Nicholas Sparks, THE RETURN

Zibby Owens: Hi. How are you?

Nicholas Sparks: I'm doing fantastic. Yourself?

Zibby: I'm good. Thank you.

Nicholas: Where are you?

Zibby: I'm in New York. This is my library/home office.

Nicholas: Wow. Is this in your apartment?

Zibby: It's in my apartment, yes.

Nicholas: I love it. I love all the books. I have books behind me too.

Zibby: I see that. Yours look awesome. I like how you have the little cages in case they're going to run away and escape.

Nicholas: All the books that you see here are actually my books, but they're my books in all sorts of different languages. Of course, I have, I don't know how many, twenty-plus or whatever, and they’ve all been translated a lot of times. Every book you see is actually mine, not that I can read them because they're in foreign languages.

Zibby: [laughs] That's so cool. I love that. Wow. How neat to have a library all of your own writing. Very inspiring. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." This is such an honor to talk to you. I've read so many of your books. The Return is so great. I've been reading it every night as my kids are going to bed. It's fantastic. Thank you for all the content that you've put out into world.

Nicholas: You're welcome.

Zibby: Can you tell listeners who aren't familiar yet with The Return, what inspired you to write this book? What was really the main premise of it for you?

Nicholas: The initial thought for the novel -- you have to have an initial thought. I wanted to do a story with a theme of love and mystery. I hadn’t done that for a long time. The last time I did that I think was in a novel called A Bend in the Road. I've written other themes since then. I've done epic love like The Longest Ride or Love and Danger, like The Guardian and Safe Haven. I've done everlasting love in Every Breath. This time, I wanted to go back to love and mystery. Of course, I wanted to make it as different as I could than my previous attempt. Once you start with that, your next question is, what's the mystery? I realized, what if there's a guy and his grandfather died and his grandfather said some things that just didn't make sense? That, of course, leads to, well, who is this person? Once you have that down, the primary element I wanted to explore was the concept of the aftermath of trauma and how people react when something terrible happens in their own life. The characters in this novel, without giving things away, have all experienced a trauma. They all react in different ways while trying to do the best they can. I wanted to explore that, perhaps, because like everyone, I've had trauma in my own life. I think it's part of the universal human experience. That makes it something that everyone can relate to. As always, I did my best to create characters who, even if they weren’t necessarily doing what you would have done, you understand why they're doing what they're doing. All of those two themes, the aftermath of trauma and a little mystery, came together. Little by little, the story came into place.

Zibby: Wow. I feel like your main character here, though, has had more trauma than most. First of all, everything with his experience being a surgeon in the medical hospital and the PTSD that you write so well about in the story, but also his family history, it's one thing after another. The poor guy, it's amazing he can even get out of bed in the morning. It's great to then explore because you do have to get out of bed. No matter how much baggage you have, the days always keep coming, if you're lucky. How do you deal with that? How do you put one foot in front of the other when you've lost your ear and just all this stuff?

Nicholas: He, of course, didn't hop up the next day. That's part of his journey. First, he got really good at Grand Theft Auto. [laughs]

Zibby: Yes, I liked that.

Nicholas: He got really good at Grand Theft Auto and drank too much until his girlfriend left him. Then he said, hmm, maybe I better start changing things.

Zibby: I was like, should I tell my son who's obsessed with GTA that it's actually in a book that I'm reading? I don't know. [laughs]

Nicholas: Of course. He'll say, "See Mom, it's helpful. It's therapeutic."

Zibby: Exactly. I can't give him any more excuses to play video games, so I don't think I'm going to bring it up. Actually, one thing that I found so interesting in your book that I feel like doesn't come up as often, I was trying to rack my brain for other examples, is really exploring that relationship between a man and his own therapy. I feel like it happens a lot with women. You hear of women and their therapists. It's just not as common. The relationship between Bowen and Trevor, it really courses throughout the book and deepened your understanding of Trevor and where he was coming from and even gave the reader some good, helpful, therapeutic tips for your life. Tell me about developing that relationship in the story.

Nicholas: Of course, there still is a stigma with mental health. There are those who, they have an automatic negative view toward therapy. Part of me wants to blow up that kind of thinking because I think that for some people in certain situations therapy can be very beneficial. I think that a lot of people who don't believe in the concept of therapy, or believe in it as long as it's not them because they're fine, don't necessarily understand the evolution of therapy. Really, really long story short, Sigmund Freud started psychoanalysis, and this is what most people think that a lot of therapy is. It's someone laying on the couch and talking about their dreams and this and that. That was very prominent for a long time. That's what therapy was. Eventually, therapists and patients learned that knowing the root cause of something doesn't necessarily help you change it. I know the root cause of why I eat too much ice cream and that's why I gain weight. Here's why. It tastes good. Knowing the reason why won't necessarily help you. A lot of therapy has changed from trying to understand why to what you do. What can you do in that instant when you have an urge for ice cream? Of course, you can substitute any issue that someone's having. What can I do if I get angry? What can I do if my hands begin to shake, as in the case of Trevor?

There's things you can do. It's cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy. They give you a list. Let's do some certain things in those moments. Then rest of your life, let's try to be as healthy as you possibly can. You exercise. You eat right. It's all the advice your mother gave you: exercise, eat right, sleep right, avoid mood-altering substances to a great extent. Then in these moments, what can you do when you get angry? I can turn and walk away. I can try to reframe the situation. There's things you do in that moment. That's really what I wanted to explore. It's to give an idea for those who haven't had therapy or who don't know what it is or have a negative view of it, why it can be so beneficial. Trevor knows why he's messed up. He needs to know what to do to not be angry at a Home Depot when someone cuts him off in line. He has to know what to do when his hands begin to shake. That's really the therapy that he's most interested in because doing the right thing in situations that are challenging leads you to becoming a very healthy version of yourself.

Zibby: That's true. I think I need to remember that as I look in the freezer at night. [laughs]

Nicholas: Look for the ice cream. Knowing why you want it, that's not going to help.

Zibby: It doesn't help at all. I want it because I just want it. Now I'm going to have it. Or because I'm angry. When you were listing the behaviors that anger should elicit, I guess eating is not really the best coping mechanism. I'll leave that for somebody else's therapy. It's so funny you say this too because I know it's so dependent on where in the country you live or who you're surrounded by, how people feel about therapy and all the different views. I was a psychology major. I'm from New York City. Therapy here is just what you do. It's so common. I know there are so many other places and even different religions or different cultures where it's just not as accepted. It's great to have a book like this which so normalizes it and explains it clearly and carefully and calmly and outlines all the benefits. That's awesome.

Nicholas: Thank you.

Zibby: I read about how your mother is really responsible for all of your success by getting you to start writing at a very early age. You were dabbling in all sorts of other professions at that time. You were so young, but didn't really see this coming, necessarily, for yourself. Can you tell me a little more about getting your start and how you started in pharmaceutical sales and selling dental devices or whatever you were doing and ended up being you?

Nicholas: My mom originally got me into writing. I was nineteen. At that time, I was very into track and field. I was very competitive. I was on scholarship. It was my world. I had dreams of being an Olympic gold medalist. That's all I wanted. I got injured during my freshman year. Over the summer, I was just miserable. I couldn't train. I had all this excess energy. I was imagining all my competitors getting better. I was falling behind. It was emotionally, mentally, physically -- I was just not in my right head. My mom knew it. She said, "Look, don't just pout. Do something." I said, "What?" She said, "I don't know. Go write a book." So I did. I wrote a novel. I was nineteen. It took me about six weeks. It was terrible. I'm not being false modesty there. It was a nineteen-year-old writing his very first novel and taking six weeks to do it. I learned that I liked stories. I, of course, never thought I could make a living at it. Finish up college, get my degree, don't get a job right away, so I write a second novel. That never gets published. I say, what am I going to do? I experiment with some different jobs for a while, find out what's calling me, what's speaking to me. Then when I was twenty-eight, I kind of had an early midlife crisis and said, what can I do in the evening while keeping my job? I had bills and things. I sat down and wrote The Notebook. It's kind of like a start and a stop, and then a start and then a stop, and then a start, and here I am.

Zibby: Wow. I heard that -- I shouldn't say I heard. I read that an agent just found it in their slush pile and brought it to the top and that's how you got discovered.

Nicholas: Yeah, pretty much. I sent letters out to a bunch of agencies. Someone pulled it out of the non-solicited query pile and said, "Hey, take a look at this." That agent read the letter, asked for my book, read it in a couple of days. Her name is Theresa Park. She's still my agent to this day.

Zibby: Wow, I love that. That's so encouraging, too, for all the people who submit blindly that it can happen. It can be a smash hit and all the rest. You mentioned earlier that your own trauma sort of informs your writing. I read that your little sister died of a brain tumor. I'm so sorry to have heard that. Is that one of the things that motivates your writing? If so, I was hoping maybe you could speak to that if you feel comfortable.

Nicholas: There was a period there of about seven years where there was one loss after another. My mother died in a horseback riding accident. My father died in a car accident. Meanwhile, my sister's having this brain tumor. Then she eventually passes away. This was all in a very brief period.

Zibby: I'm so sorry.

Nicholas: Certainly, when you get hit with these traumas, you go through it as best you can. I had children. I had bills. I still had responsibilities. It was challenging. I found that I reacted differently to each of these traumas because of my age, because of where I was, because of the addition of additional responsibilities. They certainly inform my writing, particularly when I write about grief or loss or trauma such as in The Rescue. That was one of the big things, as I mentioned earlier, that I really wanted to explore. You've got three characters that have trauma. They all react in different ways just as I reacted in three different ways after each of my own traumas. In each of those cases, even though I reacted differently, I was just trying to do my best at that time to negotiate the cavalcade of emotion that I was feeling while putting one step in front of the other. It certainly informs my writing. It's led to direct inspiration. Message in a Bottle was directly inspired by my father after the death of my mother. Walk to Remember was inspired by my sister. It's informed or inspired specific stories. At the same time, there's elements there that have woven their way into each and every one of my novels as well.

Zibby: I'm so sorry about all that you've been through. How, as a dad, do you talk about loss and grief to your own kids? How do you help them make sense of the things that have happened in your family?

Nicholas: It's a difficult question to answer. Even though my kids, they range in age from twenty-eight to eighteen, they’ve suffered loss too, not necessarily their parents or their siblings like me. In twenty-eight years, we've lost pets. They’ve had friends who've passed away unexpectedly. In the end, I think the most important thing you can do is to validate their feelings. You listen to them. You're empathetic to them. You're with them in that moment. Then you don't necessarily try to help. You validate. Someone says, "I feel so sad. I can't stop crying." You don't say, "Well, death is a part of life." It's not going to help them. What you do is say, "I know you do. I have no doubt that it feels absolutely awful. Part of you might wonder if you'll ever stop crying." Anyone will respond to that, "Yeah, that's how I feel." What that does is it opens up the ability to communicate on a deeper level. The most important thing is to validate. You say, "Look, I get it. I've been through it. It's the hardest thing ever." That's whether it's children or whether it's friends or whether it's siblings or whether it's anyone. When someone is hurting, empathy, active listening, and then really responding to what specifically they're saying and not trying to fix it, just letting them know you fully understand what they're going through.

Zibby: You should've been a therapist. [laughter]

Nicholas: Perhaps. I've had a lot of children.

Zibby: You've done fine for yourself. Not to say this was not the right career for you. It's fine, but I'm just saying. You obviously have a gift in this area as well. It's a fallback career.

Nicholas: Fallback, right. I'm hopeful some of that went through The Return.

Zibby: Absolutely. When you write, what is your writing process like? How long does each book usually take you? Where do you like to write? Is it somewhere else in that room with the beautiful books?

Nicholas: Yeah, I write here. I write in the kitchen. I write in another room near the kitchen. Then I have a second office off the gym, much more informal. I sometimes write there. I can write anywhere. I can write on airplanes, in hotel rooms, and I have. Just generally, I write at home because I'm at home a lot. I pick a spot based on my mood, essentially. Novels take about six months to write and then probably another ten weeks to edit. Much of that ten weeks is not hovering over the keyboard. You send it up to them. Then they take two and a half, three weeks, and then they send back suggested changes. You work really hard for a week. Then you send it up again. You wait another three weeks. Then you make those changes. It follows that. Then after that, you're a good chunk into the year. The rest of the time is spent on tour and then conceiving the next novel. Then you start all over again.

Zibby: How has the pandemic been, your first tour throughout this new world that we're in?

Nicholas: It will certainly be a different tour than I've done in the past. Of course, we're very concerned about safety. I certainly don't want to do things that would make people feel exposed. There's a lot of feelings and very few people who want to get this thing. What can we do? Even though I will be going out and I think it's important to support local bookstores and things like that, it's all designed with safety in mind. We'll see how it goes. I think I'm going to six or seven different bookstores. We're limiting the lines. Not that we're limiting people who can get signed books, but they're ticketed. Only some people come then. It's spread throughout the day. I sign the books in advance. If we take a picture, there's Plexiglas between us, everything you have to do so that people will feel safe. That's the most important thing on this tour, is to do it in the safest way possible.

Zibby: How about the last six months while the pandemic has been raging? Have you been working on new books during this time?

Nicholas: Yeah, I finished another novel. It's now in the editing process. I've done that. I've started another novel. Just about done with that one as well. Workwise, it's been fairly productive. Like everyone, COVID has hit home. My daughter had it. She went through that whole experience. It's affected me as much as it's affected anyone, very limited. I've been largely sheltering at home. On the plus side, if there is one, I've worked from home for years. It was my normal thing. That part has not changed.

Zibby: You've written dozens of books. How do you keep coming up with new characters, new plotlines? You're like, I just wrote another novel. It sounds so causal for you. Whereas some people, it takes them their whole lives to come up with one novel. How does it work for you? Is it just the engine and once you go, the creativity keeps going? How does it work for you?

Nicholas: It was interesting. When I first started in 1996, that's what you were supposed to do. The Notebook was published in 1996. At that time, authors wrote a book a year. If you wanted to be a successful author, you had to figure it out. It's a little bit different now. Authors, whether you're Dan Brown or you're Gillian Flynn or Dennis Lehane, for instance, all excellent, excellent writers, and I love their work, they don't necessarily put out a novel a year. Back when I was starting, that's what you had to do. I figured that's the only way to do it. You get in the habit of doing that, and so I've done that. Once you reach this stage, my goal is always the same as it has been since the very beginning, which is to write the best book possible, one that feels original to the reader, one that strikes them as something entirely new that they haven't read before even while knowing it'll be set in North Carolina, even while knowing there's romantic elements.

How on earth do you make it different? I think about, what haven't I done? What haven't I done recently? We talked about the theme of mystery. Hadn’t done that in a long time. That was one of the original thoughts in this book. Let me have a mystery that leads to all sorts of questions. What is the mystery? Then I said, what really haven't I explored? Three different reactions to trauma, brand-new idea, nothing I've ever written about before. I've done it with individual characters, but not every character in that novel. I said, oh, okay, so here's something I haven't done in a long time, something I have never done before. This is all new. This is all original. Then from there, you just keep asking yourself what-if questions regarding, what if the character's fifty? What if the character's forty? What if the character's thirty? Then what happens to the story? What is the mystery? What if this? What if that? What if this? Then you just keep walking all the way through until the story forms in your mind and you're ready to begin writing.

Zibby: Actually, I found myself getting a bit impatient really wanting to know what the backstory was for Natalie and why she was looking sad all the time. I was like, what is going on with her? When are we finding out? I can't wait to know anymore. All of them, actually, but hers in particular. What types of books do you like to read in your spare time?

Nicholas: [Audio cuts outs] traditional best sellers. You have your classics. You have foreign literature. You have award-winning literature, different styles, poetry. I read that. That's probably about sixty percent of what I read. The other forty percent is nonfiction. I find that my own interests are drawn toward histories, and just obscure histories generally. I don't want big sweeping things. I do read those. I might read a book like Salt. It's the history of salt. Or Fermat's Enigma; it's basically the story of math or something like that. I'm also drawn toward biographies of people long since dead, and hardly ever political figures. So histories, biographies, a lot of sociology, books by Jon Krakauer, things like that, whether it's Missoula which discussed date rape on college campuses and the reality. It was set in Missoula, Montana. Modern sociology as well, I'm very interested in that.

