Elin Hilderbrand, TROUBLES IN PARADISE

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

Elin Hilderbrand: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. I know that you and I have been conversing on Instagram about various different crazy things that are happening in life. Plus, of course, you have all of your own books to discuss as well. We have so much to talk about. I don't even know where to start. Why don't we talk first about Troubles in Paradise? which is your most recent book and the last of trilogy which starts off with amazing gossip. We can segue into talking about gossip from there.

Elin: Perfect. I can't say too, too much about Troubles in Paradise because it is a book three. Just a little history as to how I came to write the Paradise series is that back in 2013, my publisher, Hachette, called and said, "We've had a book fall off our holiday list. Can you write a Christmas book in four weeks?" I was writing a novel called The Matchmaker which was very emotionally draining. I said, "You know what? I'm not going to stop this and write a Christmas book, but I'll do it when I finish." I came up with an idea for a Christmas trilogy. I know this sounds like I'm talking about something else, but I am getting to Paradise.

Zibby: It's okay.

Elin: I came up with this idea for a Christmas trilogy. It turns out they didn't want a trilogy. They only wanted one book. I wrote this novel, Winter Street, and gave it no ending. Immediately, a contract for the next two books appeared because they loved the premise. Then, ironically, in the summer of 2016, my editor called and said, "What do I have to do to get you to write a fourth book in the Winter Street series?" At that point, Zibby, I was finished. I didn't want to write a fourth book in the Winter Street series, so they really had to be persuasive. I said to them, "I'd really like to write a novel or a series of novels that are set in the Virgin Islands." That was the place where I had styled a writing retreat, time for myself in the Virgin Islands. I'd fallen in love with it. I feel like, again, Hachette was a little bit hesitant. Because I was a Nantucket author, they didn't necessarily want a series set in the Virgin Islands, but they very desperately wanted this fourth Winter Street book, so they said yes. Then again, irony is the Paradise series has far, far, far outsold the Winter Street and has taken me to a new location. It's been successful, so I was right. I felt vindicated I was right. The Paradise series, book one focuses on a woman in her mid-fifties named Irene Steele. On New Year's Day, she gets a call that her husband has been killed in a helicopter crash in the Virgin Islands. Hello. She didn't know he was in the Virgin Islands. She's completely gobsmacked. She and her two adult sons fly down there only to find -- guess what? This dude has a second life including a mistress and a child. Then it's like, what else was going on? That takes us through to book three where I'm trying to tie up all of the mysterious loose ends in a way that is satisfying and surprising. That is where we are.

Zibby: Awesome. It's so funny because in the beginning of book three, you open it up and you talk directly to the reader. You're like, no, no, no, this is book three, so just put this down and go back to the beginning and read the other two books. I was like, okay. [laughs]

Elin: I'm very concerned. I feel like some people maybe are like, I'll just be opportunistic and if they buy it accidentally, oh well. I am not that person. I am the person who is like, I would like them to have pleasant reading experience where they're reading book one, book two, and book three where it's very clear where they are. I know that people have read book three first which just gives me agita, honestly. It makes me upset.

Zibby: That's so funny. And you have another book coming out soon. You've been posting about that one. That's exciting. It's coming out in June.

Elin: Yes, I have a book out in June called Golden Girl, which is my summer novel. I was doing two books a year. It has been extremely stressful the last seven years. I'm going back with Golden Girl just to one book every summer. That is my new jam. I don't know what I'm going to do with all my extra time, but I'll find something.

Zibby: How did you even get into this? How did you become who you are today? When did you start writing so much and at this rapid pace? How did this whole thing happen?

Elin: Let's see. How did this whole thing happen? It's, of course, a longer story. I went to Johns Hopkins undergrad. I was a writing seminars major. A lot of people don't think of Hopkins as a place where writers are born. However, they do have a dedicated creative writing major. Every week, I would go to a workshop. I had Steve Dixson, Madison Smartt Bell, John Barth, really great writers guiding me. When I graduated, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I went and I sat with Madison Bell. I said, "What do I do? Do I go to graduate school? Do I get a job?" He said, "You have to go out in the world and live, Elin. You have to have experiences. You're twenty-two." I moved to New York City. I lived on the Upper East Side. I worked in publishing. I hated it. I thought because I wanted to be a writer, for some reason, that publishing would be my thing. No. I hated it. I needed a job where I would have time, so I started teaching. I taught first in the New York City public schools at IS 227 in Queens. Then I got a better job teaching in Westchester County out of the city. I would commute backwards.

The summer between those two school years I wanted to get out of the city for the summer, and so I decided I would go to Nantucket. I had grown up going to Cape Cod in the summers with my family. I had been to the vineyard in college. I just felt like Nantucket was the natural third point on the triangle. I got a room in a house, fell madly in love with the island. Then after my second year of teaching, I moved back to Nantucket. I'm like, I'm going to live in Nantucket. I traveled in the offseason. I would work during the summer season and then travel. Eventually, after I felt like I had gone out and lived, I applied to the University of Iowa for graduate school and ended up getting in there, miraculously, and went to Iowa and was totally miserable. It's a very intense place. There's a lot of competition. I was just very unhappy. I was away from the ocean. I was out in Iowa City. It was bad. One of the ways that I made myself feel better is I started writing a novel that was set on Nantucket. That was The Beach Club.

Then in my final workshop at Iowa, my professor had his agent come. His agent said, "Which one of you lives on Nantucket?" I said, "Oh, that's me." It was a small-world coincidence. He said, "Stay and see me after class," which I wasn't even going to do because I had my U-Haul packed. I was ready to go, but I decided to. Thank goodness because Michael has been my agent for twenty-one or twenty-two years now. I told him I was working on a book set on Nantucket called The Beach Club. He said, "When you're finished with it, send it to me," which I did. At that point, 1999, I'm printing out the novel, sticking it in a box, and taking it to the post office. He read it. He said, "I'd like to represent you. I'm going to make you lots and lots of money." Who doesn't want to hear that? This is greatest words ever. He sends the book out, and it gets rejected everywhere. Finally, five months later, he calls and says he has an offer of five thousand dollars. I'm like, is five thousand dollars a lot of money? I can't quit my job. Since it was the only offer that we had, we took it. The Beach Club was published in the summer of 2000.

Two weeks after it came out, it was People magazine's book of the week. Immediately, my publisher ran out of copies. This was my first publisher who I think will remain nameless during this interview. I'm not sure. I was frustrated because we were without books for three weeks. This in 2000. You can't download it on your Kindle. You cannot read it on your iPhone. The copies have to be in the stores. It sold pretty well. I ended up with a two-book deal. Those books did less well. Then I got another two-book deal. Those books did even worse. I got my own publicist for book five, a private publicist that I paid for myself. She did an excellent job. Again, I got People magazine with the picture. It was book of the week and four stars. I was so excited. Again, the publisher ran out of books. I was super frustrated at that point. My agent, same agent, said, "I think we need to switch publishers." I had Stockholm syndrome and was in love with my captor. I'm like, "I will not switch publishers," but he persuaded me. I went and had what I call my Cinderella day in New York and met with ten publishers and ended up settling or deciding on Little Brown. Little Brown has turned my last twenty, twenty-one books into New York Times best seller. They did that gradually, Zibby. I didn't write Crawdads. I didn't go right to number one. The first book I had that hit number one was Summer of '69. It was my twenty-third novel. It was an incremental climb and a gathering of readers. It was a very careful, thoughtful process to get to the top.

Zibby: Wow, that is an amazing story. I loved that. That's amazing. Just that you kept persisting through and kept doing what you do, that's the greatest part. You had confidence in what you were producing. You just had to wait until everybody caught up with you.

Elin: Yeah, and I don't think I understood the book business. I didn't the first five books. Also, publishing was changing too. I can remember with my second book with Little Brown -- it was called A Summer Affair. I had a marketing person named Miriam Parker. Now she's at Ecco. She's a brilliant woman. At that time, she was like, "We're going to go to all these blogs. We're going to get all these blogs." I'm thinking to myself, I don't even know what a blog is. Why are we doing this? Why is this where we're putting our resources? She was a visionary. It came out in the summer of 2008. That was the thing to do. They were very systematic and careful, and they still are, about how they do their marketing and how they get more readers. They're so impressive. I'm very lucky.

Zibby: That’s great. That's really awesome. I know that reader response and how people accept and embrace your book is something that's been really important to you. You have all these devoted fans and everything else. Then when we were communicating about the recent situation with Jane Rosen's book on Instagram about how a moms' group turned against her and ended up banning her from the group and canceling her book event, you were up in arms about it. I just wanted to talk to you a little about that.

Elin: I've only gotten to the -- I'm on page forty of Jane's book, which I'm so enjoying. I am so enjoying. I have to say, my appetite was really whetted by the fact that this group canceled her. I can't figure out, because I'm not sure if it comes back up, but I've gotten to the part where the Upper East Side group is mentioned.

Zibby: Yeah, that's it.

Elin: I'm like, was this what [distorted audio]?

Zibby: That was it. The whole thing is on page thirty-nine to forty. The whole rest of Eliza Starts A Rumor has nothing else to do with Upper East Side moms at all.

Elin: That cracks me up. I just feel like, wouldn't you be excited or laugh? It was very tongue-in-cheek, I thought. I'd be interested to know if I actually know anyone. You live in New York, right, Zibby? You may know somebody in that group. I live in Nantucket. I may know somebody in that group. It felt so overt and unnecessary for them to decide to cancel the book based -- especially now that I know what you're talking about. I thought maybe there was more later in the book that was really scandalous. It's tough. Also, it's fiction. Jane very skillfully picks up the essence of things. I'm really, really enjoying her book. I'm also going to post about it. I may, I can't decide, mention this scandal because I think it will encourage other people to want to read it too. People always like things that are attached to real life, which makes no sense because we are in the business of writing fiction. If it has a real-life scandal attached, so much the better. I predict big things for Jane. I'm really, really enjoying the book.

Zibby: Good. Come to our event. We're doing an event. I can talk to you about this later. I'm going to do an event with her coming up too. Anyway, back to your books and all that. You open up Troubles in Paradise with a whole gorgeous description of the juiciness of gossip and how it's like a mango. You debated which fruit to pick and all the rest. There is something just so irresistible about small-town gossip or even big-town gossip. New York City really, in different neighborhoods, is just as much a small town as probably Nantucket wherever you go. How do you use gossip in fiction and in your work in particular to keep the intrigue going?

Elin: Totally. I wrote a novel in -- what year did it come out? -- 2015 called The Rumor. My purpose with The Rumor had been -- there was a lot of gossip going on on Nantucket. There's always gossip, oh, my god. I've lived here twenty-six years. I've heard it all. I decided that I was going to write a novel called The Rumor and I was going to put every single person who gossiped on Nantucket in the book. This was my goal. This is exactly, in fact, what I did. I put everybody that gossiped in the book. However, I disguised them so much because they have to fit the narrative. I disguised everybody so well that I am the only person that knows who's in there. No one has ever come up to me and said, I was the blah, blah, blah in your book. No one has ever said that. Also, if you're a villainess or whatever, you often will not recognize yourself. That was very satisfying to me because I did, in fact, get to put all the gossipy people in the novel, but nobody knew it.

One of the things about being a mother -- you know this. We all know this. Everybody listening to this knows this. It is a very fraught group. The gossip among the moms, it's mind-blowing. It's ruthless. I have graduated out of it, which I'm very, very happy to say. My children are twenty-one, eighteen, and fifteen. One of my sons is at college where gossip is no longer an issue. One of my sons is at boarding school. Because it's sort of remote, I don't have to worry about any of that. My daughter is fifteen. She's my third child. I know everybody. I no longer engage in any of the gossip. I almost feel like that is something you do more with your first child and sometimes your second child. By the time you get to the third child, you're like, you know what, I am so done. Also, with age, I feel like, is this piece of information important to me? The answer is no. I just do not engage in any local Nantucket gossip. I now say that, and I'll probably be embroiled in a scandal next week. Over the last five or six years since the kids have been to high school, it's been very mild. It's something that I think you graduate out of.

Zibby: I think the thing with moms, especially first-time moms or just really -- gossip is the grounds of the insecure. It's the feeding ground. When you're in a new situation trying to figure out what on earth you're supposed to be doing with your kids, especially in the beginning, all you want to do is compare yourself to other people and then somehow get that little glint of, not that I'm speaking for myself, but I've heard, any sort of little win you can have. Oh, I heard her kid did X, Y, Z. There's always something to make you feel better when you feel so bad. It's not any justification for it. It's not just that the kids are older. It's that you're better. You know what you're doing, and that confidence that comes from surviving.

Elin: Right. That's the thing. Ideally, you're the one that has evolved. You are now self-aware. You do not need to be boosted or fed by other people's misfortunes. [laughs] I think if you evolve the right way, it's just live and let live.

Zibby: It's so true. What you said in the beginning was also super interesting to me. A lot of people grow up wanting to be writers. There really is something to waiting. It's not a career you can necessarily dive into out of college and go up the ranks. You can go to adjacent careers like publishing or maybe a magazine in the olden days or something related. To just sit down and become a novelist without that wisdom or experience is really tricky. When you're that age, you don't want to be told that you have to go live. That's very annoying to hear because you know what you want. Let's say your kids now want to go be writers. What do you say to them? What does it mean to go live, really?

Elin: They have to have experiences. They have to travel. We've traveled with the kids. My ex-husband and I traveled extensively, lived in Australia, did a bunch of things. They’ve been all over the place. They need to go out and have experiences. They need to have jobs. They need to fall in love. They need to have their heart broken, all of those things. When I started, Zibby, I was pregnant with Max. It was twenty-one years ago. That's when I started writing The Beach Club. What did I know about life? Not one thing, really. I hadn’t had children. I hadn't been divorced. I hadn’t had cancer. All of the things that have happened to me over the twenty years that I've been doing this, in theory, should have been contributing to the richness and the nuance and emotional integrity of the writing. That’s the best-case scenario. Hopefully, it has. In theory, every book gets better. I've also been reading. One of the great things about you and other book influencers like you is that the way we can make ourselves better, the way every single woman can make themselves better, is to read. I definitely believe that. All of the thousands of books that I've read over the last twenty years have all contributed also to my work.

Zibby: It's so true. I think the value of reading is huge. Thank you for saying that about me in particular. It's so funny. Someone posted today, a little funny thing how she couldn't keep up with all the details of her family group chat, but she could remember all the details in a multigenerational family saga novel that she read six years ago. I feel like I'm the same way. I can look around and be like, oh, yeah, I totally remember the characters in that book and this book. When it comes to my own life, I have these big blanks. Why do I remember all the stuff about books? It's the weirdest thing.

Elin: We attach. We escape and we attach. One of the things that I hear a lot from my readers just because I do write escapist fiction is, I'll hear about the terrible, worst moments of their lives. They're in the chemo chair. Their parents are dying. They're at the hospital. Their children have cancer, whatever. They have my book. My book allows them to escape. That is the most humbling experience. I don't need to write the great American novel. I have no desire to do so. What I'm doing now is so fulfilling just because I'm giving people in a lot of pain, either physical or emotional, a place to go. I find value in that.

Zibby: There's tremendous value in that. Wait, tell me briefly about your whole experience with your cancer. That sounds terrible. I know you are a breast cancer survivor. I would love to know, in terms of feeding the richness of your work, how did going through that -- how did you even manage that when you're churning out so much fiction at such a rapid pace? Did you stop writing for a while? How did you handle all that?

Elin: The writing was really my, it was my gasoline. I'm very disciplined anyway. I got sick and I just said to myself, I'm not going to stop. I'm going to stop only when it's absolutely necessary. I was diagnosed in May of 2014. I had a book coming out, The Matchmaker. I had a book coming out on June 10th. My oncologist called. She said, "You have cancer." You go through a lot of steps. As it turns out, I had to have a double mastectomy. I said to her, "Can we just schedule it for August and preferably after all my social obligations? I have a book coming out. It's summer in Nantucket." She was just like, "Elin, reality check, no. You need to have this as soon as possible." My book came out on a Tuesday, as they do. My book came out on Tuesday, June 10th. Had the double mastectomy on the 13th. I had to cancel all these events. I did a couple events. Then I had to cancel a bunch of events. Then I said to my publicist, "Two weeks after my surgery, I'm going to start back and do a tour." I did. Twelve days after my surgery, I flew to Chicago. I did two events in Chicago.

I tell this story. Sometimes I cry. I will recover if I cry. The first event, I was on drugs. I don't even remember it. It was a straight signing, though. The second event was the brown bag lunch at the Cook County Library. There were a hundred women. There were two women up front that had -- one had no hair. One had very short hair. At that point, I have drains in which were hidden by my dress. You have drains, which are these horrible things that come out your back. Then they collect the lymphatic fluid. It's too awful to talk about. I was on oxy and very emotional. Everybody there knew what I had gone through. I'd been on the news. I went on with Gayle King and Norah and Charlie on CBS This Morning. The women come through my line. They say to me, "Elin, we both had double mastectomies. Together, we've undergone thirty-six rounds of chemo and sixty-four rounds of radiation. We came today to tell you that you're going to be fine." I thought to myself, okay, these women are far sicker than I am. They showed up at my book signing. They are so optimistic and so encouraging.

I really, at that point, felt like they passed me a baton which I held onto for a while. Once I was recovered -- I had some bumps in the road and wasn't really recovered until May of 2015. Then I started speaking at breast cancer events and telling that story. The good thing, I guess, about breast cancer is that the demographic, it's my demographic of my readers as well, so there was a lot of opportunity for me to connect with other people who were just starting out. I do it all the time on my social media. People will say, my sister has breast cancer. She's starting chemo tomorrow. I always reach out, always, if I can, personally. I've met a lot of really wonderful, wonderful women that way. In some sense, it was a gift, not only because of the connection it gave me with my readers, but also the gut check with what's important. You and I talked just a little while ago about the gossip. That ceased to be important. Who cares? Nobody. What became important was what was happening with my kids and the truth in my fiction.

Zibby: Elin, you have gone through so much and are such a powerhouse. You can just tell it in the way you speak. You're just a force. You're so driven. It's amazing. I'm so impressed. Were you just born this way? Do you feel like at some point this shifted, or is this just your personality in everything you do?

Elin: You know, I don't know. I've always been disciplined. I do all this crazy stuff. I exercise for three hours every morning. I do that because it's a discipline that sets up my day. I never ever skip a day. The people in my life like my ex-husband and my boyfriend now, they really hate it because, of course, it takes three hours away from my time. It's a very important discipline for me because doing what I do, which is writing two books, now one book, a year, requires a laser focus. The time in the morning, it's the discipline of doing something that -- nobody wants to exercise for three hours. Nobody wants to exercise for five minutes. Making yourself do it is setting up a discipline. I've always been like that. The connection with the readers is just something that I've learned over twenty years. It's a process. I could be sitting in my basement writing for myself, but it's so gratifying to have a back-and-forth with my readers. I think they feel the love. They know that I love them very deeply.

Zibby: Wow. Amazing. Do you have any parting advice for aspiring authors aside from going out and living?

Elin: I think it's just, you have to stick with it. That's always what I say. If you're writing a novel, you start at the beginning. You move through middle. The middle is always tough. There are lots of times when I do not know what's coming next and it feels scary. That's when you put the novel in a drawer and you think, I guess I'll get to it later because I know how it ends. Everyone always knows how it starts and they know how it ends. The challenge is making yourself get through it and moving scene by scene. In a micro sense, I would say for serious writers, you must dramatize. You must have a scene in a location with dialogue and characters and a conflict. That is a scene. My novels are one scene after another after another, but at least I can pinpoint them saying, this is the scene at the beach restaurant where she drops the tray of glasses. Everybody stops. Then the owner asks if she's on drugs. You need to have dramatization. In a larger sense, you just have to keep going until you get to the end. Then you can always go back and fix it. Wait, Zibby, you have a book coming out. When is your book coming out?

Zibby: I do. February 16th, my anthology.

Elin: Oh, my god. Can we just talk about that briefly before we part?

Zibby: Sure. [laughs] Yes, I'm super excited about it. I have sixty-plus essays that authors wrote mostly during the pandemic, some a little bit before. It was going to be this whole website goop. I had this whole idea, and that did not happen. I ended up just posting them up on my website during the pandemic. Then afterwards, I was like, wait a minute, I have enough for a book. This is a book, what got published. Then I just sold it as a book. Now it's coming out.

Elin: It's called Moms Don't Have Time To. Then is every essay a different ending to that sentence?

Zibby: No. This book is five different sections. Moms don't have time to eat, workout, read, breathe, and have sex. The essays are inspired by those topics, but they're not specifically about them. It's a personal essay about something. Then I have another one coming out in November where I picked five different things that moms don't have time to do.

Elin: What a great idea. I have to say, I'm sort of past it now, but it was definitely challenging where moms don't have to write novels. That would be my essay.

Zibby: If you want to be in the next one... Not that you don't have enough to do.

Elin: I know. That's the thing. Moms don't have time to do anything. I love, love, love. Make sure you send it to me.

Zibby: I will. I will absolutely send it to you. Thank you so much for coming on this show. I loved talking to you and hope to see you in real life.

