Charlotte Laguardia on access to individualized nutrition

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

Charlotte LaGuardia: Thank you so much, Zibby. I'm so happy to be here.

Zibby: It's so nice to see you. Charlotte, first, give listeners a little bit of a bio and your background, how you got into this industry. Then after that, we'll talk about your whole journey to getting here. Give us the rundown of a bio and background for now.

Charlotte: Absolutely, yes. I grew up in Southampton, New York, so out in the Hamptons. I went to college in Worcester, Massachusetts. I went to Holy Cross. I was studying psychology. I wanted to be in marketing. I wanted to do advertising. I was really excited to do that. I started to notice that I wasn't feeling well. By the time I graduated college, I was like, there's no way I can do a nine-to-five job. I don't have the energy. I don't feel well. I dove into a degree in nutrition trying to find some answers. That's what led me into the nutrition field. I got my master's from the Maryland University of Integrative Health. Then I did an internship. I did an exam. I took an exam to qualify for the boards, and so now I'm a certified nutrition specialist. I'm also a yoga instructor. I like to combine the two worlds of nutrition and yoga. Now I'm back in Water Mill in the Hamptons. I have my own private practice that was in person. Now I have moved to completely virtual. I do virtual yoga. I do virtual nutritional consultations as well as workshops. I do a lot of ladies' nights on Zoom. We do some breathing exercises. We talk about things you can eat and all of that good stuff.

Zibby: If people want to find you, where should they look you up?

Charlotte: My website is thriveeast.com. My Instagram is @ThriveEastNutrition.

Zibby: Awesome. Charlotte, you and I met when I had one of my many hit-bottom moments. [laughs] I was like, I need to see someone immediately. I can't do this by myself. I've had kind of a love-hate relationship with getting experts involved in what I know is something I should master myself. You were so kind and came over a few times. Then again, I sabotaged myself. Now I can't even face it again, but not because of you. You were amazing. Tell me about your own -- go back to when you weren’t feeling well. What even led you to nutrition versus med school or something like that?

Charlotte: It is a little bit of a long story. What didn't lead me to med school was a --

Zibby: -- Wait, I want the long story. That's the interesting part.

Charlotte: I know we are on a podcast for why moms don't have time to lose weight. Personally, I don't have a weight loss journey. I had always been on the thin side. I grew up thin. Nothing ever changed. I could never gain weight, actually. I always thought I was really safe. I remember in the seventh grade, learning about diabetes and heart disease. I was like, I'm not going to have that. I have no problems. I'm thin. I had this false sense of safety. I went through life never being affected by the food that I ate, that I knew. I would eat pints of ice cream. I would come from home, and my after-school snack was literally a whole container of whip cream. I was really addicted to those sugary carbohydrate foods. I remember I didn't eat a vegetable for probably years. My mom would try, but I wasn't interested. All I wanted was the white rice and some ice cream after that. I was really hooked on those highly processed, highly refined foods. It never showed physically, so I was like, I'm totally fine. Then by the time I got to college and had to go through stress -- I had all this new stress that I didn't experience in high school, the late nights. I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't exercising. I was eating a hundred percent processed diet out of the dining hall or fast food or whatever I could heat up in my microwave.

That's really when it hit. I honestly remember -- this is crazy. I would walk through halls. It would be one o'clock in the morning. I'd just finished a paper. I'd be walking through the halls of the library. I'd see, there's nothing in front of me, there's no one around me, I'm just going to close my eyes while I walk because I'm so tired and I'm so just shut. That was when I realized that something had to have been up. When I graduated school, I ended up going to a few doctors. Throughout all of that, I always had some GI things. I was never regular. I was always bloated and cramping. If I didn't eat, I'd be doubled over in pain, things that just weren’t normal. In my head, I was like, I'm thin, I'm fine. Everyone experiences this. It's okay. The GI doctors could only say IBS, which is, we all know, this blanket diagnosis. Something's not right. We're not positive, but we're going to put you in this category. Then I started getting neurological symptoms, so things like tingling, buzzing feelings in my body, the extreme fatigue, couldn't remember a thing to save my life. All of these different things started popping up. Neurologists couldn't really figure out what was going on. They were like, "You might be depressed. You might have B12 deficiencies," which wasn't the case. After a full year of not getting a straight answer and not being able to work or do anything, I was like, I have to go back to school. I need to know why this is happening, why this is happening to my body, what I can do to help fix it. Modern medicine is amazing. You get into an accident, they will bring you back. It's the preventative, getting down to the root cause where there's a little bit of lacking. It's a little lacking there.

I decided I had to be my own advocate. I had to figure out, when I eat food, what happens to it? Why do people eat vegetables and not tubs of ice cream? That was really what motivated me to go to school. I knew I could buy a textbook, but I'm the type of learner where I need someone to explain things to me. I found this great program. It was online. It was somewhat self-paced, so I could still do a part-time job while I was learning. It just changed my life. What I started learning about how our food is digested, why we choose certain foods, what all of my symptoms actually meant, and figuring out the whole reason why everything was happening -- a lifetime of antibiotic use, but we'll come to back that. [laughs] When I started learning all these things, I was like, oh, my gosh, I have to tell the world. Why did no one teach me this? Why was it in the seventh grade that I learned diabetes and heart disease existed but not how to prevent them or why they start in the first place? It was really, really eye-opening. I went from that mindset of, I want to work that nine-to-five office job -- I was so excited for pumps and pencil skirts. Now I'm like, oh, my gosh, I just need to be with people every day and share this information, especially kids. I'm finding that I'm heading more towards the adolescent world because that was the time where if I had learned all of this, I think things would have been incredibly different.

Zibby: Now I want you just to talk to my thirteen-year-old daughter. You're such a likeable person. You should have your own YouTube show or something. Do you have that?

Charlotte: You know, people [indiscernible/crosstalk] all the time. I am so camera shy.

Zibby: But you're doing great right now. I know this isn't a camera. It's just Zoom. I feel like my daughter's all into YouTube. To have somebody up there actually giving healthy, health-centered information as opposed to just how to put on her eye shadow would be really awesome.

Charlotte: I could do a little eye shadow too.

Zibby: That would be great. [laughter] So what was the answer? What was wrong with you?

Charlotte: Really, what it was, was a full-blown gut issue. I had chronic ear infections as a kid. From ages one to about three, I was on antibiotics a few times a year. For that age span, what's happening is your microbiome is really setting up. The microbiome is this about four-to-seven-pound collection of bacteria and yeasts and some viruses that should live in harmony. They are there to produce your immune cells, neurotransmitters. They even play a huge role in turning genes on and off. I don't know if you've heard the saying, genetics is the gun and your lifestyle pulls the trigger. That lifestyle influences the microbiome. Really, it's the microbiome pulling the trigger on risk factors. During that age, kids are sticking stuff in their mouths. They're eating dirt and stuff and trying to put things in their mouths. What that is, is they're trying to get bacteria into the microbiome based on their environment. It's a really special time. I was taking antibiotics which meant every time I took a course, I was killing off a big portion of that community.

Fortunately, our microbiome is really resilient. However, we didn't know this at the time. My mom did everything she could. She kept me really healthy. I didn't have chronic ear issues because we took of it then. We didn't know, take a probiotic or eat your fermented foods. As I grew up, I had this really imbalanced microbiome. There were probably strains in there that shouldn't have been. There were strains in numbers that shouldn't have been. I wasn't doing anything to help it. I was only feeding the things that fed the negative bacteria and negative yeasts. What that led to was what we're calling in the industry now, leaky gut. Leaky gut is when the cells that line your intestines start to separate. There's little perforations. Through those perforations, your undigested food particles, any bacteria or viruses that come into the body can seep into the bloodstream which then in turn can set off the immune system. This situation can lead to pretty much all of the symptoms that I had. What I learned was to go back and heal the gut and the heal the system. I can tell you, it's been years, and still always going to be a work in progress. The one thing that I'm learning is that the body is so resilient. The body wants to be healthy. That is where it's trying to get every single day, but we just have to give it the tools to get there. That's what this journey has been.

Zibby: Wow. One thing I heard you say is processed food is not going to help be one of those good tools. Is that right? [laughs]

Charlotte: It is. It's hard. We live in a food industry. Food is a business now. I tell clients every day, companies, they just want to sell you a product. They want to sell you on their brand. They don't necessarily care if it's not the best thing for you. They don't care if you have gut issues or a hormonal imbalance. They just want you to eat their product. That's just the nature of business. I can't really blame them for it. We just need to be more educated about the products that are out there. With processed foods, there's normally sugar added in everything. Ketchup, salad dressings, everything has some sort of sugar even if it says zero grams on the nutrition facts. You're like, there's no sugar in there. I'm totally fine. You look at the ingredients, and see you cane sugar or molasses or date syrup. You're like, okay, there's a little sweet in there, but it's not showing up on the nutrition facts, so it should be fine for me.

The point of that is when you ingest the food, you don't taste sweet, but our digestive system actually has sweet receptors. What those sweet receptors do is they actually talk to the brain. Our gut is connected to the brain through this vagus nerve, this big, huge nerve that goes throughout the body, but its main connection is gut to brain. Those sweet receptors take in the little sugar that you don't taste in your mouth. They recognize it. They release dopamine, which is our reward signal. It makes you want to eat more. It could be a potato chip with a little added sugar. It could be ketchup on a chicken finger, which is just a protein, but it's making you go for more because those sweet receptors keep releasing the dopamine. Your body's like, oh, this feels good. I'm going to keep going. I'm not going to stop. It's a little secret of processed foods. That's why it's really hard to only have one chip or one fry in the ketchup.

Zibby: What about if you're actually eating lots of sugar, sugar that you know you are eating because the second you put the cookie in your mouth you feel like it coursed through your body and you get this hit of amazingness? [laughs]

Charlotte: That's exactly what's happening. It literally is a hit of amazingness. Now you're getting twofold. You're getting dopamine release because the receptors in your mouth are tasting sweet. Then the receptors in your gut are tasting sweet. It's a full-body experience. At the end of the day, it is very neurological. It's not necessarily willpower either. I think that that's something that a lot of us get wrapped up in. I'm weak. If there's a cookie in front of me, I'm going to eat it. It's my fault. I'm weak. I'm not good at this. There's so much more at work here than just willpower. It also depends on the balance of microbes in your digestive system, in your microbiome. If you have higher numbers of certain yeasts like candida, that candida feeds off of sugar. It has this huge nerve, the vague nerve, that talks to the brain and can ask for more sugar. Those cravings, again, aren't that willpower or seeing the cookie. It's actually these old bacteria and yeasts in there using their power to harness the brain and harness our activities.

Zibby: How do you know if you have those in you?

Charlotte: Normally, if you have a very high-sugar diet, I tend to assume that that's where we're headed because whatever we feed will most likely be there. There are stool sample tests you can do. There are also some symptoms like sugar cravings, a lot of dandruff, and yeast infections on the skin or in the body. Thrush is another symptom of candida. It's sneaky. A lot of these bacteria, they're just around for survival. They don't care if the cookie's going to make you crave more. They just want to survive.

Zibby: What is your advice then if somebody, regardless if they have candida or whatever bacteria are feeding the cravings and maybe it's not willpower, but what do you do if now you're in this spin cycle of sugar addiction?

Charlotte: First, I like to recommend different ways to get dopamine. It sounds a little crazy, but if we do something like fifty jumping jacks before we eat the cookie, we're releasing dopamine on our own through physical activity. Then we're less likely to go for the second cookie. Then sometimes, over time, you might not even want the whole thing or even the cookie at all. It also depends on the day. I'm also not about deprivation. We're going to eat cookies. It happens. It's life. There are cookies in our world. We want to do it in the best way possible. If we can do those jumping jacks beforehand, get an initial dopamine surge, then we can have and enjoy that bit of cookie and move on. Other things we can do to release dopamine are talk to a friend or a loved one. Right now too, social isolation is a big thing. Call a friend. Call a family member. Talk to them. Skype with them. Zoom with them. Do whatever feels right or appropriate at the time. That connection releases dopamine. Then the final and favorite one of mine is a hug. A twenty-second, chest-to-chest, equal-partnership hug will help to release those feel-good neurotransmitters as well and, in a lot of cases, start to kick those sugar cravings.

Zibby: If I hug my husband for twenty seconds in front of a plate of cookies, I might not want as many cookies?

Charlotte: Correct.

Zibby: Seriously?

Charlotte: Seriously, yes. For Christmas, we got a basket of gluten-free goods because everyone knows that I don't eat a lot of gluten. You know those stroopwafles that you sit on top of your cup of coffee and they get all gooey? Those were in there. They're really good. I would have one, but then I would do some jumping jacks and I would remove myself from the situation. Yes, a few times I went back for a second one, but not as often as I would've if I didn't do those dopamine-enhancing activities.

Zibby: What's interesting about this to me is that, of course, I've heard the advice. Instead of eating, you should go do something else that's fun. I always interrupted that as a means of distraction. Yes, eating makes you feel good, but other things make you feel good, so just do them instead. I've never heard that the dopamine released from those activities counteracts the cravings for the actual treats because your body is getting the surge that it needs already, so it doesn't look to something external on a plate. Did I get that right?

Charlotte: Yes, you did. Something to remember, too, the fifty jumping jacks will not give you the same awesome explosion response that a cookie in your mouth will. It's not as intense.

Zibby: You didn't need to tell me that. That, I know.

Charlotte: It's very subtle. I don't want you to do the jumping jacks and be like, wait, I don't feel that. That feeling is going to be completely different. If we take the time, it is also a little bit of a distraction, but it's helping because you're getting that reward the body's looking for.

Zibby: Okay, I could try it. I could test this out. I could test it out.

Charlotte: It's always worth a shot to test out. Then remembering too, when we do go to eat that cookie after we do the jumping jacks, eating it slowly and enjoying it fully. I know a lot of times with junk food and cookies and baked goods and things like that, we feel some guilt. We're like, I know I shouldn't be eating this. I'm going to eat it, but I'm going to eat it fast. If I eat it fast, then maybe it doesn't count. This is a train of thought I've had many times. If you sit down and mindfully, slowly eat it, notice the texture, the smell, the mouthfeel, you're going to be so much more satisfied from the one cookie and not need to go for the second. A lot of times, you have a sandwich with two halves. You eat one half. You eat the other. You look down and think that the other's still there. That's what's happening in this guilt-driven cookie eating. We rush it because we hope nobody sees or it just doesn't count if we get it in. By eating it really slowly and enjoying it and honoring it and experiencing it, that awesome feeling lasts a lot longer too.

Zibby: I was eating a cookie the other night. It was gooey and warm and perfect. I was sitting and I ate it in front of my husband. Sometimes I do try to eat things quickly out of sight of everyone for my own guilt reasons. Anyway, I ate it. Literally, he was laughing. He was like, "I don't think I've ever seen anyone enjoy a cookie as much as you are enjoying this right now." I was like, "This is so amazing. It's the best thing ever." [laughs] Not to say it didn't make me want more. I don't think I had more at the time, or I probably would've had more. I see what you're saying. Take the time. Enjoy it. Don't beat yourself up about it. Sometimes I think that's another thing in the cycle that people do. I've already ruined it with the one cookie. I might as well eat six.

Charlotte: Absolutely. I see that all the time. It's important to remember, too, when we're stressed and eating, the stress actually turns our body's ability to digest foods down. We don't extract as much as we could. I know a cookie has sugar. It's definitely something that is somewhat processed depending on where you get it or if you made it. You could have it with dark chocolate and whole wheat flour and get some B vitamins and antioxidants. If we're feeling guilt eating that cookie, those few benefits that are in there, we won't be able to absorb as many. All the more argument to have it, but enjoy and relax and breathe. Look at it. Smell it. Just be in that moment with the cookie. Then go have a fully balanced, healthy meal before or after.

Zibby: Basically, if I or my listeners can eat a mostly balanced diet, I could basically have one amazing chocolate chip cookie every day and still not succumb to what I feel like is addiction, essentially, of the feeling of the cookie in my body. Correct?

Charlotte: Absolutely. Everyone is completely different. It is really understanding yourself. Some people might have a harder time. Some are all or nothing too. I know I have a lot of clients who, even just looking at a cookie will send them into a spiral. The whole mindful eating, have just one slowly, is just not for them. That's okay. We recognize that. We put other things in place. For a lot of people, if you can harness the power of mindful eating and you can slow yourself down, that one cookie is definitely doable, and making sure it's the highest quality cookie. You can make it yourself. You can source great ingredients, organic whole wheat flour. Like I said, dark chocolate's a health food. Add some dark chocolate in there, and nuts and seeds. Make into something that's really healthful.

Zibby: Do you have a go-to healthy chocolate chip cookie option or recipe or something?

Charlotte: You know, I don't, but I can definitely make one if I put a little time into that. After talking about cookies all this time, I'm thinking, definitely.

Zibby: If you want to drop them off here... [laughs]

Charlotte: Want to be my tester?

Zibby: I will test them out.

Charlotte: You can be my recipe tester. We'll get something good going. It would be great.

Zibby: Charlotte, this has been great for so many reasons. One, thank you for sharing your story with me. It's such a good reminder that you can't cheat on your body for too long without it catching up with you. If you're doing things that are not good for you, even if you can't see it, your body sees it. It's just a good reminder that even if you feel good with your weight or your clothing size, that is not the full story at all. That's another good reminder. Two, just the processed food, as we all know, that processed foods are like the devil. Eat in moderation. Look at the ingredients. Be careful. Eat with caution. Then also, remembering the things to counteract the hit you get from sugar and adding things like hugs and jumping jack as a means to fill that dopamine receptor up so it doesn't have as much left to fill with the cookie, which I like. I also like that if you give yourself permission to enjoy something regularly without guilt, then maybe the whole thing ratchets back down in terms of this whole viscous cycle of punishment and willpower and all the things you were talking about. Awesome.

Charlotte: Absolutely. There's so much more to it. I think we like to simplify things and say if you are eating a ton of sugar, you're just weak. You have bad willpower. That's not it. There's so much more. There's so much more we can do also.

Zibby: Awesome. I am going to get back in touch with you just to chitchat to teach my kids. Even though I teach them all the time, I think it helps so much to have someone else come in just give a little tutorial. I'm going to do that. I'm going to go bake some really good cookies.

Charlotte: Eat them slowly. Enjoy. Be in the moment.

Zibby: Yes, perfect. Charlotte, tell everybody again where they can find you if they want to book a session or learn more about you.

Charlotte: My website is thriveeast.com. My Instagram is @ThriveEastNutrition. You can message me on either platform.

Zibby: Perfect. Thank you so much.

Charlotte: Thank you so much. This was wonderful.

Zibby: Great. Bye, Charlotte.

Charlotte: Bye.

Melissa Liebermann on her family’s Holocaust story and her distorted body image

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

Melissa Liebermann: Thanks, Zibby, so much for having me.

Zibby: I'm so glad you reached out as someone who's a part of the Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight community and shared your story with me over email. Now we get to talk face to face over Zoom. This is a real treat. I am thrilled to be your first podcast ever.

Melissa: Thank you so much. As I mentioned, when you said, "Hey, do you want to come on the podcast?" to tell my story, I thought, would people want to listen to it? Then I thought, you know what, why not? As I said to you when I reached out, so much of what you have had to say on this podcast has really resonated with me. I really wanted to share it with you and was glad you thought maybe we could share it with others as well.

Zibby: Thank you. [laughs] Sorry to have taken your message and been like, all right, now we're going to blast this out to the world, but I'm always looking for interesting stories. Honestly, everyone's story is interesting to other people. There's nothing that makes one person's journey more relevant or not. We're each just trying to get through life the best we can. Everyone has their own perspective which someone out there always ends up relating to. That's why I think it's all valuable, personally.