Zibby: I know so many of your books have been made into movies. How are you feeling about the movie aspect of your work? Do you see it all cinematically as you're writing it? Do you really enjoy the adaptions of all the stories? What's your general takeaway from that element of your writing?

Nicholas: I always try to conceive a novel with the idea that it will be both a novel and a film. Then when I write, I only think about the novel. Then after the novel is written, I only think about the film. It's important to understand that the nature of Hollywood has been changing over the last ten years. International markets are much larger than they used to be for the box office. Streaming has become much more evident. Novels are now being adapted into limited series or extended series. There's a lot of changes. Then of course, in comes COVID-19. People aren't sure when and where they can start filming. There's challenges associated with that. For right now, it's a little tricky to navigate. We'll see what happens.

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

Nicholas: The best advice is to read a lot. One of the standard jokes that I ever say when I speak in front of a crowd and get asked this question is -- they say, what advice do you have for aspiring writers? I say, I'll tell you what helped me. When I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV. [laughs] I mean that. There's things you can learn from television. There's things you can learn from film. There's things you can learn from novels. I certainly was a very avid reader. If you watch television, you'll note that particularly every show you watch -- I'm talking more about network television, but even on streaming. It's just slightly different. They're really good at ending before the commercial or at the end of the show with a bit of a cliffhanger that makes you want to go and see what happens next. Of course, anyone familiar with my writing, I try to make it almost impossible to stop reading at the end of a chapter because you have to know what happens next. Where do you learn that? You learn that more in television and film than you would, for instance, in a classic novel by Flaubert or someone like that, or Proust. Read. Understand story. Stories can be understood.

Then I think the best thing is to figure out what you really want to write. There's a difference. Do I want to write something that may or may not get published? That's a different standard than, I want to write something that will a hundred percent be published; which is a different standard than, I want something that's going to be a best seller; which is a different standard than, I want to be wonderfully, critically reviewed in The New York Times and on NPR or things like that. They're all different, so to be clear on what you intend to write. Then finally, if you're a young writer, whatever you do, don't write about a young character. Everyone says write what you know, but the thing that happens when you're young is that you think all of your thoughts are original. Really, everyone's had them before. For my first novel, The Notebook, my main character was eighty years old.

Zibby: Wow. This has been a particularly great episode for my son because now in addition to GTA and playing video games you have said that watching TV is really good for you. [laughter] I guess I'm going to have to play it for him. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing your personal history and for The Return, which was so great. Thank you.

Nicholas: Thank you very much.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Nicholas: You too.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Nicholas: Bye.

Amy Schmidt, CANNONBALL!

Sara Schaefer, GRAND

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

Sara Schaefer: Thanks.

Zibby: I am really excited to discuss your memoir, Grand. I also took a whitewater rafting trip when I was younger with my family. Could you tell everybody listening what your book is about? Then what inspired you to even write a memoir?

Sara: Grand is an inward and outward journey. For my fortieth birthday, I went on a whitewater rafting trip in the Grand Canyon with my sister. It was an eight-day, two hundred miles, very rugged outdoor adventure. In the book, I chronicle the trip while also remembering basically what led me to the point of getting on that raft in that river from childhood with stories all the way up to that moment. I always knew I wanted to write a book from a very young age. Before I even realized I wanted to be a comedian or anything else, I thought, I want to write a book. This book in particular came about with the idea of, there's a lot of stories from my life that I've never shared publicly before that felt more intimate and special to me and difficult that weren’t really working yet, I hadn’t even really tried to talk about on stage as a standup, wasn't really the place for it. Writing this book came from wanting to share that part of my life and some of my stories in a more in-depth, intimate way and a little more sincerity to it than what I do on stage which is obviously trying to get as many laughs as possible. This book, I had room to breathe and be more emotionally vulnerable in a way that I don't do on stage. That's kind of the short of it.

Zibby: Was it cathartic for you to write about those times?

Sara: Oh, yeah. First, the book was going to be kind of centering around my moral anxiety which I do talk about in the book of, am I good person or am I a bad person? That's sort of my life's quest, is to figure out if I'm good or bad. Then much later in life, I realized that was such a flawed prison I had put myself in because no one is all good or bad. How did I get to be that way and the journey of my life up to now, it's a pretty crazy story about my dad and my whole life changing at age twelve, my whole family's life changing, and a journey of redemption, my dad coming forward with some pretty scandalous news and our entire status in our hometown changing, our whole lives turned upside. I, at a young age, witnessed my own parents changing their lives, taking huge risks personally, and repairing the damage, and forgiveness. All those things were drilled into me, but I was too young to fully understand it. The way I described it in the book is it was like a bone healing out of place in me of being extremely afraid of being morally wrong. I thought after the stuff happened with my dad, we were now on the right course. We were bad. Now we're good. Before was bad. Present is good. That set me up for a real shit show later on. [laughter] Excuse my language.

Zibby: The stuff with your dad, I feel like you wrote about it in such detail that we were right there with you. You had such a sense of shame over what happened and also almost detached amusement in a way. Not amusement, but like, huh, look at what's happened to my family. Look at that. How about that? How about this guy in school telling me my dad's a thief? How about that? It was at a reserve, almost.

Sara: Go back because you froze for a second.

Zibby: Oh, sorry. I was rambling. I don't even know what I was saying. I'll start again. One thing I noticed when you were talking about your dad is that you wrote about it with such clear detail and all those little memories and the day and them sitting you down and then filling in backstory that you learned later and the emotion and the uncertainty, really. Yet you also took this sort of detached view of it like you were an outside looking in, which I though was such an interesting angle. Just tell me a little more about being at that age and going through something that you weren’t sure what to make of it. Your church background, I feel like, was the frame of reference you were using for everything.

Sara: I was definitely very keen on what I was learning and discovering at church which was this concept of Christ being a source of unconditional love in all of your flawed, complicated glory. Forgiveness is such a tenet of the Christianity that I was taught, and redemption and all those things, and baptism. You're clean now. Those things just crystalized in me like, oh, this is the answer. Church was where we were welcomed after all this. My dad and my mom lost a lot of their friends and their status in our town. Certain people took us in emotionally. A lot of those people existed at my church. They are still people that I am in touch with and have been mentors to me and to my whole family. That community was crucial at that time. It set us on a path of staying together as a family and learning to get through it as opposed to running away or disappearing or hiding. We just had to get through it.

I was twelve, though. I was a teenager. I didn't want my parents anywhere near me. I was like, we solved it. We're good. Moving on. I didn't want to dwell on it because I didn't have the emotional capacity as a twelve-year-old to really get into it. It wasn't until years and years later, and a lot of it during writing this book because I discovered so much that I had never known talking to my father -- we spent a lot of time talking. I'd never heard so many of the things that happened. We went into real detail about everything. It was really heartbreaking not being able to talk to my mom in this process. That was one of the hardest parts of writing the book, was not being able to ask her questions. It comes in phases. Forgiveness is not a simple -- I don't trust people that go, "I forgave you. I'm not mad," right after something really bad has happened. I don't trust that because I know that feelings change over time. Instant forgiveness is really not complete. It is a process. People's feelings can change. My journey with my -- I use the word journey way too much when I talk about this book. [laughs]

Zibby: It's okay.

Sara: But that's what it is. The voyage of my relationship with my father has been the unexpected part of this. I wanted to write so much about my mom. I love and miss her so much. She was such an incredible person. I feel like I did a good job here, but it was just scratching the surface. I would love to write more about her and explore her story more. I didn't expect so much healing and discovery to happen with my father, which was such a gift of being able to do this, that he trusted me enough to share with me and let me share with others.

Zibby: That's amazing. It's great to be able to reconceptualize things that have happened. It's not always so clear. Not to go back into your right and wrong thing, good and bad, or whatever dichotomy. If you do something that you shouldn't, it doesn't make you, necessarily, a bad person.

Sara: No. Right. We always joke -- there was that show Bloodline. The main character says, we're not bad people, but we did a bad thing. My family uses that line sometimes as a joke. It's been tough because I'm someone who's naturally, and I got this from my mom, as being really empathetic to others. I'm lucky that I was taught empathy, and especially after all that happened. My mom working with house-less people in our town and really going there, she became dedicated to a life of service after all this happened. She felt called. I couldn't ask her for this, was she thinking, this is how I make up for -- my mom didn't do anything wrong, but she felt she was part of it in that she blindly followed what my dad did. I would love to talk to her about it now just to revisit. We entered into a life of service as a family. I was taught to see, the way my mom would describe it is that she saw god in everyone she met. To serve someone, the lowest most vulnerable person in your community, is to serve god. That was how she viewed it.

That was put into me, a lot of lessons about empathy and not to assume you know -- people say empathy is always walking in someone else's shoes. You'll never really be able to walk in someone else's shoes. Recognizing that first is the first step towards empathy, is knowing you can't assume what's right for someone else, what their experience is like, but you can try to learn and listen and let them tell you. My mom was very good at that. She wanted to meet a need. She never wanted to tell others what was going to fix their life. She was like, what is it that you need? Then she would try to meet that need. I thought that that was so beautiful. It has led me to sometimes be unable to recognize actually really bad people at times. I'm like, everyone has a story. Everyone has a reason for doing things. Then I look at someone, perhaps a certain politician, we're not naming names, or a really bad person in my life who's hurting me over and over again, it sometimes has been hard for me to back off of that and go, sometimes you've just got to let somebody go. They're just hurting you. You'll never fix or save or meet their need. That was a rambling answer.

Zibby: It's such good advice. The only tragedy to that advice is I feel like everyone has to learn it themselves anyway. It's one of those pieces that you learn through experience. Yet even if I tell my best friend or my daughter or somebody, they’ll be like, okay, yeah, but it's not going to stop them from doing the same mistakes.

Sara: They have to learn it from --

Zibby: -- You have to learn it.

Sara: In the book, I talked about that. I think that's a good story, a good connection to the relationship I have with my little sister of us protecting each other and wanting to fix things for the other. You see that in the book happen in the Grand Canyon, of our own little personal battles that we were having and not be able to help the other one fix it. You can support. You can listen and be there. That's what you need to be, but you can't force your way onto someone else's way. I would do this. Well, that's not necessarily what's right for them or their way of doing things.

Zibby: It's so true. I loved also when you had the five thousand staples, the box of staples, and you decided that by the time they were empty you had to have achieved something in your wish-list career of being a comedian. Then you finished the box and you were like, I better get out of here, basically. [laughs] Tell me about that.

Sara: I used to have a day job, my job when I moved to New York City to try and become a comedian. I didn't know at all how to do it. I'd never even seen standup comedy in person before. I'd only seen it on TV. I had no idea what I was doing. I go to New York. I'm like, I'm going to be a comedian. It's going to take six months. I didn't know anything. I got a day job because I didn't have any money. I had to support myself. New York is very expensive. I remember thinking when I moved there that the salary that I was offered for my job was so much money. I was like, I'm rich. I had no idea that it was not enough.

Zibby: Yeah, that's your subway fare. There you go. [laughs]

Sara: Barely enough to live off of. Anyway, I was at this boring law firm job. My days were just spent in spreadsheets and with a really gross kind of creepy boss. All my early comedy was office humor because that was my life. It actually ended up being a great experience to write about in my early days of comedy because I didn't know what to write about. I thought, I'll write about what's right in front of me. While no one's looking, I'll be in my cubicle working on something about this experience. I think anyone pursuing a creative career hits that wall at some point. They realize, oh, my god, this is going to take so much longer than I thought it was going to take. You're shown examples of people who are overnight successes and young success. We value youth, 30 Under 30, all these things. For many, it is a really long journey. I think it's really more rewarding to get there in a more organic way than some sort of overnight success, I would imagine. I mean, the money would be nice. [laughs]

I hit that wall. I had these box of staples. I always made little deals. I would be like, if he's standing at the top of these stairs when I come out of here, he loves me. I would do those deals almost like a he loves me, he loves me not. If the phone rings right now, that's a sign from the universe. This little deal with myself about the box of staples was a motivator. Get out of here. Get out of this day job. Figure out a way to make money as an entertainer, comedian, writer, or whatever by the time this box of staples runs out. Really didn't do the math and understand what -- I knew generally how many staples I would use a week. I thought I was making a pretty safe bet. Then the five thousand staples were gone, and I was really depressed. Looking back, it was actually not that long. I actually had a quick turnaround there.

Zibby: You were using a lot of staples. You just were flying through them.

Sara: I was only at that job for five years, but it felt like an eternity at that age. In your early twenties, it was just like, the clock was ticking. How am I going to do this? I was so lucky I got this job. It was so weird. It was hosting an online show for AOL, which existed then. It was internet video. I was interviewing musicians. I thought, I've made it, and I did. I had made it. I got to quit my day job. That's all I wanted, was just to not work at that day job. I wanted my job to be being in the entertainment industry, a comedian, writer, whatever. I didn't care what it was. I'm like, just make me a part of it. That sent me on my way. I had some setbacks. I had to go back to the law firm job once the AOL thing got cancelled. It was a real journey. Again, the word journey. Let's keep count how many times I say it.

Zibby: Then when you decide you were going to interweave your whitewater rafting trip with your family memoir of sorts?

Sara: It's crazy because I had this trip planned. You have to book them really far in advance to get your spot on the boats. We probably had it booked over a year in advance. I was already writing my book when I went on the Grand Canyon trip. I had no intention of writing about it. I don't seek out experiences for creative fodder. I'm pretty lucky in that I live in the moment. I separate my career from my life. I'm not going home for vacation for Thanksgiving and keeping a notebook. I'm not someone who does that. My stories that I tell from my life bubble up naturally. Years later, I'll go, I should talk about that on stage. I've been telling this story to friends as just a story. I'm like, why didn't I think about turning that -- I've gotten better at churning out material quicker, a quicker turnaround and realizing when something funny happens, recognizing that could be something I write about. The Grand Canyon thing was just strictly a trip for my birthday. When I went on the trip, I was in the throes of getting my first round of feedback about the book. It was a mess. It was like, you got to figure this out. I was like, oh, shit, I don't know what I'm doing. That was adding to my mental state when I went into the Grand Canyon. I didn't say that in the book because it would've been too meta.

A couple months later, I was dreading going back to work on the book. My deadline was approaching for a second draft. I was dreading it. I just started thinking, god, what it needs is a really vivid story with stakes and place and all the five senses. So much memory is so foggy. It's hard to write about memories that you're barely sure you have a handle on. I learned how to do it. It suddenly occurred to me, what if I -- I just had a little idea. I asked my editor. She's like, "I kind of like that. Give it a try," which is really scary when someone goes, give it a try. I feel like I wrote three books. The second draft was a complete rewrite. It was like I started over. When they got my notes back, only one chapter was like, this is good. It was rough. I gave it a try. It took a long time. What I turned in the next time was enough for her to go, "Yeah, this is working. You still have a ways to go, but the way you're telling this story is --" The Grand Canyon stuff lightens the heavier stuff from my life. When I was down in the Grand Canyon, that is what I was experiencing mentally. All of it is connected to these stories from my past. The metaphor, it was like a writer's delight, a canyon trip, a boat, a river, rocks. It was all so fun to write about. That part was pretty easy.

Zibby: Awesome. I thought it was great. I thought the intersection of those two experiences and going back and forth worked really well. It's something that you might not necessarily think to do. I wouldn't necessarily think to frame something that way. Yet it was so effective in the storytelling and pushing both narratives along through the river pushing the -- [laughs].

