Fariha Roisin, LIKE A BIRD

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Fariha. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Like a Bird: A Novel.

Fariha Róisín: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Your book, I read it at night. I was so disturbed and scared from some of the scenes. I loved it. It was gripping and powerful. Then I was almost closing my eyes at some of the things were happening. It's rough to take. It was gritty and out there. That's what a good book does. It makes you feel. Why don't tell listeners what it's about?

Fariha: It's funny. Under close inspection, it's about so much more than just the broad strokes. It's a survivor story. It's a story about, this young biracial girl is gangraped by a family friend. It's really in that lurching from her family, being disowned by her family, that she realizes that she actually has a lot more autonomy than she ever thought she did. That, for me, is such a personal story as well. I think a lot of women probably relate to that experience of being raised a certain way and thinking certain things about your capacity and who you are and how you should be defined and what determines you. Then you go out into the real world and you're like, oh, I have all of this that I can actually find and discover about myself. It's all of those things, but it's also the cracking of a family and the rupture that happens when people don't talk about their emotions and when they don't talk about the gravity of what they're feeling and experiencing in a day-to-day way. There's a lot of themes that might sound kind of out there, but they're also really real, like ancestral trauma. This idea of epigenetics, that's something I really wanted to bring in just even as a subtle motif because, again, it's something I think about so much. Some of us do become bearers of a familial burden, and we don't even know what it is that we're experiencing.

Zibby: Wow. This particular family has gone through so much trauma in a relatively short period of time. The scene where you have the mother when the main character is leaving after she's been cast aside and you have the mom wailing left alone with her two daughters without them, that was so powerful. I know I keep saying the same thing. I'm sorry. [laughs] I know you know it's powerful and everything, but I'm just reiterating.

Fariha: It's important to hear this, honestly. It's very validating.

Zibby: How closely does your background align with your character's?

Fariha: Not at all, really. I'm of South Asian descent. Taylia, the character, her mother is half Jewish American and her father is half Bengali Indian. That was also something I really wanted to explore because, again, the failures of assimilation and the failures of wanting a life that you think you deserve and you do deserve, but then what is lost in all of that? What happens in that transaction when you do prioritize certain things about what your family looks like, what the façade looks like as opposed to what is going on internally? Her parents are so cool. That's something I really wanted to show. Katherine and Adi are both really smart people. They're very cultured. They have taste. They want to see the world. Katherine is political. She married her husband even though her parents didn't want her to because she believed in her beliefs. She wanted expansion. She wanted to see what was outside. Then she married him. Because they kind of signed onto the same contract of living a lie together of something, there is another rupture with them that I think is so important. It's such an important facet of the story that I don't think we ever talk about, when parents, who are people, don't know what to do with themselves.

Zibby: It's so true. You were so funny writing about her mom. You wrote, "Like many white girls, even Jewish ones, Mama wanted to cause her Ashkenazi parents deep distress. She watched Guess Who's Coming to Dinner with a sadistic revery and preached to her friends that the racial divide was the true abomination in American society. Ignorant to the fact that her white-girl utopian idealism was a privilege in and of itself, she considered herself a savior and thought her protests were enough." [laughs] Love it.

Fariha: I like that you like the humor because I wanted it to be funny as well. Humans are so funny. We're so strange. We have so many contradictions. It's not like Taylia's the victim. Everybody's the victim. That's something that I really also wanted to show. That's something, definitely, I can attest to in my own life. Maybe the similarity between me and the family is that I had a pretty traumatic life. I think that's actually kind of common. We experience so much more than what we're willing to put into language. Really trying to see them through a lens of humor and trying to place them contextually in a way that's honest was really, really important to me. I didn't want it to seem like they were two-dimensional. That's also why in the end of the book there was a return to the idea of memory. What is memory? Can we trust it? She starts to replay these memories that she has of her mom and ideas that she has of her mom. Even writing them, I was just like, I've never seen this anywhere before, that questioning of, do I have this right? Did she love me? Maybe. I don't know. That was really fun and heartbreaking to play with.

Zibby: As someone who feels like she's losing her mind every day, this is very comforting to hear because I'm always like, wait, I'm sure this is what happened when I was growing up. Then of course, I'm like, maybe I should call my brother and just find out. Of course, I'm completely wrong. It's close enough. I'm like, I think this happened with this girl on this Valentine's Day. Anyway, you also poked fun at these poor parents where you were talking about how they achieved a new class, essentially. They had become wealthier throughout their, not hippy-dippy -- what's the right word? -- very, very liberal anti-wealth dogma. Then suddenly, they're wealthy, but they don't want to accept that about themselves because what would that mean to their whole identity? They kind of pretend that they're not. Yet they're living the high life in some regards. I thought that was very funny because there's so much of that, I feel like, now. You have to wonder with all this anti-wealth sentiment everywhere, if you won the lottery tomorrow, would this still be the same rhetoric or would it shift a little bit?

Fariha: Exactly. Capitalism, especially right now, it's something that we're all thinking about. I was raised by a Marxist. I was raised by a very intense Marxist. He's very anti-wealth. That's how I was raised. I have a lot of family members that are really rich. You're always navigating and seeing how they interact with their wealth. Oftentimes, there is this deep un-comfortability with the things that they’ve achieved. I can say that about my own life. I have a good life. I'm an artist. I'm a writer. I did this on my own, so I think I feel more vindicated by that. There are those contradictions that we all have to face. That's really what the book is trying to get you to do. It's trying to make you question yourself and question the way that you live your life.

Zibby: It's also, not the kindness of strangers, but whereas there's such capacity for these hateful, horrific acts, there's equal capacity for love and caring. I always forget everybody's names in books, but how the coffee shop owner takes her in not only to give her a job, but into her actual home. Then is it Kai who comes into the store and then offers her a place to live as well having just met her and saying, "It looks like you need a friend"? These are really wonderful things. I think it's important that you highlighted those too as opposed to just this tale of doom and gloom because that is what's so crazy about the world. You can have these diametrically opposed responses to the same person, essentially.