Melissa: I agree. I definitely agree.

Zibby: Speaking of stories, tell me your backstory and your relationship with your weight and body and when it began and where you are now. I'll jump in and maybe interrupt you a hundred times.

Melissa: You probably will need to because, of course, like all of our stories in this regard, it's long. One of the formative elements of this for me is that I'm the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. I think that when you grow up with, in my case, a parent, my mother, who grew up in a home with that kind of trauma -- her parents had lost pretty much all of their family in the Holocaust. My grandmother was in concentration camps. They were starved, basically, for years. There's a lot of dysfunction that comes out of that experience. I think there's not a lot that's been said about the relationship with food that people have when they have not had it. I was very much raised with food as a very prominent element in our lives. A refrigerator that is not filled and stuffed is not okay. You have to have a lot of leftovers after every meal, particularly a holiday. That sort of overabundance was definitely a reaction, I think, to my mother being raised by Holocaust survivors. I think that is an element of it.

Zibby: Wait, I'm already interrupting you. Where was your family from? Which concentration camp? How old were they? Give you a little more detail if you don't mind.

Melissa: Of course. My grandparents are from Poland. They were from Łódź in Poland. My grandmother was in a couple of camps, Auschwitz and I think another one or two along the way. My grandfather was more of a -- he escaped and was in a work camp and has this unbelievable story how he fled and survived through working and hiding. They met after the war. My grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt who just died of COVID in April --

Zibby: -- I'm so sorry.

Melissa: I lost my grandmother a long time ago. She was the only thing I had tied to her. They survived, the two of them. The rest of their siblings, there's these horrible stories of them being taken away by the Nazis, and their mother in front of them. It's just so hard to even think about. That's a lot of the backstory. My grandparents met in a displaced persons camp after the war, as did my great-aunt and uncle. They were married in a joint ceremony. Then they all came to the United States together. It's the American dream in many respects but with a lot of trauma in the history, for sure.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry that that happened to your family. I cannot believe that your great-aunt lived through Auschwitz and died of COVID. Honestly, you should call a newspaper about that. That is the most crazy journey through awfulness. I didn't say that well, but you know what I mean? That this is what felled her after she survived all that. I'm so interested in what happened after the Holocaust, and the Holocaust obviously. I shouldn't say obviously, but I happen to be super interested. I took a whole class in college about the generational effects on what happened after the war and what happened in the displaced persons camps, all of that. Now to see you sitting here, the next generation, it gives me chills, really.

Melissa: It's a lot. It's a lot of deep family history. You worry that the loss of these survivors really impacts the ability to tell these stories. I know you suffered a lot of loss from COVID. It was very sad. It was just not the way her life should've ended.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. I bet in the early days you couldn't even be with her and all that. Melissa, I'm so sorry. Okay, not to drudge up all your painful memories. So they made it through that. Then which part of the States did you end up?

Melissa: They came to Paterson, New Jersey. My mother was born there. My grandfather became an electrician and had a very successful electrical supply company. My great-aunt was a businesswoman before her time. She owned a ladies' clothing store. She and my great-uncle would go to the city and buy clothes for the store. She had a successful business. She was a working mom sixty years ago and really was a trailblazer in that way. It was the American dream. There's no question. They stayed in New Jersey, raised their family in New Jersey. That's where I was born and have lived for all of my life other than the four years of college.

Zibby: All right, so back to eating.

Melissa: It's all about the food, always. [laughs]

Zibby: You had a stuffed fridge. You have this inherited trauma of starvation in the genes somewhere that courses through that you can't escape... Continue.

Melissa: Right. I think that the pivotal time for me was actually when my grandmother died. She was very sick for a lot of her life. From when I was about seven until I was eleven, she was [distorted audio] had a brain tumor that was removed. She was paralyzed. It was terrible. My mother was consumed by her well-being and her struggle. She died the end of sixth grade for me when I was eleven. Went to sleepaway camp late because she passed away right when camp was starting. We were moving to a new house about an hour away, moving to a new town. I came home from camp to a new home, to a new town. My parents had moved over the summer. Here I am, an almost twelve-year-old girl starting what we called junior high back then, seventh grade, had gone through early puberty, was tall, was the same height I am now. I just never grew again.

Zibby: I had that too. I was tall for a hot minute in 1983 or something, maybe a little later. [laughs]

Melissa: There's a picture of me in sixth grade, and I'm the tallest one in the class. The problem is, I was that height for the rest of my life. I used to joke around. I was waiting to stretch out and it never happened, and grow. That was really the pivotal year for me because I started a new school. I didn't know anybody. I was starting to feel really insecure in my body. I turned to food. Food made me feel better. There was no expectations. It just always made me feel better. I really became a binge eater. I really started to come home from school and I would go right to the pantry. I would take out a big bag of potato chips -- it's amazing to think about what I would eat -- and ketchup. That was my binge food of choice at the time.

Then I started sneaking food. That was a huge part of my issue because I knew that I was doing something that was not good for me, but I couldn't stop. To this day, I will tell you -- I'm forty-seven years old. It's been thirty-five years since I started the behavior. I will still go to the pantry and take out something at night that I shouldn't be eating and I'll look around waiting for somebody to say, do you really need that? Do you really need to eat that? It's so deep in there. Nobody says anything except me. [laughs] That was it. I put on a lot of weight in that seventh-grade year and then went on my first diet. I was trying to think about the name of the place I went to. It was a diet center. I can picture it in the strip mall on the highway in the town I lived in. I remember I would eat these freeze-dried little apple pieces in a bag that were on my program. I would make these frozen Carnation Instant Breakfast chocolate something that was okay on the plan.

Zibby: I think I did the same thing, by the way. I haven't even interjected to say that everything is the same until this. My mom dragged me to the diet center. There were these big brown pills, whatever they were, that tasted kind of gross. Did you have the same thing?

Melissa: [laughs] Yes.

Zibby: Oh, my god. What was this place?

Melissa: I don't know.

Zibby: Now a couple people have come out of the woodwork. I only remember going briefly. I haven't heard of it since. I've got to investigate. Anyway, I was there too in New York City.

Melissa: Oh, my gosh. I went on this program. I lost the weight. I have such memories of deprivation from that program. I remember going to the movies and taking those stupid dehydrated apple packets with me so I could have a snack. It's the same. To this day, if I go to the movies or when I went to the movies and if we ever go to the movies again, if I want popcorn, I eat popcorn because I have such a terrible memory of that deprivation. So I went on this program. I lost all my weight. I will never forget. My mother never had a weight problem. She's tall, thin. She smoked at the time. She had a very fast metabolism. Her best friend, who's still like a second mom to me, always struggled with her weight. I remember saying to her when I was twelve, thirteen, "I did it. I lost all the weight. It's over. I never have to worry about this again." I remember her looking at me and saying, "Oh, sweetheart, this is going to be a battle for life." She knew. She knew what I did not know which is that it was not about one diet and losing twenty pounds and then it was over. That was really the start of this lifelong journey.

Zibby: My mother also smoked, also very thin, worked out all the time, never had an issue. Her best friend and her would talk about it. Her name was Sally. Then Sally ended up getting lung cancer. When she was super sick, she came over. She was wearing jeans and a head scarf because she had lost her hair. I will never forget this. She walked in the front door and my mother goes, "Sally, you lost so much weight. You look amazing." Literally, Sally, whose daughters are like my family at this point, puts her hands on her hips and starts turning around 360 so they could admire how much weight she had lost. Then she passed away. It doesn't end ever.

Melissa: It does not. I think that my parents, who are wonderful people and I'm so close to -- but they were always thin. They were very attached to thin being good. When all of a sudden I was not thin, it was hard. They struggled with it. I think they would do a lot of it over again if they had the chance with how they talked to me about it. I don't think they realized that this was a deep-seated problem that I was having. I also have a developmentally disabled brother. I had a sibling who was a few years younger who needed a lot of attention. It's always difficult to have a child with special needs. Forty years ago, we didn't have the resources and the community that we have now. I think that the difficulty that my mother felt in parenting him, getting him what he needed, and dealing with a sick mother and everything else, it was a lot. There wasn't that much left for me and what I was going through as a teen girl going through puberty and struggling in a new school. That was the beginning. It was not over, obviously, after that first weight loss. Then it just went on and on for years. It was a cycle. Something stressful would happen. The binge eating would return. I would lose control over it. I would put on weight. Then I would get control over it.

Then I started Weight Watchers. I'm a huge Weight Watchers fan. I still believe that it is something you can do for life. I was glad I was introduced to it in my teens. I have been on it on and off for thirty-something years. I believe in it because I'm also a big believer in moderation. Weight Watchers is really about that and the lifestyle. It went on and on, back and forth with my weight. Looking back, one of the hardest things is that I've been so cruel to myself. The negative self-talk about my body and the way that I talked to myself and still do is upsetting to me. I'm this confident person in all these other aspects of my life, professionally and otherwise. Yet I cannot shed this deep-seated negative feeling I have about my body. That is something that really is stunning to me, that it has had that impact. I say this sometimes. I have sons. I don't have daughters. People always say, gosh, you should've had a girl. You must've always wished that you didn't have a daughter. I always say to myself -- this is so sad -- I am glad that I don't have a daughter because I feel that I'm not equipped to necessarily raise a daughter with a positive view of her body. I am well past having any children. My kids are not little. I am closer to fifty than to forty at this point. It's something that is that deep in me that I wouldn't even want to have that as a responsibility because I know that I don't have a healthy relationship with my body.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. By the way, I probably should not say this, but I'm looking at you, and you're tiny. I'm serious. People listening -- not that it matters. You could weigh five hundred pounds for all it counts. I don't want to talk about weight, but you happen to be tiny. It somehow makes this even more pronounced because it's clearly not in line with how you actually look, not that it ever is, not that that's the point. It's how you feel.

Melissa: Totally. It's funny you say that because when I told my husband I was doing this, he was like, "She's going to be like, what?" [laughs]

Zibby: No, I'm not like that at all.

Melissa: I know you're not, but that's actually such a good point. I always say I think I've always had funhouse mirrors in my house. I remember distinctly being in college and being at the gym. I always was looking for someone who looked like me, somebody who was 5'2" and pear shaped and hip-y and had the same sort of body type and weighed about what I did because I wanted to see what somebody else looked like.

Zibby: You were looking for me. [laughs]

Melissa: I was looking for you, Zibby. I was.

Zibby: And I was looking for you. I felt like everyone growing up was like a string bean. I was like, what the heck? This [indiscernible/crosstalk] my body.

Melissa: I know. So I'm at this gym, Mike's Gym in Medford, Massachusetts, near where I went to college. I see this woman from afar. I'm like, that's it. That's what I look like. I was like, that's it. She got close to me. I looked at her again. I said, oh, my gosh. The woman was probably sixty to eighty pounds heavier than me. When I really looked at her, I said, that is not what you look like, Melissa. I just cannot see myself the way others do. It's still the case. When I talk to people about the fact that I've had a weight problem, and who have not known me, they are -- it's not like I used to weigh fifty pounds more than I do now. I've never been more than overweight. I'm always on the cusp of the BMI, healthy, a little overweight. When I had my babies, I put on a lot of weight, but I took most of that off. It's not about the number. It's a mindset. I relate to people who have serious weight problems. I get that in a way that -- I think that part of my being raised with this, thin is good, the string bean body is good, is that I really feel that we aren't gracious and kind to people who have real problems, whether it's binge eating or some obsessive compulsive disorder or a family history that they can't get away from. Nobody wants to live in a body that is uncomfortable. I just think we don't treat people with sufficient respect around these issues at all. Even though nobody would think it, maybe, from seeing me, I get that. I want to be an ally for people who are struggling to feel, as you always say, to feel better in their bodies. That's really my goal and my mission today for myself, is to just feel better in my body.

Zibby: And I would argue in your mind. Maybe I should add that. I guess by saying that, I really mean the whole Megillah, if you will. How you feel about it is how you feel in your body too. It's not just that this is tight or this isn't as strong or blah, blah, blah. I don't know the answer. I still feel that same sense that you were talking about with the stealing food. I had a cookie last night. I put it under my book because I didn't want my husband to see that I was going to eat this cookie. Finally, I was like, this is ridiculous. He doesn't care if you eat the cookie. Eat the cookie. Finally I stopped waiting for him to leave the room. This is ridiculous. I just ate the cookie in front of him. He said nothing. He thought nothing. It's all me. It's how many years of this? I feel like this is, in some way, generational. This is not happening to the girls -- by the way, I also wanted to say to you, you would have been a fantastic mother to girls. You would have found the way. There are other women who I know feel the same as you and I know maybe would've gone the other way. I give my kids whatever they want to eat because I had food hidden from me. I'm like, I'm not going to do that. Just even feeling that way, that you feel that you couldn't do it, that you couldn't help someone else when already you're coming on this podcast to help other people, it breaks my heart in a way, but I relate completely.

Melissa: The sneaking food, I have to tell you, you were saying that you -- it's amazing how deep-seated that is. I've been married for almost twenty years. [Distorted audio] said one word to me. We've been together half my life at this point. He's never said a word to me about my weight, what I'm eating, nothing. It's my body. It's my issue. That's how deep it is in me. I'm glad to hear that that's not the case, maybe, for the new generation because I'm sort of detached from raising teenage girls. I have a teenage boy. I'm getting to live through him. I always used to say I wanted to be a skinny teenage boy who could eat anything. I was never going to be that, but I get to feed one now. He made a comment to me a couple months ago where he said, "Mom, food makes me feel better." I thought, yeah, he's got it. He loves food like I do. I love food. He loves food. He's an athletic, tall, very active teenage boy, but he loves food. You have to stay moving to be able to eat all that.

Even with him, I talked to him about the fact that I was doing this because I said, "You need to be quiet. You guys need to be quiet." I talked about binge eating when I was a kid and all that because I think we need to talk about all of this. I'm glad this podcast and other -- this is what we need to do to cure this sort of dysfunction around food. Today, I've talked about all the history. I am much healthier about my -- I still have all these deep-seated problems, but I don't have the same issues anymore in a lot of ways. I'm focused on moving my body. I used to joke around. I hated exercise when I was younger more than I loved food. There were a lot of stretches of my life where I literally would starve myself rather than exercise so that I could lose some weight because I just hated exercise. It was a chore. It was the first thing to go. Now I love it. I need it. I have to move my body.

Zibby: What do you do?

Melissa: When I turned forty, I started running a little. I'm not a big runner. That helped. I started to get more active. Two years ago when I turned forty-five, I said to my husband -- my best friend was in Chicago. She had a Peloton bike. She said, "The Peloton bike is great. It's at home. You can get up early in the morning and do it. You don't have to go to a gym, whatever." I said to my husband, "I'm buying this." I'm not the kind of person who normally would spend a lot of money on a piece of fitness equipment. It's just not my way. I said, "I'm buying this." He was like, "You're not going to use it." I said, "I'm buying it. I'm doing this." It was the best investment I've ever made in my health because it has become a regular part of my life. I used to say that the lack of exercise was my biggest failure as an adult. The biggest failure of my adult life was my inability to make exercise a regular part of my life. I'm a professional. I'm a mom. I'm a wife. I'm a volunteer. This was the biggest failure of my life, and it's not anymore. I love to exercise. It's not just the Peloton. I walk my dog a lot. I do some strength training. I've started to do some yoga during COVID because...

Zibby: Why not? [laughs]

Melissa: Why not? Whatever works to get through the day. Look, people always say you lose weight in the kitchen. Working out is important. If I'm working out and eating everything, I'm going to gain weight. That certainly happens, but my attitude about it is different, for sure. I used to be like -- it would be the start of the week. I'd screw up. It was Monday. You already ate the three slices of pizza, and that was it. I don't do that anymore. Every meal, everything I put in my mouth, it's a new moment. I do not do that anymore. Well, this day's a wash. This meal's over. I just don't do that. Today, I had the salad for lunch. Maybe tonight I won't make a good choice. I don't know, but that doesn't mean tomorrow I'm not going to try to make a good choice again. That's more about the health part of it. That has changed my mindset. I don't weigh myself a lot. I used to. I don't weigh myself a lot because I want to feel like what I'm eating is healthy and I'm making good choices when I can and I'm moving my body. If I make it really about the number, then I get really obsessed.

Zibby: That is amazing advice. It's all so true. It's hard to move it from the realm of the intellectual to the behavior to the habit. It's all fantastic advice and important. It's so important. Working out is just one piece of the puzzle. I try to, in my head, think, this is just for my mental health. This isn't even for my body as much, but it still doesn't get me on the bike some days. I also am on Peloton. I've recently discovered it. I am ThisMomHasTimeTo if you want to be my friend on Peloton.

Melissa: Absolutely. I'm MomWifeBoss.

Zibby: I love that. Wow, that's so cool.

Melissa: All the parts of me.

Zibby: Melissa, first of all, I'm sitting here thinking as you're talking, gosh, I would really love to sit and have coffee with you sometime when we're not having this podcast on. Then I'm thinking to myself, gosh, there are so many people, if you just get out of your own world, your own proximity -- I'm thinking of you and I both growing up among people who even just have different body types and how that feels. There's all this, I was such an outsider because of this or that. Anyway you feel different than is something. If you don't see a model somewhere, not to say that I never did, but certainly not in my -- I just feel like I would encourage other people who haven't broadened out their group from where they live, that now is a great time to do that. Sometimes you have to push the boundaries of not just the moms in your school or the kids in your class or whatever. You might not find someone like you, but that doesn't mean they're not out there in the world. They are. That sounds so obvious, but I just don't think I totally understood that until I started meeting great people like you and so many people around the world on Zoom and all these ways. Thank you for sharing your story. I think your aunt's experience should definitely go in a newspaper or a book or something. I hope we can continue this offline sometime.

Melissa: I hope so too, Zibby. Thank you so much. Thanks for your community. I've told you, your book podcast got me reading again. Then this community has been so great because the message is so important. I'm not the kind of person who normally reaches out to people that she doesn't know. It's been a pleasure to get to know you through this and to talk. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: You too. Thank you so much.

Melissa: Take care.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Melissa: Bye.

Rabbi Steve Leder, THE BEAUTY OF WHAT REMAINS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Rabbi Leder. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss The Beauty of What Remains, your brand-new book.

Rabbi Steve Leder: Thank you. I'm really happy to be with you today.

Zibby: First of all, whenever my friend Karen Frankel tells me to do anything, I do it because she has the best taste and recommendations for everything. When she recommended your book, I was like, of course. Then I read it, and it was unbelievably amazing. I'm delighted to be connected with you.

Steve: Thank you. As am I. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me about it.

Zibby: My pleasure. Now I have to go back and read all your other books. Could you please tell listeners what this book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Steve: I think the best way I can frame this book is as an apology. Let me explain. I had been a rabbi for about thirty years before I started writing this book. Obviously, I helped many, many hundreds, thousands. I calculated that I had officiated roughly a thousand funerals over those thirty years. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of helping people and guiding them through this process and of helping them discover what an extraordinary teacher death is when it comes to helping us lead meaningful lives. I thought I would've given myself maybe an A-, maybe even an A, in the rabbi/pastoral department. Then my father died. In the run-up to, during, and the aftermath of his death, I realized that despite my best efforts in the past, I was really, as I say in the book, one degree shy of the deepest truth when it comes to guiding people through the many ways death teaches us about life. I wrote this book really as a kind of apology, an attempt to undo what I had gotten wrong and to get it right and to put the reader on my shoulder as I walked through my own trajectory with my father's ten-year decline due to Alzheimer's and his death and to put the reader on my shoulder as I walk into the homes and hospital rooms of so many others to help them through what is inevitable for all of us. To succinctly answer your question, the book is an attempt to get it right.

