipe calls for twelve minutes of bake time, maybe I'll set it for ten and then look at it and make the call. I think with chocolate chip cookies it's okay if they're a little glossy in the center, just a hair. Then you pull it out and you let them kind of finish baking on the baking sheet. Let that residual heat get everything to set. Then if you like a softer cookie, a little bit of cream cheese is actually a great -- the soft-batch style ones in the book, the cream cheese just makes it smoother and creamier. It kind of inhibits a little bit of the gluten production. It keeps the structure soft inside the cookie. That would be another good trick. Oh, and to use good chocolate, but good chocolate is just whatever chocolate you like. If you like dark chocolate, go for that. If you like milk chocolate, go for that. Don't feel chocolate pressure. Just use what you enjoy the most.

 

Zibby: I've recently discovered the larger size dark chocolate Toll House chips. That's not good. I've started hiding them in my office because I don't want the kids to eat them. [laughs] They're so good. So what's coming next for you? Are you going to do another cookbook? I know this is just coming out. What do you see happening in the next year or two?

 

Erin: I wish I knew. I think everyone wished they knew now, right?

 

Zibby: Assuming life was normal. Let's pretend.

 

Erin: If I had a crystal ball, that would be great. In the future going forward, I look forward to being able to do more in-person classes, things that I had scheduled that are going to be put off into the future now. I really, really love teaching people in person. It's so much fun for me to just have that energy. I teach a lot up at Stonewall Kitchen Cooking School here in York, Maine, right over the border. There's some other in-person teaching opportunities. Then I'll just keep sharing on my blog and on my social media channels. Now that I'm getting through this whole book process, I'm actually kind of looking forward to just posting some stuff for fun that has no one else looking over my shoulder with a theme or a deadline kind of thing. I've got some fun projects that I have in mind for Mother's Day and spring-y and summer kind of things coming up.

 

Zibby: That's awesome. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors, somebody out there who might want to do a cookbook or has some great idea? What do you think?

 

Erin: I think my best advice would be to write. For me personally, the more I write, the better I feel I am at it. Write anything. Write emails to people. Write what you did that day. It doesn't have to be a project. It's just getting your words onto paper. I always find that the more that I do that, the better. Sometimes if I have nothing to do, I will go on and just review things on Amazon. I'm like, what can I say about this that's funny? What can I say about this that's creative? It's a completely no-pressure outlet. No one's going to judge what you've written on your Swiffer review. [laughs] It's just a low-key way to do that. Then if someone's really serious about it, I would say to find a literary agent, to find an agent who works with authors in the field that you're in and that manages or works with people who have books that look like the kind of book that you want to write so that you know you're in the right company. I think that's such an important key. I know it's been a huge key to the wonderful things I've been able to work on.

 

Zibby: Awesome. Thank you, Erin. This has been so fun. Thanks for distracting your kids and not minding my kids walking in here. Thanks for taking the time today. Your book is obviously, not just for the fact that everybody is at home and happens to be baking at the moment, but in general is a great concept. It's just so awesome. Thanks for coming on.

 

Erin: Thanks. I appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun being able to chat with you here. Thanks for having me.

 

Zibby: You too. Bye.

 

Erin: Bye.

 

Zibby: Thanks so much. Buh-bye.

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Amity Gaige, SEA WIFE

Zibby Owens: Amity Gaige is the author of three novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize in 2014. Now she has just released her latest book which is called Sea Wife and has been launched to great acclaim. Published in eighteen countries, Schroder was named one of the best works of 2013 by New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Kirkus Reviews, the Women's National Book Association, Cosmopolitan, Denver Post. There are literally ten other ones, so I'm going to stop. Amity is the recipient of many awards for her previous novels including Forward Book of the Year Award for 2007. In 2006, she was named one of the Five under Thirty-five Outstanding Emerging Writers by the National Book Foundation. She has a Fulbright and a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Literary Review, The Yale Review, and One Story. She lives in Connecticut with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.

 

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

 

Amity Gaige: Thank you for having me, Zibby. I'm glad to be here.

 

Zibby: Your novel, Sea Wife, by the way, was in the window in the only bookstore I've seen in real life in the last two months. You got prominent placement for your beautiful cover.

 

Amity: I am so happy to hear that. It is such a pretty cover. It's this robin's egg blue. It kind of sticks out.

 

Zibby: It does. It's great. It's very peaceful too even though there's a lot that goes on. [laughs] Can you please tell listeners what Sea Wife is about?