Fariha: Exactly. That is another reflection that I definitely had in my own life. I moved from Australia when I was nineteen to New York and didn't know anybody, came to go to school. I was very naïve, very vulnerable, and met so many people that lended me a hand in way or another. After having such a traumatic, almost loveless upbringing, I really needed that. I really needed to believe that there were people out there that could offer me things that I felt were just too big. That's something she tries to explore, the guilt and the shame of taking things, of wanting things, of wanting safety. There's a lot of shame around that. You think that because you've never gotten it, maybe that's just how your life is going to be. Then when someone offers you a hand, it causes you to question everything that you've accepted before that moment. In a way, I know that it probably seems quite dramatic, but those things that happened to Taylia have all in one way or another happened to me. I negotiate them as an adult all the time. The sexual violence didn't happen like that, but sexual violence has happened to me in my life. I am constantly having to balance those extreme moments with joy and community and real care. That, to me, is the plight of being human, as you kind of said.

Zibby: Wow. So really, just some tiny minor themes here in your book, nothing too deep. Did you have a relationship with a tree in the same way?

Fariha: [laughs] I have relationships with trees, for sure. I'm definitely a little bit of a kook, I'd say. I do a lot of plant medicine, so trees are really important. The natural world has so much to teach us. Again, it is this sweet sentiment that I wanted to bring out. When I was young, I didn't have a lot of friends that I could lean on. The natural world became my friend, sticks and stones, whether it was a little patch on the grass that I knew was mine, that kind of stuff. Especially when you don't have a lot, you find ways to protect yourself, totems.

Zibby: Pretty close to, actually, a totem pole in form and shape. My heart breaks that you experienced some of the same things and emotions because the experience of this character, Taylia, broke my heart over and over again. That devastation and loneliness was really tough. I'm sorry if that was part of your upbringing. That's not fair. That just stinks, honestly.

Fariha: Yeah, I had a really bad life. I had a really hard life for a really long time. I'm a child abuse survivor. All of those things come from deep, deep places. I don't know if you knew this. I wrote this book over eighteen years. I started writing it when I was twelve. I actually wrote myself out of my pain. Through a therapist, I've kind of figured out that even though it wasn't my life completely, I was creating a story a way to have a cathartic process. My family, we didn't know what therapy was. None of those things were options to me eighteen years ago. For whatever reason, I figured out at a young age that I could do this. I had to survive. I had something to say. That's really what carried me through. I don't even know how I did it, but I did it.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, bravo to you. That's amazing. When you said you started this eighteen years ago, I was like, you must have written this when you were five years old. I'm thinking, did you start this as a drawing? You look so young and everything. I think you might win the award, then, for longest time it's ever taken anyone to write a novel.

Fariha: [laughs] It's funny because when you write something, when you work on something for so long -- also, naturally, who I am, I'm very self-critical. That's why it's validating to hear that you like the book because I don't know. I don't know if anyone's reading this book. It becomes such an isolating experience when you put something out. I hope for the best. Here's all of my pain and trauma on the page. I'm trying to also show people that survivorship is real and possible. You question yourself. Especially after this long, you're like, is this story even good? It's an everyday process of reminding myself that at least I stuck to something for eighteen years. If that's all I have, that's pretty remarkable. I always have to pat myself on the back for that because I don't really know how I did it.

Zibby: Turns out it started on a floppy disk. Then you put it on a CD-ROM. Now you finally have it on your phone.

Fariha: [laughs] Google Drive. The evolution.

Zibby: The evolution of Like a Bird. It actually started as a baby bird. Now it's grown and flown away.

Fariha: I love it. Exactly.

Zibby: Did you start by handwriting this? How did you end up deciding now is the time? You're still only thirty. You could've done another eighteen years on it. That would've been justified.

Fariha: I know. I started writing it on hand. Then eventually, maybe a couple months later, we had a family computer. I was talking to my dad about it, who's a professor. He was like, "You should start typing it." With his direction, I started typing it. I would show him the pages and be like, "This, this." I have a really close connection with my dad. I was always looking for his approval. Then eighteen years later, it's a book. It's a three hundred-page book. So much work has gone into it. The evolution is, I started when I was twelve. I finished a first draft when I was fifteen that doesn't look -- it was more of a basic simple draft. All of the things are basically the same, which is wild. I finished it when I was fifteen.

Zibby: Did you lose a sibling?

Fariha: Mm-hmm. Everything -- oh, I didn't personally lose a sibling, no, no, no. Thank god. I was around a lot of death. It was a really palpable thing for me to think about death. Around the time that I started writing this, my favorite grandfather died. I was just being faced with a lot of death. It makes sense to me in the universe of Taylia to have something that triggers her into motion. It's not the rape. The rape isn't what triggers her. That's the last straw for her. She's just like, no, fuck this. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to live like this anymore. It's really the loss of her sister and trying to compute why somebody would do this that brings her to her own evolution. Then I formally started writing this book again when I was in my early twenties. I've been working on it more full time for about eight years.

Zibby: It's so crazy to think when you were twelve, you were writing this. When I was twelve, in my journal, it's like, I slowed danced with Chris McFarron. [laughs]

Fariha: I love that.

Zibby: It's insane. Now I feel horribly guilty for having these ridiculously middle school traditional privileged ups and downs. Then this is going on in your head. It's just insane. Yet here we are as adults just having a normal conversation. What you bring to it, what I bring to it -- not to say I haven't had lots of trauma in my life. It's just not at that young age particularly. Then the way that that informs how you grow up and what you do with your life is so important.

Fariha: Don't you think that we all -- I don't know if this is how you feel. We all become products of our lives. We make choices. At a certain point, maybe you did this as well, but I wanted a better life, so I fought for it. I think the things that happened to me, my therapist might disagree, but I've come to place of a lot of peace. It brings me pain, but I have a lot of peace with my life because I wouldn't be who I am if I didn't go through it. I like who I am a lot. The fact that I can write this book -- I'm being clownish and light. I obviously want people to read it. I obviously want people to connect with it. That is my offering, sourcing all this pain and putting it onto the page so people can have a toolkit. If every survivor is able to read this book, and there's a lot of survivors on this planet, that would mean so much to me. From my heart, it's been written to aid people through this journey.