Sara: You had to go through it. We were laughing whenever I would talk to my editor about the book. We would be finding ourselves accidentally speaking in metaphors that were related to the flow. It flows really well here. I had to pull back on it sometimes. I'm like, there's too much. It's getting obnoxious. I had some people really be very encouraging. I've never done this before. They were like, it's okay to be on the nose sometimes and to hold our hand a little. The transitions between the canyon and the life chapters, I was very particular with those. It wasn't too heavy-handed, but it was a nod going, and now we're talking about this. Weaving those together was pretty challenging. It took a while. It felt like I was wrestling a bear to the ground and after a while just like, how do I fucking make this -- I had to cut so much. Every time I sat down to work on the book again, I would be overwhelmed and dreading it and just sick. It was like I was going back into a Chernobyl. I don't want to go back in there. I would thrash and not want to do it. But once you get going, you're on your way. You have to do it.

Zibby: Now that you've survived this process which you made sound so enjoyable, what do you have coming next? What are you up to from the comedy side? What are you up to from the writing side?

Sara: It's been surreal. I've been anticipating this release of this book for so long. I didn't think it would happen the way it has happened at all, obviously. But I'm healthy. My family is healthy. By the way, I've been following you on Instagram. I'm so sorry about your mother-in-law.

Zibby: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Sara: I'm very much sending you love.

Zibby: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Sara: Anyway, sorry to bring that up.

Zibby: No, it's fine. I'm very open about it. It's fine.

Sara: I'm glad you are because a lot of people are going through this right now. You sharing helps other people. I don't have anyone currently in a hospital suffering from COVID or anything like that. Reading about your experiences just underlines what this experience is really like. You can't forget it. We're still in the middle of it. It ain't over yet. It's very real. It's easy to start relaxing being like, I'm not going to think about it today. Anyway, back to me. [laughs]

Zibby: Yes, back to you. Go ahead.

Sara: I'm sorry.

Zibby: That’s okay.

Sara: The pandemic made it very weird. I had anticipated a book tour. Then I was planning a standup tour for the fall. I started working late last year on all new standup material, new jokes. I was going to start working on a solo show maybe inspired by the book. I was still figuring it out. That all went to shit. Now I've just been very lucky. I've been getting some writing jobs for TV shows that are in production during the pandemic. I've written for a few specials like a graduation special where Obama spoke. I didn't get to write for Obama personally, but I wrote for the special. I've been very grateful that the kind of TV writing I've done has put me in the stable of writers who do comedy variety-type shows that are actually more lightweight to produce during the pandemic. I've been overwhelmed with work at times where I can say no to things, which is not what I expected when all this started. Hollywood shut down. We didn't know what was going to happen. Now I'm looking forward to that this book is out in the world. It's like a baby I've put out there in the little basket in the river and just sent it down the river and let it live. Now I really want to start working on just looking forward to post-pandemic life. I'm starting to really miss performing in front of a live audience. What does that look like when I get out there? I feel like this book is such a new -- people have always known me to be a storyteller, but a little more sincere. I'm not afraid to get emotional and sappy and stuff. I'm thinking about making my live performance a little more to return to those roots of wanting to just tell stories as opposed to punchline, punchline, punchline, and maybe being a little deeper on stage than I have been before. I feel like after writing this book I can do anything.

Zibby: You totally can. I know you just gave some advice to authors. Maybe on more of a positive note, what advice would you have for somebody else out there who wants to write a memoir and maybe doesn't know how to attack it?

Sara: Yes, it is very difficult to write a book of any kind. I think memoir is particularly challenging in some ways because you're going to have to dig deep and face things about yourself and potentially have a lot of fear. I had a lot of fear around, what is my family going to think? What are people who are in this book going to think? Worrying a lot about hurting people. Some people don't worry about that kind of thing. I did. It all worked out okay so far. As hard as it is, like I just said, now I feel like I can do anything. I do think it's worth it to learn a discipline like this. When you take on a really big project, it requires such a commitment and a practice, which is something that I had never really done in this way before. It's helped me figure out how to get over writer's block. Now I trust the process more. Whereas before, I would dread things and put it off and put it off and just be in a tailspin. Now I have faith of, oh, it's okay to write for just twenty minutes in one day. That's all I could do, but I did something, and not to beat myself up. The next day is another day. Tomorrow, I might write for ten hours straight. Have faith that it will come.

Also what I've learned is discovering how good your writing can get when you open yourself up to other people's feedback, especially when it's personal. I'm usually a loner. I write for TV. I collaborate with other people. For my own stuff, I'm like, I don't want anybody helping me with my jokes. A lot of comedians collaborate. They help each other. I've always been like, no, I'm on my own. Now I'm like, man, you're better with the help of others and other ears. It's worth that personal risk. If the goal is to have the book out there, you're going to have to get used to it, so sharing it with some people early on. I shared the book manuscript with some very close friends early on. Then you have editors. Then the process, it gets into more and more hands. You're getting more and more feedback. I learned to welcome it and love it because by the end, I was like, god, I sound so much smarter than I am because all these people helped as part of the process, which was amazing. Don't give up. That's my advice.

Zibby: Love it. Sara, thank you. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Sara: Thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time. I know you're in a crazy time right now. I just thank you for what you put out in the world. It's really beautiful and authentic. I love it. I'm a big fan.

Zibby: Thank you. I'm so glad. I love doing what I do. I think you could probably tell, but this is the highlight of my day, honestly. I love my kids and we're having a great day, but I'm just saying --

Sara: -- Mommy needs a break.

Zibby: It's great. It's an escape for me too. Thank you for saying that.

Sara: Thank you so much.

Zibby: Thank you. Buh-bye.

Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman, BIG FRIENDSHIP

Zibby Owens: Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman are coauthors of the book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close. Aminatou is a writer, interviewer, and cultural commentary. She is a frequent public speaker whose talks and interviews lead to candid conversations about ambition, money, and power. Aminatou lives in Brooklyn. Ann Friedman is a journalist, essayist, and media entrepreneur. She's a contributing editor to The Gentlewoman. Every Friday, she sends a popular email newsletter. Ann lives in Los Angeles. They also cohost an insanely popular podcast called "Call Your Girlfriend."

Welcome, Ann and Aminatou. Welcome to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm so delighted to have you on today to talk about friendship.

Aminatou Sow: Thank you so much for having us.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Can you please tell listeners what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Aminatou: We are the authors of Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close which is a memoir of our decade-long friendship with each other. We write about our story. There are also interviews with experts and other people who are friends and other people who are our friends. We really just wanted to take a look together at the relationship that we have with each other because we think that a lot of people have the kind of friendship that we have. The best label to call it, really, is your best friend. As we know, that can mean so many, many, many different things. We really wanted to talk about the importance of those kinds of really long-lasting, impactful friendships.

Ann Friedman: We also wanted to put some language to many of the experiences that we had within our friendship, the fact this term best friend is one of the only words that we have for a super intimate friendship where someone might be as much a part of your life or more important to you than blood relative or has known you longer than a spouse. We really wanted to elevate this relationship to the place that it belongs in the sense of, not all friendships are the same, but if you have one like this, here's some language that might apply to the situations that arise within in. Our book is really about what's great about that, why it feels so incredible to be intimately known in this way by someone who is a friend, and also many of the difficulties that arise with that, like any intimate relationship, why it can be hard to really stay close to each other for the long term for a lot of life changes.

Zibby: I was actually surprised by the opening of your book in that the two of you were away at a spa and had come to a point where things were not perfect between the two of you. I thought that when I opened the book it would be a whole thing about the perfection of your friendship. Yet you started it so openly and honestly that, you know what, we had been collaborating for a while and it wasn't always perfect. You two even host a podcast together where you talk about everything. You come off as perfect friends, and the pressure even behind that kind of performance level of your friendship. Tell me a little about the dips and how you got back to closeness when you had that period of kind of a rough patch.

Aminatou: I think that what's interesting about our friendship -- rather, I'll say this. I think that a thing that is true about our friendship that is not true of every friendship is that we're two people who host a podcast together. It just means that a lot more people that don't know us can make assumptions about what our friendship really is. I think that that's just something to get out of the gate. The way that we do our show, I think that if you're actually listening really closely you can tell we are two professionals who are good at editing each other. It's not a show about, I'm going to air all of my grievances or I'm mad about this thing that you did in private, so I'm going to talk about it on the show. That's just not how people who are professionals are. I think that the idea that there is a kind of relationship that is perfect, whether it's a friendship or a marriage or a whatever, that's just not true. Everyone knows that that is not true. I think that what we were really trying to get to is how do we explain that, like all relationships, our friendship is not perfect? How do we make time to work on it not on the podcast? I'm not working anything out that's personal on that podcast. I don't think that that's the point of it.

I think that just like all relationships, we've had our highs and our lows. The thing that Ann said earlier about finding the vocabulary for it, again, it's because in other kinds of relationship there is really easy shorthand and really easy understanding of if you're married to someone or you're dating them and you say, we're growing apart, everyone knows exactly what that means. If you say that about your friend, what does that mean? Can you grow apart from your friend? What are ways that you can try to save a relationship that you have with a friend? Is it okay to go to therapy, or does that sound like something completely extravagant? I think that we were just trying to have, out loud, a conversation that the both of us had been having in private for a really long time. By talking about how our friendship works, we are just trying to encourage other people to tell us how they're doing friendship. We say this very clearly in the book. We're not experts at all. I don't think there's any such thing as an expert in friendships. We are two people who just really like each other and want to stay friends for a long time. The only way to do that is to be really honest about the fact that it's hard sometimes.

Zibby: Especially as long-distance friends which you two are as well. Now I feel like with Zoom and all the rest there's somehow more incentive to connect with friends from far away. I feel like you two have been working on this for years now with the podcast and have really put your stake in the ground as not experts, per se, of course, but just that you can do it. There's hope for people who miss their friends who live far away.

Ann: I think that we have long had the belief that it requires a different kind of prioritization if your friendship is not in person. Often, that's during the transition period. It's not so much once you're used to be far apart. By this point, we are pretty comfortable long-distance friends. We know, more or less, the ways we like to be checked in on. We know how to prioritize each other and let each other know that we're important even though we are not seeing each other every day. Those are things that aren't necessarily obvious if you've spent most of your friendship in the same place or in one context. We've done a lot of thinking about this as it relates to the global pandemic that we're all in right now wherein even friends who are in the same city are essentially long-distance friends. Really, that challenge of how do you transition a friendship where maybe your routine in the past was that you always went to the same exercise class together every week or you always met up with each other after work or whatever it was? Once that changes, you kind of have to say, what actually is the way we check in with each other now? That is very similar to one person moving away. Having to navigate that challenge is really laying some groundwork for other changes that you might have to navigate in a friendship, so other big life shifts that might prevent you from keeping with an old routine. We've discussed it as really, not to say that there's anything good about a terrible global pandemic, but it really is a skill set that, if you want your friendship to survive, you have to figure out how to hone together.

Zibby: It's so true. One of the parts of your friendship in the book that I found really interesting was when Aminatou got sick. Her diagnosis was unclear at the beginning. I know, Aminatou, you in the book were saying you were pretty private about it. Ann, you kept trying to help and see what you could do. Was this really the end diagnosis? What could happen? Tell me a little more about how the two of you traversed that challenging time together. Also, what do you do when you worry about a friend and their health and yet you're not right there and you can't help? What can you do? What's the best thing you can do for your friends?

Aminatou: It's a big one.

Zibby: I know. Sorry about that. You can take that one apart one question at a time.

Aminatou: You're talking about a part of the book where we talk about this concept called stretching that is really, how do you just keep up emotionally, physically, whatever, with people that are in your life when two of you are very different? Sometimes you have to stretch for very tiny reasons like your friend likes a kind of music that you don't like. It means that every time in the car they're going to play it and you just have to learn how to live with it. Sometimes the stretch is something bigger like your friend is, they're moving across the country. How are you going to stretch to be there for them? One of the examples of stretching that we have both had to do is that I experience chronic illness. It means different things for the person who is sick than it does for the person who is the friend. I think that it's fair to say that it is challenging for both people in a way that unless you are open and generous with each other, it just can become a real problem in any kind of relationship.

On my side, it was a real stretch to say, I don't actually know what is wrong with me. I'm working with my doctors to figure that out. The diagnosis is not something that is neat and easy. My life is very different in the sense that I can't do all the things that I used to do. I'm going to have to skip your wedding or I'm going to have to skip a trip that we had planned on taking or I'm just too tired to get on the phone to talk to anyone, and on top of that, just being really private and not wanting to have every single detail of my medical life up for discussion all the time. At the same time, I had to stretch in that it means that I had to ask my friends and my community for more help because I just can't take care of myself in the ways that I needed to do. This was a time in our life where, even though we weren’t talking about it explicitly, we were both trying to figure out, how can I stay friends with someone when my life is very different or when a situation that is happening that has nothing to do with a personal preference is there and we both have to learn how to navigate it?

Ann: The flip side of that for me was feeling like, here is a new situation that someone I love very much is dealing with, or maybe some new information about an ongoing situation. I am three thousand miles away which means I can't do some of my normal friendly, "I'm thinking about you" activities like dropping off some food on the doorstep or whatever. I'm a big food-drop off person. That is not possible from the other side of the country. We had already by this point in our friendship been long distance for a while. We kind of had a routine of, how do we check in with each other? That is really different when, for example like Aminatou was saying, she doesn't want to necessarily give a full health readout to all of her friends. Sometimes she just wants to catch up. I respected that always. At the same time, I'm like, I'm far away. I want to know what's going on with you. I care about you. Trying to really pull apart what is supportive of her and what is just making me feel more secure in the friendship. What do I need in order to feel like I'm still in an intimate friendship with this person? What does she need?

This are the kinds of questions that we had to work through. Some of that is helped by knowing each other very well. We write in the book about how I know and love Aminatou, so I know that sometimes she will use humor to gently deflect when she doesn't want to talk about something. If I noticed her doing that when I asked about something specific about her health, I had a choice to make, which was either explicitly keep poking or respect that she didn't want to talk about it just then. I don't know that I have any big-picture advice in terms of, what does it look like to support a friend? All of this is so specific to the friendship that you're in and to the people who are in it. It really is one reason why we wanted this language of the stretch to be a part of the book. Then it's less about, here is what you do, step one, two, three. It's more about describing the kind of situation that is pretty likely to occur in every important friendship.

Zibby: Got it. Aminatou, how is your health now? Not to pry into your private life which I know you don't like talking about, but having read it, I'm concerned. Just wanted to make sure you were doing okay.

Aminatou: Thank you so much for asking. I am doing great.

Zibby: Good. I'm glad to hear that. Another part of the book that I thought was pretty awesome was when you had come up with the idea of the Shine Theory. Then somebody stole it. The two of you decided to pool your resources and fight it legally. You overcame the people who had trademarked your original idea. I just wanted to hear about that story because it sounded like there was a lot more than was on the page about that one.

Ann: Shine Theory really began as something that we spoke about and practiced within our friendship. It was really not something where we were going to make a concerted effort to unveil it to the world and announce it and be like, hello, here is our idea about why collaboration is superior to competition and why we always try to prioritize long-term investment in people. We did not have a press conference where we rolled out this idea and thought it was going to be a big deal. We were very much taken by surprise when we realized that someone who we did not know who we had not been in conversation with about this concept had purchased the URL and registered the trademark for Shine Theory without our knowing it. That is the backstory you're referring to, I think, right?

Zibby: Yes.

Ann: Then we were presented with a choice about whether to just let that stand or whether we wanted this person who was really using it in more of a context of -- I think she was a fitness guru of some kind. I don't know. There were a lot of women's abs on the website that she had set up. We had a choice whether to let her continue to associate this very weird interpretation of what it is with this concept we had originated or whether we wanted to fight for that trademark ourselves. We chose the latter path. Do you have any memories about this, Aminatou?

Aminatou: No, I think that's very accurate to what happened.

Zibby: I just always like hearing about people struggling and working together to solve problems. Maybe there was not too much more to it than that, but I'm glad you persevered. What was your process like of coauthoring this book? I know you'd collaborated for years and years and years on your podcast. Perhaps a book in a different form was a new way of communication. How did the two of you tackle it and accomplish it?

