Shari Medini, PARENTING WHILE WORKING FROM HOME

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

Shari Medini: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Zibby: I'm excited to be here with you, especially because both our books are coming out from Skyhorse Publishing this year. We're book siblings of a sort or something.

Shari: I love it. That's a new name for it.

Zibby: Book siblings. Parenting While Working from Home, your book, could not be better timed, seriously. Who is not trying to do this right now? Despite its title, it's applicable for people who are just working from home and will be applicable for far into the future regardless of where people work because every month of the year you have really great actionable tips and worksheets and all this other stuff. Tell me a little about how this book came to be.

Shari: Thank you for saying all of that. I appreciate that. We really tried to pack a lot into it. I'm glad that that came across and that you found that helpful. The book, like you said, is broken down by months. Each chapter, we are focusing on things for that particular month. As parents, every month can look a little bit different. In current times, things seem to be running together a little bit more. In typical family life, there's that distinction. Within each chapter as well, we break that down into sections where there's something to help the parent focus on themselves, whether that's self-care or building confidence or self-growth in some form or another. There's a section for connecting with your kids, which is more that traditional parenting content. Maybe it's activity ideas. Maybe it's how to help your kids through something or work on that child behavior piece. Then we have a section for working from home which applies to working from home, but we tried to implement a lot of things that is just kind of career advice in general. As parents trying to advance in our careers, what insight, what ideas, what has worked well for us that we're able to communicate and pass along for that aspect of our lives? I don't know if you feel this way too, but I feel like there's so many different aspects to parenting while you're also trying to advance in your career. It was even helpful in writing the book to be able to segment those different areas. Karissa and I, my coauthor and I, we live our lives that way. We do tend to segment and try to -- we are able to maintain a better balance because we recognize we can't do everything all at the same time.

Zibby: Yeah, it's impossible. You can. You can certainly try, but there will be evidence that you didn't exactly pull it off perfectly.

Shari: And a lot of frustration. Any time that I'm trying to do multiple things at once, I end up just getting annoyed. That's not helpful for anybody, so stopping or slowing down, taking one step at a time.

Zibby: Even just the acknowledgment that every month is so different for parents. I know you said, yes, of course, the days are sort of bleeding into each other. They're not as extreme. For sure, December is hugely different from January which is very different from February compared to July. May, we've got camp forms. This month, we've got Hannukah gifts, holiday cards. Every month brings a new set of universal -- maybe not universal. I'm sorry. That sounds very privileged.

Shari: Right. We can't overgeneralize.

Zibby: I am very lucky that I send my children to camp and that I can give Hannukah gifts and whatever. In general, there are a lot of commonalities between the things that parents go through on a cyclical basis based on the months. It was so nice just to see it spelled out. What I really loved is that you encourage readers to quickly mark down the highlights, the things that really matter to them in certain months because it's all well and good to be like, I should write every cute thing my kid says, but three things from the month of February? I could probably do that.

Shari: Definitely more manageable, yes, for sure. Like you said, we have the monthly intentions at the beginning of every month/chapter and the monthly reflections at the end of every month which are essentially journal prompts and space to write it in there. I know it can be tempting to skim over that or say, I'll come back to that, but I guarantee you, you wouldn't remember a couple days into the next month. How can we be purposeful in even taking that five minutes to just think about it? We have so much going on in our heads in any given moment that just taking that time and space to actually think about things is meaningful. You might come to conclusions that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Really encouraging people, step one of making positive change is just acknowledging what's working and what's not working. Then we can try to figure out a solution, but we have to start there.

Zibby: It's so true. You spelled out, also, a lot of things when you're -- you have a whole Focus on You section. Part of focusing on you, there was this one little paragraph on reading and how that was great. Of course, I'm like, ooh, a reading chapter. Tell me about that and how you fit reading in and why you think it's important.

Shari: First of all, I love the name of your podcast and all of this. I know everybody tells you that.

Zibby: Doesn't get old. [laughs]

Shari: Good. I love it. I think it's perfect because it is important. What I've realized this past year, I loved reading as a kid and I stopped devouring books at some point in my adult life. I think part of it was my tastes changed and I didn't really realize that. The other part of it was, if I'm reading, it should be for something. I stopped reading for enjoyment. I've read a lot of nonfiction. I read a lot of parenting books and self-help type stuff which absolutely has a place and is valuable. Otherwise, I wouldn't have taken the time to write one myself. This past year, I discovered that I love thrillers. I kind of shocked myself. I have read book after book after book in this genre and rediscovered that love of reading. It is important. I think it's going to depend, the season of parenthood that you're in. It is not going to be easy to sit down and read a book cover to cover in a weekend. Now that my kids are a little older, I have a little more time and space to do that. Just being purposeful about taking those small moments. Karissa always keeps a book in her car. When she's waiting in school pickup line or maybe they got to a doctor's appointment early or the baby's napping in the back, she has that. She can flip through and read that a little bit. We talk about, in the book, treating a book more like a TV series than a movie. You can just watch little pieces at a time. You can read little pieces at a time. When it comes down to it, do what's enjoyable to you and understand that you might get interrupted at any moment, unfortunately.

Zibby: Sometimes reading is more like a commercial than even a TV show, seriously. I get two minutes. Then something else shifts and I have to put it down again.

Shari: You're right, which might then mean that you're choosing different books at different stages in your life. That was something that we were aware of when we were writing this. It is an easy book to pick up and put down. You can get a little snippet and dive back into it later.

Zibby: And that you can feel accomplished because, yes, of course, you can read it all at once, but you could just have your goal be to read the December chapter in December or the March chapter in March. You've read one chapter of a book. Then when the book is over, you finished the book. You've had all these tips. You've done exercises. There are things in your book, too, that I loved. I'm always recommending stupid things to kill time. I know you had in there, keep your kid in the bath as long as possible, which is basically what you said, which is basically what's happening in the other room right now. They're not alone, but that's what's happening. Even how you said stuffed animal hide and seek, I've never done that. I was like, how could I have never done that before? That's such a good idea. I think we're definitely going to have to go do that after I get off this Zoom. That's a great idea.

Shari: Thank you. I love that. Not every single idea is going to be this big aha moment that we're sharing, but little things like that that you hadn’t done before that are just simple. Like you said, we can go do that this afternoon. That's an easy thing. There's no prep. We can just go try it out. Even while I was writing the book and going back through my own ideas and reading back through Karissa's ideas, I was like, I forgot about that. We should do that one. That was helpful. Why did we stop doing that? Because life gets busy. You forget even your own best tricks from time to time.

Zibby: It's true. Maybe that could be an addendum to your book, or at least a paragraph, things that got you through.

Shari: Tricks of the trade.

Zibby: The tricks of the trade, something like that. I used to throw in measuring cups and teaspoons and tablespoons into the shower with my twins when they were really little, like, I want to say three or four. Maybe they were younger. I don't know. Whatever age that would be developmentally appropriate, not when they were thirteen, when they were really little. They would spend hours just pouring the water on each other and filling up the cups. I was like, this is gold. I could sit there. I could read. I could do whatever I had to do.

Shari: Like we talk about too, bring it into the bathroom. I can't tell you how much work I've gotten done in the bathroom while my kids are in the tub or playing with cups in the shower. Once you can find those little nuggets, then it also inspires you to find other simple solutions in other areas where you're like, how else can I apply this? How else can I expand on this? What's another idea that we can do today? You're right. A lot of parenting is passing the hours, especially if you're stuck at home. Karissa and I were both stay-at-home parents when our kids were little. There's a lot of hours in the day. They need you for all of them for a while. What do you do? What do you do when you have to spend so much time together?

Zibby: I liked your idea of listening to a podcast while you sit next to your kids on the couch while they watch TV. That was a good one.

Shari: There's always those conversations, the most-hated cartoons. I can't stand to watch this or I'm so annoyed with their voice. I'm like, just pop in an earbud. Do your own thing. They're not noticing. They don't care. Not to say you shouldn't share in that sometimes and hear what they like to talk about or what they enjoy, but it's okay to zone out and do your own thing if everybody's safe and happy.

Zibby: Yep. It's taken me a while to learn all those things and not feel bad about it. I feel like the pandemic, I don't know about you, but has made me go much easier on myself. Do you feel like that? Especially in terms of technology and watching TV, I used to be like, thirty minutes a day, max. It's been twenty-eight minutes. In thirty seconds, it's almost time for it to be over. It's like, why? Why did I care so much? Really? An extra hour? I get stuff done. They get stuff done. They're happy. I'm happy. What's the downside? Maybe I shouldn't say that.

Shari: I'm a hundred percent on board with you. Again, I'm not doing the research, but in my own life and looking back through history, we have done this with kids. I saw a thing. They said when books started becoming more accessible and more popular, all the adults were like, can you believe that kid? They're just sitting under a tree and reading all day. They're just so lazy. They're wasting their time. Now we'd be thrilled if our kid sat under a tree and read all day. I do think that it takes us a while to catch up to current times. Our kids are always ahead of the curve because that's just what they know. Quite frankly, a lot of the video games that they're play, they are learning skills. My older son, he plays with his friends. They have to be cooperative. They're building things. They're learning. They're problem solving. I don't see a whole lot wrong with that. Everything in moderation just like anything else. Just like it's not the best for us to go watch Netflix all day every day, but we need that downtime. We need that distraction. Our kids are human too. They're littler versions of us that also need to be able to tune out and do things to pass the time.

Zibby: It's true. It used to be that I thought TV was the worst thing ever. Now if I can just get them off the iPad to watch a show together, that's a victory. A family movie is hitting gold. That's the best I could do as a parent. [laughs]

Shari: Although, even that has slowed down, which has been sad that since they're not able to be producing new family movies, we miss those, having that movie night every once in a while. There's not really family shows. I don't blame them. I also want to watch what I want to watch. We try to get together every once in a while and share that, but it doesn't happen as often as maybe it should.

Zibby: The only thing I'll say that I've realized -- I don't even know why we're talking about TV and technology so much. I'm sorry. I don't even know why we've gone off on this tangent.

Shari: [laughs] It's fine.

Zibby: The only thing I'll say is not to rely too much and say, they're fine, they're watching TV alone. I always remind myself it's so much more fun if I watch TV with my husband than if I watch it alone. Of course, I'm fine either way. If I watch Sex and the City with a girlfriend, it's much more fun than watching alone. It's the same for your kids. Every so often, just go sit and watch with them. It makes the experience completely different. You're doing something together. Not every time, but every so often.

Shari: Absolutely. You're right. Throughout all of this, and especially back to the working-from-home piece, you have to do what you have to do. That's fine. We talk a lot about making sure they're set up and ready to go before you need to jump on that call or before you need some focus time. It's okay to use those kind of things. One last technology piece, I appreciated the one day that grandma had said to me, "Oh, I think iPads are amazing. When I had my kids and they were little, we never went out to eat because it was a nightmare to sit at a restaurant with four little kids. If we had iPads, of course I would've used them." I was like, "You are amazing. You just made me feel so much better. You understand that it's a resource." It shouldn't be your only resource, why not use it from time to time?

Zibby: Since the pandemic has started, I have not been out to dinner with my kids. I do not miss that at all.

Shari: No, I don't.

Zibby: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] other things I miss, but trying to manage lots of kids in a restaurant is not one of them. Working from home, per your book, is also always a challenge. I meant to flag that. I'm glad you brought it up, that piece of when they're like, "Mom, can you just do this? Mom, can you just do this?" Instead of saying, "Five more minutes. I just need to finish this first," your advice is just stop, get them whatever they need, essentially, and then go back. You'll be less interrupted. Take the time up front. I know it sounds pretty obvious, but it's very helpful advice.

Shari: It's hard because on a day-to-day basis we experience that when your kids are home. Everybody wakes up, and they start doing something. You're like, okay, cool, I can go sit down at my computer. You might get five to ten minutes in before they're hungry or they need help with something or they just want to chat with you and check in, so trying to do that first. I notice that even when my son was really little, that if I could just give him my undivided attention, not for hours at a time, only maybe ten minutes that I made sure he had food and water and that he got to tell me all of his toddler jokes that he had been brewing up, that we got to connect and laugh together and then explain what I needed to do. There's a reason that I need to step away. There's a reason I need to focus. There's a reason that I'm not going to be paying attention to you for the next however long. I'll help get you set up first and make sure you have something fun to do, but then I have to go do this other thing that's also important.

Anything gets hard when we're caught in that middle ground where we are feeling pulled in too many different directions, so just trying to create those boundaries a little bit. As your kids get older, keep them a part of that conversation. Keep that connection with them. Also, if they're seeing you work from home and seeing all of that, I love that I can have those conversations with my ten-year-old about what I'm working on and hear his insight and hear his ideas. It's a fun thing. It's helpful. It's good for him to see what this looks like. Especially since we've been home and they had been in virtual school this past semester, I'm like, this is what I do when you're in school all day. I don't just play around and have fun. I work. Since you're not at school, you're seeing me work. I know that's hard that I'm not a hundred percent available to you. When we have that distinction, they would come home from school, I would try to make myself a hundred percent available to them for snippets of time. It changes. It changes every day, every week, every year. We troubleshoot as we go.

Zibby: Having written a whole book about this and having coauthored this book -- first of all, how was it working with somebody else to produce this? How did you do that? Then second of all, what advice would you have to other people attempting a similar feat?

Shari: Google Docs is your best friend. Karissa and I have been running adorethemparenting.com for almost four years. Our four-year anniversary is two days after book launch, which is fun. We have been writing together, collaborating together on a daily basis for the last four years. It really was a surprisingly seamless process. We understood each other's voices. We were able to divide and conquer. It would be like, which of these things do you feel really passionate about, that you feel like you could really run with? We divided up who would start with it. Then the other person would read through it and add their own piece of it. Then that other person would go back through and make sure it all meshed together. Being able to do that, one, it's really motivating. It's really nice that when I was burnt out of writing, I could go back through and read what she wrote and spark some new ideas. She lives in South Carolina. I live in Pennsylvania. To be able to work together virtually on the same document in live time, it worked well. That's not for everybody. We both have a very similar parenting style perspective kind of voice which obviously makes it easier. If I were writing a book with someone else, I'm sure it would not mesh as well. Advice for other people, I do think if you're going to go into something like this, a book that gets to live on past when you write it, making sure that you have somebody that you work well with because it's not just about getting the words on the page. As you know, there's so much that goes into this. There's so many different elements to getting a book published. Once it's out there in the world, your work is not done. Finding someone that you really trust and that you can collaborate with long term is step one. Then the rest should hopefully fall into place.

Zibby: Love it. I always wished I had somebody who I could collaborate that well with. I never want to take the risk because what if it doesn't work out? I'm glad you time tested it for years before you did the book project.

Shari: I would recommend that. What are the trial runs? How can you work together on other things before taking that leap? It's hard to find that. It took us both time to figure that out and what that looked like because we're both go-getters. We both have a lot of our own ideas and ways of doing things. It's hard to let go of control when you're used to doing things on your own. It just takes time to build that trust.

Zibby: Awesome. It's true. Shari, thank you so much. Thanks for chatting with me on the podcast. Thanks for all the tips in your book. I am going to keep flipping back through it and finding new things to do for me, for them. I'm really committing to filling in those highlights because I know I'll be glad once I've done it. Then I'll know where they are, even. It's a great incentive early in the new year to stick to a goal. Thank you for that.

Shari: You're welcome. I'm so glad you're enjoying it so far. You know how to get ahold of me if you need any extra insight or have any questions along the way.

Zibby: Thank you. Congrats. Thanks so much.

Shari: Thank you.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Shari: Bye.

Katherine May, WINTERING

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

Katherine May: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. I cannot wait to discuss Wintering, your beautiful new orange-covered book. We've been just discussing where it's going to go on my color-coded bookshelf. I had to flag that it was orange and beautiful. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which could not be coming out at a better time. This winter, difficult times, you nailed the timing on the publication here.

Katherine: I would really like to put it out there that I neither planned nor caused this moment in history, but I'm very glad to be landing in it. [laughter]

Zibby: Noted. Understood. Katherine, can you tell listeners, please, what your book is about and then what inspired you to write this book?

Katherine: Wintering, it's part memoir and part something entirely different. It's really about the times in life when we fall through the cracks. That's familiar to all of us. I'm trying to draw a line between those experiences of all the awful things that happen to us as human beings. That might be illness. It might be mental illness. It might be things like divorce. It might be bereavement. It might be the loss of a job. It could just be one of those times in life when everything seems to fall apart. You're ready for a change, but you don't know how to make it. I explain that by drawing on winter, the season. I'm a big winter lover. I have to come straight out with it. I'm one of those people that's very uncomfortable in the summer. I love the winter. I also see winter as a real time of rest and renewal and restoration. I wanted to show how if we think about winter as a dead time, we completely miss the point. Actually, when we're wintering, we're amassing our energies for the next stage.

Zibby: I love how you applied that to everything from how the popular advice is misguided, that you should cope. You have to buck up. It's going to be okay. Instead, by shifting your mindset and expecting winter to come and not hoping that every day of winter is going to be a summer's day, same thing with any of the trauma, loss, job, any issue, if you have the right framework, it can make you feel so much better in a difficult time. That's really the secret sauce to this book. It's reframing, almost. It's reframing how to fit a difficult time into the chaos of everyday life, especially when other people are not having a difficult time.

Katherine: Actually, this year, everyone's having a difficult time, aren't they? That's the big change. Everyone's wintering at once at the moment and in so many different ways. I suppose I'm thinking about, there's a problem that we've got with positivity nowadays. We're all busy sharing memes on Facebook and Instagram. We want to be seen to be positive. We want to be those people who are always on it and always impressive. Obviously, that hides a lot of stuff. The message that we receive from that is that we're not allowed to fall. We're not allowed to mourn. We're not allowed to be ill. We're not allowed to suffer. We've got to put a brave face on it pretty quickly. I think that's harming us. I think we've got to the point where we can no longer keep pretending to be perfect. Actually, by living through those really painful parts of life, we get a lot from that. That's part of being human.

Zibby: Your book is so great because you make yourself instantly relatable and likable when you talk about your vacation when you're playing on the beach with your son, Bert, and your husband who you call H. Your husband starts complaining of feeling sick. You're kind of annoyed by it. I have to find this quote because it made me laugh so much. You were talking about your husband, who you call H in the book, and your son, Bert, playing on this idyllic seaside around the time of your fortieth birthday with your friends. He starts feeling very sick and comes back and he tells you that he's vomited. You say, "Oh, no, I remember saying, trying to sound sympathetic while privately thinking what a nuisance it was we have to cut the day short and head back home. Then he probably needs to sleep it off." It's so funny. Our loved ones are sick in front of us, and you're like, oh, gosh, now what's Bert going to do the rest of the day when the rest of his friends are at the beach? How am I going to entertain him? I just loved that you put such a relatable moment right in the beginning, especially because this became a horrific situation. You started with such humor. Tell me more about Bert and what ended up happening in the hospital and everything.

Katherine: I was absolutely the last person to realize that he was really, really sick. He had very severe appendicitis, very bad infection from it, and eventually ended up being taken into hospital and then had to wait a very long time for surgery because the hospital was so busy. It was really terrifying. It was really life or death. It meant that after he'd had the surgery, he was in hospital for over a week just failing to recover in the way they expected him to. It was just an absolutely terrifying time. We couldn't work out what was wrong with him. He was so sick for a long time. It was just a real mortality reminder that comes every now and again. We really felt like we could've easily lost him. I felt like I had to personally be there advocating for him all the time to make sure he absolutely got the care he needed. It was a wake-up call for us.

Zibby: Even how you described being back and forth from home to drop-offs to having your son stay somewhere else. Then when you would get to a place, suddenly feeling like there was nothing that you even could do there, rushing back to the hospital to sit and wait and have nothing happen and twiddling your thumbs and trying to be like, what can I do in this time to help anything? and that feeling of helplessness amidst the chaos.

Katherine: I think we all come to that time in our lives at some point. It's that feeling of being completely exhausted but also totally wired at the same time. You're hyper-alert. You're just trying to do the best for the people that you love and trying to balance the responses of your kids against needing to tend to your husband. That's such a hard thing to do. Bert was absolutely terrified. He didn't want to see his father. He didn't want to look at him because he was covered in wires and pipes and just didn't look like himself and kept dozing off mid-sentence and that kind of thing. That's without my own fears. That's without all the stuff that's going on in my head, like, what happens now? It's a terrible time. We had a week of it, and it was awful. For some people, that goes on for months and years. I'm very mindful of that.

Zibby: It's so true. Then you move from there to talking about your own physical response. You tied it to your stress of your job but compared it to symptoms of bowel cancer, really. Tell me about what happened then.

Katherine: I'd been doing the stupid thing that you always hear about other people doing and you think you'll never be the one that does it, which is carefully ignoring all the major symptoms of bowel cancer for about six months. It's amazing how easy that stuff is to push away when you're incredibly busy, and I did. I had a busy, stressful job. I was leading a creative writing degree at university. There was a lot going on. I was a mother, obviously. I was writing books in my spare time. I'd been coping for so long that I couldn't hear the messages my body was sending me. I knew I was massively stressed. I knew I was becoming unwell. It was only when I was sitting in the hospital by my husband that I began to realize how much pain I was in. I assume it's because it's the first time I'd slowed down for a long time. Even that didn't feel very slow, but I was sitting still.

I thought that it was probably sympathetic, almost. My pain was in exactly the same place that his appendicitis was. I left it again, of course. Then within a couple of weeks, I ended up doubled up over my desk at work on the phone to my doctor saying, "I don't know what's going on, but I feel like I'm in labor." [laughs] It took a little while, but it turned out that I had multiple bowel problems, luckily not cancer. I did go away with a very thorough ticking off and warning that I had the intestines of a particularly self-negligent seventy-five-year-old. I was sitting there going, but you know what? I eat my vegetables. I'm a vegetable fan. I'm really careful about my diet. I take exercise. Then I had to just sit down and think, yeah, but you have lived with enormous stress for years and years and years. That’ll do it. It doesn't matter how many portions of cabbage you eat. The stress will get you in the end. It did.

Zibby: That's a very sobering message.

Katherine: Sorry, everyone.

Zibby: No, it's good to hear. It is so important and good to hear. It makes me want to take a deep sigh. It's so easy to ignore the stresses or say, this is what we have. We have to do this. There's no choice. Yet there's only so much mind over matter can help with your body.

Katherine: So much pushing through, yeah. You can't keep pushing through. You have to listen to those signals that we know we should listen to. Wow, I was so good at ignoring them. I was impressive there.

Zibby: If we could give medals for ignoring your body and being self-care negligent, congratulations.

Katherine: Woohoo! That's not the medal I ever wanted to win, but there we go.

Zibby: [laughs] Tell me about the decision to write this book. I know you were a creative writing professor. You are a brilliant, beautiful writer from the first sentence on through. The way you use metaphor all the time and the way you can cut through and use language sparsely and yet so beautifully, it's very captivating, I have to say. I mean it. It's really amazing. Perhaps this is what you teach your students, in which case I want to take your class. Tell me about the writing of this book and even your writing style, how it all evolved and developed.

Katherine: When I first started writing, I did start writing poetry. I think that's such a great school for economy and finding that exact image and just that image that's necessary. Also, I think the writing style comes from my really deep engagement with winter. I just wanted to write about all the lovely things about winter. One of the first lines I wrote was about the pavement sparkling in winter. There were so many things I wanted to say. I'd been pursuing it all my life, going on holiday in Iceland and Norway instead of Spain and Greece. That's what my family has to put up with from me. The idea for Wintering, the book, came before that whole crisis, weirdly, when I realized that I was a kind of expert in living through those times of life. I recognized them really well. I actually had a technique for them. Not that I enjoyed them, but I could see the value of them. I'd learned to burrow into them.

I realized I had something to share. I wanted to write a book that told other people how to do it. I thought I was going to be writing it from the sunny uplands when everything was fine. I thought I could look back over wintering periods of my life and wisely give advice to people. That's how the book was pitched. Then everything happened at once during it. First of all, I really resisted writing about them because it's like, this is not my book. This is not fair. This was not supposed to happen. Then I realized I had to crack it open and let people into the process that I was going through at the time. I think that changed the book for the better because I think that brings that kind of immediacy to walking alongside me, going through the process with me. That then became my mission. I wanted to take people through day by day, those feelings. I think I wouldn't have thought of loads of them if I hadn’t been living them at the time.

Zibby: What was your writing process like when you wrote it? Were you at this desk with these beautiful curtains behind you? Where did you like to do your writing? How long did the whole book take?

Katherine: I'm quite random in my approach to writing at the best of times. I've always been someone that will do a little bit on the kitchen table, a little bit on the sofa, a bit in a café. Actually, towards the end of the period when I knew I was going to have to deliver the book, and as I document in the story, I had to pull my son out of school because he had stopped coping. That meant that most of the book actually got written in the cafés of play centers and on benches in playgrounds. I have a favorite playground in my hometown of Whitstable that actually has a table and a bench which means that I can put my laptop on it if it's not raining. It was really, really pieced together in tiny snatches and getting up very early, like four thirty in the morning, to get a couple of good hours in before Bert woke up. It felt very against the wire. I didn't get the time on it that I wanted. I really did submit it in total terror that my editor would say, what is this? Go back and rewrite it. I said, at least that buys me some time if she says that. That's the best I can do. But no, she loved it, luckily. I think I got away with it. [laughs]

Zibby: You got away with it. It's beautiful. It's also something that's nice to return to because you have something for each month. I read it all in one sitting because we were talking. Now that I have this, it's like, it's November, I can go back and read the November chapter. Maybe that’ll put me in the right mindset. Usually, you always talk about going north. You're always venturing into new lands. That's not my go-to thing. Even just getting to relive your moments in each month and not letting the depressing darkness, feel that, but feel uplifting, in a way, can be useful as someone who's a summer lover.

Katherine: [laughs] Maybe I can convert you. There are some people who are reading it month by month. They're going very slowly through it, which I love. I wanted it to track the year because winter isn't just one monotonous space. It's actually full of really distinct moments. They are the going into winter, that mid-winter period where everything feels quite heavy and bleak. That's actually the moment when we've arranged loads of celebrations, so maybe mid-winter passes quite easily. It's then the time after winter, that January, February time when everything feels very heavy and you think the sun's never going to come back again and all hope is lost. Everything's very dreary. I wanted to track right through to that and then into the first signals of hope in the new spring that are coming when the wildflowers come out and things like that. I really enjoyed that part of it. I learned a lot about how winter progresses. It made me engage more with that season and really notice the changes that take place that had been invisible to me before, as they are to so many of us.

Zibby: Do you have any advice on periods of wintering that don't have to happen during the winter season, so what you started out by talking about, all these different things that you can be going through? If somebody is going through a wintering season in their own life, season agnostic, what advice do you have? The advice that you reference on Instagram, you say, this is not good advice. This is not friendship. This is not how you cope. Give me the goods.