 

Amity: It is about a family of four that decides to scrap their conventional life in suburban Connecticut and go on a boat in the Caribbean for a year. It's told from two perspectives, and finally three. There's the husband and the wife and then their little daughter who pipes in towards the end. It's written in a unique way in that the husband and wife alternate a narration as frequently, sometimes, as every other line or every other paragraph. It's kind of telling the story together. You realize as you read on that they're telling the story from different timeframes. It's really Juliet, the mother and the wife, the woman, the protagonist, it's really her story. There's so much you don't know as the narration starts. All you know is that she's reflecting on their time at sea. You get to read Michael, the husband's, perspective as well. It alternates between the two of them for most of the book.

 

Zibby: And you know that she has a penchant for closets. [laughs]

 

Amity: Who doesn't? Yeah, she does. She's sitting in a closet at the beginning of the book. It was just a lot of questions about why. You know she's undergone some sort of loss. Her children are fine. Her mother is there helping. The rest of the story's unpacking what happened as she looks back on the journey.

 

Zibby: I love how when you were describing how she lost her closet to begin with, you write, "But I am a mother. Gradually, I just gave them all away, all my spaces, one by one down to the very last closet."

 

Amity: I wondered if you related to that. [laughs]

 

Zibby: I completely relate to that. I also related when you said about the husband, Michael, how he was morbidly funny and how he got funnier and funnier "while I, who had been funny, got less funny." [laughs] That was so spot on.

 

Amity: Right? I know. We used to be funny. What happened? Thank you for saying that. A lot of those lines are definitely culled from my own insights or from, certainly, friends. A lot of this book is inspired by so many conversations with so many women. I'd had a friend of mine, Susan Choi who wrote that great book Trust Exercise, we were talking about Sea Wife and she found another line. A couple of other women have mentioned the one about "Even though we were both educated people and we understood things about gender roles, we just signed up for the same kind of stereotypical gender role set we thought had been consigned to the cultural ash heap." She and a couple other women have brought that up. Little nuggets throughout the book about how it feels to be in a contemporary marriage, to be a woman, a working woman, a mom with her own ambitions, a lot of stuff about that.

 

Zibby: Here's just one more line when you wrote, "We're just a hyphen between our parents and our kids. That's what you learn in middle age. Mostly, this is something a mature person can live with, but every once in a while, you just want to send up a flare. I too am here." I feel like, Amity, I am now reading your diary, is what's going on here.

 

Amity: [laughs] It's so funny. You're picking out a lot of the lines that I definitely really relate to. There's a lot of that in there. There's also stuff that I don't. There's stuff that since I had to represent different points of view, I really had to imagine my way into especially Michael's consciousness. He's my male character, and I wanted to give him a lot of depth too. The line you just read is from him, so there we go.

 

Zibby: Wherever they appear on the page, we know where they're coming on. [laughs] No, I'm kidding. Obviously, it's fiction. I'm not trying to suggest that this is all what's actually in your head. I'm really just poking fun.

 

Amity: Let's admit it. We always think that the author is the same as the characters. I do too. We often imagine that, that they're the same. Of course, they're not. My family is all intact. We never left suburban Connecticut. It's more of an imagination than anything else.

 

Zibby: I heard that you did learn to sail so that you could write this book.

 

Amity: I did.

 

Zibby: How was that?

 

Amity: That was a nightmare, but I am a better person for it. Walking that back a little bit, I started with this idea that I really wanted to set a book at sea. I love describing things. I love books with a strong sense of place. I definitely think that Sea Wife is kind of in that category. The setting is so important. I did my best to certainly learn everything I could about sailing and about maritime life. I interviewed many, many families who live at sea. I visited them. At a certain point, I knew that I needed to sail on my own -- not on my own. I ended up going to the Caribbean to Grenada for a ten-day sailing course, which frankly wasn't a lot, but I learned everything that I needed to know to write Sea Wife, which is not just how some of those parts of the boat work. Sailing is very complex, so I did need to know what a winch and sheet and stanchion are. It was more that I really needed to feel the wind at sea and hear it and hear a whistle in the rigging. I needed to feel what it feels like to try to walk when you're below or try to sleep in a storm, all of those sensory aspects of things. That's what I got when I went on that sailing course. Since we did meet some weather, I also really needed that to inform some of the later scenes. Basically, the last quarter of the book is one long journey into the middle of the sea. It was very necessary that I went and took that journey myself. Also, my characters are really novice sailors. They're not pros. It helped that I wasn't trying to be an expert about sailing. They were more like me. Juliet is more like me in the sense of, she was like, "Okay, I'll do this for you, honey. I want to try to save our marriage. I'm depressed myself. I need to have an adventure and maybe try something new." She was extremely weary and skeptical. I think the real journey of the book is really hers, which is that she needs to break out of that fear and indecision, and sail. Really, that's what she ends up doing.