Aminatou: A book is definitely one of the larger projects we have done. I think I can say it's the biggest thing we have had to deliver all at once. It was a lot of fun. It was also really, really, really challenging. On the podcast, for example, we are able to work remotely. We don't have to be in the same place to do it. With so much of the writing of the book, we did have to make time to essentially go on long stretches of writing retreats with each other. The process is not unlike a lot of the other things that we do. We talk it out to death. Then we go away in our own respective corners to actually do the work. Here, because we wrote in a joint voice, it meant that we had to outline it together. We talked about what the stories were that we were trying to illustrate, the ideas that we were trying to bring to the forefront. We would go in our separate corners of the room and write the assigned word count and then come back and edit that all together.

Zibby: Got it. Did you enjoy it? Do you want to write another book together? Was it one and done? How did you feel about it?

Aminatou: I will work with Ann Friedman in all mediums for as long as she will want to work with me.

Ann: The pleasure was exquisite, as was the pain. I also don't know that that's any different than what anyone would say about writing a book. I am extremely grateful to have had this other kind of window into the way Aminatou thinks and really works over an idea. Also, really just grateful for the opportunity to come to a joint understanding about what some things in our friendship have meant to each of us individually and also to us together. Even if no one really ends up reading or liking this book, I feel really, really good about what this process has brought to me personally and what a gift it was for us to be able to examine our friendship in this kind of depth.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to aspiring authors having survived the process?

Aminatou: Write a little bit every single day. That's my advice.

Ann: [laughs] Amen.

Zibby: Great. Thank you, guys, so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." You have made me, as I mentioned earlier, I now want to call my best friend. Even just the thought of thinking about friends in today's day and age makes things seem so much better despite all the chaos and everything else. Thanks for even highlighting the importance of friendships and giving some tools to help navigate them over time and raising the origin story and all the rest of it in your book. Thanks for sharing your story with me and with readers. Good luck.

Ann: Of course.

Aminatou: Thank you so much for having us.

Ann: Go call your friend, Zibby.

Zibby: I'm going to. My friend, her name's Jen. I'll call her soon.

Aminatou: Bye.

Ann: Bye.

Zibby: Bye, guys. Thank you.

Aminatou: Thank you.

Ann: Thanks.

Tara Stiles, CLEAN MIND, CLEAN BODY

Zibby Owens: Tara Stiles is the founder of Strala, the revolutionary approach to being, moving, and healing. Strala teaches yoga, tai chi, and traditional Chinese medicine to help people release stress, let go of bad habits, and move easily through all kinds of challenges. Strala is practiced in more than a hundred countries. Thousands of guides are leading Strala classes daily around the globe. Tara has authored several best-selling books including Yoga Cures, Make Your Own Rules Diet, and Strala Yoga. She's been profiled by The New York Times, The Times of India, The Times in the UK, and featured in most major national and international magazines. She is a sought-after speaker on topics of entrepreneurship, health, and well-being. Harvard even profiled Tara's work in a case study. She has spoken with students at Harvard and NYU about her experience and approaches to creativity and leadership. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and their daughter, Daisy. Her most recent book, by the way, was helping advise on National Geographic's book of animal yoga poses, which is amazing.

Hi.

Tara Stiles: Hey.

Zibby: I'm excited to talk to you again. I know we discussed Yoga Animals on Instagram Live, which I have here. I think I didn't have it front of me last time even though it was upstairs. Anyway, now at least we can chat for a few extra minutes and hear more about all the rest of your stuff and not just this book. For listeners who don't know about Yoga Animals, which is a National Geographic kids' collaboration that you did, you were the yoga expert for them on this book, the subtitle of which is A Wild Introduction to Kid-Friendly Poses. Tell everybody a little more about your role in the yoga community and then how you ended up being a consultant for a place like National Geographic, which is pretty awesome.

Tara: Yeah, that is pretty wild. Pretty simple, I started a tiny little studio in 2008 in my boyfriend at the time's apartment. I ended up marrying him. He was nice about it. The idea was to move in a way that felt good to you. That was really, if you can believe it or not, scandalous at the time within the yoga world. I was playing soft, feel-good music that people could identify with. That was also very scandalous at the time. I wasn't trying to start all these problems. I learned about yoga as a young kid in a dance program. My first thought was, this is incredible. This is amazing. I had a really good teacher. My second thought was, why don't my friends do this? Then I just started walking around and talking to people about yoga. Then I realized all the misconceptions. People felt like they weren’t included or they weren’t flexible or it was against their religion. I get it. There's all these different kinds of communities. I just saw, I wouldn't even say an opportunity, it kept pulling me in. I just started sharing yoga with my friends in the apartment. One thing kept leading to another. It's a global thing now with what we offer.

We have a community of guides. We call our instructors guides. I never liked the word teacher. I was twenty years old teaching yoga to doctors and lawyers and all these smart people. I knew how to lead them through a yoga practice safely, so the word guide really made a lot of sense. My husband, then boyfriend at the time, was a mountain climber. He was saying, "A guide, you walk up the mountain, and it's the person who's done it before, but you're also doing it too." I'm like, oh, let's just say that. [laughs] It was more of a self-deprecating move. There was a lot I had to say and a lot I wanted to express for people to experience yoga in a way that felt like them and a tool that you could use instead of this thing that you needed to live up to in a way. It kept bringing more opportunities into my life. I had no choice but to keep saying yes. Ten years later, it kept going. One thing kept leading to another. Got an email from National Geographic and thought it was a joke, deleted it a few times. [laughs] Happy to help them. If I can offer, especially with the language in the book for the little ones, not to have them read language or be read language that makes them feel like they're not able to do something, so instructing in a way that's about moving your body in a way that feels good for you and nice for you instead of trying to push your body in a certain way or make a certain shape as the goal. That's really been the basis of what I've been sharing for the last couple decades.

Zibby: Amazing. What does yoga do for you? What makes you so passionate about it that you want to share it with everyone that you know and you don't know and everything else?

Tara: Basically, it helps me feel better so I can do better. It's this lock and key for everything that I am. I feel like if I don't do it, if I don't have a period of time where I'm thinking this way, I'm doing these things, then I can become distant from myself. I just know that from my own experience. It's not about the poses. It's not about the length of time. It's just about getting on the floor, connecting with myself, doing that for a few moments every day at any part of the day where I feel disconnected. I automatically, it works every single time, feel better. It's like magic fairy dust in a kind of corny way. If I need to rest, it tells me to rest. If I need to speed up, it tells me to speed up. If I need to read one of the books you suggest, it says, go do that now. The intuition becomes a highway instead of, maybe I should follow that. It's like, nope, you're following that. I feel like I'm put on a train and going in the right direction when I practice. I think that's because I do yoga in a way where it feels good for me and I refuse to do yoga in a way where it's about contorting my body into a certain pose. For me, I know that that works really, really well. When I share that, people seem to have it work well for them too. How can I not give that to people once I've had that experience myself, or at least show them that they can do it themselves and guide them so they can become guides of their family? It's simple. We all can do it. It's just like reading. If I could have forty more years doing this and get to a point where I've convinced enough people that yoga is the same as reading, you just open up a book and do it, you just get on the floor and do it, then I think that's a good thing.

Zibby: How about yoga while reading? Maybe we could combine forces here and put downward dog with a book here. Two birds with one stone. [laughs]

Tara: Absolutely. Especially, I think it's important with yoga to always be comfortable, always be changing your position. If you're sitting and you're reading and you're just sitting and taking in information into your mind, taking that information into your whole self with your breath and allowing your body to move, yeah, let's do that. We could do a class. [laughs]

Zibby: It's one thing for you to teach yoga and then create a whole network of guides to teach other people through your philosophy. Writing about yoga, I would think, is a challenge. I tried at one point to write about all these different fitness moves and I remember thinking, what do I say now? Move your foot to the right. Not that they're always so prescriptive, but you've written a lot about yoga. What are some of the tricks of the trade to make it easy for people to follow and understand and get your overall message as well?

Tara: Honestly, it's funny because you're such a book industry person. For me in the beginning, it was getting the editor out of the way. [laughs] The first yoga book I wrote, it was still before there was a lot of yoga books. There was some instructions in there. There'd be the person who's the fitness expert that wants to make it about the physicality. Yeah, you need to say where to put your foot. That's absolutely important, but it's also important to not say, squeeze your thigh. It's important to talk about the movement. My background is in dance, primarily. Describing yoga as movement I feel is much more open than describing yoga as poses that you should be able to do exactly. It's like, yeah, obviously you're going to bring your foot forward, but before you do that, you should lean to the side and then bring your foot forward so you have some room for that foot to come forward. My descriptions tended to be, especially when I was figuring it out in my first few times writing about yoga, it was a lot longer. Then I would infuse way too much language of "if it feels good" or "when you're ready." Then I realized that if you just describe things like Hemmingway, as clearly, as simply as possible, then there's so much beauty in that, and that will be conveyed. How I came about learning about writing in general was through writing yoga movements or little prescriptive five movements for a headache or whatever and figuring out how to do that in a way that wasn't just about moving your body around.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about your dance career and where the main challenges were and the best parts and how you ended up getting off that path.

Tara: I'm from this tiny little rinky-dink town where there's one little dance studio. You go and do these really terrible competitions where your parents put blue eyeshadow on you and send you off. I didn't love all the blue eyeshadow, but I loved going to these places outside of my small town and learning from the best choreographers in New York and Europe and everything. Then I'd get little prizes. People would say, "You should do this for your living." I'm like, just leave me here. [laughs] I always had to go back, which was fine. My parents were like, "You can't leave when you're sixteen. We're not going to move to New York." Anyway, I ended up going to this dance conservatory after high school for a little bit. It was wonderful. It was a whole world of everything I wanted from age five, but long after that.

My ballet teacher was with American Ballet Theater in New York in the seventies when yoga was having its first moment in New York. He brough in, which was kind of new in ballets programs, but he brought in yoga on Fridays for relaxation. That was the first time I took a yoga class. It was this guy sitting in the front of the room. He was sort of happy for no reason at all. I remember just being so amazed and confused. You can't be getting a lot of money for doing this. Nobody's even paying attention to you, and you're still happy. I was just super curious. I wanted to learn everything about it. I loved the experience of the physical practice. It was super simple. It was before all the yoga explosion of styles and all of that. It was just a normal experience. I felt like I was in my own spaceship where I could connect to myself. I remember my first thought, this is incredible. Then I opened up my eyes and I'm like, why doesn't everybody do this? I was like, what's going on? It was sort of like discovering reading if you're the only one in the world that reads. [laughs] I was pissed, to be honest. I'm like, what am I going to do now? There was no yoga teacher that I knew. I thought this guy was from a spaceship or something sent down from planet Zoltar. There's nobody like him. He's got to have another job. He was a secretary at Sprint or something. Who's knows? This was not a career decision. I was dancing. I thought that would be my job. I moved to New York, was dancing in some small companies.

I wouldn't take a job for a company full time because I had this hesitation of I wanted to be open in some way to do other things. I think that was the early stages of yoga pulling me in a little bit. If you say yes to the company, then you're on tour. You do the whole thing. You're stuck with that until they fire you, basically. Then you work in the costume department there or something, which would've been fine. I kept getting these other gigs and opportunities to dance in a Matthew Barney film or a strange Whitney Houston video or something. It was always these things that would give me a little bit of money to pay my rent and be a fun opportunity. It kept pulling me out of making that decision to join these more well-known troupes and things. Somewhere along the line, yoga kept pulling me in. I'd find my way into some class or some workshop or some talk or some poetry reading or finding all the people imparting wisdom. They'd be on flyers somewhere at that time. It just kept finding me until I couldn't take it anymore. Then I just started sharing it with friends. Anybody that I would meet that would have back pain or stress, I would show them a few things they could do. They always felt better. That made me feel good. I still thought it wasn’t a respectable way to spend my time or anything I could be able to earn a living at or would even want to earn a living at. One thing just kept leading to another. Starting this small studio was still just a hobby. It was fun. It just started to take up more and more of my time.

Zibby: How big is the whole thing? I know you're everywhere. You have all these classes. Tell me what it's grown to. I know it's the pandemic time-ish, but before, pre-pandemic let's say.

Tara: It's cool. It's very decentralized, which I'm happy about because I never wanted to be like, I'm this yoga person, follow me around. We've led trainings over the years and things like that. There's a few thousand guides around the world doing this. It's cool because we all are in this community together. We all know each other and support each other. Everybody's doing their own thing. We also have partner studios and partner online studios now. A lot of them have gone online. It's pretty global. It's in a hundred countries, if we sat down and looked at where everybody is and everything. That's what's cool about it. It's people that have the same idea of yoga should be something that feels good for you, and they want to share that. I think that's spread as it's gotten -- a lot of people just want to feel better. They want something that helps them feel better, something that doesn't make them feel worse, essentially. [laughs] It's a bunch of partner studios, thousands of guides. They're everywhere. They have their own studios. They teach in gyms. They teach in other people's yoga studio. We're very open in that way. It’s not like a SoulCycle where Strala Yoga only happens in this place. We also don't care if people do the training and they don't call it Strala Yoga, they just have a yoga class somewhere. I'm just much more about showing people a way to do this that feels good. A lot of people want to stay within the community. A lot of people want to take it into their life in a different way. I'm just happy that I get to be a part of that.

Zibby: I know a lot of former dancers have all sorts of pain or physical leftovers from the past, or a lot of athletes. Do you have any of that? Do you feel like your integration of yoga into your day-to-day life has sort of mitigated any of the lasting pain that you could've sustained?

Tara: I don't know what's wrong with me, but the only time I ever hurt myself was when I was trying to be a goofball and jumped over a ballet barre and broke my toe. [laughs] I was trying to show off for my friends. It was, of course, right before a performance, so I had to perform with a broken toe. Your broken toe never quite heals. I guess I just got lucky. Mainly, I had really great teachers. They weren’t telling us to force ourselves. They weren’t telling us to be bad to our bodies. They were professional dancers. Our modern teacher was Eileen Cropley. She was in the station wagon with Paul Taylor, one of the first dancers. She’d get mad if we were working in a way where we would injure ourselves. She was like, "How are you going to have a career like that?" I know a lot of people have that experience of injuring themselves so much in dance. I never fell. A lot of my friends, they would have falls from some boy dropping them wrongly or something like that. I was also so tall that I didn't do a lot of -- I did some partner work. I was as tall as the guys, so there wasn't a whole lot of lifting of me happening.

Zibby: How tall are you? It's hard to see. It's hard to tell.

Tara: I'm 5'8" and a half.

Zibby: There are taller girls.

Tara: I'm not six feet or anything.

Zibby: Literally, I thought you were going to say, I'm 6'3". I was going to say, oh, okay, which is fine. You just don't know when you're on the phone or whatever. That's funny. What about collaborating with your husband? How has that been?

Tara: I joke with him, I say, "You're the first straight guy that I met that did yoga, so that's how I said yes." [laughs] I met him at this yoga thing. He was the first straight guy that I ever really talked to that did -- all my friends in dance were gay guys, basically. Those were my friends. Those were my male role models growing up. They'd take care of me. It's funny because he has whole upbringing in tai chi and martial stuff and all this stuff that he doesn't talk about because he can't talk about it. I'm kind of unsure. I'm like, are you in the CIA, or are you just making this up? [laughs] It's very body-oriented things, specifically with tai chi. That's been really cool. I've learned a lot about and had a lot of synergies with my experience with dance and his experience with tai chi, especially that I got him talking about tai chi more and sharing tai chi more in this way. When I met him, he had some startup that he didn't care about at all. I'm just like, "Why are you doing something you don't want to do?" I just don't understand that for my own life. It's not really an option for me to do something I don't want to do. Just qualification-wise, I don't know if I could get a job. Eventually, he just kept coming around. We started working together. It was fun, and then not fun, and now it's fun again. [laughs]

Zibby: That's awesome. If people listening want to do what you said before, they have a terrible headache or they're feeling super stressed today or this is the worst day ever, where can they find those moves of yours to help them through?