Zibby: It's beautiful that you did that. I feel like I should put a theme song to this episode that's like, [singing] "I'm a survivor."

Fariha: Destiny's Child. [laughs]

Zibby: Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Yes, Destiny's Child. Thank you for not stopping the singing. That's my first singing on a podcast ever, and my last. [laughter]

Fariha: It's great.

Zibby: Thanks. What's coming next for you? In, let's see, 2038, will we have your next novel eighteen years from now?

Fariha: I'm working on another novel which I'm really excited about. It's still really early stages, so I won't talk about it, actually. I'm also writing a book of poetry called Survival Takes a Wild Imagination. Then I have my fourth book that comes out January 2022 or spring 2022 about the wellness industrial complex. It's my first nonfiction. I'm diving into, again, the things that we're talking about, trauma and my own experience and rooting it in my own experience, but also looking at the failures of the wellness industrial complex and how we very much owe it to one another to care more about one another, and especially in this climate and everything that's happening and where the world is going with climate change. It's going to be really, really interesting. Those are my two major book projects that are coming up. Then the novel, I think in a couple years. Stay tuned. Then I'm writing some screenplays as well. A lot of things are happening.

Zibby: Wow, that's great, as they should. You deserve nothing but success, especially having taken what was so painful for you and given it, as you said, as an offering to others. I hope that the circle of life gives back to you what you needed from it. It's just great.

Fariha: Thank you.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Fariha: Trust your voice. Don't let anyone tell you that you don't have something to say. If you feel like you do, really trust it and nurture it. Read. Read a lot. I think enough writers, or enough people, don't read. We do need to read more. [laughs] I know that your podcast is about that.

Zibby: I would agree with you. I agree with you. I agree. Not enough people read. I actually read some crazy statistic recently how the average American reads one book every two years. I probably just botched that statistic, so nobody quote me on this or write it down. Just pretend you didn't hear me say that, but it's something like that. A lot of people hardly ever read. A lot of people don't even own a lot of books or any books. I just donated some books to this school in Texas. None of the kids had ever owned a book before and were writing me all these thank-you notes. "Oh, my gosh, I get to take it home. I get to keep it." I get more notes every day from this school. I'm surrounded by books. They're how I stay sane. They’ve helped me through everything that I've ever gone through in my life. I think, wow, I have these talismans of stories and experiences. I just look and I remember them. Now I'll have yours. Then it just brings it all back. Anyway, yes, I think people should make time for books and find ways to get books in everybody's hands.

Fariha: I love that sentiment. Reading is how I survived. If I couldn't have gone into different universes, I don't know what I would've done with myself. Absolutely, it breaks my heart that young kids don't have access to that.

Zibby: By the way, I was going to say this earlier, not that it's any of my business, but you should go to schools. I don't know if you're doing that or not. You should put yourself on the school circuit and go in and have talks and go to middle schools. You never know what's going on with people during that time. They might really need to hear it in the moment. I know it's a lot, this book, but I think you should do it. I think you should try a few schools and see what happens. I think you'll be surprised at how much you'll be able to affect change at that level.

Fariha: Okay, thank you. I'm going to listen to that.

Zibby: Just my two cents for what it's worth.

Fariha: Thank you.

Zibby: This has been unexpectedly fun. I thought this would be so deep and disturbing and intense. I think I had to lighten it up a bit as self-protection or something for both of us. Thank you. This book was beautiful. Your writing style is beautiful. When you said you weren’t sure if people were going to read it or whatever, I found your writing style to be something that was so captivating and a little bit different and a unique voice. I just kept reading and reading. I really liked it. There you have it.

Fariha: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

Zibby: Thanks for coming.

Fariha: I'll talk to you soon.

Zibby: Yes, keep me posted on the meaning of life and everything.

Fariha: [laughs] Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Kate Riordan, THE HEATWAVE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Kate. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about The Heatwave.

Kate Riordan: Yay! Thank you for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Did you intentionally pick a shirt that matched the cover?

Kate: No, all my clothes are green. [laughs]

Zibby: Good, perfect. Excellent. I just wanted to make sure.

Kate: It's a good idea. I should've gone with that.

Zibby: For people who don't know, could you please describe what The Heatwave is about?

Kate: The Heatwave is about a single mother, a divorced mother, Sylvie, who's returning to the South of France where she's from with her younger daughter, Emma, for the first time in ten years. Ten years earlier, she lost her eldest daughter, Elodie, there. The book really is about finding out what happened ten years ago. It's sort of a suspense novel, really.

Zibby: What is it that inspired you to write this story? I know it's not your first novel by any stretch. How did you come up with these characters? Why this story?

Kate: I first of all really wanted to set a book in France. That was my starting point. I'd been looking for an excuse for years. I went as a child and spent many, many years in France. My French is not actually very good, but my heart's in the right place. I do love it. I always wanted to write a book in France. Then I really wanted to write a book about sibling rivalry. The initial idea was to have it written from the point of view of the younger daughter, the youngest sister, Emma, who's thirteen/fourteen in the book, and have her living in the shadow of this older sister that was killed ten years earlier and how she deals with that. She's half resentful and half adoring. Then I found when I was writing in Emma's point of view, it was a bit flimsy. I didn't feel as though it was coming very naturally. I thought I'd try out writing in Sylvie's voice, Sylvie being the mother in her early forties. It suddenly took off then, the book. Then it became a book about mothers and daughters and a toxic relationship between a mother and a daughter. Then I got really into that. I'd found my book then. It came quite easily after that. There was a lot editing. I'm not saying it was that easy, but I felt immediately as though I'd got the right story when I started writing from Sylvie's point of view.