Zibby: Wow. There was so much helpful information in the book. I don't think you need to apologize. I think A- would've been perfectly fine, by the way. You still have graduated with honors in my book.

Steve: You didn't grow up in my family. [laughs]

Zibby: Okay. In my family, they were happy with A-, at least for me. I think that even without that layer, you had so many tidbits and anecdotes and stories from the many people you've helped, including really gut-wrenching decisions like to what to say with your rabbi hat on versus your Steve hat on to the woman who wanted to know if her family could assist in her death at the last minute and you didn't know what to do, to all these other moments where you've helped families say goodbye, moments you've come in with jokes. I appreciate you putting in a few jokes in case the rest of us are really at a loss and need a good one to buffer our conversation skills. I'm going to have to photocopy those and hang them up. There's this whole piece of you which is, this is me as the rabbi, and this is me as me. Then this book, I feel like, is where the two come together.

Steve: I did want to explore in this book, the tension and the dance that goes on within me when I am both rabbi and friend, rabbi and son, rabbi and husband, rabbi and father. Often, those are aligned, but sometimes they're in conflict. What I really, really tried to do in this book is to weave that conflict and that tension and that resolution throughout the entire book. It's another component of putting the reader on my shoulder because so few people see behind the curtain when it comes to what clergy really do and how they do it. So few understand, so few clergy honestly, understand the dynamic within themselves that has to be resolved, the cognitive dissonance between, in my case, the rabbi and the man, the rabbi and the son. Addressing that conflict has made me a better rabbi and a better son. That's the end result. That's part of the reason I called the book The Beauty of What Remains. There are other reasons, but that's a big part of it. Once you engage in that internal conversation, what remains is really, for me, something quite beautiful.

Zibby: One of the most helpful pieces of advice in this book, and there is just so much, is for anybody who's feeling anxious about death, it means they're not dying and that you can just go back to living and wait. At the time when you die, then you can start worrying about it. For somebody with immense amounts of anxiety about everything like me, that was very helpful. Here, I'm just going to read this one quote. You said, "Most people are ready for death the way we are all ready for sleep after a long and exhausting day. We just want to pull the covers up around our aching heads and settle in for the peace of it all. We are not anxious about sleeping. We are not depressed about it. We are not afraid of it. Disease, age, and life itself prepare us for death. There is time for everything, and when it is our time to die, death is as natural a thing as life itself. Consider this very good news. For those of us who fear death, dying people are not afraid of dying. If you are afraid of dying, it is not your day. Anxiety is for the living." I'm actually going to post this on my bulletin board right now. That's going to stay.

Steve: It's really true. It's really helpful for people. It's sort of counterintuitive, but it's really helpful when I can look someone in the eye after they tell me, "I'm really afraid to die." I say, "That's because you're not dying, certainly not today." When you are really actively dying, you will not be afraid. Zibby, in thirty-three years now at the bedside of more than a thousand dying people, when that person is really ready to die, not once, not one single person has expressed fear to me. I ask, "Are you afraid?" The answer has, every time, been no. I know that's anecdotal evidence, but it's pretty persuasive. It is why I can say with a very high degree of confidence that if you fear death, you're not dying. Take a breath.

Zibby: It's interesting. My grandmother just passed away. She was ninety-seven and had been very healthy until the very end. Because of COVID, we could only say goodbye over FaceTime, which was just horrific and so sad. She was there with an aid. As she was unconscious at the end, I was like, "Is she afraid? Did she say she was afraid?" When she was alive, she was always taking about how afraid she was to die. "Does she know she's dying? Is she afraid?" She was like, "No, no." Maybe she was just saying that to make me feel better. She said, "No, no, not at all. I told her I was right here. She said, okay." Then when I would say over FaceTime, "Gadgi, don't be afraid. Everything's okay," her eyes kind of flickered, and that was it. I didn't see any fear. I just felt a sense of peace.

Steve: There is a point in life when death makes sense, but you have to be at that point in order to understand that.

Zibby: So I guess it's good I don't understand it.

Steve: It's a sign.

Zibby: It's a sign that I'm alive. [laughs]

Steve: That you're alive and not actively dying, correct.

Zibby: The rest of your book, though, talks about -- not the rest, but a lot of your book talks about the effect of death on the living and the loss of other people and the effect of illness like all the things you had to go through with your dad. Oh, my gosh, the scene with you tossing the balloon at your dad, all these moments, when you go and cry in the hallway, you can just put yourself in your shoes time and time again and feel that pain and suffering. The rest of it is about how you deal with the loss. You had great advice on that too. You say, "It won't always hurt so much. I used to think that what they meant was that eventually grief abates, the ache diminishes. Now what I think they meant was not that it won't always hurt so much, but that it won't always hurt so often." Tell me about that.

Steve: That's right. One of the most difficult things that I have to manage is the death of a child. There are very few things in life more difficult than that. Of course, as the rabbi, I take that on my shoulders with the family. I carry it with them. I even carry the casket. I always volunteer to carry the casket because it's too painful for the parents. Just imagine a casket the size of a shoebox.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, stop.

Steve: As a way of learning more about the feeling of losing a child, I read a book many years ago edited by two women, both of whom had children who died. It's an anthology of writers writing about writers who had children die writing about the experience. For example, Robert Frost had four children die. Mark Twain had a child die. They wrote about it. In the introduction, these women say that the thing that helped them the most and was the most honest was when someone said to them, it won't always hurt so much. I said that for years. This is part of the apology component of the book. I said that, Zibby, so many years, decades, to parents. I would say, look, the most honest and helpful thing I can tell you right now is it won't always hurt so much. Then my father died, obviously a more normative circumstance than the death of a child. I stopped saying that to people because it's not true. The truth is, it won't always hurt so often, but when it hurts, it hurts every bit as much.

That is the truth. That has to be said. I find by enlightening people in this way, it enables them to go with these waves that come at them. One of the things I say in the book is that anyone who thinks the shortest distance between two points is a straight line doesn't understand grief because grief is nonlinear. This business about there being stages of grief, my opinion, it's nonsense. Grief is much more like waves. It ebbs and it flows. It ebbs and it flows. The waves get further apart. Every once in a while when your back is turned, you can just get slammed by a rogue wave that you didn't see coming. It can be a song. It can be a taste. It can be a place. It can be something you desperately wish you could share with your loved one who's gone. These waves hit us. When you're really looking at a wave, you have two choices. You can try to stand up against it -- what normally happens then is it crashes in on you and throws you upside down and you're gasping for air and lost and confused -- or you can submit and lie down and float with it until you're able to stand up again. That's grief. It’s the floating. It's the learning to float with it until you can stand again. That is the honest truth about grief.

Zibby: I have been, then, on the beach watching this ocean ravage my husband and his sister as their mother and grandmother just passed away from COVID. I have watched firsthand exactly what you're talking about, especially the first week. In the first week, every few hours somebody would fall. It was one and then the other and the other. I was running back and forth. Now it's been a couple months. It's still, well, it knocked me over this morning. I was okay, but then two days ago, this. It's exactly it. It's not predictable. You can't plan for it.

Steve: No. I think it's always okay when it comes. I don't think there's a wrong way to grieve. Obviously, I'm not talking about a person who doesn't eat and can't sleep for months and becomes clinically ill. There's really no wrong way, just as there's no wrong moment or time to feel love because actually, that's really what you're feeling. That's another way of seeing grief that makes it more beautiful to embrace. Grief is really a reflection of love. One of the things I talk about in the book -- the book is for everyone. Obviously, I'm a rabbi and I wrote it, but it's really not a Jewish book. It may be a book for Jews like everyone else, but it's not a Jewish book. I do, in the book, talk about that verse from the twenty-third psalm that everyone knows. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil." There are two very nuanced and very beautiful and important, profound ideas in that verse. The first, we walk through this valley of darkness. We don't stay there forever.

Even more nuanced and more profound is this metaphor of a valley of shadows for grief. If you think really deeply about a shadow, no matter how long, no matter how dark, it's proof that the light is still shining. You cannot have a shadow without light. Without light, you have total darkness, not a shadow. The light is obstructed in this metaphor by mountains on each side of the valley, of course, but in the real world, by our grief. What is grief really if not a reflection of the love that we had and continue to have with the person who has died? In that way, we can start to rethink grief and see it as something quite beautiful and really exquisite despite its pain. There's a duality, of course, to grief. I also say in the book, there's a duality to memory. We always say, may his memory be a blessing. Wolf Blitzer's made a living off of that on CNN. The truth about memory is that it's beautiful and it hurts. It's both. In the book, I say it's like being caressed and spat on at the same time. That's memory.

The more we understand the fullness of the experience, the more we're able to find the beauty within in it. Maybe there's a little bit of hyperbole in this statement to the ears of others, but as a guy who's been on the inside of this for a long time, I will tell you, I think death is the great teacher in life. Imagine a deathless life. Think about that for a moment. Imagine a life that was endless. What value would that life have? What would happen to ambition? What would happen to love? What would happen to having children? It would all be gone. Death is the great teacher when it comes to really embracing and enjoying and getting the most out of and giving the most to life and love themselves.

Zibby: Now I'm getting worried that maybe you're sick because it sounds like you're not scared at all to die either.

Steve: I don't think about it. Look, I don't want to die. I'm sixty years old. I want to have grandchildren. I want to have fun and all of these things. When I do feel any fear of death, I remind myself of my own words, which is, you're clearly not dying if you're worried about dying. When the day comes, you're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be better than fine because it's as natural, as I said, as birth itself. My kids worry about me. Especially now during COVID, I'm officiating at three, four, five funerals a week now. Very large congregation, obviously. My kids get wind of this. They’ve been at the dinner table for their lives listening to Daddy's day. My kids worry about me dying. I say, look, rare accidents occur, but the truth is, I am not likely to die until you are ready to handle it.

Zibby: Aw, that's really nice. I'm going to steal that and tell my kids.

Steve: And it's true. We can get to what to say to kids about when they ask you, are you going to die? There's a whole conversation that you can have with them that I think will really calm them down quite a bit and maybe calm you down too, Zibby. I don't know.

Zibby: [laughs] I know you wrote about that in the book as well. You had advice on everything that anyone could ever want.

Steve: I wanted it to be a field guide and a journey. That's really what I was hoping to do, put you, the reader, on my shoulder and journey through the resolution of the rabbi versus the son, the son versus the rabbi, the resolution that memory brings to my relationship with a very complicated and difficult father and also a very amazing father. As most high achievers are, they're complicated and they're amazing. Also, to put you on my shoulder on this journey with other families and other situations. I hope that it's a field guide for this journey. I ultimately hope that it really helps people -- well, you read it. You tell me. Be honest. I hope that it ultimately helps people take their own lives more seriously and appreciate those lives more deeply. That's really the hope. That's why it's called The Beauty of What Remains.

Zibby: What you said, one of my favorite lines that I think reflects this, you said, "The profound and simple truth is that we are each writing our own eulogy every day with the pen of our lives." That's also going up on the bulletin board. These are profound statements that you make. It's so true. The way we live each day, the culmination of that, that's all that we're left with. That's what people will say when we're gone. That's all you can do, is live the way you want to be remembered. It sounds obvious, but it's so important.

Steve: That’s right. There's this notion that I often share with people about living as a good ancestor. We don't think of ourselves as ancestors. We are, just not yet. Can you live as a good ancestor? That's a really good question to ask one's self. Am I being a good ancestor for generations yet to be born? You know this line of cleaning products called Seventh Generation?

Zibby: Mm-hmm.

Steve: That comes from the great law of the Iroquois tribe which says that when the elders make a decision, they have to consider the impact of that decision on the seventh generation to follow. What a way to live. What a world we would have if we lived that way.

Zibby: Wow. It's certainly something to aspire to. That's a lot of cleaning. Tell me a little bit about the writing of this book. You wrote in the book that you took a sabbatical and spent a month in Palm Springs just writing about death in the midst of COVID. Tell me what that experience was like.

Steve: Off and on, I set aside time. I need a long runway to write. I'm not a guy who, oh, I have an hour and a half, I'm going to sit down and knock out ten pages. I need a really long runway. There's a lot of pacing. There's a lot of straightening up. There's a lot of snacking on sunflower seeds and potato chips. I need a lot of runway. I also need to be intensely alone when I write. Most of this book was written in an empty house in Palm Springs and in an empty cabin in Joshua Tree, which is an extraordinary desert about three hours from Los Angeles. I locked myself in a cabin with no TV, no internet, nothing. This book just poured out. I don't know if that's a process as much as it's an environment. Putting myself in the right environment with absolutely no distractions is the only way that I could do it. This book forced me into the duality of memory because I had to go back and revisit the pain of my father's Alzheimer's, the pain of his death, the pain of his life, the pain of his mistakes, and to find a way for myself, and therefore I hope the reader, to see how we can round the sharp edges of our loved ones through memory and through our own lives and our own behaviors in their honor and memory.

Zibby: Beautiful. Last question, what advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Steve: There are a few things. First, I would say be aware that there is not one fun thing about writing a book, not one single enjoyable, fun thing. [laughter] You have to know that going in. There's nothing sexy about it. It the hardest kind of work. It's really work. I think it was Hemmingway who said writing's easy, you just sit down and open a vein. You really have to want to say what you're planning on saying. That's the first thing. The second thing I would say to aspiring writers is write what you know. Write what you know. The best books, I believe, are not research based, they're people writing about what they intuitively know and have lived. Thirdly, I would say get published everywhere every chance you get. Say yes to everything. My writing career started because I said yes to writing a weekly column for a little Jewish newspaper in Los Angeles. A publisher started reading the columns, and I got my first book deal. Someone read that book, and I got my second. Someone read that book, and the third, etc., etc. It's because I say yes to every opportunity to be published because it makes you better and because you learn.

It's a combination of these things. Have no illusions about the pain of it all. Write what you know. Say yes to every opportunity. Since I began the answer on such a carping note to that question that there's not one fun thing about it, I will say, and this happened to me two days ago -- it's emotional for me, writing a book, especially one as intimate as this. Other than holding my children in my arms when they were born, there is no feeling like holding your book when the publisher sends it to you and you're the first. You open that carton and you hold that book, there's no feeling like it on earth. I dreamed about it. I was in the writing program at Northwestern as an undergrad. This feeling of "I am a writer" is a very deep and beautiful and powerful feeling. It is not the same as, I am a parent, I am a mother, I am a father, but it's in the same universe. It's a pretty amazing feeling. To know that you've helped people, what else could one ask for than that?

Zibby: That's amazing. You're such a good speaker. You're such a great writer. I wish I could just join your congregation.

Steve: You're in. Plenty of room on the [indiscernible], Zibby.

Zibby: Maybe I'll do a virtual -- I'll join my third temple. [laughs]

Steve: You're in.

Zibby: Thank you so much for all of your time. Thank you for this amazing and so-helpful book. Even, by the way, the article you wrote recently about surviving the holidays with grief in your life, that was also super useful. Thank you for all of it. I hope to stay in touch.

Steve: Thank you, Zibby. I deeply appreciate what you're doing. Thank you.

Zibby: My pleasure. Buh-bye. Thanks.

Steve: Bye.

Felicia Luna Lemus, PARTICULATE MATTER

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

Felicia Luna Lemus: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here to get to talk with you. Thank you.

Zibby: You too. Particulate Matter, do you call it a poem? How do you describe it? It's beautiful and made me feel so accomplished because on this page, all it says is, "Don't they have an app for that?" and I read an entire page. [laughs] I feel like this is the perfect book for people who don't have time because each page just has about one sentence, which is great.

Felicia: I'm glad that it's handy in that way. That's wonderful to hear.

Zibby: Very handy. Not your intention, but a side benefit.

Felicia: It's creative nonfiction. I don't refer to it as a poem or memoir, but I think that it is a bit of both of those things. For me, it's just the best way that I was able to try to create a portrait of this particular moment in my life. This was the form that it took. In part, the funny thing that you say, for folks who don't feel like they have a lot of time to read, I felt like I didn't have a lot of bandwidth and energy and headspace at that particular moment to write. Part of it was, things came out in a concise form. Then I edited it even more to get it even more exact in the ways that I wanted it to be. There's something to that. I could hear that.

Zibby: For listeners who don't know, why don't you tell us about the story that is encapsulated in this work of creative nonfiction? What is it you needed to work through? Tell us that time and place and the emotion, which obviously comes across on the page immediately, but for those who haven't read it yet.

Felicia: Thank you. This is a piece that I wrote when my spouse was very ill. There was a point where she developed -- she’d been a lifelong athlete her entire life, and an avid hiker, played all kinds of competitive sports through school, always incredibly healthy. Out of nowhere, she developed adult-onset asthma. She went away for a business trip at one point to Seattle. We live in Los Angeles. She went away to Seattle where the air is wonderful, no air pollution or anything. She was feeling much better with her asthma. Came back home, and literally could not breathe. It was this emergency situation where the doctors said it's truly a matter of life and death. You need to get to cleaner air immediately. We lived in a very polluted part of Los Angeles. It was the air pollution that was making her sick. It was an incredibly devastating moment for us to all of a sudden -- I can't think of many things that are -- to lose a loved one and to feel the fear of, at any moment this person who I had a fairy tale, wonderful, happy life with all of a sudden might be taken away for no fault of her own.

I wrote this in that year that we were experiencing -- we had to live apart for a while. It was just a really hard time. It was a very hard time. At the same time, I think it was one of those moments where I realized that these everyday details that are so -- sometimes you're just rushing around, rushing around in life. Before, I did not stop to notice the beautiful things in the everyday. All of a sudden, I was profoundly aware of them and grateful for them, just any little thing that could get me through to the next day and to try to get us through this thing that we're going through. Thankfully, the air helped. That's been a wonderful change in our lives. This is the book that came out of that. It's a love letter to her. These were the things that I noticed when we had to be apart and I was facing the possibility of losing her. It was a horrible, horrible thing to think about.

Zibby: What did she say when she read it?

Felicia: It's hard for both of us, honestly. It takes us back to a particular moment that we are so grateful to be past at this point. She knows how much I love her. She's my one. I think it's hard to read about a difficult moment in our life. At the same time, it's a love letter. She knows it. She knows it's filled with love. It's just how profoundly I adore her. It's the whole thing of when you love someone so much, when something happens, it's really devastating. I felt the earth shake when this was a possibility.

Zibby: It's also so timely because of everyone's sort of collective inability to breathe right now with the pandemic, emotionally, but also physically. This is the main effect that people have, when COVID attacks your lungs and you can't breathe. Everyone is going through their own version of this hell at the moment, and the fires, even, in the book. Then there were more fires. It's your own experience, but you're closely tracking collectively certainly what everyone in Los Angeles is going through and around the world, really. It's a moment in time that maybe -- I'm sure you couldn't have possibly intended it to mirror our reality. It just goes to show how much your individual experience can really reflect a greater collective. That sounded like a total ramble. I hope you know what I'm talking about.

Felicia: Thank you. I really appreciate that. It was a profoundly vulnerable-making human experience. In whatever form that comes into our lives, we all experience it one way or another. I don't wish that experience on anyone. The pandemic that we've been going through, just the ways that it so profoundly impacted people's lives and rippled out all across the globe, it's horrifying. It's really awful. At the same time, I'm hopeful that there's something in what I wrote that can give some comfort to someone who maybe has gone through something similar. There's so much beauty in the world. Also, we all have pain. We all love. We all experience loss. If there's any way to have that human connection, I'd be really grateful for that. That would be really wonderful.