Katherine: The first thing I'd say is that you can't avoid winter. It's coming. Obviously, Game of Thrones was more insightful than we even realized. Winter is coming. If you know that downtime is coming in your life, then there comes a point when you have to stop pushing it back. You can defer it for a while, but actually, it gets worse. My advice, always, is to engage with it, to walk alongside it, to make some space for it, to be in that sadness or that grief or that fear, whatever those emotions are, to actually spend some time with them and to be with them because they're always asking us something. It's usually a change. I often think that a wintering is the process of accepting a change that's coming anyway. That is the painful bit. If change wasn't painful, then we would adapt to all sorts of things that happen to us in our lives instantly and it wouldn't be a problem. We can't. We have to, very, very slowly, adapt. I don't think I'm alone in this experience.

When a major thing has happened to me, it takes a few months for it to enter my dreamscape at night. I don't know if that's true for you. I think there's a sign there that that's the moment when we've begun to integrate whatever it is that's come into our life. It takes that length of time. Those of us that have lost a loved one know that there's that year cycle in which everything is so hard that first year. You're still grieving after the first year, but it takes that full year to really absorb the change that's happened. I think at the other end of the scale, it takes a full year to absorb having your first child, perhaps, that massive, massive change. We've lost the ability to talk about change as slow and that that slowness is necessary and useful. We want to rush everything. We want to short-circuit everything. We want to find the book that gives us ten easy steps to get through it in a month instead of a year. I think we have to radically abandon the idea that that's even possible and learn to know that we've almost evolved to accept things slowly. That's how it works for us. It's not an easily packageable idea.

Zibby: That's okay. [laughs]

Katherine: It's not. It's the hard, hard truth of being a human, that actually, we can live through those moments at a very slow pace, but that great work is being done.

Zibby: Back to that first year of having a child, you wrote about actually losing your voice, which, as I hear now, is absolutely beautiful, but that you literally lost your voice when you had your child and had to reteach yourself to sing and all this stuff and how you were a walking metaphor for losing your voice in parenthood. Tell me a little bit about that.

Katherine: I was teaching at the time as well. When I was a teenager, I'd always been a chorister, so I'd always really valued my singing voice. I love singing. I might not sing professionally, but it's something that I do to release energy and tension. First of all, my voice just began to crackle. Then I experienced it cutting out fully mid-sentence. It would just go. I had various investigations. I didn't have polyps or anything like that. I ended up going to a singing teacher after months and months of really struggling. It became very uncomfortable too. It was really tickly. I'd start talking, and then I'd cough, cough, cough. I felt like I was being silenced. I was in this point in my life when I suddenly felt really invisible and really irrelevant to the outside world and really overtaken with mother work and like I was just clinging on by my fingertips onto the career that I wanted to have. I didn't know what to do until a friend who's a professional singer said, "Look, I know this really brilliant singing teacher. Professional singers have trouble with their voices all the time. I bet he can help."

I thought, you know what, if nothing else, I might quite enjoy it. I might quite enjoy spending some time singing. I didn't think I could possibly hit a note. There was one particular note I couldn't hit, which ironically is middle C. I don't know if you've even done singing training, but you always start at middle C and sing upwards in your scales. The first note, I just didn't have it. It wasn't there in my voice. We retrained my middle C back in, but we had to do that by bouncing onto it from other notes. That retrained my whole voice. They can remap your vocal cords so that you're using different parts of it. The process was remarkably quick. It took a few weeks, and I was talking again. He also taught me how to read from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas as a way of learning how to retrain my speaking voice as well so that I was almost singing. I think my voice is probably different now to what it was then, but I've got used to talking that way. It's much easier.

Zibby: Last question. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Katherine: Just write. I hear so many people giving so much advice. I don't think there's any one system you can follow. I don't think there is any practice that's better than another. If you can sit down and write as much as you can on whatever subject you want to, whatever really moves you and makes you want to talk, then that's the best start you can possibly have. It's beguilingly simple, isn't it?

Zibby: Katherine, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing Wintering, for your beautiful book again.

Katherine: I'm going to wave my coffee back at you. Look.

Zibby: Look at that. [laughter]

Katherine: Thank you so much for having me. It's been really lovely to talk.

Zibby: You too. Have a great day. Take care. Buh-bye.

Katherine: Thank you. Bye.

Malcolm Mitchell, MY VERY FAVORITE BOOK IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

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

Malcolm Mitchell: I'm excited. Thank you for having me. By the way, I'm a new father. Oakley, my son's mom looked up the podcast and told me I was on a superstar podcast.

Zibby: [laughs] Congratulations on your son. That's really exciting.

Malcolm: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Zibby: How old is he now?

Malcolm: He's going to be six months in a few days.

Zibby: Aw, that's good. You got the smiles going and all that.

Malcolm: Exactly. You have some experience, huh?

Zibby: I have four kids. I'm out of the baby stage, but I miss the baby stage. I love babies, oh, my gosh.

Malcolm: I don't know. I think I'm ready to be out of the baby stage.

Zibby: I love babies, but now I would be happy to hold someone else's baby. How about that? [laughs]

Malcolm: Okay, we see to eye to eye.

Zibby: Sleeping is nice. I don't miss having four babies. I had twins too, so that was really tough. Somehow, the days keep going and they get older. That's really fun.

Malcolm: Moms are incredible too. I always say Jasmine, Oakley's mom, does ninety-nine percent of the work, and then I complain about the one percent I have to do.

Zibby: That sounds about right. At different times, different parents step in. Who knows? Maybe at age five it'll be ninety-nine percent you, or it'll stay the same. Anyway, I'll let you two work that out. [laughter] Congratulations on your book, My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World, which is a fantastic book. For listeners who aren't familiar with this book yet, can you just tell them the basic story of it? Then what inspired you to write this particular book?

Malcolm: My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World was inspired by my personal experience. I grew up a striving reader, struggling reader. I believed some words were too big, some books too thick, some sentences too long and complicated. I was afraid of reading. My hands would get sweaty. My behavior really suffered from that in classrooms. Through my journey into literacy and finding a love for books, I realized how magical they are, how powerful they can be, and how much of an impact they can have on one's life. I committed to making sure kids understood the importance of reading. My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World documents this kid going on this search for this book that inspires him. Through his journey, he realizes that sometimes the best stories can be found inside of ourselves.

Zibby: Love it. I kept wondering the whole book, what's the book going to be? Then you had that nice twist at the end and wrapped it all up with a nice bow. I liked it.

Malcolm: At first when I wrote the story, I said, I don't know, it could come off a little corny. It's such a truth, though. You go on this search for this story or you search for purpose to find yourself. You realize the answer was always there. I guess that's a more philosophical look at it.

Zibby: It's true. That's the way it is with most things in life. The things that you strive the hardest for are often found within yourself anyway. I'll carry the corny theme on extrapolating it to life in general. I read that you were reading at a middle-school level when you got to college. What happened then? Also, were you ever diagnosed with any sort of learning disability, or was it just a lack of education in the reading arena that caused that? What was that about?

Malcolm: Let me start by saying I was not diagnosed with any learning disabilities. I think my community promoted sports and entertainment over education. I was just like every other child. It was no one's fault. It's just the way the community was structured. I had this intense draw to sport and football, which worked out. I was able to go to the NFL, played in a Super Bowl. I had that unworldly experience, but it was really restricting. It kind of placed me into a box only relying on that natural skill set. Once I got to the University of Georgia, I realized how limited my thinking was. My exposure was not wide or broad, and I wanted to change that. I wanted to feel empowered not just physically, but mentally. Through a series of fortunate events, I discovered that if I wanted to be more emotionally intelligent, more cognitive, a better decision-maker, I needed to be literate. There are different signs that I'm more than willing to dive into, if you want, that led me to that conclusion. I started trying to read. When I started, I actually started with this book. It's titled The 48 Laws of Power.

Zibby: That's what you started on? Maybe that was your problem. [laughs] I don't even know if I could get through that book, and I read a trillion books.

Malcolm: I started with this. Of course, I was discouraged. I was terribly discouraged. I put the book down. I said, forget it.

Zibby: For people listening, by the way, Malcolm just held up a thousand-page book with the tiniest font and a trillion words per page called Power which looks incredibly intimidating. Although, I'm sure it's fantastic.

Malcolm: It is fantastic, but it's still intimidating. It took me a year to read that thing. I started off with this. Like I do everything else in my life, I just jump in, had no thought. Got into it, realized it was terribly difficult, kind of shied away from it, but had this revelation that, no, I need to read. I started reading picture books and took my athletic approach of you start with fundamentals. Then eventually, you get better. Then you become your own version of the athlete you want to be. I thought to myself, maybe if I do this same thing with reading, it'll work out. I started with the fundamentals. I went back and started reading picture books.

Zibby: You taught yourself? You did it by yourself?

Malcolm: I'm in my dorm room reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar, writing down notes about sentence structure. I did that with books like The Giving Tree; Exclamation Mark; Cat in the Hat; Oh, The Places You'll Go. Eventually, my theory played out like I thought it would. I gradually got better and better and better. I think I started with self-help because they're really easy to read. Then I moved to graphic novels because they were very simple. Then I moved into young adult. I started with Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. Eventually, I was writing down vocabulary words and such-and-such. Next thing I knew, I was reading The 48 Laws of Power.

Zibby: Wow.

Malcolm: It was a fun journey to even go back and think about. Funny story. I'm glad this is causal because I'm rambling.

Zibby: Please ramble. I'm really enjoying it.

Malcolm: Funny story. I started reading these books. I figured if I enhance my vocabulary, I'd be a better reader. One of my biggest struggles, I couldn't identify the words. I didn't have the skill set of sounding them out. What I would do is I'd read the book. If I came across a word, I'd jot it down. I'd go to Google, let Google say it to me. Then I'd challenge myself to use that word in a sentence three times a day. Now, I'm in a locker room full of other athletes just like me that had similar backgrounds who didn't have this overwhelming appreciation for education. I'm using words like superfluous and evanescent. They're looking at me, what are you talking about? It was a fun journey.

Zibby: That's really impressive. In the middle of college, and you're playing football in college and you're soon to be drafted to the Patriots, you could've been doing anything. You could've just been partying every night. You could've been relaxing, anything. Instead, you've chosen to completely improve yourself in every way by teaching yourself and pushing yourself through all these stages. What was the huge inspiration?

Malcolm: If I go back to the root, it would probably be my mother. I grew up in a single-parent household in a small town. My mother has this infectious way of encouraging and uplifting and empowering. She was limited due to her own personal challenges. She really enforced this unwavering faith and almost blissfully ignorant belief that you could do anything you set your mind to. I adopted that. That's what helped me be a professional athlete. That's also helped me never -- bad sentence structure here -- never stop striving to be a better version of myself even today. I always want to search for more, not monetarily or materialistic, but just trying to really reach my full potential. I'm not sure that's even possible, but my mom made me think that it is. I still believe that, so I still go. When I realized that I would be capped if I wasn't literate, I needed to be literate to stay on track of evolving into a better version of myself. My mom is the answer to your question.

Zibby: Have you told her that?

Malcolm: Maybe not like that. In my first picture book, The Magician's Hat, the forward is, "To my mother for always allowing me to believe dreams can become reality." Then in my second book, My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World, I wrote, "To my mom, my very favorite person in the whole wide world."

Zibby: I know. That was so nice.

Malcolm: Maybe not directly, but indirectly I think I've tried to acknowledge her.

Zibby: You should just call her when we finish doing this and say what you said. As a mom, if my kid were to call me and say that -- I'm sure she's insanely proud of you to begin with. Just to hear it, I bet it would make her day. Just saying, if you have a free minute, you'll make her smile.

Malcolm: For my mom, I have all the time in the world.

Zibby: Aw. Are you an only child?

Malcolm: No, I'm the middle.

Zibby: Did your siblings grow up with the same drive as you, or was it just you? Yeah, same way?

Malcolm: I have an older brother and a younger sister. I'm the middle. I would say they have the same drive as I do. They took different direction, of course. We didn't go all in the same direction. We are all on our own individual journeys, but that philosophy of never giving up and pulling the best out of yourself is something I think my mom instilled in all three of us.

Zibby: You must have hit so many roadblocks in different areas in your athletic career, in your teaching yourself to read, now writing, forming your nonprofit. How do you push past those moments where you feel like you can't keep going and then you do anyway?

Malcolm: I've had several of those moments. In college, I went through a series of injuries that kept me out of football for a year and a half. I went through the same situation once I got to the NFL. I ran into that issue in reading, forming the nonprofit. Problems are everywhere. It's just the way of life. I heard this powerful message this past weekend that said, how can you have victory if there's no battle?

Zibby: That's good.

Malcolm: Right?

Zibby: Yep, that's a good one.

Malcolm: It's the way I live my life. Once it gets hard, it almost energizes me because now I have something to conquer. Now I can get out of bed and say I'm after something. I think that's just maybe a part of my personality. I can't really take credit for it being that way because I don't know how I became that way. It's impossible to be a winner or -- that's a bad word. Let's use a different word. It's impossible to have victory if there's no battle. There has to be some type of confrontation to accomplish anything. I'm sure you've even had your own set of obstacles with this brilliant podcast.

Zibby: Thank you. [laughs] Yes, I've had lots of obstacles and lots of setbacks and losses and things in life that happened that knock you down.

Malcolm: How did you overcome yours?

Zibby: Thank you for asking. That's nice of you. How did I overcome mine? One thing I always try to do is focus on the things I'm grateful for even when I'm going through things that are really awful. It could always be worse. That's sort of my mantra. It could always be worse. Yes, this is terrible. Yes, I'm devastated. Yes, this is awful. I worry about stuff all the time, so then I just start thinking about the eight thousand other things that could be really bad. Then I feel a little less bad about what's going on.

Malcolm: Reverse psychology.

Zibby: Yeah, something like that.

Malcolm: I got you. Cool.

Zibby: That's how I do it. [laughs] I want to talk about your nonprofit, but I have to ask about your career-ending injury because I always wonder about athletes who -- my husband's a football fan, but I have to say I don't really follow football. I didn't know too much about your career ahead of time. He's not even home right now, but he'll make fun of me for this, not that he makes fun of me. You know what I'm saying. Anyway, I didn't know the trajectory of your career. When I heard about your injury, I thought about all these athletes of all different sports who I hear about who all of a sudden, they have an injury and they have to stop. I think, oh, my gosh, how do you deal with that? After a lifetime of training and your body fails you when everything else might be in line, what then? How did you deal with that?

Malcolm: It's heartbreaking. To be honest with you, it's still terribly difficult to get past that emotionally. I'm trying to, for those who are listening, give a good -- it's like you have a fifteen-year career and you wake up one day and someone says, no, you can't go to work. You can never go back to that job. You say, why? They give you this answer that's out of your control. I'm doing a bad job of explaining, but it's kind of like -- I think this is a testament for how difficult it is.

Zibby: It's not a bad job explaining. It's something a lot of people can relate to. It's not your fault. It's not fair, and it happened anyway.

Malcolm: Yeah, but you have to accept it. You have to move on. You can't stay stuck in the mud or life will pass you by. It is really difficult. I advise anyone going through any catastrophic changes to get a counselor and help you work through it. For me, it was just really tough thinking -- I had been playing sports since I was nine or ten years old. I was fifteen years in. I just had no understanding of how the world worked without athletics. Imagine being on a different planet because that’s the reality. I'll be honest with you. The way athletes think, perform, their daily schedule is so different than ninety-nine percent of the rest of the world. When I was done being that athlete, it's kind of like I got thrust in this environment where I didn't even understand it. What do you mean people can't yell at each other and move on? What do you mean you can't tackle somebody if you're mad? [laughs] How do you handle your problems? Handling my problems were in the form of some physical exertion on another human being. You'll go to jail for that. You can't do that anymore. I had never dealt with anxiety because by the time I'd become anxious, I'd go out on the field and make this extravagant play. It's filled with this euphoric appreciation that, okay, I'm no longer sad or anxious or depressed. Now I have to deal with those real emotions. It's like reprogramming or evolving. Depends on how you want to look at it.

Zibby: How is your knee now? Are you functional in your body? Can you go for a run, or are you done with everything?

Malcolm: Yes, I can do basic workouts, but no more cutting left or right. That phase is over.

Zibby: No more Tom Brady catches and Super Bowls and all that.

Malcolm: No more of that. Maybe some backyard catch. I can handle that.

Zibby: So he just has to come to your backyard. There you go.

Malcolm: Exactly.

Zibby: Tell me about Read with Malcom and your whole foundation and how you're helping all these other kids read.

Malcolm: I started Share the Magic Foundation in 2016 as soon as I graduated from the University of Georgia. I wanted to start the foundation because, like many kids in my community, millions of kids around the world don't understand the importance of literacy. I don't think I was an anomaly by any means. I couldn't have been because there are hundreds of kids that I grew up with that thought the same as I did.

Zibby: By the way, nice use of anomaly. Keep going.

Malcolm: [laughs] I went through this transformation through literacy. I had become empowered. I wanted to give that gift to other people. I did not want them to feel they only had these two options of being an athlete or entertainer to live a sustainable lifestyle. In some communities, that’s just what you believe. I'm a picture book author. That's the strangest thing if you go back to my community. That's not even talked about. I started the foundation because I wanted to spread this magic that I had discovered with other kids around the world hoping that I could unlock their potential just as reading had unlocked mine. That's the simplest reason of why I started Share the Magic Foundation.

Zibby: How involved are you? Is it something you do every day, or you just check in on board meetings?

Malcolm: Every day. Every day, I'm doing something to further the mission. Right now, we have virtual reading challenges that go on annually. Our next one is Read Bowl. We get on the phone each morning. We talk about how to make that accessible to kids and communities where it may be tough. We also talk about book ownership, how to make sure kids who can't afford a book has one. That and being an author is what I do.

Zibby: How do you distribute the books? Do you raise money? Then how do you allocate where the books go? I'm assuming that's how it works.

Malcolm: We used to do it through in-school programming. That's been affected by COVID. Now we raise money. We purchase books from third parties. We distribute them into communities that are poverty pockets and book deserts. Usually, it's to a Title I school. We do it through schools versus individual households just because we can do a better job of managing the process. All money raised goes to book ownership and making sure that our virtual programs stay free. That's something that is important to me. I have this belief that necessity should not come at a fee. I'm really bothered that we have to pay for water and food because without it I wouldn't survive. Literacy falls in that category. That's just how strong I believe in it. Without it, you're kind of stuck in the cycle of poverty. You're caged by not having that social mobility that literacy can grant you. That's just as deadly, to me, as not having shelter. It should be free. That's my philosophy with the foundation.

Zibby: Do you teach people with your virtual programs how to read? What if they get the books but they can't even read children's books yet?

Malcolm: We don't do -- let me talk about what we do and not take a negative spin on it. What we do is we provide the tool, which is the book. Then we inspire. We don't have the bandwidth today to productively teach reading. What we do have for now is the financial capabilities to make sure those who don't have a book have one. That's part of the biggest challenge. It's hard to tell a kid or any person to read if they don't have a book or any form of language to read. Then through the sport-like enthusiasm, we encourage. That's what the virtual reading programs are really there for, to encourage reading through this very sport-like mentality that obviously I gathered from years of playing sports. If anyone wants to check it out and get a better understanding and not hear me ramble about it, you can go to readwithmalcom.com, just like it sounds, readwithmalcom.com, and look through it. Let me know if you like it.

Zibby: I want to get involved now. I'm going to donate. I think that's amazing. I connected with this schoolteacher in an underprivileged community in Texas earlier this year. She was talking about if maybe I could give away a copy or two of a book. I donated just to her. I don't even know her. This is probably not the smartest thing. Now we're BFFs. I just wrote her a check. I was like, "Here, go buy everybody some books." She gave all these kids books. She's like, "Some of these kids had never owned a book before in their lives. Now they could bring home a book. They were so excited to own their own book." I was like, that's amazing. That's one of the things that made me happiest this year to do. Put that on a much bigger scale, that's probably a better -- [laughs].

Malcolm: I'm telling you, when we go into these Title I schools in very low-income communities, you give a child a book, they're trying to give it back because no one's ever given them anything. It's astonishing, even what I've experienced coming from a similar community, but there are some communities that are way more needy that what I experienced. Doing it for them is a big part of why I do it. Tell me why you started the podcast. I'm curious.

Zibby: Why did I start the podcast? I didn't even mean to the start the podcast. The short answer is I am a writer. I love to write. I've been writing since I was eight years old. I had been writing, recently, a lot of parenting essays, not how to, like, I'm crying on the bathroom floor, are you doing that too? More like that. My husband one night said, "You should put all your essays into a book." I said, "Ugh, moms don't have time to read books." Then I thought, oh, that's funny. I'll make that my book title. Turns out, publishers didn't think that was funny. The advice I got is that they wouldn't. Maybe I shouldn't have listened, but I listened. Then another friend said, "While you're building up --" I wasn’t even on social media. I had no following. I had nothing, just some freelance articles. She said, "Why don't you start a podcast?" I said, great, I'll use the title for that book, and I'll do a podcast. I was going to start by reading -- I'm always sending articles to friends and things. I'll start by just reading great articles and essays. Then I realized that was illegal. I couldn't do that without permission. I thought, well, I'll try interviewing authors. I knew two authors. I'll see how that goes. I just started. I was like, oh, my gosh, I love this. I love this so much.

Malcolm: That's impressive. So where's your book?

Zibby: I have an anthology coming out in February. I actually have two anthologies and two children's books that I have deals for now.

Malcolm: Congratulations.

Zibby: I'm doing that, but I have lots more writing that I want to do. Now I don't have time. [laughs]

Malcolm: Since I know you, do I get a free book? No, I'm kidding.

Zibby: Yes, you do. I'm giving my book to everybody who's been on my podcast.

Malcolm: Really? That's nice.

Zibby: I'll ask for your address through email later. I'll send you one. If you want to contribute, my next -- it's all written by guests who have been on my podcast, writing essays. I would love you to do my next one. It's not coming out until next November. We're still getting some submissions for that if you have any interest.

Malcolm: I have a ton of interest. That's really cool. Isn't it amazing how that takes place? You start this journey with no anticipation or -- expectation is the word -- expectation to go anywhere. By the time you look up, you're like, wow, I have three books that I'm responsible for sharing with the world. It's kind of cool. I had a similar experience. I self-published originally because I wrote the story in college. I wrote The Magician's Hat while I was in college. Because of NCAA rules, I was restricted from signing with publishers and taking money and stuff like that. That's why I decided to self-publish. I wasn't very patient. I did it with no expectation. I just had this belief that -- I'm an athlete. For some odd reason, people think I have something worthwhile to say, so maybe I should think of something worthwhile to share. That's what got me into writing. It's me realizing where I was positioned in life and trying to find some valuable way to inspire someone else outside of catching the pass.

Zibby: Why have you not written a memoir yet?

Malcolm: I don't think I'm that interesting.

Zibby: Yes, you are. You have a great book in you.

Malcolm: I don't know. I get bored with myself, actually. That's why I do so many different things.

Zibby: I think there's a story in there. It doesn't have to be that long. I'm sure you have a ton on your plate, but I think you should write a memoir. I think it would be really inspiring. It would get more people reading, get more people helping.

Malcolm: Maybe your books will inspire me.

Zibby: Okay, fine. I will let you go. Thank you so much. I will text you about writing for this anthology. Stay in touch. I'll send you a copy of the book. Thank you for coming on my podcast. Now go relieve your partner and go spend some time with your baby. [laughs]

Malcolm: This was fun. I enjoyed it. Thank you for having me. I'd love to stay engaged however I can. This is cool.

Zibby: I love this too. This is great. Thank you. You're really inspiring. You're hardworking and driven. I love it. It's awesome.

Malcolm: Same to you. Give yourself credit. You're doing it with four children. I'm doing it as a lazy dad. More kudos to you than me.

Zibby: [laughs] I don't think so, but thanks a lot. I'll be in touch. Thanks, Malcolm. Buh-bye.

Lauren Martin, THE BOOK OF MOODS

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

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

Zibby: I literally cannot wait. I have been counting down for this interview because your book, which is called The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions Into My Best Life, has been the most helpful book I've read. It's not self-help. It's not memoir. It's this perfect hybrid of, here's what happened to you. Here's how I can help you. Here's what you need to know. It's shifted my whole mindset on everything. Maybe you should jump in and just tell listeners what the book is really about, what inspired you to write this book. Then we'll go from there. So much to talk about.

Lauren: I'm just so happy that you thought that because I was worried with the book being published during this crazy pandemic, oh, wait, is this going to seem trivial? Now I'm realizing more than ever, people are kind of locked in their emotions and locked in these places. I feel like we're dealing with such monotony, but also, life has expanded. We need something to ground us. I'm hoping this book is that. Basically, the book started obviously before COVID hit, five years ago. I was living in New York. I was in my twenties. I had everything I wanted. I had a good job at a magazine. I had just moved in with my boyfriend. I was living in New York City. I kept, I don't want to say breaking down, but just ruining my days. I would get in these bad moods. One day, I came home from a really bad day at work. I remember I was in a bad mood. It was a bad commute. I was irritable. My husband was there. He's just always in a good mood. He was making dinner. He was excited to see me. I was just a bitch. I was cranky. I was mean. I was moody. I couldn't get out of it. He poured me a glass of wine. He was trying to talk. Eventually, he just snapped. This was after probably six months of living together. He was like, "I can't do this anymore. I really can't live with someone who cannot control -- it's exhausting, these ups and these downs."

I think when you live with someone, you're forced to look at yourself in a different way. I realized my moods didn't just affect me. They affected him. It's one thing for me to have a bad day or a bad week, but that affects those who you live with. I talk about in the book, mood is energy. Energy's transferable. It just is this snowball effect. That happened. We broke up for a little. I also met this amazing girl, which I talk about in the book, in this bar. She was like, "What's wrong? Why are you drinking on a Monday night?" She said it so simply. She was like, "Oh, you just have moods. Me too." She was one of those women who, I could tell, had a handle on them. I realized, maybe this is something for me to figure out for women. Maybe there's so many more women like me who feel this way who can't seem to get through a day without obsessing over a remark or looking in the mirror and not liking what they see and then just not being themselves and feeling bad. I was like, you know what, I want to explore this. I spent five years studying all my moods, anytime something put me in a bad mood, a comment from my mom, a subway delay. I tried to organize them and evaluate them. Then I started working on things to try and fix them, like things I would read from psychology or spirituality or science. The book is a whole distillation of the best things I learned and the things that worked for me.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. First of all, I am so with you on having moods. I wish that when I was your age -- I'm in my forties now. I wish that back then when I was having so many moods, I had taken five years to sort them all out. [laughs] I pursued different tactics for trying to regulate myself. I think so many people have what you're talking about, which is moods that feel like they take over you. They almost feel out of your control. They can run your life and hurt your relationships. You always feel bad afterwards. I didn't mean to say that. I didn't mean to do that. I didn't even feel like myself. I feel like things like lack of sleep, all these things are triggering factors. Then what do you do? What do you do with this whole composition of characteristics? Your book answered the question in a way.

