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.

Karma Brown, RECIPE FOR A PERFECT WIFE

Zibby Owens: Karma Brown is the best-selling author of four novels. Her debut novel, Come Away with Me, was a Globe & Mail Best 100 Books of 2015. A National Magazine Award-winning journalist, Karma has been published in a variety of publications including Self, Redbook, Today’s Parent, Best Health, Canadian Living, and Chatelaine. Her latest book is Recipe for a Perfect Wife: A Novel. Karma lives just outside Toronto, Canada, with her husband, daughter, and a labradoodle named Fred. When not crafting copy or mulling plot lines, she is typically working out, making a mess in the kitchen, and checking items off her bucket list with her family. Her nonfiction project out early '21 is called Time Change.

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

Karma Brown: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: I'm sorry it took us so long.

Karma: You know what? It's been crazy.

Zibby: It's true. There have been some world events that got in the way, some changes and everything. Anyway, here we are. I'm delighted to be talking to you, finally.

Karma: Me too. Me too.

Zibby: Your most recent book, Recipe for a Perfect Wife, for listeners who might not know what it's about, would you mind giving a quick synopsis?

Karma: It is a dual narrative book. It takes place in the 1950s. The other character, you visit her in 2018. The book takes place in the same house. These two women live in this house, but sixty years apart. There is a cookbook that the modern-day woman discovers that had belonged to the 1950s housewife. Within those pages, she finds some secrets about the life that this 1950s housewife lived in this house that she's now living in somewhat reluctantly as she was dragged from Manhattan to the suburbs. Their lives intersect through this cookbook. It really is an exploration of women and marriage and being a wife and looking at how far we've come from the fifties, if we really have come that far. It was a really fun, interesting book for me to write.

Zibby: I had one of those cookbooks from my mother when was a little girl, the Betty Crocker old-fashioned one.

Karma: Yes, I have that one.

Zibby: I have it. It had my grandmother's notes in it and all the rest. I treasured that growing up. Every so often I would pull it out and look at the pages and all the pictures of what moms used to look like. [laughs]

Karma: I know. I still have those books. I actually have this thing for vintage cookbooks. That was one of the inspirations to write this book in the first place. I also loved all those notations. My mom puts notations in her cookbooks. My grandmother has done that. Some of these cookbooks I have that are not family cookbooks, also looking at the notations in those books and imagining what those women's lives were like way back when. It's sort of like you're panning for gold, information about these women and how they lived back in the fifties and sixties.

Zibby: It's so crazy when there's an object that passes through time. My engagement ring was a vintage piece I found in this shop in Charleston, South Carolina. I wear this ring. Actually, I copied it. At first, it was the actual ring until we found out it was cracked. Anyway, I had it and I was like, so who is this woman? Who was she? She wore the same exact ring. What was her life like? It all feels like a movie or something. Speaking of movies by the way, congratulations. I saw that your film and TV rights were acquired for this book. That's amazing. Congratulations.

Karma: Thank you. It's exciting to imagine them having a life outside of the pages. I'm often asked, who would you cast these characters as if you were casting the movie? Honestly, it's the worst question to ever ask me because for all of my books, I never know. I don't see them that way. I see them very clearly, but not as celebrities. I like to always ask, if anyone has an ideas, let me know because I am terrible at this game.

Zibby: I'm wondering maybe -- now I'm blanking on her name. Who's the one who's married to Ashton Kutcher?

Karma: See, this is why I'm terrible at it.

Zibby: I'm not good at it either.

Karma: I'm not a celebrity follower. What is her name?

Zibby: It'll come to me.

Karma: She was on the '70s Show with him, right?

Zibby: Yeah, somebody like that because the PR job ahead of time, I view her as being all put together and running around. Then wanting to shift gears and become a novelist, it has to be somebody cosmopolitan enough, worldly enough. That was my first instinct, but I am really bad at casting too.

Karma: We're both bad at this. We just won't play that game.

Zibby: Sorry, I'll stop the game right now.

Karma: It's not our job anyway, so it's okay.

Zibby: No, it's not our job. [laughs] I loved, by the way, there was such a perfect, relatable moment, at least for me, when the main character -- why do I always blank on the names of all the main characters? I can remember all the details.