Tara: Even without going to our website, doing our videos and all that shenanigans, I think just coming down to the ground and letting yourself crawl around a little bit and slow down and start to breathe a little bit more full, a little bit more deep to the point where you're letting your breath move your body instead of trying to move your body with yourself, with your own muscles. From right there, that's kind of the foundation of everything that we share. That can feel better instantly without logging online and going to our videos and the app and all that stuff. We have all that stuff. A lot of it's free. I think that that's super important and everything, but that's really the basis. If I could just get on the floor, breathe, roll around, your body will start to show you what it wants to do. Then I think that's what's so great about yoga treated like a vocabulary of movement. If you learn a few different movements, then you're going to, just like reading, know how to put a sentence together, know how to write a letter, or whatever it is. I hope to empower people to be able to feel confident enough to do something for five minutes on their own in a way.

Zibby: What's coming next for you? What do you have up your sleeve aside from our new hybrid yoga-reading situation?

Tara: I think that's going to be the main priority right there. [laughter] Oh, my gosh. We finally had time now because of our current situation to do our app which we had on the backburner because we do so much in person. It's just so fun to be in person with people. We love to travel and see everybody and go to all the partner studios. We just hadn’t prioritized doing that. That's coming soon so people can practice with us. I've been doing this silly class on Instagram for almost a hundred days now, every day. It's free. The live element has been really cool to do with people. That's really what the app's going to be about. It'll have all of our decades of videos and collections and things that people already do, but it'll also be more of a live digital home studio. We're excited about that one.

Zibby: That's awesome. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors having collaborated on this children's book, Yoga Animals, and then all the other books that you wrote?

Tara: Oh, gosh. I'm so grateful I get to do it. I feel like I'll keep creating books as long as any publisher will say okay. I think that's the spirit of doing it as progress. A lot of people that I meet that want to write a book are waiting to write a book instead of just doing it. Sure, it's nice to find a publisher that wants to do it, but it's always nice to have something to show the publisher instead of what's in your head. If it's in your head, it doesn't count, I don't think, at all. [laughs] You have to just sit down and do it like a practice every single day. It's not my number-one main job, but I do love it so much. I love the process of writing so much. I love getting better at it. I love reading. I love improving. I love figuring out how to explain things differently and with more maturity as the previous book or whatever it is. I think it's just really important to sit down, put everybody else's books aside that are your familiar people that are kind of like you or that you think are like you, and just sit down. For me, it's making an outline. If I don't have an outline, I can't do anything. It's sort of like I need to know that I'm going to do yoga before I do yoga. [laughs]

I think that's really important, creating an outline and writing an introduction, and then just getting to work, doing it. Then sharing it with people that have more experience than you. In my experience, especially with writing and everything, is people want to help. People are so happy to help people that are already doing the work. I have friends that tell me about their books. I'm like, "Okay, show it to me." They're like, "No, no, it's my idea." I'm like, oh, god. I can't. Just write pages. Do something. Get it together. Then rewrite it a bunch of times. I'm not the gatekeeper to getting your book published. Then start showing people after you have something down. If you're not proud of it, just keep rewriting it. Keep showing up. Keep doing it. Don't wait until you have the perfect hair day. Don't wait until your stomach has the right amount of food in it or whatever it is. There's so much. I fall to that all the time because it's not my only job, writing. I do love it so much that I'm always working on it. I notice that's a bad habit of mine, thinking, I'll do this tomorrow. I'm like, no, I can't. If I want to work on a new project, it has to be, for me, at least some point every day. I have to sit down and do it. Then that's it.

Zibby: That's great advice. I love it. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming back on another piece of my platform here and talking on the podcast about all of your great work. Like last time, I still feel so inspired to now do yoga after I speak to you. Then of course, two minutes later I forget. [laughs] I'll have to put reminders in my calendar to interview you every couple months.

Tara: I would love that. When we first met on your Instagram, I was like, I want to be friends with this woman. She's so cool. We could do yoga together. She'll tell me all the cool books to read.

Zibby: Totally. That would be awesome. I know. I would love that. One day when we're out of here. Thank you so much for coming on. Have a really great day and everything.

Tara: You too. Thanks so much.

Zibby: Bye. Thanks.

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Stephen Shaskan, PIZZA AND TACO

Zibby Owens: Welcome to day two of the second week of the July Book Blast. This is the seventh day in all of my ten-day July Book Blast with episodes I recorded throughout the quarantine, some quarantine related, some not, all of which deserve to see the light of day before the summer comes to an end. Today is Young Readers Day. I have a collection of children's books and middle grade and all sorts of stuff that your kids might like. How interesting to hear from children's book writers, which is exciting to me because I actually sold two children's books to Penguin Random House that will be coming out in the next year or two. I have a personal affinity for children's book authors. Enjoy these episodes.

Stephen Shaskan is the author and illustrator of several picture books including Big Choo, spelled C-H-O-O, Toad on the Road, Max Speed, The Three Triceratops Tuff, A Dog Is a Dog, and the new graphic novel series which, by the way, my littlest guy is obsessed with called Pizza and Taco. He also illustrated the picture book Punk Skunks and the graphic novel series Q and Ray, both written by his wife, Trisha Speed Shaskan. Stephen and Trisha live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and love visiting schools and libraries, reading their stories, and inspiring young authors and illustrators.

Hi.

Stephen Shaskan: Hi. How's it going?

Zibby: Good. How about you?

Stephen: Going good.

Zibby: Awesome. Thanks for joining today.

Stephen: Thanks for having me. This is really great.

Zibby: Are these all your books in the back? You want to give me a little tour of some of these books?

Stephen: I have The Three Triceratops Tuff picture book that I wrote with Simon & Schuster. A Dog Is a Dog, the one right here in the middle, this one right here, that one's my first book that I ever wrote. That's with Chronicle Books back in 2011. Then Toad on the Road is with HarperCollins along with my books with my wife, Trisha Speed Shaskan, Punk Skunks, which is over here. What else? The Q and Ray series also, I wrote with Trisha. That's been a lot of fun too. Those are my books. I worked as an educational assistant and an after-school art teacher for about eight years in the public schools here in Minneapolis. From there, I went on to be working in preschools for about twelve years. I was a preschool teacher for twelve years. Then I slowly transitioned over here into making books for kids. I went to Rhode Island School of Design for illustration, but that was a long, long time ago. That's what my original intent was. I made a lot of my own comics when I was in my twenties, and poster designs for bands and other things like that, but just started focusing on working on creating books for kids the past ten years or so.

Zibby: Wow. That's exciting. Tell me the story of publishing your first picture book for kids.

Stephen: A Dog Is a Dog was a real fun one. It was while I was working as a preschool teacher. I was coming up with ideas for different books. I always put in a lot of fun things in books. This one's going to be backwards, obviously, because of the Instagram thing. Dog Is a Dog, a fun thing about this book is I always put a little bit of nonsense in my books. You can tell by Pizza and Taco being two characters that are just kids, that type of thing. It goes "A dog is a dog, whether it's naughty or nice, whether it suns on the beach or glides on the ice. A dog is a dog if it's skinny or fat. A dog is a dog unless it's a cat." This goes on having a lot of different animals coming out in costumes and so forth until it comes back to being a dog. I like putting humor in my books. I like doing that. This book came about, I did drawings for it and I sent it out. It took a year to have a response to it. I had nine rejections from different publishers. Then a year after I sent it out, Chronicle Books contacted me. They really liked it, but they didn't like the art, and so I had to work on the art more. I don't have an example. I should have an example of my original dummy, but it changed a lot. I really am happy with the end result. That's the story of my first book. Then from there, it was just trying to figure out what comes next. Then what came next was The Three Triceratops Tuff. I got that idea from three kids in my preschool who were pretending to play the Billy Goats Gruff as dinosaurs. I was like, wow, that's a really good idea. [laughs] Of course, it made absolutely no sense the way they were doing it. I had to make it make sense.

Zibby: When you were young, when you were a little kid, were you drawing all the time? Was that your thing? Did you always know you wanted to do that, and the kid thing came later, basically?

Stephen: Yes, that's all I did. I drew all the time. It was my favorite thing to do. I always wanted to be an artist. After going to art school, I realized that not everybody who likes to make art was supported by their parents, but my parents were always really big into it. My dad was a stockbroker. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, but she also did accounting for things and other stuff. They both really supported my art. My dad actually, even though he was a stockbroker, painted on the side. He did oil paintings, landscape paintings in the basement. He always had setups for his art. Right now, he sells his art at art fairs. He's retired. He's eighty-six now. He's down in Florida. He puts on art shows and art fairs and things. They’ve always been really super supportive of my art. That was a lot of fun growing up and always having supplies. That was something that they never had a problem with me doing. I always loved making art. I also loved comics growing up. Reading comics was my main thing to read. I was considered a reluctant reader. At the time, I probably read like three thousand comics. [laughs] I started thinking about how many comics. I would go to the comic store at least once a month with my dad and spend all my allowance on my comics. Back then, it was sixty cents a comic. My allowance wasn't that much. Still, over the course of a month I would save it all up and be able to get something.

With Pizza and Taco, what was really cool was when I was a kid, I just loved comics so much. I had a group of friends in elementary school. I grew up in Syracuse, New York. I had a group of friends there. We all made comics. We all drew comics and loved to make art and talk about comics and everything. It was just a really cool thing. I grew up on all the Richie Riches and Casper the Friendly Ghost and Underdog and all those kind of goofy ones. Also, then I got into superhero comics like the X-Men and the Teen Titans and those books and collected -- I still have quite a number of my collection, but not all my collection. Over time, things kind of whittled down. I think I went from collecting comics to collecting albums in high school. When I was working on this book, it was a lot of fun because I just delved back into reading comics. I had been making picture books for so long. Suddenly, I'm working in this medium that I just loved. I'm sitting there at my desk working and just laughing and having so much fun creating this. When Q and Ray first came out, there was this joy just because it was like, wow, I created a real comic. Like I said, in my twenties, I made a bunch of my own scrappy, Xerox-copied comics into independent adult comics. Still, this was like, wow, this is a real thing. I was really excited. That's what brought me to create Pizza and Taco.

Zibby: Tell everybody more about Pizza and Taco because it is so fantastic. It's sort of like an advanced Elephant & Piggie of sorts. It's these new characters blasting on the scene. Tell me how you came up with it and all the rest.

Stephen: This is the book right here. We do a lot of school visits. With Q and Ray especially, when we utilized school visits, we would create characters of kids, original characters, original comic characters, and show kids how they can create their own. One of the big rules is to keep it to simple shapes because you're drawing these characters over and over and over again hundreds of times in just one book. You're drawing each character. That was a really important thing to get across to kids, to just use simple shapes and that type of thing. Then we give some background to the characters before. Before you start writing a story, you want to have a little bit of a background and think about, who are these characters? What do they like to do? What are they afraid of? all these types of things. One of the things is, what's their favorite food? Every school that we went to it was either pizza or tacos, was their favorite food. It's funny because my favorite food is pizza. Trisha's favorite food is tacos. It kind of made sense. I was like, oh, there's that weird nonsense of, why don't I just make this into a -- why aren't pizza and taco best friends? We had characters like Pizza Man because every once in a while somebody would pick a triangle head.

Then I started thinking about, how simple could I draw a piece of a pizza and a taco? Pretty much a triangle and a half circle. You can see, it's just a half circle here and then the triangle shape, just trying to keep it as simple as possible so I can draw them over and over again. I was really also inspired by the Narwhal and Jelly series. I just loved that. Trisha and I also teach week-long comic classes at the Loft Literary Center here in Minneapolis. It was really cool to see. Kids would come in and they'd be drawing all the Narwhal and Jelly characters. Just seeing that, I wanted something that kids could draw easily themselves because I think that's really powerful for kids. I've been doing that with different things where I've had a couple school visits this past week online and showing kids how to draw Pizza and Taco, but also showing them how to draw other characters that might be food-related comic characters. The kids are immediately drawn to it and just drawing immediately and showing me their drawings. It's really cool to see that kind of thing. There was one kid who already had created -- because they knew that I was coming, they had created a whole book on Spaghetti and Meatball.

Zibby: Awesome. I love how Hamburger and Hot Dog have cameos in your book. Those are important best supporting actress and actor. Actually, I think they're both boys.

Stephen: They're not very nice to Hamburger and Hot Dog. Some people had pointed that out. One of the things about Pizza and Taco is that they're kids. They have flaws. They're not perfect. They're going to be jerks sometimes. Even in this book, they're kind of jerks to each other. That just happens. You can't have a best friend without having a best friend fight. You can't grow up without having kids around that you're not that friendly with. It just happens. You can't be friends with everyone. It's an unrealistic adult perception of childhood. If you think back to when you were in kindergarten and first grade, there are kids that you liked and there are kids that you didn't like. There are kids that you wanted to play with and kids that were like, god, do I have to play with that kid again? I'm not saying that that's good. I'm just saying that that's real. Flaws in characters are real. These characters have a lot of flaws. They're not perfect characters.

Zibby: How is it collaborating with your wife? What is that like? How has the coronavirus impacted your work together?

Stephen: I'm actually working on dummying out a picture book that she just wrote while I'm working on -- I just finished dummying out the third Pizza and Taco. The second Pizza and Taco comes out next year. It's Pizza and Taco: Best Party Ever. They throw a party. I just finished dummying out the third book, which is where they make a [distorted audio] that she just wrote. We work really well together, actually, which is really nice. She's written probably three or four picture books since working on something collaboratively last time. Most of them are things that I wouldn't work on. Now this last project, I was like, I really like this project. I think I could work on this project. When we work on projects together, it's typically something that we're both invested in. We're not forcing it. It's something that we both really like and want to do. That's really important. We're also really respectful of each other. We have fights, but when it comes to writing and creating books together, we try to make the best book we can. We're really working on doing that. It's funny because I think we rub each other a little bit more wrong when it's a book that we're not working on, when it's one of our own things, our own projects, and we're critiquing our art. I'll be critiquing something that she's working on that I'm not working on with her or she'll be critiquing something that I'm working on that she's not working on with me. We tend to be not as good friends. [laughs]

For me, one thing that was kind of crummy with all the coronavirus stuff is that we basically ended up canceling probably eight different events, school visits and so forth. For us, March 14th I think was when we started shutting down here in Minneapolis. We had three events the next week at different schools to go to and different things like that and ones that hadn’t been figured quite out for May and June. That was kind of tough. We work from home anyway. We both have a studio in our house. We both have places where we work. That really hasn’t affected. Luckily, I was on deadline, so I just focused on that. Then I'm on deadline again. For me, I really enjoy working at home and being isolated. This is how I focus. With all the school visits that we had, I don't think I would've been able to finish the second book and dummy out the third book all in this time as well.

Zibby: Do you have any parting advice for aspiring illustrators, artists, children's book writers?

Stephen: My advice is for kids more than for aspiring. If you like something, just keep doing it. I talked about how I had those friends in elementary school that I made comics with. Out of that group of kids, I think there were five of us, only two went on to be artists. That's me and another friend. He does fine art. I do comics and picture books. I was, out of those five friends, probably as talent goes, like fifth, but I just kept doing it. Nowadays, if those kids who are now adults would be drawing again, they wouldn't be as strong of an artist as I am because they just stopped doing it. They're having very happy lives doing what they're [indiscernible/laughter]. Still, just keep doing it. Don't let other kids get you down. If you see somebody else being a better artist than you, that's great, just keep working at it. You'll get better and better. If you like music, if you like science, if you like anything, just keep working at it. That's my advice for kids.

Zibby: I'm going to play this for my kids later. Thank you.

Stephen: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks for the hours of entertainment you've given us during this quarantine with Pizza and Taco. I'm really grateful. Thank you.

Stephen: Thank you.

Zibby: Take care. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to Young Readers Tuesday, part of my July Book Blast. I hope you've enjoyed it.