Zibby: I loved how it wasn't just from Sylvie's point of view. It was almost as if it was a letter to Emma. It's like, you came in and I was giving this to you. As a reader, you feel like you're just sort of listening in on a mother's conversation with her own child telling her this whole story, which was so great especially as things escalated and got very exciting. [laughs]

Kate: I enjoyed doing that. Actually, I had a discussion early on about, do we like this second-person narrative? Is it confusing? I really stuck up for it and thought it made it more intense. It's really an apologia to Emma. Why is that? What's happened? What doesn't Emma know? That was another reason for moving the point of view into Sylvie's head so that she became a more interesting narrator because, actually, the whole point is Emma knows very little. If you as the reader are stuck with Emma for the whole book as someone who's totally in the dark, I was worried that it would become quite frustrating for the reader. Whereas with Sylvie, there are flashbacks in the book. The present day is actually 1993, but it flashes back to the seventies and eighties. That enabled me to let Sylvie in the past reveal clues as to what happened one by one. Hopefully, that draws the reader on and propels the narration along.

Zibby: It was super successful. I feel like from a craft perspective and structure and everything, it was just perfect. Both went in tandem letting us stay in it and yet getting enough of the backstory, just enough at each time to really care even more. I thought it was awesome.

Kate: Thank you. I was just going to say that with the editing, I've got to thank my editor in the UK and my editor in the US, Grand Central [indiscernible]. They really worked me hard to make the book tight and said things like, "She's sitting by the pool again. Things need to happen." I have them to thank for a lot of that. I did the nice atmosphere and they helped me narrow down the action.

Zibby: The atmosphere also was fantastic. I felt like it was my biggest vacation in this whole quarantine time where international travel is not allowed. All of a sudden, I could smell and taste and see and hear everything going on in the South of France. It was such a nice little respite. In fact, I put it in my newsletter this week and said if anybody wants a trip to France, pick up The Heatwave. I have all these people saying, thank you, I got it. I feel like I took a trip with you. That's really great. I loved also, as you were mentioning before, this whole relationship with mothers and daughters and how fraught it is. There's some stuff in here that's very much relatable to really any mother and daughter, and any new mother especially, who's trying to get to know their child. You never know what you get. I've said this before, but before I was a mother, I thought that I would have a lot more control over how my kids turned out. As I've had more and more kids, it becomes very clear to me that I have no control and that they're kind of born the way they're born. All I can do is straighten out the edges, but the bed is made. Here's one quote. You said, "Although my joy is laced with fear, it's the kind every parent feels, the kind that hurts your heart and makes the world seem as amazing as it is hazardous. I am a mother." This is right when she becomes a mother and is trying to figure out how to process this in the context of the world.

Kate: Before it all goes wrong.

Zibby: Before it all goes wrong, yes. Although, it goes wrong kind of slowly, and so you get to go along with her, which is great. Tell me a little about that part of the narration, the relationship between mothers and daughters and your own perspective coming into it. Did you take anything of this from any part of your life or relationships you've seen or friends or relatives? Did any of this germinate in a part of your life?

Kate: The thing that really is strongly drawn from my life is actually Sylvie's relationship with her younger daughter, Emma. In the present day in '93, a lot of that is me and my mom. I'm my mom's only one. My parents split up when I was five. I've got great stepparents and it's all great. Mom and I were very close. That is very much us. In terms of Elodie, who is the difficult child and the child that Sylvie really struggles to bond with, that is very much me having -- well, it sounds bad saying having fun with, but really letting my imagination go. I suppose I've been influenced by other books and other films in that sense. Something like We Need to Talk About Kevin is an obvious example of that, a mother who actually -- my Sylvie started off with a much more idealized idea of motherhood than maybe Eva does in We Need to Talk About Kevin. She becomes more and more ambivalent as times goes on and starts thinking -- there's those questions of nature and nurture. Are the problems with Elodie my fault? Is she born this way? Then what happens is when she, ten years later -- she decides she's not going to have any more children because she thinks she's terrible at it and she couldn't cope, possibly, with another one. Then she falls pregnant again with Emma by accident. Then Emma's really easy. It all slots into place. It's exactly how she dreamed it would be. Then she starts thinking more and more and feeling about this, gosh, maybe it is actually to do with Elodie rather than me.

I think even if a mother has a fairly straightforward relationship with their child, there's always loads of guilt in there and worry that you're not getting it right or that you're going to stir up troubles for your children. They're going to be in therapy forever because of some small mistake you're making down the line. It's probably also interesting to say that I'm not a mother. I didn't have children. It didn't happen for me. That's a whole other story. I felt actually quite liberated to write this in many ways because I didn't have to -- I'm not saying women writer who are mothers shouldn't write a book like this. For me, there were no qualms about writing a book that my child would one day grow up and read and maybe think, did mom feel like this about me at any point? I could just go for it. I felt as though I've got lots of mom friends who, there are things they don't say. There are still taboos. You might say, oh, god, I'm finding it really hard. For instance, I think a lot of moms don't want to admit that it's often quite boring, being a mom of young children, and very repetitive. You feel like you've lost yourself a bit and you've just become mum, or mom. [laughs] I could explore all that and really go for it. I was trying to do a little bit of a service to mothers everywhere in that sense. That sounds ridiculous, but I can be really honest because I don't have children. I think actually a lot of you feel like this sometimes, and that's fine.

Zibby: Thank you. Thank you for the service on behalf of moms everywhere. I appreciate it.

Kate: [Indiscernible/laughter] medal.

Zibby: Medal is in FedEx right now. Thank you. Can you talk a little more about your decision not to have kids? Is it private? You don't have to.

Kate: I'm actually quite open about it. I don't mind talking about it. I actually had loads of miscarriages. I had always been quite ambivalent about motherhood. I wasn't sure it was for me. I need a lot of my own space and time. I'm not good with noise. I was never sure that I would be terribly good at it. It maybe wasn't taken out of my hands. I could've maybe kept going. I had made the decision that I didn't want to try anymore. I felt as though my body wasn't my own. I felt the hormones were making me mad. I just stopped. It was a real relief, actually. I have dogs instead who are much easier, probably. [laughs]

Zibby: I don't know. I find kids easier than dogs. I've had a couple dogs. At least kids, you can reason with them at some point. I feel like dogs, I don't know if they understand me. I love dogs, but I don't have the gift of dealing with dogs.

Kate: I have two rescue dogs. One particularly is completely nuts. I've actually put her to bed in her crate with a cover over because otherwise she would be growling and jumping up and wanting to see who you were and hear your voice. You couldn't do that with a child, probably. That would be seen as a bit cruel to put them to bed and lock the door.