Karma: Nellie and Alice.

Zibby: Alice. When Alice relocates to Greenville and leaves her job and her mom is like, "How's your vacation going?" and she's like, "No, I'm going to be a novelist," that is just so classic. It's a little passive-aggressive, what's up with you? I just loved that detail, by the way.

Karma: For Alice, she had this big career in Manhattan that was really important to her. Things fall apart for reasons that I won't talk about now because it gives away some stuff in the book. She ends up holding that secret about what's happened with her career. Everyone's thinking, then, that she's quite content to go and become this housewife in the suburbs and let her husband go to work. She's going to stay home and take care of this really old house that hasn’t changed much since the fifties and have babies and do her thing, that next part of her life. But really, she's hanging onto this huge ambition that she has. It doesn't go away. It doesn't just leave because she has this thing happen with her job and ends up moving. That's really part of the theme through the story too. What do women do with this ambition? How can you have that huge career ambition and also have a family? Can you make those two things work? I don't believe you can have them at the same time. That is my personal feeling. Sometimes something has to take the top position, and they just switch back and forth. For me, that's personally what has been true for me in my life. I think this idea of trying to have it all at once puts a lot of pressure. It's really hard to do. I'm sure there are people making that work. Good for them. I personally have found that a really tricky balance.

Zibby: Yes. I'm sure a zillion women will agree with that statement, the complexity of that. I think your book also, though, not only the role as a wife or a mother eventually or whatever, but I think it's also how these two women handle pain, physical and emotional, and how that shifts in terms of how much they share with their spouse, how much they take on themselves, and how that looks across generations too. Maybe talk a little more about that or if that was intentional.

Karma: I think that they are living very different lives. Really, Nellie, who's the 1950's character, is quite confined by her generation. For her, independence is something she desperately craves but is very difficult to get because of the nature of the way that things were within marriages back then. Her journey through the story is getting that independence and figuring out how to do that for herself in 1956 when nobody is really figuring that out, women anyway. For Alice in 2018, she's a very independent woman who is in a relationship with someone and has a marriage. How do you keep that part of yourself when you couple up with someone, when you merge your lives together? How do you keep that independence? In a lot of ways, I think that Nellie is sort of the talisman for Alice around that idea of figuring out how to maintain your sense of self and how to maintain that independence and cope with, as you said, both physical and mental pain through that, but as an individual. That was a big lesson for both of the women through the story.

Zibby: Let's now pivot to your personal life, if you don't mind. Now that we've had five minutes, I feel like I'm entitled to ask you your innermost secrets. [laughs]

Karma: Oh, you can ask me anything, anything at all. No secrets here.

Zibby: It's so funny. Well, it's not funny. I was reviewing all your different novels and all the different themes. I was like, why are all her books somehow about either car crashes or losing babies or intersecting lives? What is it? Something must have happened to her that this is the theme that she keeps coming back to over and over and over again. Then I went into your personal essays and I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm a moron. Here it is right here. It explains everything. Your essay for Self magazine about your being one month into a relationship with the man who became your husband and finding out that you had a rare form of Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cervical cancer and having to figure out how to cope with that and eventually what happened with your sister, oh, my gosh. I know you're working on some sort of nonfiction book. I'm really interested in hearing what that is. I was like, I want a whole book on this experience. I left that article being like, tell me more. Tell listeners about what happened to you, and then start writing that book.

Karma: [laughs] Okay. I have written elements of that book. In my second novel, The Choices We Make, it is about two best friends. One of them ends up carrying a baby for the other one. Before Recipe for a Perfect Wife, I wrote tearjerker books. It is a tearjerker book. Not everything goes according to plan. For me in my personal life, my sister was our surrogate. We had a much happier outcome in a sense that we had no major traumas as we were going through that. Just to back up a little bit about how that happened, when I was thirty, I had just met my husband. Well, he wasn't my husband then, obviously. I just met this new guy. He was very young. He was only twenty-six at the time, which I thought was far too young to be serious about. Then a month into our relationship, I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the cervix, which is a very rare place for them to find it. What that meant is that I wouldn't be able to have children naturally. We had to do a quickie IVF cycle. It was funny because I had been dating him for probably a month and a half at this point. I was at the fertility doctor. They were asking me all these questions and giving me my options about where to get the sperm from because you need sperm to make embryos. They said, "We have a book you can flip through and choose sperm, or you can get some from someone you know."