Lauren: Moods are very individualistic. I'm not going to be triggered by the same things that you are. It's funny. When we hear our friends complaining about their bad moods, it seems so trivial. That's because that's their trigger. The book is broken up by my triggers: family, friendship, beauty. At the core of those is the underlying emotion, which is universal. It's anxiety, depletion. Even though you're seeing my triggers and my stories, I think most people will understand that feeling. What I hope they do is start looking out for their own triggers, which can be kind of fun in a way, and kind of like the love language, find your specific triggers.

Zibby: It's so true. The chapter that I think stayed with me the most -- I shouldn't say I think. One of the most compelling chapters was your chapter on beauty and when you got a zit on your face and you didn't want to go to a party. To be honest, when I read it, I didn't know what you looked like. I didn't even know at first how old you were until you gave it away in the book, essentially how old you are. After I read that whole chapter -- basically, it was you saying you felt so awful about how you looked and that you've always been comparing yourself to other people. You have to come to terms with the fact that you're not a pretty person, and that's okay. Everyone feels ugly from time to time and lets it get them down, but it's okay. You can power through. You come to some state of, really, resolution on it and how to carry those feelings in the world and not let them get you down and whatever. Not to be totally superficial, but then I saw your picture. I'm like, oh, my gosh, what is she talking about? You are so pretty. Then my heart hurt for you even more. Not that it would've been okay for anybody to be beating themselves up over it, but you happen to be very pretty at the same time. For you to be feeling this ugly -- you even talk about being with somebody else who made you feel that way, somebody you idolized. You were like, I can't believe she felt that way. It's almost like everyone's feeling that way. Just tell me more about that whole section.

Lauren: First off, I so appreciate that. Since the book has come out -- I never did Instagram Lives before because I don't like to look at myself. I don't. I talk about in the book, I don't think women see themselves. I think we just look in the mirror and see this compilation of all the things we think are wrong with us. I look in the mirror and, to my husband, he sees something completely different. I've grown up being like, my cheekbones could be better. My lips could be plumper. My eyebrows could be better. I don't see myself. That mood, it's the second chapter because it was a big one for me. Especially living with a man who -- he's confident. He didn't understand. I would have a zit and didn't want to go out. He was like, "Who cares?" To me, it was like, but my beauty is my worth. I think it was coming to terms with my beauty is not my worth and also coming to terms with the fact that I am beautiful, but in my own way. I need to start appreciating that way.

There's this mantra that I talk about in the book. It changed everything for me. It was the whole, you're not pretty like her, you're pretty like you. I found that a few years ago. I made a little sticker out of it. I put it on my phone. Every time I was walking somewhere and I saw a beautiful girl on the street or just was comparing myself, I would look at it. It started to change something in my brain a little bit and really rewire it. Now it's like, I don't know if it's because I'm older or I've just practiced it so much, but I really do feel more confident. I feel like I have these amazing gifts to give. I have these unique things that make me beautiful. I'm going to stop comparing myself to women. Also, when that happens, I think you start appreciating women more. Rather than comparing yourself against them, you can start to be like, wow, this girl's amazing, and I'm amazing. I swear, this book was like -- I was writing through it as I was experiencing it. I let a few friends read it. She was like, "This is a love letter to yourself. This is really beautiful because you can tell you're reckoning with something in each chapter." I really did go through the chapters in real time and have to experience it, which is why I'm glad it resonated with you.

Zibby: Totally. Even when you challenge us, go back and look through photos from three or four years ago. Were you really as bad as you thought? Also, being around older people and having them see the beauty in you as the youth itself, that's something just so intangible. Until you lose it, you didn't even know you had it. You didn't value it. It had no value to you at the time. It was only once you lost it that it takes on its own value.

Lauren: Exactly. There's this amazing Nora Ephron quote that I put in the book. It's like, if I could go back, I would put a bikini on until age thirty-five and never take it off. We just don't appreciate ourselves in the moment. Then I always look back, I'm like, wow, I was so cute back then, but right now, I'm cute. Why can't we just ever appreciate ourselves? I talk about in this chapter, a little bit of the spiritual aspects of washing dishes while washing dishes and appreciating the moment.

Zibby: Yes, I loved that.

Lauren: I'm glad it resonated.

Zibby: That was so great. I'm sorry I'm cutting you off. I'm so excited. I'm not even going to let you talk. I used that the next day. Last night or the night before last, I had this going on. There were so many dishes. Even when my husband was cooking, I was like, "Are you sure you want to make eight things and heat up four things in other pots? That's going to be a lot of dishes after." He's like, "It's great. Everybody's going to want this. It's going to go bad if we don't use it." I'm like, "Okay, fine." Then of course, there were a thousand dishes. Everybody left to go watch TV. That's not true. I had some helpers. Anyway, there I am with my hands in the wet, soapy water. I was like, wait, this is what Lauren was talking about in her book. My kids were around me. Everybody was sort of happy. I was like, you know what, this might be the best moment even though I would normally be annoyed and in a bad mood that I had all these dishes. Is it worth it? Instead, that was like, wow, this is a moment in time. There are actually a lot of great things going on. I was thanking you for that as I got that mindfulness boost from the book.

Lauren: That is the most amazing thing to hear because that's really all I think any author wants from a book, is just someone -- especially with a book like this that's more self-help, even if just one thing sticks with you and that changes the way that you perceive something or live your life, that's a huge feat. That's amazing to hear. I do the same thing when I wash the dishes now. I'm like, Lauren, appreciate this right now. This is a great moment. Stop thinking about the future. Stop thinking about what you'd rather be doing. This is a good thing to be doing right now. Your husband's in the other room. You're washing dishes for the food that you just had. Life is good.

Zibby: You even said something like maybe you're washing dishes and eventually you won't be washing dishes for two. You'll be washing dishes for one. That made me want to cry. The whole thing is such a great reminder of making the best of life, is really what it is.

Lauren: I just felt like my bad moods, I was wasting my life. I was wasting my life in these bad moods. Why can't I be in a good mood more often? I know when I'm in a good mood, I'm my best self. I'm happy and cheerful. My husband said something to me the other day. He's like, "Oh, my god, you're so cute today." I was like, "Why? I'm wearing sweatpants." He's like, "You're just happier. You're happy." Most women, we get so in our heads. We just get so distracted. Then we're not ourselves.

Zibby: It's so true. What is your stand on medication? A lot of people might come back from this conversation and say, maybe she just needs a higher dose of Zoloft or something like that. [laughs]

Lauren: I think everyone kind of wonders once in a while, do I have depression? My grandmother was bipolar. I think everyone wonders a little bit. I have been prescribed Xanax when I couldn't sleep. I talk about that in the book. I think there's a fine line when you know this is a bigger issue than something I can handle myself. In high school, a doctor did put me on Zoloft. I didn't stay on it. I think I was on it a week. I was like, you know what, this is ridiculous. I want to see if I can work this out. I've always had that. I think some people are just born with a little bit more sadness than others, especially artists. I find myself more introspective. I think a lot of women have this amazing quality for empathy and this amazing quality for emotions. We have so many emotions within us. I didn't want to lose that. This book has been my source of help and medication. I do think you know when there is a time and place for you to seek actual help. There's a fine line. I think you'll know when you should speak to your doctor if you are feeling those ways. I hope this helps those who aren't sure, really. Then maybe this could be the last try.

Zibby: Totally. How did you find the actual writing of the book? You loved it?

Lauren: No. [laughs]

Zibby: No?

Lauren: It's not that I don't love it. I talk about it in the book. I think it's the first chapter.

Zibby: How you did not want to do it at all and looked at it like hell. [laughs]

Lauren: I had a breakdown. I was freaking out. I do come from a writing background, but when you're doing it for -- you probably know this. When you're doing it for a publication, you have a deadline. You just get it done. I was writing an article a day. It's just like, whatever. You care, but it wasn't this, wow, this has been my whole life leading up to this book. This is a publishing company looking -- you also understand because I know you're working on a book, not to be creepy. [laughs]

Zibby: It's not creepy. Buy my book, everybody. [laughs] I'm kidding.

Lauren: Just throw that in there. It was so anxiety-inducing because I started worrying so much about, is it going to sell? Is it well-written? I started going to what I always did, which was Words of Women, looking at how other women approached it, and especially writers. I love writing advice. I just love it. I was finding a lot of solace in how other women faced the blank page. I took the best ones and I put them in the book. I feel like writing advice is really life advice. Focus on one word at a time. Just pay attention to what you're working on. Stop getting ahead of yourself. The process started as very chaotic. Then as I was getting into and finding this writing advice, it got much calmer. Then I loved it. I loved every bit of it.

Zibby: People think my podcast is about books, but really, it's about life because that's all writing is. It's all stories and moments. That's what a good book is. It's a way into somebody else's life and into their heads and into their advice and all the rest.

Lauren: Writers are these vessels. We're just trying to explain our life experience and the things that we see in life and interpret out of life. I feel like the two coincide really well.

Zibby: Tell me more, also, about Words of Women. You had all the quotes. That's grown into this huge thing now. Tell me about that.

Lauren: Five years ago, I was obviously in this dark place. My boyfriend and I had kind of broken up. I met this girl. I was really lonely too. I talk about friendship in the book. I was in New York, but I didn't have the college friends anymore, and the high school friends. I had some coworkers, but I felt really lonely. I was seeking, at the time, women with moods and trying to understand it better. I started finding all these amazing quotes that these women were saying. They really made me feel better. I think a lot of pain has to do with the loneliness as pain and how we feel so alienated by it. We must be the only one feeling this way. When I found these other women saying, "I feel this way. I feel anxious. I feel insecure," it would be, like, Isabella Rossellini. I was like, oh, my god, these amazing, successful, powerful women feel the same way I do. I feel not only less alone, I feel really empowered by this. I started putting the quotes onto an Instagram account. At the same time, I was like, I'm going to -- I couldn't get a publisher at this point. I was an unknown writer. It's really hard to get a publishing deal. It's hard to get an agent. I was like, you know what, I'll self-publish one day. I was like, I'll build this account. I'll bleed in what I'm learning from the book and my own words and these amazing quotes. In five years, I'll self-publish. Five years goes by.

I also have a newsletter. This woman reached out to me on the newsletter who worked in publishing. She was like, "I love your newsletter. I love your account. Do you have an agent?" It kind of went full circle. I really believe if you invest in yourself and really -- these quotes that I was putting were things that were driving me to keep going and keep following my dreams. It just grew organically. I think a lot of women like knowing that they're not alone and also like hearing these amazing stories of women. I talk about it in the book. I also wanted to kind of disrupt the feed. I think a lot of our moods and our insecurities come from just scrolling through perfected lives of others, these fake lives. We see, oh, it looks like a beautiful girl on a yacht, beautiful girl, friends hanging out without me. In between that, I really wanted there to be an amazing quote that wasn't cheesy or inspirational, but a really profound quote about life or friendship or just the female condition that made you really stop and forget about the rest and think about something different.

Zibby: Would you do, or maybe you already have this in the works or something, just a quote book, like a beautiful coffee table book with all your quotes?

Lauren: I would love to do that. I had one publisher -- I think my agent's mad at me -- reach out to me about doing it. I'm so particular because I've been doing it for five years. I basically did a pitch to her with all of these quotes I would use and this idea. She was like, "No, I just would rather have it be --" She wanted a Beyoncé lyric for the name of it. I was just like, that's not the vibe of Words of Women. If I'm going to do it, I want it to be done right. I passed on it. I'm waiting for the right opportunity to really do it and do it right, but I would love to do that.

Zibby: Don't wait. You should just send it out now.

Lauren: Yeah, I know. Now it's like, stop waiting.

Zibby: Now's a really good time.

Lauren: You're right. Okay, I'm going to definitely work on that.

Zibby: If you just maybe get your agent on that this afternoon, I bet you could. Call me in two weeks and let me know if you haven't sold it. [laughter]

Lauren: I love that idea. It definitely is on my radar.

Zibby: I was just saying on another podcast, I have this secret, maybe I should have a publishing house myself or something like that because every time -- not every time. A lot of times I talk to authors like you, I'm like, I want Lauren Martin's coffee table book on my coffee table now. Who's going to do it? If I could just make it happen, that would be so cool. I'm not at that point. If I were, I would be doing it myself.

Lauren: Maybe I will wait for that. That's what I mean. I'm happy to just wait for the right opportunity. I'll keep an eye out.

Zibby: Okay, great. I have four books slated ahead of you. No, I'm kidding. [laughter] I'm totally kidding.

Lauren: Fine with me. It'll give me time.

Zibby: No, I'm kidding. What are you doing now? You must have all this press coming up for the book and all of that. Are you still writing? Are you doing it just on the side to keep yourself sane, or what?

Lauren: It's so hard because I'm kind of superstitious. I'm like, I don't want to start working on another book until I feel like I've sold enough of this one and I'm out of the woods. I'm very overly cautious. I do still work full time. I work in marketing. I so want to be a full-time writer. That's my dream. This is my first book. I don't want to jinx it. God forbid I quit my job and -- I know how life works. I know that it can take time. You look at someone like Elizabeth Gilbert and you're like, I'm going to be a best seller like her. Eat Pray Love was her fourth book. It takes time. I'm working. I'm writing on the side. I still write my newsletter. I still run the account, which I love doing. It's an obsession. I have a few ideas for -- I would really love to do a book on female friendship. I think it's not really talked about enough. I think women have a little bit of a warped view of these friendships we should have in our thirties and forties that's not realistic. I feel like it would be helpful to have someone say, look, I struggle with sometimes feeling lonely or maintaining a friendship that I wish I could maintain. That might be something I'm working on next.

Zibby: That would be great. I'm sure you could put some of the quotes in there too.

Lauren: Of course, I'll put the quotes. I'm a quote queen.

Zibby: You could do The Book of Friends. You could have a whole series of The Book of...

Lauren: I love that. My husband and I are currently working on getting pregnant. We had a previous little thing, but it didn't work out. I was thinking when I was pregnant for a little, the emotions --

Zibby: -- I'm sorry.

Lauren: It's okay. I'm so happy more people are talking about it, like Chrissy Teigen and all these amazing women. In the few months I was pregnant, I was like, this is so extreme, these emotions and being a woman and having to just keep going through life but also being pregnant and being tired and being nauseous and having your hormones change. Then I was so excited because I was like, when motherhood comes, that's going to be a whole range of moods that I'm sure I haven't experienced yet, and triggers.

Zibby: Yeah. Hold onto your seat for that one. [laughs]

Lauren: Exactly. That's kind of also in the works, as in getting pregnant hopefully one day. Motherhood would definitely be an interesting subject.

Zibby: You could even call it The Book of Trying.

Lauren: I feel like there's definitely not enough literature out there for women who experience miscarriages or lost babies. You do feel very isolated when it happens.

Zibby: Especially because people say don't talk about it until after twelve weeks. People are much more open. I have thirteen-year-old twins and also a seven-year-old and almost six-year-old. When I was trying to have my twins, nobody was talking about anything. All of a sudden, it's like, don't tell anybody even if you are pregnant for twelve -- I'm like, how could I not tell anybody for three months when I'm vomiting on the street? This is the time that I would want to tell everybody every little detail because it's the wildest ride ever.

Lauren: It's so true. You're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. I didn't tell anyone except my parents. I was twelve weeks. Then when I experienced the miscarriage, I had to go out with my friends. I'd been avoiding them for three months because I didn't want to tell them. Then I went out for drinks with them. I had just experienced this intense traumatic experience. I didn't want to tell them because I hadn’t told them I was pregnant. I wasn't going to be like, guys, I'm really sad today. [Indiscernible] so much that's internalized. You're going on with normal life. You're just like, this incredible thing happened to me. This also terrible thing happened to me. I just have to act normal. I'm happy to see more women are speaking about it. I do think we definitely could talk about it more.

Zibby: Especially as you're going through it, even if you're not ready to write a whole book about it, you should be journaling and taking notes on all the feelings and moods. I think that a book like this on that would be really interesting too.

Lauren: Definitely. I've been trying to write about it. I will say, it's been harder. I'll write about it. Then I'll have a drink and start crying later. I'll be like, clearly, that was a very -- I need some time. When I was pregnant, first of all, I just can't get over how tired you are all the time. I was way too tired to even write. I was like, I'll write when I start feeling better and normal. It's an intense experience.

Zibby: I didn't mean to put pressure on you to do it. Not that you need more ideas. You already had a fantastic book. I want to keep reading what you're writing, so that's why I'm throwing out all these --

Lauren: -- I love it. Trust me, multiple people have been like, you should be journaling. You should be writing about this. I know as well. I'm just excited. My first book, it's definitely anxiety-inducing. I'm trying to, as I speak about in the book, change that verbiage from, I'm so nervous and anxious, to, I'm excited. Otherwise, I'll have a heart attack.

Zibby: Even what you said about -- what did you say? It's not stressful, it's a challenge, or something. It's not hard, it's just a challenge.

Lauren: It's been five years, and [indiscernible].

Zibby: I know. I'm sorry. I should've had the quote at the ready. I'm like, can you please quote this back to me?

Lauren: I was actually talking about this the other day with someone.

Zibby: And accepting the inevitability of pain and then keeping going, all of that too, so you don't have to worry so much.

Lauren: Stoicism, yeah. I'm trying to find it as well. Of course, you can never find things when you need to.

Zibby: No. Sorry, this is my job, and I'm not doing it. Anyway, you said something great as if -- it's basically just reframing. You just have to reframe the hard times and see them all as --

Lauren: -- Exactly. Oh, here it is. It's to replace "Calm down" with "I'm excited;" "I don't want to" with "I get to;" "I'm scared," "I'm pumped." It's switching that. That's called anxiety reappraisal, which is obviously a cognitive trick. It really does work because the feeling of nervousness and anxiety is the same as excitement, but the way we label it is the way that we then experience it.

Zibby: It's so true. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Lauren: Yes. One, I just wrote about this in my newsletter, there's always a back door. I think the hardest part about writing, especially if you're kind of unknown and you don't have a large following of anything, you're like, what's the point? I'll never get published. If there's a will, there's a way. This is coming from me. I literally moved to New York when I was twenty-two. I didn't even major in English. My parents wanted me to major in marketing. They're like, "You'll make more money." I just decided, I'm going to go to New York. I'm going to just walk door to door until someone gives me a job. If I'm an intern, that's fine, which I was, worked my way up. Then I couldn't get an agent the traditional way, so I built a social platform. It took five years. If you love to do something, it will come. Have faith in yourself. Have faith in the process. Even if you need to self-publish, I think there's no shame in that. Fifty Shades of Grey was self-published. Even if you go towards your goal that way, don't be daunted by it. Once you start writing, I think the biggest thing is to just have faith in what you're doing.

I literally have a Google Doc which I also might one day publish. I think it's two hundred pages of quotes from writers giving advice. So much of the advice is just get it all out. Get it all down. That's what the first draft is for. Then the second draft, just rework it. I think it's so daunting when you see the blank page. You need to just get it out even if it's not good. Then you can rework it later. The other is Dani Shapiro. I love her. I know you've met her and interviewed her. Her book, Still Writing, is my bible. She has so many good quotes. I just love her "build a corner." That's what people good at puzzles do. They do one piece at a time. They focus on the corner. I think it's just staying calm and staying passionate and not getting discouraged by the process and not getting discouraged by when your friends are getting published and you're not and feeling like it's impossible. Anything worth doing is hard. If you have that burning desire, that's enough proof that you deserve to be a writer.

Zibby: I love it. Lauren, thank you so much. Thanks for this chat. Thanks for your book. Thanks for indulging all my random ideas for you which you don't even need. I'm sorry.

Lauren: No, I loved -- they were all the ideas I've ever had, and someone was just validating them. Thank you.

Zibby: [laughs] Okay, great. Stay in touch. Congratulations.

Lauren: Thank you for having me. Talk soon.

Zibby: My pleasure. Bye.

Lauren: Bye.

Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher, SANCTUARY

Zibby Owens: Hi, everybody. Hope you're having a good afternoon. I am really excited to be doing an Instagram Live with Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher. I've been carrying this around in my bag all day, as I often do with all my books. I hope people are going to join or I'll feel really silly. Anyway, first, I am going to talk to Paola and then Abby because you can only have two people on at a time. I'm going to invite Paola to join in a second. I'll just read you this description if you want. "It's 2032, and in this near-future America, all citizens are chipped and everyone is tracked--from buses to grocery stores. It's almost impossible to survive as an undocumented immigrant, but that's exactly what sixteen-year-old Vali is doing. She and her family have carved out a stable, happy life in small-town Vermont, but when Vali's mother's counterfeit chip starts malfunctioning and the Deportation Forces raid their town, they are forced to flee. Now on the run, Vali and her family are desperately trying to make it to her tía Luna's in California, a sanctuary state that is currently being walled off from the rest of the country. But when Vali's mother is detained before their journey even really begins, Vali must carry on with her younger brother across the country to make it to safety before it's too late. Gripping and urgent, co-authors Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher have crafted a narrative that is as haunting as it is hopeful in envisioning a future where everyone can find sanctuary." That is your preview. Now I'll get Paola into this discussion. She can tell us all about writing this book, writing it jointly with Abby, what inspired the book, and so much more. Hi, Paola.

Paola Mendoza: Hi.

Zibby: How are you?

Paola: I'm good. How are you?

Zibby: I'm good. Sorry it took so long for us to connect on this. Congratulations on your book.

Paola: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for reading it and having me here today.

Zibby: You're welcome. It's a chilling thought, what would happen if this was reality. How did you envision this alternate universe? How did you think about it? Then how did you make it into a novel? Which came first?

Paola: I've been working in the immigrant rights space as a storyteller for over fifteen years. I've heard and had the privilege to listen to the stories of immigrants, specifically undocumented immigrants in this country, for a very long time. In 2018, the Trump administration implemented a horrible policy called Family Separation. What that did for those that might not remember is that families across the southern border into this country were ripped apart from their children. Their kids were placed in foster cares. Their kids were placed with strangers in some instances. To this day almost three years later, not all families have been reunited. In that moment of despair and darkness, there was a group of us that started organizing against this policy. We organized marches across the country. The, I don't want to ever say good news, but there was a positive outcome in that the zero-tolerance policy that allowed family separation as we knew it then, it stopped. It was ended within six weeks.

Then I started to imagine what would've happened if we hadn’t stopped that policy. What would that allow the Trump administration to -- what would he have done next? What would've been the horrible thing that he would've done next? I started to imagine the beginnings of the world of Sanctuary. I started to see this really scary, dark, unfortunate place that I didn't want to live in, a United States that seemed possible, but definitely not the future that we wanted. I then asked myself, what's the answer to this horrible nightmare? The answer was Vali, our main character, sixteen-year-old in the book. She's undocumented in the book. She does extraordinary things to protect herself and ultimately protect her community. That was the beginnings of Sanctuary. Then I started working with Abby Sher, who's my cowriter. The two of us really dug deep into the bones of the book and wrote this together.

Zibby: What made you decide to have a cowriter?

Paola: It's a great question. Three things, if I'm being really honest. One, I had written a book previously by myself, and I hated every moment of writing it by myself. I'm a collaborator. I love collaborating as an artist, as a writer, as a director. That process was so solitary and so lonely that I was like, I will never do that again. That's one. Two, also, the Trump administration, working within immigration and telling stories of immigrants, what we've seen in the past three and a half years is that Trump really attacks and dislikes immigrants. His policies are really horrible towards immigrants, and so I knew that I didn't have the luxury at this moment in time to post up in my house for two years and just write a book. I knew that I was going to be needed to do other things on top of writing this book. In order to write this book within the two-year time period that we had given ourselves, I had given us because I wanted it to come out before the election, I knew that I couldn't do it alone. Those are the two real answers. The third answer I would say is that I'm a better artist when I collaborate. All of my previous work, whether it's filmmaking, whether it's visual art, photography, writing, I'm a better artist, I create better, I enjoy the process better when I am collaborating. I feel like my voice is actually much clearer when I'm collaborating. I was excited to experiment with collaborating on writing a novel, which is probably the artistic process that has the least amount of collaborations in it.

Zibby: How did you do it together? Did you each take a section? Were you on Zooms? What was the process like of your cowriting?

Paola: Everyone is very curious about our collaboration.

Zibby: I know. I'm always so intrigued by this. How do people do this? It's like making magic together. It's like a witches' brew or something.

Paola: It is a witches' brew. It absolutely is. We didn't set out with any specific rules in place. It just kind of fell into place. We don't live in the same city. We live close enough, but not in the same city. A lot of the work was actually done remotely. Google Docs were our best friends. We wrote live on Google all the time. We would plan out the story more than just a detailed outline, specifically, all of the action plot points of what was happening when and how the character got here and what they encountered, and the conversation was about this. It was a very, very, very detailed outline, for lack of a better word. We each knew where the story was going. Then that took, obviously, a very long time because it was so detailed. Then we would go and we would individually write. Our strengths revealed themselves. Abby, her strength is in character and in detail. My strength is in plot and in story. We each knew that that's where our mastery was. That's what we gravitated to, though it doesn't mean that we didn't work on other aspects of it because we did. At certain points, the drafts were just going back and forth. We're editing and writing, and editing and writing, and going back and forth with one another. It's unclear exactly who did what because it just becomes this witches' brew, as you said. We were just there stirring the pot.

Zibby: [laughs] It's great you found somebody you could work so well with. That's so great you are great at collaborating. I just feel like it's so easy to find the wrong person. You can like someone a lot as a person, but maybe you don't work so well together. You don't know until you know. Hard to get into that when you're writing a book, I would think.

Paola: It's true. It's true. It's a marriage, but it's a marriage that will last a finite period of time. Hopefully, it doesn't end in divorce. In our case, it did not end in divorce. We're renewing our vows. That is a good thing.

Zibby: Are you writing another book together?

Paola: Yeah, that's the plan. We want to. We want to write the second book to Sanctuary.

Zibby: Maybe if marriage actually was for a finite period of time, more people would be able to be successful at it if you knew. Just saying. Maybe it's time for --

Paola: -- You might be onto something.

Zibby: I don't know. Not that I want my marriage to end. I'm very happy. Anyway, back to the book. [laughs] Tell me a little more about your background in film and photography and how all these creative juices seem to flow in you. How did this all happen? How did you get started?

Paola: I started off as an actress, actually. I have my undergraduate and my graduate degree in the theater, in acting and directing. That was what I wanted to do, and then I realized as I started working professionally as an actress that the life of an actress was not for me because I didn't want to tell the stories that were being told. I had other desires for stories. It was very unfulfilling. I had nominal success. I was a working actress, but it was just not a happy place for me. I decided that I wanted to make a documentary. I picked up a camera. I worked with one of my best friends. He had never made a documentary either. The two of us were like, let's figure this out. We had a lot of filmmaking friends, so we called them. We were like, "We have this camera. How do we turn it on?" That's where we started. We followed a family for about a year and half, really committed to their story, and learned how to make a movie while we were making a movie, both of us did. Then we edited the film, learned how to edit while we were editing, and finished this film.