 

Zibby: Wow. Your structure, as you mentioned before, is complicated in that one point of view is at the end after the adventure. One is at the beginning from a different character's point of view. Then you interweave a third. How did you keep that all straight while you were writing? What did your desk look like? Do you have it all in your head? Do you have notecards? What was the process like for you?

 

Amity: That is a really good question. It was kind of controlled insanity, I would say. It was definitely my most ambitious thing that I'd done. Not only was it quite difficult to try to write about the sea when I'm not a sailor, but also to structure the book exactly as you said where it's back and forth in time. It also has a strong narrative, but it has these moments of meditation. Say one characters comes under Michael, he meditates on helicopter parenting. Then Juliet comes and meditates on poetry and women poets. I thought of the book, I like the metaphors of waypoints in sailing. In sailing, there are waypoints, which are just legs in a journey. Sometimes those waypoints are in the middle of nowhere. If you're going to cross the ocean, you still have to aim for something, but that point might be just coordinates in the middle of the ocean.

 

It was very similar in writing the book. Let me just get to this waypoint. Let me get to this waypoint. I'm going to sense or intuit my way from one to the next. I hope that we are going towards -- I knew where I wanted to go, but I did not know the waypoints. I was constantly pushing towards the final goal in the journey, but there was a lot of movement on the way. One thing I hope about the book is that the reader feels both those things too, both the narrative tension in terms of the total journey, which is across the sea, and also the momentum of these waypoints and these pauses where one character remembers or reflects on things. Those are also quite important. As you're reading the book, there's a sense of forward movement and also pausing. I think they're both important. Of course, if somebody wants to read it all in one sitting and just power through it, I love that. I've gotten some readers saying, I stayed up all night, or I lost sleep to read this book. I think that's a huge compliment. There also are these poetic moments of stillness in the book.

 

Zibby: And also with Juliet being a poet and having her own poems. It's perfectly fitting.

 

Amity: Right. She loves her poetry. She's studying it and trying to be an academic. She also just is a sensitive person hoping to understand her own life experience through poetry which is something a lot of us do.

 

Zibby: After you write a book like this -- I know this is not your first novel by any stretch. I think it's your fifth. Did I get that right? Your fifth or your fourth?

 

Amity: This is my fourth. For a second, I was like, oh, my god, did I write another book and forget about it? [laughs]

 

Zibby: I'm sorry. I have it front of me, but I was not -- anyway, sorry. Okay, your fourth. After delving deep into what happens with a family away at sea and really going into the relationships, how do you then go back to your own family? Does that make you feel any differently about your own marriage or your own parenting or anything having examined this other fictious family's life for a while?

 

Amity: That's a great question. For sure. I think I felt that mediating on my own life and choices throughout the whole process of writing the book. As I was researching, I was meeting families who were living in nontraditional ways. I started out the book thinking these people are crazy. As I said, I'm not a sailor. As time went on, I realized that there was actually -- I've always admired people who take risks and adventurers even if they don't succeed, and sometimes especially if those adventures don't succeed. I was moved to see these people taking these risks -- not reckless. These are very good sailors. They know what they're doing. The children are extremely safety-conscious and everything. I admired them. It didn't make me want to go and set sail, but it reminded me how much it matters that a spirit of adventure is in my own life and to not live a life out of fear. Of course, you don't need to go sailing to prove it, but a spirit of adventurousness even in smaller ways. My own parents, one great thing they did with me is they were great travelers. We went to some strange places in the world. That made a huge impact on me because I had more perspective. I would get out of my narcissistic little box that we're all born in. That's very valuable. I want to bring that to my children. I want to be able to have them be brave in nature, and spiritually. I do want to do that. Then like everybody, I often don't and can't do those things. It's an aspiration and something to keep in mind and to do whenever possible.