I was like, hey, I have this new boyfriend. [laughs] Maybe we can make this work. It wasn't casual. It was fast, but we were really quite in love already. They were asking me questions about him and his birthday and his middle name. I didn't know his middle name. I called him and I said, "This is the deal. I need to figure out what I'm going to do." He was like, "Okay, let's do it. Let's just do it and have faith that we stay together and this all works out. If we don't, I want you to have the opportunity to have, genetically, your own children." Anyway, it all worked out. I couldn't carry a baby, but my sister stepped in. One of those embryos which was frozen for five years was put in my sister's uterus. She became our oven for nine months. My daughter, when she was younger, she used to like to say that she was five years older. She would say, "I'm not eight. I'm thirteen," very all-knowing because she technically was conceived in 2003 but was born in 2008. We have our one little miracle baby. My sister was our surrogate. I have been cancer-free for a long time, since 2003, so seventeen years. It did all work out in the end.

Zibby: Wow. It was just so amazing how your sister, you said in one of the articles how immediately she was like, "I'll be the uterus for you. I'm stepping in." She already had two little kids of her own. She was just like, "I'm in." Then she did it.

Karma: She's quite bossy, actually. She was quite determined to do that. It's an amazing gift for someone to do that for you because I wouldn't be a mother. I mean, I might be a mother in a different way, but I wouldn't be a mother to this child. For me, it's a really special thing. As for the themes of my book, I had this life where I had all these plans. I was thirty. I was young. I had just finished journalism school. I was in a new relationship. I am a very motived, ambitious person. I was clear about what I wanted to do. Then I got cancer, and my whole life flipped upside down. My books are all really about women who are in situations that are challenging, perhaps the most challenging. We meet them on the most challenging day of their lives. Then they not only survive, but they thrive through that experience. That has been an ongoing theme for me through all my books. That's what I'm interested most in exploring in my novels anyway.

Zibby: Wow, that's just amazing. I thought it was so neat, you said something like how you used to be so much less anxious. Then you had such a great expression. You once dreamed of being a war correspondent, but now you're someone who sticks to the speed limit.

Karma: It's true.

Zibby: That's so interesting, just this idea that now you take on all the anxiety that the situation brought. Some people are born more anxious. Then they get through something like this and they're less anxious because they realize, okay, I've been worrying my whole life something bad's going to happen. It did. Now I'm okay. They become more fortified. You went into it already totally confident and rah-rah and then had this setback. Now you're more cautious. It's just sort of interesting how people deal with a trauma, essentially.

Karma: I think when you have a trauma like that, it never goes away. I'm cancer-free, but that experience lives me. It has shaped who I am from that time. It shapes all my decisions because life is precious. Everyone knows this. When you have been a through life-threatening experience, does it become more precious? I don't know. You suddenly realize the whole why-me thing. Everyone, I think, has a moment of thinking that, but then very quickly you're like, well, why not me? Why wouldn't it be me? Once you have that happen, the realization that it could happen again, bad things happen even when you do everything right. That is a very unsettling thing to live through and really understand deep in your core. I spend a lot of time now trying not to be anxious about things and to enjoy life. I had once gone to a therapist who was like, what do you think about this fact that you're going to worry about your precious life for the next ten years and worry about all these ways that it could be turned upside again? Then you're okay because the reality is you probably are going to be okay. You will have spent this decade worrying and marinating in this anxiety. Are you really enjoying your life when you're doing that? That did resonate with me. I try to remember that. The worry does fade. It does get easier. As you said, someone people are natural worriers. I just came to that place a little bit later in my life. [laughs] Maybe I'll flip back the other way and I'll be skydiving when I'm seventy. I doubt it, but you never know.

Zibby: These why-me moments and these traumas and the things that happen that make you aware of the fact, not just intellectually, but feel that life is short, they make you into different much more feeling-type people. You don't wish this upon anybody. I wouldn't wish a cancer diagnosis or anything like that. However, I think the aftermath of some of those experiences makes the rest of life so much richer. It sharpens the colors. That sounds so cheesy. I just feel like it changes the tune. It's like on a piano, the two different things start playing versus just one hand playing. I don't know.