I fell in love with the movie-making process. I fell in love with the ability to see a story, envision a story, and tell the story how I wanted to tell it. Then I was like, okay, that was a documentary. I want to write a script. Never had I written a script, but obviously had read so many plays. As an actress, I'd read so many scripts. I was like, I'm just going to try. I worked with a friend of mine who had been my editor on the documentary. I was like, "Let's write this script together." She had never written a feature script either. She was like, "Okay, let's do it." We figured it out. It was based on my mom's story when we first came to this country. The film is called Entre nos. I was like, "I want to direct this. Let's co-direct it together." We co-directed Entre nos. That's kind of just been the process. My first book, the opportunity landed in my lap. I was like, I've never written a book before, but let me try.

This idea of experimenting in different mediums comes from actually something that I, when I taught -- I taught quite a lot before I had my son. It was something that I told my students. It's really this mantra that I had lived by as an artist. I would tell my students, don't be afraid to create bad art. We will all create bad art. If you just embrace the fact that what you try and do might be bad, but it doesn't make you a bad artist, it's more freeing. I look at my work and what I'm working on as the entire body of my work that I'm working on for my entire life. That will determine my value personally. I'm not talking about the value to the exterior world, but my value personally as an artist. There might be some work that is way better than other work. There definitely is some bad shit that I've created, but that doesn't determine my value as an artist, nor does the "masterpiece" I might have created determine my value as an artist. It's about the entirety of my body of work. Knowing that, it's allowed me to go out and experiment and try things that I've never tried before and get an idea and be like, okay, let's try it. Let's figure it out. Let's try it and see if I like it and see if it works. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't.

Zibby: Your son is so lucky because that's exactly what they tell you to do as a parent, is encourage your kids just to try and not to worry about if they're doing it well or not doing it well. That's how you end up creating all of this stuff. If you're afraid to try and fail, then forget it. That's amazing and very inspiring. You liked writing, so this is now something you want to keep doing and not just a one-time experiment. Do you prefer different -- which is your favorite if you had to rank them? Just wondering, like film and...

Paola: I think that I am more naturally a director. That is definitely my initial voice. In the past three and a half years since Donald Trump was elected to the presidency, I realized making movies takes years to make, writing a script and getting a movie produced. I tend to work in independent film. It takes a very long time. I knew that I was not going to be able to do that in the Trump administration. I was, again, going to have to be working on a much faster pace. All that to say is that I haven't made a feature film in a very long time, but my heart is pulling me back to that. I feel that that's kind of my natural zone as an artist. To have the ability to experiment in other things is really exciting too.

Zibby: Is Sanctuary going to become a movie?

Paola: That's what we hope, yeah. That's what we're in the process of. Cross your fingers. Lots of things can happen, but that's what we're trying to make happen right now.

Zibby: Amazing. Do you have any advice for people just starting out, writers, creators, anybody who could use your encouragement? You tried, and look how successful you've been.

Paola: I would say, A, most importantly, don't be afraid to create bad shit, bad art. That's really important. Two, tell the story that is keeping you up at night. Tell the story that you can't ignore. Tell the story that, maybe it's lived inside of you for decades. Maybe it just got planted into your heart or just started whispering in your ear. Tell that story because the road to creating art is a very difficult road. It is not easy. Everything in the world will conspire to make you stop. If you have this story inside of you that you can't let go, that you can't ignore, you will be able to push away all the things that are telling you not to do it and get to the finish line and tell the story how you want to tell it. Be very protective and specific with the stories that you invest in.

Zibby: Will you continue to be an activist/creator? Would you see yourself as an activist?

Paola: Yeah, absolutely. All of my artwork is social in its storytelling.

Zibby: I didn't want to label you an activist if you didn't self-identify that way.

Paola: I definitely self-identify as an activist, but I absolutely identify first and foremost as an artist. I'm an artist first and an activist after my art.

Zibby: Awesome. This is great. Thank you. Now we're going to talk to Abby. Thank you so much for coming on and discussing. I'm sorry we can't all do this all three of us. I'm a moron for not remembering that Instagram couldn't be three ways, but this is great too.

Paola: No worries. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. I just want to say that the book is available at all bookstores. You just can click on my link or my name up there. The link is in my bio. Please support women writers, Latinx writers. Please support immigration stories. Go out and vote right now if you can because early voting is happening now.

Zibby: I voted.

Paola: Oh, good. Where do you live? What state do you live in?

Zibby: I live in New York, but I got an absentee ballot because I wasn't sure if I would be in the city. I voted, so everyone can leave me alone. [laughs]

Paola: Wonderful. I'm so glad. Didn't it feel good to vote?

Zibby: It did. I felt a huge relief. I felt like I was happy to spend a month telling everybody that I already did it. [laughs]

Paola: Good. Thank you so much. Take care.

Zibby: Bye.

Paola: Bye.

Zibby: Now we're going to talk to her coauthor, Abby Sher. Let me get her to join. Abby was also on my podcast for Love You Miss You Hate You Bye, which was a fantastic book. Hi. How are you?

Abby Sher: I'm good. How are you?

Zibby: I'm good. Where are you?

Abby: I'm doing something scary just for you, Zibby. I'm doing this from soccer practice for my son. I'm sitting on a public bench, which freaks me out. I thought walking around would be a little bit more disturbing.

Zibby: Did you put something down like newspapers?

Abby: No, it's just me. That's me.

Zibby: It's going to be okay.

Abby: It's going to be okay. I'm just going to wash my butt really well tonight.

Zibby: Get your clothes, put it in the laundry. This is so typical. "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," you're at soccer practice for your Instagram Live.

Abby: Let's hope no one gets hurt. I'm just going to keep one ear over there.

Zibby: I just talked to Paola. She's amazing. That was so fun. I didn't know her at all, so that was great, or I hadn’t talked to her at all. Tell me your side of collaborating with her and how it went on this book. I know you've written all by yourself and now together. What was it like?

Abby: I have to say, now that I've tasted the juice, it's really fun to collaborate. It really is. Writing is a very solitary sport. I've whined for the past ten years, I just want to do this with someone. It was really dreamy because, as Paola said, I think we just gravitate towards different things. I gravitate towards the character side of writing. She gravitates toward the plot. It's not like we set that out for each other, but it really helped us because she had a vision of where these characters needed to go. Then I would need to get in their brains and be like, why would they -- I was staying up at night going, why would they want to go into a desert? She was staying up at night plotting out how physically they would get out of a desert. Spoiler alert, they get out of the desert, but you know that.

Zibby: [laughs] That's okay. I feel like you have this great skill of getting into the minds of, I guess, high schoolers. I feel like your last book was all about helping a friend through a really difficult time and getting through that period of life. Now we have Vali who's getting through this and dealing with her brother and eagerly sitting there while her mother -- what's going on with her aunt? All that anxiety you feel as a pseudo-adult, tell me about that. Tori O'Connell just wrote, "You're a YA savant."

Abby: [laughs] Tori, that's because I'm stuck at that age. I think I've been told by many a therapist, are you sure that you're in your forties? You act like a fifteen-year-old. I do think that I, in many ways, am emotionally stuck as a teenager. I also think that they wear it all. They have it all happening to them. They don't know how to hide it very well. They put on a good show, but they don't know how to hide their feelings very well. They don't know how to process them very well. It gives me, as a writer, a real treat to try to process it with them. We've been talking to some middle schools and high schools now, which has been really, really fun. We're talking to students who are this age. It's fascinating to see. Vali doesn't want to be an activist. Vali doesn't want to be a revolutionary. She doesn't want to be in the limelight. She's not someone who's even going to go try out for the spring play. She's a thoughtful teenager. She's concerned about friends and lip gloss and things that we all are concerned about. There's no part of her that's like, "I'm going to change the world," when we start the book. She's forced into this role. I think that's how a lot of us learn our skills, is that we're forced into it. I didn't want the circumstances I was raised in. She certainly does not want the circumstances she's raised in. It was fun seeing a class the other day be like, how do you learn how to fend for yourself like that? They didn't know exactly what it meant to be undocumented. Paola's really, really great at explaining it to any age. It was really fun to see how a sixteen-year-old processes that literally right in front of you.

Zibby: Wow. Paola was saying she identifies first as an artist and then as an activist. Where are you on the activism scale?

Abby: I think she's changed me. I didn't start this book thinking I need to be an activist. I thought, moms don't have time to read, moms don't have to time to get out and -- I'll march. I have my pussy hat. I will do all those things that I can, but at the end of the day, I also have soccer practice. I don't know how to do that without somebody really falling through the cracks. Paola's definitely inspired me to take more action. I've brought my kids to a lot of marches. They did family separation marches. Now I just don't even offer it as an option. I just say, "Mom has to go canvasing." If there is an argument, I guess it happens when I close the door. [laughs] That's really great parenting. Don't take this advice.

Zibby: I was sitting there thinking, wow, this is impressive. If I say I'm going to this doctor's appointment or something, they're like, "Why? Why can't you take us here? Why can't you do this?" I'm like, I don't know, I just can't.

Abby: Exactly. There's definitely that. Then the more that they learn, the scared-er they get right now. "Why are you going to a protest? Can people shoot you at protests?" It's a crazy time to be alive. It's a crazy time to be raising children and trying to explain what's going on.

Zibby: Wow. Are you one of these people who's asking everyone if they’ve voted?

Abby: I will be honest, I have not voted yet. I have my ballot. I don't know exactly what I've been waiting for. I think I'm going to be so sad when I let it go. I feel like it's my conch. I have to do it. I've been phone-banking. That's not fun. I hate phone-banking.

Zibby: I know that Paola said she wanted to work on another book with you. That's really awesome. Are you also doing stuff on the side just yourself for your own writing, or are you waiting to do another with her?

Abby: I'm always noodling on something. I've been playing with these characters for a long time. It's an adult book, I hope. Although, I always say that, and then it winds up being a YA book. I'm trying to take it from the perspective of the mom for a change. I have been working with Rebel Girls, which is a really fun company that started Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. I love the spirit of that whole team. They just had a virtual rally this weekend, which was really fun. People from all over the world joined in. It was led by girls who are young activists. I'm dipping into things. My goal is definitely to write the next book with Paola and see what happens of these movie talks and things like that.

Zibby: Excellent. That's exciting. It's really good to see you again.

Abby: You too. We talked right before this all happened, right before the lockdown.

Zibby: You were one of my last in-person interviews.

Abby: It was another lifetime.

Zibby: Another lifetime. Now through the screens, I've gotten to know a lot of people. Anyway, congrats on this book. Stay in touch. Have fun at soccer.

Abby: Take care. Have a nice day.

Zibby: Bye.

Abby: Bye.

Zibby: Everybody, I know that many people aren't watching right now, but hopefully later, please buy Sanctuary. This is a really interesting book about -- it's basically a what-if for our country. Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher. You can get yours now. Bye.

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Peace Adzo Medie, HIS ONLY WIFE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Peace. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss your book, His Only Wife. Congratulations on the book.

Peace Adzo Medie: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. I have to say, I listened to this in the car on a bunch of drives that I did. I had it with all the kids in the car. I would listen back and forth, back and forth. Then I finally said, "You know what, guys? This is the book we've been listening to." They were like, "It's so short. What do you mean? We've been listening to it for hours." [laughter] It's been a part of my family, so I'm happy to tell them that we're finally doing this interview. Can you please tell listeners what His Only Wife is about? Also, what inspired you to write this book?

Peace: His Only Wife is a story of a young woman in Ghana. Her name is Afi. She is in an arranged marriage. It begins as Afi gets into an arranged marriage to a man. His name is Eli, very wealthy man. This is a marriage that has been arranged by Eli's mother who is called Aunty. Aunty has arranged this marriage because she doesn't approve of Eli's partner. On one level, Afi has this task of bringing Eli closer to his family because the woman has come between Eli and family. On another level, this is a book about a young woman finding her voice, finding her place in the world, and coming to a place where she can speak about what it is that she wants. That is His Only Wife. I wrote the book for several reasons. One being that I'm very interested in how social pressures shape women's lives. I do research on a variety of issues including on violence against women. I've done some fieldwork in Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire. I've spoken to survivors of violence. Something that came through in my interviews with them was how they wanted to leave abusive relationships, but they didn't because people encouraged them to stay. People discouraged them from leaving, usually family and friends. That really got me thinking about the decisions that women make in relationships because of the pressures and the advice that they receive from the people around them.

Zibby: All very good things to investigate. I read this -- this is going to sound so silly. Maybe not silly, just surprising I should say. There was an ad for a dog food company. In the ad, it said forty-seven percent of domestic abuse victims don't leave because they don't want to leave their pets. Isn't that interesting? I just keep storing this fact away and repeating it because I find it so interesting that you can feel so trapped and so helpless and be in such an awful emotional and physical place and yet your allegiance to your pet is placed at a higher premium, almost, than your own mental and physical health. I found it very interesting.

Peace: I think it makes sense that if you're in such a difficult position that something that brings you joy, something that brings you a bit of comfort, it's something that would be very difficult to part with.

Zibby: Yes. I couldn't part with my dog. Do you have dogs?

Peace: Not anymore.

Zibby: I just inherited a dog. I'm already in love with her after a month. Also, you were the Reese's Book Club pick. It must have been so exciting. Was that even on horizon of things you were hoping would happen with this book? What happened when you found out? Tell me about that.

Peace: I hoped briefly before I ever knew. Then I thought, don't even think about that. What are the chances that would happen? It was an extremely pleasant surprise. Honestly, I found out, and I had no idea what to do with myself. I was almost just frozen. I was like, what do you do with this information? I'm so, so happy. What do I do with this information? The Reese's Book Club community, they're just a wonderful community of book lovers. They have been so supportive in so many different ways. It's been wonderful being the October Book Club pick.

Zibby: That's exciting. I was watching you today because I was wondering if they had posted -- our interview will air later, but a lot of places were airing their November picks today. I was on there and watching you give all the clues. I was thinking to myself, does Peace know the answer to this, or do they just give her clues? Do you know the answer, or did you just get the clues?

Peace: They just gave me the clues. Everyone, reading their responses, I was like, oh, okay. Is this what people think it is? I just know the clues. [laughs]

Zibby: Everybody in the comments seemed to be pretty convinced it was one particular book, but I don't know. They all wanted that free giveaway, I guess, so they hopped on the bandwagon.

Peace: We'll find out today, I think.

Zibby: This book was so realistic, particularly the scenes where Afi was in the apartment just biding her time waiting for Eli to come visit. She didn't know what to do. Luckily, she was able, through Richard and her family, to go take some sewing classes and go to different schools and all the rest. For a while, it was just her with the thick carpet and her mom, alone padding around and wondering if she should be dressed and ready and what was going to happen for her husband to show up, who she hadn’t even seen including at the wedding, which is crazy. Tell me about crafting that moment and that feeling. Did you have a period of time where you felt that same sense, that the minutes were so long? That's how you made it feel for the character.

Peace: I've definitely felt like that when waiting for things to happen. I really wanted to communicate the things that women do for men and the sacrifices that women would make for men, including a woman like Afi who is ambitious, who is smart, but has been led to believe that she should make these sacrifices. She should be willing. She should be ready and prepared and perfect-looking all the time in order to please this man who she's never even met officially since they’ve been married. In crafting that period in Afi's life, I really wanted to show this excruciating detail of just waiting, and waiting because you’ve been led to believe this person is so important and you should give so much of yourself to this person.

Zibby: By the way, when Eli did finally arrive -- as I said, I was listening in the car with the kids. They finally got together. My daughter was like, "Mom!" I turned it down. I was like, "I'm sure this scene's almost over." Then I turned it back up. They had gone out to the kitchen. Then you had them go back in the bedroom. It started again. She's looking at me. I was like, "Okay, okay, okay, I'll do it later."

Peace: Oh, no! What have I done? [laughter]

Zibby: I was so mortified. Mental note, don't listen to this middle part in front of your kids. Part of the book, too, was not only her allegiance to Eli, but also the postmortem allegiance to her father. Her father passed away leaving the family in financial ruins. She had to live with her aunt and felt indebted to her aunt for a long time. This is part of why she wanted to repay the aunt. It's the loss of not only her father, but also the lifestyle that her father provided and what it's like to have been somewhat frivolous with her purchases and not really thinking. Then you had a whole thing where she's like, if only I could go back and have a moment of those clothes that I didn't care about or all of that and just hold onto those not knowing that they were about to go away. Tell me a little more about that element and the kind of fall from grace that can so easily happen.

Peace: A big part of this story is the class divide. I really wanted to show that. I've thought about it and said, would Aunty have proposed this marriage if Afi's father was alive, if they were middle-class? I don't think so. I think it's because of the family's financial situation. That is why Aunty felt bold enough to propose this marriage. I just really wanted to explore how economic disparities impact the decisions that women make, but also even how it shapes marriages. Then you have a relationship where one person has more power than the other because that person has the money and is therefore then able to call the shots. I really wanted, in small ways, to show how the death of Afi's father and their financial fall was even driving the behavior of her mother. I think her mother would have been a very different woman if Afi's father had been alive. I just really wanted to explore this and show how the change in their financial status was influencing them in different ways.

Zibby: And also how the mom and daughter's different views on what a marriage should be affected their relationship. They used to be more like friends. Then as soon as she got married, it became a much more mother-daughter, I'm going to tell you what to do, you have to do this, a didactic-type relationship, and how a wedding, a relationship, as we all know, can seriously change your other relationships in unforeseen ways.

Peace: Yes, yes. A big part of it is Afi's mother has an idea of what a marriage should be. Afi starts off disagreeing, but then agreeing, and then disagreeing. Definitely, along those lines, we see the relationship between Afi and her mother change in so many ways. I think it's actually very realistic. Once money comes into the picture, a lot of our relationships tend to change.

Zibby: That too, yes, for sure. Are you married yourself? This is none of my business. You don't have to answer. I'm wondering if you're married, if your parents are married. What types of models for a marriage do you have in your own life?

Peace: Wonderful marriage. I think this book is unusual in two ways in that there's an arranged marriage. I tell people that it's actually not common, where I come from at least. A lot of it was me imagining what an arranged marriage would look like and what a person in an arranged marriage would feel. It's also kind of a polygamous relationship where you have one man with multiple partners or wanting to have multiple wives, not entirely succeeding. That is also not as common as it used to be in Ghana. These relationships still exist, but they are not as common as they used to be. What I would say is that I'm not in an arranged or in a polygamous marriage. I'm very interested in these institutions. I'm very interested in why people are within these institutions, but also how they have changed and why they are changing. If I look at my grandmother's generation, for example, there were more relationships or marriages with more than one partner, with more than one wife. In my generation, my parents' generation, it's become much less common. To me, it's very interesting. It also says a lot about what women's expectations are and what women are willing to accept within marriage as well in Ghana and I'm sure in many other places.

Zibby: Interesting. Tell me about the writing of this book. How long did it take you to write? What was your process like?

Peace: I began thinking about this book around 2010, 2011. I was finishing up my doctoral dissertation at Boston College. I was spending a lot of time just sitting at my desk trying to write the dissertation and graduate.

Zibby: By the way, I had this vision of you in Ghana writing with all the sights and sounds the way they are in the book. You're in freezing cold Boston around the corner? That's crazy. Okay, go on.

Peace: [laughs] Some of the writing did happen in Ghana, but I began thinking about it when I was in Boston. Then I seriously began writing late 2012, early 2013. I was back in Ghana by then. It took me five years because I went back and started teaching at University of Ghana and still had a full-time job where I was doing academic research and writing, teaching, and everything else, but also writing fiction. I had a very hectic day. I'd wake up four in the morning, write fiction. Around six in the morning, I would switch to writing -- I no longer do that, thankfully. Then switch to nonfiction around six. It was very demanding, but I really enjoyed it. I use fiction to relax. I use fiction to step back from my academic work. While they were very long days, it was very enjoyable.

Zibby: That’s good. What are you working on now?

Peace: I'm the final stages, I'm editing the second book manuscript. I was supposed to be done Monday morning. I told my agent I was going to send it to her yesterday morning, and I haven't.

Zibby: It's only Tuesday. It's okay.

Peace: I'm finishing up that manuscript and excited about the third one.

Zibby: Wow. Can you give any previews as to what those two are about?

Peace: The second book is about friendship. It's about two cousins who are very close. I'm very interested in how relationships come apart. It's two cousins who are very close, but then they come apart over time. I explore why it is that this happens. I'm also interested in how two people can experience the same thing but think about it very differently. Two friends, they are both convinced that the other person is in the wrong. For me, that it just so interesting. Basically, it's a book about friendship.

Zibby: Great. That sounds good. I've definitely been in situations where I'm convinced I'm right and perhaps I'm not, so that will be good. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Peace: It's important that you love what you're writing. For me, that has worked really well because writing, it's long hours, very demanding. I think that if you don't love what you're doing, if you don't love the story that you are telling, I think it will be really tough to just stick with it for years and years. I've been working on this book, if I count editing, it's almost nine years, almost ten years. I feel like if you don't love the story, if you don't love the characters, it will be hard to keep at it. Write the things that make you happy. Write the things that you love. Eventually, the writing will find its readers.

Zibby: That's excellent advice. This book has certainly found a lot of readers, so that's great, including me and apparently my kids. [laughter] Thank you for all of our hours of entertainment in the car. Thank you for chatting with me today. Thanks for this beautiful story and all of its different elements that really made me think. Thanks.

Peace: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed chatting with you.

Zibby: You too. Have a great day.

Peace: Buh-bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Alyssa Milano, PROJECT CLASS PRESIDENT

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

Alyssa Milano: I am so excited to be with you. I totally agree. We don't have time to read books.

Zibby: Right? It's impossible.

Alyssa: It really is. It makes me super sad because I love to read. Then again, something to look forward to once the kids are big and grown.

Zibby: Exactly. That's why I do this podcast, so we can get glimpses of different books and hear more about it. Then people will be so convinced that they have to run out and buy the book and find time.

Alyssa: I love it.

Zibby: Thanks. Speaking of books, your middle-grade novel about Hope running for president is so timely given the upcoming election and everything else. Your series is fantastic. Tell me about starting the series in general and then this particular book in it.

Alyssa: It's actually a pretty amazing story. I became friends with our illustrator first. His name is Eric Keyes. He's a brilliant illustrator. He's also the character designer for The Simpsons. I DMed him once because I was starting my Patriot Not Partisan website, which is a website filled with all essays from both sides of the political spectrum. I asked if he had any political art that he wanted to share. He had this character that he designed that was this little girl, she was more like toddler age, marching with a bullhorn and doing really incredible things. I said, "Oh, my god, who is that? What are you doing with her?" He said, "Nothing, really. You can do whatever." I said, "Can we try to sell a children's book using her?" He said, "Yes, let's do that." I created this whole character. He's like, "What would her name be?" I said, "Hope. Obviously, her name is Hope," and had this whole story idea in my head. We were able to sell the idea to Scholastic as a series. The one that just came out is book three of four. I just love this character so, so much. She was originally a toddler. I was like, "Are we going to do a picture book?"

I left it up to Scholastic to give me some kind of direction because there is no one better in the children's book genre and world as far as publishing. They said something which I found was really interesting which was that middle school is such a rough time and rough transition for kids. It's really this untapped market because not a lot of people are writing books specifically for that age range when there are such specific issues that that age range goes through. I thought it was a perfect idea to age her up a little bit because when you look at -- I have two kids. I have a nine-year-old and a six-year-old, a boy and a girl. The thing that's been so interesting in raising them is that they innately have this sense of empathy and compassion and wanting to help and wanting to do good. I was just always so curious about, when does that go away? Obviously, the teenage years, it becomes a lot more self-consumed. I think it goes away around middle school because their entire life changes. It is such a rough time for kids. They're usually in a new school. They have to make new friends. They're going through puberty. Their bodies are changing. They're becoming more self-conscious and self-aware. The thought was, how can I create this character that combines all the things that children go through in middle school personally but still cultivates what they naturally have inside of them as far as wanting to be helpful and to do good and to change the world?

That's how Hope was born. I found this amazing cowriter, her name is Debbie Rigaud, who's just been awesome and fearless and such an incredible partner to have. The way I describe her is she wants to change the world, but she has to go through middle school first. The first book was all about Hope finding her voice and using it. That can sometimes be super uncomfortable but a necessity. Then the second book, Hope: Project Animal Shelter, is about Hope becoming a community organizer in raising money to keep her local animal shelter open. It's really cute. The illustrations are amazing. This one's called Hope: Project Class President. Basically, we wanted to give kids a real sense of a civic class, almost, embedded in this fun story of Hope running for class president. Kids will learn terminology like town halls and debates and canvasing and things that we are hearing a lot about now when you turn on the news with the election coming up. It's been a really rewarding experience, one that I am super proud of. Just to have something that I'm able to give my kids and say, "This is for you and your friends," has been really, really great.

Zibby: That's amazing. I have to say, not all young kids are empathic.

Alyssa: They aren't?

Zibby: I don't think they all -- I've met some...

Alyssa: Really?

Zibby: Yeah. [laughs]

Alyssa: I don't know. My kids just came out very concerned and empathetic. When I think about what happens when one baby cries and then another baby cries, to me, that's empathy. That's feeling a shift in the environment that causes some kind of emotion. I think all kids sort of have that a little bit.

Zibby: Maybe I was just thinking of some of the meaner kids who we've crossed paths with.

Alyssa: I think those are the kids that never had their compassion nurtured at all and is probably lacking that in other areas of their lives, not just in taking care of other people, but how people treat them.

Zibby: I totally agree. You're absolutely right. I have four kids. My oldest kids are twins. They're thirteen. We are in the middle school years as we speak. I'm only a couple years ahead of you. I have to say that, at least in my case, I feel like the empathy doesn't totally go away. Nothing happens overnight, but it is so essential at this time to get books like yours and show leadership and kindness and how you can help and just get out of your own bubble of worries into the world, which, frankly, a lot of adults could use as well.

Alyssa: Yes. Isn't that the truth? Yes, for sure. I really wanted to nurture the beauty that I saw in my kids. It's so amazing that they always know how to reduce something that seems so complex to its most basic emotional place. That goes for political issues too. The way in which their minds think about the issues has nothing to do partisanship politics. It has to do with humanity and being a good person. I think that it's very interesting to watch them process what's happening right now. I think for a lot of parents it's very interesting to try to figure out how much to tell their children about what's happening and in what way to say it. It's very hard.

Zibby: It is a very loaded time to be a parent.

Alyssa: It really is. Then you have the pandemic. It's hard enough being a parent and knowing that you're making the right decisions with your kids. Then you add the pandemic part on top of it. It's like, I don't know, is this going to affect them for the rest of their lives? Are they going to want to wash down packages forever? Are they going to grow to be neurotic or more neurotic or have worse anxiety than they would've normally had? There's just so much to it. Is it bad that I'm keeping them home from school and homeschooling them even though there are kids in their class? Is it worse if they get sick? It just feels really big. It all felt big before.