 

Zibby: #Goals. [laughter]

 

Amity: Also, I will say, of course I thought a lot about marriage. I have a beautiful, supportive husband. Nobody ever believes that because there are these stressed marriages in my novels. [laughs] I would say that, of course, this sense of marital stress, it's quite common, especially when children arrive. It hits men and women quite differently, the arrival of the children. I think it's always so important to remember that the other person is a human being with their own dreams and to try to honor that, each spouse honor that in the other. I think that that's something that Juliet and Michael, they fail at. They try, but they don't do it in time. I guess if there was sort of a message that the book gives, it would be to try to do that while you can. Love each other while you can. Try to communicate while you can. Don't let the past or other wounds rob you of connection with your spouse or with anybody.

 

Zibby: Now that you have all that relationship advice out there, any parting advice for aspiring authors?

 

Amity: Aspiring authors, oh, my gosh. I'm a teacher. I've taught so many years. I love teaching. I think that aspiring writers should reach out and find community. They should find a mentor if they can or peers who are like mentors and get together and celebrate their writing. There is so much genuine community in sharing your work with others and hearing what they say. You don't need to wait for publication for that to happen. It's certainly one of the coolest things about being a published writer, is that suddenly that community really opens up and you hear from strangers. That's the coolest thing in the world. Until you can get to that place, you still share. Share. I think that's what we're looking for, recognition from others and to be seen by others when we write our stories. Don't wait.

 

Zibby: I love that. That was awesome advice. Thank you so much, Amity. This has been so much fun. I feel like now I want to go meet you for coffee or something.

 

Amity: I know. Maybe someday in better times.

 

Zibby: Someday, yes. In the meantime, Sea Wife, congratulations. So exciting. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

 

Amity: Thank you so much. It was so fun.

 

Zibby: Have a great day.

 

Amity: Bye.

 

Zibby: Bye.

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Jayson Greene, ONCE MORE WE SAW STARS

Jayson Greene, ONCE MORE WE SAW STARS

Jayson: I don't think that a lot of people that I've talked to have told me anything similar about their trauma. Most people I talk to tell me that they were unable to write sentences or read or focus because of the acute nature of what they were living through. I don't know why I was able to, but I paid attention to the fact that I was, even through everything. I made it a bit of a practice. Six months later, I had a lot of writing. It was all for me, really. It was all just me making sense of my new existence and reconciling with all the nasty, ugly emotions that come up when you're grieving. Then when Stacy got pregnant, I looked at what I had. It just clicked into my brain. I was actually writing something for my son, and if not explicitly for him, then for myself as I prepared to be someone else's father. For me, part of that became, I have to show this to someone else. This can't just be a private journal for me anymore. I had a real need to share it somehow, and so it started to become a book, at least in my brain. I continued writing. I didn't change anything I was doing. Every day, I wrote about what I felt. As I did, I kind of, in the back of my mind, was thinking a little differently about where this journey was going and why I was taking the time to do it.

Jasmine Guillory, PARTY OF TWO

Jasmine Guillory, PARTY OF TWO

Jasmine: I just love food, and I love writing about it. Also, I'm always curious as to what people are eating. If I'm watching a TV show and they go out to dinner, I want to know what they're ordering. I'm interested in that. I want to know where they go or if someone's a picky eater or not. Do they like to share or don't they? I think all of that is interesting and tells me something about a character and just builds on that. I tend to have even a lot more about food in my first drafts. Then I have to edit stuff out because I just find all of that endlessly fascinating when I'm writing characters and when I'm writing stories. A lot of times, I feel like that's ignored. Sometimes I'll be reading books and see them doing things from morning to night, and I think, did they stop to eat? Wouldn't you be hungry? [laughs] I'd be hungry.

Phyllis Grant, EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL

Phyllis Grant, EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL

Phyllis: I've been collecting hundreds of recipes for years that I've been developing. It broke my heart a little bit to narrow it down to seventeen. Now it feels like such a relief because each one can have a purpose, either for teaching someone something new, like making tart dough or a template for salad dressing. Start with what's in this book. Then just look around and see what you have. As long as the balance is about the same, you don't need lemon. You can use sherry wine vinegar. You don't need olive oil. You can use coconut oil. What I'm hoping is this gives people a little more confidence to play in the kitchen and not be so rigid and not be so locked into recipes because you don't learn until you step away from the recipes, at least I didn't.