Zibby: That would probably not be a good idea. I would not recommend that. [laughs]

Kate: That's the good thing about dogs. You can do that. It's allowed.

Zibby: That's true. I've realized that the child equivalent of that is basically putting them in a trampoline. They can't really go anywhere. You zip them in. It's contained. There is a noise factor, but it's usually outside. The trampoline as a modern-day playpen for kids up to however old. Sometimes you can just throw your partner in there, zip it all up. [laughter] In terms of the structure of the book again -- I know I'm jumping around here a little. I've always been wondering, when you write two timelines like this and you have such discrete stories going, two at a time -- essentially, you're writing two books at the same time. Then they have to somehow marry at the end. Did you write one of them first and then the other? Did you write them both in tandem? How did you approach the writing process of the story?

Kate: I started off just writing random bits that interested me because I have to coerce myself into writing quite a lot. I really love it when I do it, but I sort of avoid it and I fight it. When I'm writing a book, at the beginning, I write bits that I'm interested in, and so they’ll be all over the place. I actually work with Scrivener quite a lot because I find -- I don't know if you know that program.

Zibby: Yep.

Kate: It means you can move things around much more easily than you could in Word. Often, I'll write sections and then move the order about. With this one particularly, I've written a lot of the more difficult scenes, shall we say, the bits that go in the last two-thirds. The flashbacks are chronological. They see Elodie growing up. I needed more at the beginning. The softer bits, the bits about when she's pregnant and she's still getting on with her ex-husband Greg, a lot of those were actually slotted in and written quite late. If you do that, then you can play around with it. You can also find little patterns. If in a 1993 scene, there's sort of a theme going on, you can maybe have a little hint of that in the flashback that follows that ties those two things together. It might be something to do with the house and a little feature that crops up in the house that reminds the reader that this is the same place. I think that can add to atmosphere and the idea of the place almost being haunted by memories. I do lots and lots of moving about. Even old scenes, I will then rejig and add in different nuance.

One of the main things I had to work on on the edit quite hard was actually to make the more dramatic scenes -- this is hard not to give stuff away with this book. Elodie is a very troubled child. There are scenes where she's being a bad child and kind of scary. Some of that stuff, I had to work on because my editors felt maybe some bits weren’t scary enough. I was actually being too subtle with it, which is interesting to me. I've got a half-brother and sister, but they're quite a lot younger than me. I did grow up more or less as an only child. I was putting in sibling rivalry scenes. My editors were saying, "That's kind of normal," and I was thinking it was really disturbing and dark. I had to up all that stuff but keep it on the right side of -- I didn't want it to get stupid. I didn't want it to become almost farcical and too grim and too gory. With that, ideas of callous and unemotional children who you worry might grow up to be psychopaths, there are a lot of tropes they use again and again. It's very hard to escape them entirely. I didn't just want the neighbor's cat ending up dead. I wanted to do something a little bit different if I could. Working on those bits was fun. I've gone on a massive tangent from your original question.

Zibby: That's all right. I enjoyed listening.

Kate: I don't write in order by any means. I mess around and come back to bits and then slot it all in as a jigsaw at the end.

Zibby: Tell me about how you have to motivate yourself to write. Tell me about that, even though you've decided to be a writer. [laughs]

Kate: I know. I know. I'm a masochist. Yes, I love it. If I've had a good day of writing, I feel so, so calm and lovely and yogic that evening. I think, I'm just going to do that again tomorrow. I'm going to have a proper routine. It all goes out the window. It's really weird. I don't understand that resistance because it's my job. If I couldn't get any more book deals, I'd be distraught. Who knows? They get done. I've written five books. Maybe don't beat myself up too much because they do get done in the end. I never miss deadlines. I was a journalist before I was a writer. I wasn't even on monthly magazine. I was on weekly magazines. That really suited me because I'm quite quick at getting stuff done. I quite like that, doing a little bit of research, write it all up. Then boom, it's done. It's in. It's complete. I can move onto something else. Whereas with a book, it is a kind of, we'll see you in a year. I find that quite tricky to navigate because I've always been a last-minute person. You really can't be a last-minute person if you're writing a ninety thousand-word novel. You'd have a nervous breakdown if you left it until the last month. I have to be consistent. I walk around with a lot of guilt. I'm coming around to thinking that actually a lot of days when I think I'm, we say in Britain skiving, I don't know if that's a word in America, where you're kind of bunking off, these are all really British terms, but when you're shirking and not doing the work you should be doing. Sorry, what was it?

Zibby: Maybe procrastinating where you're putting it off?

Kate: Yeah, that kind of thing. Actually, I think I am doing work in my head. I'm walking the dogs and I'm making little notes on my phone. I do more work than I think I do. Things are percolating all the time, hopefully.

Zibby: We're going to go with that one. Non-stop workaholic. [laughs]

Kate: Yeah, I never stop.

Zibby: Never stop. Slow down already. Come on. So are you already at work on your next novel? What's going on in your time now?

Kate: I'm busy at the moment with stuff for The Heatwave, which is really fun, like this kind of thing. Yes, I've started. I've done about a fifth of a book set in Italy. I was due to go to Italy this summer with my parents, actually, and do some research. I was really looking forward to that. Obviously, that's been postponed. If The Heatwave is about mothers and daughters, this is about marriages. I split up with my husband quite recently, which is totally amicable and nice. I'm forty-two. I think it's an interesting age, early forties, late thirties. You're still very much young enough to start again. Not that being fifty is not young enough to start again, but you know what I mean. You're probably halfway through your life if you're lucky. It's a time where you think, what do I want the rest of my life to look like? Is this enough? It's exploring those kind of things. I keep saying to my ex, it's not going to be about you and me. It's not going to be about you and me. Don't worry. Inevitably, you do draw from your life a bit. I'm really looking forward to that. There's some American characters in that as well who I'm looking forward to writing. Maybe I can do a research trip to the States as well.