Zibby: That is the similar reel I have playing in my head. The only thing I have turned to, and you're probably the same way, is you just have to listen deep down, what you feel is right. This isn't about, should my kid be on travel soccer? Things that seemed like big deals before, now it's like, all right, this is what my comfort level is, and I just have to go with it because I've got nothing else to go on.

Alyssa: Right. I did not have the easiest childhood being a working child at the age of seven. I always fall back on, I was okay, and the only reason why I'm okay now is because I have parents who loved me. It was so important for them to make me feel safe and loved. I feel like that's the biggest part of this. As long as we can continue to allow our children to feel safe and loved, they're going to be okay no matter what.

Zibby: Now that you have kids of your own, do you look back on that period of time any differently than when you were going through it? Do you think, how was I able to do it? How could I pull it off? Any regrets?

Alyssa: My son is nine. In one year from my son's age now was the age when I shot the Who's the Boss? pilot. I look at him and I'm like, what in the world? How did I ever -- it is really crazy that we expect kids to be able to perform for -- I was on that show for eight years. It was such a big part of my life, but it was hard. It was hard. I was working and going to school and trying to be a good daughter and friend and sibling. It was definitely a thing. My point is just that I think children are incredibly resilient as long as they feel loved and safe.

Zibby: Very true. I love how you even give role models in the current Hope book of how leadership can change institutions. Even something as simple as changing the entrance of a building and making people feel special with a VIP sixth-grade walkway and all these little things that she did, and even helping her friend and saying, "You know what, you be my campaign manager," and just all these she does to bring everybody together, it's great to see a girl doing that, honestly. It's just nice to have such a great role model in a middle-grade book. That's all.

Alyssa: Often, we teach our young girls about leadership through historic women or celebrity women. To be able to create a character who was a peer of young children who could show leadership qualities and not be those terms that we seem to use when girls show leadership qualities like bossy or snobby or self-centered, but to really give her this warm, beautiful strength and to lead from a place of service, which is the thing that I think women do incredibly well -- we lead from a very different place. I feel like men lead, often, from a place of wanting something like power or notoriety or fame or money. I think as women, when we're at our best and our strongest, we're leading from a place of service. What does that look like in middle school? Creating an entrance specially for the sixth graders. It's been really rewarding working on that project.

Zibby: Did you ever think you were going to write books for kids? Has that been a goal of yours, or it just happened this way?

Alyssa: Once I had my own kids and I saw what was out there -- there are some beautiful children's books, but there's also some really silly children's books. For me, wanting to contribute to that place was important, especially since I had -- when you have kids, all of a sudden you're like, I'll do an animated movie and play a squishy or whatever, because you just want your kids to like what you're doing. I'm really happy. Just the fact that I get to dedicate books to my children and my nieces and nephews is pretty cool.

Zibby: Tell me just a little about how all of your activism plays into this. You're doing so many different things. You're saving the world here from Time's Up to UNICEF to directing and acting and writing and your kids. I know we're all busy, but I think that seems like a particularly heavy load to bear.

Alyssa: I realized that this idea of women having it all is kind of something that we are made to feel like we need to do. Once I put the pressure off of me, that's when everything fell into place. I realized that there is no such thing as balance. It does not exist. The most important thing we can do as moms and women is do the things we love, the things that make us feel fulfilled, and be really present and in the moment when we do those things. When I'm with my children, I am concentrated on being the best mother I could possibly be. When I'm writing whatever, I'm concentrated in that moment in writing. When I'm being interviewed, I concentrate on that moment. I found that that is the best way to manage the chaos of it all. It's a lot of chaos. It really is. I think every mom feels it at some point where they just feel overwhelmed. It's six PM, they're like, I'm going to go lay down by myself. [laughter] We just need that decompression. I don't believe in balance. I don't think it exists. I think you just have to manage your time well and in a way where you are in the moment in every moment.

Zibby: That's great advice. I'm envying the moms who can take a nap at six o'clock. That's not happening in my house.

Alyssa: That wouldn't be a nap. That would be going to sleep at six o'clock.

Zibby: Oh, going to bed for the night. Okay, yes.

Alyssa: For the entire night. You're dealing with dinner, honey. I'm going to go do whatever I have to do, whether that means be on the treadmill and take a hot shower and get into bed early, whatever that means. I really try. I think it's so important that we all try to have those moments.

Zibby: I just started this new Instagram community and a second podcast called "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight" because I felt like so many people, especially with the pandemic, have just felt like things have gotten a little out of control.

Alyssa: Oh, yeah.

Zibby: I feel like I hear all day now just how hard it is to even get in a walk or a workout or whatever just to stay --

Alyssa: -- I bought one of those little recumbent bikes that I can put under my desk. When I have five minutes, I'll just do that or kick the soccer ball around with the kids or jump in the trampoline, something that at least gets my heart rate up. I try once a day, but it's hard.

Zibby: It is hard. The trampoline is a hidden gem. That's the best.

Alyssa: I don't know what it is about the pandemic. I was sick. I had COVID in March and April. I have a lot of the long-hauler symptoms, just tired all the time. Even my friends that haven't had or didn't have COVID are just tired all the time. I think that's there something about -- it's almost like our bodies just go into protection/hibernation mode.

Zibby: Yes. When an entire planet is fearing for their lives, something happens.

Alyssa: Like a collective worry or a collective pain.

Zibby: I'm sorry about your experience. I know I read about that. Are you okay now?

Alyssa: I still have symptoms. I'll be totally fine some days. I don't have an autoimmune thing that I can compare this to, but it feels like -- you know how people who have Lupus or MS, they’ll talk about flare-ups? They’ll be okay some days. Then they’ll have flare-ups. That's what this is like. I'm totally fine, feel strong, have energy on some days. Then other days, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, joint aches and pains. I don't know one person who has recovered from this that has been totally fine. I have one friend who felt good. Then they found a blood clot in his leg. It seems like nobody just gets the acute sickness and then is out of this. The doctors don't know. I got this new symptom a little while ago, not burning palms, but kind of a bubbly under my skin feeling. I called my doctor. I was like, "This can't still be new --" He said, "Yeah, that's probably your small blood vessels leaking." I'm like, "Does that go away?" He said, "Well, we'll see." We'll see? That's it? That's all I get?

Zibby: My mother-in-law was very, very ill with COVID and ended up passing away. For six weeks we were --

Alyssa: -- I'm so sorry.

Zibby: I know. It was awful. I was on the phone with doctors all the time. We would say things like, "What comes next? What do you think?" When the doctors are even like, "We're not sure," what else can you do? We don't know. My whole life, you're brought up that the doctors know most of the answers. There are some things that are incurable, but for the most part, they’ve got it under control.

Alyssa: Or that there's at least some article somewhere that they could go back and refer to that will tell you how to deal with respiratory viral infection. This was so, so new and so raw. I'm so sorry that you were affected that closely. That is brutal.

Zibby: Thank you. I'm sorry you were, and so many other people. It's insane. It's everywhere you turn. Anyway, on to happier things. Back to Hope, are you expanding the series? Do you have other big projects in the works? Are you doing more TV/movie stuff? What's on the next six months for you?

Alyssa: The election is first and foremost. We just announced a Who's the Boss? sequel.

Zibby: Oh, that's right. Yes, I saw that.

Alyssa: Which I'll be doing with Tony, which will be really, really, really fun and exciting. We don't know anything about it yet except that he's probably going to come visit Sam for a weekend and never leave. Then the chaos will ensue of him taking care of my kids. Then the holidays will come up. Then I'm not sure, really. I'm in the process of writing a book of essays right now. I'm super excited about that. I'm hoping to take a little bit of a vacation and just rest for a little bit. My idea of resting is just not doing things back to back to back every day, but have a half a day where I get to paint or do something that I'm not trying to crank out. That's it. We're all just playing it by ear right now. There's people on sets. They're all masked up and with shields and these little dressing room pods. Not only does it not look fun to go back to work on a set right now, but also, it looks like it would totally make me anxious because there's a constant reminder that this thing is in the air just by the way in which you have to function for twelve hours a day. Being home, we could sort of isolate ourselves. We're so adaptable that we can, I feel like, at least shut off what's happening on the outside a little bit. If you're on a set for twelve hours and seeing how everybody has to sanitize and put on protective gear, I think that would really mess with my anxiety.

Zibby: Yeah, in your face.

Alyssa: There's no avoiding that.

Zibby: I feel like even just to go to a doctor's office -- I had to go to some building today. I'm in New York City. First, we walked in. Then I had to go to a computer. Then I had to get my temperature screened. Then we had to wash our hands. I kind of wasn't emotionally prepared for that. It's everything, everyday life. It's just a bit crazy. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors or just aspiring creative people? You're an artist in a lot of different ways from acting -- what advice would you have?

Alyssa: I think to nurture your creativity is important not only to keep it alive, but also to spark other ways in which you can be creative. It feeds off each other, I feel like. I just started, during the quarantine, doing watercolor painting. It's amazing how just sitting down for twenty minutes in the evening and really being mindful and doing something that is so fluid, so unforgiving can spark ideas about an essay I want to write. I really think creativity breeds more creativity. You don't have to do just that one thing that you're think you're creative at. You can start something new. It will still feed the thing that you think that you're good at. Just keep doing it. Keep forcing yourself to sit down and have that time to allow that part of your brain to work. At least for me, I know that different parts of my brain will supersede my creativity sometimes. I have to really slow it down and try to find that again. Sometimes that means listening to great music. Sometimes it means watching a movie that I love. Also, the idea that there's beauty in everything, that idea that there's this perfect system that's at work here, there's something about just that mindset that lends itself to more creative thinking, thinking outside of the box, thinking in new ways how to share a part of yourself. Ultimately, that's what art should be, sharing who you are. Hopefully, that resonates. It can resonate in different ways for different people.

Zibby: Very true. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this time with me and for using this limited focus time here.

Alyssa: Of course. Thank you for allowing me a chance to be on your podcast.

Zibby: Of course. I hope you feel better and that all the symptoms go away and that your kids keep loving your books. I think that's the coolest.

Alyssa: Thank you. Be well.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Alyssa: Bye.

Kwame Mbalia, TRISTAN STRONG DESTROYS THE WORLD

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

Kwame Mbalia: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Zibby: Your latest book, Tristan Strong, part two essentially, Tristan Strong Destroys the Universe, follows the award-winning first book, Tristan Strong Punches the Sky. Did I get that right? Yes? Tell me about this series. Tell me how you started it. Tell me about why this happens in the second book. Just give me the whole backstory of this phenomenal series.

Kwame: The Tristan Strong series, wow, it's something that I've always wanted to create and be a part of, this idea of bringing forward these characters and stories that I listened to and that I read growing up as a child, bringing them forward for a new generation of young readers, but also for older readers who might not have had a chance to be exposed to the same material that I did. I love this idea of contemporary fantasy, this idea of magic existing in the time right now because it's almost like an escape. We get to imagine. We get to enter this different world, this different realm through the eyes of a middle school student. We all know that the world expands for us when we're in middle school. What more perfect hero could we have than a middle school student who travels through this fantastic realm and learns of his own magical powers?

Zibby: Totally. I have two middle schoolers. My son in particular, this is right up his alley. He will be happy when I give him this whole series. I read, also, your Last Gate of the Emperor, which is coming out in May of 2021.

Kwame: That it is.

Zibby: I got a sneak peek. I loved how it was described as an Afrofuturist journey to a galaxy far away. This whole theme running through all your books is sort of taking -- maybe I should ask you. What do you think the theme is coursing through all your books? before I opine on it myself.

Kwame: I am fascinated and enthralled with this idea of exploring non-Western fantasy and science fiction, building magic system, and imagining scientific innovations for future worlds through the eyes of African and African Americans. It's a way for me to explore and learn more about my own culture while also sharing it with the greater world, while also just having fun and telling jokes and letting my immature sense of humor shine throughout the tales.

Zibby: I saw in an interview with you did with Rick Riordan Presents, who's your publisher, that your parents used to tell you these types of stories all the time, which is so nice. Tell me about more of the African folklore that you grew up with.

Kwame: They did a fantastic job in scouring this country, and when they traveled to Africa, scouring bookstores over there, looking for books that centered on the African and the African American character. I always tell this story. One of the reasons why I wanted to include and talk about Anansi, the spider, the trickster god, is that when we were growing up, me and my siblings -- there were four of us. We were sharing a bedroom. If you've ever had to put multiple children to bed at the same time, it can be chaos. One of the ways they got us to calm down is they would play cassettes of the Anansi tales. We would fall asleep listening to Anansi trick or be tricked in all of his different stories. It holds a special place in my heart and one reason why I wanted to make Anansi be such a central figure in the Tristan tales.

Zibby: Wow. Tell me about growing up more. That sounds interesting, four kids in one room. I have four kids in my house, and I can barely do it. What was it like being so close with your siblings like that, not having any personal space? Did that make you want to turn to books for an outlet that you could have yourself? What was it like?

Kwame: I don't think you really think too much about it when you're younger. When you're younger, it's just like, hey, I have playmates. They're here all the time. As you enter middle school and high school, yes, you definitely want your space. For me, one thing special that I can remember is -- I'm the second oldest of the four that we shared the room. The younger two, they would fall asleep. It would be me and my older brother. We were a little older. We're not ready for bed yet. We would play this game called Brothers. Basically, it's a storytelling game. We would tell the story, but at the beginning of the story you have to choose, what animal friends do you have? What kind of cars do you have? You're setting up the setting, the world building for this story. It got to the point, that's how we counted sheep. We never actually got to the point of telling a story. We would just talk to each other about, what is this story about? Who's in the story? What type of cool moves and stuff will we do? That is one of the most special memories that I have, is falling asleep to this idea of telling a story.

Zibby: Then were you a big reader growing up?

Kwame: Oh, my goodness, I was a voracious reader growing up. My parents heavily encouraged it. My mother, what she would do is every Friday, she would take us to the library. She said you could check out as many books as you want to read. You just have to carry them and be responsible for them. Of course, I'm walking out carrying bundles of books. No matter what, Sunday or Monday, all of the books would be read. I would be anxiously waiting for the next Friday to come around. What's hilarious is that my parents, they had this little thing that they would do for me and my older brother. I don't want to call it tricking us, but to encourage us. They would say, "It's quiet time. It's nap time. You can either take a nap or read a book, one of the two things." I'm seven, eight years old. I'm like, I'm going to read a book. I'm not going to take no nap. Now it's all I can do. I just want to read. I want to read. I want to read.

Zibby: I thought you were going to say all you want to do is take a nap.

Kwame: That too now. Now I miss those nap times. I really regret not taking advantage of them.

Zibby: Me too. How old are your kids?

Kwame: They are twelve, nine, five, and a four-month-old. Now I'm really regretting not taking advantage of that nap when I had the chance.

Zibby: Are you already reading to them all the time and trying to encourage this in them? How is that going?

Kwame: Absolutely. For us, books have been the one thing where it's like, it's not that we don't say no, but it's like, all right, you want a book, let's get you a book. We encourage reading and literacy from a young age. Even my five-year-old who's learning to read, going through the motions and the act of opening a picture book and telling her own stories as she interprets the pictures, that's an act of learning to read. That's an act of reading. It's something that we've always encouraged. My nine-year-old is reading my book, too, right now and telling me what her favorite parts are, which is cool. It's fun. Seeing her laugh at some of the things that I laughed at while I wrote the book, it's fun. It's rewarding in a way.

Zibby: Tell me about how you got into writing books to begin with. You loved to read as a kid. You found your place in the world in middle school realizing what was going on around you. Then what happened?

Kwame: I've always also been a writer. The difference is, I didn't write for others. I wrote for myself. Writing was, for me, an act of sharing and expressing my emotions that I may have not felt comfortable talking about. I would just put them in a little story with a little character who was definitely not me. I've always been a writer, but it's only, I would say, within the past fix, six, or seven years that I've thought or dreamed about becoming an author. That's because I received encouragement. I received feedback from people who said, "Hey, some of this stuff that you write is really good. Have you ever thought about becoming an author or publishing it and sending it out?" I hadn’t until that point. That's when I really began to think that maybe this could be a career for me. I never dreamed it would be my only career because I'm a scientist. I went to school for biology, chemistry. I worked in the sciences after I graduated. It was always like, this is a hobby. I can make a little money from it. Now it's a career which just goes to show you that you never know where you're going to end up in life and to never self-reject, never gatekeep yourself out of trying and doing something.

Zibby: I read you were a pharmaceutical metrologist. What does that even mean?

Kwame: Metrology is just the calibration of instruments. Basically, I would travel around to different people who manufacture drugs, Tylenol, Advil, inhalers, and stuff like that. One of my kids has asthma. I would travel around and I would make sure that the instruments that they use to manufacturer the medicine worked right. The box says you're taking five hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, and then you're only taking four hundred and you're wondering why the pain isn't going away. It's because maybe the instruments weren’t working right. That's what I did. I traveled around. I loved it. It was a great job. I was sad to leave it, but I'm happy to say that I've been able to incorporate a lot of the characters that I met along the way, a lot of the dialogue that I had, the conversation, and a lot of the settings into my own books and stories.

Zibby: Then how did you end up writing the first best-selling Tristan Strong? How did that happen? Then what was it like when you found out that it was such a success?

Kwame: We learned that Rick Riordan and Rick Riordan Presents, the imprint, were looking for African American stories, African American storytellers. It was over the winter break, for five to seven days, I sat down and I wrote the opening three chapters and then a synopsis of what would become Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky. They came back immediately. They said they loved it. I had written the now infamous Gum Baby scene where Gum Baby breaks in and tries to steal Tristan's journal. Gum Baby was a fan favorite. From the very onset, from the very beginning, there was truly something special about these two characters and the way they interacted throughout the story. Disney and Rick Riordan Presents, they loved it. They said, "We want you to be a part of the imprint." I said, yay!

Zibby: [laughs] That's amazing, oh, my gosh. What's your process like when you're working? Do you work right there where I'm seeing you? Where do you like to work? How long does each book take and all that good stuff?

Kwame: Just to let you know that I have a four-month-old, so I write in fits and spurts. My wife, she's gone to back to work. A lot of the times, we'll pass the baby back and forth. We'll take care of him. She's watching him right now. I'll watch it when she gets on her meetings. It's really about, right now, taking advantage of time when it becomes available. Sometimes that might mean writing one hundred to two hundred words. Sometimes it's one AM in the morning and I'm writing two to three chapters. You never know. There is no schedule right now. It's take advantage of what you have and try to create the final installment in that story and do the best job that I can with it.

Zibby: I feel like the combination of pandemic plus infant must just be -- I don't know how you get anything done.

Kwame: It's fine. I love it. It's a dream. That's sarcasm.

Zibby: Oh, okay. I'm like, we're no longer friends here. No, no, no. [laughs]

Kwame: It's difficult. There was a definitely a period of time there, a month or so, where I absolutely struggled. I maybe wrote all of a chapter throughout that whole month because it was so difficult. A lot of creative people were dealing with that at the time, quarantine, being restricted, having to adapt to new ways of handling life both professionally and personally. Thankfully, we're out of -- I shouldn't say we're out of it, but I've become accustomed to it, working around it. We're going to get this story done. We are going to get it finished one way or another.

Zibby: I heard that you are hard at work on the next book in the series. True? Finished?

Kwame: No, not finished. I'm so close. I'm so close. That last five percent is going to take the most time because you're wrapping up a series. You're putting a stamp and concluding a character's journey and their growth. You want to do it in a way that closes the door on that story arc, but it doesn't close the door on the world. You can still imagine them having adventures and going off. There's no finality. It's the end for now...

Zibby: Is this going to be a movie? You mentioned Disney earlier.

Kwame: Rick Riordan Presents is an imprint of the Disney Books Collection. I don't think there's any author out there who doesn't want their story to become a movie. I'm really, really, really hopeful that it will be. It's just, hey, we need more readers. We need more fans to shout about it and to draw attention to it. The more you read and share and the more people like you have me on to talk about it, the more the chance there will be that it'll be a movie.

Zibby: Good. I'm glad I could play a tiny piece in that. When it comes out, I will be like, that's all me. That was because of my interview right there. [laughs] What advice do you have to aspiring authors?

Kwame: I mentioned it a little bit in the beginning. What I would say is that as writers, you will meet so many different what we call gatekeepers, the people who will either allow your work through to the next level, to the next rung in publishing, or will reject it and send it back. You will meet so many of those gatekeepers who control access. The very first gatekeeper you will meet will be yourself. You cannot self-reject. You cannot gatekeep yourself. You cannot say, my story isn't good enough to go here or my writing isn't great enough to do this. You have to be your own biggest fan, promoter, publicist, and really energize yourself. Don't self-reject. Submit your work. Submit, submit, submit. You say yes even if you think everyone else will say no. You say yes.

Zibby: Okay, we're saying yes. Just out of curiosity, what ended up happening to your other three siblings? Are any of them authors? What did they end up doing? Are you guys still close?

Kwame: We're still close. My sister just recently finished -- she got her doctorate. She's Dr. Mbalia. She's the third Dr. Mbalia of the family after my parents. It's really cool. She's definitely an inspiration. My brother is off doing amazing things. I don't even know what he does. We look at pharmaceutical metrologist. He worked with the NOAA, the National Oceanography Association of Americas. He's just off doing wonderful things. Then my other brother is a teacher. Coming from a family of educators -- both my parents were professors. My wife started off as a kindergarten teacher. As someone who interacts with teachers on a daily basis as an author, teachers get so little credit for what they're doing both especially right now during this pandemic and just in general. My siblings are off being awesome. I am out here just writing them into books and making fun of them.

Zibby: That's amazing. You can write my son's teacher in, my five-year-old son. We had curriculum night last night. His teacher said that she has now gotten certified in both sky diving and scuba diving. You would never know from looking at her. I felt like that was a James Bond story in the making.

Kwame: So she just teaches -- to go from --

Zibby: -- I don't know if it's the same day, but she does them both now regularly.

Kwame: That's fantastic. I will live vicariously through your son's teacher.

Zibby: Thank goodness for summer break for the teachers. Although, not these days. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm so glad I could help this become a movie. [laughter] You will be entertaining my son at boarding school very shortly when I send him all this. Have a great day. Thanks so much for coming on.

Kwame: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. I really appreciate it. This has been a blast.

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

Kwame: Bye.

Arden Myrin, LITTLE MISS LITTLE COMPTON

Zibby Owens: Welcome to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," Arden. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Arden Myrin: Zibby, I was so excited to be asked. Thank you. I'm a fan.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. First of all, the care package you sent with this, it was months ago now, I was like, this is going to be so fun. [laughs] Anybody who's cool enough to put their worst middle school or lower school picture on a puzzle is my kind of -- that's really awesome. Little Miss Little Compton, really awesome.

Arden: Thank you so much. That was what I actually wanted for the cover. I did recreate my sixth-grade photo. I begged for them to put that on the cover, and they wouldn't. I actually love the cover. I think I got the right cover. I think they were right, but I was excited. I was like, I can't have recreated that and just have it go nowhere. I was like, I'm going to do a meet-the-author with me and my cat, Mittens.

Zibby: It's perfect. I love how you got it in there. It was perfect. Also, when I watched you jumping up and down on Instagram and you were like, "I wrote a book. I wrote a book. I wrote a book," literally, I wanted to applaud. That was so cute. You can just tell how proud you are. You should be that proud. It's an amazing accomplishment.

Arden: For anybody out there who is an author or a first-time, so somebody who's never written a book or is writing, I have to tell you, I am so short attention span theater, the sheer fact that -- I've always been, in life, I could make magic in a short period of time, but I've never been the long-distance race -- if I can't finish it in one sitting, I generally wouldn't do it. I will say for anybody out there that is an author, I had this fantasy that if you sold a book and you wrote a book, that an author gets up and they have their breakfast, and then they log in at ten and they're done at four. Then they go on a walk and then have a brandy and watch some classy thing on television. Particularly in the beginning, it was almost like, you stay in your corner, I'll stay in mine, page. The blank page, I was cautiously approaching it like a caged animal. I would, in the beginning, just do twenty-five minutes a day at first. I would time it. I wouldn't go online. I wouldn't check my texts. I wouldn't be calling anybody. It was just facing myself. Then eventually, I could go a little bit longer. Anybody who knows me, it is a huge accomplishment to actually just allow the process. I started with the word count. I had a pretty aggressively structured proposal which gave me the format. I was so overwhelmed. I started with the word count. I printed it all out. I organized everything. Then I just allowed for it to be a terrible first draft like I was going to Michael's crafts and I was getting glue and felt and yarn and sparkles and to trust that I had to just get the material. Then when I had all the words out, then I went through chapter by chapter and really made sure to tighten and shine each one up and then made sure the flow of the arch of the narrative made sense.

Zibby: Wow. It came off as one really cohesive story. The part that I found really interesting -- it was all awesome, your description of where you grew up and your dad, Willy. He was right off the page. I feel like I got to know him so well, his foibles and his strengths and weaknesses and all the rest. It's almost how the book developed unintentionally because you were talking about your life and then things happened through the writing so that you could even say, "While I wanted to make this like a beach read, now it's serious," but so poignant and moving. I don't want to give anything away that happens later even though it's your life. [laughs]

Arden: It's an interesting thing. This was a book that I'd been trying to sell for a while. I had this unusual upbringing. It's a small-town life. My parents married on a dare. I had this very salty dad. He's a great literary character, maybe not so great in person as a dad, but a great literary character. [laughs] I thought I could this tell this funny story. If you read it, there's a twist at the end that was not part of the original plan. I thought it would just be a fun, female comedian, here's all my most embarrassing stories. Here's my quirky upbringing. Here's my Dorothy going to Oz, how to go from a town with a general store and make it onto a sitcom. Here's all that fun. Then an event happens on the day that I find out that I've sold the book that alters the entire DNA of it and I actually think made it a better book. I mean, made life trickier.

Zibby: I agree, not that I would wish that to happen.

Arden: I know what's going on with you. I know you know what that's like. It's an interesting thing. We can talk. What do you think? Is it giving stuff away?

Zibby: I don't know. It's hard to say because it's your life. I guess anybody who knows you would know what happened.

Arden: It was sort of this fun beach read for a while. It's this funny story. In it, my dad had passed away. I was writing about that. It took me about a year, but I was feeling better. The proposal had been getting shopped around. I'm on this show, Insatiable on Netflix. We were back filming in Atlanta. This is eighteen months after my dad had died. Nobody could get in touch with my mom. She had just died making breakfast. She just died. I had to go home. On the way to the funeral in this tiny town, I got this email from a publisher that was like, "Hope you're having a great week. We're so excited to do this book with you." This has been something I've been trying to sell for a few years. Then it was so strange that of all the versions of what the book could be, she was barely in the proposal because she wasn't quite as noisy of a figure. I think it became her book. Then my friend who read it, she's like, "Arden, it's not your memoir. It's your mom-oir."