Zibby: Even just flipping through randomly, these simple images you have. "This bean and cheese burrito is, as always, too much for me to eat. Your half is waiting for you." Then of course, it's tinged with, is this person going to come back? "The hearing in my right ear keeps going out. Quiet whispers. I stand at the mirror and hold a flashlight to my ear. The whispers stop. The only scratching I could hear stopped. I keep walking into spiderwebs face first. Another web. I am beyond exhausted and numb. I don't want to get used to this." It's just so raw. It's like I'm reading your diary and you're here in my computer. It's like some bizarre experience. "Down the rabbit hole we go. The ten-minute nap with you on the new bed, heaven. I hope we can keep it. A cup of peppermint tea made from you with a spoonful of wildflower honey, heaven. You, heaven." It's so beautiful. It's really beautiful. Here is my question. In terms of making this into a book -- there aren't that many words. I don't know how long it would be if you put it in one Word doc, to be totally technical now to get us away from this emotion and whatever. It's so cute and small. Cute is the wrong word because this is a serious book. The format of it is so compact. How did you know this could actually be a book versus a novella or a short essay somewhere? How did you convince somebody to publish it in this form? It's awesome. People are always like, publishers don't want this, publishers don't want that. Now here is a book which is totally different, which is, in part, why I wanted to talk to you about it because it's just so cool. How did it become a book? Do you know what I mean?

Felicia: I think you hit on something, though. It really is, in some ways, like my diary of that particular time and experience. There would sometimes be one thing that I would fixate on in a day. My mind would just play with it all day, one detail from the world around me or something that I was noticing at home that normally I would just tell Nina about at the end of the day in passing. All of a sudden, it had this huge importance and magnified presence in my life. I'd write it down. It'd be sometimes one sentence, one particular detail that I would just try to capture as specifically as I could. It's that thing of when you're going through something that is so all-encompassing, sometimes that's how the brain works through a situation. I was giving so much energy to do everything that I could to help her get better and to try to keep our life together.

Sometimes all that I could focus on was one specific detail. That's what got me through. It was that one particular beautiful detail like a hummingbird's nest, just this magical thing that this hummingbird's nest fell outside our house. All of a sudden, it was there. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. It gave me some hope. It made me sad too because I thought there should be little birds in here. [laughs] It was this whole mix. Everything had the layers like that. I'm lucky that I work with really wonderful publishers who are happy to take risks and are happy to try to push the boundaries of what's included in literature. Akashic Books, they're amazing. That's what their whole purpose is, is to really expand those boundaries and to bring to the center, pieces that may not be conventional in some ways but that still really speak to a human experience and hopefully are good literature. I'm hopeful that this lands in a way that, even though it's so different, people will appreciate it as much as one of my novels.

Zibby: I didn't mean different would be bad. Different is very good. As somebody who reads a zillion books and looks at books so often, even the books I don't end up reading but I evaluate or whatever, to have something so different makes me stop and sit and look. In a way, that's also what these life experiences do to us. You're going and going and going. Then next thing you know, you're not going anywhere. You're just forced to stop and sit. I feel like the form of the book mirrored the sentiment of the book. I think it really worked. That's my own two cents. Tell me more about your writing in general and novels and how you got started as a writer and how we got here, you and me, this afternoon.

Felicia: Well, because you very graciously invited me to come talk with you. [laughter] It's funny. I thought I was going to be an academic. I studied history in college. I absolutely loved it. I was all geared up to go and focus on German history in particular. I was really interested in cultural history and all different sorts of things like that. I went through my program as rigorously -- I was a nerd. I'm just going to say that. I was an absolute nerd. I was convinced that I was going to be a professor. My professors were supportive of it. Then all of a sudden about a year after I had finished that and I was actually in a teaching credential program because I thought maybe I'd want to do this for a little bit first, I saw an advertisement in the OC Weekly where I lived in Orange County in Southern California at that point. It was kind of like The Village Voice publication.

It was a photograph of this historical figure, [indiscernible]. I saw this picture. I was like, oh, my gosh, who is this punk riot girl? She looked fierce and wonderful. That was kind of my scene at that point. I thought, there's got to be some great show that's coming through town. No, it turns out that it was actually an Edward Weston photograph. There was some very classy, very lovely exhibit in Laguna Beach that I ended up going and seeing. The second I saw this person -- I had no idea who this person was. There was very little written about her at that point. I was just absolutely obsessed and compelled and could not stop thinking about her and started writing. That's how it happened. I was obsessed with this person that I couldn't find anything out about. I started writing these stories trying to imagine who she was. That material became part of what was then transformed into my first novel. Then I came back to it for my second. That's where it went. It's the whole thing of if you just have that one moment where everything changes course. Here I am.

Zibby: Wow. Tell me about, when did you get off the main track and sit and start writing and said, this is it? How did it work in terms of publication? Did you sell the pitches of that? Tell me a little more about it.

Felicia: I ended up going to graduate school. As a nerd, I felt like I needed to learn more and be guided and just learn more. I wanted to know more about how to do this and to learn from some people who knew how to do it well. I went to graduate school. My thesis ended up becoming my first novel. It was really difficult at first to try to get it placed. Then once it happened, it just all clicked really beautifully. I'm really grateful for it. It was a really lucky set of events that happened.

Zibby: Amazing. Are you working on anything now?

Felicia: Oh, my gosh, I'm always writing. There's so much going on in the world right now. I'm trying to figure out what the next project's going to be. There's so many things that I've been thinking about. It's going to take a minute. There's just so much going on in the world that is worthy of being addressed in a really smart way. I think it's going to take me a second to try to figure out how I might try to contribute to that.

Zibby: All right, we'll give you a second.

Felicia: Thank you. [laughter]

Zibby: What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Felicia: Read everything you can, especially the things that inspire you. Read it as a book lover and also actively reading it to figure out how writers are doing the magic that they do that inspires you. Work really hard. Be kind. I think that's important. Be kind to the people who support you and take time to read your work and offer feedback. Be appreciative of all of that because it's always a group effort to get this stuff done. Stay humble. Just keep working hard. Keep at it. If it's what you love, it'll click.

Zibby: And don't forget to breathe.

Felicia: That too, and stretch, especially right now with everything being on computer all the time. Be sure to go outside and enjoy beautiful nature. Spend time with people that you find joy in. Stay human

Zibby: I miss people. I miss people a lot. Thank you. Thank you for your time. I'm so glad our paths have crossed in this bizarre format such as it is. Thank you for talking about your work. I'm glad that your partner is okay and that you guys got through this. I hope you both have continued health and all the rest.

Felicia: Thank you. I really appreciate it. You and your family too.

Zibby: Take care.

Felicia: Bye. Thank you.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Elizabeth Lesser, CASSANDRA SPEAKS

Zibby Owens: Elizabeth Lesser is the cofounder of Omega Institute and the author of Marrow, The Seeker's Guide, and the New York Times best seller, Broken Open. She has given two popular TED talks and is a member of Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul100, a collection of one hundred leaders who are using their voices and talents to elevate humanity. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her family. This is her book, Cassandra Speaks. Basically, she talks in this book -- I'll let her explain it more. It's a collection of her own thoughts and feelings and responses to how history has shown women to not have the most advantageous position in the narrative, but it's not an angry book at all. It's thoughtful and considered. Cassandra, the myth that she's referencing in the title of the book, is because -- I can't remember all the details, but something like Zeus gave Cassandra the power to see the future but not be able to enact any change or really have anyone believe her. In a way, that's similar to how some women feel that they know everything, and they say it and people don't listen. Here we go.

I'm live with Elizabeth now. Hi, Sam. Thank you guys for watching ahead of time. Hopefully, this will work. There are so many quotes and so many sections that I wanted to talk to Elizabeth about today, and the fact that at the beginning of most chapters she has these little quotes, which I always love.

Hi.

Elizabeth Lesser: Hi. Oh, boy, here I am.

Zibby: The problem with Instagram Live is that everybody who eventually gets on is completely flummoxed and frazzled because it never works right at first. I'm sorry.

Elizabeth: I'm on my iPad sitting in my living room. Thank you for having me on.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Thank you for coming on. Your book was so good. I was showing the people here, I dogeared like every other page. Usually if I find something interesting, I just turn it. Maybe there'll be two or three things where I'm like, I have to talk to this author about this. In this book, this page and that page. Now of course, you're here, I'm not going to be able to remember what I wanted to ask. Anyway, thrilled to talk to you about it. If you wouldn't mind, for everybody watching, I read your bio already, but if you could explain better than I did what Cassandra Speaks is about and what inspired you to write this book, that would be great. You can bring in any family members, anyone in the background. Totally fine. [laughs]

Elizabeth: My husband just walked through the room. Ask me the question again.

Zibby: Here, we'll start again. I'll pretend that this is a podcast only. There's a dog barking in my house too. My sister-in-law is here with my mother-in-law's dog. Welcome, Elizabeth. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Zibby: [laughs] You're welcome. You're the author of Cassandra Speaks, which I told you is amazing. Subtitle, When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes. Could you please tell listeners what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Elizabeth: In a way, I've been preparing to write the book my whole life. It's my fourth book. People often say, how long did a book take you to write? I'd say my whole life. This one, not the other ones. I'm the daughter of a feminist mother and a domineering father. I have three sisters, so four girls. From my earliest age, I was like, what's going on here? How come men told the story and women's values and who we are don't also get expressed in our myths, in our movies, in our literature? I studied literature in college. I love books like you do. It's not just that so many books that we consider the canon of Western literature are written by men. So many of them are about what men care about. It's not that women also don't care about the hero's journey and adventure and war and sports and things like that, but we also care about things like family and relationships and talking. These get put into women's literature as if that's a genre, as if women are a genre of writing. I always wanted to explore, what would've happened if women's storytelling had also been valued as much as men’s? How would history have changed? How would culture have changed? I go back into the old stories of Eve, Cassandra, Pandora, Hester Prynne, a lot of the old literature, and newer movies. I also explore the canon of power, books about, what is power? like Machiavelli, The Prince, and Sun Tzu. How did we come to define power as what we do? I also tell a lot of stories about my own life as a mother and a wife and a daughter because I'm primarily a memoirist, so I can't help but do that too.

Zibby: I loved those parts. All of it was super interesting, but I found myself wanting to fast-forward to, when's the next little snippet she's going to share about herself?

Elizabeth: I know. Isn't that so? My first book many years ago was about how America was changing the way people did their spiritual searches, the democratization and diversifying of spirituality. It was primarily research, but I told a few of my own stories. People would always say, that was interesting, but I really liked your stories. My next book was almost completely memoir because I think people -- see, that's the point. People learn through stories. We've learned everything about humankind through stories written primarily by men. Not that there's anything wrong with male stories at all, but we'd left a huge part about what it means to be human out of the human story.

Zibby: You show how all the statues are of men, how everything is about war, how even our vocabulary, the way that we talk, like no-holds-barred, and all these things refer to things that have the meaning of power that isn't necessarily the best meaning of power.

Elizabeth: An imbalanced meaning of power.

Zibby: And how we can change it even with little things like the way we use our vocabulary. I love how you started it off tiptoeing down to procrastinate and you're going through your son's boxes and finding his whole canon of literature downstairs where you start going through some of these books. It was so clear in the book, but just tell people watching how when you were down there and going through the books, you were like, can you even believe that it says this in The Prince, or all these other books that you had been opening? Tell me about that moment a little more.

Elizabeth: My youngest son went to a college called St. John's College. It's the Great Books school. It's an amazing school where every student reads the same one hundred books over four years. That's all they do. They read the Greeks in ancient Greek. They study math through reading Pythagoras, no interpretation. They just read the original texts. The students lovingly call it the dead white man's curriculum. Whenever I'm trying to do something, especially writing -- maybe you can relate to this. All you writers out there can. The way I procrastinate -- because writing is hard. Even if you've written a lot, writing is hard. I procrastinate best by cleaning. I love to clean things, closets, my car. The basement is particularly, according to me, not my husband, disgusting in our house, just tons of old boxes and everything. I was about to start this new book. I thought, oh, my god, I got to clean something big. I went into the basement and I started going through boxes. One was a box of my younger son's college books. That was the first box I opened and, PS, the last box. I just got completely caught up in the books.

Here I was about to start writing a book about women and power and stories, and I start reading through these hundred books. I felt so naïve. I opened the first book. It was The Prince by Machiavelli. Now, I doubt any of you have read The Prince. Maybe you have. I never had. I knew his name. I knew he said something like the ends justify the means, but that's about all I knew. I start reading this book. It was shocking, some of these quotes about how you do power by making sure people are either enemies or followers. He said something like a leader should be feared more than loved. I was just like, really? Why wasn't I informed of this? Then I opened Sun Tzu's The Art of War, same stuff about fear and love being for wimps. There I am in the basement. I'm actually sitting in an old rocking chair that I nursed my kids in in a dark basement reading these books about men and power thinking, wow, there actually is a primer for the abuse of power. Why wasn't I informed of this? I took all those books upstairs. I made a deep study of the history and the pathetic way that we've reduced power down to either dominating or aggressing. All the newer forms were [distorted audio] women come into more power of vulnerability and inclusion. None of that's in the old doctrines of power.

Zibby: It's so true. Then of course, you led a big retreat, which started off small and, as you say in the book, grew and grew and grew, called Women in Power. You have all these high-powered women come in and strut their stuff and do everything from getting people away from their phones to regroup to having great speakers. Tell us a little more about your Women in Power conference and how that came to be and what the goal of it is, especially vis-à-vis men in power and the imbalance that exists today.

Elizabeth: I'm the cofounder of an organization called Omega Institute which is a conference and retreat center in Rhinebeck, New York. I helped start it in my early twenties. I've been at the same place for forty years running this conference center. Even as I say it, I can't believe it. What? I'm not telling the truth. Forty years? Actually, it is. As such, I have organized hundreds of conferences over the years in everything from holistic health to poetry and sports, because it's a holistic learning center, all sorts of ways that humans can learn and grow. As a woman in power, I had been aware yet confused and scared about how I was learning the language of how to be a leader with all these men. I was grateful for what I was learning, strategy and some form of holding my own and ways of being powerful that I was eager to learn. My way of expressing -- let's say I was a leader in a meeting and I was emotional and it was making me want to cry, I would stuff that and try to be a guy among the guys, like locker room putdown or stoicism or whatever. I felt, I am losing a whole part of myself to be powerful. In many ways, I'm losing the best parts of myself: my empathy, my ability to listen and include, my desire to empower people as opposed to dominate people. I'm losing that part of myself. I don't want to lose that part of myself. What do I do? Help.

I looked around. There was no one to help me. I thought, I'm going to start one conference. The first conference I organized, I had Anita Hill and Eve Ensler who wrote The Vagina Monologues. I just picked anybody I could who would be like, who are women doing power differently? I don't want just women who are out manning the men. I want women who are actually trying to bring some of their best qualities into leadership, changing leadership from the inside out. Not that men, bad; women, good. Look, the world's a mess. We need something new. Could women do it differently? I brought this first conference in. Usually, I do one conference on a subject, and that's it, but people were starving for it. Women were so hungry just to be a room and to say things that we can't usually say. One thing we can't usually say is, I want power. We're not supposed to want power, but I don't want that kind of power. I want a different kind. Twenty years later, the conference is still a vital, amazing gathering where we've brought women leaders from all over the world and every discipline, an astronaut and artists and actors. Also, the women in the audience are so fantastic. A lot of that informed the book. A lot of the keynotes addresses I've given informed my Cassandra book.

Zibby: I love when you were backstage at the TED talk. Who were with? Madeleine Albright or something. You were all nervous about going out and giving your big talk. Tell me more about that experience and how you've found your way to lead in the way that you wish other people could lead.

Elizabeth: That was funny. I was giving a TED talk. If you'd ever like to actually almost have a heart attack, you should give a TED talk. They figured out a way to make every speaker incredibly nervous. The person who's about to go on and the next person and the next person all go in the greenroom at the same time. The person before me was this amazing speaker who actually founded an amazing organization called A Call to Men which is helping men actually become more vulnerable; and then me, I was going to give my talk; and Madeleine Albright who, of course, had been the secretary of state and brokered peace in Serbia. She was so nervous. The reason I told that story is because as the founder of Omega, I've had a chance to meet so many powerful people, men and women. People often ask me, what's the best thing you've learned from being around all these people? I would say that they're all scared children inside just like you and me. It doesn't matter what's on your resume. It's doesn't matter. Everyone has that core, super strong dudes, women athletes. It doesn't matter. We all have that part. We just all hide it from each other in different degrees of success. That is a very helpful thing to remember as anyone wanting to do power differently. Part of the skill, to me, of being a new kind of leader is finding that place in another person. The best way to find it is to admit our own, to be our vulnerable selves with each other. I do believe that is something women have a little more skill at than men do. It's what the world needs now.

Zibby: This is validating my personal confessions on Instagram all the time. You're making me feel better about that. [laughs] Another part of why I think you told the story from the TED talk was that the man who had gone before you talked about how one of the young people he had coached or mentored had said that should somebody tell him he threw like a girl, he would have been more than upset. He would have been destroyed by that comment. You were saying, what kind of gender roles do we have if being compared to a girl would make a boy feel destroyed inside when girls want to, perhaps, throw like boys or whatever else? What does that say about what our genders are defined as these days?

Elizabeth: It's very interesting. I'm a grandmother now. Right before I signed on here to Instagram with you, I had picked up my eight-year-old grandson at school. With COVID now, he goes to school just two hours every morning. It's crazy hard for parents. You just start working, and suddenly you have to go pick up your kid again, so I've been helping them. I picked him up. He's eight. He likes every now and then to wear dresses to school. I'm thinking, this is so cool. This is so amazing. Often, it's just like, is this okay? Is this okay that my little grandson wants to wear a dress? It's so amazing what's going on now. I'm not saying it's easy for any of us as all of this merges and melds and changes. The fact that if a girl is called a tomboy and she feels good, it's kind of cool to be called a tomboy, but a boy is called a sissy or a mama's boy, and that's an insult. What does that say about what men think about girls and women? I'm insulted if you compare me to a girl, but if a woman is compared to a dude, we feel cool. Unpack that. Just think about it. It goes all the way back to the ancient stories. The fact that there's some fluidity now [distorted audio] strong kid boy and still like beautiful things, I'm so fascinated with this.

Zibby: My son likes to wear all my daughter's stuff a lot of the time, all her nightgowns and whatever. He wants to be her. She's so cool. He doesn't have the type of school that would allow anything but uniform, but whatever. Just the fact that he can paint his nails and we can have the greatest time and that's just the way it is, it's fantastic. I love it.

Elizabeth: That's new. That's also not universal. In other cultures and in houses down the street, we are still under the influence of a double standard of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman and what kind of values are seen as primary.

Zibby: You illustrated that so well with your support group of the 9/11 survivors and how even though you were like, it's okay, you can all share, I'm here, everyone's like, we're not doing that. [laughs] No matter what you did, no matter how skilled you were at eliciting feelings and confessions and all the rest, the men were too set in their trained ways to break through all that to be able to share the trauma that they had been through. Tell me a little more about that.

Elizabeth: I've been a teacher of mindfulness meditation for many years. After 9/11, people who had that skill, many were asked to come and help first responders who were having trouble integrating what they had seen and experienced. They were forced, if you can enforce mindfulness on someone, it's doesn't really work, but they had to take these courses so they could learn better how to deal with their reactivity. When you're traumatized, your reactivity, you can get triggered very quickly. Somebody gave money for first responders in New York City to take mindfulness classes to learn how to take that pause before you react, which is what meditation is so good at teaching. I was trying to teach mindfulness to wounded warriors, all guys, who were firemen who had rushed into the buildings on 9/11. I loved these guys. We had a wonderful, fun repertoire. As you say, every time I would have them -- often when I teach meditation, I have people start just by, put your hand here right now on your heart. There's something very powerful just about that. Just stop, pause, and breathe. What's in there? There's varying degrees of -- some people put their hand on their heart. I ask, what's in there? They just start to weep because there's grief in there.