Elin: I hope so. Bye, Zibby. Thank you.

Zibby: Bye, Elin. Thanks.

Brandon Hobson, THE REMOVED

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

Brandon Hobson: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Your latest novel, The Removed, is a beautiful story, so well-written, about all different characters as they relate to the loss of a fifteen-year-old boy, Ray-Ray. Tell me a little more about what inspired you to write this novel. Where did it come from?

Brandon: It came out of a question. Chekhov says that fiction should begin with questions. The question is always what I begin with in my work. The big question here was, how do we grieve and how do we heal? I'm also really interested in the question of, what is home? I think that applies to this book as well as some of my other work. That's the starting place for me, examining those questions and then taking it from there.

Zibby: I feel like you tapped into so many different things. If somebody had an issue going on, it's probably in this book. Someone with Alzheimer's, someone with an opioid addiction, someone with loss, all of these things are so relevant to everyone. Yet somehow you even weave them in and threw in a foster care child to boot. You packed so much in. Yet it all interwove seamlessly by how you divided the different points of view into the different chapters. How did you decide to take this view by all the different people in the family and shifting the camera lens, if you will, around to different places and perspectives?

Brandon: For one thing, one of the things I like about fiction writing is getting inside characters' heads. Here, it was an opportunity to take the Echota family and get inside their heads. The different points of view are all first person. That means trying to have very distinct voices. I don't know whether I pulled that off as well as I could've. I don't know. That's part of the fun. It's sort of like acting. I heard Ottessa Moshfegh say this a few years ago. I went to read her reading. Then afterwards, we went out to dinner and talked a little bit. One of the things that she said, and I think it's certainly true of me, is that it's sort of like acting in that you're getting inside a character and really seeing how they respond to certain situations. That's a big part of the pleasure of writing, is doing that and playing with voice and circumstance. This family, I had the mother, Maria, she was maybe the most challenging because she's an older woman who's lost a child. I wanted to try to get that voice somewhat distinct and specific. I actually talked to a friend of my mom's, and my mom's in her seventies, a friend of hers who, many years ago, had lost her teenage son. I talked to her a little bit about that experience, which was hard, but it needed to be done.

Zibby: That's true. I should've added this to the many themes that you touched on in the book, which is also police brutality in a way or, really, racism and targeting people on first glance based on how they look, which is what happened with Ray-Ray in the story. So many powerful, powerful issues to be explored. It's really amazing. When you sit down to write this book, okay, fine, we have Chekhov's question. This is the question you're doing. How did you decide how to craft all of these characters and what you were going to tackle in their passages? Obviously, you did research by talking to your mom's friend. Did you research all the characters? Did you outline the whole thing? Did they just appear in your head?

Brandon: That's a very difficult question. Where do characters come from? I don't necessarily outline. I start more with an image. Sometimes images will come that I'll see. I'm not sure what the scene is or when it takes place, but I'll see a character doing something. For Edgar's part, which is probably the strangest of all of them because he does have some addiction problems, I wanted those sections to be the most surreal, the most strange not only because of his drug use, but also because he finds himself in a sort of mythical place called the Darkening Land. The Darkening Land is out of old Cherokee stories. That's a specific place. In this place, I kind of had free reign to create it however I wanted to. I really wanted to hone in on the strangeness of this place and hopefully parallel it to the strangeness of the country we're living in right now in terms of, look at the way that racism is so prevalent today and the way that video games are used, and virtual reality. Edgar becomes a target of a game that he fears for his life, a real shooting game. That was really exciting because that was, again, crafting out of an alternate universe, a very dreamlike, surreal place. His sections were really fun. I knew that I wanted Sonja to be very obsessive and obsessed with romantic -- she's a very strong woman. She's very confident. She finds herself involved with a guy who is not native who becomes very dangerous. I knew that I wanted Sonja's character to be in a situation with someone who was dangerous. She's placed in danger. Edgar's placed in danger in the Darkening Land.

The mother, Maria, is really the one that is trying to pull everything together. She's dealing with her husband's Alzheimer's. Her husband Ernest is just really suffering from his Alzheimer's. Then they take in this wonderful little boy named Wyatt who almost feels like he begins to heal Ernest because of, look at how closely he resembles Ray-Ray from fifteen, twenty years ago. At the beginning, it just was taking off. I was doing each character separately. I was writing. Here's the way I knew that I was writing Sonja's, her thread, and I was writing Edgar's thread. I knew with Maria and Ernest, their threads just started taking off. I think that's often what happens when you start writing and you really get to know your characters very intimately, very well. They sort of start doing things on their own. You just follow along. I don't really outline much. All that sort of stuff comes with editing afterwards to help with the structure and shape after the draft. I think the most fun part is the very first draft because you're just -- Charles Johnson, he wrote this fantastic craft book. He was a student of John Gardner's. Charles Johnson, in his craft book, talked about the pleasure, the fun of writing. Finding that pleasure really is where I feel, for me -- I feel very strongly about that and its importance to my work.

Zibby: How many times do you think you've started novels at this point? Have there been others that you've started that haven't been finished?

Brandon: Oh, yeah. In my twenties, back in the nineties, I had several novels. It took me a really long time. I've been writing since I started college, for thirty years. I wasn't writing as a kid. I started writing fiction in college. It's been a long time. It's taken a long time to develop an understanding of how to do it.

Zibby: Writing novels takes so long relative to a round of tennis. If you only played five rounds of tennis, you wouldn't be that good, especially your first round. Because novels take so long sometimes, then they think because of all the amount of work and time invested, it should speed up or something, but it doesn't. You still need the practice. Another author I was talking to said, "It took me twenty-eight novels to get to number one on the best-seller list." That makes sense to me. If you do something over and over and over and get better and better at it, then it stands to reason you might have your most success at your twenty-eighth book versus your first. Not to say that there aren't -- anyway.

Brandon: There are great, amazing, young writers. It just is amazing to me when you have someone in their twenties, which is really young to be so good. They're out there. I think that's great. It is a lot of work. I don't have a whole lot of other hobbies, really. I have two kids here. My hobbies are usually spending time with them and shooting baskets with my thirteen-year-old or my seven-year-old. There's an obsession about it, I think. That's probably true of anything. Like you say, tennis, I think one has to have an obsession in order to really, it seems like to me -- I don't know. There's probably a lot of natural ability in sports. I don't know if that's true with writing, this natural ability.

Zibby: I think people have natural ability, but I think that some people who don't can get really great at it. I think some people who do can squander it.

Brandon: That’s true.

Zibby: I have two thirteen-year-olds and a seven-year-old. I also have a six-year-old. I find that that makes my ability to ever write or be productive a little bit impaired. How has that been for you, especially with the pandemic? How has that affected your writing to be parenting with everything else?

Brandon: It's really strange. My thirteen, as you know, they're pretty self-sufficient. The math, my wife has to help him. I don't remember seventh grade math being that difficult. I like helping my seven-year-old, especially with the art projects. We went out and found leaves. I live in the desert. There are not a lot of leaves out. We went over to a tree and found some leaves a few months ago and were able to make birds. Those have been fun. My writing, especially during the pandemic, I haven't been able to write during the day. It's been between the hours of ten PM and two or three AM, usually. During those four hours that I sit down to really think, this is my writing time, I'll try to get as much done as I can. I tell myself it's a success even if I just go through and edit or write half a page or a page. That's a success because you can go days and days without writing. During the day, I'm always trying to think about it. I'm kind of a night owl anyway. I will sleep a little bit later and stay up late, but I've always been like that.

Zibby: Interesting. Did you feel like, after your book got nominated for the National Book Award, that you had anxiety about starting another book, or did that fuel your resolve to write something else amazing?

Brandon: I don't know that it really gave me anxiety. There's so much out there. There's so many books. Part of it, for me, I published a couple of books with small presses, and I'm used to people not paying that much attention that I don't think so much about it when I work. I think had that been a debut novel, like the first thing I ever published, it might have created some more anxiety. Most of my anxiety -- I do have anxiety. It comes more along the lines of when I'm having to be in a social situation with people and talk about it. With you, one on one and I'm at my house... But talking about the book in front of large groups of people gives me significant anxiety. Then I find myself having one too many glasses of wine or too many beers to try to overcompensate. Then I may embarrass myself. It's gotten better.

Zibby: I feel bad. I said the thing about anxiety because I was literally just putting myself in your shoes. I worry about everything all the time. Then as I was saying the question, I was like, okay, this is my own issue that I am now asking him. [laughs] It just happened that you also have that same thing.

Brandon: You know what? I do. I have severe anxiety. When I was a kid, I had such social anxiety so bad. I just wouldn't talk for long periods of time. It's gotten way better now. I've talked to a therapist my whole life, so that helps.

Zibby: I had a lot of social anxiety as a kid as well. I went this one entire summer on a summer program to France where I just didn't talk. I was supposed to go learn the language and live with the family. I spoke a little in French, which now of course I don't remember a word of. With my peers, I was so shy. I didn't open my mouth the whole summer. What I found during that time, which I think of a lot -- I don't know if you do the same thing. I spent so much time analyzing language because it seemed so natural for other people to just talk. I was so struggling with the ability just to talk and figure out what would come next. I just listened all summer. I think about that sometimes now as I ramble or write my heart out or whatever, how at times it's so hard to even form a sentence and how that ease of conversation, it's sort of stayed with me.

Brandon: I went to Paris for the first time the summer before last. I taught for a week-long writing workshop. That was the best, most amazing trip I've ever been on. It was so great. I love the language. I love the city. I loved everything about it. I'd never been out of the country. I'd been to Mexico once in my entire life. I'd never been anywhere else. I walked around a lot. It was just amazing, an amazing experience.

Zibby: Interesting. Are you working on anything else now? What is it you're doing in the middle of the night?

Brandon: I am. There are a couple of things I'm working on. One, it's too early to really know what it's going to form into yet. I'm going through this first draft. It’s not much yet. It's not much at all. Then I'm working also on a children's book, not as in real young, but as in middle grade. My son's a seventh grader. I've started that and hope that that -- I just like to do different stuff in terms of writing. Stuff is a weird word. I always like a different project. We'll see.

Zibby: Got to keep mixing it up.

Brandon: There's always something I'm working on, always.

Zibby: That's great. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Brandon: One of the most important things is just, this is what everybody says, but to read a lot and read widely with a very open mind. Writing, it's almost like, the more you do it, the more fun it becomes. If aspiring writers are not in a program or have taken a workshop or a class, sometimes those get really bad -- I don't have an MFA. I didn't go for an MFA. I have an MA in English. Then I went on and got a PhD. There's something to be said about being around a community of other writers and people who are in the same space with you and you're all looking at each other's work and helping each other. There was a time in my life where I didn't have that at all. When I did, I became very grateful. I think that that was largely what helped me become a better writer on a craft level, is having that community of people. I would just say other than reading widely, get your work among a community of readers that you can share each other's work and talk about what's working and what's not working.

Zibby: That's great advice. I feel like especially now with the whole world on Zoom and your local habitat opening up to everybody else, it's easier to find those like-minded souls than it was before when you were sort of confined by the people around you who may or may not share your interests at all. Now you're in the desert somewhere talking about writing. I'm in New York City. It's so neat.

Brandon: One thing I didn't talk about in terms of the new book was, there's an ancestral voice named Chala. One thing I did want to mention, if it's okay, was that Chala, in the book, is based on a real man named Chali. What happened was he was killed for refusing to leave the land when Andrew Jackson ordered removal. Before the migration, what's known as the Trail of Tears, some people refused to go. There was one man who, with his son, died. This Chala, this ancestral voice, is based on him. He's speaking to the Echota family in the book trying to weave in -- here's, again, that question. How do we grieve? How do we heal? He incorporates the traditional Cherokee stories. It was also fun because I also had a couple of my own that I just write.

Zibby: Was one of yours the -- who had the one about the deer, the doe, talking to the guy in the woods? He had to run. Then he stood where the -- I'm not explaining this well. Then the leeches would get him.

Brandon: The leeches, that's based off a traditional story. Him rescuing the wolf and the wolf speaking through his eyes, that was me. That's not necessarily from a traditional story. To return to the pleasure of writing, to go back for aspiring writers, I really think there should be a lot of enjoyment and a lot of pleasure. I like the strangeness of it. It's Coleridge who said great art should incorporate some type of strangeness. That was Coleridge who said that, so I don't know. Take what you will. I do feel very strongly about the pleasure of writing. If it starts to feel like it's not pleasurable and it's just work, then it's maybe time to just put it aside and start something else.

Zibby: Excellent, excellent advice. This is great. We started with Chekhov. We ended with Coleridge. This is fantastic. I feel like I just had a little English throwback class here today. Thank you for dusting off the volumes in my mind.

Brandon: That's what getting a PhD does to you. It makes you throw these names out there, I guess.

Zibby: Might as well get your money's worth out of that PhD. If not now, when? [laughs]

Brandon: Exactly.

Zibby: Brandon, thank you so much. It was really a pleasure talking to you. I hope this wasn't as anxiety-invoking for either of us as perhaps some other settings.

Brandon: No. Thank you.

Zibby: It's been a pleasure to talk one on one with you here today.

Brandon: Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was fun.

Zibby: Good. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Brandon: Thanks. Buh-bye.

Rachel Hollis, DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING

Zibby Owens: Hi, Rachel.

Rachel Hollis: Hi. How you doing?

Zibby: I'm good. How are you doing?

Rachel: Good. Thank you.

Zibby: Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." This is such a treat to get to talk to you. Your latest book, Didn't See That Coming, I feel like that is the story of my life and obviously for so many people, especially during this time. Oh, my gosh, best title ever pretty much.

Rachel: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Zibby: Obviously, there's so much in life that none of us can see coming. You've had a lot of twists and turns from a very, very young age starting with your brother's suicide, which you write about so poignantly, all the way up until now. When you decided to write this book, which part did you want to focus on the most? What did you say was, this is the book that I have to talk about X, Y, Z? What was it?

Rachel: It's interesting. I read something years ago that said that all authors are essentially writing the same back over and over. There's a central theme for every author that they just keep exploring from a bunch of different directions. I thought that can't be true for me because I've written fiction, I have cookbooks, and I have nonfiction, personal development, self-help stuff. I thought about it. I was like, oh, yeah, all my books have the exact same theme no matter what it is I'm talking about, which is, you can do this. You can do this thing. In this book, what I wanted to explore most was encouraging people who are going through a hard season or who are in the midst of something difficult that you can get through this. Not only can you get through this, but you can come out the other side of it as a better person than you went into it. In order for that to be true, you have to make a conscious decision that you are going to pursue the learnings in this, the wisdom in this, the information that you can glean out of it. Otherwise, you feel bitter or you get stuck or you don't know how to move forward because you become paralyzed by the pain that you're inside of.

Zibby: Wow. It's all so true. You wrote so beautifully to your point about how people can get through grief especially. So many people are grieving right now given the pandemic and obviously just for regular life as well. You had this whole section. I just wanted to read a tiny portion of it because it was so encouraging. I have recently been through a lot of grief myself, so this was particularly resonant for me. You said, "The grief over death is making them miss the life that's still there. I can't tell you how to grieve. That's an incredibly personal process that nobody's in charge of but you, but I can tell you something with absolute certainty. The person you lost would not want this for you. The person you lost would never ever want you to suffer over their absence." Then you say, "It's okay to be sad. It's okay to miss them. It's not okay for you to lie down and die too. You are still here, and there's a reason for that." Tell me more about that and how to really channel what you might know intellectually but then put it into practice emotionally.

Rachel: This, for me, shows up in two ways. One is, you know if you've read the book, there's a chapter in it where I talk about my parents. I have children. I cannot imagine what it felt like for my parents to lose their only son to suicide. I can't even fathom that, but I do know what it feels like to be the little sister who -- as a little girl, I felt like I'm not enough of a reason for them to keep living because they both, in different ways, just checked out. They weren’t present. Ryan died when I was fourteen. From the time I was fourteen years old, I truly raised myself. Nobody cared if there was dinner. Nobody cared if my homework was done. Everything that I figured out how to do, I figured out on my own. I really truly live my life in a way that asks how situations, even if they're bad, can be for me. I look back and I'm like, oh, that's why I'm a self-starter. That's why I'm an achiever. That's how I built my company or wrote these books.

It was because of having gone through that experience, but there's still a part of that that's deeply painful that feels like I was abandoned by these people who are supposed to take care of me. That effectively, I don't want to say destroyed, but really hurt the relationship I have with both my parents for the rest of my life. On the one hand, I am speaking about grief from that perspective. Then the other place that I come from is having done so much therapy for so many years about coming to terms with the loss of my brother and finding the bittersweet in missing him. When he first passed away -- grief, if you've experienced this, then you know this is true. Grief is an evolution. The grief that you feel when you first lose someone or when you first lose something that really matters to you is very different than the grief that you experience five or ten years later. I don't think that it ever goes away, but it does evolve. To have gotten to a place in my life where I can miss my brother but also really see that there's beauty in that missing, it's celebratory of his life.

I was very close to my grandparents. Those are two other people that I, all the time, am missing. In my house, there's pictures of my brother. There's pictures of grandma and grandpa everywhere. I talk to my kids about them. Last year, we lost my brother-in-law very unexpectedly. That was devastating for our whole family. I was cooking dinner the other day. My niece, she's a grown-up, she's walking through the kitchen. It was her dad that we lost. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, I got to tell you, every time I make this, I think of your dad." She stopped. Her eyes are really big. She's like, "Why?" She just was so starving for that story. I'm like, "Let me tell you this story about when I was a little girl. You dad made me this thing." Even though there's pain in that memory, there's so much beauty in those people that we've lost still being very present in our lives. If there's a way for people to get to that place, it is just such a better state to exist in than only feeling the painful emotions.

Zibby: It's true. I feel like people are sometimes hesitant to tell stories or bring up the person who's recently died for fear of upsetting the griever, which I feel like couldn't be further from the truth. You're already thinking about the person. It's not like, oh, I forgot about this horrible thing that happened, but because you brought up my brother-in-law, now I'm upset. I think that's a big misconception. By the way, going back to your parents sort of abandoning you, when you wrote about it in the book, about your Christmas holidays and watching the movie over and over again with your sister, oh, my gosh. Then how your husband thought that that was just something you enjoyed doing, but it came from this deep place. Anyway, my heart was going out to you.

Rachel: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Zibby: I actually recently interviewed an author named Hope Edelman who wrote a book called The AfterGrief. I don't know if you're familiar with it or not. It's about how grief that stays with you for your whole life ends up, as you just mentioned, sort of morphs in some particular ways. She followed a group of people for thirty-odd years and did a lot of research into what the lasting effects of grief are. One of the points is exactly as you had said. There is a silver lining to it even though it's horrific and you wouldn't want that lining if you could return it, but that you do have a different type of appreciation of life. Anyway, in case you're in the market for a new book to read.

Rachel: Yeah, thank you.

Zibby: Another thing that I was really struck by in this book is that you have built up such a reputation for yourself as sort of the healer to everyone. You've sort of taken on everybody's pain. You were so honest in this book about how that makes you feel, like the scene where you're out with your son. Somebody comes over to you and starts spilling out their most traumatic memories and you're like, um, hold on. [laughs] Tell me a little bit about that. You don't often hear people who have become big-deal leaders on the emotional front having to confront how that makes them feel. I was hoping you could just tell me a little more about that.

Rachel: It's so interesting. This is the thing that people have to understand. This was never my aim. I never in my whole life thought that this would be what I was known for, truly. In fact, if you look at my career as an author, I started writing fiction. I just loved to write. I wrote fiction. Then I wrote cookbooks. I never thought, oh, I'm going to be this self-help whatever. Then I had another author friend who prompted me who was like, "What would you say to women? If you were going to write nonfiction, what would you say to women?" My answer was Girl, Wash Your Face. It was my first nonfiction book. I put it out there. Just like every other book I've ever put out in the world, it had a slow start. I was like, oh, my gosh, five people read it. This is great. Then it exploded, millions. I want to say it sold five million copies. It's insane what happened. I was describing it to someone the other day. I said the past three years have felt like I'm riding a runaway horse and I'm trying so desperately to rein it in and get control of the journey. It's not always graceful. I don't always do it well. It's just felt like a really crazy experience.

Back before COVID, my company would throw a big women's conference. We'd have five thousand women come from all over the world for three days, an amazing event. In those settings, I'm very prepared to hold space for your pain. I'm very prepared to be in that with you and talk about the hard things and do the work. There is a way that you can mentally and emotionally prepare yourself for that kind of experience. What happened when the books exploded was that there were no boundaries anymore. People would truly come up to -- the thing I talk about in the book is a real experience, being at the grocery store with my son and a woman walks up with no "Hello. How are you?" Just immediately starts bawling and telling a very traumatic and upsetting experience as my little boy is standing next to me holding my hand. He's afraid. It's funny, but it's one thing when it's me. When it's me and I'm walking through an airport or whatever, let's go. I'm here for you. I'll do all the things. I will be present with you in that space. The times that it has felt out of control, and it's happened many times, is when I'm with my kids. That feels, to me, so inappropriate, especially because women are often telling stories that little kids shouldn't hear.