I'm sure you're going through something similar. The experience of when somebody dies, and when somebody dies who's fun and beloved, people tell you stories about them. All of these stories were told to me that I didn't know. I didn't know that she was the den mother of my brother's cub scout troop. I didn't know that she’d made a flipbook. I grew up in this town with fisherman and lobsterman. It's as small as you could possibly imagine. She was like, okay boys, today I'm going to teach you how to put on a Broadway musical. She made a flipbook. Just things like that that I would never have known. It really became a fun tribute to -- all it takes is one person rooting for you. My parents married on a dare in Manhattan. They never went on one date. They married on a dare for vacation time. It was this odd upbringing. It just takes one person who's like, protect your light, go for it, encouraging you.

Zibby: Your mom was, I want to say, such a hoot. Do you know what I mean?

Arden: She was a hoot.

Zibby: She was so funny, even the clips that you put on from when she would call in and you would talk about her as a real estate agent. She just seemed so funny. You clearly had such affection, not just affection like mother-daughter. I feel like it's such a general term, like, oh, my mother this, but it doesn't do justice to the crazy people these people are in the world. She was quirky and funny. Then you build her up so much in the writing that when you get to the part with the teacup on the counter, you want to just cry with you.

Arden: It's an interesting thing. You're one of the first people who've read it. I've had a few friends who are comedy friends. They’ll text. They're like, "Ha-ha, I'm reading. Your dad is eating his sheet cake diet." Then I'll get a text that's like, "Oh, my god, I'm in tears." I thought, you know what, for me personally, I'm proud of that. I'm not trying to make my friends cry. It's an interesting thing growing up in New England. You're sort of taught to, not keep secrets, but for me, I grew up keeping things funny. Then I actually will say it was my podcast -- even in my comedy, I was never super personal in my standup. I host this very silly Bachelor podcast. I don't know if you're having this experience now. Both of my parents died in season. Both of them died on Saturdays. The Bachelor airs on Mondays. Then I record on Tuesday. I've always been fairly private about my personal life, but there was no way to hide that I wasn't in the studio and that I was in my family den. I'm with my brother.

I allowed myself to cancel anything I wanted to cancel. I wanted to do that. I felt a real kinship with my listeners. We chose to do the podcasts. It was interesting. I was worried I was going to freak people out, that it was going to be too much, that people were going to be frightened by that information, that they're like, lady, we just want our Bachelor news. We don't want to hear that your dad died. Are you a psychopath? People were like, thank you so much for talking about what's going on. It helps me. I have stuff going on. It helps me to see that you're still moving forward. I was pretty honest about my path there. On the page, I feel like each time, the universe or the creative spirits or whatever I think are encouraging me to feel safer and safer exposing more just of my heart or the truth. It doesn't have to be malicious, but that by telling your story it doesn't have to just be the funny parts. That makes it a better story.

Zibby: I agree. You can still appreciate the funny parts. It's like looking at a very pretty tree but you don't see the roots or something. Once you can see the whole thing, then it's even more majestic that it can rise. That sounds ridiculous. There's something about seeing the whole thing, seeing what maybe other people can't really see all the time. Then it makes it deeper. Then you enjoy the comedy more or something.

Arden: The people I appreciate sort of lay themselves out. The world is so bonkers, and even before 2020. Life is a journey. Just to know that everybody grew up with some stuff, everybody has stuff, even if it looks the best, everybody has a few cards in their hand that are complicated that was dealt to them. I feel like just the humanity and the connection -- I have a very close friend who's this wonderful playwright, Tom Diggs. He's my classy friend. He was nominated for a Pulitzer. I kept calling him as I was writing this. He has two things he kept saying to me. I have written scripts and things. He kept saying to me, "Arden, each piece reveals to you how it wants to be written. It's not the same strategy for each piece." Then when I was debating -- my dad was tough. He was entertaining if he wasn't your dad. He was funny. He was beloved by friends and neighbors, but he was a tough dad. I was asking him, "I don't want to throw somebody under the bus. I don't want to throw somebody under the bus that's not here." He just kept encouraging me to be like, is it necessary? Check your motives. Why are you telling it? Is it your story? How much can you reveal, not to be Pollyanna, but like a lady? You're letting people know sort of what's going on without having to throw somebody under the bus. That was one of the things I'm proud of. My brother hasn’t read it yet, so we'll see what he thinks.

Zibby: Oh, no.

Arden: I kept asking him if he wanted to read it. I said, "The part that might be hard --" He was tricky. My brother, he's so sweet. He's like, "Look, I know he was a tough dad." It's that balancing act of, here's the real story. Here's the story.

Zibby: You did include a nice, my brother's a great guy and he turned out great. [laughs] I feel like you said something like that towards the end.

Arden: It's so funny about my brother too because I just love my brother. Did you grow up with boys?

Zibby: I have a brother, yeah.

Arden: To me, if you grow up with boys -- we wrestled. We were both equally horrible to one another. We were both tiny. No one was in danger. We were both the runts of the liter. That's sort of the fun of having a brother. Some of the people, I think, did not grow up with boys. I think they thought that I had this tough brother. I'm thinking, no, that's just a brother. I have to say for any women out there who didn't grow up with a brother, this is a very nice person. This is the eighties. In the eighties, you're like little Peanuts characters just rolling around. That's the deal.

Zibby: Totally. My brother used to hit me all the time. I remember telling this to my husband. My husband's like, "He was three years younger than you. What are you talking about?" [laughs] I'm like, "I don't know. That's just what happened all the time. We just fought."

Arden: It's kind of fun. Who else on earth can you fight with?

Zibby: Of course, now when my kids fight, I'm like, stop! What I was going to say about your dad is when you talked about how your mom wanted four kids and he didn't want any kids and they compromised at two, but your dad was like, if you want to have kids, that's your thing. Then you said, my mom, my brother, and I were like a threesome, and my dad was just there, which paints the whole picture. He just didn't deal. It wasn't even personal. Yet he was aware, and this is what happened, almost.

Arden: He would just be like, "I told your mother if she wanted to have kids, she had to deal with you." You're like, okay. When you're little and that's the house that you're in -- I don't know if it's also dads of that era. I didn't really know a lot of my friends' dads. I think mine was harsher about it. If you don't grow up in a different house, you're like, okay, that's a dad. Thankfully, my mom, my brother, and I were such a team. We had so much fun. It literally felt like the three musketeers, and then there was a dude that lived in the den, which was fine. You just didn't go into the den. I just hang out with my buddies. That was very openly the deal.

Zibby: Then you even say everybody gets dealt a different hand in life. Some people just aren't meant to love or they just don't know how to love that well. That part made me so sad. That just made me sad. That hurts.

Arden: That was what was interesting when my dad died. It's an interesting thing. Look, I certainly didn't think my book would be coming out in a global pandemic, but I actually feel like it is a good book for this time in that I do think it's a fun, funny, lighthearted read. I do think there's an honest -- I feel like the world is collectively grieving, and it's different. Everybody has different experiences. With him, I thought it would just be a relief because he'd been sick for so long. It was the grief of failure to launch. There was never that come to Jesus at the end where, I'm so sorry. It just didn't happen. Just wanting to tell anybody out there, I just speak for myself, I am okay. It doesn't mean that there's not hurt in the heart for that. There's other people in my life that love me. He just couldn't do it. Even with what happened with my mom this year, I know a lot of people are walking through all sorts of things right now that no one could've imagined. The way it went with my mom, it was literally my worst nightmare and what I pictured. I got to tell you, there was a weird grace to last year even though my world was on fire. I would say there was certain gifts to it which I write about in the book too. I'm such a people-pleaser. I found that with both parents, one of the gifts of grief was I literally felt like I had no skin. The upshot of that was it was very clear to me who I wanted to be with, who I didn't want to be with -- I still knew I needed to have a little fun -- what felt safe and fun and what was like, no freaking way. I couldn't force myself to say yes when in the past, as such a people-pleaser, I would've made myself or gone, I should do this. I don't want to hurt their feelings. It wasn't that I was rude about it, but that one of the gifts of it is that I felt like it really separated the, what is it, the chaff from -- I don't know.

Zibby: The wheat from the chaff?

Arden: Yes. It just became clear. What can I eliminate? What makes my tail wag? What is joyful? What feels good? I really loved the grace of that. You're very present. Time takes on a different quality, which I think is happening globally right now anyway. I just have to really slow down and listen to next indicated action. What do I need? I'm such a doer. I get things done. How about half speed? How about just lowering the bar? How about your best is good enough? It may not be perfect. Done is better than great. Maybe you're going to be late to your little gym class. Maybe you didn't send that email, but okay. You're doing the best that you can. There was some magic to that that I wouldn't wish on somebody, but that if god forbid your world gets set on fire, you'll be okay one day. This too shall pass. It won't always feel like this.

Zibby: I feel like you've just been dropped down to talk to me directly. I'm pretending like nobody else is even listening to this conversation, so thank you. Your book and grief island and all the stuff you went through, it helps to hear someone else's story. I'm sorry you had to go through it all. I'm really truly a hundred percent from the bottom of my heart sorry. Being able to share it and tell it and experience your own version of something you couldn't have imagined, it just somehow helps everyone else.

Arden: It's so strange. Again, this book was supposed to be a fun --

Zibby: -- Not to say it's not funny.

Arden: It is very funny.

Zibby: It's super funny. I'm sorry.

Arden: If you don't want to get to the sad part, stop after I go to England.

Zibby: Literally, most of it is hilarious and funny and whatever.

Arden: Eighty-five percent. Most of it, it is the fun beach read. Just stop after chapter eighteen. Just skip the last two chapters. There's even hope in that. I will say, growing up in this very WASP-y New England family that doesn't talk about emotions and doesn't talk about feelings, I really felt for whatever reason, the timing of the sale of this book, that this would've never been my path in life, but somehow normalizing grief. Nobody talks about it. It's okay to feel sad. You don't have to feel not sad right away. I can't handle the, "She's in a better place." That one was the one, I was like, I can't do that. I can't do the better place one right now. For me, each one took about a year. It was like, oh, boy, here we go. My friend likened it to getting strapped -- you go to Six Flags and when you go on one of those rollercoasters that the things come down and lock you in, it's like, I didn't sign up for this ride, but it's taking me. I have some tips in the book of how to survive your own grief island and maybe even have some joy in it because there was some grace.

For me, the key was being around people where I could be not okay. That actually made me feel more okay. Debbie Ryan, who wrote my forward, the delightful star of Insatiable with me and the star of Jessie, who would've ever thought that this wonderful twenty-five-year-old Disney star would be the person that -- [laughs]. She just showed up. We were in Atlanta filming. She wasn't afraid of it. We would go roller-skating. We'd go out for tacos. We'd go to the roller derby. We'd go do karaoke. It was okay if I was a little bit out of it. I didn't have to be on point. For so much of my life, I think particularly growing up in kind of a quirky household, trying to look normal or trying to fit in like everybody else, there's such a grace of just being with people who are like, come as you are, girl. Put on your sweatpants, but here's some glitter roller-skates. We know you're not great, but come on. We're not scared of you in sweatpants. Come on. We love you anyway. Come on, honey.

Zibby: It's so true. The people who end up coming through in times of loss, not coming through, but the people that you feel the most connected to are never, not never, but are rarely the ones you expect. It could be total strangers.

Arden: Sometimes the ones you expect can't handle it. You don't know. Honestly, it was all of the kids on Insatiable. It was the entire teen cast. There was a boy on the show that was this teen heartthrob who is absolutely adorable, Michael Provost. By the way, ninety percent of this book is not this. Don't be afraid. This boy, Michael Provost, one day he showed up at my Airbnb. He texted me. He was like, "What are you doing today?" I was like, "I'm supposed to be writing my book." I'd say no to all these fun things. He showed up at my doorstep. This sweet teen dream had made me a lasagna. He goes, "Look, I didn't know what to say to you. I thought about it. I remember when somebody in my town would pass, my mom would make them a lasagna, so I went on YouTube last night and I learned how. I baked you a lasagna." He borrowed his mother's baking pan, and he made me a lasagna. He showed up. He was twenty-one years old, eight million Instagram followers. He could've gone to a bar legally. He's super popular. This young man went inside and baked his grieving adult lady costar a lasagna and brought it over. People can be -- there's so much goodness. You don't know who.

Zibby: Yes, that's the best part of the whole thing, is seeing all the good and all the connection and all that behind the scenes, so to speak. It could be Behind the Music of -- [laughs].

Arden: The Behind the Music of teen dramas on Netflix. True story.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, Arden, I feel like I could talk to you all day. I feel like we're just scraping the surface. I had so many quotes and all the rest from your book. Anyway, I loved talking to you. I love that you gave so much advice along the way of people, what they should do when they're writing a book and all of the rest and your journey and loss and humor and how it all combines. It was just a true pleasure to chat with you.

Arden: Thank you so much. Can I have a little giveaway for your listeners?

Zibby: Yes, oh, my gosh!

Arden: Premiere Collectibles does a thing with authors. For the first 250 people, you can get a signed book and a little Little Miss Little Compton tote bag for the cost of the book if you go to ardenmyrinbook.com, A-R-D-E-N-M-Y-R-I-N,book.com. For the first 250, you get the tote and the signed book. Then the second 250, it's just the signed book. Get them while they last.

Zibby: I'm releasing this when your book comes out, so I'm worried that maybe they’ll be gone by then.

Arden: Then go to your local bookstore and support an independent bookstore.

Zibby: Or maybe they’ll still get it. We'll try.

Arden: We'll try.

Zibby: Thank you so much.

Arden: Zibby, you are a delight. You're so much service to so many authors and so many people. I was so excited to come on your podcast. I hope to meet you in person one day.

Zibby: I hope to meet you in person one day soon.

Arden: Hang in there.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Arden: Bye.

Meredith Masony, ASK ME WHAT'S FOR DINNER ONE MORE TIME

Zibby Owens: Thank you, Meredith, for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm sorry for having to reschedule from [indiscernible/crosstalk]. I'm really sorry. I'm delighted to be talking to you today about Ask Me What's for Dinner One More Time: Inappropriate Thoughts on Motherhood, which was basically the bible of my life here, so thank you.

Meredith Masonry: I'm glad you enjoyed it. I love your shelves and how your books are color coded, sort of. I was like, am I seeing something? Then I was like, no, there are definitely colors.

Zibby: They are, yes. I've had it like this for a couple years.

Meredith: It looks great. It makes an extremely pleasant viewing experience.

Zibby: I'm so glad. I'm glad I could brighten the day a little bit with that.

Meredith: You did.

Zibby: There's so much to talk about in your book and your whole journey to becoming a YouTube sensation and all of your success in general. I wanted to start, if you don't mind, with the worst part, I'm guessing, of your life when you were dealing with your esophageal cancer, it wasn't cancer, your tumor, and what happened then and how it made you basically have a whole new approach to life.

Meredith: Everybody has an origin story. That would technically be mine because it did, at the time, feel like I was being punished, but it ended up being this gift. I had been sick for a while, and I just ignored it. I think as moms, we have a tendency to do that. We ignore. We say, I'll get to it later. You end up coming last because you have to take care of everybody else's needs. Finally after several trips to the doctor and them just upping my heartburn medication, I finally demanded a scope. I said, "I need you to look inside." I was starting to have a problem where I wasn't even able to swallow my food. My food was coming up. My pills were coming up. I got him to do the scope. "We noticed something. There's a lump." What does that mean? What's a lump? Why is there a lump there? What do you mean? Next scope, he just handed me off and said, "I can't even be your doctor. You have an esophageal tumor that has broken through your esophagus which is why you aren't able to swallow food right now. You have to see an oncologist."

It went very quickly from there. I was thirty-four, three small children, and basically handed off by a doctor who had ignored me for over a year. I panicked. I started to panic. You start to have all of these thoughts. You're like, if I die, who's going to do the laundry? Who's going to cook for these kids? Who's going to do all the drop-offs and the pickups? Who's going to do all the jobs that I do? On top of the relationship that is with your spouse. You panic. I did a lot of closet drinking and crying, if we're being honest. Then I also realized after I panicked and cried about all of those things, I grieved about a life that I hadn’t lived, which sounds so selfish. Part of it is selfish because you didn't get to do the things that you wanted to do. Then people will scold you and say, you got to be a wife and a mother. It's like, yes, but that's part of what I wanted to do.

There were lots of other things that I wanted to do that I put on the backburner because I assumed I'd have time. Now you're telling me after I did that part that there's no time? That became this quiet shame I held because I was mourning a life that I was possibly not going to be able to live and then felt guilt about that because I think as women and wives, we feel guilty about everything. Luckily, the tumor ended up being benign. They were able to remove it. I had to have three reconstructive surgeries. It was this blessing because it opened up my eyes. It made me realize that if you want to do something, do it today. Do not wait for tomorrow because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Not to sound too dramatic, but you could step off the curb and get hit by a car. There are so many things that could happen that nobody thinks about. It could be it. That could be it. I was given a gift. It completely changed my perspective on being a mom, being a wife, being a woman, eventually becoming an entrepreneur. It changed everything in my world.

Zibby: Wow. I'm sorry you had to go through that, but I'm happy for all the benefits that it yielded and the way that you're able to reframe what could be a negative experience and turn it into such a positive. That's the essential A+ therapy move. [laughs]

Meredith: The thing is, it's not like it was positive while I was going through it. I'm not going to lie and tell you that I was like, oh, a tumor, we'll get through this. No, I cried. I screamed at God. I said, why are you doing this to me? What did I do? What mistakes did I make? I know I was probably awful to my parents. Is this punishment for that? Is this punishment for acting out as a teen? What is this punishment for? You assume, when this happens, I'm being punished for something, as an ex-Catholic. I'm a Catholic light, so to speak. As an ex-Catholic, I assumed this was punishment. God was rendering some justice on my life. It was difficult to wrangle with that and look at these kids and think -- when the doctor looked at me and he said, "I have to operate now because if this is cancerous and I go in and I go to remove it and it has spread, you're not going to be here for Thanksgiving. You don't have that time to wait," that was just like, holy crap. What do you mean I don't have the time? Of course, I'll be here at Thanksgiving. Why would I not be here at Thanksgiving? It's August. You don't know that. It was very trying during the time. From the moment I opened my eyes and my husband looked at me and said, "It wasn't cancer. You're going to be okay," I had just this relief and this feeling of a million pounds being lifted off of my chest. I said, I've got to do something. I have so many things I need to do. I want to do everything that I said I was going to do from when I was five years old until now. I'm going to do all of it. I've taken lots of risks. I've been told no a million times. I have failed. I have also been so blessed to get to do so many of those things that I wanted to do from when I was a little kid. I'll take it.

Zibby: What are some examples of those things? What's something you always wanted to do?

Meredith: I always wanted to be a comedian in some way, shape, or form. I loved Saturday Night Live. I feel like we, people our -- I'm not going to speculate on your age. I'm going to say people my age, because I just turned forty, we got a really great crop of SNL actors that ended up going and doing so many things in their careers that are noteworthy and spectacular. I got to watch that growing up. I always said, I want to make people laugh like that. I want to do something that makes people laugh. I also loved writing. I am shameless and I will tell you that I got a five on my state writing assessment when I was in high school. I was like, I'm going to be published someday. I used to write for the local newspaper. I always said, I'm going to write a book. I didn't know what the hell I was going to write about, but I was going to write a book. I've been able to check some of these things off my list. No, I've not been on SNL, but I'd like to think that the videos I make and the content that I create is seen -- I have videos that have been viewed hundreds of millions of times. I can say, yeah, I didn't make it to SNL, but I don't care. I've been able to make videos that make people laugh. That makes me happy.

Zibby: It's amazing. That's the comedian. I want a few more examples. Anything else? I'm trying to think now that you're saying this, what would I put on my list if I had two months, for instance? That's a tough question. Are there things now that you still haven't done or that maybe have come up since that you're like, now these are next on my bucket list?

Meredith: What is shameful is my workspace. I can tell you that I'm looking down at my desk right now and I have eight notepads with eight different lists. Every day I decide I'm going to do something else and there's going to be another project. I already have the idea for book three. Whether or not somebody is going to buy that, I don't know, but I already have it. It's ready to go. I'm itching to write it. I also love to make T-shirts. I'm a T-shirt designer. I love to put my sayings and do all of that. I want my T-shirts sold in major retailers. I am pushing and working hard to do that. We also have a podcast, my cohost and I. We'd love to get this podcast out to as many people as we possibly can. It's called "Take it or Leave it: An Advice-ish Podcast for Parents." I have all of these things that we're doing. It's my goal to -- always at the center of every one of my "businesses" is to make sure moms are being heard and seen and feeling less alone because the struggle is real. We do face it each and every day. I think the pandemic magnified that. In no time in history that I can think of have parents and children been locked together for such an extended period of time where they weren’t either going and being social with other kids or going to school or the parents leaving the kids with a sitter or at a daycare or whatever. I don't think that's ever happened. Being able to be a voice to say to women out there, hey, totally cool that you lost it today and you're probably going to lost it tomorrow and you lost it eight times last week, none of this normal, but we're here together. Let's talk about it, the disaster that is virtual learning, the disaster that is keeping our kids separated from their friends, celebrating COVID birthdays, which suck, all of those things. I think it's great that I get to fill a role in helping people feel better through this process.

Zibby: I was trying to think of other times in history. The only time I can think, and this is not to make this time -- I feel like this will strike the wrong tone. I feel like in the Holocaust, parents and children were stuck. I actually, during the pandemic, thought about that a lot when I was having the feel-sorry-for-myself days at the beginning. How did people do that with the fear of death if their kids even spoke? It's not like people were so different. They were just like us, just maybe far less electronics. It's not like people were built differently or had more patience. They were just moms like us but trapped and hiding. How on earth did people get through that? Then it made this pandemic like, oh, for god's sakes, so I have to mop my nice house. It's okay.

Meredith: That's the thing. We were given a pandemic in a time where we had Netflix and grocery delivery. I did talk about that a ton. Yes, we're pushed together, but there is an upside to this. We're being told to sit on our couches and watch TV. Yeah, our kids are driving us nuts, but by gosh, would I take this over other things that happened in history? Of course, every single time. Then it became so political. It became so much about everything other than what it simply was, which is we have to try and contain a virus that is spreading like wildfire across the globe. Even places like social media where we could go to escape, it became a spot where you couldn't even go to do that because everybody was talking about those things. I don't talk politics at all, zero. What I can tell you as a person who believes in wearing a mask when they go out in public in order to keep somebody else safe and keep myself safe and paying attention to logically what we're doing to minimize risk, these things are important. You can't even talk about it without igniting a massive fire on social media. To me, that's crazy.

Zibby: I could not agree with you more. I posted about masks and everything myself a couple days ago because I had been sort of hiding out on Long Island this entire time and recently came back to New York City to put my kids back in school. This is where we live. I came back. I was afraid to come back. People were wearing masks, but not all people. I'd say maybe three quarters. It depends on the day, the time of day, where you are.

Meredith: Wow. That's great, though.

Zibby: I was horrified. I came back. I posted it on Instagram and Facebook expecting everybody to be like, no way, that's awful. That's what a lot of people who didn't live in New York said. A lot of people who did live in New York were like, we've been here the whole time and I don't think you saw that right. That's not what it's like in my neighborhood. What are you talking about? I got such pushback. It's not like I was alone. I was with my husband or I was with my daughter. I was like, am I losing my mind? Then the next time I got in the car, I was like, I just counted twelve people in two blocks who weren’t wearing masks. Did everybody see that? [laughs] Come on. I am seeing this. Why is this political at all? If somebody were walking off a street corner, I would say, watch out, if a car was coming fast. That's exactly what I feel like I'm trying to do now. I'm trying to scream it from the rooftops. Yet people are like, no, no, no, it's all good.

Meredith: It's been very weird to watch that as a mother too because we want to be like, this is going to help you. This is going to protect you. I need you to do this. I need you to listen. This is what we're doing. Believe me, I posted one thing once, and it was such a fifty-fifty divide. I was like, whoa, okay. This is political, apparently. I don't believe it to be political, but we're not going to fish in those waters because I do believe that I fall underneath the entertainment umbrella. When people come to our page, they want to be entertained. That's what it is. That's part of my purpose. I say, okay, not a problem. We can do that. I can do my best to entertain you. It was also hard to be in that headspace when you were freaked out about every decision that you were making as a parent and a human being. We all had decision fatigue about everything. Can we go to the grocery store today? Should we not? I don't know. I heard on Facebook that three people at the Publix had COVID. Should we even go out? I don't have any Lysol wipes left. I don't have spray bleach. What should we do? What should we do? Then other people who were just like, it's not real. That's not what's happening. You just would shake from the panic, the questions.

Zibby: I feel like it hasn’t totally ended. I was outside today and there were kids playing on the playground. I just don't feel comfortable with that. It's one of those times where, back to your whole point about parenting and how we each learn how to do it, I feel like this is also magnified, the fact that you just have to go by your own compass. Everyone's going to have different ways they raise their kids. Everyone's going to have different ways they approach the pandemic. There's no right or wrong. If you feel deep in your gut that if I really don't feel comfortable sending my kids to the playground, I just have to listen to that even if my friends say don't be silly.

Meredith: That's the thing. I don't think there are a lot of situations right now where you can be silly. To you, these decisions, and to 99.9 percent of the people, it matters. I got scolded. We walked past a playground. I didn't even let my kids on it. I was doing an Instagram story because I took them to the tennis court so they could just hit the ball back and forth. Nobody was there. It was a court with a net. I walk past a playground. "How dare you take those children." I was like, I didn't even take them to a playground. It's just the way people feel. Because they're feeling this way, they want to then tell you how they feel. Then it just snowballs. We've been doing distance learning for several weeks. We're in Florida which has been a hotbed for this after New York. You guys had it first. Then we had this massive spike. Our schools didn't shut down. My kids have been begging me from before school started, "Let us go back to school. Let us to go back to school." We are in a very small county in Florida that isn't, knock on wood, having a spike. I started to get really torn. I was like, should I just send them back? Virtual schooling isn't working at all. They're not doing what they need to do. I am on them screaming constantly, "Get [indiscernible] to your Pearson Math." "I can't find it." "Well, I don't where the hell it is." I'm in there trying to find the folders that the teacher set up digitally. I can't understand the apps inside of the program inside of the whatever. I'm looking at this agenda. I don't know where any of these things are. I finally called her. I said, "I need to schedule a Zoom with you because I don't know how to find the stuff you're telling my kid to do. That's not an excuse because he should probably know where this is because you do Zooms with him, but I can't even find it to tell him to do it. I don't know how to do it." I technically own a tech company, so that's scary.

Zibby: It should be intuitive enough that a bright forty-year-old woman could figure it out.