We're not trained in grief. We've got this bizarre idea that you get one day off when your mother dies, from work. Whereas in the old cultures, the women wore black for a year. They'd walk through town and they'd get great respect. Oh, she lost someone. Now you get over it, closure, my least favorite word. Some people are afraid to go in because if you go in there, uh, oh, what else is in there? I maybe would cry for a year and never stop. Some people are like, feelings? Wimp. Get over it. They're just going to slow you down and confuse the matter. That's for the girls. Those guys were like that. I'm not going in there. I'm not talking about it. I'm supposed to get over it. That's what Tony Porter, the guy who gave the TED talk before me, he calls that the man box. Not only men are in the man box. To some extent, we all suffer from patriarchy, for lack of a better word. We've all been trained. That's Cassandra's story. Cassandra tried to tell the truth of what was going on, but no one believed her because she was a hysteric. We have this mixed up idea that if you feel deeply, you're a hysteric. Men don't want to be hysterics, so they lose out on so much, such depth of feeling and intimacy and all the juicy, good things that are in here. They're the strong and silent types. I tried to help them feel that you could be soft and communicative, and that is also powerful and good and helpful. It'll heal you. You'll actually get over what's bothering you quicker. We made some progress. We made a little progress, but it's deep. It's deep inside of men and many women.

Zibby: Do you think it's too late? What about this new breed of female empathetic world-changing leaders that nobody might be ready for? In your Omega Institute, how do you walk into a room full of men who aren't of the new mindset? How do you affect change when you're still a minority in that sense?

Elizabeth: Hard, but it's being done. I'm super hopeful even though it looks alarming at the top right now. It looks like we have backslid back into the neanderthal caves, without naming names. Look at the leaders who have handled COVID best in the world. They're women. They're Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand. They're Angela Merkel in Germany. They're in Taiwan and Finland. I think the top seven countries who've dealt the best, the least deaths, the least new infections, are women. They're in power. They're obviously doing something different because their countries are handling it different. In neuroscience, they talk about, for years, you've heard the way humans deal with trauma and stress is flight or fight. Those are the only two ways. There's been a lot of new studies done on women. Now they're calling it tend and befriend. There's fight and flight, but there's other ways to deal with stress too. Women have millennia of dealing with it through tending. There's a trauma. You tend to the old. You tend to the children and befriend. Instead of making someone an enemy, hey, can we do this together? Can we all create a goal we want to solve? We may have different opinions, but can we move together toward something? This is how the COVID women leaders have been dealing with it, by tending to the most vulnerable and befriending the different ideas of how you deal with it and trying to create a community as opposed to dividing people. Those studies, both the medical studies and the studies done sociologically in organizations about tend and befriend versus fight and flight, are so fascinating. I really recommend people reading them.

Zibby: Interesting. I love that, tend and befriend. That, I can do. Those come easy. On the writing side, can you tell me a little more about your process of writing the book and then also if you have advice for aspiring authors?

Elizabeth: I'm the kind of writer -- when I wrote my first book, I kept trying to be a different kind of writer. I kept trying to write what, I think it was Anne Lamott calls shitty first drafts. I write sentence by sentence, word by word. I can't leave a sentence until I love it. I can't write big, huge things and then go back. It makes for an extremely slow and tedious writing process. I'm not a very fast writer. I just work those sentences. I love words. I love language. The construction of a sentence tells me a lot of what the next sentence needs to be. There's a poetic sense to my nonfiction. It's the way I do it. I've tried not to do it that way because it's slow and torturous, but that's just the way I do it. I keep telling myself, well, you wrote a book, so I guess you can do it this way. When I'm writing a book, I'm very, very disciplined. Other parts of my life really suffer. My friends don't understand me. I disappear. At the end of every book, I'm like, I am never doing that again. Why would I do that again? Just last night, I'm laying in bed thinking, when this virtual book tour is over, what will I do? I have a book in my mind. I'm like, no, don't do it. [laughter]

Zibby: You clearly know what you're doing. Now I can't wait to go back and read your memoir now that I was just trying to pull out all the bits of you from this. You really are a beautiful writer. I underlined so many things. I don't, for sure, always say that, so I mean it.

Elizabeth: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Zibby: Any parting advice for aspiring authors?

Elizabeth: I'm a nonfiction writer. I did try to write a novel once. I think probably all nonfiction writers try to write a novel. My agent, when I showed him the first couple hundred pages, he said to me, "Well, your dialogue kind of sounds like a stilted civics lesson." I was like, ouch, run away. I put it in a drawer. I've never looked at it again. This is advice for nonfiction writers because I'm not a fiction writer. I just think people learn through stories. The stories people mostly learn from are not the sweet and happy and "isn't my life so perfect" stories. They're the stories of mistakes and really poor behavior and learning through just everyday crap. I end up telling those stories. I always say the book made me do it. People are like, you're so brave. I'm like, no, the book made me do it. I would just say be brave about telling your own story because that's what we want. We want you.

Zibby: I love that. That's great advice. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me a part of your publication journey. I know you have so many notables interviewing you. You had Dani Shapiro and Maria Shriver and all these great people on your tour.

Elizabeth: You're a great people. [laughter] Thank you for teaching me how to do Instagram Live. I learned I can't do it on my computer.

Zibby: I should've put that in the email. It's my fault.

Elizabeth: No, no, no.

Zibby: Now you've got the hang of it. You'll know how to do it from now on.

Elizabeth: I do. I know now. Thank you.

Zibby: You're welcome. Take care.

Elizabeth: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Heather Land, A PERFECT 10

Heather Land: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Zibby Owens: Oh, my gosh, I'm thrilled to have you. I've been really excited to do it.

Heather: Thank you. You've given me a reason to get up this morning and put on a bra, so I appreciate it.

Zibby: That might be the most useful thing I do for anyone all day.

Heather: It's a reason to live.

Zibby: That's good. [laughs] Congrats on the release of your latest book, A Perfect 10. So exciting. Look your I Ain't Doin' It mug. Look at that.

Heather: Got to represent this morning, right?

Zibby: Yes, exactly. I think I saw that your shirts were sold out or you're rereleasing your shirts. Aren't you doing something with merch or something? Do you have a new T-shirt?

Heather: Yeah, we have a new 2020 I Ain't Doin' It. They sold out in two hours. We were like, oh, we grossly underbought. We've got to rethink this. We've got to make a new order. That's a good problem to have.

Zibby: It's a good problem to have. For people who aren't as familiar with your trajectory to becoming this sensation comedian, Instagram, author, everything, can you talk a little bit about how you got started and how you ended up here?

Heather: It's kind of a crazy, weird phenomenon, really. I had just gone through a divorce after almost fifteen years of marriage. I had been in ministry my whole life and leading worship. My ex-husband was a youth pastor. When you go through a divorce in the church world -- church work is very emotional. It takes heart and soul. I just didn't see a way to continue doing that at that point. I was really broken and needed to heal. I moved home from Colorado. I was in Colorado. I moved home to Tennessee. Moved in with my parents for about three months, me and my kids. That was great fun. Then finally got a little rent house. Got a job. A really good friend of mine gave me a job doing some administrative work for him. Then ended up creating a refinance department, essentially, for his company. He put me in charge of it. I'm like, "Listen, I can barely do simple addition. Are you sure?" He really took a gamble and gave me a good job with some stability.

In the meantime, my kids had turned me onto Snapchat. I found the ugliest filter I could find on Snapchat and was just making really stupid videos between me and a couple of my friends. They were like, "You need to put these on social media." I said, "Absolutely not. I'm single. This is not the way to get a date." I wouldn't do it for the longest. Then finally, on a dare, one of them dared me -- I can't even remember what my reward was for doing it. It was evidently something really great, so I finally posted my first video to Facebook, to my personal page. People started watching it. They were messaging me saying, "We love your I ain't doin' it videos. Is that what they're called?" I was like, "They're not called anything. I don't even know what you're talking about, I ain't doin' it." I didn't even realize that I had said it. I had to go back and re-watch it. I was like, oh, I did say I ain't doin' it. People were asking me for more. I was like, okay, yeah, we'll make some more I ain't doin' it videos. I made two or three more. Then Susannah Lewis, Whoa! Susannah, she reached out to me. She actually was one of my neighbors, but I never knew her at the time. She just said, "Can I post a video?" I said, "Sure. I've got a big girl job, so I don't really care. You can do whatever you want." She said, "You're going to need to start a fan page because people will start following you." I didn't even understand what she was talking about. I was mortified to start a fan page. I said, "Absolutely not. People are going to think I want to be a comedian. I've got a real job. I'm not trying to be a comedian." She said, "I'm telling you, you're going to want to start that page to keep people away from your kids and all that," so I did.

I started a fan page. I went to work that morning. It was September the 6th, 2017. I started that fan page. When I went to church that night -- we still go to church on Wednesday nights in the South. I went to church that night. There were 750 followers, which I thought was amazing. She had posted her video, obviously. When I came home, there were 55,000 followers. It just kept going up and up and up. After a month, the page was at a million. I had my two cousins and a girlfriend answering thousands of messages every day. They would report back, "I'm sitting here typing at work. They're just blowing me up on my phone. People want you to come to their churches and their events and their theaters." I'm like, "What do they want me to do?" They wanted me to do comedy. I told my friend Tasha, I said, "I am not a comedian." She said, "Yes, you are. You just don't get paid for it. Do you want to try to get paid for it?" I'm like, "I don't know." Two weeks later, I quit my job. I sold my brand-new house that I had just built. I moved in with some friends in Nashville for about three months until I found a place, sold a bunch of T-shirts to get me by for a few months so I'd have a paycheck, and here we are. I went on tour. I've done a couple of tours now. It's the weirdest life I've ever lived, but I just am loving it. I'm taking it in stride. I'm like, okay, whatever's next. Let's see.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, that's amazing.

Heather: It's been super [indiscernible].

Zibby: I saw on your Instagram that you met -- your husband was your production manager on your tour.

Heather: Yes! We're getting married in twenty-four days. He was my production manager on my first tour. My manager introduced me to him and said, "This is your production manager for this round." We jumped on a bus and just fell in love pretty immediately. We've been inseparable ever since. Now he is really my road manager, essentially, if I can ever get back on the road because of COVID. We obviously get each other and our line of work. We love being on the road. We love traveling. It's been awesome all the way around, just really sweet, redemptive story after going through quite a bit. It's been a relief and a joy.

Zibby: It's amazing. We get a sneak peek at a happy ending already.

Heather: Right, for me too. Every day, I wake up -- this morning, I said, "We're getting married in twenty-four days." Every day is just so exciting. I've never lived that life. It's very weird and wonderful. I just love it. Loving it.

Zibby: I have to say, as I was researching you and reading your book and learning about your story, I feel like there are some parallels. I also got divorced. I was forty when I got divorced, or around there. I had four kids and had to start over again. That's actually how I ended up starting this podcast, which came out of nowhere for me. Now it's become a whole thing. I actually got remarried a couple years ago now, but totally fell in love, my own sort of redemptive story. Anyway, when I was looking at your pictures and getting all ready for the wedding, I was thinking back to my wedding and getting bridesmaids dresses for my little girls and my boys. It can happen.

Heather: Can we have coffee off the record soon so we can talk about all that?

Zibby: Yes, please.

Heather: I would like to dig into that a little more. It's interesting. Like I said, I did ministry my whole life. Once I went through a divorce, it opened me up to a whole new group of people that I never could relate to. Really, it's like half of the population. I'm like, oh, wow, this is a new ballgame. People have gone through a lot when they’ve gotten divorced. I had no clue. It really does change the whole game. You start over. You have to check the divorced box on your taxes. That was a tough one for me. It is a stripping away of everything that you thought represented stability to you. Really, I feel like even though I have tapped into this new side of myself that I didn't even know was there, I really have found who I am through divorce. It's been such a beautiful experience on this side of it.

Zibby: I feel the same way. That's why sometimes I feel like I want to shout it from the rooftops. I'm like, I'm me again. I had lost me for so long. I didn't think I was coming back. Now this is just who I am. Now every day I get to talk to people and record it. [laughs] It's not just in my professional life. It's in every area. My mom says your sparkle comes back.

Heather: You're alive again, really. Hopefully for me, it seems like this is your story as well, that you have a partner now who lets you be you and gives you the freedom to explore who you are and all the changes of who you are. That's really what Steven does for me. He loves me every phase. Whether I'm a comedian or not, he doesn't care. At first, I thought, oh, gosh, he only knows me on the road. Is he still going to love me off the road? Then COVID hit. I went, okay, here we go. This is going to test the waters. We've had the greatest time quarantining together. We just love each other's company. He really lets me be me. It is just so refreshing.

Zibby: That's amazing. How is it with your kids?

Heather: Quarantine or new stepdad?

Zibby: Well, both. I mean with him, incorporating a new guy into the scene.

Heather: It's been wonderful. They absolutely adore him. They're thrilled about the wedding. I'm kind of like you, I'm picking out my son's -- we went and got his suit and getting my daughter's dress. They absolutely adore him. He doesn't have children. He's never wanted kids, but he always potentially saw himself marrying someone with children. He loves the older age, which I know nothing about. I'm all about that baby phase. Now I've got a seventeen-year-old and an almost fourteen-year-old. I have no clue what to do with them, not to mention we are virtual schooling and I am the most technically challenged human being. Steven left to go send off some T-shirts. I was like, "Please don't leave me alone with Zoom." He looked at my phone. He said, "You don't even have Zoom on your phone." How have I been surviving? All to say, he is the technical guru of the family. Right now while they're both virtual schooling, I am not parenting. I just lay around and drink coffee in my pajamas while he parents. You know what? I'm like, "Listen, it's your turn. It's your turn. I'm tired. I'm tapping out." It's really been a great partnership from my perspective anyway.

Zibby: [laughs] My husband is the same. He didn't have kids of his own. He just walked into our situation and embraced it. Now he cuts all the kids' hair. He does all the cooking.

Heather: I need to meet this guy.

Zibby: He buys a lot of their clothes, like the coolest this and that, and things that I just don't know. He's up on all of it. It's such a gift.

Heather: A gift, yes. Zero to four, man, he deserves more than a pat on the back. Good for him for embracing it. That's so wonderful. I love that.

Zibby: Before we even got together, I was like, "Okay, just don't even kiss me because I have four kids. I'm not having any more kids. You could go meet some pretty young thing and have lots of babies and have your life. Just let me walk down the beach the other way." [laughs]

Heather: You are so funny. I said the same thing to Steven. I said, "Listen, you don't have to sign up for this. This is a lot. I've got baggage. I've got kids. I've got a lot of history. Save yourself. Run." He just wouldn't. Every day that he stayed, I think it made me love him so much more, you know? You do know. You get it.

Zibby: I totally get it. It's funny because I don't often meet people in the same life stage situation hardly ever. I'm trying to think if I know anybody. Anyway, it's nice.

Heather: I want to interview you. I want to ask you more questions. We need to continue this at a later date, for sure.

Zibby: Yes, I would love to. I would really love to. Oh, my gosh. By the way, I read in your book that you grew up with a payphone in your house. I thought that was one of the most memorable details I've read lately. [laughs]

Heather: Yes. It's one of my most memorable details of my life. It's turned out to be a great memory, actually. At the time, it was not. Obviously, you read my mom lived only thirty minutes from her family, but it was still long distance. She was running up that phone bill. My dad was not having any more of it. He told her if she didn't quit, he was putting in a payphone. He stuck to his word. We had a little bowl of dimes sitting on top of it. We'd have to stick a dime in there every time we wanted to talk. Then the chord was maybe a foot and a half, so you weren’t going anywhere. Everybody was listening to your convo right there in the hall. It was -- wow. I don't even know what to say about it. It was scary, not fun.

Zibby: You said in your book that you were always the kid from the very beginning who would try to entertain the grown-ups. As an only child, that would be your thing, making people laugh or entertaining them. That's who you are. Is that just how it was?

Heather: Mostly, I entertained them with my hairbrush. I would sing. That was my gig as a kid. Whenever anybody asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be a singer. That's all I cared about. My parents kind of pawned me off as the singing entertainment. I was petrified every time, but I always loved it. I always did it. That's where it started. Always growing up, I was the one who always tried to get a joke in under the radar. Sarcasm really got me through life. I touched on it just a little bit in this new book because I'm honestly trying to just test the waters with it. I talked a little bit about growing up with an addictive parent in the house. I think sarcasm really helped me muddle through that, unknowingly. I didn't even realize that was a coping mechanism that's now turned into a career. I do think that's what it was. It was just a way to cope. I've always been, interestingly, very melancholy. I cry a lot. I also am super sarcastic and optimistic at the same time. It's quite the conundrum, quite the split personality. The comedy side just helped me through life. It still does every day.

Zibby: That's what they say. You just have to have a sense of humor.

Heather: You got to laugh or you'll cry. That's what we say in the South.

Zibby: That's a better expression.

Heather: You got to laugh or you'll cry.

Zibby: So tell me about how the writing entered into your life. You started the viral videos. Things started blowing up. Then when did this become a writing thing?

Heather: I think it was actually a few weeks before I even posted a video, I really felt in my heart -- I'll never forget where I was. I was sitting in my bedroom in my house. I was writing on my computer, just like a little blog entry except that I had no blog. I thought, you know what, I think I'm going to start a blog. I remember texting a friend and telling her that. I feel like I'm supposed to start a blog. I don't know why, but I'm just going to throw it out there and see what sticks to the wall. Started a little WordPress free blog spot and started just posting a few random entries. Once the videos went viral, I got approached by some literary agents. I didn't even know what a literary agent was. I read the emails. I was like, I don't really know what this means. A friend of mine was like, "They're wanting to try to get you a book deal." I'm like, "A book deal?" I was just so new to all of it. I thought, well, okay. I've got a blog. I know how to communicate. Let's give it a go. As you can see from my writing, it is very conversational. There is nothing fancy about it. It is exactly like I would sit here and talk to you. I think it works for a humor book and for comedy. It's relatable. It's pretty dumbed down. Anybody with a third-grade reading level can snatch it up and get through it in a day. [laughs] It's pretty simple. That's how it started.

Zibby: You are playing the book down tremendously. By the way, being able to take what's in your head and get it on the page is not something that everybody can do. That is actually a skill.

Heather: You're so sweet. You know what? Sometimes I think, and I've said this to Steven, I've said, "I think I just need to go write my thoughts down because I'm better on paper." If I can write you a letter and tell you how I feel, it will come out so much more accurately and eloquently than if I try to muddle through the millions of thoughts in my brain. For some reason, it's almost a better means of communication. Too bad I can't put tape over my mouth and just put a pen in my hand.

Zibby: My husband Kyle is finally like, "You cannot email me anymore. Stop emailing me these paragraph-long things."

Heather: Can't get through them.

Zibby: I'd be like, "Here's how I feel." He's like, "I'm sitting right --" He'd be on the couch. It's so much easier to say it right and get it down.

Heather: And delete. You can delete before it's out there for everybody, before you can not take it back. That's the beauty of it. You get it.

Zibby: He's like, "I don't even have time to read all these." [laughs] After a while, I'm writing him books.

Heather: Put them in your memoir.

Zibby: Exactly. [laughs] Got to save those. Dig them up somewhere.

Heather: That's right, girl.

Zibby: Then how did you find the whole experience? Tell me about the first book versus the second book. How was it with the book out there, your whole life out there, your kids, people responding to it, and all of that?