I didn't know how to handle that, truthfully. I had no idea how to process that. What I did was, I just didn't want to leave my house. I traveled quite a bit at that time. I would travel and be on the road. People would stop me all the time. Then I would go home and I wouldn't leave home because I was afraid that I wouldn't know how to handle it. It just felt so overwhelming. It took a lot of time to come to terms with that and to accept the responsibility of that. I do think it's a responsibility. I handle it now by believing if I am in public, then I am prepared to hold space for people. I worked really hard to get here, but I also believe that God and the universe gave me this opportunity. I want to take that responsibility with the measure of how big it is, I want to take that and do it well. If I'm in public, I'm like, all right, I'm here for you. When I'm with my kids now, I have learned to steer the conversation. I have learned to hold boundaries up. I make it really clear that it's not an appropriate time to talk to me about that thing right now.

Zibby: Wow. That's a lot to have to put on your shoulders just to walk out the door if you want to go run to the store or pick up some milk. That's just a lot that you have to be -- it's almost like some sort of an ambassador, like a ruler almost, like you're the president. Being a public figure I guess is what I'm trying to say. Maybe you're not in the mood that day. What if you're having a terrible day yourself?

Rachel: Honestly, there's an interesting thing. I have some friends who are high-profile figures. The unique situation that I'm in is that I think because I talk about so many personal things in my life, my readers feel like they're my friends. They don't think that there's anything weird about walking up and being like, oh, my gosh, Rach! Then they’ll tell me some story. It's almost like they feel like they're in the middle of a conversation with me already. There are definitely other friends I have who, they don't experience that. I try and look at that as a gift. This is the biggest, lamest namedrop that I could possibly do, but my best example of this experience is, I had the opportunity at the end of this year to speak for Oprah on her tour. It was a lifelong dream. She's my hero. It was just such a huge moment. I love this story because I've met so many people that I admired and have been really disappointed. I can tell you that Oprah exceeds every expectation you could possibly hope for. I did my keynote. I was backstage. She had welcomed me onto stage and hugged me when I was done. I'm like, okay, that's it. She's freaking Oprah. I've had my moment. I went back to my dressing room. I was there with my best friends. We're just like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing.

Someone knocks on the door and says, "Miss Winfrey would like to come see you. Would that be okay?" All of us in the room pee our pants. We're like, what? I'm in this teeny tiny dressing room. Oprah wants to come to me in this trashy room? She's the queen. Shouldn't I go to her? It was so wild. I'm like, "Yes, that would be just fine." I close the door. We start cleaning. When you were little, if your company was ever coming and the whole family just starts cleaning feverishly, we're shoving things under cushions. Get it clean! She comes into the dressing room and hung out with us for about fifteen minutes, which still blows my mind. There was this moment where she said -- I know this sound cheesy, but she looks into your soul. She's not human, first of all. She's a goddess. It's something so much bigger than a regular human being. She looks into my soul through my eyes. She's like, "How has this felt for you?" I said, "It's been really hard. I have had to ask myself a lot in the last year if this is something I really want." She touched my hand. I wish you could see me right now because I'm acting out this entire thing. Truly, I cannot explain. My best friends were all there. It was a divine moment in my life. There is no other way to put it.

She touched my hand. She looked me in the eye. She said, "Do you want this?" Nobody spoke for like ninety seconds. I felt like it was the universe asking me, are you willing to carry this responsibility? I said, "I do." She said, "Okay, but you have to understand what you're taking on because very few people will understand what it means to hold this for so many women. I understand what it means. Just know what you are signing on for." I was like, okay. [laughs] It was truly just one of the most amazing moments in my whole life, understanding that you really do have to look at it as, it's not about me. None of this is about me. It's about her. It's about the reader. It's about who might be helped. I'll tell you truthfully that I approach my work, always, if I'm going out to give a keynote, if I'm writing a book, always, my prayer is, God, let this help one person. One person. If one single person is helped by this thing that I am about to do, then it was worth the effort and the energy and the pain and all of it. It doesn't matter. I'm talking about me. We could be talking you or your listeners. Whether you're a teacher, if you're a stay-at-home mama, if you're a podcast host, whatever it is that you're bringing to the world, if your work can positively affect the life of another human, then what a blessing. What a gift. I'm willing to carry the hardship and stress of that if it means that I can be helpful to someone.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, that was amazing. I want to stop recording and just replay this five times for myself. That was amazing. Thank you.

Rachel: Good. You're so welcome.

Zibby: First of all, I can't believe you started that by saying it was a pathetic namedrop. That was the most inspiring -- [laughs].

Rachel: I always feel like, "Oh, this time I met Oprah," shut up, dude. Don't be that person. I met a lot of people that I've been like, oh, man, I wish they weren’t so lame. She was so wonderful. Not only that, but she talked to my friends and hung out with my friends and took pictures. She had no reason to do that, no reason whatsoever. I like to tell that story because I think it's good to hear that people are good.

Zibby: I agree, especially somebody like Oprah who's so iconic. For you to have this personal experience and to know -- sometimes you hear things about people. You're like, she seems great, but privately she's really awful or she's so rude to other women. Then you're so disappointed. I'm not surprised to hear that she's as authentic as she seems, but it's still nice to hear.

Rachel: Absolutely.

Zibby: Wow, that was a fantastic answer. Let's talk about time and how you deal with all of the things that you do being of service to basically anybody who has an issue in the entire country or world or whatever, dealing with all of your kids, writing books, running a business. How are you doing all of this? I don't want to talk about juggling. Just literally, how do you get through this?

Rachel: I actually just posted something about this last night on Instagram. I will tell you, I'm saying this and maybe it's not true, but I am one of the most intentional people you will ever meet. I am wildly intentional with my time. I want to say this to your listeners. This is a learned behavior. This is not something that I grew up having. I would say about ten years ago when I really started to grow my business and I really started to focus on pursuing the goals that were in my heart, I started to understand that I needed to be so effective with the hours that I had inside of every single day. You do that by, number one, knowing what your personal values are. Especially for women and especially for moms, we are often told by the world, by our family, by society what we are meant to value. I absolutely fell into that trap when I was a new mom and was first trying to figure it all out. I was trying to be this picture-perfect, Pinterest mom and throw these elaborate birthday parties and volunteer as room mom and do all this stuff. I felt so frustrated. I felt so bitter. I did not feel closer to my kids. I felt like I was sort of making other moms think that I was doing a good job, but that I wasn't really doing what I wanted to do with my own family.

The first piece is knowing what your personal values are. I tend to think that we should choose four to five things that we're really going to focus on. The key, once you know what your values are, is to say, anything that is not these values does not have a place in my day. For instance, one of my biggest personal values is growth. I want to learn. I want to grow. I am a voracious reader. I am constantly challenging myself. I'm trying to learn Spanish. I'm taking horseback riding lessons. I want knowledge. It lights my heart on fire. I don't even care what the knowledge is about. I just love to learn. That is really important to me. Someone else might say, my greatest personal value is showing up in my community and volunteering. They might then spend their time doing that. If you know what it is that you care about, then you can lay out your day to make sure that you have time to do the things you say you care about. Know what your personal values are. Be willing to say no to anything that doesn't fall into that list. If you saw my schedule right now, it might stress you out. It might stress lots of people out. Yes, I am very busy. Beyond the stuff that's inside of my work schedule is just -- I'm looking at my calendar right now as I'm talking to you. My calendar starts at five AM. I put things into my calendar like, this is your reading time. This is when you do your gratitude work. This is when your workout happens. This is when you're going to meal prep for your day to make sure that you're eating foods that are going to bless your body today. This is when you're going to go on your run.

It's all in there because in order to accomplish and make traction against your goals, both personally and professionally, you have to have a plan for when they're going to show up. I'm super intentional. I'm very focused on where I'm going. The other piece of this is that if you're going to take the time to figure all of this out and you say that you care about something and you say that you're putting it in your calendar, you have to show up for yourself. I have a personal rule that I do not break a promise that I make to myself. As women, we often will keep our promise to everybody else, but break the promise that we made to ourselves. Meaning, you said, man, I'm for sure going to get a walk in today because I know it makes my spirit feel so good and I love to get outside, but then someone needs you to do a favor. You're like, you know what, I'll not the do the thing that matters to me so that I can do the thing that you need me to do, which is how we get to the place where we're burnt out and stressed out. If you say that you are going to do something, you got to do it. You've got to hold yourself accountable to the things that you said you were going to do. Those are some really practical things that I do to make sure that I can accomplish all the things that I set out to do.

Zibby: This is amazing. You have bullet points for everything I ask. This is perfect advice. It's amazing.

Rachel: The thing is, I get a lot of the same questions on social or on Live or whatever.

Zibby: Oh, I'm sorry.

Rachel: No, no, no, don't hear me like that. What I mean is, I get a lot of the same questions from people in my community, not that I get the same ten questions, but I get the same one hundred questions. I try really hard to come up with answers that are helpful. Even for you, you're doing this podcast and you're helping people find information in the world. Oftentimes, someone will ask us how to do something. We think that the knowledge that we have -- you're like, oh, that's so simple. Anything I tell you would be dumb. Nobody wants to know how -- no, people want to know exactly how. I try really hard to pay attention to how I get the result so that when somebody prompts me, I'm like, great, I've got three things you can do right now.

Zibby: Wow. I'm going to put that on my list of things to do, having a million answers ready for when anyone asks me anything, not that anyone cares.

Rachel: Girl, don't say that. If you have listeners, they care.

Zibby: I'm joking. My one question about your really effective, intentional time management system is that you have lots of kids. So do I. They don't really care what's on my schedule sometimes. When they fall and need a Band-Aid or when they want to show me their art project, I stop everything. How do you interweave the complete unpredictability of having children with the need to be totally self-directed?

Rachel: Great question. I'll tell you that as I look at my schedule right now, I've got this chunk of time that starts at five AM and ends at six thirty, which is when the kids get up for school. Then there's a chunk of time that's just, breakfast, lunches. Get everything prepped. Get everything ready. Get the day going. Once they're settled, then I'm going to start my workday. I will tell you, because I'm the queen of ask for help, I have a nanny. I'm really blessed in that I have a nanny of four kids. I could not do the work that I'm doing if I didn't have her help. The kids' dad is as present as a father as I am as a mother, so definitely coparenting inside of the family. Then the other thing I would say is the schedule ends every day at five PM. Past five PM is clear. I know the things that I want to do because I'm really big on routine and ritual. Each one of my kids, there's a different bedtime routine that I go through with them. That's really important to me. I talked about, how do I want to show up as a mom? I freaking love teachers. I'm so grateful for teachers. If someone wants me to donate money or get cupcakes for the class bake sale, I am there. If you want me to volunteer my time, that is not a value. That's not a personal value that I have as a mom. My value with my kids is intentional time with them at home, so what happens in the morning, what happens at night, what happens on weekends. After five PM, it's clear again because that's just family time. That's kid time. By compartmentalizing my day like that, I am so much more productive with work. At five o'clock, I do not look at work. I'm not picking up my phone. I am not checking email. I am not on Slack because that time is for me and my kids.

Zibby: Wow. That's impressive and inspiring. Thank you.

Rachel: Just know, please know this took me years to get to this place. I would just make a little bit of progress over here. Then on that progress, I'd add another great little thing and another great little thing to get to the place that I am today. I don't think we go from zero to sixty overnight. I think that you just slowly try and weave in things that will be helpful to you. Then you build the foundation for the life that you want to have.

Zibby: That's great. If I could figure out how to cut out hours of emails after five PM, that would be very nice. [laughs] I'm working on it. I'm going to use the Rachel Hollis tools now. I feel empowered and all the rest.

Rachel: There you go. I know you're a reader. I just want to ask, have you read The One Thing by Gary Keller?

Zibby: I have not.

Rachel: Please put that on your list, especially as you're working on the show and you're trying to grow your platform, whatever that looks like, for people who are listening who are businessowners. Heck, you could look at it through the lens of having a better family. The idea in that book is Gary Keller, who is Keller Williams Real Estate, he talks about this idea that we all have this stuff. We have fifty million things that we want to do in our business, in our life. It helps you identify, what's the one thing that I could do that would make the rest of the list obsolete? If I pursue this one thing and I make traction against this one goal, everything else, it's like the tide coming into the harbor. All the boats rise. That's a really powerful tool, a really incredible read for anybody who feels like, oh, my gosh, there's so much going on. How do I even focus? The One Thing by Gary Keller.

Zibby: I'm buying it right this second. I'm on my phone as we're talking.

Rachel: Please do. You'll love it.

Zibby: It's in my cart. I'm checking out. Done. See, multitasking, there you go. [laughter]

Rachel: Perfect.

Zibby: This whole thing has been advice, but in terms of writing itself because we haven't talked too much about the actual writing, do you have advice to aspiring authors on how to get everything done or just any inspiring advice on that front?

Rachel: Yes. Honestly, I will give you a little tidbit. I got this request so often that I just did a podcast about this I want to say three weeks ago, four weeks ago. It is my most successful podcast of all time, which is wild. "The Rachel Hollis Podcast," it's called How to Write a Book. If you go look, it's just a few weeks old. It won't be hard to find. I share all of my wisdom. What it boils down to is, writing -- I don't care how much support you have from family and friends. I don't care if you don't have support. Writing is a really interesting thing because it is a solo endeavor. It doesn't matter what is going on in the world around you. You have to find the will to write down the words. I was at an author conference years ago. I was listening to a workshop given by Nora Roberts who has written ten million books. Someone raised their hand. They were like, "What's the trick? Tell me, how are you so productive?" Everyone's looking for the magic bullet or the thing that's going to -- can I buy something that's going to make this easier? or whatever. Nora said, "Yeah, I'll tell you how to finish. Sit your butt in the chair," except she didn't say butt. She said, "Sit your butt in the chair. Write the freaking words." She also didn't say freaking. This sweet, petite, polished older woman fully dropping F bombs was like, write the words. That's the trick. If you want this thing, there's a reason that not everybody does it. It's hard. You have to give yourself the permission to get to a first draft that's awful. You have to let yourself create. This is not just for writers. This is anybody who wants to create. You're going to have let your creation suck. If you don't let it suck so that you can get to the end of the first draft, you're never going to get to the polished book which comes in the eighth edit. Just let yourself have that freedom. Push yourself to finish. If you want all the other advice, go listen to the podcast.

Zibby: This is great. I wish I could interview you every day. [laughs]

Rachel: There you go. Here I am.

Zibby: Thank you. Wow. I hate to even end this, but I don't want to take too much of your time. I know I'm already over. Thank you so, so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and sharing all of your tips and tricks. I know there are a bazillion more in the book, Didn't See That Coming. Your story with Oprah is going to stay with me the rest of the day. It was just awesome. The work you're doing is amazing. It was great to be able to chat with you.

Rachel: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Zibby: No problem. Have a great day.

Rachel: You too.

Zibby: Thanks. Buh-bye.

Rachel: Buh-bye.

Alice Hoffman, MAGIC LESSONS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Alice. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I feel like I should call you Mrs. Hoffman. I have so much respect for you. I feel bad just calling you Alice.

Alice Hoffman: Please call me Alice.

Zibby: I'm delighted to have you on my podcast. I was actually secretly thrilled when you followed me on Instagram. I was like, oh, my gosh, Alice Hoffman's following me. It's a thrill. Welcome.

Alice: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Congratulations on your latest book, Magic Lessons. At this point in your career, do you even get excited when a new book comes out? What's it like when a book comes out when you've already written so many books?

Alice: I more get anxious than I get excited. You're with the book by yourself for so long. Then it goes out into the world. It's kind of like sending your kid to school or something like that. You lose control. You don't know how people are going to like that kid of yours. Then once it's out, then it's fine. It's just more like the week before, the week of its first being out there, it's anxiety-provoking.

Zibby: Do you feel any better at this point? Are you calming?

Alice: Yeah.

Zibby: I'm glad I caught you on the down. [laughs] Would you mind just telling listeners a little more about Magic Lessons and why you chose to write a prequel to Practical Magic at this point?

Alice: I wrote Practical Magic, the original book, twenty-five years ago. I never intended to write any more about that family, but I kept getting notes and letters from readers that they really felt like it wasn't enough. They wanted to know more. Instead of going forward in time, I'm more interested in going back in time. The first thing I did was write a book called Rules of Magic which took place in the 1960s because that's my era. It was a pleasure to write about it. Then when I thought about writing another book because I kept getting letters, I thought I really wanted to see how the family originated. I'm always interested in, there's a theory of ghosts in the nursery, those relatives that you've never even met that influence everything about you and your life. I wanted to go backward in time and see who the first Owens woman was.

Zibby: Wow. By the way, my husband and I listened to this. We started listening to it in the car together. Our last name is Owens. It started the narration, and we were looking at each other like, [gasp]. [laughs]

Alice: I don't know, maybe you're related.

Zibby: Maybe.

Alice: I have to say, the recording is great. It's Sutton Foster. I'm a big fan of hers. She was in Younger. She's a great theater actress. It's a wonderful recording.

Zibby: I just had Pamela Redmond on my podcast who wrote Younger. It's all coming full circle.

Alice: Really?

Zibby: Yes. It was an amazing recording and very captivating. The drive flew by. Why write it now? Why at this point? You could write any book. What's it like when you sit down and you're like, what's my next project going to be? How come you arrived at this today?

Alice: I don't know if I think about it that way because I have a list of projects, things that I'm interested in doing, books that I think I'm going to write. It was sitting here. I just thought, I had a lot of fun writing Rules of Magic, so I wanted to get back to that. I kind of wanted to escape. I felt like this book could be an escape for me as a writer. I think it is in some ways for readers. This is such a difficult time. I felt like I wanted to go back to this other time and escape into magic and escape into this family. As it turned out, a lot of things that had happened in the seventeenth century had a correlation to what is happening right now in terms of how women are treated and the idea of strong, independent women being feared. Also, I didn't realize it took place during and after the plague in England. As I was writing it, it was just very strange that the world seemed not that different.

Zibby: I was helping my daughter study for an American history test last night. I was reading through the things. I was like, "Actually, this is very similar to the Black Lives Matter movement that's going on right now. You know how there are protests across the street? This is what they did then." It's funny how things sort of ebb and flow in cycles.

Alice: They really do. It was really interesting to me. Also, the whole idea of the puritan mentality -- puritans were the ones that started the witchcraft trials here. Although, there were witchcraft trials all over Europe. The idea that women were kind of at the root of all evil, it's the idea of Eve bringing evil into the world. It was really shocking, their whole philosophy, and a little bit scary because there's a little some of that happening right now.

Zibby: I was going to say, that's not completely gone, I would think, from some people's imaginations or whatever you want to call it. Why do you think witchcraft? I understand what you're saying about women in general, but what is it about the sorcery, the witchcraft-y-ness of it? You have lists of ingredients and what all of these things do, which you must have researched, I'm assuming.

Alice: Oh, yeah.

Zibby: What is your fascination with it?

Alice: I have always been fascinated with witches. I was a fairy tale fanatic as a kid. At that point when I was a kid, I felt like it was the literature that spoke the truth in a very deep way, an emotional truth that other children's literature didn't at that time. I still think it's the deepest psychological literature, especially when you're a child. I feel like witches, they are the only female mythic creature. They're the only mythic creature with power. I think that's why as a little girl I always wanted to dress up as a witch. I always wanted to read about witches. I just felt like they had power.

Zibby: There you go. It's funny because I never really thought of witches in such a positive way until this whole experience with you.

Alice: Good. [laughs] The idea of midwives and healers, I think that's all kind of under the same label as witch, women who do things they're not supposed to do. I thought it was so interesting that during the plague that women who did herbal remedies had a bigger success rate than doctors, mostly because they washed their hands. That was so interesting to me.

Zibby: That is interesting. That's the thing I try over and over to teach the kids. This is of the moment, the most important thing. What about mediums today? Do you feel like they're in the same family as the witch, or you think it's witch-adjacent?

Alice: I think witch is more mythic, more nature. It has more to do with green magic, nature, herbs, healing. That's how I perceive it. I have to say, in fairy tales, I can't remember the exact statistic, but over ninety percent of fairy tales have girl heroes, which is very unusual in folk tales or in any story, really. In fairy tales, the girls are the ones that figure things out. The girls are the ones who are at risk. I always feel like they're cautionary tales, the stories your grandmother would tell you to beware of certain things and to know certain things.

Zibby: Speaking of at risk, let's go back in time to your career trajectory here. First of all, can you tell me a little more about how you got started? I know I've read about it, but if you could just tell me the story of how your passion for writing translated in such a unique way into becoming a writer.

Alice: I never thought I'd be a writer. I was a reader. I was a fanatical reader. I was a secret writer, as I think many people are, especially girls. I had stories and notebooks that I never showed anyone. Then when I was about sixteen, for some reason I wrote a story and I sent it to Esquire magazine. I had never seen Esquire magazine. I'd just heard of it. I'd never read it. I sent them a terrible story about the end of the world. I didn't use any capital letters. I got back a handwritten note from somebody who said to me, "You should use capital letters and grammar. Also, if you have another story sometime and you're not kidding around, send it to us." I was in shock. It was this thing where suddenly I was in touch with the outside world, and somewhere, someone at this mythical magazine thought I was a writer. That stayed with me. I kept writing. I never intended to go to college. I lived in a very working-class world. I started going to college. I went to night school. My brother lived in California and said there was a really good school out there, I should apply, and then I could move to California. I had never heard of this school, but I applied.