Meredith: I sat there and I was like, I don't see Pearson Math. I assume there would be an icon that said Pearson. It's a textbook. I know Pearson textbooks. I couldn't find it. It was buried inside of each daily folder, not an app on the thing. I'm looking for it. Then I said to him, "I need you to do the last twelve of these." He goes in and he did them. He's like, "Can I go outside and play now?" It's like, I guess. I don't even know if I should be mad about this. We have been on the fence about sending them back. Of course, masks, hand sanitizer, talking to them about the way they need to act when they're at school. I even asked, can I go to the school and watch the kids change classes? No. Okay, you don't want me on campus. I get it. I've even thought about sneaking around the school during the day to just peek. I assumed I'll probably get arrested for that. I think I'm leaning towards sending them back because the environment we have here is not conducive to learning. They're not learning anything. Then you feel guilty about that.

Zibby: [Indiscernible] to convince you in any way, it's been two days of school for my kids. I was scared to send them back. I was like, really, just for socialization? Isn't survival so much more important than that? Where is the line? How do you balance? My kids' schools did let me go in and see. Well, one of the schools did. I have a kindergartener, a first grader, and two seventh graders. The little guy's school, I got to see. They're doing a really good job. One of the schools, I was more worried about the parents on the street in pickup. They had thought everything through for the kids and not necessarily the parents. I sent an email to the top five administrators being like, here are twelve free and easy things you could do to make this pickup and drop-off better and safer. That night, they sent an email out to the whole school saying, here's how we've changed it. I was like, okay, I made a difference. Good. All the touchpoints have to line up.

Meredith: Exactly, and those aren't the things that you're thinking about in a normal world where we're not freaked out to be within six feet of someone. It's so weird now. I've noticed I'm playing a game of freeze tag in the grocery store. If somebody comes the wrong way down the aisle and going to reach for something, I just immediately stop. I stand frozen until I can see which way they're going to go. Sometimes people just get right up next to you. Then you're panicked. You're trying to walk backwards while you're frozen. It looks ridiculous. God forbid I'm asymptomatic and you're eighty and I'm breathing. I have my mask, but I don't want to give you something. I would feel terrible if I found out in some way, shape, or form that I perpetuated this. I'm doing my best. It's weird because we don't even know how to act in public anymore. I think we've scared the children enough in the sense of the mask stays on no matter what. You're not the uncool kid if you keep your mask on at the bus stop. It is totally the cool kid thing to do. Keep the hand sanitizer in your pocket. I'm going to refill those, make sure that they're full to the brim every day when you go in. Make sure that you're washing your hands frequently. I know they're doing that at the schools. I know they're making the kids wash their hands in between classes or at lunch, at least at the elementary level, because I did get an email about that. The middle and the high school, you got to hope you've given them that knowledge. I have a sixth grader who's a middle schooler. Then I have a high schooler. I just have to cross my fingers and believe that my kids are going to do what we've been doing from day one, which is making the best choice we can for keeping ourselves and others safe. They're kids.

Zibby: My mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law passed away from COVID over the last couple weeks.

Meredith: Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry.

Zibby: We had a whole medical odyssey with my mother-in-law that lasted six weeks, three in the ICU, three in a regular hospital. It was awful and gut-wrenching. My kids were aware of it the whole time. I think we're particularly sensitive to norms.

Meredith: I would say so.

Zibby: It's so crazy. I run into people who don't know. Yes, I posted about it, but not everybody's on Instagram and not everybody reads everything. I run into people and they're like, "Aside from the whole COVID thing, how was your summer?" I'm like, "Not good." [laughs]

Meredith: Because of the whole COVID thing.

Zibby: The whole COVID thing affects people. It might affect you. If you would just take three steps back, maybe it wouldn't. [laughs]

Meredith: To your point, I have seen posts where people said, I don't even know somebody who's had it. It's like, well, you follow me and I have friends who have had it. So you do know somebody, whether it's just on social media or not. I have several people in the blogging space who have come down with it and have been public about having it. If you want to just talk about the celebrities that have come out, you do know. Saying I don't know anybody or it's not affected me is not really a true statement in that sense because we do know people. Three doors down, our neighbor, before we had moved in here -- we moved during the pandemic. The whole neighborhood was on lockdown because the neighbor down the street had it. His wife never got it. His kids never got it. He worked at Amazon, and he got it. You know people. Even if you think you don't, you do.

Zibby: Now you know me too, and I know people.

Meredith: Right, now you're listening to this. That's tragic. This is absolutely tragic. Any way you want to slice that, this is a tragic event that your family endured. It can't be taken lightly. We have to mitigate risk where we can.

Zibby: I'm glad to find a kindred spirit on the whole thing. I feel like people are so different in different ways. It's nice to speak to somebody who's so aligned. That’s great.

Meredith: I feel it.

Zibby: Meanwhile, we've barely talked about your book, Ask Me What's for Dinner One More Time: Inappropriate Thoughts on Motherhood. I feel like we've gotten such a sense of you. There's so much in here like mommy martyrdom and sex and parenting. You have so many funny things and poignant things, raising an autistic child. There is a lot in this book. We obviously don't have time to talk about it all, but it was really amazing of you to share yourself like that with readers the way you do all the time in your entertainment, so to speak. It was really awesome. I just want to ask at least, would you have any advice for aspiring authors having written this and now onto your third and all the rest?

Meredith: I would definitely say the hardest part, which most people say, is actually just starting the book. I said for a while, I'm going to write another one. I'm going to write another one. It wasn't until I just committed to saying I'm going to put pen to paper, so to speak -- you have to get started. Once you get started, whether you self-publish, because I did self-publish my first, or go with a publishing house, you really need to take whatever you're -- like I said, the idea of this book was to say to moms, you're not alone. Here are some examples of how we probably share a lot of the same things, how we've gone through a lot of the same things. Then you've just got to figure out how to chunk that out. I looked at this book, and I think how I'm going to look at future books, as chapter books for moms because moms don't have a lot of time, especially to read books. The Audible version of this book actually performed very well which I was excited to see. Anybody who picks up this book, you can open it to any section and read a story. This doesn't have to be a start to finish. This is, pick it up almost like those -- do you remember the books as a -- I just bought my son these for his birthday. It was Choose Your Own Adventure. You could be, oh, I've got to go to page eighty-seven now. We're going to meet a dragon. When I was writing this book, I thought about that.

I was like, I want a mom to be able to pick this up and say, I've got ten minutes. You can go to any chapter in any section and read and have a story. You don't have to keep reading if you can't at that moment. Then I have people who have reviewed it and messaged me and said, "I read it in four hours. My husband let me have the whole night off." I loved how she said that. I giggled because I could feel that one in my bones. She read the book cover to cover. She's like, "I laughed. I cried. I laughed. I cried. I laughed more. I cried more. I pissed my pants. I laughed." I was like, okay, great. I did my job. That was my job. I did it. I felt a lot of relief and excitement and kind of a euphoria from that, from reading these reviews. I got some shitty reviews. I'm not going to lie. I don't know if I can say that, sorry, poopy reviews. One woman told me that I am not funny and I should rethink my entire career, so there's that. Overall, it was such a wonderful experience to read through those. I would tell any author who's getting ready, make sure that whatever the core of why you want to write this, get to that and stick with it. Don't let anybody divert you from that path. At first, it was like, "You definitely need to have around four hundred pages." I said, "Of what? Nobody needs four hundred pages of this. This is a chapter book for moms." "Moms don't read chapter books." I said, "They will. Every mom wants a chapter book because they don't have time for this. We're busy." I stuck to my guns with that. I think it did what it was supposed to do and hopefully will continue because I really would like to see this as the book that people give at the baby shower, at those types of events. It's the stuff that people don't necessarily want to talk about, but we all go through it as moms.

Zibby: It's so true. Thank you, Meredith. Thanks for sharing all this. Thanks for writing. Thanks for helping so many moms.

Meredith: Thank you. I appreciate it. I was very excited to see you holding the book and talking about it a little bit and have the review for GMA and everything. It was great. I didn't even know you had a copy of it. Then when they emailed me, I was like, really? I ran and I found you in the feed. I went, yes, this is so exciting. It was great. Then when they told me we'd do the podcast, I thought, this is fantastic. I was so excited.

Zibby: Good. Awesome. Me too.

Meredith: Thank you very much. It was wonderful speaking with you. I appreciate that you read it and enjoyed it. That makes me happy.

Zibby: Good, I'm so glad. Take care, Meredith.

Meredith: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Caitlin Moran, MORE THAN A WOMAN

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

Caitlin Moran: It is my absolute pleasure. It is true. Moms don't have time to do anything. I'm presuming yours are probably doing something dangerous in the kitchen. I don't even know what mine are doing. They’ve made it to this old and they're not dead yet. I've got to presume I'm doing something right.

Zibby: I have the perk of being divorced, so they're with my ex-husband right now. I assume that they're okay, but they could be burning up the kitchen, just not in my house right at this moment.

Caitlin: You've got to tell me. I have been married for twenty-five years. Obviously, divorce, traumatic and difficult and all this kind of stuff. At the same time, I am so jealous of my divorced female friends because when the kids are gone with their dad, they're gone. That time is yours. That seems like a considerable upside on the whole financial, emotional heartbreak thing. That's a definite up, isn't it?

Zibby: It is a definite up. I have a teenager daughter like you. She FaceTimes me every twenty minutes or something crazy. She already forgot all her underwear. It's always something. It's not like it's ever done. I'm still coordinating everything. They're just not right here.

Caitlin: How often do you have this conversation? They go, "Mom, where are my shoes?" You say, "In the coat cupboard." They go, "I've looked there." You go, "Look again. They're definitely in the coat cupboard." Then thirty seconds later you hear, "Oh, yeah. They are." Look properly the first time. Use your eyes.

Zibby: We have a lot of "where is my phone?" panic. Now the Find my iPhone is constantly going off. More than the phone is the Find my iPhone ring.

Caitlin: Nine times out of ten when they cannot find their phone, they're sitting on it. You'll be on the sofa. Then you have to get up. It's hard to get up once you get to forty-five. I find it quite effortful. I'm like, this is going to be a bit of a job to get off the sofa. Then I'm looking everywhere. Then they stand up, and it's underneath their bum. They're like, "Oh, here it is."

Zibby: Totally, I know. I sit down and I read books on the bed with my son. He's like, "No, no, not this Mr. Men book. I want that one." I'm like, oh, gosh, I've got to stand up now. Can I hold onto the bunk bed? If I hold onto the bunk bed with my left hand and pull myself up, will my knees hurt less? [laughs]

Caitlin: You need some advance warning for that. I like to be told a good ten minutes before I've got to stand up. I need to prepare for it like some kind of Olympic athlete. I've got to make all the ooph sounds. It's exhausting.

Zibby: Do I do the rollover, try to get up on my side? Should I just go straight up? Sometimes if I pull my knees together, I find it hurts less. I'm trying everything new just to stand up.

Caitlin: When you tell younger women this is what you've got to look forward to, they're like, I don't want to hear it, I don't want to hear it. They can spring off a chair and go and dance. I can't do that anymore. You enjoy it while you can, ladies.

Zibby: We're not even old. I feel like we're the same age. I'm about to be forty-five. You're similar at...?

Caitlin: Forty-five.

Zibby: It's not like we're eighty-year-old women sitting having this conversation. [laughs] It happens really fast.

Caitlin: It's because you spend so many years hunched over breastfeeding and then hunched over a laptop that actually, standing up is quite a rare event. You just lose that ability quite quickly.

Zibby: It's true. To your question about how great it is, the perks of divorce here, your chapter on when your kids go to school -- what did you call it? It was so clever. The whole thing was amazing, how you're basically a drug addict beholden to your children. Oh, called The Hour of Missing Children, could not have been more apt. I read it. I underlined it. Then I print out some pages. Then I read it again. It's amazing. It's so good and so true. No one's thought of it that way. It seems so obvious. Tell me about this whole thing, the drug addict model, even the Superman/superhero model, all of this.

Caitlin: It's so weird. As a female writer and stuff and writing about being a woman, when I actually look around at the amount of stuff that's written about motherhood, it'll either be practical advice like this is how you put them to sleep and make them have this mashed carrot or it'll be a traumatic memoir about how painful a birth was. I've done both those things. That's fair enough. No one ever writes about the emotional, creative, psychedelic, physical, druggie aspect of being a mother. It's a crazy thing. It's because it's women. In the years where you can remember what it's like, you're too busy being a mother. Then by the time you'd have time to write about this, then you've forgotten it because you forget everything. It really occurred to me that when my kids were little that I just couldn't wait for them to leave. You need to go to school so I can do literally everything before you come back. You're already not at school long enough for me to do everything I need to do. I'm working real fast here.

Then within two and a half hours of them leaving, I'd go to the toilet and then I'd find myself, without even consciously thinking about it, getting into their little bed and sniffing where their head had been on the pillow and picking up a little toy that now suddenly seems so sad, now a child isn't playing with it, and being really tearful and going, I miss them, like physically miss them. I need to smell them. I need to touch their stuff. I just started thinking, our kids are our drugs. We are physically addicted to them. It is a chemical process. Getting pregnant is a chemical process. Breastfeeding, growing a baby, giving birth, it's oxytocin and all these hormones and estrogen and all this stuff. That continues all the way through motherhood. When you hug your baby or your child or even your teenager, you sniff them and you get high and relaxed off it. When they're gone, after two and a half hours you are like a junkie just clucking going, need to smell the baby smell. Feel really tense now. Just need to sniff the baby. We find ourselves doing this. Again, so little is written about the weirdness and wiggy-ness of the emotional aspect to being a mother. I was just thinking, obviously if men got pregnant and had babies, we would have movies about it all over the shop. It's basically like Alice in Wonderland. You take on this magic substance, sperm. Then your body changes. You grow an extra organ. You’ve suddenly got these superpowers. You can stay up for five nights straight looking after a baby and then get your work done. All you want to do is save the kids. You're utterly selfless. Everything is about saving the kids. I said, why aren't there any films about this? There's no films about what it's actually like, this psychic quest that you go on as a mother.

I suddenly went, hang on, this is basically the plot to all superhero movies. The superhero takes on this magical substance, in our case, sperm. In their case, a radioactive asteroid or gets bitten by a spider. Then their body changes. Suddenly, instead of producing -- we produce milk. They produce web out of their wrists. They're suddenly strong and superhuman. All they want to do is, in our case, save the baby, and in superheroes' cases, save mankind. Also, the other thing is with all superheroes is that humankind having been rescued by the superhero over and over again is never grateful. You are a secret superhero. You never get the thanks. All of New York doesn't go, thanks, the Hulk, for saving us. You get no credit at all. That's being a mother. You're constantly saving the world over and over again. The kids never go, wow, that must have been hard. Well done. I realized that Hollywood has basically taken the whole story of motherhood and just given it to usually teenage or young white men and made it superhero movies instead. They’ve just carefully disguised a couple of the little details. They're telling our story with Spidermans and Batmans. That's not fair. We did that. That's our story. [laughter]

Zibby: Co-opting the story of motherhood, Marvel Comics, watch out. Lawsuit pending. [laughs]

Caitlin: They have appropriated the thing we do. It's so unfair.

Zibby: It's so funny. Your whole thing about the chemical and smelling, I literally posted on Instagram like two weeks ago the last time my kids were gone about how I picked up my daughter's little fluffy pink slippers at the bottom of the stairs and just sadly -- also, to your point about things left at the bottom of the stairs, when I'm home with just my husband, I have to carry this stuff upstairs. Anyway, I put them into her bedroom and plopped them down. It's just the saddest feeling. Yet as soon as they come back, within a minute it's gone. I'm like, okay, when are they going again? [laughs]

Caitlin: Literally, that. The process of being particularly a mother is constantly either saying go away or come back. That's it. The only other people who do that are shepherds with their sheep. It's that constant, go away, come back, go away, come back again. That's what we are. We're shepherds just telling our children to go away and then come back. Mommy misses you.

Zibby: I just wanted to read what you wrote in the beginning of this chapter. You wrote, "Five hours, that’s all it takes, just five hours. At eight thirty AM, I am desperate for the children to leave home. By one PM, I miss them again. This is the push and pull of young children, wishing them away, wishing them back again. It's either too much or never enough. Parenting small children often makes you feel like Richard Burton married to Elizabeth Taylor. She drives you to distraction when you're with her, always wanting things, always arguing, always creating drama. But every time you get divorced, you end up staring out of the window sighing, you know what, I miss that crazy bitch. It's no fun without her. Both your child and Elizabeth Taylor are the most beautiful things in the world." Then you say, "I leave my laptop to go to the loo, and afterward, without even realizing what I'm doing, I find my wandering into the girls' bedroom like a lovesick homing pigeon." [laughs]

Caitlin: Right? That's it. The whole thing about parenting is none of it makes any sense at the time. It doesn't work. All the way, particularly with small children, you're going, this doesn't work. Yet you make it happen every day. You just never really properly make sense of it. That was one of the pleasures of being a writer. My job is to think about this stuff and write it down, being able to go, women with small children, I see you. I know what you're going through. I'm going to put it in a book because you don't have time to do that. That's my job, so I'm going to do that for you.

Zibby: I know you mentioned Jerry Seinfeld in your book with the whole, men are not really thinking about anything. They're just wandering around picking things up. Literally, that's the end of the inner dialogue. I feel like you are like the female Jerry Seinfeld. You are so funny in terms of all the observational humor and a new way of thinking about everything. I was just like, this is perfect. You're like the Seinfeld for women. It's perfect. Not that he's not for women, but you know.

Caitlin: I will take that. Thank you. One of the reasons that I write what I do, the TV shows and the movies and the books and stuff, is that so much of women's lives just isn't written about. We're too busy doing it at the time. Still, the things that are thought to be women's things and a women's world, it's a combination of boring and so ordinary. There's no need to write about it. That seems to be the general cultural feeling. It's like, no, we are literally making the people that will populate the earth. Without us, it all just ends quite quickly. There is no bigger job on earth than being a mother and making children inside you and then just getting them to adulthood without them falling off a cliff. We deserve a couple of books about that. We're really busy. We've worked really hard. Why doesn't anyone just turn around and go, I see you, thank you?

Zibby: You pointed out in your book so many times, all the other books that should've been written that weren’t. You were trying to tackle them all, even about caring for aging parents and what it's like to suddenly be in that role. Why are people not writing books about this? This is a huge life shift that everybody has to deal with. Yet nobody's really talking about it all that much.

Caitlin: Totally. The weird thing when your parents start getting frail and then when they start dying is that you suddenly become top of the family tree. They have been the matriarch and the patriarch, and you are the child. When they get frail and ill and then when they die, they become the children. You're looking after them. Suddenly, you've got to climb to the top of the family tree. You're suddenly the matriarch in charge of the rest of the family. I don't know if it's your experience, but I've generally found that it's my female friends that have to go and look after the aging parents. For some reason, brothers are just like, you're better at that, or I'm too busy. You're like, I'm not busy? They're just like, it feels like that's a woman's thing. You should deal with that. We talk about it in terms of [indiscernible] or [indiscernible]. It's very common to have small children and ailing parents at the same time. Then you're still trying to be a human being with a job and a relationship and friends in the middle of that. We are just squeezed. We are extraordinary. We deal with this. No one notices it. No one thanks us. No one pays us. I just felt constantly when I was writing this book, I always have this thing that I'm just putting my arms around women going, mate, this is hard, isn't it? I see you. I'm going to write down what you're doing so people know how brave and brilliant you were at this time. I see that as my job, to just say to women, I see you. You're amazing. You're doing so well. Carry on.

Zibby: This is the book I want to give to every girlfriend that I have. It is so spot on. I feel like being in our mid-forties, there's suddenly no guidebook. I don't know what I'm doing half the time. I have to say, your book was so funny. I was laughing out loud at parts. Then when you went into all the struggles you were having with your daughter and her eating disorder, oh, my gosh, I couldn't believe it. Then I'm crying over your book. I couldn't believe it and all the stuff you've had to go through. Every parent has something that they're out of control with their kids. All you want to do is take on the pain yourself, but you can't.

Caitlin: That's where it goes wrong as well. It's so great getting to forty-five because you can look back and go, where did I make mistakes? How could I have learned? Is there any knowledge I could pass on with my daughters? I was, I would say, briskly badly parented. People ask me what my parents' parenting technique was. I say it was basically that of salmon. They spawned extravagantly. They laid all their eggs. Then they just sawm away. My parents had eight kids in very quick succession. Then that was it. We were not parented again. I cobbled together a personality based mainly around watching classic musicals staring Judy Garland. What Judy Garland taught me was that whatever your problems are, you stay cheerful. You crush all your bad emotions down and you just crack on and do your thing. That has worked very well for me and got to me to where I am.

As a parent, that became a weakness because if you've got girls, or boys but I've got two girls, you are sad and anxious. You keep making a joke or singing a silly song or, come on, just crack on, just crush all your emotions down and it'll all be fine. There comes a point if they are very sad and very unhappy and very anxious where that becomes quite dangerous. In my daughter's case, it metastasized into an eating disorder. I realize now that's kind of like a communication. If you are not taking this unhappiness seriously, then if it became a medical thing, then you will hear that I am sad. It took me a long time to realize that, for the first year and a half of her illness, that I was scared of her sadness and her anxiety and her depression. I was trying to make it to away. I was just saying to her, come on, just make yourself better. She couldn't. That was a huge thing that I had to learn, to sit down and go, I'm not scared of your sadness. I'm not scared of your depression. I'm not scared of your anxiety. We're going to do this together. Do you need to hear me say that I love you no matter what is happening here? I'm going to say that. We are going to do this together. Once I'd learned that, then she started to recover. Now she's fully well, touch wood, and incredible.

That was another reason why I wanted to write about it in the book. I think particularly for people of our generation, eating disorders were quite secret and shameful. Any mental illness was not spoken about in our generation. Her generation, they don't have that stigma. They talk about it. When I started to write the book, she was like, "Please write about my illness. I want you to be able to put that advice in there for other parents. You would be able to help. It's not a secret. It's not shameful. I was ill. It was the same as breaking a leg. You would want to put advice for how to treat a broken leg in a book if you knew how to do that. Then it's exactly the same here. See if you can help other people." It was definitely the hardest thing that I have done without a shadow of a doubt in my life. Those three and a half years were brutal. I was frequently on my knees with it because you're so racked with shame. If you don't know how to help your kid, there is no failure like a child that won't eat. That's the most fundamental thing that we want to do. As soon as your baby's born, you feed it. To suddenly have a child that's going, no, I will not eat, it's just like being electrocuted constantly. You can't handle the pain of it and the worry of it.

Thankfully, we had a happy ending. I wanted to write about it because also when I was trying to find books about eating disorders, every one that I found had a sad ending. They were, she didn't recover, I'm still ill. If you are lucky enough to have a happy story, put that out there and give people hope because god know you need it if you're dealing with that. If anyone out there is dealing with it, I absolutely salute you. There's a book by a woman called Eva Musby which gives you scripts of how to deal with an ill child, things that you need to say. You can't parent them anymore. You have to be a mental health professional. She gives you scripts of what to say. The transformation when you say the right things is extraordinary. I would heartily recommend that if anybody's unfortunate enough to be going through that right now.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. That's the thing with parenting. Whatever gets thrown your way, you have to adapt. I interviewed a women's whose daughter was born with a developmental disorder. She was like, then I had to learn how to become an occupation therapist. As you're saying, you then had to become a mental health professional. Whatever your child needs, you have to learn that skill set. That's it. That's all you have to do. You can't even think about it.

Caitlin: The state of being a parent is, it's the one thing you cannot walk away from. You do it every day without a break. Every day you have to turn up and do this stuff. There are no days off. It's every day for the rest of you're life. There's a bit in the book where I talk about how before you have kids you have no conception how long it will take. You're just kind of like, I'm sure I'll cope with it. Then you get five years into it. You're like, this is going to go on forever. There's one bit where I go, if I now type the word long and I just put so many O's that it fills the entire book, an entire book just full of O's, long, that's still not even one thousandth of how long it takes to be a parent. It's so incalculably long. It's an endurance sport, parenting. [laughs]

Zibby: I know. I loved that. I was just thinking you should have this little companion piece where you literally put just the O in the book.

Caitlin: There were days when I was writing the book, I thought, could I just keep my finger on the O? That could be the book. I could finish that quite quickly. Cut and paste, bang, we're done. No, I put other words in there as well. There are 87,000 other words other than the word long. [laughs]

Zibby: You also had so much -- and thank you. I feel like I didn't properly acknowledge your talking about your daughter. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you to her for sharing it. Thanks for offering up your story which is quite personal and emotional to help other people. I think that's the biggest gift we can give others as parents, as women. Just sharing our stories is the key to sanity for everybody. Helping others, it's all we can do.

Caitlin: Literally, if you're going to go through that, then what is the one good thing that you could do that would turn the negative into a positive? Just tell people what you learned. Just hope that you make their illness one day shorter, make one day a bit better. If you're doing that, then it's not worth it, but at least you managed to find something good in the horror.

Zibby: Thank you. Thank her too. It's really beautiful of her to share it. Back to the funny stuff for a second, you also wrote about marriage, particular long-term marriage, in a more brilliant, funny way than I've read about ever, especially the fact that people don't talk about their marriages. Once you're in a marriage, you just sort of stop talking about it. You said, "You have become replete and also silent now. Once the door has closed on the marital house, no reports can emanate from it. If the marriage is good, then the marriage must also be silent. That is one of the rules. You do not gossip. You do not share. A good marriage is mysterious to everyone around it. What happens in there? Who are those people who walked into it on their wedding day and then pulled up the drawbridge? If a marriage is successful, you walk in there in your teens, twenties, or thirties, and then only come out again in a coffin, the partner who outlived you standing there waving goodbye." Then you said, "For we don't write novels about long and happy marriages. We have big blockbuster stories on how to raise children. We don't show the endless everyday business of domestica. We have no template for that."

Caitlin: Right. Again, when I started thinking that -- so this is a sequel to the first book, How to be a Woman, which is about your younger years of making yourself. When I finished that, I thought, that's it. All the hard years are done. The rest of it's going to be really easy. I know everything. I've put it all in this book. I am done. Then ten years later, you're like, no, no one talks about middle age. Particularly since the book came out, we know about younger women's lives now. We've got Girls. We've got Fleabag. It's all about hot messes and masturbation and pubic hair and having to get an abortion and bad luck love affairs and stuff. We know quite well what a young modern woman's life is like now and the problems and joys of that. Then suddenly, it just stops. If you are in a successful relationship, I'd walk down the street and you go past every single door and you're like, what is going on in there? There are adventures in there as epic as any ring quest in Lord of the Rings. People, they are battling demons. They are facing heartbreak and joy. They are having to be a team. It's a business.