Heather: It's interesting. The first book, I had this well of blog entries to draw from. I knew that I wanted it to be just an essay book, standalone chapters. You don't have to read it in order, simple stories. The first one, I think there was so much momentum behind -- I was on tour. I would watch Steven. He's on the stage working during the day. Of course, I don't go on until the night. I would sit up in the balcony at whatever venue we were at and I would just write. It was a really fun, easy experience for me. Like I said, I think the momentum of the time kept me going, kept the juices flowing. The second one, if I'm being totally honest, the first thought that came into my head was, I don't know how in the world I'm going to write a second book. I have nothing to say. I'm so tired. I did pinch-hit a little bit with this book. One of my best friends -- if I was having a bridal party, she would be my maid of honor. She is throwing me a bridal lunch and doing the whole thing. We're not having a wedding party. Anyway, she's a great writer. Her name is Heather Leonard. She's in Mississippi. I asked her to help me with this book. We kind of tag teamed it. She did most of the heavy lifting with my stories. We talked through it and rewrote and had fun girl weekends where we got together and wrote. It was really nice to have a little bit of help from somebody on the outside that was pulling things out of me.

The book is very similar in style. It's another essay book. It's standalone chapters about nonsense and just more stories of growing up Southern. I do write a whole chapter about Steven and how we met. I write, like I said at the beginning of our convo, a little bit about growing up in addiction. That is something I really do want to write more about and talk more about. I'm trying to ride that fine line of being a comedian and telling my story but without embarrassing or disrespecting anyone. That's definitely not in my heart to do. I've really tried to find the balance. I wrote a little bit about it, which was just me tiptoeing in to see how I felt and to see how it was received. It's nothing too deep, but I do want to get that part of the story out there because I think people will relate. It's honest. It's real. A lot of people go through it, people that we don't even realize. I want to give people the freedom to share that part of their story. That's why I wrote about it. My kids, when it comes to writing or comedy or anything that I do, they just think I'm an idiot. They are completely unimpressed with me. My son constantly says, "I cannot believe you make a living doing this." It is baffling to him, and to me too. They're not impressed. I wrote in the first book, I dedicated it to them or I wrote in the acknowledgments to them. They don't care. They're like, "That's sweet. Thanks." They just want to go be with their friends, for me to buy them a skateboard so they can skate, give them money to go shop. Typical teenage life, unimpressed with mom, which is awesome. I wouldn't have it any other way, really.

Zibby: How else would you stay humble?

Heather: Absolutely. [laughs]

Zibby: How did you monetize the comedy? Was it going on the road and selling tickets? Not to dive into your personal finances here.

Heather: It's a totally fair question. Doing live events, that’s the way. I have no money anymore because I haven't been on the road in a year. I've done one show this year. It was on Valentine's Day. That's what has brought in the money. Merch helps a little bit. It helps just monthly, pay the bills. I'm very grateful for that. Very ready to get back on the road not just because that's my livelihood, but I really love the people. Every time I get on the stage, I feel like I'm in somebody's living room. It's scary, but it's so fun. The relationship that I'm able to somehow develop between me and the people overrides the nerves. Writing a set is very daunting. I don't know about you, but my creative process is weird. Everybody's is different. I have a friend who's a songwriter. He tells me you have to schedule in creativity. You have to schedule it. I try to do it. I try to do it his way, but it doesn't work for me. I'll go to writing sessions. I still write songs. I've got some buddies that I write with. If I'm not feeling it, nothing comes out of it every time. The minute that I'm feeling inspiration, and eventually I always do feel it, I'll just say, I got to go. I got to go write. I'll get in the car or I'll get in the bathtub. Those are my two best places to think and write. It's the weirdest thing. It just comes out. The process is super weird. The payoff is being in front of people and doing the live comedy. Man, it's quite the thrill for me.

Zibby: You're bringing a laptop into the tub?

Heather: I've just got my notes out on my phone.

Zibby: Oh, the phone. Okay.

Heather: Yeah, I've just got my phone out.

Zibby: I'm thinking, this is a very risky writing habit here.

Heather: I do have one of those long things that goes across my tub and I can set my computer on it. I'm super scared. I'm better with just my phone. That's how it goes for me.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to aspiring authors now having written two books and all the sets you do and everything else?

Heather: Oh, lord. First of all, I am not one to be giving advice. Let's just throw out that disclaimer. Since you asked, this is my advice. Be honest. Be authentic. I just feel like that's what people want to hear. They want something they can relate to. I've been in church my whole life. I've sat through a million and one sermons. I've fallen asleep in probably three quarters of those. The minute somebody starts talking about something they went through or a personal story from their own life, I perk up. I think we all do. That's my advice. Start with the real thing, whatever it is. Tap into how you know what you know. Is it because of an experience? Yes. So write about that. Let me know how you went through that thing and how you got through that divorce and how you got through that addiction. People are sick of fake. I'm so sick of that. I have no room for it. Be honest. Push through the non-creative moments. Don't quit. It's pretty simple from my perspective anyway.

Zibby: Love it. Heather, thank you. Thank you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I really would love to keep talking.

Heather: I know. Me too. Call me back. Call me on my cell phone. Where are you? I don't even know where you are.

Zibby: I'm in New York. Where are you?

Heather: It's my favorite city. Hey, I'll come to you.

Zibby: Great.

Heather: I'll come to you. We'll have coffee. Can we go to Chelsea Market? It's my favorite place in New York.

Zibby: Is it still open? I wonder if it's open now.

Heather: I'm sure it's not. Once COVID's over, I'll come to you.

Zibby: I would love it. Let's do it.

Heather: That sounds great.

Zibby: Where are you? You're in Nashville?

Heather: Tennessee, Nashville.

Zibby: I've never been there. It's the top of my list.

Heather: Okay, well, you come to me too.

Zibby: I would love to come there.

Heather: That sounds great. Thank you so much. I've enjoyed it.

Zibby: Bye.

Heather: Bye.

Brooke Adams Law, CATCHLIGHT

Zibby Owens: Welcome to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Congratulations on Catchlight. So awesome.

Brooke Adams Law: Thank you. I'm really excited.

Zibby: Start by telling the story of the prize you won and how this whole novel came to be.

Brooke: Oh, my gosh, okay. It's a little bit of a journey. I don't know if you're even ready. I had the idea in the summer of 2007, so this is thirteen years in the making, which is part of the reason why it's so exciting. The way that it came to be originally was I had this idea for a book. It's twofold. My grandmother had recently died of Alzheimer's disease. Also at the time, I had just graduated college. I was reading this book by Madeleine L'Engle, one of her lesser-known books called The Severed Wasp. That book is about this woman, Katherine, who's in her eighties. She's a concert pianist. For her whole career, she travels the whole world. She retires. She comes home to New York City to make peace with her life and really process her memories and figure out, what was that whole life I just lived about? I started asking this question. What happens if we don't get to do that at the end of our life? What happens if you go through this process of having dementia or Alzheimer's and you don't remember your life? What happens then? That was the genesis of the book. In any case, I started writing. I ended up with a draft. I was like, I know that it can be better. I have no idea how to make it better. I decided to get my MFA degree. I spent the two years of my program, I started over from the beginning, wrote the whole book again; started over a third time, wrote the whole book again.

In any case, this brings us all the way up to 2014. I went gangbusters, queried 125 agents, was entering contests, was pitching small presses. It's no after no, after no, after no. Then also, the silence, silence, silence from other people. [laughs] I put it away for a little while. Then in 2019, I entered, for the second time, the Fairfield Book Prize contest. The first time around, I didn't even make the final cut. I was like, what do I have to lose? I have nothing to lose. The thing about the Fairfield Book Prize is it's only open to members of the Fairfield MFA community. You have to either be a student or have graduated from that program. On the one hand, it's a smaller pool than a lot of contests. On the other hand, you know that everyone's work is really good. Everyone's worked with the same amazing mentors as you. Everyone's really solid in what they're doing. In any case, I entered in 2019. That June when my daughter was nine days old, I opened my inbox. It's like, "Hey, did you get our email from two days ago? Catchlight won the Fairfield Book Prize." Part of the prize is a book deal with Woodhall Press. That's how it came to be.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, so awesome. I love that story. How old, now, is your daughter?

Brooke: My daughter is fifteen months old at this point. She's toddling around and has big opinions about life. Then my son is four. We're right in the thick of it parenting-wise.

Zibby: That must have been the best feeling ever. It just goes to show, persistence is so important. It doesn't even matter who ends up publishing it. Until I was getting to know this industry, and I don't know if it's just me, but I never paid an ounce of attention to who published what book. I didn't know what the reputations were of different publishers. None of that meant anything to me even as a huge reader. Do you feel the same way?

Brooke: Yeah. I've been a reader for all of my life. I have never even noticed if it's a small press. Sometimes I end up with self-published and I don't even know. I don't even know that that's the case. I really feel that way too. I never paid any attention until recently.

Zibby: I realize now that they all have their own particular brand of -- well, their own particular brand, end of story. For people buying books, who cares? It doesn't matter where the book comes from. It's so amazing that you got yours out there and that we're talking. It was a very motivating, inspiring story to not give up. When you know you have something to share, just kept getting it out there.

Brooke: Thank you so much. For me, there was also this lesson of sometimes there's a pause. There was a pause of a few years where I was consciously like, I'm going to put this away for a little while. I'm not giving up on it. I also wanted to write something else. I was spending all this time pitching. I was like, I really just want to work on something else. It was a pause. What I see now, because hindsight of course is twenty/twenty, is this idea that six years ago, I didn't know anything about marketing or the business side of publishing. Since then, I started my own business, and so I know a lot about marketing and just getting the word out. I feel like I'm in a much better position that I would've been five or six years ago. That gives me some hope. Sometimes it's the not yet. It's not a no. It's just not yet. It's the patience and persistence married together that really made the difference for me.

Zibby: Totally. You went and got a whole degree in the middle. I tried writing a novel when I was just out of business school. This is when I was twenty-eight or something. I remember I applied to MFA programs, which people said was ridiculous because I had just finished business school. I don't know if I actually meant it. Anyway, I got rejected by the two I applied to. I was like, well, that's it. I'm not supposed to be a writer. End of story. [laughs]

Brooke: I don't know. I don't think that the gatekeepers that get to decide -- that goes with publishing too. There are great books out there and great writers. There's gatekeepers that may or may not know. It's just maybe not a fit for their program, but it doesn't mean that you don't get to be a writer, if you want.

Zibby: I interviewed Jennifer Weiner again recently for a live event that we did for Temple Emanu-El. She was saying anybody on social media can be a published author now in two second. That's it. Write something. You put it on your post. There are no gatekeepers in some ways at all. There's almost too much content on the one hand and not enough in the other. As long as it reaches people, that's the greatest.

Brooke: Agreed.

Zibby: Your book was great. You had all the different perspectives with the people dealing with their mother who had Alzheimer's and the initial diagnosis and then the father. I don't want to give things away. I was like, oh, my gosh, no, now this? And such super different characters. I thought that, at first, the whole book would be told from the point of view of Laura. Then when I got James's perspective and what was going down in the bar bathroom and all of that, I was like, whoa, Brooke, okay. [laughs] Hold onto my hat here.

Brooke: I know. I love it. When I was in my MFA program, one of my professors recommended -- the original draft was only from the point of view of Laura. As you know, she's a therapist. She's very much always trying to manage everyone's emotions and make everyone play nice with each other. She does not have the best emotional boundaries. Her brother, James, is an alcoholic. He's the family black sheep. He's a total screw-up. I just started playing with his voice. I was like, oh, my gosh, he deserves to have a voice in this story because his perspective is so different. Also, I think there's this interesting tension with James where on one hand, he always screws up. He really does. Then also, it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy where he's like, everyone just expects me to screw up, so I might as well just hold to the pattern. Then you get to see the different choices that he makes as they go along. It's definitely a firestorm of things happening in their family.

Zibby: Did you take a lot of your grandmother's illness and put that in? Is that how you got all the details? Did you also do a lot of research?

Brooke: This is a great question. I didn't use much from her case or her story at all. I was asking this question about, who are we without our memory? Then when my grandmother was ill, I was away at college. I was only a few hours away, but there was still a certain amount of distance happening. I really thought about it after the fact. My dad is one of six siblings. I didn't see any of this up close, but I was like, what would it be like for siblings in this situation to suddenly -- in the case of this family which is totally fictional, I was like, they don't get along at all. They can't stand to be in the same room. Then all of a sudden, they have to make these very serious decisions about their mother's care and about her finances and how they're going to care for her. That was really all imagined. In terms of the actual disease, I just did a lot of research. I did ask my dad a little bit about his experience, but it was mostly research and then just my imagination going wild.

Zibby: It really is amazing. I feel like they should tell you earlier in life -- for people listening, maybe now this is our chance to tell other people. When my mother-in-law was in the hospital, she had to sign off on things with her brother, from whom she had been estranged for a long time, about their mother's care. Now again, my husband and his sister, they had to join together and sign. You can't lose touch with your siblings or not speak when it comes to making major life decisions for your parents. No matter how grown up you feel, you're ultimately the child of your parent. It comes down, often, to you to make those decisions. I had no idea. Even for the form about cremation, you need both signatures from the children. This is now getting really dark, but I didn't know that. I'm assuming other people might not know that too. Anyway, in your book you mentioned how it was the first time that all the siblings had been together without their spouses or children with their mother and stepdad in a really long time. I feel like as we grow up, it is so rare when we all have our own families to have that initial family back together.

Brooke: Yes, the family of origin. Actually, that line came from -- this was probably about two years ago. Actually, my aunt passed away very suddenly. My family is in Philadelphia. I'm in Connecticut. I drove down for the funeral. It was a blizzard. There was a blizzard happening. My husband ended up -- he was going to come, but he stayed home with our son. In any case, it was my dad, my mom, and my sister, and me. My sister's husband had to leave to go back to work. I can't remember. It was just the four of us. We were sitting in my parent's house where I'd grown up. My dad was like, "Wow, we've never, just the four of us, been together." I think it really was my college graduation, was the last time. That's what it says in the book. It was very poignant for just the four of us to have this moment of this loss for us, for my aunt. Then in the book, it's this moment when they find out Katherine's diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. It just happens to be the six of them in the room. I felt like that was really significant that the family of origin is coming back together for this sea change in the end of Katherine's life. I felt like that was very important for them to have that time.

Zibby: I'm so sorry about your aunt. That's terrible.

Brooke: Thank you.

Zibby: Now that you've been through this crazy publishing process and your book is out there in the world, tell me about that experience. What's that been like versus what you had in mind? Tell me about the aftermath, if you will.

Brooke: Oh, my gosh. I am honestly having so much fun. [laughs] It's really fun. Like I said, I've been running an online business for a few years. A lot of my launch stuff, I had already been planning to do it online. The fact that we've converged with pandemic is actually -- not that it's ideal for anyone in any way. Also, I'm like, oh, I can just leverage a lot of the things that I already have in place to make it work. I brought together a group of family and friends and people that I know to have a launch team. The launch team idea was, they all preordered the book. Then they got advance copies. We're going to have a party just for the launch team in a week or so on Zoom. They're going to commit to posting a review. It's just a fun way to build buzz. They commit to sharing on social media and telling friends and family of theirs. It just feels fun to work with my friends to get the word out.

They have been so supportive and my champions. It's really lovely to see this community, people from different eras of my life. It's a college friend alongside a colleague from my MFA alongside -- one of my clients signed up. It's just really fun to have them all in a little team and feel like they're standing shoulder to shoulder with me and helping me tell everyone about Catchlight. When people hear the story that I told of, it's thirteen years in the making, that has built some interest as well, which is really fun for me. I'm glad that this journey is appealing in some way. The other thing is, in the middle of it, I did not know that it was going to have this very exciting ending. I was kind of like, I don't know if this book is ever going to see the light of day. That's part of it too. It's such a long culmination that it's really just, I'm so thrilled that people are reading it and enjoying it that I think that shows. People are attracted to that, which is really fun.

Zibby: I love the launch team idea. It seems so simple. Everyone should have a launch team. I've never heard that before. Obviously, you have your teams in the publisher and all that, but just assembling your friends and making it an actual team. Are you giving them all T-shirts and stuff?

Brooke: I have gifts for them. I ordered custom Catchlight bookmarks that are just for the launch team. I'm now doing autographed nameplates that I'm going to send them that they can stick in the book. Like I said, we're doing a party just for them. Then this is actually my most favorite idea. This was an idea that a friend of mine in publishing gave me. They are actually getting access to the original first three chapters of the book that got cut from the final manuscript. The launch team is going to get access to that exclusive content. No one else in the world will get to read the original three chapters. The feedback that I got, which I agreed with, was it was too much setup. I was just setting everything up. My editor was like, "We just need to start. Just throw us in there." I definitely think it's a stronger opening. Also, they’ll get to see originally how I had conceptualized introducing everyone and setting up the world. That's a fun bonus too.

Zibby: So cool. I love that. Wait, so tell me about your marketing business. Maybe I need to hire you for something. [laughs]

Brooke: I love it. I've learned a lot of marketing just for my business. For a long time, I was doing copywriting for online entrepreneurs. I was doing websites and email funnels and sales pages and that kind of thing. I actually switched gears just in the past six months. I'm teaching all about writing and creativity. I have a membership community called Write Yourself Free. I love it so much. It's kind of an amalgam of personal development and writing, which are my two favorite things in the world. It's all about, how do we use the process of writing and creativity to have more self-expression and rediscover your purpose? Also, a lot of people in there are writing books or writing just for fun. I also have some entrepreneurs in there who are like, I need to write weekly blogs for my community. They just wanted a little bit of extra support in terms of, how do we come up with an idea? How do we stay inspired? That's what I do in there. Then I'm also offering writing coaching for people who are writing their first book. One of my clients right now is working on an amazing epic novel about Uganda. I can't wait until we get that finished and it gets to come out into the world too. It's really exciting.

Zibby: Didn't I see that you have something where Mondays at ten people all write together? Tell me more about that.

Brooke: Oh, my gosh, yes. Every Monday morning at ten AM Eastern, I do something called the writing circle. We literally just gather on Zoom. I do a ten-minute inspiration teaching at the beginning. Then we all sit on Zoom and write together for an hour. It's so much fun. People always say, I can't believe how much writing I can get done if I just don't get up. We all sit. Everyone leaves their video on for forty-five minutes. If you have to get up, obviously you can. People are always like, if I just focus for forty-five minutes, I can finish so much writing. It's really inspiring. I also set it up, to be totally honest, as accountability for me because I'm working my next book. I'm like, I need to just have this protected chunk of time once a week where I know I'm staying connected to it. Even while I'm doing all this launch work for Catchlight, at least once a week I know that I'm going to show up to this new book because these fifteen other people, whoever's going to show up that day, are going to come. I get to be there and hold space for them.

Zibby: I love that idea. I just love it. Are you all on mute?

Brooke: Yeah. We all mute ourselves for the forty-five minutes. Then at the end, we come back together. I usually have a question to wrap it up and people can chime in if they want to. The fun thing is, you don't have to come every week. You just come whenever you're free. Zibby, if you ever want to come join us.

Zibby: I really might.

Brooke: I'll send you the link.

Zibby: I am totally not kidding. That's awesome. I'm thinking, what do I usually do Mondays at ten o'clock? Is it free?

Brooke: Totally free forever. It'll be free forever because I just love doing it so much.

Zibby: That is awesome. That's a really great resource. It seems like, what would forty-five minutes do? They add up.

Brooke: Forty-five minutes every single week. I've been working on this new book not for very long, but I have twenty-five or thirty pages already. Right now, I'm only doing it that once a week, pretty much. That's pretty much what I've got. It adds up.

Zibby: What is your new book about?

Brooke: My new book is called The Apothecary of Stories. It's a little bit like The Alchemist in that it's sort of like a pilgrim's progress style. It's about a journey, but it's very symbolic. It's an allegory. That was the word I was looking for. It's this allegorical journey. There's things happening out in the world, but most of it is happening underneath. That's as much as I will explain, but I am kind of obsessed with it. I'm really excited to keep unspooling it as we go along.