It was Stanford. They gave me a fellowship. I had a great mentor. It just totally changed my life. I feel like sometimes you have this one teacher that just changes everything. My teacher was Albert Guerard. He sent my first story to City College, to a magazine that they had called Fiction. A friend of his was the editor. It was published, which was a shock. There's no money involved. I don't think people became writers to make money or anything back then. After the story was published, I got a letter from a very famous editor named Ted Solotaroff. He said, "Do you have a novel?" I wrote back. I said, "I do." I started writing it that day really fast. I think that's why I'm a fast writer. I just felt, I don't know if this guy's going to keep his job or what's going to happen. I better write this novel fast because no one's ever going to ask me this again.

Zibby: Wow. How long did that book take you?

Alice: Six months, but it was terrible. It was terrible. He helped me with it. In the end, he didn't take it, but he sent it to my agent. I feel like it was luck. Also, every time somebody opened the door, I walked through. I didn't say, I don't know, I don't have a novel, or it might take me two years. I just felt like, this is my chance and I'm taking it.

Zibby: That's great. You don't have the same agent, do you?

Alice: She was my agent until she passed away.

Zibby: I'm sorry.

Alice: She was my agent for, I think, forty years.

Zibby: I'm so sorry.

Alice: I was lucky. I was really lucky. She was great. Her name was Elaine Markson. She was an amazing agent.

Zibby: I also noticed you started the Hoffman Center for Breast Cancer Research. Is that right?

Alice: Yeah.

Zibby: I wanted to find out more about why you started that and what that whole initiative is about.

Alice: I'm a breast cancer survivor of twenty-five years. When I was being treated at Mount Auburn Hospital, which is a Harvard teaching hospital, this small hospital, they didn't have a breast center. While you were waiting for radiation, you'd be sitting next to someone who had broken his arm. Once I sat next to Gina, my wonderful dog groomer. There was no privacy. I think when you're going through treatment for that, you need something special. When I finished my treatment, I asked some of the doctors over there, what could I do? They said, "Let's start a center here. That's what you can do." For twenty-five years almost, maybe it's more like twenty years, we've been doing an event every spring where writers come and read. We've had incredible writers, everyone from Amy Tan to Celeste Ng to just so many amazing people who have given so generously of their time and created this state-of-the-art breast cancer center. I'm really proud of being involved with them.

Zibby: I want to get on the list. Put me on the list for the benefit. That sounds great. Obviously, as we've discussed with my love of books, I'm a sucker for hearing authors talk. I never seem to get tired of it, which is sort of shocking even to me. Of course, to support a great cause is also wonderful.

Alice: I will. I don't know what we're doing this year because everything is different this year.

Zibby: Everything is different everywhere. I'm beginning to think it's just never going back. I've given up. I've given up hope. [laughs]

Alice: I think Zoom is here to stay, don't you think?

Zibby: I do.

Alice: I think podcasts are here to stay. Certain things I think are not going back.

Zibby: It is nice not to have to move around as much throughout the world to see all these different people, which is nice. That's the only perk I've found. A lot your books have been adapted to movies, TV. How does that process fit into your thinking when you're writing the book? Do you visualize scenes at all, movie-wise, or does it not even come into your consciousness?

Alice: The truth is, I was a screenwriter for twenty-five years, some with my own books, but mostly for other people's books. I learned a lot from being a screenwriter. I learned a lot about telling a story. When I'm writing, I don't think of it as a movie. I feel like it's something I'm living. I feel like I'm in the book. I'm living it. I am the characters. I don't really think of it as a movie, like, would this make a good movie? That's not really the way I think about it.

Zibby: I'm sorry. I did know that because you wrote Independence Day, right, the screenplay for that?

Alice: Mm-hmm.

Zibby: Anyway, I'm sorry. I have heard from other authors how critical a skill it is to be able to screenwrite and then turn -- I feel like there's so many people who write fiction primarily and they're like, now I'm going to try screenwriting. I think there's something in the reverse that's very powerful.

Alice: I think it does teach you something about telling a story. It's really different. They're very different things. It teaches you to know what the heart of your story is. I think when you're writing a novel, this happens to me, you can just really get lost in these offshoots and tangents. Sometimes they're really interesting. Basically, with a screenplay, you're pretty much telling a straight-on story. That’s helpful.

Zibby: Which of your many projects are you going to pick up next?

Alice: I'm working on the fourth Magic book. I thought I was finished until I talked to my editor, but it turns out I'm not finished. [laughs] I have some more work on it. That's been both really fun and really sad because I feel like it's the last book. It's the end of twenty-five-year relationship with the Owens family. It's been both things. It's also been a great escape during this time during that's such a sad, terrible time.

Zibby: Which period of the world? What timeline are you writing that book in?

Alice: It's modern times.

Zibby: Wow, how great. Then you can have a whole box set, sell it at Halloween.

Alice: They're not all published by the same publisher.

Zibby: So you can't do that?

Alice: I can't do that with all of them.

Zibby: Well, that's okay. You can make your own. [laughter]

Alice: That's a good idea.

Zibby: Little gift bags. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Alice: I really think the best advice is to do it every day. My life is a little complicated right now, but I always would get up really early before anybody else was awake, before the phone's ringing, and work for at least two hours so that you get that two hours in. If you get up at five thirty and start working from six or whatever time it is, for me, that always was really helpful. When I had other jobs, I'd get up before that other job and write then. I feel like if you write every day, it's not so hard to go back to it. For me, I always feel like if I stop writing, I'm never going to be able to remember how to do it again. That's my tip. You have to write in order to write.

Zibby: It's so funny that you've been such an established literary figure and you still are afraid that if you take too long a vacation, you'll lose it.

Alice: I am afraid I'm going to lose it. Every time I start a book I feel like I don't know who wrote the other books. I don't know how they did it. I don't know how to do it. I have to relearn, how do you write a book?

Zibby: [laughs] How do you do it? Do you get it all out? Do you ever outline your stories?

Alice: I do. I'll outline. I make a lot of notes. What's fun for me is world-building. I write down lists of plants and lists of places and if I'm writing about the sixties in New York, all the different music clubs and all the different bookstores that were there, just starting to build the world for the characters to move in.

Zibby: Wow, that's beautiful. It's amazing that there's a job that allows you to just recreate the universe in which you live every time you open your laptop.

Alice: It's a good job. You know, it's kind of what you do as a reader. You leave this world behind. You go into a book. You escape. I feel like it's the same thing when you're writing. You're creating this other world using things that you knew, who you are and how you see the world. It's just creating something brand new.

Zibby: I know the world has changed so much from when you first went to Stanford until now. Is there anything that you miss from the way the publishing industry used to work? Is there anything you long for?

Alice: When I started, nobody talked about getting published. Nobody talked about money. It was right after the Ken Kesey era. Yes, you wanted to write a perfect story or something like that. There were no book tours except for people like Norman Mailer or something like that. There were no book tours. It wasn't about the outside things. It was about the inside, about wanting to be a writer, wanting to tell a story. I think there's a lot more pressure on people right now. I think it's harder to get published. The publishing houses are conglomerates. There were a lot more publishing houses. Now there are also different options about publishing in different ways, online or with small presses. I kind of miss that freedom to just do whatever you wanted to. It was about what you wanted to write, not about what's publishable. Now for people starting out, they have to think about both things.

Zibby: That's true. That's where the commercialization of even fiction writing -- but I often hear that the best advice is to ignore all of that, as I'm sure you would agree, and just do what's fun for you and what you need to write or else you can kind of tell when there's no passion in it.

Alice: Absolutely. You have to have passion. If you want to be published, it also can't be, like, a diary. I always feel like I'm writing for myself and I'm writing the book for myself. Somebody else has to read it and have it mean what it means to them.

Zibby: Is there any innovations that you've particularly adapted well to that you're like, I love X, Y, or Z? I don't even know why I'm asking you these questions. I'm just curious.

Alice: I love Google because if I don't know what year something happened and I'm in the middle of writing, I don't have to go through all my books. I can just find out what year the Salem witch trials ended real quick. It's very helpful. Also, when I started, people were typing. It took a long time. Every time you rewrote, you rewrote the whole manuscript, really. I think it was kind of good practice, actually, but it just was time-consuming.

Zibby: I am old enough that I used to use a typewriter for my school assignments and have my mother help me and have to restart and the Wite-Out, and oh, my gosh.

Alice: Wite-Out, yeah.

Zibby: The idea that you can even produce as clear a thought when there's so much on the line, when you have to start over again as opposed to now, it's like, I'll change that.

Alice: I actually think that's good for writers. I tend to still do that. When you start at the beginning again instead of moving things around the way we can do now, it gives it different rhythm. It makes for a different kind of revision. Sometimes when I talk to -- I'm involved in a program for young writers at Adelphi University out on Long Island every summer. Sometimes I think they really think that writers just write it down, and that's it. That's not it at all. Most people have to do lots of revisions and lots of changes. I think that's just a good thing to know when you're starting out, that everybody does it.

Zibby: Yes, wait for those comments in Google Docs. Then everything melds together, your love of Google. There you go. [laughs] Thank you so much. Thanks for chatting with me today. I'm sorry I had such random questions, but I was really curious about the lifespan of being an author for so many different periods of time as the industry has changed. You've stayed just as current. It's really awesome. It was a unique vantage point, so thanks.

Alice: Thank you. Thanks for chatting with me today.

Zibby: Thank you. Have a great day.

Alice: Take care. Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Alison Hammer on ending the taboo of talking about weight

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Alison. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight." 

Alison Hammer: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited. I'm not a mom, but I am an aunt.

Zibby: You do not have to be a mom. I'm delighted to have a non-mom. It's just because I'm a mom and this is my brand and whatever. [laughs] Alison, you've been part of the community on Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight. You've been commenting. You have an interesting story. I would love to hear it. Tell me about your journey.

Alison: Absolutely. I've been dealing with needing to lose weight pretty much my whole life. I was talking to my mom this morning trying to remember exactly how old I was when I was in Weight Watchers. It was either eight or ten. I was the youngest member in the meeting. Then we did another program, a medical program. I was the youngest by far. It was all these forty-year-olds and me. At the time, I think I was twelve or thirteen. I went to a weight loss camp when I was a teenager. I've done everything. I've had a few times in my life where I've been successful, but it usually would have a stopping point. I would get back into bad habits. I wasn't necessarily an emotional eater. I wasn't necessarily an overeater. I think that I made a lot of bad food choices. I put a lot of pressure on myself. My family, weight has been an issue on both my mom's side and my dad's side historically. My grandmother was a lifetime member of Weight Watchers. My mom has done Weight Watchers. She still thinks she needs to lose weight even though she doesn't. It's been something that has just been part of my family and part of my life since I can remember. It has been a constant struggle. This past year, it's been a big year for me. I have a full-time job. I also have a second full-time job. I had my first book come out this year on April 7th.

Zibby: Congratulations.

Alison: Thank you. About two or three weeks into the pandemic, so it's been a crazy ride. That was a big moment where I thought I might be out there a little bit more. I'm sorry, I'm a mess. [laughs] 

Zibby: There's no right way. Literally, we're friends talking. I just want to hear the story. You don't have to have any pressure. I'm just curious.

Alison: This is the first time I've publicly talked about it. This might be interesting. When you're struggling with weight, it's something that, it's visible. Anybody who sees you, they know it. It's such a taboo topic that it's not like people really talk about it. I remember one time when I joined Weight Watchers probably my fourth or fifth time, I made a point to tell people because if you tell people, then they’ll help you be accountable. It's not something that I've ever talked publicly about. I'm really excited, but I'm also a little bit nervous.

Zibby: I understand. I totally understand. If it makes you feel any better, I had the same thing. My mother had me, age ten, I was measuring half a cup of orange juice and writing down my calories and looking it all up in a book before I went to fourth grade. I understand the pressure and societal expectations and all the rest. I get it.

Alison: It's fascinating to me because I think that our mothers, they were doing what they were doing out of love. It's because of what their mothers did. I think that this generation, it's different in the way of body positivity and of accepting. The world has changed, I think for the better. The fact that we're having conversations like this and there's communities like yours, I think it's all for the better. I'm very social. I always have a lot of friends. I'm doing a lot of different things, but I feel like I probably kept part of myself hidden. When I look back at photos, I always had to be the one who was in control of the photos because I wanted to be able to protect myself from any unflattering lens. I was always really careful in that situation. I also, looking back at photos, saw that I would always be in the back. I would be kind of hiding and popping my head out. I was just very self-conscious about how I looked in photos. With my book coming out, it was something that was on my mind. If I was doing a reading, back when the world had readings, if I was a bookstore, I couldn't control that anymore. That was something that I was a little bit worried about. As excited as I was about this new career and this new world I was getting into, I had a little bit of anxiety about it. 

About a year before my book came out -- it's such a long process. I sold it in 2018. It didn't come out until 2020. I had another writer friend who had a health scare. That scared me. I was always like, I'm fine. I'm heavy, but I'm healthy. I also have an issue -- I hadn’t been to a doctor for a checkup in a while because it was something, again, with a lot of anxiety. I found a great doctor using the Zocdoc app. Just finding a new doctor can be overwhelming in itself. The app made it really easy to find someone who had availability that week so I didn't lose my nerve. They had Yelp reviews, so I could find somebody with good bedside manner. I went to the doctor. She suggested that I try Whole30. I was like, "No way. There's no way I can do it." I have a ton of friends who do it. I'm very picky. I don't eat red meat or pork. That was the main thing. It felt to me like something that was so protein heavy. I eat chicken, turkey, and seafood. I love cheese. There's no way I can do that. She's like, "Try it." I was like, "Okay, fine." I tried it. It wasn't as hard as I thought. In the first month, I lost twenty-five pounds. It was crazy. I decided to keep going with it. On Whole30, it's super strict. They want you to break habits. If you always have coffee with cream and you're like, there's no way I can do it, break that habit. You might be surprised that you like it. They don't want you to do a lot of replacements because they want you to break that habit. Because I was making it more of a lifestyle, I decided I'm okay with getting a replacement. 

I avoid anything with grains, dairy, or sugar, which sounds like everything. It kind of is, but I've found things that I love. I look forward to lunch every day. It's something that is totally on plan. The other night, I'd had a tough night. Just between work deadlines and book deadlines, I was like, I don't have time to cook. I ordered from a restaurant down the street. It was wings that were not breaded and crispy potatoes. That's on plan. I wasn't cheating. I lost weight the next day. I think that there's such a thing about good foods and bad foods. What I tell people is that it took me forty years to find out what worked for me. Looking back, it's that my body doesn't react well to grains, dairy, and sugar. Even if I just had a little bit or even if I was counting points or even if I was doing all these different things, not every plan is right for every person. I tease, it took me forty years to figure it out. In May, I hit the one-hundred-pound mark. It's crazy. It's funny. When I look in the mirror, I don't always see it. There have been a few times where I've seen pictures of me that other people have posted where I can't find myself in the photo. Then I look and I'm like, oh, that's me. It's been an interesting experience. Then I hit a hundred pounds and went into quarantine. My building has a gym. The gym closed. I, again, have two full-time jobs that got really busy. I sit at this little table for fourteen hours a day, it seems.

Zibby: Where are you in the world, by the way? Are you in New York?

Alison: No, I'm in Chicago.

Zibby: Okay. Sorry, go on.

Alison: I live in Chicago. I have a six-hundred-square-foot apartment. There's not a ton of room. I probably use a lot of excuses. I'm sure I could've done a Zoom workout, but where would I have done it? I'm really good at procrastinating. I'm really good at making excuses. I kept up the eating. I commented on one of the posts in the group about this the other day. I take an eighty/twenty approach. If I was going to be good a hundred percent of the time, I would fail. I'm somebody who believes in setting goals that I will achieve. I want to set myself up for success. I end up doing probably ninety-nine to a hundred. Most days, I'm staying in plan. I have a group of writers. We call ourselves Slice of Fiction. We go out for pizza once every couple months. I had a piece of pizza. It was amazing. I didn't feel guilty about it because it fits into that eighty/twenty. It doesn't get me off of the rails. I found substitutes. I like salty more than sweet, but I like a bite of sweet. I found a few things that don't have grains and don't have sugar but can give me that fix. I don't feel like I'm suffering.

Zibby: Wait, what are those things? [laughs] Back up to the secret weapon there.

Alison: There's two things that I go to. One of them is Catalina Crunch. It's a cereal. They have a chocolate flavor. They have a graham cracker flavor and a cinnamon toast flavor that I've had. I literally just take a little pinch of it. I have just a few of those dry. It feels cookie-like. There's another thing I just tried last night. Some of my friends posted all of their baking photos. They were quarantine baking, and cookies. I wanted something sweet. I decided to try, I have this Birch Benders pumpkin pancake mix. I asked my critique partner, I'm like, "Do you think I could pour them in a muffin tin and turn it into muffins with a batter?" She's like, "Why not?" I made muffins with pancake mix. It turned out great. Another thing, I love pasta. I'm Jewish. I feel like Jews and Italians, they have a lot of similar issues and food we love. I found a chickpea pasta which literally tastes exactly the same to me. I put my sauce on it. I have an almond ricotta cheese that I'll use a little bit of. Really, I don't suffer. When I go out to restaurants, most places it's fine to make accommodations. I think just starting was the hard thing. Then once I got used to it -- one of my best friends is vegan. When she made that decision to go vegan, she realized that everybody has food issues. When you go to a restaurant with five people, someone's going to say, that on the side, I don't want that, I don't want that. 

Rather than be embarrassed about my special needs, I'm proud of, no, I'm doing this for my health. I'm doing this for me. I've been okay with it. I am pretty annoying to go out to dinner with, though. Again, once I went into quarantine, it just stopped. As of today, I'm at 104 pounds lost. I reached a hundred in May. I haven't gotten to 105 yet. I've been between 104 and then 98 for the last six months. I've just been going up and down, and up and down. It's been super frustrating. I've been really frustrated with myself. I have a lot of friends who are like, "Everybody else in the world is gaining weight during quarantine, so maybe maintaining is okay." I'm really hard on myself. I know a lot of women are. When I saw you starting that group, I'm like, maybe that accountability is what I need. I use accountability in my writing life. I run a Facebook group for women called The Every Damn Day Writers. I think that having that support and that accountability, it helps me get my writing done, and so maybe it'll help with this.

Zibby: I hope so. I hope we can help. I think just having the group and knowing anybody out there cares and listens is helpful, for me personally. I'm a member of -- what's that hair club commercial? Do you know what I'm talking about, or am I dating myself here?

Alison: I do. I'm not just a spokesperson, I'm a member too.

Zibby: I'm also a member, right. You can follow a plan, but there's something intangible that I think the Weight Watchers method originally set out to do, which I think has been lost in the corporatization or whatever. It was sitting around talking to other women in someone's living room. There are no living rooms, but I was doing that with books. If I could do that with weight loss -- women, we could sit and talk for eight hours straight about eating stuff.

Alison: A hundred percent. To me, I loved that part of Weight Watchers. I actually used one of the lines, my Weight Watchers, the leader when I was living in Boston used. She said that if somebody offers you something that you can't have, say you're allergic and that you'll break out in hips. [laughter] With Weight Watchers, for me, it would always work. Then I would get so comfortable with it that I would eyeball things. I would be like, I don't have to count because I know. Then just bit by bit, you would get back into bad habits. For me, I realized that, again, it's what I have to do for myself and that I'm better when it's stricter. It's worked. It's crazy. One funny story. My gym has opened again with mixed hours. I got to a point where I had certain Netflix shows. I watched You on Netflix, but I would only let myself watch it when I was on the treadmill. That was a motivator to go do that. I got into it. I got to a point where I was actually looked forward to it. It had been five months since I had been on the treadmill. I've been taking walks, but there's something different about the ground moving underneath you or not when you're on a treadmill. 

I went back last week. I was very proud of myself for going back, but I made a mistake. I started where I had left off. I was doing this interval program at intermediate level. My first time back in five months, I went at intermediate level. Let me tell you, I should've started back at beginner again. I wouldn't have been surprised if I had fallen off the treadmill. It started going so fast. It did show me how far I had come when I was doing it. I do think that it's that habit and routine. Again, everybody that I talk to -- my sister tried Whole30, and it didn't work for her. I think that a lot of it is trying to see what's right for you. I spent a lifetime trying things. I'm glad that I finally figured it out. I'd like to lose about forty more pounds. I don't know if I'll ever be thin, but I don't know if that's my goal. I want to feel good and look good and be healthy and not have to worry too much about hiding from photos and being able to enjoy my life and to not have to worry about not being able to keep up if my friends want to go somewhere. I'm in a walking city, being able to walk everywhere. It's been a big year. I'm excited about it.

Zibby: First of all, I don't want this to sound condescending to say I'm proud of you. Maybe that's the wrong word. I'm really excited for you. I think it's amazing that you found something that worked, and you stuck to it and you had a huge accomplishment. That just shows such commitment and drive and so many other amazing qualities about you and your focus. I know how frustrating it must feel when you're close. You're trying so hard. You didn't give up trying for six months, even though I see why people want to say, oh, you didn't gain. I do feel that way too. It could've been far worse, but that's not what you want to hear when you're trying to go forward.