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Jennifer Steil, EXILE MUSIC

Zibby Owens: Jennifer Steil is the author of two previous books, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, a memoir of her experience as a journalist in Yemen, and The Ambassador’s Wife, a novel about a hostage crisis that was also inspired by her own experience. Her latest book is called Exile Music. She currently lives in London with her husband and daughter.

Zibby: Hi.

Jennifer Steil: Hi there. Wow, I was too big for a minute.

Zibby: No, you're great. How are you?

Jennifer: I'm good. Thank you. Are you okay?

Zibby: I'm okay. I'm sorry. I'm usually very together. It's just been one of those days.

Jennifer: No, I get it.

Zibby: Your book is so good. I can't believe you reached out to me directly. I hadn’t read it. You know what? It's written in such a vibrant, refreshing, new way. I feel like I've read a zillion books about this period of time and the Holocaust and everything else. This is a whole different thing. Anyway, I am loving it, just so you know.

Jennifer: Thank you. I really appreciate that. I'm sorry you've had such a short time to read it.

Zibby: No, it's okay. I did what I could. I will come back to it because the characters are embedded in my brain now and I'm really excited. Why don't you tell people watching and listening, because this will eventually be a podcast as well, what Exile Music is about and what inspired you to write it?

Jennifer: Exile Music is based an underexplored slice of World War II history. During World War II, there were between ten and twenty thousand Jewish refugees in Bolivia. A lot of these were artists and musicians. I lived in Bolivia for four years and met some of these refugees and their descendants. I got the idea for the book when my husband came dashing home from work one night full of energy and said, "I just had the most interesting conversation with the Austrian Consulate. Did you know that during the war there were more than ten thousand Jewish refugees here?" I hadn’t known that. We'd only just moved to La Paz when I found this out. Soon after that, I met the son of one of these refugees who was born in La Paz the year that his parents arrived from Poland. His mother is from a small town in Poland that I'm not going to try to pronounce. This town was pretty much wiped out by the Nazis. Almost no one survived. His mother suffered horrific things while she was there. She was hidden below a pharmacy. Her two-year-old went blind in captivity and then was murdered by the Nazis along with her parents. Her husband had been conscripted by the Russian army. He was away with the Russian army for all of the war. After the war, somehow miraculously, they were reunited in Poland. She gave testimony to someone who has archived it in a Holocaust museum in Israel. John, my friend from Bolivia, gave me his mother's testimony which I read in full. He has not read it himself. Unsurprisingly, it's too traumatic for him to read. That was where this story started. I began wondering what it must have been like for these very urban professional musicians and actors and artists and others coming from Vienna to suddenly find themselves in the middle of the Andes living at twelve thousand feet. I just thought, not only is there a difference in culture and language, but a completely different -- sorry, our doorbell is suddenly ringing.

Zibby: That's okay. [laughs]

Jennifer: I'm hoping that my ten-year-old will get it. Sorry about that. So it began with me imagining what it must have been like for these refugees to arrive in La Paz at this time. At the time, my daughter was around three or four. She was very busy creating this imaginary world that was quite complex. It had not only a queen, but it had a president who was a hermaphrodite so that this person could equally represent men and women. That was her solution to that problem. She was creating such a complicated world. She had maps of it and drawings. I thought, if I were a little girl growing up in Vienna while the Nazis were closing in on me and my family and I wasn't able to understand or cope emotionally with what was going on, I might be tempted to retreat into an imaginary world. I started with those two things, with my friend John's story and with my daughter's imaginary world, and started with this little girl in Vienna who I knew I wanted to arrive in Bolivia young enough so that she could still adapt more flexibly than her parents could.

Zibby: Now it all makes sense a little. In the book, it seemed impossible that you hadn’t been to some of these places. Your knowledge, I'm like, she couldn't just be making this up. You must have been there. What brought you and your family to Bolivia? What were you doing there?

Jennifer: At the time, my husband was working for the European Union. My husband is British. He worked for the British Diplomatic Service his whole life and then was on secondment to the European Union when we lived in La Paz and then after Brexit went back to working for the British Foreign Office which is what brought us to Uzbekistan.

Zibby: Wow. How did you begin writing to begin with? Tell me a little more about your memoir. Now I want to go back and read everything you've written before.

Jennifer: Thank you. I was working as a journalist in New York City. I got an email from my high school boyfriend saying, "How would you like to come train journalists in an impoverished Southern Arabian country?" was how he phrased it. I wrote back and said, "Could you just give me the name of the country and tell me a little bit more about this?" He ended up coming to New York. I said, "Look, I have a good job in New York. I can't just run off to Yemen, but I could come for my remaining vacation days." I had about three weeks left. He said, "That's great." He talked to the editor of the newspaper in Sanaa, Yemen, who said, "Yeah, bring her over." I said, "I'll do a training for three weeks. That's all I can spare." So I went over to Yemen having never been to the Middle East before, having taught myself a few words of Arabic in one of those books called Learn Arabic in Ten Minutes a Day kind of things. I went over Yemen and met the staff of this newspaper who amazed me. I had never felt more welcome anywhere in my entire life. I'd never met people who were so eager to learn and to work for me. They treated me as if I were visiting royalty. The Yemenis were the most hospitable, warm people I'd ever met.

The owner of the paper said, "I love what you're doing with my reporters. Would you be willing to come back as editor-in-chief of the newspaper and turn it into The New York Times?" I said, "Well, I've never worked for The New York Times. I'm not sure anyone in their right mind would want me to run a newspaper. I have no managerial experience. I've never run a newspaper." I'd been a journalist for more than a decade, but I hadn’t actually run a newsroom, let alone in Yemen. I went back to New York, thought about it, and realized that, actually, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in the same little gray cubicle, so I moved back to Yemen, took the job, which was the most exciting thing I've ever done. It was incredibly challenging but also incredibly rewarding. I made such close friends with my reporters. I'm still in touch with almost all of them today. That first year I spent working with them was so interesting to me. I learned so much from them. I wanted the world -- this was 2006. Like now, there's a lot of bias against Muslims and a lot of bias against Yemenis. Hardly anyone I met in the US could place Yemen on a map. I just thought, I want people to know my staff. I want them to know these Yemenis. I want them just to meet them and get to know them and realize that the media reports aren't always accurate. That's how I came to write my first book which was a memoir of that time I spent running that newspaper. Because I ended up meeting my husband in Yemen at the end of that first year, I then ended up living in Yemen for three more years. My daughter was actually born while we lived there.

Zibby: You were a journalist. You lived in Yemen for all this time. You wrote the memoir. Then you switched to fiction and wrote The Ambassador's Wife. How did that happen? When did you come up with that idea? Do you mind that I'm asking you your whole life story here? [laughs]

Jennifer: No, I'm happy to tell you. Once I met my husband, he was, at the time, the British Ambassador to Yemen. Once I moved in with him, I was suddenly plunged into a deeply surreal universe for me never having had any contact with diplomatic life. Suddenly, we had bodyguards. We had Scotland Yard sleeping in our guest rooms and ministers visiting from the UK. It was just such an interesting and crazy world that I was suddenly in touch with. I thought, I have to write about this, but I can't write a memoir because I don't want to destroy my marriage right away.

Zibby: Yeah, I want to make it die a slow and painful death. [laughs]

Jennifer: I don't want to make it die at all.

Zibby: No, I'm kidding. I know. I'm kidding. That wasn't even funny. Go on.

Jennifer: That's all right. That's why I started writing fiction. I thought, I want to place something in this world so I can write about it, but from a fictional point of view. I also was kidnapped while I was six months pregnant when I lived in Yemen. That was my third year. That experience inspired the opening scene of The Ambassador's Wife which starts with a kidnapping. That scene is pretty much how it happened to me. Then having been kidnapped, I then came to the UK to give birth but moved back to Yemen with my infant daughter, which some people thought was a bit crazy. Then my husband was attacked by a suicide bomber and we were evacuated.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh.

Jennifer: That’s the nutshell version.

Zibby: Wow. I'm glad I asked because that's not most people's nutshell version. Wait, back up for a second to the kidnapping. How do you get over something like that? I don't know how it ended or started or whatever, but I'm assuming it must have been traumatic for you in some way. How do you then pick up and go on? What was it like, the mini version of it?

Jennifer: In a way, I think that the fact that I was pregnant actually saved me. First of all, I was with four other women who were amazing. They were cool as can be. They were protective of me because I was pregnant. A lot of them had lived all over the world. They'd been held at gunpoint before. This was not their first experience like this. They were so calm and helped me. There was a moment at which I thought, we're all going to die. They're going to line us up and execute us. My husband's going to lose me, our daughter. In my panicky phase of the kidnapping, I started having cramps. I thought, I'm going to lose her. I don't want to. I don't want to miscarry in the middle of a country with questionable healthcare either. I said, all right, if I'm going to keep this baby in, I have to calm down. I just have to calm down. Thankfully, I had learned how to do yoga breathing. This is the one time it was really useful to me. I started doing that breathing and doing a little chant to her just saying, stay in. Just stay right where you are. You're cozy. It's not safe out here, so you just stay right where you are.

I think that saved me. I'm not sure I would've been as calm had I not been afraid that if I didn't just learn how to relax then I was going to lose the baby, and then being with these other women who were incredible. I had lost my phone in a scuffle with this sheik who was holding us hostage and borrowed a phone from someone. Fortunately, I'd remembered by husband's phone number. He quickly got the government involved with getting us back. When I called him, you'd think I called to tell him what was for dinner. He was like, "Okay. Do you have a sat phone with you? Is Mohammed there? Could I talk to him? Who's holding you? Where did you drive?" When I got back, I said to him, "Weren’t you worried?" He said, "Worried? I didn't have time to worry. I had to get you out." He just goes instantly -- I think this is his diplomatic training. When there's a crisis, which there are a lot of in diplomatic life, you just have to go straight into solving the problem. You don't have time to freak out. I've never seen my husband freak out in a situation of stress. I think that helped.

Also, these other women, I think just knowing that they were there with me helped a lot. I invited them all for dinner about a month after this happened. One of them hadn’t even told her husband that it had happened. I thought, how did you explain us being gone for an entire day? This was interesting insight into someone else's marriage. The other women were one of the things that kept me calm. The UK also, they had me write up my experiences. That's the other thing that helped. Right after it happened and I got home and had had a bath, I wrote down every detail of what happened, which is why I was able to come up with the first scene of the book. I already had it written down in first draft form because I had to turn that into the office so they were aware of exactly how it had unfolded.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Now Anne Hathaway is going to star as you?

Jennifer: I think actually, unfortunately, that option has expired. If anyone out there is interested in the option, it's now re-available. These sort of things, I suppose, happen all the time with film options.

Zibby: Yes. I hear this over and over and over again.

Jennifer: I know. I was pretty excited about that, so we're very sad.

Zibby: I'm sorry.

Jennifer: There are worse things that could happen, especially now.

Zibby: I just interviewed Wally Lamb on this same show last week.

Jennifer: Wow.

Zibby: Yeah, it was really awesome. His option lasted fifteen years for I Know This Much Is True. They tried to make it all these different ways. He kept getting disappointed. Then he finally took the option back and now has just made it into a limited series that just aired last Sunday. Oh gosh, I forgot to watch last night. Anyway, the Sunday before this Sunday. It all worked out. It took a while, but he's like, "I'm glad because this is the form that it should be taking." This form wasn't even available then. All to say, you never know.

Jennifer: You really don't ever know. It could happen. We'll see.

Zibby: You still travel all over the place. You're in London now. You lived in Uzbekistan.

Jennifer: I am in London at the moment, but we don't live here. We actually live in Uzbekistan. About two months ago, I think it is now, we were evacuated because of this pandemic. Even though there were no cases in Uzbekistan when we were evacuated and London was an epicenter of the pandemic, I think the foreign office thought if we do get sick, they wanted us to be near British healthcare. That was their thinking in sending me and my daughter back here, but we didn't have anywhere to live. In the middle of this, we suddenly had to find an apartment with two days' notice, which we did miraculously through another writer because writers are wonderful people. We have somewhere to stay now, but we don't know how long we're here for or when we can see my husband again because he's still in Uzbekistan and the airspace is closed.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh.

Jennifer: We're apart until Uzbek airspace opens. Also, he's quite busy at the moment.

Zibby: Your whole life sounds like a movie. I'm glad you keep writing. I can't wait for the next. You must be working on something else, right?

Jennifer: I am, actually. I'm on the second draft of the next novel, which is completely different from anything I've ever done and I'm really loving writing. It's mostly in dialogue, which is my favorite. Someday if I ever grow up, maybe I'll write plays. For now, I'm doing this. I'm doing a PhD at the moment. This is part of the dissertation for that.

Zibby: That's right. I read that you were doing a PhD. I was like, does that really say expected 2021? Could she really be getting her PhD now in the middle of all of this? How unbelievable.

Jennifer: This wasn't going on when I started. The University of Birmingham has a distance learning for this. I talk to my supervisor every month. He's just the most incredible man and writer. For me, it's a huge luxury to do a PhD because to have someone whose job it is to read what I write every month, that doesn't happen to most writers. Usually, you're just sitting alone in the dark, which is how I've wrote my first few books. Now I have someone to talk to along the way. It's just great.

Zibby: Wait, give me a little bit more about this dialogue-driven novel.

Jennifer: Basically, it's about a gay/queer underground in Bolivia, almost exclusively lesbian. It's about this community living underground. That again is based on something I heard about when I was in Bolivia. Even though homosexuality is official legal, it can still get you killed in Bolivia. A lot of people who come out are thrown out of their families and abused in all kinds of ways. Some of these people have sought refuge underneath the city, in tunnels underneath the city. I again was wondering, I wonder what that's like. I've just loved these women that have formed this underground community. The underground genre seems to be so male dominated. Books like Jack Kerouac's Subterraneans and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and all these other books about the underground seem to be these very male undergrounds. All these revolutionary undergrounds are often male. I thought, what if it were a female space? How would women try to create revolution without violence?

Zibby: Wow. I'm following you now forever. I can't wait to see what you write. I'm so excited. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Jennifer: I do. This is advice based on my own experience. I guess that's inevitable. For me, what helped me the most was moving somewhere that made me profoundly uncomfortable in a lot of ways and forced me to question a lot of the assumptions I had about how the world worked, how human beings worked, how culture worked. I've never been the same. Since I left for Yemen in 2006, I haven't lived in the US. Living outside of the US for that long, I've learned the ways in which the US shaped me and that other people are shaped in different ways. I feel, I hope, I am always gaining a broader perspective on thinking about people more globally than from purely an American lens. I think that's really a useful thing to do as a writer, is to have to flounder around in somewhere completely foreign and figure things out. You start to realize things about yourself you wouldn't realize if you didn't leave your comfortable space.

Zibby: Interesting. If we can all ever travel again, that sounds great.

Jennifer: Yeah, not so easy at the moment.

Zibby: That's okay. I feel like I'm floundering in my own home every day, so lots of material in this time. [laughs]

Jennifer: You are not alone.

Zibby: Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for coming on my podcast and this show and for Exile Music, which I can't wait to finish, and for introducing me to your really interesting, one-of-a-kind life. What a treat.

Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

Zibby: Take care. I hope you see your husband soon.

Jennifer: Thank you.

Zibby: Buh-bye

Jennifer: Bye.

Lynn Steger Strong, WANT

Zibby Owens: This is day five, the last day of this week for my July Book Blast. Today is Fiction Friday. I'll be releasing a few episodes of novels that I think are pretty awesome and can't wait to introduce you to these authors. I'm doing the July Book Blast because I interviewed a lot of people during quarantine. The books came out during quarantine. I would love them to get the airtime they need now to get the word out. Also, a lot of these books are great beach reads. If you have any time this summer, I would love for you to hear more from these authors directly. Please enjoy Fiction Friday. Stay tuned. This whole week was Memoir Monday, Debut Tuesday, Beach Reads Wednesday, Thrilling Thursday, and now today, Fiction Friday. I hope you've had a chance to listen to a few this week. Enjoy this one. Bye.

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of Want: A Novel and also Hold Still. She was born and raised in South Florida and has an MFA from Columbia University and teaches writing.