Zibby: Your enthusiasm is so awesome. It's really great to hear. I feel like so many people are like, if you can do anything besides write, do it. You're like, no, I did. I'm the writing cheerleader of all time. [laughs]

Brooke: This is actually a pet peeve of mine. Part of what I teach in Write Yourself Free is that writing can be fun. I know that culturally we have this mindset that it's the most terrible thing in the world and the greatest writers drank themselves to death, which is actually true. A lot of writers have. I want to reclaim that for people that think it has to be, first of all, this super dry, intellectual exercise that's only open to people who have an advanced degree. I don't believe that at all. Even though I do have an advanced degree, I don't believe that at all. I think anyone can be a writer if you sit down and write. I also think that it can be fun and exciting and doesn't have to be horrific. [laughs]

Zibby: That's great. It's just awesome. If people want to join your writing circle, how should they do that?

Brooke: I can send you a link if you want to put it, if you have show notes -- do you have show notes, or not?

Zibby: Kind of. I have a little description. I'll try to remember that.

Brooke: Totally fine. People can go to my website, which is brookeadamslaw.com. It's just my full name. At the top, there's a little bar that says "Come write live with me." You just click that, and you can sign up. You'll get a reminder every Monday. Again, you can opt out at any time. You can also just show up whenever you want. It's not like you have to come every week.

Zibby: I know you're the marketing person and all, but you should, eventually if you build that up enough, you could get advertisers who are either pitching different books or people selling writing-type things or programs. You could sell ads, something, or sponsors.

Brooke: I like this sponsor idea.

Zibby: Maybe you could monetize it somehow for a -- not that I'm good at that at all, but just saying. Maybe. [laughs]

Brooke: Sounds fun. Thank you. Thank you for that idea. I love it.

Zibby: You've already shared so much advice for aspiring authors. I feel like that's what this entire conversation has been, but I always ask it at the end. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Brooke: Yes. There's a couple things. What I always say is, if you have a desire to write, I believe that it's a calling to write. I have students come to me all the time and they're like, who do I think I am to write? Who would ever want to read what I have to say? What I say to them is, listen, there are millions of people who never think about writing. It never enters their consciousness. The fact that it has entered your consciousness and you're really interested in doing it means that you're supposed to do it in some capacity, so just do it. Just jump in. The other piece is, I always say that the act of writing is what makes you a writer. I know plenty of people who have an MFA degree who have never written again. They wrote their thesis, whether it was a book of poems or the first hundred pages of a novel, and then that was it for them. They never kept it up. I believe so strongly that the act of writing is what makes you a writer as opposed to the book deal or the degree or the accolades or any of that. We can all claim the title of writer if that's what you want to be doing. All you have to do is sit down and write. You can start by showing up at ten AM for the writing circle.

Zibby: That's so cool. I'm totally going to check that out. I love it. That's great. You're right. So many people don't want to use that word to describe themselves because it seems pretentious or if I don't have six published novels, how can I say I'm a writer? Meanwhile, all I've been doing all day is writing. [laughs]

Brooke: You're a writer, totally.

Zibby: It's also like how they say people who are worried they might be alcoholics, people who aren't alcoholics don't usually sit around worrying about that.

Brooke: That's a really good point.

Zibby: It doesn't cross your consciousness, sort of like what you're saying with writers. My kids, they don't like to write. I'm like, "Let's write. Don't you want to write about what you're feeling?" They're like, "No." I'm like, "What? Why not?" [laughs]

Brooke: You're like, not everyone processes their life by writing? I'm the same way. I'm trying to get my four-year-old -- I'm like, "Don't you want to draw or practice your letters?" He's like, "No, I don't want to do that at all." I'm like, okay, we're very different. I remember as a four-year-old, bugging my mom to dot out my name so I could trace it. Even then, I was like, writing is everything. He's like, "I don't want to do that."

Zibby: That's why this podcast is so much fun for me. All these people, they're all my people. We were all reading as kids and writing in journals and diaries. Not all. Everybody has different journeys.

Brooke: I was totally that kid.

Zibby: That same mentality and approach to it. Gosh, I wish I could sort out my life without writing, if I could just instantly do it in my head. Maybe other people just don't have their lives sorted out at all. [laughter]

Brooke: It's not even, for me, sorting out because I don't know if my life ever feels sorted out. I'm just a gibbering idiot if I can't process via writing. I can't even compute to anyone what I'm thinking or express myself in any kind of way.

Zibby: I didn't mean to say, either, that my life was in any resolved or that I could check it off the list or anything. I'm like, I don't know what I want to do. Then I can sit down and write. I'm like, oh, I totally know what I want to do. These four things are making me choose something else.

Brooke: I can so relate to that.

Zibby: Brooke, thank you so much. This has been so fun. I hope I get to meet you in real life at some point when we go back to normal.

Brooke: I would love that.

Zibby: I'm excited for your whole launch team effort. I might just show up and surprise you on these writing circle days. That sounds like a good call.

Brooke: I love it. I'm going to DM you the link on Instagram.

Zibby: Okay, please do.

Brooke: Thank you so much. This was really fun.

Zibby: Bye.

Brooke: Bye.

Raven Leilani, LUSTER

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

Raven Leilani: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: This is such a pleasure. First of all, your book, Luster, has been on every single list of good books. You must be over the moon. It's gotten so much attention and success and everything. What has this been like for you?

Raven: It's been really, really surreal. Truly, when we acquired the book, I think the main concern in the publishing industry at the moment, a year ago in the before time, was how do you publish a book during what is sure to be a very insane election year? Then we had the year we had. There's so many things that happened that almost make it feel inappropriate in a way to be talking about my book. I feel really heartened that people have rallied around books and that people are connecting with my book. That's really the dream, is that you put the book out there and people care about it. I used to work in publishing. I've also seen the other side of it. My expectations were very managed. I had an idea of how this goes. It's really just surpassed my expectations.

Zibby: It's amazing. For people who don't know what Luster is about, can you give a little synopsis about the plot? Then what inspired you to write this book and come up with the story?

Raven: In a nutshell, Luster is about a young black woman who is trying to lay claim to the right to make art. It's also about her relationship with a man who has an open marriage, but more so the relationship that she develops with his wife and child. That's the general plot. In writing this, I'll say when I start any project, I don't really know what it's going to be and what it is or even what I mean by it until I'm maybe halfway through. When I got to the page, the thing that was really in me was I wanted to depict a black woman who is full of yearning and desire and was seeking connection in a way that feels human. I wanted to make room for her to stumble, to make mistakes, but also for her to express that earnest id part. [laughs] I wanted to write about art. That was sort of the second half and more just because it's the thing that always finds its way into my work. Artmaking but also the role of failure in artmaking is really important to me because I think that is eighty percent of the endeavor. I wanted to talk bluntly about that.

Zibby: Do you perceive all different forms of creativity as art regardless of the medium?

Raven: Yes, a hundred percent. I think that no matter what you're making, if you're making it, you're making something from nothing, there are hurdles that you have to jump in order to be able to realize that vision. It's a hard and occasionally demoralizing state to be in, when you have a thing that you want to communicate and you cannot effectively articulate it or create it. I wanted to write about how you potentially move from that state into one that feels generative. For me, being able to write about it in a way that felt honest I hoped would feel liberating. I know that while I was writing this, I was in my MFA. I was in school. I was working full time. That is generally the framework around how I wrote anything. Really, anything I've ever written has been those off hours after my nine to five. My journey to even writing this book, it was really jagged. It wasn't straightforward progress. I felt it was important to talk about the idea of it, that sometimes there are hurdles. Sometimes there are detours. That's okay.

Zibby: Take me back to the very beginning of you to find out how we got. Where were you born? When did you start to like writing? When did you know you were a writer? Just take me along your jagged path that you just referred to.

Raven: It's funny. I've been writing technically for a while. The event of my childhood was when my mom and I would go to Waldenbooks. We'd get one new sketchbook and one new journal. I actually currently have an entire wooden chest of all the journals I kept. I was constantly writing. I grew up Seventh Day Adventist. Part of that is keeping the Sabbath. My means of rebellion was writing privately, these little private stories. It really wasn't until pretty recently where I really wanted to make a real go of it. I was living in DC. I'd been there for four or five years working and paying my student loans and just trying to work. Then it was 2016, 2017 and I decided to come back to New York to pursue my MFA. I was really looking for a community of writers. With an MFA, you never know. You don't know what that will actually yield ultimately. I knew I needed an environment where there was a certain seriousness and rigor around the work. You can find that in a number of different ways. That was the moment where I was like, I'm really, really going to try and do this thing. It was four years ago. I was like, I feel really serious about this. I have to at least try it and go after it. I will say in the years before that, I was really just doing, like I mentioned, I was writing after work and writing short stories and submitting them everywhere, like hundreds of places. I mean, not hundreds of stories. I kept an Excel document with all the rejections from the literary magazines. Those were the first steps I took to try and be serious about it. It's honestly been a journey. Most of the work has been work that is private and so almost invisible. Right now, I'll say it feels like a dream to have a visible thing in the world.

Zibby: It's so amazing. By the way, just little tip as an aside, I also kept a whole cabinet of all my journals from the diaries I kept growing up. I have different formats and whatever was trendy at that time, the different cars. I have piles and piles. Recently, my thirteen-year-old stumbled upon them. Keep them locked up until you're ready to have all these questions of whatever it is there. [laughs]

Raven: That's so funny you say that because when I was getting all of that stuff out of storage -- it was my parent's storage. I was taking it home with me. My boyfriend was with me. He happened to pick up one of the journals. I was like, no, you cannot see that. [laughs]

Zibby: Exactly. Some were pretty chaste, like, I had my first slow dance today, the green marker. All the yearbooks with all the messages in them, I'm like, let's just keep all these yearbooks [indiscernible/laughter]. Oh, my gosh. You never know where these things are going to end up. Meanwhile, Luster is so vivid and almost with this brazen sexuality. There is no holds barred. In fact, my niece was listening to us and I was like, this is not the podcast for her to be sitting on. [laughter] I don't know how this is going to go. Tell me about not only writing about all the sexual feelings and experiences and everything from not having the right batteries for the vibrator to all the fantasies before and getting ready for the -- why is he not having sex with me? Just so much stuff, how do you feel now that that's totally out there? How do you feel about that?

Raven: I will say I didn't actually anticipate the intensity of the response to those things in the book because I feel like I just wrote it the only way I could, which was in a way that made room for that, the parts of bodily drama, the parts of sex that are concrete and ugly in a way. It's important to talk about not being able to find the right batteries for the vibrator. This is a character who feels deeply and cares deeply and is really seeking that out in the world and making mistakes in service of that. It's actually kind of tricky to talk about because there's so much about Edie that's sublimated. If we weren’t privy to her interior, to her candid thoughts, she would be a never different character if we only saw that external behavior. It's not that she is always earnest in that she's expressing herself, but her core is earnest in that she is full of yearning and full of desire and unabashed in a way that she tries to satisfy those carnal real human needs.

When writing the sex, that too, it felt like an extension of her seeking. Writing when she's not having sex and then she's dying to be touched, I didn't want to write a character who was actually aloof. She makes jokes about wanting to be that and wanting to curate an image that looks like that. You mentioned fantasy, what it looks like when you come up against the fantasy and you have to reconcile it with the flesh as she does with Eric. The role that fantasy has in reinvigorating that connection between them, the way it's obliterated when they get to know each other is really fun to play with. I think the realities of the body and of however many bodies in this space revealing themselves to each other is really fun real estate to play with. It was important for me to make room for the way to be silly and strange and contradictory and to be really direct about especially the drama inherent of the female body. There's so much that's always going on that I think we are conditioned not to talk about and also to pretty up. I wanted you to know what was happening with her bowels. I wanted that backstage work to be forward.

Zibby: What you just said a minute ago about how from looking at someone on the outside, looking at Edie on the outside, you wouldn't know all the things going on on the inside, that's the main gift of writing. You finally get to pull the curtain back on a person or a character and figure out what the internal monologue is. Then you figure out all the things that you can potentially share with somebody, so many things that you wouldn't know because we don't talk about. Maybe everybody's looking for batteries, as an example, I'm just saying. I think that's one of the greatest parts about being able to share the interior life of a character.

Raven: One hundred percent. Whenever the question of -- I don't know if people ask it anymore, so maybe I'm resurrecting an old argument or question. The idea of the death of the novel, the reason why it will never die is because the way you can represent consciousness on the page. I don't think there is another medium that can depict it in that way.

Zibby: I totally agree, except perhaps memoir.

Raven: Right, which is writing as a medium.

Zibby: Writing as a medium is unparalleled access. Without it, I feel like we would lose so much connection with people. That's what people are searching for every time they open a book, truly, is connection, no matter what form that may take even if it's escapist or they want to forget their life own life. Now I'm sounding ridiculous.

Raven: No, that isn't ridiculous. That is why I open a book, is because I want to be absorbed in the reality of someone either like me or totally unlike me. It's like writing. Reading, it's an act of discovery. This is my taste where I love feeling like I'm looking at a thing that is authentic in the way that it is not studied. I love the feeling of being a voyeur, of looking in on a private moment. I think the novel does that so well.

Zibby: You're absolutely right. It's not like people are going to sit down and tell you about it. Somehow, it's okay to write about it. Then we can read about it. Somehow, that's all socially acceptable. Let's just go with it.

Raven: Totally. Getting on a stage and performing this with the content of this book, I'm also a severely introverted person, so this is the only way I could have ever written a thing like this, is written it on the page and then released it into the world.

Zibby: I was so shy as a kid. I went a whole summer on a summer program not even opening my mouth and just thinking about language so much. How can some people talk when I'm finding it so impossible to even form a sentence? and just being such an observer all the time. Yet as soon as I would pick up a pencil or whatever, it's like, whoosh! [laughs]

Raven: Yes. I feel that so hard.

Zibby: Then it's almost like people can't know you until you have that release onto the page because it's only a fraction of yourself that you present to the world.

Raven: To that, I will say that it's funny, I feel like I've had some interactions since releasing the book where people who know me personally will say something like, "It is so strange interacting with you now that I know that that was inside you." [laughs] Writing, that medium, is the best way I know how to express, it's not autobiography, but how to express myself. It is the only way I know how to say precisely what I mean. In real time, I feel like I never do.

Zibby: That's why sometimes when I talk to people and they're like, "How can you be so open? How do you write all that stuff? I could never," I'm like, the harder part is going through the rest of life without being able to say it out loud. The easiest part is that it can come out this way. I guess there's always, do you feel comfortable sharing it? If I couldn't do that, I don't know how I would even sort through what I was thinking and feeling. Anyway, I digressed from your amazing novel a little bit. I also wanted to talk about the way you talk about race in the book because you did such a beautiful job. I was sort of disappointed with myself because I always like to find quotes that maybe people don't talk about that much. When I was reading your book in the Kindle, I was like, this is a great quote. It's like, eighty-one people have also highlighted this. I was like, oh, for god's sakes. I'll read it anyway because I still thought it was interesting. This is the passage where Edie is comparing herself to somebody, another up-and-coming black woman in her office and talking about the competition and that she feels she's about to be passed over and also their relationship between each other. You said, "And then I miscalculated. Too much anger shared too soon. Too much, can you believe these white people? Too much F the police. We both graduated from the school of twice as good for half as much, but I'm sure she still finds this an acceptable price of admission. She still rearranges herself waiting to be chosen, and she will be because it is an art to be black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things, and she is embarrassed that I am not." Tell me about this popular passage.

Raven: Writing those scenes, I wanted to be really careful because I didn't want to make any grand statements around a correct way to be black. I wanted to write two professional black women who have very different tactics to pretty much the same needs, which is survival. They're both, in their own way, trying to survive in an environment that does not allow them any real margin for error. Aria's response to this is to adhere to this impossible standard, to flatten herself to make herself more palatable. Edie's response is refusal in a way. The fact that they cannot find kinship is each other is perhaps -- they may both be actually complicit in that, but more to blame is the environment that has pit them against each other. It was interesting to write these two black women who are both hungry, who are both trying to advance, and who can see that in each other, who in a, perhaps, different context would be able to seek [indiscernible] in each other but are unable to, which I think is really real but also devastating in a way that they are both really truly in need of a friend and of kinship. Because of their environment and because of the demands that are foisted upon them in how they might survive in this environment, it makes it almost impossible. Those were real sad sections to write even though Edie within her mind is deeply judgmental of Aria, and also envious. Those were scenes where I really just wanted to talk about some of the ways that that hunger can manifest and the way a lot of black women are meant to rise to the occasion in a way that flattens them.

Zibby: Interesting. There's been so much talk in the news and everywhere right now, it's so of the moment, talking about black women in publishing or black people in general in publishing and the shift that's occurring and how it has been and how we hope it will be. What has your in real life experience been, not in your character's life, being in this industry? Do you think that it's ripe for change?

Raven: Yeah, I think that there's a real reckoning happening. Just a few months ago, I feel like a lot of black people working within this industry were very vocal about not just the uppercase versions of marginalization that they experience in this industry, but the very small demoralizing almost mundane moments. There's a lot of work to be done in terms of what kind of stories we prioritize, who we allow to tell them, and who we invest in. I do think that, I hope, that that reckoning will usher in a different way of going about inclusion. I feel like those words like inclusion, diversity, in practice have become kind of like these sexy, almost -- I don't know how to articulate it. These things that actually mean so much and that make us better and make our art better, I think it cannot be a surface-level change. It has to happen in a real fundamental way before we make any progress.

Zibby: So what is coming next for you, Raven? Are you working on a new book? What's the plan?

Raven: I'm really excited to start working on my second book. I'm not really in the work of that yet. I have a handful of books still in me that I would love to be real whenever I have a moment. Currently, I'm really taken up with the task of ushering this book into the world. It is in the world, but that's mostly what I'm doing right now.

Zibby: That's okay. [laughs]

Raven: That too is kind of a dream, that that could be my work. At some point when this dies down a bit, I'll be able to get back to work, get back to the page.

Zibby: Enjoy it. Soak it all up. It's amazing. Last question, do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Raven: One hundred percent. A common concern and question that I think that I was trying to mull over and also that I know a lot of writers who are trying to get their work out there are thinking about it, which is when can I call myself a writer? I think you call yourself a writer because you're doing the work, because you're actively working on your craft. It is really wonderful to receive affirmation and validation and acceptance from a literary journal [indiscernible]. I do think that, for me at least, those moments, they were kind of rare. Much more of the process was doing that private work and trying to figure out what worked and what would stick. I feel like the private work is meaningful work. As long as you are putting in the work, then you are a writer. As long as you're working on that craft, you are a writer. That's what I would say.

Zibby: That's awesome. Thank you so much. Sorry for all my distractions. Thank you for rolling with it. I appreciate it.

Raven: No, not at all.

Zibby: Thanks for sharing everything. I'm going to think of you next time I'm doing a mental purge on the page. You're out there doing the same thing wherever you are and sharing that connection. Thank you so much for coming on.

Raven: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Raven: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Heather Lanier, RAISING A RARE GIRL

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Heather. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about Raising a Rare Girl, your amazing memoir.

Heather Lanier: Thanks for having me. I'm so thrilled to be here.

Zibby: Of course. For those who don't know, could you please give a quick little synopsis of what Raising a Rare Girl is about? Also, what inspired you to write this memoir?