Alison: It's interesting. I didn't think about this until you just said that, but I had my book launch as my goal. I wanted to lose a hundred pounds by April 7th when my book came out. I didn't make it. I was close. I was at ninety-five or something. I was still happy enough about it.

Zibby: That counts.

Alison: Doing this side by side was great. When I hit a hundred, it was amazing. Then my attitude was like, okay, I hit that goal. I know I want to lose another forty, but I'm not in a rush for it. I was in a rush for it before. I did it healthfully. I lost in a safe amount of time. Maybe I need that goal. Maybe I need to give myself that. My next book's coming out April 13th, so I maybe I need another [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Zibby: There you go. I think that's perfect. What is that? Six months away or so?

Alison: Exactly, from tomorrow.

Zibby: Six months, six times four, it's about twenty-four weeks. Maybe forty's too much, but if you do a pound a week.

Alison: I think that I should pick a number. Forty's the final goal. Maybe I can do it. I, again, like goals that I can reach. I want to make sure I can reach it. Giving myself a goal, I think that I became a little bit more relaxed about it. It's become a part of my life. I do think that I perform better under deadline.

Zibby: There you go. You'll find a number that feels good to you and that's achievable. Sometimes at the beginning when I'm trying to gear up to try to stop overeating so much, I'll be like, oh, my god, but I have to lose twenty pounds or thirty pounds or whatever it is that I'm like, oh, my god. Then I'm like, I actually just really want to lose one pound. If I could just stop the train from being so out of control and just lose one, then the second one's a lot easier. I feel like one after the next after the next as opposed to being overwhelmed by how much is left, that works.

Alison: It's interesting. I find a lot of parallels between my writing life and the weight loss. You're a writer. You know. There's a massive amount of words. I'm trying to finish my second draft of a book by the end of this month. When I looked at the amount of words, it was overwhelming. I'm like, there's no way I can do it. Then I divided it by weeks. I divided it by days. I'm like, okay, I have a plan. I know what I have to do. If I miss I day, I know the exact number I need to make up. When we look at something like twenty-five pounds or forty pounds or anything, it just feels like so much. When you do it a little bit at a time -- the other thing that I think is that it's good to mix things up a little bit for your body because your body gets used to things. Sometimes I feel like if I get in a rut, I'll try something new. Then my body will do well with that. I also tried, about six months ago or maybe a little bit more, I brought intermittent fasting into the mix just because I had stalled. I think it was the ninety-pound mark. Ninety pounds, I was there for over a month. I was so frustrated because I was like, I haven't changed anything. 

My friends were like, "Yeah, you haven't changed anything, so maybe you need to change something up." I tried it. It worked. The first week, I saw movement again. I haven't since, but I'm afraid to stop trying it. I don't eat after eight thirty. Then I don't eat breakfast. I don't eat again until twelve. I'm bad with math. I don't know how many hours that is of fasting, but it's doable. It's easy for me. I feel like I can't stop. I was recently wondering if I should maybe try two weeks on or two weeks off just to get my body out of the rhythm. I wish there was a guidebook. I think that everybody's body is different. Our bodies even change and get used to things. It's just about keeping going. I know a mistake that I used to make was I would make one mistake and I'd be like, then it doesn't matter what I do. I would kind of give up. Again, the accountability. Thank you for starting the group. I'm really excited. I've already picked up some good tips. I've been drinking more water. That was my challenge for this week. I think it's going to be great for women to support each other in this journey that most of us are on, I feel like. [laughs] 

Zibby: Totally. I feel like everybody's on it in one stage or another because this is part of life. This is all we have. This is our car through life. We only get one. We have to sometimes change the oil or take it into the shop. I think you're super aware of what's coming next. I love tying the goal, as long as it doesn't make you crazy, I love the idea of tying it to your next book and taking a smaller, more achievable goal based on the twenty-four weeks or whatever, count them up, that you have left. Maybe half a pound a week. Maybe it's twelve pounds, is your goal.

Alison: I do something that everybody says not to do, but I can't help myself. I get on the scale every day. So much of what I learned from starting Whole30 was about how foods can cause inflammation. I think that part of what I lost in that first month, a lot of it was inflammation because of the different foods not agreeing with my body. Part of it is seeing the daily fluctuation. If I'm up this one day, what did I have that may have caused that? Some days, I'll be bad. Then the next day, there's nothing on the scale and I'm so excited. Then two days later it shows up. It's not an exact science. Again, I think it keeps me accountable. It's fascinating talking about these things because I'm understanding maybe why I do some things that I do. It's a lifelong struggle. I was in Florida visiting some family. They were asking me about my diet. I was like, it's not a diet. I think the word diet has a lot of negative connotation to it. There's nothing wrong with it. For me, it's a lifestyle change. It's not like I can't have something. It's that I choose not to. I think that putting myself in control and determining the narrative and using the words I want to use and making the choices makes it not as hard. It gives me more control. In a world where we don't have control very much at all, it's nice to be able to just claim this one thing.

Zibby: I think once you get out of your apartment and get back to the gym and find some new things, you're working out your body in new ways, I have a feeling, if I were a guessing person, a betting person rather, I would bet that that will help shake up things in your body as well because you're burning more calories than you were before. I know it's not as simple an equation as that. There's more output. You'll be more active. Maybe you'll get into something fun like kickboxing. Who knows? Mix it up. Try some new things. Feel how great your body feels where it is now. Maybe make something not just the scale. Maybe there's an amount of weight you want to lift. Maybe there's some physical, an amount of jumping jacks. I'm just saying maybe the way to get the scale down is not to stare at it, but to do something else just to mix it up. Take up jump roping, spinning. Sometimes I just think, try it. You can write about it. You can put it in your book. Write funny articles. Talk about how it feels. Experiment. Use that new body of yours. Try it out. Take it for a spin.

Alison: If I took up jump roping, I would owe the biggest apology to my downstairs neighbor. [laughs] 

Zibby: Maybe do it at the gym. Okay, fine.

Alison: I'm laughing at the image of that. You're right. The scale is only one way to measure. I know there's a thing, NSV, non-scale victories. I do look for those. Back when I would go to the office, I cut my commute time so much because I'm walking faster. My clothes, there were a few sad moments because some of the clothes that I used to love don't fit anymore in a good way. They just look too baggy on me. The clothing size change, being able to shop in stores that aren't just plus size, it's still crazy. It still surprises me sometimes that I can wear a size that I don't know if I've worn since junior high. I do look for those little moments to appreciate how far I've come. I try not to be too hard on myself, but I think it's a little human nature. At least, it is for me. I'm excited about this goal, April 13th. I'll message in the group. I'll make that official. I'll choose my number. I'll post it in the group.

Zibby: Then we'll be checking in. I'll be looking at the comments all the time. I'll be watching for you and rooting for you. It'll be interesting to see what ends up moving the needle, so to speak. I really want to see you try some new stuff at the gym. I think that's going to be really fun for you.

Alison: Thank you so much. It's been so nice talking to you. Again, thank you for starting this group. I'm really excited about it.

Zibby: Good. I'm really excited you're a part of it. Take care.

Alison: Bye.

Zibby: Bye, Alison.

Megan Harlan, MOBILE HOME

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

Megan Harlan: Hi, Zibby. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Zibby: Yay. Your work, Mobile Home, can you please tell listeners what this is about and what inspired you to write it?

Megan: Mobile Home is a memoir in essays about how I moved seventeen different times across four continents when I was growing up. It really explores how our homes and our places shape who we are. The types of homes that I lived in really spanned the gamut. At one point, I was living in a very posh flat in London, in Kensington. I also lived in several different really normal suburban houses in California and Texas, so your McMansions and your ranch houses, that sort of thing. I also lived in three trailers. One was located in Saudi Arabia. One was in a jungle in Columbia. The first one was in Alaska not too far from the Artic Circle. Moving all the time, it gave me a different relationship with place than probably most kids tend to have.

Zibby: I would say so. How could it not? That's a perspective that, child or adult, most people have not been able to have. That is a huge geographic and structural variety that you have there. Wow. There are so many things to tease out. One is the effect of frequent moving. One is the actual environment into which you moved. Break it down for me a little bit. When you were moving so much, what do you think that did to you as a personality and all the rest of it? Then we can go to what those places were like.

Megan: On the positive side, I think it gave me a sense of ease with cultures across the world, a real curiosity, and just a desire to learn more about the world. Socially as a kid, I think it was actually really difficult. It's funny, I didn't really see it until I became a mother myself. I had always sort of believed that my childhood was this great adventure. It was in a lot of ways. I don't think I ever really had the perspective of what a child who's growing up actually needs from their home, which is a sense of rootedness and, really, structure. If you've ever taken a child on vacation somewhere, if you're in Paris, you want to see the Eiffel Tower, and they want to get ice cream. Their perspective on a place is just completely different from what any adult would have.

Zibby: That is why I haven't taken my kids to Paris.

Megan: Exactly. It's a little bit wasted until they're at a certain point, maybe.

Zibby: Yes, wasted on the youth. [laughter]

Megan: Totally. That was something that, again, when I had my son, I started to see this huge difference. I would think about when I was in kindergarten and I was living a motel for a while. Then I was living in a hotel in London. Then I was living in Saudi Arabia. It was always about a year. Meanwhile, he was going to a very normal public school in our city and just had a completely different life than I did. The chasm between these two experiences really started to fascinate me. I started writing these essays. I would say he was about seven or eight. I started exploring the differences that we were having.

Zibby: How old is he now?

Megan: He's thirteen.

Zibby: I bet he's glad you're not up and moving all the time.

Megan: I think so. He loves his home. He does. It's worked out. We do travel as much as we can. I think being in one place, for our family at least, has really been the right thing.

Zibby: Do you feel itching to travel all the time? I know you discussed your nomadic childhood, but do you feel like a piece of that snuck into you? I think you said you did.

Megan: I do. Partially, I just think it's my family history. Everyone in my family is like this. I do think there's almost a genetic part, possibly, that some people like to keep moving and some people really want to stay in one place. If I hadn’t become a parent, I don't know that I would've settled down the way that I have. We'll never know at this point.

Zibby: Tell me about writing the essays. How did you decide how to structure each one? Then when did you decide that they would be great together as a complete work?

Megan: I love writing essays. I find the form to be incredibly freeing. When I start a piece, I usually have some kind of question in mind. As I'm writing, I'm really trying to find, not so much an answer, but maybe more interesting questions. For example, I wrote a piece about my arachnophobia. I still am afraid of spiders. I have kind of a superstition around them. I never kill them. As I was writing the piece, I started seeing there were actually some more interesting questions that were buried underneath the surface. I really come to each essay trying to look for more discoveries as much as I can find them. As far as the book itself, I don't know that when I first started writing the essays I conceived it as a collection. At a certain point, it was hard not to notice that there was a certain theme that kept coming up. Then I was able to write a few pieces to pull them together and give the whole thing a shape so that they would cohere, hopefully.

Zibby: What do you think the characteristics of being able to adapt like that -- what makes someone better or worse? Like you said, you feel it's genetic. I kind of like things the way they are. I would like to be more, today I'm in Saudi Arabia, tomorrow I'm in a posh flat in London. To be perfectly honest, I'd rather just stay in the posh flat in London if I was going to go anywhere. [laughter]

Megan: Were you always that way? I know you have kids. I do think when you have a family, it really does change.

Zibby: I like to travel, but I'm not like you. I like to travel recreationally a few times a year. I wish I had that wanderlust. I know people like you. I have someone in my life who loves to travel and is always off somewhere. You have to have a baseline adaptability, a baseline, you can drop me anywhere and I'm going to pick up. It's like my dog. We just inherited this dog from my mother-in-law. Anywhere we drop her, she's fine. She just figures out what's on that block. I don't know how to get that or how to give that to my kids, but you have it. I want it.

Megan: [laughs] I think there is a lot of nature and nurture. It's hard to suss that one out, I have to say. Are there places that intrigue you from afar that you've never been? I feel like there are cultures that I'm just like, I have to go there. I have to feel what it's like to be there. That, more than anything, is what drives me to keep exploring and keep things fresh. Honestly, it's a nature/nurture question. I'm not sure I can figure that one out.

Zibby: These days at least, travel is sort of on hold anyway. I can table this for my self-improvement next year. [laughs] I love your writing style. You have a really beautiful writing style that's different than others that I've read lately and that really was arresting from even the first page, the way you see the world and your vocabulary and the way you piece it all together. It's a really nice style.

Megan: Thank you. That's so kind.

Zibby: Tell me about your writing background and what classes you may have taken or when you decided that -- I know you realized that essays are your preferred medium, but when did that all happen? Take me back.

Megan: Such a good question. I studied poetry early. I got my MFA in poetry from NYU many years ago. Then I went into freelance journalism. I really made a living doing that. I did some travel writing. I did a lot of book reviewing, some arts journalism. I did author interviews, that kind of thing. I think that what happened for me is -- poetry, obviously, is so creative. Then the journalism I also really enjoyed, though, because I actually enjoyed the fact-checking. I liked just learning about a subject and almost having a humility when you come to it. You think you know something. Then you research. You discover new elements to it. For me, writing essays really smashes these two things together where I can be creative and bring kind of a lyrical voice sometimes to the subject, but then also keep everything tethered in reality to some degree. That's really my background. I have another book, which is a book of poems. This book, it really does bring together what I love to do in writing the most.

Zibby: Tell me a little about your publishing journey.

Megan: My publishing journey for this book, I submitted it to some creative writing contests, academic presses, that kind of thing. I sort of felt that because it was a book of essays that are very literary, I probably should go the university press route. I picked out some of the contests that looked really interesting to me and the presses that I know are class acts. I really focused on those. I was so fortunate with this. The contest I ended up winning that resulted in my book being published was the first one I submitted to. I didn't know it, of course, for many months, so I was still submitting to other contests. I was very fortunate. It's worked out beautifully.

Zibby: I love that. I had somebody else on the podcast recently who won a book prize in Connecticut that she had entered. It just makes me think people should be entering more contests. I don't know if people are doing that or what the hurdles are. I don't know about the cost or whatever. I don't know much about them. It just seems like a good way to at least motivate you to have something finished enough to send out to that as a start.

Megan: Absolutely. I know. There's nothing like a deadline. In fact, I actually finished the collection the day of the deadline of this contest, believe it or not. I was sending it that day. It was really my goal. I'm like, I'm going to get it in for this one. Having the deadline is key to finishing. I feel like I can pick at these things for years, as I sometimes have. It's really helpful for me to have a deadline at some point.

Zibby: Since the contest and then it sold and all the rest, what have you been working on? Are you someone who has five different essays going at once?

Megan: I do. I actually started a new project last year. It's another creative nonfiction type of thing. It's funny to me because there are themes that really overlap with what's happening this year. It's really changed the way I see the whole thing. I'm not sure quite what to do with it. I've got some new stuff in the works, not that I've been writing recently.

Zibby: That's all right. I was going to say I'm eager to see the output from this time, see how it's affected literature and what comes out.

Megan: I know. It's such an intense year. One thing with the pandemic and then the election and just so much to pay attention to with home schooling with my kid, it's just been a lot having everybody at home all the time when I'm not always used to that, to have my own writing time. I'm really impressed by the writers who have been getting work done because it's been a thin time for me.

Zibby: Do you have any go-to sanity-reclaiming measures in your day-to-day life to sort of regroup?

Megan: Yeah, I do. I do a lot of walking. I have to get out. I do yoga. The physical stuff is really what helps me the most, I'd say. We've had wildfires here in California. That's been another layer of pressure on the whole system. Right now, things have cleared up, so I'm able to get out again and do hikes and socially distance with friends and that kind of thing. It's really a lifesaver at this point.

Zibby: We inherited this dog recently. I didn't used to walk in Central Park that much. I'm in New York City. I'm just not somebody who takes a walk with no destination. I'm not like, I'm going to go for a walk. It's like, I'm going to go pick up my kid and I'm going to take the long way, maybe. Now that I have this dog, I'm constantly out and in the park. It's a totally different perspective on the city and city life and life in general, getting out into nature. I know this is the most obvious thing.

Megan: No, it's funny how we forget the obvious things all the time. I do, at least. It makes a huge difference. Are you enjoying it?

Zibby: Yes. Sometimes I'm so busy that I'm like, oh, my gosh, the dog hasn’t gone out in five hours. Yes, I enjoy it. The other day, it was pouring. I was like, oh, no, I'll just go in the rain. I have to go. Now I need it. That happened very quickly. It's only been three weeks, but now I'm very into it. All goes to show how quickly we develop habits and all the rest. I see a zillion books behind you. What kind of books do you like to read?

Megan: These days, mostly nonfiction. I read a lot of travel. I've been doing a lot of armchair travel just to remind myself that there is a world beyond my little town here. Actually, this is my fiction collection. These are all novels. I have a ton of books. Like I said, I used to review books for a living, and I just collect books. I adore them. I love the objects. I don't read a lot on Kindle. Although, I do when I travel. I'm very old-fashioned. I just love having it in my hand. I'm also a margin person. I write in the margins all the time, so I'm kind of hard on my books. I love having them around.

Zibby: Me too. I always like to turn the pages and [indiscernible/crosstalk] back and forth. Plus, I find the ones I read online, if I don't have them, I kind of forget them. Whereas if I'm always reacquainting myself with the spines, they stay in my consciousness.

Megan: It's true.

Zibby: What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Megan: For creative writers, I would say the best advice I wish I had had a long time ago is to write the pieces as if you're never going to show them to anyone. This is also one of those obvious pieces of advice that I feel like I did hear many years ago. Write for yourself. Write not even because you're afraid to spill the skeletons from the closet, but just because you want to write the piece. There's some subject you're fascinated with, you suspect maybe other people may not be, but go for it anyway. See what happens. I just think having that freedom is the key to really doing creative work.

Zibby: Very true. Amazing. Thank you, Megan. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Mobile Home. Congratulations on winning the contest. Sorry for how many times we rescheduled to get here.

Megan: [laughs] That's okay.

Zibby: I feel great that we can finally say we did this.

Megan: Yay! Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Thanks for the conversation.

Megan: Excellent. Thank you so much, Zibby. Bye.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Megan: You too. Bye.

Jenna Bush Hager, EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IN ITS TIME

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

Jenna Bush Hager: I love your podcast. Sometimes moms do have time to read. I'm so happy to be here.

Zibby: I feel like you and I are united in our desire to help other people read more. I love shouting out to good books. You pick all your books for all of America to enjoy, so I feel like we're on the same page.

Jenna: Definitely.

Zibby: Tell listeners more about Everything Beautiful in Its Time, which, by the way, I listened to on all my walks with the dogs back and forth across the park and was so great. I was crying in Central Park. It was just amazing. You've been coming with me on all my walks lately.

Jenna: First of all, I have to tell you, recording that audiobook, it was in the middle of the pandemic. The book is about the thirteen months I lost my three remaining grandparents, so it was a really difficult time for me. Recording the audiobook, Henry, my husband, was like -- I came home with just the puppy-est eyes. I said, "The poor recording technician who got this assignment had no idea he would be passing me Kleenexes." He kept saying, "Do you need a minute?" He was so kind and thoughtful. It was reliving these moments that were difficult. I wrote this book, I started writing, really, for myself. The night that my grandmother, Barbara, died, I was alone in my apartment in New York City. My husband was in Texas. My sister, who at the time lived in the city, was in Texas. I was watching the news. One of the things that's really hard and interesting that she taught us was that losing somebody publicly is difficult. I turned on the news. There were all these in memoriams and news reports about her. At first, I just couldn't stop watching. Then I was overcome by the fact that, obviously, they were just talking about her as Barbara Bush, the politician's wife. There was so much about our Ganny and that wouldn't be said that night. It just wouldn't. There was no reason for it to be except for that’s how I knew her. Nobody knew her as intimately as we did. I turned off the news, and I wrote her a letter. That was really the beginning of this book. I use a writing a lot in my own life as a way to heal, as a way to process. Then I just decided to publish it, but it started off for me.

Zibby: Amazing. That's how the best stuff comes out. It's truthful, from the heart, what you need. Turns out, other people need it too. Isn't it true that you weren’t there because you had strep throat which you caught from your daughter? which is such a typical mom thing to have had happen.

Jenna: Yes. I went to the doctor. My dad was like, "If you have strep throat, you can't go." Obviously, my grandmother was dying, but also, my grandpa was there. I just knew I had it. My daughter, Mila, had had it the week before. Of course, moms are so close with our kids. I remember when Mila got the stomach flu. I called my parents to tell her, when she was a brand-new baby, that Henry and I were up all night cleaning up her mess. My parents just laughed knowingly. They were like, "Now you will be getting things like the stomach bug that you just haven't had since you were in third grade yourself." I couldn't go to see her, but I did get to have a conversation with her before she passed away, which was profound and meaningful to me.