Zibby: Totally. Come visit. I had the same thing. I got divorced five years ago. I'm forty-three, so when I was thirty-eight. I'm remarried now. I feel like hitting your fortieth birthday, there's a big shift and recognition you only get one life to live and life's too short to be miserable type of thing, so you might as well. It's still a big step and a big risk. I am really eager, then, to read your next book.

Kate: You might like it. It is a really interesting age. I've got lots of friends who are going through similar things. It's all happened around the same time almost as though it's contagious. Lockdown finished a few friends off as well in terms of their marriages and their relationships. It's just strange times all around, really. I'm hoping I can write something that speaks to people about that stuff. I have written a few books now. I used to write more historical fiction. As I've gone on, I've got more confident and maybe being happier to write stuff that's closer to me. When my mom read The Heatwave for the first time, she said, "This is like you." She didn't mean that Sylvie is me.

Zibby: Uh oh. [laughs]

Kate: Or Elodie is me.

Zibby: Elodie, okay. Good.

Kate: Imagine that. But just that it felt as though it was me speaking. I thought, yeah, that's a confidence thing. I think the next one will be even more that way, maybe. [laughs]

Zibby: That's great. We'll get all the way to maybe a memoir in forty years. Who knows? You'll work your way slowly there. What did you and your ex decide to do about the dogs, just out of curiosity?

Kate: Currently, he's between places at the moment because I've bought him out, so I'm in the cottage. They're with me all the time at the moment. We're going to have a week on and a week off. That will suit me because I like spending some time in London. I've got family there. I live in the Cotswold in the middle of nowhere. I like having that city/country thing. I think that will work well. Currently, I am kind of a single mom to them. It's quite hardcore some days, especially when it's raining and I have to take them out. It's been very nice and very amicable. He's a big support to me, always. As divorces go, it's been a good one.

Zibby: Do you ever feel scared? If I were in a big cottage in the middle of nowhere with just me and my two dogs, I feel like I get scared all the time outside of cities having grown up in New York City. Anytime I'm in any sort of wilderness, I'm like, what's that noise?

Kate: I was like that to begin with. The first night we spent here it was so dark. I couldn't tell if my eyes were open or not. I was born in London. I'm like you. I've got used to it. Luckily, weirdly, it's 1750s, this cottage, but really not very creaky, fortunately. What there is is a lot of spiders at the moment because they're all coming in to mate. Every night I'm having to deal with these huge house spiders. I've really grown up in the last couple of weeks. That bit's not fun, I must say. So fairly soon would quite like another husband.

Zibby: Or perhaps just an exterminator.

Kate: Maybe I'll get a cat or something. They can get the spiders. Apparently, they do.

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?  

Kate: This is also advice to me. Give yourself a break. Don't beat yourself up all the time. I always talk about this because I love Stephen King. He wrote a book, On Writing. It really, actually, intimidated me because he's got this prodigious work ethic. He said if you're not writing two thousand words a day, then what hell are you doing? You're not really a serious writer. You don't, obviously, want it. It really made me not write for ages because I thought I'm just not doing it properly. I would say do what you can. Also, read. Read, read, read. I was a reader way before I was a writer. You will learn what you like and what you don't like and what's effective. If you read a book and you're on the edge of your seat, you can look at why that is. Look at it like a construction. That's the best way to learn, I think. So there you are.

Zibby: I totally agree. If you end up needing to do research on American divorcées, you can just DM or something and we can keep this conversation going.

Kate: That would be great. [laughs]

Zibby: Thank you. Thanks, Kate, for coming on. I absolutely loved this book. I've recommended it a hundred times in everywhere I recommend books. Just the way you write, and I know we talked a lot about structure and all the rest, but your actual writing style is so beautiful. I just loved it. I just loved it. I emailed your publicist in the beginning. I was like, I love this book.

Kate: Thank you. I love that. That's really made my day. Thank you.

Zibby: Good. Have a great day. Stock up on the green shirts for future interviews. [laughs] Good luck with the dogs.

Kate: Thanks so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Have a great day. Buh-bye.

Kate: Bye.

Jane Rosen, ELIZA STARTS A RUMOR

Zibby Owens: Jane L. Rosen is the author of Eliza Starts a Rumor. She's also the author of Nine Women, One Dress. She is a screenwriter and a Huffington Post contributor. She lives in New York City and Fire Island with her husband and three daughters.

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

Jane L. Rosen: Thank you for having me. I'm a big fan. I think you know that because you must see my name at two o'clock every day. It's the governor at eleven and Zibby at two. [laughter]

Zibby: So funny. Eliza Starts A Rumor, let's talk about your book. It's coming out. I'm not sure when I'm releasing this exact transcript, but it's coming out next week when we're talking, which is so exciting. You have a big event coming up with Katie Couric. First of all, how did that happen? That's exciting, at McNally Jackson.

Jane: It's exciting. She's a friend of mine, in all fairness. She's just a very supportive friend. She loves my books and my writing. She writes a lot too. We pass it back and forth. I was just so happy that she agreed to interview me. Very, very cool.

Zibby: Aw, that's awesome. If she wants to be on my podcast too, you just send her my way. [laughs]

Jane: I will. She's writing a biography, so you'll have her soon.

Zibby: Well, there you go. Back to you, Eliza Starts a Rumor, can you please tell listeners what this book is about?

Jane: The book is really about female friendship and about women supporting women. At the basis of it, it's a woman who's an empty nester and runs a bulletin board kind of like the Upper East Side bulletin board or mamas' groups and all these different things that are all over the country. She's feeling a little irrelevant. She has agoraphobia, which is a funny thing. The timing of it is kind of funny with this because we've all been staying home so much. I can almost relate to her even more than I ever did. Anyway, she starts a rumor to liven things up on this bulletin board and basically tumbles into many different people's lives. It's, at turns, funny, and at turns, difficult because it explores all the very common problems that different women have. It's different age groups. One of the women is forty-eight. One is thirty-eight. One is twenty-eight. It's a whole intergenerational female exploration.

Zibby: I don't know anyone who's ever started a rumor, so I don't know, I don't think anybody would be able to relate to this book at all. [laughs] It's funny because gossip as a topic doesn't get discussed that much even though it sort of is a currency among women, if you will.