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

Lynn Steger Strong: Thanks so much for having me. Moms definitely don't have time to read books right now.

Zibby: Isn't it even harder now? Do you think it's even harder with everything going on? It must be.

Lynn: Oh, yeah. My husband is commuting to work. I'm by myself with my kids all day. I get up very early, but I haven't been reading very much. It's hard.

Zibby: Your book, I made time to read.

Lynn: Thank you. That's good.

Zibby: Your novel is called Want, coming out in July. Tell listeners what Want is about and what inspired you to write this book.

Lynn: It's about a woman, a mom. The short answer is she declares bankruptcy and she gets in touch with an old friend, but I think, I hope, it's about being a woman and motherhood and privilege and the particular fact of trying to want when you've been told you can have anything you want and then realizing that that's not true. I started at the start, which is to say I started with the opening scene, I started with this idea of a woman -- I was really interested in someone who's going through a lot and who, on paper, seems like she's struggling but also has an obscene amount of privilege. I started with a woman who walks out of her job and literally disappears and realizes no one notices. That idea of who has the power and privilege to disappear was a lot of what started the book for me.

Zibby: I feel like the book throws you right into this woman's, nonchalance is the wrong word, her ambivalence about everything, her lack of being able to feel it all. She's going through the motions. The way you described the scenes in the shower with her husband, everything is just so matter of fact. She gets it done. Then she moves on. She's catatonic, which I feel like is a state so many people can get to when they're not fully happy in their lives. You didn't even have to say it. You just illustrated it with your words. That was great.

Lynn: Thank you. That idea of ambivalence was one of the grinding factors. I was constantly like, if something seems one way, in the next scene I want it to almost seem the exact opposite. If a character seems sort of good or nice, in the next scene I want the reader to see how they're another thing. The idea of everything being not only but also was running through my head a lot.

Zibby: You had your main character obsessed with her childhood friend, Sasha. Am I getting that right?

Lynn: Yep.

Zibby: Why? What was that about? Did you have a friend that you would stalk on Facebook or something? How did you come up with that as a device? Was it from life or what?

Lynn: I think that we're all sort of obsessed. I at least have very intense female friendships. In a lot of ways, they’ve been formative to me in ways that both feel familiar in terms of a lot of my -- again, they're my friends, so whatever. A lot of women have those experiences. With regard to this idea of motherhood and womanhood, I think that our mothers are our models. I also think that the other women in our lives become our models in ways that we don't always realize. For me, Sasha especially was this way. I think when we're teenagers, we play at being grown-up. We don't realize that sometimes our actions have grown-up consequences before we're ready to know what our actions are. Sasha's there to sort of show how when the main character tries to love people, she doesn't have any other model besides her own mother. Her own mother is not a great model. Then when she tries to love Sasha, she accidentally does things that as a grown-up and as a mother to her own children she would never do and she regrets. The obsession was with another female character, but it was also this obsession with wanting to be good at taking care of people and not knowing how to do that well.

Zibby: Interesting. I love how you took it all the way back to when Sasha -- what is the narrator's name? I'm blanking on this.

Lynn: Elizabeth.

Zibby: Elizabeth. That's my name, actually. How could I forget this? When they contrast even how they grew up and how Elizabeth was saying her house was much bigger and it would seem like maybe that would make for a happier home when in fact, not at all. The exact opposite was home. Her parents would just stroll in and barely acknowledge her. Then in Sasha's house, which was much smaller and they didn't maybe have as much privilege, it was all about the love and what was missing. I feel like so much in female friendships, you look for what you're missing in yourself a little bit, try to fill that gap. Anyway, thought that was neat.

Lynn: Totally. Again, I think that privilege, it's such an elastic, slippery word. On paper, Elizabeth's family has more, but in reality, it feels like Sasha's family has more. Also, the other things are true too. Sasha has more student debt than Elizabeth.

Zibby: I read one of your articles on Catapult about writing about how you had dinner with your family and you wanted to write a story about them, but then you'd have to make them characters and maybe they wouldn't be perfect characters. I was just wondering how you ended up with fiction, if you ever did attempt to fictionalize your own family, if that has crept its way into your novels, and just how you ended up becoming a novelist, really.

Lynn: I think it all creeps in. I think people who say it doesn't are lying. I have tried to write nonfiction. I've actually written a bit of nonfiction. Ultimately, I always return to fiction because I think that scenes are the most, at least for me, they're the thing that I'm best at. I think they're the best sometimes at communicating ideas, not least because I don't really want to make any arguments. Like you said, I'm really interested in ambivalence. The best way, I think, to make readers sit inside of spaces of not knowing or this sort of everything is often more than one thing at the same time is to just depict scenes as carefully and precisely as I can. That's how I continually return to fiction. I'm trying to think of all of your questions.

Zibby: I know. Sorry. I loaded them all up at once. [laughs]

Lynn: No, it's okay. The particular way that I was loved and the particular way that I think that love is always flawed and that we always hurl that word at one another but fall short in different ways, obviously that came from personal experiences, which I think is also how I became a novelist. I became a writer in some ways because I felt like I was saying things and I was given language, but that language never matched up with the experience. It was just this long process of trying to find language that was effective enough that people heard what I was saying. I had this New Yorker cartoon when I was in college, maybe, or twenties that was this girl sitting in a window saying, "Dear Mom and Dad, you gave me a good childhood. As a result, I can never be a writer," which is silly and funny. My parents loved me very much. I feel like everybody who becomes a writer in some ways has experienced some, I feel like trauma's too strong a word, but I think specifically trauma around language. Words have been used against them in ways that makes them want to reappropriate that power in some way by saying, I know how powerful language can be. I want control of that. I'm going to enact that on other people.

Zibby: That's an interesting theory. I'm going to test that out. I like it. I fully agree that -- I have a girlfriend who came to this one book event I had. All these authors were talking about different books. She was like, "You know, I think I've just had too happy a life. Nothing really bad has happened to me. I feel kind of badly saying that. My parents are happily married. I'm very lucky. I have a nice marriage." I do think there's something to having had some sort of pain that can infuse your writing in some way. I think it generally helps. Something has to inspire you. Maybe not. Now I feel like writers are going to be like, nothing bad happened to me.

Lynn: I have plenty of friends with -- again, I put myself in this category in a lot of ways -- who had very idyllic childhoods. It's also just more a relationship to recognizing the ruptures in your life and other people's lives and then thinking about how those shift your experience. If you're paying a lot of attention, which I would argue is the one rule of being a writer, is to just pay a lot of attention, if you're paying a lot of attention, you see all the fissures and ruptures even if they're not necessarily happening to you.

Zibby: Love that. This is great. You teach writing too.

Lynn: I do.

Zibby: Tell me about some of the things that you tell your students. Sneak me some information that you share with them.

Lynn: I try to do a lot of generative writing in almost all of the classes that I teach, which is to say that I think that language is as much generative as communicative, which is another way of saying, so you have an idea and it's in your head and you think that you can just pop it in a word, but I don't believe that that's true. Language is a limited object. I might think I feel love, but my idea of that word love is very different from your idea of that word love. Already, there's a disconnect. Because language is separate, we can take language and we can see what language can teach us. That's a long-winded way of saying I think it's really important that sometimes you write and not think about what you're writing, but just keep going. I make my students do a lot of that, especially in the beginning of our different -- depending on the class I'm teaching. In that vein, the first assignment I always give them, which is stolen wholly from Amy Hempel, to write the thing that destabilizes your sense of yourself. That can be both you as a human but also you as a writer. I teach grad students and whatever. Also just depending on the mood you're in, some of us don't necessarily want to be sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers crying. [laughs] You can always write the thing that destabilizes your sense of yourself as a writer. You can also write the thing that destabilizes your sense of yourself as a human. I would argue they're connected.

I'll also say just for whatever it's worth, I don't ever make people share any of this. I think that's an important part of being a writer and writing and finding a way to saying something worthwhile. You have to inhabit spaces where you're like, I will never share this with anyone ever. What would I write if I gave myself that space? Then maybe seventeen drafts later, you might find yourself in a space where you would share it, but to make sure that you sometimes sit down and say, this is just a secret and I'm seeing what that secret feels like in language. That's the one other thing. Then I'll stop. That's the one other thing I tell students and the thing I hope my books feel like. We have so many forms of storytelling at this point. One of the thrills of reading that I want to give readers is the thrill of secret sharing. You can't get that energy of secret sharing if you're never sharing secrets or what feels like secrets.

Zibby: I feel like secrets are another motivating factor in writing. I feel like anyone who has held a secret, which is basically everybody in some form or another, but depending on the level of destruction that that secret has wrought in their lives, I feel like that informs so many stories and entire novels. There should really just be a whole thing on, write your secrets on the way to your novel or something like that. [laughs]

Lynn: That's another writing exercise I give students. Share a secret, but also share a secret with someone for who the secret is high stakes. Write that letter to the mom character in the book that if she got that letter, she would cry. That's also it. How do secrets function as sources of tension? They almost always do if you look at the right people.

Zibby: Then that's the trick of turning those into fiction. When you said that first prompt, something popped into my head that happened in college which I haven't thought of in forever. Then I was like, no, I couldn't write that because I could never share that. Then I was thinking, well, maybe that would be interesting in a novel. Then I would get on a call with somebody and they'd say, did that really happen to you? Then what would I say? Yes or no? [laughs]

Lynn: This is why fiction's so fun. You would turn it into something concrete that's separate from the secret. For example, and this is giving away a part of the book, but no one has ever offered my family money for my husband's sperm. That's a detail in the novel. What has happened in my life is that I've had a complicated relationship with my femininity and my husband's masculinity and my ability to make babies in my relationship. I've thought a lot about that. Again, no one's ever offered me money for her husband's sperm, but that idea, sitting at a dinner and having someone say, we think that your husband's ability to procreate, we think your husband's ability to make a home is more powerful than yours, is absolutely a thing that I have felt. Then in fiction, it becomes this very specific scene with a very specific action that has consequence that has other people to interact around it. But in my life, it's just a thought.

Zibby: Wow, that's really neat. This is great. I feel like I've just taken a little mini writing tutorial here. I'm so inspired. This is great.

Lynn: I'll send you some writing prompts when we're done. I love writing prompts.

Zibby: I actually subscribed, there was a -- I can't even remember what it was called. Somebody did, pay fifty cents a day for a writing prompt or something like that. Every day, she would send a writing prompt. I ended up deleting it. I'm like, I don't have time to write right now, so I'm not writing, but the whole idea of everything sparks all these stories and they're all tucked away. I don't know about you, as I get older, I feel like I'm probably much older than you, but if someone says, tell me a story from college, I'm like, I don't know. But if somebody reminds me of specific thing like somebody I went to college with, of course it comes back. You might not think of it until you have the red carpet that rolls out right to that moment.

Lynn: I had a grad school professor, Victor LaValle, who's a genius. You think about how you remember an experience as a feeling, but actually, feelings have logistics. He was talking about, he was writing about a depressed college kid. Depression inevitably feels really one-note. I think I'm playing with that in my book too. In my book, a ton happens. Also, his description was, but then I remembered I was a depressed kid who smoked a lot of weed which meant I had to interact with my dealer which meant that was sometimes funny. Actually, I ate a lot of food, which, A, food is super -- I'm sort of obsessed with food as a really useful space to think about families and relationships and etc. You think about the thing that you felt. As writers, we often want to talk about our feelings. Then you think about, there are usually logistics and rituals around those feelings, and those can provide scenes.

Zibby: It's so great.

Lynn: I hope. I don't know.

Zibby: Tell me about the process of writing Want and how it differed from your first book.

Lynn: Hold Still was my first book. It came out. I wrote it, and I was not very happy with the reception. I think most writers are sort of like, my dream came true and I'm still myself. It can be a jarring experience to still have to be yourself. I had this big, complicated novel that I spent a few years on that was nine point-of-view characters. Anyway, long story short, after a few rounds of submissions it did not sell. I was pretty devasted but also pretty much like, well, I tried. It didn't work, so now I'm just going to do whatever I want. I tend to get up pretty early. I started to get up around three or four instead of four or five and wrote a bunch. My kids were in camp for -- there was this very short period of time -- I usually have three or four jobs at a time. For that period of time, I had one or two jobs on and off, but many fewer jobs than usual and needed to do much less childcare than usual. I just was a little bit of a crazy person. I was probably very hard to live with. I was getting up at three or four. I would write until my kids woke up. I would take them to camp. I would write until it was time to pick them up. I would watch them/let them watch television. I would put them to bed. I would write more. It came out very, very quickly. It was sort of intense and unsustainable. Then I had a draft. Once I have a draft, and this is always true, once I have a draft, I can sort of calm down because I know what it is. I feel like it has the energy and the rhythm I want it to have. Now I can do the stuff that feels more like the actual work of figuring out how to put the pieces together. The process was very intense and, again, probably not super fun for my husband.

Zibby: What time would you go to sleep on the days you were waking up at three?

Lynn: Ten or eleven. I'd work again once my kids went to bed. I don't know if you feel this as a parent. I also just need some time when no one needs anything from me. Even if I don't sleep and to go real low and highbrow, like I'm watching Real Housewives, I just need some time when no one wants to talk to me. I also have to fit that in somewhere.

Zibby: Every so often when a kid wakes me up in the middle of the night -- I don't usually get out of bed ever before three. I try not to be in the threes, but sometimes they wake me up and my brain just starts going. I'm like, ooh, how nice. I could go into the kitchen and no one will walk over to the table and bother me. [laughs] I can do anything. I could read. I could write. I could prepare for all these podcasts. It doesn't matter. No one's going to talk to me. That alone is enough to get me out of bed in the middle of the night just to enjoy the silence.

Lynn: I feel like people look at me like I'm crazy, but it is a magic time. There's also this weird pressure to be productive and efficient which I feel very much just also as a person who has to survive in the world. I feel weirdly at four AM, I can give myself a break. This morning I looked at the pigeons. I was up at four. I went for a run. Then I came back and I watched the pigeons out our window. At five thirty, that feels unproductive and like I need to start doing something. At four, it's like, nah, it's fine.

Zibby: The other day, it was literally three thirty. I was like, look at these cool shadows on the books in my office. I start taking all these pictures. Then of course, I put my little card in my computer the other day. I was like, oh, my god, what was I doing that night? [laughter] Yes, it's very nice to escape the chaos, the nonstop, especially these days. Our little kids are similar ages. It's a lot. It's a lot of needs to meet. It's intense.

Lynn: It's a lot.

Zibby: Are you writing another novel now? What are you up to?

Lynn: I am, yeah. Like I said, I'm mostly looking at the pigeons these days. Like you say, I'm trying to do our very hobbling version of remote learning because my kids are still doing that for a couple more weeks. I have a book that is about -- it's interesting because I started it before everything that's happened. I was thinking a lot about the climate, as I think a lot of people are. It was about a kid who goes missing. It was about making art. It's very specific. It's over the period of a holiday weekend. A child goes missing. The families go out in search of her. It's also about trying to raise people well and make art when both of those things in different circumstances could feel like sort of absurd endeavors in our current context. I have had 167 pages of that book for a couple months now. It's a distracting, tricky time.

Zibby: That is true. Do you have advice to aspiring authors?

Lynn: Keep going. Keep going. You're going to write bad things. Also, the things you write that are good, people are going to tell you are bad, so keep going. Create language for and ideas around what you want to make because you might be the only one who knows when you've made it. You want to be able to stand up and say, no, you don't like it, or no, you don't want to publish it, but this is what I want to make. If this is not what you want, then I will find someone else. Just keep going. It's such a weird, slippery, hard path. The only people I know who have published books are the people who kept trying to write books.

Zibby: Very true. Thank you. Thanks for all your insights. Thank you for coming on the show. I will be thinking of you in the middle of the night. [laughter]

Lynn: Enjoy your shadows. To me, it's so exciting. Thank you so much for having me. Good luck with your children and all the things.

Zibby: Thanks, you too.