Zibby: What you said about it being a public occurrence at the same time, you had a scene in your book where you're pushing Mila and holding Poppy. You're walking down the street. You got like a hundred text messages all at the same time. You're like, oh, no, what happened? You had to backtrack and figure it out. I could so see you just like any other mom, but here it is, a huge public figure. How do you even reconcile something like that when you have it coming at you in every direction?

Jenna: I don't know. It's so funny. Probably just like any other mom. We live in a place where we're walking everywhere around, New York City. There's just been so many moments where -- I really do try to put my phone away and be -- especially when they were really little and they didn't get the fact why I was holding this thing and looking here instead of at them. That day, I put my phone away. I played with them at the park. I watched them play. I hadn’t been looking at anything. Then when we got up to leave, I checked the phone to see the time. I had so many text messages from, I was telling Hoda the other day, one from our old boss who was like, "Let me know if you need me." That was the first text. I was like, why would I need anybody? My parents had tried to call, but my phone was away. My grandmother had said she was going to seek comfort care. I had never really even heard those words. I didn't have context for them. I didn't know what that meant. The five blocks home was very distracted. I tried not to be that way, but I just was trying to figure out what was happening while I had one scooting child and one toddler in her stroller.

I feel like moms, dads, parents, but maybe particularly moms, we just have to make it work. I remember when I had little kids and I got sick for the first time. I was like, wait, what's going to happen? It's like, you're not going to be sick. A parent, no matter what, you have to parent through it all. It's sometimes an exhausting part of it all, when you're grieving, when you are hurting. I know so many people right now feel exhausted by everything. Also, kids can be the most beautiful distraction. The things that they say, my girls healed me, what they said. Now I have a baby boy, but I didn't have him at the time. What they said about their great-grandparents, all three of them, who they lost, who I lost, little things that they said which I wrote down in this book -- I'm so happy because otherwise, I would never remember. The little things they said and did brought me this beautiful peace. They're so wise, our children are. If you want to feel good, put your phone away. Try to not think about the news of the day. Listen to what your kids say. Write it down. They say the most hilarious, beautiful things. I knew they’ve been a major comfort to me. I hope I don't put that on them. I'm not like, how should I feel better? Just by listening to the funny, quirky, beautiful way they see the world, I feel like it can be a wonderful comfort.

Zibby: I completely agree. I went through a loss recently. I have four kids. They were so amazing. They can be supportive. They’ll come over and hug. Then they just say the crazy things that they say because they're kids. I wasn't smart enough to write all of them down.

Jenna: Write them down when we get off. Write them down when we're done today because you'll want to remember them I later.

Zibby: I know. It's so true. Grief is so unpredictable. You had so much so quickly, such a huge part of your family. It's nice to have had that outlet, at least. Of course, you're not using them for it, but you just have to. You don't have the choice to stay in bed and dwell in it. You can't as a parent. You just have to figure out how to make it all work at the same time. Even you, you wrote in the book about having a meeting at work and then almost missing the bus pickup for your daughter. I feel like I've been in that same situation so many times, like, [gasp], pickup! [laughs] It's so relatable.

Jenna: I know. Why is pickup the most stressful of all things? This particular day -- actually, it's so funny because the people that I was at this lunch meeting with -- I remember, I felt like I was on fire. It was the beginning of the year. I had a to-do list. I was wearing heels. I wear heels every day at work. Then I take them off and I put on, they're thrown right here on the ground, these clog mom boots. I can run in these things.

Zibby: Those are cute, though.

Jenna: Thank you. I can run in those. I cannot run in high-heel knee-high boots. It was the beginning of January. I was wearing them to prove to myself that this year was going to be new, was going to be a different year. Of course, I forgot Mila at the bus stop. The amount of times even in the short months -- weeks. It feels like months. It's been a couple weeks since my kids have been in school. The amount of times I've been racing to the bus stop, I can't even tell you, almost every day.

Zibby: I once ran through the Central Park transverse where the cars are to try to get to curriculum night on time all dressed up and all this stuff. It's just so funny when you think about the city and all these moms running, not just moms, but all the running to get to places on time and what we do to make it work here.

Jenna: I know. By the way, that was a moment where I really, and I have them often, but really loved New York City because I was running and the UPS guy was like, "You got it, girl!" Another mom was like, "I've been there." To feel supported by your community in a moment of complete panic and shame is [distorted audio].

Zibby: Yes, as opposed to driving like a maniac and all that risk. Another part of your book that I really responded to is when you were talking about your Aunt Dory and how she bought the dress for the funeral. Your grandmother was more of a spendthrift. She didn't want people to waste money on clothes. She bought this special dress and then went to the mirror. The mirror fell on the ground. She took it as a sign that her mom was upset, and she went and returned the dress. You had a beautiful message to her of what your interpretation of that was. Can you just share a little of that?

Jenna: Sure. My grandmother was a force. She took on things, private pain, things we didn't know. She took it on. She was an enforcer. We didn't necessarily know why she was the way she was. She was private and also very transparent at the same time. I'm not sure if that makes sense. Towards the end of her life, we were in Maine one summer. I came down the stairs early. I still picture her when I think about her in this screened-in porch. Early in the morning, she would write in her journal and write letters to her friends and do a little bit of work, read the newspaper. When I think of her now, that's where I imagine her. I came downstairs. It was early. It was before the sun came up. She was in a particularly sharing way, sharing mood. She told me a lot about her growing up. She grew up with a mother that would say things like, "Martha," who was her sister, "is the beauty. You are the funny one." Then her mother passed away in car accident. She had a stepmother that reinforced that. Luckily, she had a dad who thought she was brilliant and hilarious and told her she could do anything she ever wanted to. I do think -- and I don't know. This is just my opinion. When I heard these stories, I felt her pain. I just couldn't imagine, as a mother myself and as somebody that's been raised by a woman who was gracious and loving and loved Barbara and I unconditionally and equally even though we were so different -- we were never compared, thank goodness for me. I just couldn't imagine being that little girl that heard over and over, "Don't eat that, Barbara," and felt less than in her appearance.

My grandmother definitely had a way about her where she would sometimes make comments. I could tell afterwards she would feel like, why did I do that? She would comment on our clothes. Maybe after freshman year in college when everybody gains a little bit, there would be a comment about how we would look. What I understood about her in that moment sitting having that conversation about her childhood was that any of that part of who she was, was really a reflection of how she raised and that she was, in some ways, talking to that little girl. She was saying to herself, why do you look like that? She didn't mean it to us. When my Aunt Doro bought this dress and thought, god, Mom would think this is too expensive, I should take it back, and the mirror fell -- and that was Doro's interpretation. I said, "Maybe she was thinking, stop worrying about the way you look." The interesting thing about her is that she was a complicated woman. She didn't, in some ways, worry about the way she looked. She famously said talking about your hair is boring. She let her hair go gray probably before she was even my age, in her thirties. I do think deep down there was some pain that was never really resolved. I think she was telling my aunt, who is beautiful and incredible, don't waste your time on earth worrying about things like that, which is so hard because so many of us as women have that little voice in us that berates us for certain things. I think what she was saying is, don't waste your time looking in the mirror criticizing yourself.

Zibby: I love that. It's giving permission to stop self-flagellating in a way, being so self-critical. I recently started, in addition to this podcast, "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight" because I feel like so many moms, with COVID in particular, have been at home and gaining weight and in their closets all upset and all the rest. Then as I was focusing on that and listening to your book, I sat at my computer and then I saw that now you're doing Move with Jenna at eleven o'clock on the Today Show. I'm like, this is amazing.

Jenna: I'm doing Move with Jenna. I'm not the one that's actually working out, but yes, we are doing it. I always like to move for mental health. I like to go for long walks. Hoda and I have been doing outdoor classes here in the city right after work. Otherwise, it's hard to go. Once you get home and you're with the kids, and I have a new baby who's always home, forget it. Once I see his little face, it's hard to motivate to go away from him. I always think it's important to move. Granted, I will tell you that I did the show from home on Zoom for two months, three months. When you're at home on Zoom, you're wearing sweatpants on the bottom. You don't have to zip up a dress. All of a sudden, the world comes back and you're like, whoa, wow, that cacio e pepe I've been cooking from Joanna Gaines’ cookbook has really caught up with me. [laughter] You're right. It's best to not dwell. Just do things that make you feel good. If you do that, then hopefully the COVID fifteen, the COVID nineteen as I like to say, will come off.

Zibby: Yes. Tell me a little bit more about writing. When do you like to write? Where do you do it? Is it in your bed at night? Give me a visual here.

Jenna: I'm a morning writer, for sure. I work in morning television, so I'm already waking up early. I always write in a journal. One thing that my husband and I do which we brought back today -- although, he hasn’t texted me back. We didn't need to do it for a while because we were never away from each other, never apart. Now that I've started coming back to work, we text each other three really specific things that we're grateful for. I like waking up that way. I like having my mind focused on the really good instead of the bad. I also like sharing those little insights with him and having him share his with me. They're not about each other, necessarily. Although, sometimes they are. I always write in a journal in the morning. For this book, when I was "writing" writing, I would set the alarm for about four in the morning. I would write in our little office/guest room/playroom. It's the New York, where you have nowhere to write except for this one little den where I wouldn't wake up the kids and Henry. I did that at least three days a week. Then right after the show at eleven, I would go over to my office at 30 Rock and I would try to continue for an hour or two before my mind had nothing left to give. I read at night. I read for pleasure and for fun every night before I go to bed. I want it to be fun. I don't want it to be work. I cannot write at night. I can't really do much at night. I have this much left to give because my mornings are so big. Then by the time the kids go to bed, I just have an hour or two with Henry to try to decompress, and then that's it.

Zibby: I have so much respect when people are like, let's go meet up at this time. Why don't you do all your emails late at night? I'm like, I am fried. That's it.

Jenna: I agree. I also think even any sort of arguments, any sort of anything that's not great happens in those hours where your rope is done. It's shortened to just a tiny fuse.

Zibby: It's so true, oh, my gosh. Tell me about the reading for Read with Jenna. How do you pick your books?

Jenna: It's been such a really fun part of my job because I just love to read. I'm reading now for January and February. I read about six months in advance, which is so fun. I love that I get to get some of these books in galley forms and read them and be one of the first, maybe besides the editors and other people that have book clubs and obviously the indie bookstore owners, who get to read this work. It feels really like a privilege. We look for books that are debut authors in many cases. We want new voices, voices that may not always get the attention. We like diverse voices, voices from all over the world or country, people that look different and have different experiences, and then just books that move us, books that move me, books that I stay up late into the night reading, books that I know will inspire. I've been in a book club throughout my life in different iterations in different towns. I know what will inspire really cool, wonderful conversations. That's really what goes into it. It's just so much fun.

Zibby: You have to come to my book club. I started a virtual book club. I have like a thousand members. Anyway, you should come. It's really fun.

Jenna: I'm in. Why don't you choose -- I'm looking around my office. I don't know if you've read Leave the World Behind.

Zibby: Yes. I just had Rumaan on my podcast yesterday. I haven't released it yet.

Jenna: I love Rumaan. I hope you told him I said hi. You probably didn't. He is brilliant. He is so awesome. Did you read this with your book club?

Zibby: We haven't yet, but you know what? We should do it. We hardly have any male --

Jenna: -- Have you read it?

Zibby: I read it myself, but I haven't assigned it to my book club yet. I think that's a really great idea.

Jenna: It's so, so good, isn't it?

Zibby: Yeah. Maybe we will do that. That's a great idea.

Jenna: Okay, good. If you ever need help, call me up. I'm happy to be part of a book club one month. Let me know.

Zibby: Do it. Maybe the two of you can do it together or something. That'd be neat. I'm sure you've interviewed him. That would be awesome. So you have so much going on. What's coming next for you? You are churning out books and kids and TV shows.

Jenna: [laughs] Churning out books and kids. With each book, there's a new kid. No, nothing is next for me. I'm just going to slow down a little bit. Obviously, the show is on every single day, which is so much fun. It's been a really wonderful distraction in this world that we live in to sit next to somebody that I admire as much as Hoda and have conversations that feel light and, I hope, filled with goodness and positivity. That's so awesome. Before the pandemic, we were in a studio with lights and people and music and a DJ and Oprah. It was the pinnacle of where we wanted the show to go. Then all of a sudden, I was at home on a ring light with my phone and Hoda on FaceTime, and it didn't matter. I missed being close to her. I missed our team. I missed the audience and the studio. Regardless, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed our conversations. What this has shown me is that it stripped down to what's really important. Thanks goodness she and I really like each other and have fun talking to each other. Otherwise, it would've been really difficult. I think it's proven to all of us that it's stripped things down and only the most important things matter. I feel so lucky that even with the ring light and a phone and us separated by distance it was still such a pleasure to do the show every single day.

Zibby: So funny that you didn't even think you wanted this job to begin with. Wasn't it your grandfather who was like, "Maybe we should watch the show"? which is so funny.

Jenna: The most obvious. Also, it's a humiliation that that wasn't something that would've come into play, but I was teacher. He was like, "Do you ever see this thing they call the Today Show?" I was like, "Nope, I'm at school by seven in the morning." We watched it together. They gave me great advice. My grandmother was like, "You just always take the meeting." Even though I just want to be home, as we said, in my pajamas by 8:08 PM, I think that advice of always taking the meeting, being ready for whatever life's going to throw at you next is really good advice.

Zibby: So it's always take the meeting, but try to schedule it in the morning.

Jenna: [laughs] Exactly.

Zibby: What other advice might you have for aspiring authors?

Jenna: I just think, write. Write all the time. This was the advice of my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Cunningham, in Dallas, Texas. She said, "You are a good writer." Nobody had really told me -- I have a sister who is an academic who got into every Ivy League school she applied to. She missed one question on the SAT. She's brilliant. I struggled in math. My dad would sit around the kitchen table and be like, "Let's get to multiplication." To have somebody put that faith in me, like, this is where you're going to go, this is what you're interested in, and you have talent in this, I will never forget it. What she said to me, the advice is read, read, read. Good writers, brilliant writers -- it's so true. Now I get to and you get to, I'm sure, talk to all of these brilliant authors who I have crushes on.

Zibby: Me too. I'm the same way. Sometimes I even get nervous. I'm like, oh, my god, Nicholas Sparks!

Jenna: I know. By the way, a friend asked me, they were like, "Who has been the best?" I'm like, "Oh, this person. Kevin Wilson's so good. Ann Patchett's my good friend. I love Emma Straub." All of them are kind and generous of time and of talent, and brilliant. All of them share the same quality which is that they love books. They read incessantly. They read everything. That's my advice, is to read constantly. It makes sense. If you want to be a great artist, you study art. You study the great artists. If you want to be a great writer, you study the beautiful pieces of writing that we get to read. I just feel like I'm happiest in my bed with a book, possibly a sleeping child. The child needs to be asleep, though. Otherwise, as you know, moms don't have time to read. If there's a cat thrown in there, that's it. That's my very perfect day. If you believe in the afterlife, that's where I'll be, in a bed with a cat, a sleeping child, and a book.

Zibby: I might be there with a dog. Maybe with some chocolate on my bedside table.

Jenna: Yes. I was going to say a cheese plate. Add some cheese plate and a glass of wine. There we go.

Zibby: That pretty much is it. That's all we really need in life. [laughter] Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for all your great books and entertainment and all the great work you do and for highlighting all the authors, so many of whom I've had on my podcast and who I love. It's amazing.

Jenna: I loved talking with you. I love your podcast. I love that you're trying to get moms reading.

Zibby: I'm trying. Thank you.

Jenna: Thank you so much. It was so nice to meet you. Thank you.

Zibby: So nice to meet you too.

Jenna: Bye, everybody. See you.

Zibby: Bye.

Brooke Hecker, LETTERS FROM MY TOOTH FAIRY

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

Brooke Hecker: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited.

Zibby: I think you're the first -- is this true? I think you're probably the first school mom friend I've ever had on the podcast, which is really exciting.

Brooke: Oh, wow. That's amazing.

Zibby: I can't even think of any other mom friends who have written books. Can I? I don't know. Of course, something will come to me, but it's pretty awesome.

Brooke: Oh, yeah. There's a lot. Thank you so much.

Zibby: I just literally finished reading out loud your whole book to my two little ones. They were like, "Read it again. Read it again," which is always the best sign.

Brooke: That's good. It's a long one. Apologies in advance.

Zibby: No, it was great. Explain how you came up with the idea for your book and how it became a book, please.

Brooke: First, I don't know if you need me to do this, but this is it. It's called Letters from My Tooth Fairy. It's from real life. When my older daughter lost her first tooth, she got it knocked out at school. It was this big drama. The whole school knew about it. It was very exciting. She went to bed that night. Right before bed, it had been a long day, it was nine o'clock at night, and she said, "I wonder if I'm going to get Priya's tooth fairy," a school friend who lived around the corner. I said, "Probably. She lives around the corner." She said, "That's great because Priya gets a poem for her teeth." I was like, "Oh, great. That's great." [laughs] I spoke to Priya's tooth fairy who told me that it's a form letter from the internet. She gave it to me. I thought I just could probably whip something up really quick. I started writing poems for each tooth. They rhymed. They were very cutesy. It had to do with every single story of the tooth. Every tooth seemed to have a story. It also reflected a specific part of her life. After a bunch of these -- they were really cute. They were a big hit. I'd share them with friends and family. It was like, maybe this would make a cute book idea. That's what the book is. It's a collection of letters from the tooth fairy for every single tooth. You're really following throughout this girl's life. I like that it gave you a snapshoot of her life and the different parts of childhood, but through this very narrow and specific lens of the tooth fairy. That was how it came about.

Zibby: It was great. By the end when she says goodbye and all the teeth had fallen out, it was so sad. [laughs]

Brooke: It is sad.

Zibby: It's emotional because you go along the journey. It is sad when your kid loses their last tooth. It's the end of an era.

Brooke: Mine has not lost her last tooth. A lot of this is just made up. Thinking of these scenarios when your child is still young, it was kind of sad to go through and think about it. My younger one still doesn't like to read the last one because she gets really upset. It's very cute.

Zibby: That's so sweet. Each note was so clever. I was wondering as I was reading, did you have to do dental research? I don't know the names of all the different teeth. Did you have to do any sort of googling or dental digging to know the name of all the different teeth?

Brooke: I did do research. My cousin's an oral surgeon. I asked him just timeline, when you would lose teeth, when you would get braces, all that sort of stuff. I definitely did a little bit of research. Then the illustrator, who is not me, went ahead and did little diagrams of each thing. She did her own research separately because we worked completely in silos. It was very interesting to see what she came up with. We definitely did research. I asked certain questions. One question that my daughter asked me -- a lot of this was made up because I talk about teeth that she's never lost. Some of it is real-life questions. One of them that I got was, "How are my teeth going to fit? They're huge. The first two teeth that you get in the top are so big. How are they going to fit?" What we learned was that they're full size when they come in and your mouth grows around them. When they're ready, that's when your other teeth come out. Things like that, I learned as a forty-year old.

Zibby: The drawing of the walrus. [laughs]

Brooke: It was very cute.

Zibby: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] walrus forever. It is such a funny thought that your teeth are the same size forever and you grow around them like [indiscernible/crosstalk] or something.

Brooke: Yes, it's quite fascinating.

Zibby: What you should really do now that this is out is a companion journal/keepsake thing which has all [indiscernible/crosstalk] teeth and [indiscernible/crosstalk] the same way. Then it'll become a whole thing that you have to write your tooth story in these books.

Brooke: That's a really good idea.

Zibby: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] scrapbook. You could put the note from the tooth fairy. You could write your own story or drawing or something.

Brooke: That's a really cute idea. There's a lot of things that you can do. It came out last month right when COVID really hit. It was kind of hard to do all the things that we planned to do around it. It's an underserved market too. There's not a ton on the tooth fairy. I think there's so many fun things that you can do.

Zibby: The only one that I feel like we read a lot, or we used to read a lot, is Purplicious. Was it Purplicious?

Brooke: It was one of the Pinkalicious books. Yes, we have read that quite a lot.

Zibby: Right?

Brooke: Yes. [laughs]

Zibby: As I'm saying this, I'm realizing we haven't read any of those books in ages. Now we're onto Dog Man and I don't even know. Yes, those books, there was one with little notes. Aside from that, not too many.

Brooke: The tooth fairy wrote her back, but also the easter bunny.

Zibby: Oh, that’s right. You know, you're absolutely right. You're right, yep. You could even put a little map. I'm talking about your keepsake journal that now I want you to do. Then you could [indiscernible/laughter] out a map. My daughter just lost her tooth in Montana. Her first tooth, she lost in Mexico. This is making us sound very spoiled. I'm sorry. She was with her dad in Mexico and lost her first tooth and wrote a letter to the tooth fairy saying, "I know I'm in Mexico, but could you please leave my money in dollars and not in pesos?"

Brooke: That's so funny.

Zibby: Which the tooth fairy did. Dollars, I mean. Then the next tooth she lost at my brother's house in Montana. She was determined to write a note for a toy. I was like, "You don't get toys from the tooth fairy." "So-and-so in my class gets toys from the tooth fairy." I was like, "No, no, no. Tooth fairy only leaves money." [laughs] Anyway, it would be neat to see, even in your book, at school and all these different places.