Jeff Gordinier, HUNGRY

Jeff Gordinier, HUNGRY

Jeff: I don't think he intended that to be the case, but [René Redzepi] was kind of my therapist. Jokingly, a friend of mine, about a year ago before the book came out, when he read it in galleys, he said, "I love it. It's eat, pray, eat, love, eat, eat, eat," like Eat Pray Love with way more eating. I was like, yeah, it kind of is actually. I love Elizabeth Gilbert, so I thought that was flattering. Even if some of your audience is not into high-end tasting menus and the high stakes of gastronomy and all that, all of which I admit right now seems very far away, the book is actually really about reinvention and personal change. It's really about how I changed and René changed in the course of these four years we spent together.

Emily Gould, PERFECT TUNES

Emily Gould, PERFECT TUNES

Emily: Perfect Tunes is the story of a mother and daughter who are very close in age because Laura, the protagonist of the book, got pregnant with Marie, her daughter, when she was in her very early twenties. The circumstances of that pregnancy and Marie coming into Laura's life really changed the course of what she thought her life was going to be like. Laura moved to New York, as many people do, with big dreams of being, in her case, a singer-songwriter. She is someone who has a lot of talent and not a lot of ambition in terms of figuring out how to get her talent out there. She falls in really quickly with a group of people, including the man who ends up being Marie's father, who are much more driven, much more ambitious, and much more savvy in the ways of the big city than she is.

Jen Gotch, THE UPSIDE OF BEING DOWN

Jen Gotch, THE UPSIDE OF BEING DOWN

Jen: The book itself was, I wanted to share my stories in the hopes that it would help people that are struggling with mental health issues feel less alone, also speak to entrepreneurs. I share a lot about building my brand, Ban.do, and then offer up some potential solutions along the way. Really, the intention was just to build self-awareness in the reader. I feel like after twenty years of therapy, I had some wisdom that I wanted to impart and to do it in a way that -- I feel like my approach is probably more lighthearted than most for a difficult subject matter but still in treating it with respect. I just wanted an accessible mental health memoir.

Joanna Guest, FOLDED WISDOM

Joanna Guest, FOLDED WISDOM

Joanna: Folded Wisdom is an illustrated story. I like to throw in the word illustrated to give people a sense of how much color is in the book. It's the story of the morning notes my dad wrote to my brother Theo and me every morning before we went to school. The notes started in '95, not to give away our ages or anything, but they started in 1995 when my brother was in preschool and I was in the second grade. They continued every school morning from then until we both graduated from high school. The book is obviously centered around my dad and the story of how he managed to write these notes and what the lessons were inside. I would be remiss if I didn't shout out the unsung hero of the whole thing who's truly my mother who managed to, after all these years, save them somewhere in the house. My mom sifted them all out and somehow - I think my back-of-the-envelope math says that he probably wrote us like 4,800 notes. We have a little more than 3,500. It's very wild.

Jennifer Gefsky & Stacey Delo, YOUR TURN

Jennifer Gefsky & Stacey Delo, YOUR TURN

Stacey: One of the things we've found is that in our business, Après, we focus primarily on women who have taken career breaks and helping them get back into the workforce regardless of how long those breaks have been. What's interesting is when you look at the data, there are fifteen million working women with children under the age of eighteen. The press focuses a lot on maternity leave and the need for paid leave, which we strongly agree with, and then that return back. Then we focus a lot on women returning to work. Yet there is this large swath of women in the middle, in that messy middle as we call it in the book, who are trying to make these decisions about whether to take a career break, whether to go part time, whether to go freelance. Often, they're left feeling very stressed about those decisions and what the opportunity costs are going to be when they make those decisions. Like Jen said, if you see the cover of our book, it's a career dial with many stops along the way. We wanted people to understand that they can turn it. You can go part time and still get a full-time job later when you're ready. You can take a career break and still get back into the workforce. Giving women these options and understanding that they have them and then how to make those decisions is really what the book is about.

Elizabeth Gerlach, BEN'S ADVENTURES

Elizabeth Gerlach, BEN'S ADVENTURES

Elizabeth: Then I was driving in my car one day and I thought it would be really cool to do a children's book to create a legacy for us or for [Ben] or give tribute to him and show a kid in a wheelchair. You didn't really, at the time, see a ton of picture books that showed all types of people, all types of kids with different needs or different abilities. I thought that would be really cool to represent, in my way, a kid in a wheelchair that had different needs. I didn't want the books to be about disability, just to be about how he lives in a wheelchair. I wanted it to be about a child that was a kid even though he was in a wheelchair. He could have friends. He could have dreams. He could enjoy his life. He could have fun. The premise of my books is that it's Ben's Adventures. Ben's in a wheelchair. He dreams up all of these fun instances.