Heather: It's about raising my daughter for the first five years or so of her life. She was born very, very small. That shocked everybody in the world, in the room, me. I had ventured to have this absolutely super healthy baby and did all the right things. I went overboard to do all the right things. She was incredibly tiny. At full term she was four pounds, twelve ounces. We eventually learned that she had this very rare chromosomal syndrome called Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome where she has little deletion on one of her chromosomes, on the fourth chromosome. The book is about, a lot of it's devoted to the first year and the disorientation of learning about that diagnosis in the midst of parenting, the lack of normality in my life as -- parenting is really mapped by normal, a map of normal, like what the baby does and when the baby does it. Even when you can't find common ground at the playgroup about politics or jobs, you can usually find common ground on when your baby put something in his or her mouth. I just wasn't in that club at all. I wasn't in that club of typical development. My daughter had a lot of other things to teach me. The first year is a lot of processing that, feeling disoriented, feeling grief for the trajectory I thought that child would have. That takes up about half of the book. Then the other half of the book is devoted to life after, reorientation. What does it look like to advocate for her? What does it look like to be a good medical advocate, to encounter doctors who belittle her, to give her language and communication when her mouth wasn't capable of it at the time? That's the book.

Zibby: I couldn't believe the reactions, how greatly they differed among different doctors and people who so rude and so negative without, almost, regard for how you were feeling at all and then doctors who were sort of minimizing. I don't know how you go from all these different spectrums of advice. It's a lot.

Heather: We encountered a lot of different doctors. I had never had a condition that required me to show up for regular appointments. I went for an annual checkup. I saw more doctors with Fiona in her first several months than probably my whole life. What I learned really quickly was, get a second opinion should you ever need one. There just are so many different approaches. So much of someone's personality comes into play when they actually give you medical advice. I learned quite a bit about doctors and reading the room really quickly. The doctor that would come in and be enthusiastic about her and treat her like a kid, they were good doctors. They often gave us really good advice in the end too. The doctor that was troubled by her various ways that she was different, we didn't want to return to them.

Zibby: I can imagine. You captured so well how expecting moms try to do everything right and the pressure that we feel. I have four kids of my own. I had a twin pregnancy, so that was a whole nother thing. Just the pressure that we have on ourselves that if we eat this turkey instead of that turkey, what could happen to our child? Just the pressure in addition to the physical that moms are under to have these perfect pregnancies and therefore expect these perfect outcomes, I feel like you share this belief, but we cannot control anything. No matter how much you do all the right things in any part of life, it's all just kind of a hoax. [laughs]

Heather: Yes. I think there's a lot of illusion of control that's really put on contemporary motherhood. Sarah Menkedick's book, Ordinary Insanity, it just came out in April, it's about postpartum anxiety and depression, but it's about so much more. She writes a lot about the pressure that women feel to produce perfect children or the pressure that we feel to ensure that our kids are developing normally and also the combination of that as a natural thing and how that, it can be the perfect storm for anxiety. She writes a lot about anxiety and does all these interviews. I didn't have postpartum anxiety in any sort of clinical way. Sarah Menkedick's argument is that baseline motherhood is anxiety and that we've sort of accepted that as normal, and it's not. It's not. It shouldn't be okay that we're all feeling this sort of pressure to keep everybody perfect or suffering free or pain free. There's very little we can control.

Zibby: I did not even know postpartum anxiety was a thing until fairly recently. I was like, that's so funny. That's just life. How is that a thing? That's not even a medical term. You did such a good job too when you were in the hospital at the very beginning. They said that you were supposed to rest. You kind of even felt guilty for that despite just having had a child. You were like, I've done all these things. Now that's my one mandate. I've spit a child out of me, and now I can relax. Then of course, you quickly realize that you can't just rest. Now you also have to worry, which is something that people try to control. You're like, no, now I have to take this on because what's going on?

Heather: That was definitely communicated to me in the hospital. They literally wrote, what's your agenda for today? Rest. I was like, yes. Also, really? I've never rested. I'm better at resting now that I'm a mom, or at least trying to take an hour to be like, you need to do nothing. It was clear that they didn't mean that at all. They were so concerned about her size that they meant, if you want to breastfeed, we have to start getting you a lactation consultant. She has to be fed around the clock. There was a lot of stress on me. It was interesting even in my postpartum fog to read the cultural cues there. Rest, mom. Take care of yourself. Breastfeed your baby or she'll be doomed to live a non-breastfed life. Lots of pressure.

Zibby: Of course, you raise the issue that over time different groups of people have had different culturally accepted child standards in a way. In the olden days, they would send off babies with down syndrome to a home. They would say, don't have this child, or all these horrific things. What is really the meaning of a child? I feel like you looked into that from a sort of religious angle, a spiritual angle, medical angle. Who's to say a child has to be perfect according to these random set of standards that some people in society think is really important?

Heather: For sure. It was important to think about why we become parents in this book. I think the pressure to make children who are supercharged with health and wellness and resilience -- resilience is good, but the nonvulnerable human being, first of all, it's impossible to be nonvulnerable. Second, it's not the main reason we become parents, is to create this person that transcends us. At least, I don't think it's the reason we should become parents, is to make a little super baby or mini-me, I guess you'd call it, someone who climbs up the ladder even further than we were. At least from my experience, it felt like the reason that we become parents is just to be absolutely leveled. [laughter] Even if you have the typical kid, you will fail miserably at something in the course of it. Wow, it just levels you. It's so humbling. You always think you're going to be a certain kind of parent. Then you have the child you have. They require a different kind of parent, a different kind of parenting. They don't breastfeed or whatever it is. I wanted to bring that angle into the book. I wanted the book to not just be a story, but also to be some reflection and some essaying, as we would say. Luckily, my editor was great and allowed me to do that. I know some readers will think, I just want story, but I wanted there to be both.

Zibby: It didn't feel choppy in any way. It was all seamlessly integrated. Whatever you did, you did it well. You talked here about this moment where you were like, I didn't sign up for this, but look what I got. I feel like any parent in some way, shape, or form has said at some point, oh, my god, what do I have to deal with? You said, "Of course I signed up for it. Every parent does. When we venture to become parents, we sign up for the fragility of life. We sign up for the precariously vulnerability of being human. We just don't always know it," which is so key. I just had to read that quote because that was no nice.

Speaking of this religious aspect to your book and spirituality and everything, you talked a lot in the book about your relationship with your husband and how he was actually ordained during a time when you couldn't even be there and the fire alarm went off and all that and also been training to be a monk and how he can take ten minutes to make tea and you're like, what are you doing? You said you would've titled a memoir about your relationship Red Wine and Green Tea, which is so funny. Just tell me a little more about what it's like having that kind of influence. I do think in any stressful situation, whether it's something with your child or something in your life, the personality or temperament of who you choose as a partner is so key to how you get through it. Just tell me a little about that dynamic and how it's affected your parenting.

Heather: I want to create an environment where people can improve a lot. Every day at the end of the day, I think about, what could I do better tomorrow? My husband Justin is much more relaxed about that, particularly in parenting. That works out really well because we create this balance. When Fiona was really little, she was six months, the advice that we got constantly was, she needs to do more tummy time, more tummy time, more tummy time because it strengthens the baby's core. I was like, we have to do tummy time all the time. Eventually, I asked the early interventionist, "How much? Just give me a goal. I need a goal here so I that I can hit the goal and I can rest," which I'm not great at. Then she said, "Oh, there's really no amount of tummy time that's too much," which was the worst advice for me. Whereas my husband, he just didn't feel that same pressure. It doesn't mean that he didn't also integrate therapy, but he didn't have this sense of needing to do it and then taking all the joy out of it. He would find ways to make it fun. He would have her on his chest. He would just enjoy her. She would look up at him. He'd play music in the background, lots of reggae. It ended up being great for Fiona to have that balance because she had this very accepting relaxed person and this person who was more worried. That worry, I was the engine behind getting her language. It was me home with her and not being able to communicate with her as clearly as I wanted or as she wanted that made me think, we need to find more people. Justin was busy working. He was a priest. I think it's helpful to have two very different people in a kid's life. That's what happened in this case.

Zibby: I feel like I'm in your camp of personality types. I can never rest. I was on bed rest with my twins. I was like, no, I don't think so. How am I going to do this? What do you mean relax? I don't even allow myself to watch TV unless it's pouring rain. I have all these rules.

Heather: Me too, like don't eat dark chocolate in the morning, things like that.

Zibby: Yes, wait until the afternoon.

Heather: He'll just break those. What are you doing?

Zibby: I'm like, if I start this chocolate thing too early, the rest of the day, what's going to happen? [laughter] Forget it. The wheel's off the train. Also, with the advice that the OT therapist said about there's never enough tummy time, then you cannot accomplish it. If there's no end goal, then you can never cross it off the list. That's the worst thing too when you're trying to get things done.

Heather: That reminds me, he was really good at just saying, this person's advice or their influence in our lives isn't helpful. let's just cut that voice out. He didn't mean let's just cut [indiscernible] out, but he would be like, let's just sweep that away. I would still hear that voice. I don't know if this made it into the book, but I had this therapy session where the therapist pointed out a lot of things that Fiona wasn't doing well. By therapy, I mean physical therapy, gross/fine motor therapy. The therapist left. I leaned against the door and slid down the door and just sobbed. I felt like it was impossible to do a good job in this job of motherhood, which is what I mean when I say we're leveled. In this case, I was trying to get Fiona to make some gross motor gains. My husband said, "I noticed that when these people come --" They came every two weeks. By these people, I mean these particular interventionists. There are amazing early interventionists out there. The one we had was really stressing me out.

He said, "I noticed that she takes away your intuition. She's there, you start to doubt yourself. You start to listen more to outside voices." He's like, "You know what to do." It was really helpful to have him say too, just get rid of the voices. "If this person is causing you to second-guess yourself constantly, which is one of your most important tools as a mother, is the knowing, this deep inner knowing," he's like, "it's not worth it. We should just cut them out." That particular person he thought we could just not have them over. I still was like, no, we have to do what we can. It really did make me think the most important thing is that, at least in parenting and particularly parenting when there's no real clear map or other parents aren't doing what you're doing because their kids are very different than yours, that inner knowing is key. Anything that interrupts that, it's okay to get rid of that.

Zibby: That's good advice. I'm going to take your husband's advice. I have had many a door slide in tears myself. I feel like many parents have had that downward moment. You had another -- hold on, let me just flip to this quote. This was one of my favorite parts, this one particular moment because it really speaks to how none of us really know what's going on and why in the world, and so all we can do is go with what we have as information. Your mother -- was it your mother or your mother-in-law? Your mother, you said, "One morning during her devotional time with her Bible opened on the kitchen table, the prayer she offered was a tear-filled and desperate, why? As in, why did you give this child Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome? The reply she heard was so striking and clear, so separate from herself that it stopped her straight. The voice said, you have no idea what I intend to do with this child. After that, my mother trusted the body my daughter had been given." I loved that. I read it out loud to my husband. I was like, this is it. This is the answer. You don't know. You don't know why. Maybe there's a bigger purpose to everything, for every struggle. Now I'm sounding ridiculous and all woo-woo, but I feel like with every struggle and with every challenge, maybe there's a reason why. Maybe there's not. Maybe some is just bad luck. I don't know. I just loved that part.

Heather: The why question is apparently one that Americans ask a lot. There was some famous Zen master who came to America to teach Zen. He was like, wow, these Americans ask why a lot. It is a question we like to ask. I think there's great freedom in just saying we don't know. Perhaps there is bigger reasons that we could never, ever fathom. I was just talking to my kids about this. We were reading a book about space. I'm reading this kids book about space facts. Every once in a while, I'd be like, listen to this, there's a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. There's billions of galaxies. I can't even fathom that. The human mind just can't fathom a lot beyond our world. Actually, just for writing purposes, I had my mom read that section. I asked her if she was okay with it. She actually tweaked the voice that she’d heard. She's like, "No, it wasn't quite that. It was this." Just in terms of the writing process, it was important for me to not to share other people's deep, personal, divine moments without actually getting their permission.

Zibby: Tell me more about the writing. You actually teach writing. You even had little tidbits in here about highlighting details and just little bits of advice sprinkled through for writing itself. Tell me about your whole approach to this book and how you tackled the project and what it was like to write it.

Heather: I was actually working on a book about my husband and I and our falling in love and the fact that he had been a monk and that I was a recovering Christian or recovering from Baptist faith. I was working on this book and also had Fiona. She was about a year old when I really wanted to write about what I was experiencing, encounters we had with doctors, what I was learning about myself, what it was like to parent someone totally different from what the baby book said, any sort of developmental book explained. I started writing a blog on the side. It was almost like I was cheating on the main manuscript, eking out these blog posts. I wrote blog posts at three in the morning while pumping milk. I wrote it a lot when Fiona was napping. All the while, I was working on this other book. I started writing sometimes longer essays about parenting a child with disabilities, maybe five or ten of those. Then eventually, I think it got to ninety-some blog posts and ten literary essays. I knew that eventually I would write a book about Fiona. I really just wanted to reach readers easily rather than got through the slow route of literary publishing.

After an essay called "SuperBabies Don't Cry," an editor and an agent contacted me. I think it was the same weekend. Those ended up being my agent and my editor the book. That book just sort of fell into place. My agent said -- I said, "I don't love writing book proposals. I like writing the book." The proposal I worry can kind of kill the book idea because you're sort of planning the thing that I don't really want to be planned. I like to find myself in the writing or discover things in the writing. She said, "I'll help you." She did. I wrote it really quickly to try to get it over with. I wrote the proposal. I wrote it from July to August. Then she submitted it to that one editor at Penguin Press in September, and we had a contract. That's how it unfolded. Then this other book that I was cheating on, I haven't looked at in a while. I need to open that back up and figure out -- likely, it will be different now given that it's five years past.

Zibby: Wow. When you did you proposal, though, you hadn’t written it, right? You had just written the blog posts and all the supporting materials?

Heather: Yeah, that really only got you to the actual book deal. Then what happened was I thought, well, I got so much writing done. Surely, this won't be that complicated because there's just all of this material. That summer that I wrote the proposal I spent reading through the blog posts and the essays that I'd written. Sometimes I had just been writing, also, in a Word document that was accumulating pages of experiences that I'd had. I was cleaning out my garage at the same time, or my basement. It felt the same. Going through the basement and all the discorded stuff in boxes felt the same as sorting through all of these different pieces of writing. It was because there was no narrative consistency in the voice. The person who was a mother to a one-year-old who’d just been diagnosed with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome seven months before, however long ago before, that person was very different from the person who had a six-year-old whose kid was in kindergarten. I'd fully accepted and embraced my daughter and learned so much. I had to figure out chronology and what was important. What was the voice going to be? That all took time. There are moments that I had written about in the blog that end up in the book, but under very different -- they all got recast in this voice with different emphasis. Everything got expanded too because I got the large space of a book rather than a little post.

Zibby: How long do you think the writing took?

Heather: They gave me fifteen months for the first draft. I made my deadline.

Zibby: Congratulations.

Heather: Then it was nine months of revision rounds. My editor, her assistant, and I did three rounds of revisions. Two years after the contract was signed, the book was accepted as done. Then we did fact-check, legal review, stuff like that, fine-tuning, copy editing. They spent from September to this past July getting it all ready and figuring out a book cover and things like that.

Zibby: Now I feel like the uncertainty that you write about in the book and things not going according to plan -- I'm sure I'm like the eight thousandth person to ask you this question, but of course this is now what every parent and every person is dealing with, with the pandemic and how life is just not on track in any way for anyone. What do we do with that information? Now I feel like you're so uniquely positioned to handle that challenge.

Heather: There is a sort of surrendering to uncertainty that I practiced in Fiona's first years. In the early months in the pandemic, I feel like things have shifted so much in some ways and shifted not at all in others, but I did get the same feeling that I had when Fiona was six months or whatever. I would get this quiet feeling in my heart or in my chest that was like, there's nothing that you can do. All you can do is just fall into this and pray or hope or trust that something will be caught here, that you will be caught, that you'll be okay. Okay doesn't mean everything will work out great, you'll keep the job, your kid will walk. It meant it will be a different kind of okay than you would perhaps like, but still okay. I got that feeling again in the first month or two of the pandemic. It was comforting because I thought, oh, I have been here before. I've been in a place where I don't know if my kid is going to walk. I don't know if she's going to talk. I don't know if she's going to live past two. What does that mean? How can I go forward? At the time, what it meant was you love the hell out of life. You take it all in as much as you can and love your daughter as best you can. That doesn't mean I don't need introverted time alone to journal or what have you. I think it's still a good lesson. When things are really uncertain, it brings us closer to the sense of what things really mean and what really matters. It's not fun or comfortable. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. I think it does click things into focus in a helpful way.

Zibby: I feel like you have a whole passage about this at the end. I circled it. I was like, meaning of life. [laughs] You were like, "The point of this human life, I believe, is love. And the ridiculous and brave and risky act of love turns my heart into taffy, stretches it across the broad spectrum of human feeling. My daughter has given me a thousand portraits of grief and a thousand portraits of joy. I hurt. I long. I exalt. I rejoice. Loving my daughter tenderizes me, makes me more human. And yes, my chest sometimes aches from this work, but the ache in my chest is a cousin of joy." It's so amazing. It's so beautiful. Oh, my gosh, your writing. I love your writing. It's as if we're talking, but it's more literary than that. You just want to sit down and be your friend. It's so evocative. I'm not being very articulate myself in describing your writing. I can't even speak. Then you had these little funny lines like vacationing while parenting is kind of like juggling while sleeping. That's perfect. That should be on a pillow that every parent should be given in the hospital. Every airline should have that. Let's just make these difficult situations humorous because what else can we do?

Heather: Yes, they can just give that instead of those baggies of formula.

Zibby: Right? Who needs those? Come on. Forget the bibs. We'll get bibs. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Heather: I was just talking to a friend of mine who wants to tell her life story. She writes poems. She loves writing poems because she can get lost in them. They surprise her. Then she comes out on the other side and she didn't predict that she would go there. She loves that about poetry. She's really overwhelmed to write her life story. I gave her this advice. Maybe it's useful. Sometimes we need constraints to feel free. For her, I was thinking, you have this twenty years she wants to tell in this memoir. What if she gave herself the constraint of, she's going to write as many sections as it takes, but they're only going to be three hundred words? It sort of feels like a poem. Write three hundred words. Write your way into it. Maybe it's a scene. Maybe it's a reflection. Be surprised by it, but it has to be over in three hundred words. That's not necessarily a constraint that works for everybody. I do believe as a writer in the enabling constraints. As a poet, if I start getting sloppy or uninspired, I'll go back to meter. I go back iambic pentameter or whatever form. I'll try to write a huzzle [sp] or some kind of obscure form. It's helpful for me and I think a lot of writers to feel constrained in one way. Then it feels liberating in another. I like that. I like to play with that as a writer.

Zibby: That's great. You could do it with timeframes too. You can only write about one year of your life or make it happen over one day, things like that.

Heather: Yes. Sonya Huber, a friend of mine, has a book coming. It's apparently a nonfiction book about one day. Inside that day is all of this other stuff woven into it. Constraints can be helpful. External forms can be helpful that you borrow. That's one bit of advice.

Zibby: Awesome. Thank you, Heather. Thanks for your amazing book. Thanks for sharing your story. I know your mom said a voice told her that who knows what this child is intended to do. At the least, it changed my time reading this book and my time meeting you and getting to know you and your story and feeling less alone in my slide down my down into the tear land.

Heather: You're calling it a slide. Now I'm envisioning a playground slide. It seems fun now. We just slide down our doors.

Zibby: Yeah, we're all sliding together. It's a wild ride down the slide. It's not just a descent into depression. [laughs]

Heather: And you're not alone either, particularly now. Everyone's doing it.

Zibby: Everyone's doing it. You got to do it to be cool. Anyway, thank you. Thanks for coming on.

Heather: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Bye.

Heather: Bye.