Brooke: That's exactly part of the book. You have a different tooth fairy when you sleep at your grandma's house. We've had the same thing too. Hannah had lost a tooth at an airport. At LAX, she knocked a tooth out. Both my kids have knocked teeth out. She had an airport tooth fairy that followed her on the plane. It's true. People lose teeth everywhere. It's a good idea. We should do one branded for this.

Zibby: You could do it. It's easy.

Brooke: There's so much to do. There's nothing out there.

Zibby: It'll be like the baby book equivalent. Then pretty soon everyone will use it.

Brooke: It's a really good idea because right now we hide everything in a vase on a bookshelf.

Zibby: You don't have to save the tooth. You can still maintain the illusion. I'm sorry to waste our time talking about this.

Brooke: No, it's true.

Zibby: It's like you're telling your own story. The kids are basically writing their own story. Then they’ll have it to look back on. Then I wonder if there are other rites of passage that you could somehow brand. It's perfect, the twenty teeth. Why did no one think of this before?

Brooke: They really haven't. There's not a lot out there. It's twenty teeth across a very profound part of your life.

Zibby: Where there's so much change. [Indiscernible/crosstalk] so well with all the moving and the baby sister and all of it. I can't think of even anything comparable.

Brooke: It's a really good idea. We should do it.

Zibby: I don't have to do it. You do it. [laughter] You and your team, you take it up. Take it and run with it. So do you have plans for other books aside from the one I just suggested?

Brooke: Yeah. This is my first book. This was a big swing for me. I didn't ever think to do this. It came at a time when I was working freelance for years and years at a television network and sort of stalled out because I was working part time. I was like, what do I have to lose? It's an advanced age to start something new. It's a slow process. This is a very slow industry. It's hard for someone that works in a very fast-paced industry to slow it down and realize we're talking two years ahead right now. I started working on more now that this has actually happened. It's opened up a whole new world. With everything that's going on now and being -- I'm doing remote with the kids. Being home all the time and not having any sort of alone time, it's stalled me out a little. I've been working on something. It's been a lot of fun.

Zibby: Sometimes, though, when you have so much time, then there's more material to pull from.

Brooke: I do a lot more reading now that we have found time. I feel like that always helps too. Just reading more lets you write more.

Zibby: Every time I'm doing something, especially, I don't know why, with my little guy the most, I'm always like, "Oh, we should write a story about this. Oh, wouldn't it be funny if we wrote a story? That would be a really great idea for a book." I'm like, you know, there's going to come a time where you're gone, I'm sitting at my desk trying to think of ideas for picture books. Now they're coming so fast and furious that I don't even stop to take the time to write them down. I'm like, oh, I'll remember it. Meanwhile, now I'm talking you, I can't remember any of them, and it was like two days ago.

Brooke: I keep a notebook. It's true. You're reading these books every night now. Soon, you won't. Our girls are already doing it on their own. It's getting less and less of me reading to them. Now is the time.

Zibby: We just reorganized my little guy's books. He was like, "These are the books from when I was little," the little board books. When you read the other books, do you approach them differently now that you're writing one yourself? Are you looking more for pacing or structure or anything more analytical?

Brooke: I know what styles I like more. I tend to like things that rhyme or flow. All the Julia Donaldson books, they're fun to read. I think that kind of book is fun to write too. I like humor. There's humor. That's getting to be more and more prominent in the marketplace too, which is really fun. We laugh so much with books nowadays. Some of my favorites are Grumpy Monkey. I don't know if you guys have that one.

Zibby: Yes, we have Grumpy Monkey.

Brooke: Every time, it cracks me up when the vulture suggests eating dead meat. I don't know why. I've definitely found the things that I like more to read. That's part of the journey too, just figuring out what you like.

Zibby: It's nice because for so long everything is centered around the kids. Will the kids like this book? Let me read the kids a story. Starting with Go the F to Sleep, I feel like that's when picture books were like, wait, what? We can do this?

Brooke: We can be funny too?

Zibby: Maybe there's another way to use these pages. Yes, I feel like the tired parents who are reading the picture books are often looking for something funny.

Brooke: Something funny and easy to read that flows off the tongue, those are all things I've come to appreciate. Sometimes your throat hurts at the end of the third story that you've read.

Zibby: Yes. Those five-minute stories together, it's like six hours. It feels like a hundred hours. Having successfully sold and had this book come out and everything, what advice could you give both on the writing process and the publishing process aside from warning that it's slow?

Brooke: My only advice could be for someone just starting out because this is me and I'm just starting out. There was two lessons that I probably learned the most. One was, rejection was not something that I'd ever had to experience because I worked in a corporate world. That's just not the way it worked. You did your work. You moved up. Everything was fine. We went out with this book first, and it rhymed. My letters had rhymed. The book rhymed. I absolutely loved it. My agent had told me, "Rhymes don't sell as well. Would you consider rewriting the whole thing in prose?" I was like, "Well, I love it. Can we try it first like this?" She tried it. It got rejected across the board, and not a very quick one, but very slow because everything is very slow in publishing. It was a very slow trickle in to get rejected. It was the first time in my life I had been told no. I just assumed, well, I tried. I guess it's just not going to happen. My agent was like, "No, no, no. Then you go out to the next batch of people," or whatever. I rewrote it. We went out with it again. When it sold, it was a very good lesson. I was ready to just walk away and be like, I tried something new and it didn't work.

That was the number-one thing for someone that's completely out of the industry to get used to because that's something that is just going to happen. It's very hard to get rejected and have that confidence in yourself with no basis, basically, to say that I'm going to keep trying and I believe in myself. That was a really good lesson. I think that was a good lesson for my kids to see happen. That was just very foreign to us in the work that my husband and I do anyway. It wasn't part of our everyday. The other thing is just the patience. It takes a long time. It's all self-discipline, which you know. We have a mutual friend. She writes. She churns out five, six books a year. That's because she sits in her office and has the time and dedicates it and gets it all done. Not a lot of people work that way. That's been a lesson too, of trying to get the self-discipline to do something where you're accountable for yourself. It's all about you. Those are the two things that I've learned, to really set aside the time and to believe in myself instead of what three editors might have said.

Zibby: You never know what is going on with those editors, what else they have in their -- they might even have liked it and thought it was funny, but they have other books or their quota's met or whatever. You don't know.

Brooke: Exactly. It was just such a foreign concept. My first instinct was like, she said no and she's an expert, so that means that I guess I tried. Especially for someone who's starting this in midlife, it's a whole new way to operate.

Zibby: When you said that earlier, I was like, I don't think it's late at all. I don't know how old you are, but I'm forty-four. I feel like most of the people I talk to are not -- I don't know. I feel like your forties are somehow the best time ever to write books, I swear.

Brooke: Really? Well, because you have more experience. You're right. You have more life experience.

Zibby: You have enough experience. You're in it in so many levels. There's so much emotion in your forties. You don't have to be parenting, but you're usually caretaking either your parents or friends or kids or something. You've had loss. You've had caretaking. You've had love. I'm picturing a mixing bowl in the kitchen. You've had enough ingredients thrown in that you can bake something that tastes a little better than maybe the really pretty cake from your twenties, but it didn't actually taste that good. You know what I mean?

Brooke: You're absolutely right. You are. I think it's just, I come from an industry where, I'm forty-two, when you're in your forties, you're kind of past the prime a little bit, unfortunately, or you're at a really successful level and why would you start something new? To try something new, of course you can. Of course, you can do something new and different, but it's a big step.

Zibby: Writing, it's like an outgrowth of you. I know it is something new, but it's not like you're trying to get into mortgage-backed securities or something. It's a creative expression of who you are in some way. The more you define who you are as a person, the clearer your output becomes.

Brooke: A hundred percent. It was a good thing to learn because obviously I was wrong.

Zibby: [laughs] I don't mean to say you're wrong. I'm saying this to try to be more encouraging than not. It's never too late.

Brooke: No, it's not.

Zibby: A memoir I'm about to read by someone who's seventy, and I can't wait to read it because I'm like, this is an interesting point of view. How neat is that? It's just never too late.

Brooke: You're right. It is never too late, but I had to learn that, definitely, for myself.

Zibby: This was so much fun. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for the great new book for the repertoire. [Indiscernible/crosstalk] enough not to feel babyish, but still a picture book. It's perfect. I hope to see you back at school.

Brooke: I know. I can't wait. I hope so too. Fingers crossed.

Zibby: Fingers crossed. Bye.

Brooke: Bye.

Jeff Hobbs, SHOW THEM YOU'RE GOOD

Zibby Owens: Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and talking about your latest book, Show Them You're Good. As I mentioned to you over email, I also loved your first book. Welcome.

Jeff Hobbs: Thank you. That means a lot.

Zibby: Show Them You're Good, can you tell listeners, please, what it's about?

Jeff: Show Them You're Good, it's about a group of senior boys at two different high schools in very different neighborhoods in Los Angeles applying to college and going through their last year of high school.

Zibby: What inspired you to tackle this topic? It seems like you're very interested in how different lives along the same timelines can veer off in different ways, from this book, from Robert Peace book. What's that about? Where's that coming from?

Jeff: I wrote The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace about a really good friend of mine from college who passed away. That book was very hard and personal. I didn't really think anybody would read it because it is hard. When it came out, something sort of terrifying happened, which is that a lot of schools started asking me to come visit and talk. You can already tell after two minutes that I was never meant to speak in public or really speak in general.

Zibby: Oh, please. [laughs]

Jeff: I went to schools from Ivy League schools to juvenile halls and a lot of spaces in between, I would say mostly city public high schools, and had these conversations with young people. We were talking about race and education and access and entitlement. There was something about Rob Peace and his story that brought young people, particularly young men, to share their own stories or even just fragments of their families and their aspirations. I carried those home from these different places. It was meaningful. I just started thinking that maybe there's a way to tell some stories about what it looks like and feels like to be eighteen years old in America right now.

Zibby: What was your experience at eighteen like?

Jeff: It was unremarkable. I played some sports.

Zibby: What part of the world did you grow up in?

Jeff: I grew up in the country in Pennsylvania, so a small school where you go to school with the same fifty people for fourteen years, very different from going to high school in Los Angeles. This project in no way was me trying to relive the glory days, sort of the opposite.

Zibby: How did you find the guys in your book like the character, not the character, the actual person Owen whose parents were in the film industry, and so had such reputable careers themselves. Then you have the boy whose parents are Chinese immigrants. You have all different kinds of boys, let me just say that, for all different backgrounds. How did you find them? Why did you pick them?

Jeff: I didn't really pick them, so to speak. I undertook this project and started reaching out to schools. My wife thought I'd lost my gourd. Maybe I had. Very few schools want some awkward journalist roaming around their hallways, if you know what I mean, mainly because schools get dinged a lot by journalists. These two schools, I'd visited both of them before to, again, speak at assemblies and do book groups. I knew some teachers. The principals took a chance and opened their doors. They just sent an email out to seniors and said, "There's going to be this guy hanging around. If you would like to meet him, come to such-and-such classroom at such-and-such time." These guys came. One of these schools is in South LA right outside of Compton, which is a neighborhood a lot of people have heard of and even think they know what it's like. The other school is Beverly Hills High School. If you watched TV in the nineties, you might think you know what's going on there. These four or five guys in each school came. Then they kept coming every week. The center of the research was just these roundtable conversations I would have with these groups once a week for two or three hours at a time about what was going on with their lives. I think they came because I brought food.

Zibby: That will bring most young men anywhere. [laughs] After spending all this time with all these guys and analyzing all their interactions with their family and their grades and everything, you went into so much depth, what was the main takeaway? I feel like people are very down on the youth in the US today, and what kind of life are we giving them? and all this. Do you feel that sense of pessimism? Do you feel more optimism? What's your outlook on the next generation, if you will?

Jeff: I'm optimistic. I always risk sounding a little bit kumbaya, maybe. I got to know these guys really well over the course of a year. What I found is it's an exceptionally interesting generation because these guys know that they're the ones who are going to be dealing with a lot of issues that for older people, we talk about them and get outraged about them, but they're still kind of abstract, whether you're talking about climate or politics, race, all those things. I think these guys know that it's on their shoulders, and not abstractly. What ended up coming out of these conversations is the idea of self-determination. It's our national ethos that if you want something and dream big and work hard, you can get that thing. Particularly in schools, that is something that’s a notion that's drilled in pretty hard. It's in every graduation speech I've ever heard. I've heard a lot at this point. A lot of that year as they applied to college, again, from very different backgrounds, very different levels of privilege and family circumstances and levels of help, it was them learning that those lines are not straight. Life is messy. Things go wrong. The way they adapted to that messiness of being a human being is what makes me optimistic because that is resilience. Resilience is the other thing that's drilled in high school.

Zibby: When you were writing this book and doing all the research, what was your process like? How long did you take to do the research versus the writing? How did you sort through the piles of transcripts? How did you actually do it?

Jeff: That's just a lot of work. For the year, this was the 2016/'17 school year where these guys gave me a lot of time when they didn't really have much time. I probably spent a hundred hours or so with each group. I went to classes and dances and sports games and plays and proms. That's a tall stack of transcripts. I recorded most of it. You take that home and type it out and start rooting through it. Really, the hard thing was editing what was probably two thousand pages of single-spaced transcripts down to a book. You get very attached to people. You get very attached to their stories. You have to leave things out. That's hard sometimes.

Zibby: It's true. Did you always know you wanted to investigate and be a journalist and a writer and all of that? Was that something that you always had in your mind?

Jeff: Writer, yes, to the point where my older brother was playing baseball games and my dad would be yelling at me to get out of a tree and stop reading. But journalism, no. That was something that happened when my friend died, Rob Peace. It's not as if I went to his funeral thinking I was going to write a book. I went to his funeral, and people did the things they do at funerals to celebrate a person. Mainly, that is to tell stories. At the time, I thought I'd just write down some stories maybe for his high school newsletter or the Yale magazine or something that nobody would read but might speak to his life more than his death. That undertaking, I call it a eulogy that got out of hand. Through that process, I just learned I was a good listener in that I like listening.

Zibby: I like listening too. Maybe we should have a podcast where we both sit here silent and just hear the background noise and see how that goes.

Jeff: Listen to the kids banging around.

Zibby: Yeah, you could drag in a dog if you wanted. [laughs] So what project are you working on now?

Jeff: I spent the last year on a project about juvenile halls, sort of similar, some different schools. They are schools, jails/schools. I've just been spending time with young people going through those systems.

Zibby: Exciting. Why does your wife think you're out of your gourd for focusing so much on this age group and basically reliving your youth that you didn't really have in this way? What's that about?

Jeff: I think you just said it. It's odd to tell your family that you're not going to be cooking dinner on Friday night because you're going to a Halloween dance in South LA. I thought the stories were just really powerful. They're kids, but they're making these adult decisions. You mentioned Owen whose parents are very successful in Hollywood. He's kind of the perfect picture of this privileged Beverly Hills kid, but his mother's bedridden with an illness. He knows how little the world really cares about privilege. He knows randomness. He's trying to figure out how to be a good person knowing nobody really cares if he's a good person because he's a rich kid from Beverly Hills. A kid named Carlos who was applying to Ivy League schools and DACA at the same time and carrying that social narrative of upward mobility, all these kind of tropes we have in our world that when you get underneath them a little bit and look at the humans, they're pretty complicated. They're hard narratives for these people to carry.

Zibby: It's true. I felt so terrible for Owen's mom with not being able to find a diagnosis for so long and ending up in a wheelchair and all of that without knowing even really what was going on with her.

Jeff: There's a really touching scene, to me, when he's in all the school plays and he was practicing a song and dance number for Putnam County Spelling Bee, was the play's title. At night, he would sing and dance at the foot of his mother's bed while she harshly critiqued him.

Zibby: Wow. None of my kids are running around doing full-on dance recitals for me like that. Maybe I have to figure out a way to get better acting output. [laughs] Anyway, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Jeff: No, it's usually just kind of a clumsy process of stumbling around, I find, my particular work which I guess is called immersion journalism. I don't know if it exactly fits. Like we said, it's just kind of sitting and listening. Different issue, but I'm a white guy who grew up pretty easy. My work brings me around people who don't look like me and didn't grow up easy. That's a complicated thing. A lot of them trust me to tell their stories. I take that seriously. A lot of them don't trust me to tell their stories. I take that seriously too.

Zibby: That's great. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for talking about your new book. I'm sorry, I read your last book a while ago. I should've reread it before we talked. All I remember is how much I loved it. I'm sorry if I messed up any details. It was a while back.

Jeff: You didn't mess anything up.

Zibby: Sometimes I just have a feeling. I see book covers, every cover, I feel a feeling. I remember loving it or not really liking it or not even finishing. Some books really stand out on the shelf, but I can't always say exactly what about it was what -- anyway, sorry for not bringing up any details, but I know it was amazing. This was a really interesting portrayal of a whole group of people.

Jeff: It means a lot that you would remember it and that you would have me.

Zibby: No problem. Good luck on the juvenile hall thing. If you get all the way back down to kindergarten, I have one of those lurking about. If you get there, you might need a therapist alongside. I don't know. We'll see what happens.

Jeff: That sounds treacherous. I have a first-grader, so I'm sort of in that all day anyway.

Zibby: Got it. Thank you so much. It was nice to chat with you today.

Jeff: You as well. Thank you.

Zibby: Thanks. Buh-bye.

Alyssa Shelasky, APRON ANXIETY

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

Alyssa Shelasky: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: I have so much to talk to you about. I don't even where to start first. First of all, your book, Apron Anxiety: My Messy Affairs In and Out of the Kitchen, was so good. I know you wrote this a while ago and you have lots of exciting stuff coming up and everything. I have to say I just loved it. It was so good. I just had to start with that.

Alyssa: That means a lot to me. The people who did read that book had a similar reaction. I would get emails from people saying, "I'm in the grocery store thinking about this scene. It brought me to my knees." People had a really emotional reaction to the pages. It makes me really happy. It also makes me kind of emotional to talk about the book. It's strange because it was a while ago. It was eight years ago that I wrote it and published it. It really stuck with me. I still have dreams and also even sort of nightmares about some of the stories in the book. It really defined a huge part of my life.

Zibby: You talked in the book about everything. It was like a coming of age. Also, your learning how to cook was a metaphor, I feel like, for so many other things. I also had to teach myself how to cook when I was about the same age. I feel like there were so many similarities in our lives. Going to LA, I also went to LA for part of the time. I also lost a dear friend on 9/11. There were all these things in both of our growing up that I was like, oh, my gosh, this girl should be my friend. [laughs]

Alyssa: Thank you so much. It's strange because I get that a lot even in the articles I write for New York magazine or The New York Times. I often hear from people that, you are me, or you know me, or you hear me, or whatever. I get it from people who are so different from me, so different from you. To me, it just speaks to the universal truths that we all want to love and be loved. Everybody hurts. Especially right now, everybody is struggling. Thank you. I can't believe that I have one more reader. I didn't do a really good job marketing that book. I just didn't get it. I was happy that I wrote a book. I was so happy to be done with the book. I wanted to move to Italy and write my own Eat Pray Love the minute it was over. I didn't really work on the marketing or the sales of it all. Now I know the business. I know what goes into actually selling a book. Not that many people read it. I do feel like this real closeness to people who now know all my secrets and who were on that journey with me.

Zibby: No time like the present. Let's get this in people's hands. Also, it's so timeless. It doesn't matter that it came out eight years ago versus today. Aside from the global pandemic, there's nothing that you can't relate to now. There's nothing that a twenty-three-year-old going through the same things today -- not that you have to be twenty-three. It could've been at any time, really. You had a very successful blog at the time, Apron Anxiety. How did this become a book from the blog?

Alyssa: It feels like many lifetimes ago. I was engaged to a celebrity chef. I don't know if he's quite a celebrity anymore. At the time, he was kind of the "it" chef. He was on Top Chef. It was supposed to be a very different book. We were really happy. We were young, dumb, and in love. I got a book deal with Clarkson Potter. It was a food memoir with recipes. It was supposed to have a happy ending. No spoiler alerts, but like most relationships with sexy, hot, young chefs, it did not go as planned. Right when I started writing it, after I got my book deal, we broke up. Again, that doesn't ruin -- you could google me. I have two kids with a totally -- I have a totally different life now, so you know I didn't end up with a chef. After we broke up, my world fell apart. On top of everything, I assumed I had lost my book deal, which was really the greatest love of my life. The thing that mattered more than any of it was as a writer, to have a book. I assumed I lost that on top of everything else. I called my editor at Clarkson Potter. I said, "It's over. I'm not going to be a chef's wife anymore. I'm moving back to New York alone. I doubt I'll be cooking for anybody ever again."

She said, "Are you crazy? Write through the pain. First of all, as someone who cares about you, write through that pain. It will save you. Second of all, what a better story. Who needs another happy ending? What a better story that you went through this. You lived it. You survived. You lived to tell about it. At some point, you will be able to laugh and celebrate the mistakes you made." She was right. That was what turned out to be the book. It was a totally different type of book in the end. It was much more of a memoir than a cookbook. I think part of the reason the minute the book came out I just left for Italy is that it was a really intimate story to tell and very, very hard to retell over and over. I was very much heartbroken and thirty-four and starting to really become scared about my future and wondering if I had really fucked things up for the long term. The last thing I wanted to do was keep retelling this story of immense pain and regret. I did some press. I did what I could because I was very proud of the book, but I mostly wanted to literally turn the page. That's why I moved to Italy and started a whole new trajectory of messed up relationships and difficult men and just romantic disasters that I couldn't seem to escape. Luckily, there's going to be a second book to talk about.