Jane: It is.

Zibby: You almost trade on that information to become closer. I see my little kindergartener daughter starting to do it. It's an interesting way to enter into different friend groups. I know it's on a site, a bulletin board. Still, the idea of it, of what does gossip do for us? What does it do for women? It's sort of an interesting topic.

Jane: It's a little bit of a thrill. Sometimes you don't want to admit it, but gossiping, it's interesting somehow even though you know you shouldn't be doing it. How many times have you said to someone, "You can't tell anyone this"? You kind of have, right? Then you think they probably do. [laughs] You could see how something spins out of control so quickly.

Zibby: I know. I feel like my memory is not what it used to be. Now I'm like, I can't say anything because I don't remember what are secrets and what are not secrets.

Jane: I told someone something personal the other day. Then I said, "Don't tell anyone." It was about one of my kids. It wasn't even my thing to tell. Her husband walked in three minutes later and she just told him. [laughter] I was like, "Oh, my god, I just told you not to tell anyone." It's definitely a bad idea. This is more of a random kind of thing. She starts a rumor that she doesn't think is true just on the bulletin board to liven things up. It's not talking about someone she knows. It's fun, though. It has its moment of laughter and fun.

Zibby: How did you get the idea for this book?

Jane: You know, it's funny. I was at my last book talk for Nine Women, One Dress. When you do talks like this -- this is the first one for me for this book. When you do these talks, it gets a little boring for yourself if you repeat the same talk over and over again. It was the last talk. I decided to just wing it and change things up a bit. I even gave out some little juicy tidbits about the book, like that something really maybe was kind of true in it. As a joke I said, "It's like these moms' bulletin boards where you can say anything you want and people act like it's not on the internet and no one's going to repeat it." Have you noticed that?

Zibby: It's so true.

Jane: It's hysterical. They’ll just say anything. Anything goes. But of course, everyone else is reading it. Anyway, I started talking about it. All the women -- it was in New Jersey. They were like, "We belong to this one. We belong to that one. They say this. They say that." All of a sudden, I'm like, that's my next book, while I was up on the podium speaking. I wrote notes the whole way home.

Zibby: Are you in any message groups yourself?

Jane: Now I am, of course, because --

Zibby: -- You had to research, right?

Jane: Yes. I tried so hard never to steal even one line from any of them because I just didn't want to be pillaging. I'm in the Upper East Side one. I live downtown, but I brought my kids up on the Upper East Side. I'm in What Would Virginia Woolf Do? which is really how I started getting into this. Have you ever seen that one?

Zibby: No.

Jane: It's kind of neat. It's like thirty thousand women. They just took it offline and made it into something else that you belong to. I'm in a few of them mostly because of this. The LA Mommies are mentioned in the book. They're doing a book club with me over the summer, which is fun, and some other places like Moms Behaving Badly. People are just into it.

Zibby: The first time I joined a message group was when I was pregnant with twins. Now this is over thirteen years ago. The amount of information and the pace at which people are sharing, it's really unbelievable. It's like some people are just sitting there all day doing it. It's pretty astounding.

Jane: Also, you can ask something even in the middle of the night. If you have something wrong, your son had a rash, I feel like you could say, "What is this rash?" and then sixteen women say, "It's impetigo. It's this. It's that." People are insomniacs. You can just get any answer to anything.

Zibby: It's true. It's like a twenty-four-hour community-supported help line.

Jane: Yes, but there was a big controversy on the Upper East Side one recently.

Zibby: I heard that. I haven't taken the time to dig deep into what exactly happened.

Jane: It was about a moderator being -- they wanted to add a black moderator and make things more equal. It was a whole argument with the current -- I don't know. I really don't pay that much attention to it now because I'm onto my next book. [laughs] It's an interesting concept. It really is.

Zibby: You obviously did research by going into different message groups. What else was part of the process of writing Eliza Starts A Rumor?

Jane: There are some serious things touched upon in the book, and I had to really research that. The main character, Eliza -- this is not really giving anything away because right at the beginning you find out she's agoraphobic. The reason why she is agoraphobic comes out as the book goes along, so I don't want [indiscernible]. I did a lot of research, just women going through different things and then how they reacted and how it carries with them. There's a whole Me Too section, Me Too moment of the book. How would it feel if your husband was accused of Me Too kind of thing? That took a lot of research. There's a whole cheating thing also. I researched that, which is funny because when you research something like cheating, every time you turn on your computer, it's like, do you want to spy on your spouse? Ten times that he's cheating. If anyone was to look at my computer, they'd be like, this poor woman's husband's awful. My husband's wonderful. The internet thinks he's awful.

Zibby: [laughs] How long did it take to write? Where did you go to write it? Did you write at home? Do you like to go out to write? How did it differ from your last book? How did you approach that one versus this one?

Jane: My last book was really complicated because it had like seventeen different narrators. It was about this dress. Let's say over a four-month period, I literally had to put where the dress was on a calendar because it was too confusing. I kept on, where's the dress now? I kept on losing it. This was a lot easier for me to write. It wasn't all these different voices. It kind of just came right out of me, the first draft, only like four months, really. I write mostly at home in the mornings very early. Writing first thing in the morning, to me, is the best. My brain is clear. I'm not yet thinking about the to-do list and all of that. I try and do that for as long as I can. Then basically, I'll go out, do whatever it is I have to do, do errands. Then in the afternoon, maybe I'll walk into -- I live in New York City, so I'll go into a different coffee shop just to get out a little. If not, I hate to say it, I could stay in my bed and write for three straight days. [laughs] That's not a healthy situation.

Zibby: There's no lack of material just going out the door in the city.

Jane: Yeah. You pay attention on the subway, the subway's a plethora of material.

Zibby: I read an interview you did a while back where it seemed like the title of the book was actually going to be The Hudson Valley Women's Community Board. I hope I got that right.

Jane: Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board.

Zibby: Bulletin board, sorry. Tell me about changing the title and how that all came about.