Thanks so much for listening to Fiction Friday, part of the July Book Blast of "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I hope that you found some really great reads this week. All five days I've launched tons of episodes so that I can entertain you and you can connect with stories and just feel a little better in the world knowing that these stories exist and that these authors are out there. I hope you enjoyed all of these Fiction Friday episodes and that you had a great day. I hope you have a really great weekend. Come back next week because I'm doing one more week, one more five days I should say, of another July Book Blast week. I'll have five new fun days then, and then back to normal. You can have a binge podcast fest or something. Anyway, have a great weekend.

Stephanie Storey, RAPHAEL, PAINTER IN ROME

Zibby Owens: Stephanie Storey’s debut novel Oil and Marble was hailed as “tremendously entertaining” by The New York Times, has been translated into six languages, and is currently in development as a feature film by Pioneer Pictures. Storey is also the author of Raphael, Painter in Rome and has a degree in fine arts from Vanderbilt University and attended a PhD program in art history before leaving to get an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She has studied art in Italy and been on a pilgrimage to see every Michelangelo on display in Europe. Stephanie has also been a national television producer for nearly twenty years in LA from shows including Alec Baldwin on ABC, Arsenio Hall for CBS, and Emmy-nominated The Writers' Room on the Sundance Channel. When not writing novels or producing television, Storey can usually be found with her husband, Mike Gandolfi, an actor and Emmy-winning comedy writer, traveling the world in search of their next stories.

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

Stephanie Storey: Thank you so much for having me even in the middle of all of the crazy world we have going on outside of our doors. I appreciate having any opportunity to talk about books and getting a little bit of an escape for a moment.

Zibby: Yes, I'm happy to provide the forum for that. You have such an interesting background. Your first book was Oil and Marble which took the world by storm and is now becoming a feature film. Is that right? Is that still happening?

Stephanie: It is still happening. Pioneer Pictures is making the movie. They're a great group of guys. I believe they have just finished up getting the screenplay solid. Now they're going out and attaching other elements and still hoping to plan on shooting in Italy once all of this closes down. There will be news forthcoming on that, but the moviemaking process is slow.

Zibby: Yes, I am acquainted with that a little bit. [laughter] How nice does filming in Italy sound? Even the idea of being able to travel. I know that's the least of these days, but just the ability to be in other parts of the world.

Stephanie: Just the ability to think about going back to Italy soothes me in some manner, to think about being able to head back to Rome or head back to Florence or just do something that feels a little bit more global than being sheltered in place in a house right now, which I understand is important. I'm all for it, but it is nice to be able to dream of going back to Italy at some point. Filming there would be amazing, oh, my gosh.

Zibby: I was looking at this picture. I have this photo of a pier with the Mediterranean Sea around it and all these people. There's this one woman who's walking down. I did this, I don't even know what it was, mindfulness -- I don't know what it was. I was like, I'm going to imagine that I'm her and I can hear the sounds and smell the water and pretend that I am there because instead, I am in my same place that I've been now for weeks and weeks and weeks. It helped. [laughs]

Stephanie: Then imagine yourself going and eating pizza or some pesto. Something like that would be really nice.

Zibby: I feel like you're going to get to Italy before me, so you are now required to send me some pictures or some footage of that trip because I am craving that experience. You have Oil and Marble. Now you have a new book, a new art historical thriller coming out. Tell me about that. I see it behind you.

Stephanie: It is. It is behind me, not that anybody else can see it, but it's right here.

Zibby: Not that you can see, sorry. We're on Skype.

Stephanie: It came out on April 7th. It just came out. Oil and Marble was about the rivalry between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci when they were both living in Florence. At the end of that book -- this is not really a spoiler because it doesn't really give much away. At the end of that book a guy by the name of Raphael shows up on the scene. My newest book sort of in a way picks up where Oil and Marble left off. Although, it's very different. We follow Raphael down to Rome where he then engages in this high-stakes rivalry with Michelangelo. While Michelangelo was painting the Sistine ceiling, Raphael is just down the hall decorating the pope's private apartments. This newest novel is written in first person from Raphael's point of view. You only get this big rivalry between these two huge artists from the eyes of Raphael. You only see Michelangelo through the eyes of Raphael. He's sitting across a tavern table from you, the reader, telling you this story of how he engaged in this huge rivalry with Michelangelo, and the story, and how Michelangelo does create the Sistine ceiling during that and how Raphael deals with his rival doing such amazing things on a ceiling, and how he counters that.

Zibby: These days, someone's rival might get more likes on Instagram. Then they're painting the Sistine Chapel. [laughs] Things were so much more impressive.

Stephanie: Right? The Sistine Chapel. It's so funny because I've been talking to book clubs and people who have already read Raphael. They're like, "I went to the Vatican to go the Sistine, but I don't remember seeing Raphael's rooms, the pope's private apartments. I don't know if I went through them." I'm like, oh, no, you have to walk through them in order to get to the Sistine. The Vatican forces you walk through the Raphael rooms. They are gorgeous. They are little jewel boxes of rooms of these amazing masterpieces. People are so focused, I think, or at least Americans, are so focused on seeing the Sistine that they forget and they don't stop and pay attention to this other amazing art. I'm hoping that my book can do a little bit towards reviving Raphael. He was the most famous of the three, of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael during his lifetime. He was the most beloved. He was the one that everybody held up as this perfect painter. This year was the five hundredth anniversary of his death. There was supposed to be this huge global celebration going on of Raphael's life. This huge exhibit in Rome got shut down days after it opened. I was heartbroken for Raphael, not for me, for him. I was like, this was supposed to be your moment. I guess that's why I wrote it, because I get all flustered and weird when I talk about how we're missing out on Raphael's art and his brilliance and how we need to go back and reconnect to it. He was a nice guy, so he gets left out of the history too much. People go, he was so nice, so generous, so humble. He's not interesting. No, he's really interesting. Trust me.

Zibby: You have a PhD in art history. No, you don't? You don't.

Stephanie: I went to a PhD program. I attended one. I did not finish because academics do not like it when you make stuff up.

Zibby: [laughs] So then you switched to your MFA?

Stephanie: Then I went to go get my MFA.

Zibby: I was like, how did she do all of these things?

Stephanie: I'm old. I'm forty-five now. My first book came out when I was forty. I'd already had time to go to a PhD program, drop out, go get my MFA, move to Hollywood, produce a bunch of television, and then come out with a book. I don't know. It's an obsession. I'm obsessed.

Zibby: You can tell the passion in your voice. Now I all of a sudden care about Raphael. I was just going about my business not really -- I thought I had enough of an impression of what he was like before, but now I have to revisit the whole thing.

Stephanie: You have to. That's the point. He got left out. Now he's just a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. [laughter] Come on. He's so much more than that.

Zibby: Wait, back up a little bit. You were a TV producer also for a long time before this. How did you decide to quit your day job and pursue fiction writing?

Stephanie: I have written novels or books, fiction, since I was seven years old. I wrote my first, Hoardy the Hog Goes to School, when I was seven. I've written fiction every day since. Everybody told me that's not a real gig even though I had my MFA in creative writing. I moved down to Hollywood because I heard there was this business where people told stories and it was an actual industry where you can get a job and make money, so I did. However, Hollywood was my total plan B. I was like, I'm going to do this until I get a novel. I went there and I produced primarily news and talk television. Candice Bergen had a talk show. Carrie Fisher had a talk show, Governor Jesse Ventura, Tava Smiley, Arsenio Hall's relaunch to CBS. Alec Baldwin just had a talk show a couple years ago on ABC that I produced. I did that forever while in the mornings and at nights and on weekends I was writing screenplays for a while with my husband.

Then I had one of those moments in 2011 where you realize life is really short and it's not going to last forever, so you better do what you really want to do. I was terrified of writing a novel. I thought, oh, man, what if I'm not good enough? What if I'm only good enough to write a screenplay in television? I'm not good enough to write a novel. I really wanted to. I really wanted to tell the Oil and Marble story, the Michelangelo versus Leonardo story. I just bucked up and did it in 2011. I was thirty-six when I started, when I really said I'm not just going to write fiction for myself. I had seven novels or something in a filing cabinet by that point that were never going to see the light of day. This was the first time when I said, okay, I'm going to try to make one good enough to get it published and send it out into the world. Then I sold it. Then my husband and I sold our condo and went on book tour. I thought, that’ll take three months. We don't need to pay the mortgage at the Marriott too. Up until this pandemic, we were still traveling full time with gigs and writing events and speaking events. I don't know how it happened. I just looked up and went, I guess I have a noveling career now.

Zibby: Wow. That's really impressive. Essentially, you're homeless. You've just been bouncing from one place to another.

Stephanie: I am very lucky. My parents have property on a lake in Arkansas. They have a guest house. Whenever we need to stop down and do some laundry or have a home-cooked meal, we stop in at the guest house. Then we leave again for the Marriott. Although, we are sheltering in place by lake in Arkansas which has turned out to be great. We're away from humanity. I only go to the grocery store. It's a quiet place to write my next novel.

Zibby: What's your next novel about?

Stephanie: All I am saying about it at this point is it's still art historical fiction because I hope to be writing that until the day I die, like Michelangelo. Michelangelo was still carving the week before he died when he was eighty-eight years old. He was still carving marble. Come on. Raphael dies when he's thirty-seven, so he's still painting his greatest masterpiece two days before he dies. Anyway, I hope to be doing that. Art historical fiction, but the new one is leaving the Italian Renaissance for now, not that I won't be back. I have other eras of art history that fascinate me. I'm leaving both era and I'm leaving the country. I'm leaving Italy to go to a different country too. That's about all I'm saying about it, unless you follow my social media in which case you might be able to figure out what country I've been obsessed with lately. That's all I'll tell people.

Zibby: I'll go back and do some detective work. What happened in 2011? What happened that made you rethink your life and decide that now is the moment?

Stephanie: My husband had a stroke. He was forty-nine years old. We were in a hospital. He's the healthiest guy I know. He was a vegetarian. He doesn't drink. He doesn't smoke. He runs every day. He does yoga. He is literally the healthiest guy I know. I'm sitting there. At the time, I'm thirty-six. I'm going, this is crazy. How can the healthiest guy I know have had this big of an event? We didn't know at the time when I'm sitting in the hospital room. He's fully recovered now. Now you'd never know. At the time, you're like, this is bad. We're in for physical therapy. We're in for a long journey. I don't know how he's going to be. The beeping machine, I could still just -- in that moment, you go, well, this isn't going to last forever. If this can happen to my husband, it can happen to me. He's healthier than I am.

Zibby: How did the stroke present itself? How did you even know it was happening?

Stephanie: It turned out he'd already had a smaller one earlier in the year which we didn't identify. He just started walking like a drunk cartoon character. We were like, that's weird. The morning of I had already gone to work. I was producing television, so I was up really early in the morning. I got a phone call at my office phone from a neighbor saying, "Hey, I'm with your husband. He's asking you to come home." He gives the phone to my husband. My husband says, "Come home." Something's happened. I don't know what. I get home. I don't know what's happening. He woke up and his arm flew up in the air without him doing it. Then he couldn't dial the phone himself. He was sort of confused. We go to the hospital. It's a very long story. I'm going to make it very short. We go to the hospital. They run some tests. They do not run an MRI. They send us home telling him he's dehydrated. That was at nine o'clock in the morning. That night he kept getting worse, but they had sent us home. They told us he was okay. I just wanted to get him to bed. Went to a friend's house for dinner. He's not talking right. Something's not right. Then he woke up in the middle of the night. He was choking. I said, "What's wrong?" He said, "Agubhughughu." I went, "What?" He went, "Agubhughughu." What he thought he was saying was, "I just sneezed." I got up and raced him back to the hospital. By that point, it was obvious. His whole left side was flat. He couldn't move his arm. He couldn't walk. By that point, it was beyond anything I would've -- there was no doubt once you get back to hospital then. Then the hospital goes, oh, my gosh, we sent him home. I don't usually tell that story. You're very good.

Zibby: Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry into your life. I'm sorry. I'm just so interested. I'm sorry.

Stephanie: You didn't. It's not something I keep that I don't share. I just don't usually talk about it, so it's interesting that I did in this scenario.

Zibby: Thank you for talking about it. I'm sorry you had to go through that. That's a lot. That's terrifying. Oh, my gosh. That's a lot to handle. I see why it made you pivot in the rest of your life. When someone you love goes through something like that, everything changes. That's it.

Stephanie: And you're so helpless. You can't do anything to help. All you can do is sit there and go, well, I can help him recover. Then I can reexamine my life and say, what's actually important to me? What's actually important to him? What's actually important to us as a married couple? How do we navigate forward to try to make the best of the life that we have? I guess for me that meant writing about five-hundred-year-old dead artists. [laughter]

Zibby: I might not pick the same sort of item in the toolbox, but to each his own.

Stephanie: I think it's a weird choice, but I guess that's what came up because that's what I've done.

Zibby: How great that there's a demand for it too. It's also so unique. I'm sure that's what drew publishers to it. Your passion for it, I know I already said this, but this is intense love of these artists and this time period. I took art history every semester of college. I like to think that I really do care about art and I'm interested and I like the backstory, but I am nothing. This is a whole new world.

Stephanie: I just care so much that they're real people. That's what bothers me. People walk into museums. They look at these artists as though they're just up on these pedestals and they're untouchable. They're not like you and me. They're these geniuses who fell from Earth to create these pieces of art that changed the world. That's BS. They are real people who faced real struggles and really fought hard for the work that they created. Those are the stories I've tried to tell, is that story of creativity and fighting for creativity. It's part of humanity. In addition to writing about art and humanity, I also throw in a lot of fires and floods and dramatic murders and all kinds of fun things because it's a book. This period of history is full of that stuff. It's full of popes poisoning other popes and dukes killing cardinals. It's just full of fires and floods and all kinds of exciting things. You might as well throw them in. That's the other thing. I try not make my art history like you had it in your art history class where you just look at a slide and you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the name and the date and the title and the artist's name, and then you move on. It's all the most important stuff in the world to me. That's embarrassing. [laughs]

Zibby: No, it's not embarrassing. It's awesome. I love it. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors? Particularly because you said in the beginning that you just have drawers and drawers of these manuscripts and you've written so many novels and that you decided to finally write one that was good enough, tell me about that journey and why you didn't give up. What's your advice on not giving up there?

Stephanie: My advice on not giving up, boy, I don't know. You have to really want to do it because it's a really, really hard job and really, really hard process. My best advice to aspiring writers is if you are going to try to go publish something, if you are going to go aspire to put it out into the world, make it as good as you can possibly make it before you send it to anybody. I see so many young or older-but-aspiring writers who write a draft. Maybe they edit it. Then they go, yeah, this is good. I'm like, no. Compare it to Goldfinch. Compare it to Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Compare it to Dan Brown. Compare it to JK Rowling. Pick the biggest stuff you see on the shelves and honestly look at your work and compare it to the work that's out there. Force yourself to get it as close to that as you possibly can. I hate to tell you that means like a hundred drafts, not two.

Zibby: Good point.

Stephanie: That's the reality of it. Particularly when you get into the business, there are so many books out there. It's daunting. You might as well aim for the planets. There's a famous quote online. It's attributed to Michelangelo. I haven't found the actual primary source, but I'm going to give it to him anyway. The problem for most of us isn't aiming too high and missing our mark. It's aiming too low and hitting it. That's the truth. Aim high even if you miss it. I think you'll hit something more worth putting out into the world. We need new stories and new art out in the world right now because we need to all unify and find hope and move toward bending the world toward some sort of beauty instead of where we are right now.

Zibby: Preach. Love it.

Stephanie: I can't help it. [laughs]

Zibby: Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you for coming on my show. Thanks for opening up. I loved talking to you. Send me those pictures if you ever get to Italy.

Stephanie: I will. Thank you so much for having me, Zibby.

Zibby: It was my pleasure.

Stephanie: And for making me comfortable enough to tell you a story I don't usually tell. I appreciate it.

Zibby: No problem. Bye.

Stephanie: Bye.