Zibby: Wait, can I just ask a PS to Apron Anxiety, are you still in touch with the chef? Do you have a relationship with him now?

Alyssa: No, not really at all. This is not just some cheap line. I only have beautiful, warm, loving feelings for him. Number one, he let me write that book with no drama. I remember the editor and the lawyer saying, "We have to send this book to him to approve every single page." I wanted that too. I wanted to make sure he was comfortable with it. Within half a day, he wrote back, "You write whatever you want. I support you." He was so kind and generous. I loved him for a long time. Then I stopped loving him. We moved on. I think he had a child right around when I had my first child. At the time, the thought of that, your ex having a baby with somebody else who they're madly in love with sounds like, how would you ever deal with that? At the time, I was nothing but joyful for him and psyched for the two of us. We did it. We found our happy places. We found our people. We found our babies. It's all good. No, I don't really know anything about him. I'm not one of those people that googles her exes. I think that is so toxic. I don't want to know. He kind of has a public name, so every now and then people will be like, I heard he is opening in -- I don't want to know. I don't. Nothing good comes from that. Why? So I can miss him a little bit? So I can cry a little tear? I don't want it. I don't know what he's up to. We're not in touch, but I love him and I hope all good things.

Zibby: Aw, that's amazing. I did find myself sometimes rooting for you guys to make it work knowing that it was almost impossible. I knew it didn't because I've read your more recent stuff. You know how you can suspend disbelief when you're reading? I'm like, maybe. I don't know. Who knows?

Alyssa: I know. Then you just tell yourself what you need to at the end of books so that you can sleep at night. That happened with Normal People. I was like, oh, they took a year -- I assume you read it or at least saw the show.

Zibby: I saw the show.

Alyssa: They took a year or two off, but they totally found each other in the end and they're totally together. I had to tell myself that just to be able to put the book away.

Zibby: So you went to Italy. You were a single mom for a while. Then you fell in love. Now you have another child with someone you call your baby daddy and your partner and whatever else.

Alyssa: God, I really need to rebrand the term for whatever we are. I know a lot of non-married couple also don't know how to deal with this. I'll rewind. I went to Italy. I fell in love with literally the first human being I spoke to. We were inseparable for the next year. I was like, okay, this is how my story ends. This is interesting. I have a Brooklyn/Roman life. We go back and forth. I became a travel writer for Condé Nast Traveller. I was the Rome correspondent. The optics of it were very, very glamorous, but he was very dark. I clearly have a type. He was a little bit dark and brooding, super sexy. He, after a year together, told me that he wanted to ride off on his motorcycle through India smoking hash in yurts alone.

Zibby: Ugh.

Alyssa: I know. Ugh. That's exactly -- and I didn't see it coming. I moved back to New York the next day. By then, I was romantically dead. I was just dead. It was like, how many heartbreaks can one person go through before they are officially broken? I was a little bit broken. My inner spirit was not herself. I didn't know what to do. I let myself be sad for a few months, but it’s really not my style. I can't stay sad for long. I rose above. I remember one night I looked in the mirror in my little Ditmas Park apartment in Brooklyn. I was crying. I said, what do you want, Alyssa? What is it? What will make you happy? You are capable of anything. You can handle anything. What do you want? The answer was motherhood. I was like, okay, I'm doing this. I'm going to be a mom. I've always wanted to be a mom. It wasn't like an aha. It was like, it is time. By then, I was thirty-seven. I knew -- and not all women know this. I can only speak for myself. I knew I wasn't going to have a happy life if I didn't have kids. That was just my truth.

I only knew one other person who was having a baby on her own. That's a mutual friend, Amanda. She was a little ahead of me. I've quoted her in stories. She knows that she's sort of the hero of this story. I did exactly what she told me to do. She knows her shit. She knew the best doctors. She knew the best sperm bank. She's so cool. I really relied on her to get me through this. I'm telling you, Zibby, from the minute I made that decision, I'm going to have a baby on my own, I've never felt scared. I was never nervous. It felt so right and so natural and so obvious. What took me so long? It worked. I got pregnant quite easily. I chose a sperm donor who I knew the minute I saw his profile that he was the one. I had my daughter, Hazel. While I was pregnant, I dated a little bit because why not? I felt sexy. My boobs were amazing. I felt more alive than I ever had. I stopped dating, obviously, when it became uncomfortable to button my little wrap dresses and stuff. I had a little bit of a romance while I was pregnant which was nice because I had a person to call after my appointments. It was a magical time.

Then I had my daughter. I should say I wasn't totally alone. I have an incredibly supportive family. We all live nearby. I had an emergency c-section. My dad was there with me. He was the first person to hold my daughter. It was a beautiful lovefest. I never felt bad for myself. I never worried about how I would pull it off. I don't have a lot of money. I don't come from a lot of money. A lot of people were concerned, how would I support a child? I knew it would work out. It did. A few months after I had Hazel, I was bored. I was nursing around the clock. I had watched every show. I had binged every housewife. I had nothing left to do at three o'clock in the morning, so I joined Tinder. I put in my profile, single mom with a very uncomplicated situation. In other words, no crazy ex. It was weird to have a five-month-old. I had to sort of explain, but I didn't say too much. I just said it's all good. I got a good situation here. I'm single. I kind of just want somebody to have a glass of wine with. I was not looking for a husband. I was not looking for a father for my daughter. I just wanted a little bit of flirtation. One of the first people I met was this guy Sam. He said he was from Maine. He was a documentary filmmaker and all the things that always lured me in, the sexy, artsy thing.

I could tell within a minute of talking to him he was more than that. He was a family man. He came from a big family. He was grounded. He was stable and steady, all of those missing pieces from before. We had a first date. My mom watched my daughter. We had bloody marys at Vinegar Hill House. Hazel came with us on every single date from that point on. We became a family really quickly. It's a fairytale. It really is a fairytale. He's wonderful. She said daddy before she said mommy. We just had another baby together. I'm forty-two. I just had a second baby. It wasn't that hard. It's a lot of miraculous, hopeful things. I do often hear, it all worked out. It did, but also, we would've been okay. I don't really love the message that we needed a man for it to all work out. It worked out the minute I had a healthy baby. It's a beautiful story, but it's not a beautiful story just because we found the prince charming. That's just a nice handsome cherry on top. That's the story. It didn't come without a lot of pain and a lot of hard choices. I tell my stories and I always cry because they're beautiful stories, but there was so much heartbreak and so much struggle that went into this. There will be more heartbreak. There will be more struggle for all of us. That's what it is to be alive. That's why I can't wait to write this next book. I have so much to say about this stuff.

Zibby: Wait, so tell me about your next book. Congratulations on your book deal. It's so exciting. Tell everybody the name and what it's about and all the rest of it.

Alyssa: I'm so glad I can announce it on your podcast.

Zibby: Yay!

Alyssa: It just happened like a second ago. We're calling it This Might Be Too Personal. It's a series of essays on my own private stories of love and pain as tied to my career as a love, sex, and celebrity writer. So many of my relationships and hardships happened because of where I was with work or my career or my ambition or my successes or my failure, and mostly my failures. [laughs] It's all in there together sort of like Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which I'm listening to right now and loving. They're personal stories, but in relation to my really unique work life. I'm so excited to do it. There's nothing I'm not going to talk about. I'm scared, but I'm really excited.

Zibby: I can't wait. Before, you were saying you have high hopes it's going to be a masterpiece, which is the greatest thing to hear from a writer. I love it. No doubt it's going to be amazing. I cannot wait.

Alyssa: I don't suffer from that. I'm not one of those neurotic self-hating writers.

Zibby: Thank goodness.

Alyssa: I think I'm a great writer. [laughs]

Zibby: That's it. Own it. Why not? It's awesome. Your recent articles in The New York Times have been so amazing. I particularly appreciated your article when you let every married couple off the hook from having sex in the pandemic. That was very kind of you. Thanks for that. [laughs]

Alyssa: I was really surprised that so many people were like, thank you so much. I'm like, isn't this what you talk about with your friends? All we talk about is how we don't want to have sex. It's like, hi, did you want to get a latte? Did you have to have sex last night? That's it. Like I said in the story, we will all get our sex lives back, but oh god, not now.

Zibby: [laughs] Oh, my gosh. I am so excited to have gotten this sneak peek of your new book. I loved all your articles, being a single mom and then how you just told it now and how you wrote about in The Times and your recent article in The Times and your book and all your other zillion articles and essays and everything. You're a fantastic writer. I love that you just share your voice so openly. You are who you are. It's refreshing and awesome. I am so rooting for you at every step, as I was just even reading the book, just holding my breath and rooting for you. Now I feel this sense of ridiculous pride even though I just am meeting you having gone through your memoir to see where you are now and all you've been through. I can't wait to keep following you. It's amazing.

Alyssa: Seriously, it's super meaningful to talk about the new book with you for the first time because I feel really safe with you and really close to you through our mutual friends. I think that you're awesome. I think you are so good for women and writers. I'm lucky you're part of my tribe.

Zibby: Aw. Anything I can do to help with this new book. I mean it. I know it's going to be amazing, just like you do. I still think we should try to resurrect Apron Anxiety and get it back out there and not let it just sit undiscovered because it's so good. I'm in your corner. I'm glad we connected.

Alyssa: Thank you. Good luck with everything you guys are going through.

Zibby: Thank you. You too. Bye.

Alyssa: Big kiss. Bye.

Kristy Woodson Harvey, FEELS LIKE FALLING

Zibby Owens: The first author that we're going to talk to is Kristy Woodson Harvey. She's written many books. Her latest is called Feels Like Falling. She's going to be our first speaker. Kristy Woodson Harvey is the best-selling author of Dear Carolina, Lies and Other Acts of Love, Slightly South of Simple, The Secret to Southern Charm, and The Southern Side of Paradise. Kristy is the winner of the Lucy Bramlette Patterson Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. She was a finalist for the Southern Book Prize. Her work has been optioned for film. She also blogs with her mom, Beth Woodson, on Design Chic, which is her Instagram account, about how creating a beautiful home can be the catalyst for creating a beautiful life. She is a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate, which means she did really, really well in school, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That was in the School of Journalism. Then she also has a master's in English from East Carolina University, with a concentration in multicultural and transnational literature. She's a member of the Tall Poppy Writers Group, which has a lot of fantastic writers who have been on the podcast. She's a frequent speaker at all sorts of events. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and her seven-year-old son. Her latest book is Feels Like Falling. That's what we're going to talk to Kristy Woodson Harvey about today. Sorry for the long bio, but how impressive is she? Aren't you glad I read it?

Kristy Woodson Harvey: Hi. Thank you for having me. I have to let y'all know right off the bat, I am sort of on the Camille train. I live in North Carolina, like you just said. We're having a major thunderstorm. We walked around the house and we're like, what's quiet? Hopefully, it won't be loud. It's kind of dying down, but if you hear something crazy, that's probably what it is.

Zibby: It's also a huge storm where I am, so we'll see what happens. What is up? It's bad enough that it's a Monday morning in quarantine. Now we have to have thunderstorms and the dreariest day possible?

Kristy: The only thing saving us is the good weather. What are we going to do? [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I don't know. Better Monday than Sunday. Who knows? Whatever. I guess it's nice we had a nice day yesterday.

Kristy: Yes, yesterday was gorgeous. This is kind of the payback.

Zibby: I feel like it's been a hundred years since I met you last summer at Author's Night for the East Hampton Library. That was so nice. You were so radiant. Oh, my gosh, it was so nice to meet you.

Kristy: That's nice. It was so fun. I was so excited to meet you. I was fangirling really hard. You probably remember. It was probably embarrassing. I'm sorry. [laughter] That was such a fun night. I'm going back again. I'm really excited to be there next August. Hopefully, I'll see you again.

Zibby: I hope that events are still going on in August. Do you think they will?

Kristy: I do too. I usually go on a six-week book tour when I have a new book come out. This year, for some reason, some really smart person said, let's split it. We'll do four weeks in April and May and then two weeks in August. I'm hoping that we can at least salvage that August part. If we can't, we can't. I love going on book tour. It's just fun to get to go meet readers and cool people like you.

Zibby: I feel terrible for all you guys who can't go on your book tours. It's so sad to get to the finish line of a big project and not be able to celebrate it and make sure it gets into the right hands.

Kristy: It's going to be so interesting, though, to just do something completely different and do things like this and see what happens. I feel the worst for people who, this is their first book and they’ve been really waiting to do this book tour. I feel terribly for them because that is so exciting. It's the culmination of all that hard work that you've done and all those years. That is really sad for them. Hopefully, they’ll be able to move theirs. I'm just so grateful they're not moving my book release date. I was afraid that was going to happen, or it was going to have to have happen because we weren’t going to have books. Putting out a book a year, I started thinking about that logistically. I was like, first of all, this is not really a book that you want to come out in November. That's not an ideal time for the beach cover. I started thinking, I was like, oh, my gosh, if it comes out in November, we're already going to be starting promotion for Under the Southern Sky, which is my 2021 book. People are going to be like, enough, we've had enough of you. [laughs]

Zibby: That's a pretty great problem to have, is that you're creating so much good content that you can't even figure out how and when to promote it all.

Kristy: It's good. It's great.

Zibby: Is that your schedule? One book a year every summer?

Kristy: I'm not saying I'm married to that for the rest of my life or anything, but it's worked for me really well. We're in the groove. That's how it's going. I kind of have my bearings with that situation a little bit. Actually, oh, my gosh, I'm super grateful that I had a book to be working on because my edits were due two or three days ago on Under the Southern Sky, and so it just gave me something. I was like, it's normal. I'm working. I have to focus on the book. I can't think about all the craziness going on. Focus. Of course, you're thinking about it and feeling terribly about it. It gave me an outlet so I wasn't sitting there watching the news twelve hours a day and all the terrible things going on. I was in my little writing cave for at least a few hours a day focusing.

Zibby: What are you going to do now that you've been freed from the cave?

Kristy: The new book comes out April 28th. We are scrambling to get this virtual tour put together because it takes like nine months to put these tours together. Then to turn around and put together some semblance of a virtual tour, we will be working nonstop on that. We didn't want to do it too early because, like I said, we didn't know if we were going to have books. I have heard now that the books have shipped to the distributors. At the very least -- I know you feel this way and so I do, I'm a huge proponent of independent bookstores. I love them. They are so amazing. I hope that this is a time when people will choose to support them. We're bored. We're at home. Go buy a book. Pick it up at the curbside. Have them deliver it to your house. They're getting really creative. It's impressive.

Zibby: It's true. I went on this walk yesterday, which is the first time I've walked into the town nearby. It was out of desperation. There was one little store that I never really go into. There was a sign on the door. It says, "If you really need a cozy sweater, call this number and we'll drop one off for you." I was like, I could use another cozy sweater. I've worn this one like a hundred times. I think I might have to call. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what turns up. Anyway, back to you and your book and all of this greatness. Can you hold it up again? Can you explain the plot and what it's about? The plot is so great for this book. It was so good.

Kristy: Thank you. Feels Like Falling is a book about Gray and Diana who are two women from very different worlds who come together to form this odd couple friendship. They meet on a day when they're both having a really, really bad day. You know those days where it's just like nothing's going right? Gray is at a point in her life where she could really use some good karma. Diana's at a point in her life where she could really use some good luck. Instead, Gray inadvertently gets Diana fired from her job. It thrusts these two women together that, on the surface, seem to have nothing in common. Sorry, that was a thunderstorm shutter-blow. In reality, they have so much in common. They’ve both lost their mothers, albeit in very different ways. They're both dealing with the loss of a partner. Although, again, in different ways. They're both at a crossroads in their career, which is a major situation in both of their lives. Neither of them know it, but they're both about to embark on a really great love story too. That's always one of my favorite parts.

There are a lot of issues that come up in the book. There are a lot of things that these women are dealing with that real women are dealing with. I think it's my funniest book, I hope. I tried to make it. When I was really going through the process of writing this, we were out of our house from Hurricane Florence. I was like, I just need some comic relief in my life. I sort of feel like it was this omen of, we're also going to really be needing some comic relief in our life when this book comes out. I'm happy for that because I do think it's a funny book. I think people can really escape into this book. It's set in the fictional town of Cape Carolina, which is based on Morehead City which is near where I live. You get to see that it's one of those fun, beachy locales. These women are just great. They sort of wormed their way into my heart. I hope that they will for readers too.

Zibby: Aw, that's so great. You wrote it during a hurricane. Now it's coming out during a pandemic. What are the odds?

Kristy: Am I bad luck? What's going on? I know. It's so strange. Actually, the really funny thing about this book that makes it sort of unusual and different from my other books is that I wrote it in 2016, and it's actually coming out now. I wrote this book. I got contracted for the Peachtree Bluff series. I wrote all three of those books. They came out. Then I spent eight or nine months completely tearing Feels like Falling apart and putting it back together. It was such a cool exercise because I had changed so much in four years. The world had changed so much in four years. The way that I felt about these women and what they would be doing and how they would be handling these situations in their lives completely changed. That was so interesting for me. I try not to go back and read my earlier books just because it kind of makes you cringe a little, I feel like, because you hope that you've grown from book to book. You're like, oh, why did I say that? Why did that character say that? Why did they do that? It was this great opportunity to get to go back and totally rewrite this book for where we are today. I think it's good timing. I really do. I feel like it all worked out the way it was supposed to. I'm glad this book is coming out now and that it didn't come out in 2016 when I wrote it.

Zibby: Wow. What about your next book, the one you were just talking about having finished?

Kristy: Under the Southern Sky comes out 2021. We don't have a pub date yet. I think April-ish. I'm really excited about this book. It's actually a book that I've been thinking about for five or six years. I haven't really talked about it much. I don't even really know how to tell you about it. Essentially, the protagonist of this story is a man. This is my first male protagonist. I have four female protagonists also. Parker is kind of the center of this book. His wife has passed away three years earlier. When the book is opening, a childhood friend of his who is also a protagonist of this book, has accidentally discovered that these embryos that he's frozen with his dead wife are about to be destroyed because they haven't been able to get in touch with them. It sort of bursts this story wide open about, what do you do? You have this piece of this person who's gone. What's the next right step? There are, of course, a lot of other storylines going on. That's the main one.

Zibby: Ooh, wow. That sounds really good. Is it hard for you to come up with ideas? Do you just have a ton? Do you keep a notebook? What's your process like?

Kristy: I have a ton. I keep separate Word documents on my computer. Just whenever I have something kind of interesting that comes up, I'll pop it in a Word document. Usually, I don't know where a story's going to go. Even with this one, a friend came to me and said, "I have these embryos. What am I supposed to do with them now?" I just jotted that down, but I didn't know what this story was until I actually sat down and started writing and thought, who are these characters? What are they like? What's happening to them? Even in Feels like Falling, I remember finishing this story. My husband was at a work conference. I had gone with him so I could just finish this book and be done. I met him downstairs for dinner. I was like, "That ended the exact opposite way that I thought it was going to." He was like, "You're the one writing it. What do you mean?" It is just so cool how the characters, they just take over the story. They really come to life. I'm a person, I like to read character-driven stories. I like to write character-driven stories. I do think that's a big part of that. The plot is important, but it's not usually what's on the forefront of my mind. Then narrowing it down and trying to figure out, what is capturing me next, what is it that won't let me go, that won't let me sleep at night because I'm so excited about writing it? that's usually where I go next. A lot of times, I end up sticking a couple stories together at some point. One idea isn't the best one, so it kind of combines with another one. Then it's the right thing. It's a really interesting process.

Zibby: Having written all of these books, do you have any advice for aspiring authors? I feel like you've turned this into a system and you have it down.

Kristy: What I tell new authors or aspiring authors, it's a business. You have to treat it as such. I feel like the creative part of it is what lights us up and keeps us coming back to it, but the business part of it is what allows us to actually be able to do this as a career. I am very systematic about writing my two thousand words a day. It's the first thing that happens because if I don't have a new book to put out, I don't have a job anymore. That's the most important thing for me. I'm not saying that everyone has to do that. It's whatever schedule works for you, but I think treating it like something real that is really going to happen. You are the queen of talking about this, but finding the time is so difficult. People tell me all the time, I don't have time. I don't have time. I don't have time. I'm like, I get it. I wrote Dear Carolina, I had a two-week-old baby when I got the idea for that book. I would sit in my closet at night while I was breastfeeding and jot down Dear Carolina. That's how Dear Carolina came to life. There was no, I went on this six-week retreat to Italy and wrote this beautiful -- no. Oh, my gosh, no. Books are being written in the midst of dirty diapers and homeschooling now. It's just like everything else. You've just got to get it done.

Zibby: You got it. Kristy, thank you so much for coming on. It was so nice to finally get to chat with you. I hope the storm there passes. Thanks for giving us great things to look forward to reading.

Kristy: Aw, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.

Zibby: It was great chatting.