Jane: I have a new publisher from last time, a new editor, a new agent, new everything. They called me one day. I was at lunch with my friends from college. Maybe it was my agent that called me. She's like, "They want to change the title to Eliza Starts A Rumor." I always take a little while to get used to things. At first, I was like, what? I couldn't believe it. Of course, it's up to you. I used to be a screenwriter. When you're a screenwriter, nothing is up to you. They could change the title to Four Women Go to Mars, and I'd have to be like, okay. [laughter] You could say no, but I thought, they're so much smarter than me about this. If they think that this is the right idea, I'm just going to go with what they think. I did. Then within a week or two, I was like, you know what, this title's much better. It's not limited, really. It's interesting. It focuses on Eliza who really is the main character even though there are three other women and one man that are pretty much -- you follow their stories as well. They changed the name, and I was fine with it, and the cover. Everything changed.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Tell me about your screenwriting and how you got started in that.

Jane: I had an idea for a script. This is a really good story because it means anybody could do this. Anyone could find time to read. You could also find time to write. I had an idea. My kids were younger. I signed up for this Gotham Writers Workshop, screenwriting. I think it was Eight Weeks to Being a Screenwriter or something. I went one night a week, no big deal. I wrote this script. It was called Confessions of a Dog Owner. I write the script. Fast-forward a couple of months and a lot back and forth and stress -- I don't want to say the name. I'll say it. Miramax bought the script. It was crazy to write your first script and sell it to you-know-who. I don't want to say his name.

Zibby: You can say his name. It's okay.

Jane: Harvey Weinstein. [laughs] It was pretty exciting. There was a lot of rewrites and all of that. As with many scripts, it never got made. I was writing screenwriting for a long time. I loved it. I love the visualization of everything. I love writing that way. I wanted my stories to be heard, so I wrote Nine Women, One Dress kind of thinking I'll write the book and maybe it'll be made into a movie. Hallmark has optioned it, so we'll see.

Zibby: That’s great.

Jane: Even now, I write very visually like a screenwriter somewhat.

Zibby: That always helps in propelling the narrative forward when you can see it all in your head. That's great. And with dialogue, of course.

Jane: Yes, the dialogue. They're just very different crafts, though. Everyone in screenwriting, they would say something to me like, "Could you have them meet when they're young?" the two main characters. I'll go, okay, and I'll rewrite the whole thing with them meeting while they were young. Come back with the next draft however many weeks later. They read the whole thing. They come back to me. There's like six people working on a movie. They're like, "Could you have them not meet when they're young?" I'm like, okay, and then redo it. [laughs] It's a crazy thing. With the editing in the book world, it's just been -- I love it. I love editing. I loved my last editor and this editor. It's just a great collaboration.

Zibby: Did you always love to write? Is this something that you've loved to do your entire life? Is it something that's come more recently?

Jane: When I was a little kid, like sixth grade, that age, I loved to write. I got a lot of attention for it. In elementary school and stuff, they would bring my work around. Then I don't know what happened. I just kind of lost my way with it. I guess I was more interested in finding a job that I could support myself and live on my own in New York City and the whole thing. I didn't major in that. I didn't pursue it. I went into the [indiscernible] center, which was very helpful with Nine Women, One Dress. Then when I had kids and I was home with them, I started writing again. I wrote children's books. Then I broke into the screenwriting thing. There was definitely a big gap. I wish I went to college and studied English and writing and all of that, but you don't know, right?

Zibby: No. You can't do it again. This is the way it happened.

Jane: No one tells you. I look at my kids and say, "You're good at this. You're good at that." It doesn't mean they're going to end up doing it. I feel like my mother was just like -- she didn't pay any attention to my school or anything. She was just like, "Great, you're graduating. Great, you got into college." It's just different now.

Zibby: That's funny. Are you working on anything new?

Jane: Yes, I am. It doesn't have a title yet. I want to wait. I don't want to --

Zibby: -- You don't want to jinx it?

Jane: No. [laughter] It'll come out, not next summer, but the summer after. It's with Berkeley. It's all set. It's happening.

Zibby: Oh, you already sold it and everything. That's great. Congratulations.

Jane: It's fun. It's more of a romance. There's romance in Eliza Starts A Rumor, but just a small part of it.

Zibby: Interesting. Having had the success that you've had, what advice do you have to aspiring authors?

Jane: I would say just keep writing. I didn't publish my book until I was fifty. If I would've given up -- sometimes I felt like, this is ridiculous. It's almost embarrassing. You're writing and writing, and nothing's really happening. I sold things. I wrote a bunch of scripts. Just don't give up. I think that's the main thing. Just keep writing and don't give up. Eventually, something's going to stick. When the first thing gets turned down, write something else. Put it down. Start with something else. Go in different directions. That's my advice. Congratulations to you too. Don't you have a children's book that's out?

Zibby: I did, yeah.

Jane: That's so exciting.

Zibby: It feels kind of silly because I've been trying to write a novel for two and a half years. Then my children's book sells. Life is weird. [laughs]

Jane: I don't think it's that silly. I wrote children's books first years ago. Now we're sending them around. I sent them to everybody back then. So mine was the opposite. It doesn't matter.

Zibby: No, I'm thrilled, though. I am thrilled. It'll be great. I'm excited for that to happen. It feels very far away. Awesome. Thank you, Jane. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for telling us more about Eliza Starts A Rumor. Now I will think of you and hold my tongue for gossiping, a little more I think. [laughs] No, I'm kidding. There's hardly anything that happens.

Jane: If you don't publish it on the internet, you would probably be okay. That was where she really went wrong.

Zibby: I feel like the gossip also, there's nothing even to talk about. What happens? It's not like there's even a group anymore. We're all so spread out.

Jane: There's nothing to gossip about now. What are you going to say?

Zibby: Exactly. There's nothing.

Jane: My milk expired. [laughs] There's nothing to say. It's like Groundhog Day now.

Zibby: I know. It's so true. Anyway, this was really fun. I'm glad we finally got to talk.

Jane: Me too. Thank you so much.

Zibby: I'm excited for you and your book. It's really cool.

Jane: Thank you.

Zibby: Thanks, Jane.

Jane: See you at two o'clock. [laughter]

Zibby: Okay. Bye.

Jane: Bye.