We are supposed to be silent about this. It's seen as disloyal to talk about a marriage. I just wanted to throw all these doors open, the format of the book is twenty-four hours in the life of an average middle-aged woman, and just go, what is happening every hour? What are you dealing with every hour? How are you making this work? What is making it difficult? To just be honest about that process, once you've realized that you're writing about something that other people generally haven't written about, it's so exciting. Anything you put in there, people are going, yep, that was me. Oh, my god, I can't believe you said that. I didn't even know you were allowed to say that. When I was talking about sex in a long-term relationship, even I was going, is that disloyal to my husband? Am I breaking some kind of marriage code to talk about how difficult it is to keep an exciting sex life going over twenty-five years? All the advice that you're given, it's generally for a younger woman. It's all the, have you tried spanking and sending texts? First of all, if you and your husband or long-term partner are spanking each other and you've got children in the house, you will hear a scared voice on the other side of the door going, what's that clapping sound? Mommy, I'm scared.

If you're sending each other illicit texts, then almost every family has it that their phone is linked to another device in the house. Suddenly, you've got a scared child who's watching Peppa Pig going, Mommy, a text has come up and it looks like it's two hams pressed together. You're like, no, I shouldn't have sent that belfie. That was wrong. Particularly women are supposed to be endlessly inventive and questing in their sex lives and bringing grapefruit and whips and all this kind of stuff. That completely misunderstands the average heterosexual man who's just happy to have some sex. If there's a naked lady in front of him and he's got twenty minutes with her, more than nine times out of ten he's going to be perfectly happy with that. Instead, we're like, I need to put the spice back into my relationship. If you try and put your spice back into a twenty-five-year-long relationship, it's going to be terrifying. We tried roleplay. I was like, could you be a naughty sexy pirate? If my husband were a famous character actor, if it was James Gandolfini or Mark Rylance, then maybe he would've workshopped that character and it would've been good. The accent was questionable. He kept saying, what's my motivation? You can't suddenly start being sexy pirates twenty-five years into a relationship, and you don't need to. You don't need to. Just have a normal, straightforward shag. It's perfectly fine. I relieve you all of the responsibility of having an exciting sex life. It's just twenty-five minutes. Say thank you to each other at the end of it. On with the rest of the day. It's done.

Zibby: Everyone can take their eye patches and just chuck them over their shoulders.

Caitlin: It's not going to work.

Zibby: Caitlin, how did you even get into writing? How did you begin this journey in your life? Did you know you wanted to write? How did this all happen for you?

Caitlin: I read a lot as a kid. My parents were very clever. They were generally terrible parents, but they did one clever thing. They had a suitcase under the bed that was full of classic children's books like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women stuff. From a very early age, they were like, "You're too young to read those yet. When you're old enough, you'll be able to read these," and so made books seem like this incredible thing that one day I'd be clever and special enough to read. When they finally opened the suitcase and went, "You can read these," it was like, now I feel honored. This is the good stuff. Usually if you're a writer, you're a reader. I think it's a bit like the digestive system. If you put enough words into you, then you probably start pooing them out. I don't want to give away the magic of what writing is. [laughter] You read something and you either go, I disagree with that, now I've got something to write, or you go, they were so right. When it happened to me, it was like that. I want to write my version of this. To be chin-stroke-y for a minute, if you're a writer, you're in a constant conversation with all the other writers that have been before. You just want to join in their game and go, I could do that too.

We were home educated. We didn't go to school. By the time I was thirteen, it was very apparent to me that with no qualifications and no schooling I would probably have to work out what my job would be and then get on with it on my own, so I just started writing a book when I was thirteen. I finished it when I was fifteen, it's a children's novel, and sent it off. It got published. There were a couple of interviews with me at the time because it was like, a teenager has written a book. The Times newspaper saw the interview and asked me if I wanted to write some pieces for them. I said yes. They gave me a column. By that point, I was seventeen. They gave me a column, which I now realize isn't the normal way that you get a job. I was also working as a rock critic on a music magazine at the time. I was still living at home. By night, I'd be at a gig smoking cigarettes and drinking cider and hanging out at rockstars'. Then at half past eleven, I'd creep home, get into the bed that I shared with my little brother because we didn't have our own beds, and then wake up in the morning, write the review, look after the kids, and then that night go off and be in the world of rock and roll again. It was quite unusual. It's not a template that I think anybody else could follow, so it's kind of useless me telling you. That is how I did it. [laughs]

Zibby: I don't think it's useless. It's highly entertaining. Then what came next? You had the column. Then what?

Caitlin: I had my kids really, really young. I'd met my husband when I was seventeen. Thank god that was one problem that I didn't have to worry about. We had kids really young. I was twenty-four and then twenty-six. I was just writing the column on The Times for ten years. You don't realize how long a minute or an hour or a day is until you have to sit under a child and not move. The first thing that I learned from breastfeeding other than it hurt was that as soon as I didn't have to have a sleeping child on me, I would do stuff. I was not going to waste any more time. The first day the youngest one went to school, I was like, I'm going to do stuff. That was when I started writing How to be a Woman, which was sort of trying to explain feminism to a young generation and tell dirty, funny stories about life. Then I did a couple of novels. I did a TV series about my childhood. I've just done the film of one of the novels, How to Build a Girl, starring Beanie Feldstein who is an absolute delight. She plays the teenage me. She's better at being the teenage me than I was. We have a little WhatsApp group. She's as obsessed with dogs as I am. Whenever we see a cute dog, we take pictures of it and send it to each other like, this is a good dog. Look at this noble fellow. This is an adorable one. It's a pretty sweet life, I have to say. At forty-five I'm like, wow, if I could tell my thirteen-year-old self that it was going to work out this well, I'd be pretty pleased. I would be, certainly, less anxious.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to people who might not have this fall into their lap? Not that you didn't earn it, not that you haven’t earned it. You're incredibly [indiscernible].

Caitlin: I was so lucky. It was a much easier time to be a writer and get paid. Everyone can be a writer now because you can blog, but you don't get paid for it. There's necessarily a class barrier now. If you're young and you've got parents who can support you, you can write full time. You can blog full time. If you have to get a job, then you're not going to start writing until you get home probably quite tired and start writing. There's an immediate class and economic barrier put to writing these days, which is sad. If you are a writer, it took me quite a while to realize that if you're writing what you think -- you look at the game and you go, this is what everyone's writing about. That's what a column would look like or a book would look like. I should do something like that. If you do that, you're trying to get into a very crowded field. You're going to have to be absolutely excellent to compete with people who are already established and have contacts. If you do this thing where you turn 180 degrees and go, what aren't people writing about? Where's the gap in the market? Where is the silence? Where are the taboos? Where are the stories that aren't being told? Suddenly, you're going to be more in demand. You've got more of a market value because no one else is doing that.

That's where things that would often be seen as a disadvantage, like being of color, being LGBTQ, writing about middle age, whatever it is, become an advantage because those are areas that are not serviced that well. We don't have that many writers talking about those things or those kind of lives. Once you see that what you might perceive as your weakness is actually your strength, then hopefully that will give you the courage to go, no, I will be doing something useful if I write. That's a lovely thing to think of as a writer. You're not being indulgent. It's not like writing poetry and hoping people will cry. You're going, no, I'm being useful. I'm going to tell people things. I'm going to ask questions. I'm going to try and work out why these things happens. I have a purpose now. Once you feel as a writer that you've got a purpose, so long as you are determined enough, you will find an audience in the end because people like you will need to hear your stories because no one else is telling them. You’ve got to be resilient. Whatever you think is your weakness is your strength. People need what you are going to be writing about.

Zibby: I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on this show. I am such a huge fan of yours. Loved this book. Can't thank you enough. It's just been such an awesome experience talking to you.

Caitlin: You are absolutely fantastic. I love your bookshelf. It's giving me such joy. My eyes are so happy looking at it. Thank you so much, darling.

Zibby: You're welcome. Buh-bye.

Caitlin: Buh-bye.

Sue Miller, MONOGAMY

Zibby Owens: I interviewed Sue Miller a while back. I'm releasing her episode today. Thanks to all of you who listened to my very personal heartfelt episode that I released this weekend about my family's losses. Thank you. I'm sorry I made so many of you cry. Thank you for all the direct outreach as a result of that episode. I had to get it out of my system. Anyway, Sue Miller, critically acclaimed and loved by readers, Sue is recognized internationally for her elegant and sharply realistic accounts of the contemporary family. Her books have been widely translated and published in twenty-two countries around the world. The Good Mother from 1986, the first of her ten novels, was an immediate bestseller, more than six months at the top of the New York Times charts. By the way, I totally remember my mother reading this when I was little. Subsequent novels include three Book of the Month main selections: Family Pictures, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; While I Was Gone, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and The Senator’s Wife. Her novel The Arsonist and her nonfiction book The Story of My Father came out recently as did her latest book which we talk about in our interview which is called Monogamy which, by the way, I keep leaving in front of Kyle just to give him nice reminders that it's so important. [laughs] Not that he needs some. Her numerous honors include a Guggenheim and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. She is a committed advocate for the writer’s engagement with society at large having held a position on the board of PEN-American Center. For four years she was chair of PEN New England, an active branch that worked with writing programs in local high schools and ran classes in prisons. She has taught fiction at, among others, Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, Smith, and MIT. By the way, we did this interview from her bathroom. I even made sure that she took her shower cap and moved it out of the screen, so we were immediately bonded for this interview. Anyway, enjoy.

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

Sue Miller: I'm completely in sympathy with the title. I'm glad to be here.

Zibby: [laughs] It's such a thrill for me because growing up, my mother had your books. The idea that it's come full circle and I get to interview you, I just get such a kick out of it, as does she. Your latest book, Monogamy, was so great. I'm so excited that we're going to do a book club about it. I just fell into these characters' lives. Would you mind telling listeners who might not know what it's about a little about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Sue: It is a character-driven book, completely, as most of my work is. I'm really interested in exploring human nature and human foibles and so forth. We have two main characters in this book. Graham, who's a bookseller, the husband in this quasi-monogamous marriage, an ebullient, enthusiastic guy, he loves good food. He's a little overweight. He loves wine. He loves his wife. He loves books. He needs to have people around him. He needs to have people love him also. He's married to Annie. They’ve been married for about thirty years. She's a quieter personality. She's also much smaller than he is. They’ve gone to a party once years earlier as Santa Claus and one of his elves. She's a photographer. At the moment the book begins, she's about to have a show for the first time in some years and is full of anxiety about her career. She's basically been full of anxiety about most of her professional life. She's particularly anxious now because it's been a while since she had a solo show.

You get, at the beginning of the book, a flavor of their life together and the way they exchange. I move around between their brains, essentially, in third person and enter them and explain them a little bit or have them explain themselves. Then quite early on in the book, it gives nothing away, really, or maybe a little, Graham dies in the night of a heart attack. Annie wakes up and he's dead in the bed next to her. She's numbed and shocked and then, as she must, begins to call other people to whom this will really matter. That includes the other main characters in the book. They get introduced, actually, by being at the end of these phone calls. The first person is her daughter with Graham, Sarah, who's in her late twenties and is in San Francisco. They have a reasonable relationship, but it's a little strained. Sarah has loved her dad enormously, he kind of rescued her through a tough childhood and adolescence, and has a lot more difficulty with this quite reserved and, as she sees it, unknowable mother.

Then she calls, actually, the next person is Graham's first wife, Frieda, who has been, by his wish, very much a part of their marriage, partly because they’ve had a child together who is Annie's stepson and is very much, of course, in Graham's life. She's just a member of the marriage in a certain way, Frieda. Then she, Frieda, turns -- you're with her now. She calls her and Graham's son, Lucas, who's in New York. Basically, the book moves around among these characters and their grief and what his death means to them and then how they connect to each other after the death and what happens between and among them after the death. There's a lot that happens. Graham is not out of the picture in a certain way because his relationship to them and their memories of him and things that happened with him and so forth take up a lot of the energy as the book moves along too. That's the basic way it's set up, I guess you would say, and the people we care about, or I care about and I hope I make you care about along the way.

Zibby: I cared about them so much from the very beginning. You spent so much time orienting us to Annie and Graham that when he died, I was very sad about that as opposed to having it happen on the first page before you get to know him. I felt like you really got us into their marriage and the bookstore and his character and what he was like and them sitting drinking wine. I knew that's what the book was about, but I kind of forgot once I was in it. Then it happened and I was like, [gasp]. I felt a sense of loss, so well done. It was so good. I couldn't help but think this must have happened. You couldn't have made all this up. Have you gone through something or a loss like this? It just seemed so vivid to me, this whole scene. How did you come up with this? Did you lose somebody really close to you? I know about your father from your memoir. Tell me a little more.

Sue: I had a friend a long, long time ago. I was remembering, his wife died in her sleep. He really told me about that, how just incredibly strange it was to wake up and have her dead. I think my father's death informed me a lot too. I was with him as he died over a long period of time, ten days or so. That's it, probably. I've never had anyone that I was in love with die, and especially not in bed next to me. [laughs] Sorry, that's no thing to laugh about.

Zibby: No, it's okay. [laughs] Then I noticed you gave both Annie and Frieda mothers who both were battling Alzheimer's as well in the book. That was one of the common bonds that they had, perhaps with your experience with Alzheimer's yourself or you wanted to just put that in. What was that about? What made you put that?

Sue: It was in part that. I was thinking that there needed to be ways in which they became friends. Annie resisted it very much at the beginning thinking that it was too modern and silly, she thought of it, and a little embarrassing, almost, to welcome this person as a friend who was once married to Graham and had a child with him. Frieda had less trouble because she’d lived with Graham through the whole era of the sixties and seventies when all the rules about how marriages were supposed to work were deliberately broken, at least by people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as far as I could tell. They needed to have ways to slowly become very close friends, which they do. So I just gave them that. When my father was ill, it was so comforting to me to talk to my husband then, just to talk about what was so funny that had happened that day in his crazy world that I was part of and had to agree to go along with and then, of course, awful things too. Frieda says that that seems to her to be the nature of this disease, that it's amazingly funny and amazingly awful at the same time. That's what they share with each other. Then over the years, they're always together at holidays. Frieda's just always there because Lucas is there, her son. Since they all live in the same neighborhood, it would be strange not to have her there. Graham very much wants her there. He's continued to have a really warm relationship with her, regrets what he did to their marriage and that sort of thing.

Zibby: It was so neat how you had the stepmothers get to know -- or maybe not the stepmothers. Yeah, the stepmothers, get to know the other child by the other -- [laughs].

Sue: Yeah, the children get along better with the stepmothers. Each of them has his or her own reasons for having trouble with his or her own mother. They did this almost trade for a while when they're entering adolescence and then through adolescence. Each of them is more helped by the other mother who's not really his or her own mother.

Zibby: How do you do it? How did you invent characters, particularly Annie but also Graham and I guess every supporting cast member in this book, that are just so incredibly real? I feel like you inhabited this character of Annie more so than almost any other character I've read in every little detail and how she does every little thing. How do you structure that? How did you come up with her? How do you make sure to show the reader so much about her? It seems like magic to me.

Sue: It certainly is in the sense that I really can't account for all of it. I love the close third person. That's the voice in fiction that gives you the most fluid access to a character so that you can sit a little bit away from the characters in the third person and talk about what she's doing. Then you can step right forward into her brain and essentially speak in her voice and speak about her reactions and speak about what she's saying to herself. I think a lot of it is that, the wonderful fluidity of a third-person narration. The other thing is I make an enormous number of notes before I start to write anything so that I could feel that I know the character quite well, just notes, for instance, about what they hate, what they believe, what sort of books they like, or things like that. I've always done that just in very simple ways. I'm not writing a book at that time. I'm just making notes to myself.

Then as soon as I begin to write, anything they say, it's sort of like you feel you know someone maybe if you're online dating or something and you think, this person sounds so interesting, and then they speak and you think, oh, my god, no. This is how I would imagine. I've never done it, actually. Or you think, this is such an interesting voice. As soon as I began actually having them speak to someone, that just does it for me. I invent the voice and that makes me comfortable with everything else if I feel it's right. I love doing it. That's one of the main impulses for me in writing fiction, is to make what I hope are believable characters. My sense is that when you get mostly deeply engaged in fiction is when you actually sort of think these people are real. You know they're not. You know they're fictional. That's what I want to get you very close to believing anyway.

Zibby: It's like when you're in a movie theater and next thing you know you're sobbing. Two hours before, you didn't know who that character even was. Now you're completely emotionally invested. It's a longer version here, more immersive almost. What part of this book was the first germ of the idea for you? Was it Annie? Was it Annie and Graham? Was it the thought of a loss? Was it dying in the sleep? Which was part of it was like, oh, I think I'm going to write about blah, blah, blah?

Sue: It was actually, had to do with my father's death and then the aftermath of that. After he died, I was just swept by grief. It just would not release me for a couple of years. I tried therapy. I tried this and that. I was on antidepressants for a while. I decided I would write a book about him, also about Alzheimer's disease. At that time, the stuff you could read about Alzheimer's disease was either sort of sappy, you've got to get a hobby and you have to be with friends. It just wasn't useful to me. Then the other thing you could read was incredibly technical stuff. I felt I wanted to write a book addressed to the reader telling her or him something about my father and also talking, to some degree, about the kind of moral or ethical issues I felt were raised by my being the one with him. I felt also as I was doing this book about him that I uncovered new information. I talked to friends of his. My sense of him really changed over the course of writing the book. I felt connected to him in a new and different way. That made me feel different myself in my relation to him. I wanted to explore that feeling of contact and change after death with someone and in this case really falling out of love with someone and then falling back in with someone long after he's dead, in Annie's case. That was the sort of feeling I had about that great mystery of death and the way one can change over time, the way one feels about the dead person.

I started with that and then thought it will be Annie. She was the first character. This will be this woman who -- I thought of some things. Then Graham arrived. Once he was on the scene, he made me immensely comfortable with everything else in the whole book because that's the kind of guy he is. [laughs] I was charmed by him. I also wanted to present him as a complicated person, someone you'd have to think, well, that wasn't so nice. You might even feel that he's awful. In some ways, he is awful. He sort of recognizes in himself, this terrible need in his -- anyway, I wanted to make him as complicated as possible while also trying to make you like someone very, very complicated. That was the impulse, really, was to have this whole thing after his death that goes on with Annie in particular. It happens with other people too, a kind of shift each of them feels, each character, about Graham's presence in her or his life, and not always good. In some cases, they're looking at everything with a little more distanced eye too.

I described this before. When I was taking psych classes in college and afterwards, we used to do these sociograms where you make a circle and you put all the people you're considering around the edge of this circle. Someone acts or something happens to one of the characters. You trace these radiated lines, what it means to this person and what it means to this person on the circle. Each of them reacts. Their reaction crosses the circle to this character and this character. By the end, you just have this web of connection and feeling and whatever else is going on, anger or joy. That sort of was what I wanted to do be doing, was to just watch this circle of people and all their connections with each other, the ones that worked, the ones that didn't work, and look at how complicated but try to make it easy for a reader to enter and to look at too. It was a world.

Zibby: Was it hard? Tell me about what it was like writing this book. Could I have a visual? Where did you write it? Was it at home? Did you like to go to a library? Where did you write it? Then because it's so immersive, did you ever have trouble putting the work aside and going back to your real life?

Sue: No, I didn't have trouble like that. [laughs]

Zibby: All right, that's good.

Sue: I wrote it over a long period of time. I wrote it in many different places. Basically, most of the time I wrote it in my office. We have a little place in the country, and I wrote it some there too. I write in longhand, first draft, so I can move around. What I like about it is I can move around the house, one of the things I like about writing in longhand. I write in little books. That was the way I wrote it, essentially, and the places I wrote it. There was a lot going on in my life and in my family's life right then, and so there were periods of time when I wasn’t working at all. Now my granddaughter lives in Germany. She's young. She's twelve. She's sort of also old, but she's young. When she comes to stay, I just drop everything. About four or five years ago, she began to come and stay for the summer. That was just a huge open space in terms of my getting any work done and that sort of thing. I've never been incredibly disciplined about my work, I'm afraid. It took a very long time, this book, and probably benefited from that in some way or another. I had these pauses where I could just stop and think about it and make a few little written notes in my notebook and so forth to think about for the next time I actually sat down. Then I just type all that stuff in and then pull it out and then write over that for the next draft and just type it back in again. I waste more paper. More trees have been consigned to death by me because of all the in and out that I actually physically do instead of just changing things on the computer and not having to use that much paper, which would be much better to do, I know, but that's the way I work.

Zibby: I forgive you on behalf of everyone because at the end of it, then you've got these masterpieces. There you go. It's worth it. Everybody has their own process and everything. How did you get to be a writer at the very beginning? If you go all the way back to the beginning of your career, how did you get your start?

Sue: I always wrote. I wrote as a little kid. I always invented stories. I can remember these little girls down the street a little bit younger than I. I must have been in fifth or sixth grade. They must have been in second or third. They would wait for me to come from down the street to their house. We would proceed on to school together because they wanted me to continue this fairy tale, essentially, that I'd begun with them. Then I wrote a lot all through my childhood, silly, horrible things. I actually won a Scholastic fiction award in high school. A lot of very distinguished writers have won that, Truman Capote and Joyce Carol Oates. I entered this world of real writers in a certain way. I wrote a couple of novels after college, one right away and then one that took a lot of time because I got married and I had a child. I got divorced. I was a single mom and working and so forth.

I never thought of it as a career, somehow. I just assumed I would always do it. I didn't much care about publishing at that point. Then at a certain point in my life, in my mid to late thirties, I began to send out a few short stories that I'd written. It sort of occurred to me. I'd gone to a few writing classes just to make myself finish things, which I rarely did. I just wrote because of the circumstances of my life. I was looking at other writers and thinking, I'm actually a lot better than they are. [laughs] Actually, my teacher encouraged me in that case. I just began to send things around. They got taken, almost everything I'd written from the first story I wrote. They didn't get taken right away. I had to send them to six places or something starting with the places that would've paid me a little bit of money, or a lot of money by my standards then. Then when my son was a little bit older, when he was about ten, I really started seriously writing a novel. I had two unpublished novels that I'd written before then and quite a few short stories.

Then I thought that I would write something that might get published. That was the first time I thought it. I was probably thirty-eight or so, something like that. And it did. It was The Good Mother, which was my first book. It just changed my life in this astonishing way that was really shocking and discomfiting. I sort of thought I was in charge of my life and I knew what it would look like. With the short stories that I'd published, I was able to begin to teach writing here around the Boston area which is a great area to be in for part-time work like that because there's a lot of writing programs and a lot of writing requirements at various colleges. There are a lot of colleges here too. That's what I thought my life would be like. I would write and I would teach and go on living at the same sort of quasi-poor. That was fine with me. There was nothing about that I didn't like. Then suddenly, all of that changed. I did feel for a while, really out of control, that I was not in control of my life, and discomfited by it a little bit. That's the story.

Zibby: Wow. Once you had this major success, did you find it hard to follow it up? Did you feel pressure to perform on your next books? Were there things in the works? How did it affect your writing, this huge success that you had?

Sue: The main thing was I was determined not to do the same thing or even the same kind of book. My first book was narrated in the first person. At the very center of it was a courtroom drama in which my main character loses custody of a child. I just stuck right with her. It was a very dramatic plot, to say the least. I really decided deliberately that I wanted to do something very unlike that because I didn't want to be -- now that I had a publisher who was waiting for it, I didn't want to be doing the same thing and become the person who always wrote that. Although, now I'm the person who always writes about family and domestic life. That's the way I'm categorized. I ended up always writing that anyway. The second book that I wrote, my father is ill and dying during that period of time. Again, I was sort of slowed down. It was about a whole family. I moved around from person to person in the family. It covered about forty years of their life together, a family with an autistic son. Everyone's response to that person in the midst of the family is different and is complicated.

Again, it's like the sociogram, that book was, essentially, all of these people whose lives were connected. There was much more to be really angry about for everybody, or troubled about, in that book. I just wanted to announce, I'm not doing anything you think I'm going to do. I loved that book. I like them all, but that was amongst my favorites. I don't know. I haven't ever organized them, this is my third favorite book and this is my sixth favorite book. Anyway, I dealt with whatever pressure there might have been by just saying, there's not pressure on me. I'm doing what I want to do. There was a little pressure to do something very different, that's true, but I wanted to do it. I wasn't doing it because it was different, a little bit, but not all the way.

Zibby: How do you continue reinventing what you want to say and do? What advice would you have to aspiring authors, people who are starting out who want to have a career like yours, for instance?

Sue: This would not be something I think you could deliberately do, but I think it helped me a lot not to feel I was launching a career. I was doing this thing I wanted to do which might or might not be the center of my life. That made it easier for me to please myself with what I was doing. Also, to just go as slowly as you can. As I say, I had written two novels before The Good Mother. I had sent one around a little bit, but instantly sort of didn't want to do that. I think just to wait until you feel really, really certain of the book that you're sending out, until you love it yourself, it's the very best you can do, and not be so focused on -- I was old for a writer. My first book came out when I was forty-six, my first novel. It's hard to say let time go by. There certainly are people who have written wonderfully very young. I'm not prescribing anything, but I feel like I benefited by being a little bit more relaxed about things. The other thing is just to read and read and be asking yourself all the time, why do I feel this way about this character? Look at what's on the page. Just practice in that way, rob some people technically, essentially.

Zibby: Do you have a type of book you like to read in general or a certain genre? Do you like to read what you write type of books, or totally different?

Sue: Both. I like to read what I write. I also like a lot of other different kinds of books. One of my favorite writers is Alice Monroe. The form she writes in is completely different from mine. She's utterly brilliant. Then the British writer Tessa Hadley, she's much more interested in writing about adolescence and growing up. Although, there are a lot of quite wonderful -- she's a wonderful writer. I really love her work. Some of Brian Morton's work, I just wait for his next book to come out. It's varied. I just read this really wonderful book by the unfortunately named Michael Crummey, he's a very established Canadian writer, called The Innocents. It's just as different as it could be. It's set in Nova Scotia with a few children whose parents both die. They set up living alone in the nineteenth century, I think it is, or maybe the early twentieth, but I think the nineteenth. It's the story of their complete innocence, of their not knowing anything about anything. It's an amazing book. I can't recommend it highly enough. So that sort of thing. I like to read some nonfiction. I move around a lot. I think I'm more judgmental of books like mine, domestic books. I'm more critical of them because it's more like the work that I do, probably. I think [indiscernible] should've done that better than you did.

Zibby: [laughs] You wouldn't want to see the novels that I have stashed in my drawer, then. Anyway, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thank you for so many delightful moments reading Monogamy over the last couple weeks. I'm excited for you to come to my book club and talk to everybody there. Now I want to go back. I have to read your memoir about your dad because it sounds like such a moving, emotional experience and relationship. Hopefully, by book club I will have read that too.

Sue: Great. It will be good to see you again. I'm very glad to have met you from my bathroom to your bedroom or wherever.

Zibby: Exactly, this is the Zoom universe. [laughs]

Sue: Thanks so much.

Zibby: Thanks. Buh-bye.

Sue: Bye-bye.