Karma: I think it does do that. You're not naïve about things anymore. I think you can bury in your head in the sand a little bit, especially when you're young, and think that bad things don't happen, people don't get cancer. It allows me to also be more empathetic with other people and to understand what to say and what not to say and how to sit with someone in a tough time instead of trying to just brush it away or make it better somehow by not talking about it. I have learned how to be more empathetic towards what other people are going through. It doesn't have to be cancer. It can be anything. People have lots of different experiences that can be quite traumatic. I am not a silver linings person. I don't know that I ever have been. While there have been things that I have learned because of this, I would always have rather not had it happen. I don't say that my cancer was a good thing because I just don't see it like that. It would've been nice not to have to go through it. However, there are lessons and learning in that that I now have that I'm grateful for and appreciative of.

Zibby: I hope I didn't make it sound like it was a good thing that you had gone through that.

Karma: No, you didn't.

Zibby: Okay. I did not mean to suggest anybody actively look for bad experiences to happen them.

Karma: No. I do think some of that silver lining stuff -- people say that to me all the time. You wouldn't have this, that, and the next thing if you didn't go through that. I'm like, yeah, but I might have other things that I lost because of that. Cancer takes a lot away. Any terminal, not terminal, but potentially life-threatening condition or experience, it takes stuff away. I don't think you said that at all. That's not how I heard what you were saying.

Zibby: Okay. Phew. [laughs]

Karma: I just like to do the, yeah, I'm not a silver linings person. Maybe, again, when I'm seventy. Maybe then when I'm sky diving, I'll be a silver linings person. We'll see.

Zibby: Maybe so. We'll wait. I'll look up and see what I can see. The one quote I just had to read, and this is from your Self article, you said, "I would not be a mother to this child who with her arrival took the hell of our experience leading up to her, crushing it into a tiny ball and dropped it down a deep, dark well where it can no longer break my heart." That is beautiful. That's just a beautiful sentiment, a beautiful sentence. I just had to read it.

Karma: It's true. I was quite sad not to be able to carry my own child. I think for people who want to have children, they would understand that, or who have children and have been able to have -- I know pregnancy is not amazing for a lot of women, but I always was sad that I couldn't do that. My mom had said to me, "Don't worry. Once the baby's here, you won't care how she got here. You won't miss that part because this is the best part." She was wrong, but I can tuck that away. I think that's what that quote is. I have her and all the amazing things of being a mother that I can now experience, but it doesn't mean there aren't still heartbreaks that have to be just put down that well and left there. They don't go away. They just maybe go to a dark place where you leave them buried.

Zibby: Or you take little sprinkles of that and put it in novel after novel after novel, which is another way of getting through and coping and making sense of experiences like that that don't really have a good place to go.

Karma: It's true. It's sort of like therapy to some degree. It's cathartic to be able to do that.

Zibby: Tell me about your writing process and how you come up with ideas for your books and then how long they each take. You've written five novels already?

Karma: Five, yep.

Zibby: Amazing. That's a lot. Tell me about your process a little more and how you maintain this level of output.

Karma: I maintain the level of output because my daughter didn't sleep. The truth is that she used to get up at three thirty, four in the morning for years and years. I finally got to the place where I could no longer watch Dora the Explorer at four o'clock in the morning. I thought, I need to do something with this time. She's okay. I don't need to really be with her for every moment of that morning time. I started writing in the early morning. It's a habit I still have now. She sleep trained me. Now I can't sleep in. She sleeps in, but I can't. I get up around five, between five and six every day, and I write. It's quiet and peaceful. No one needs anything from me. The rest of the world has not woken up yet. That's when I do the majority of my really creative writing. I save the emails and the other busywork that authors have to do for later in the day when she's at school even though she's not at school right now. COVID time is like, who knows what's happening and how I'm actually ever going to write another book. That's really been my process from the beginning.

I never wanted to be a writer. When I went to journalism school, I wanted to be a news broadcaster. That was what I was planning to do. Then I was diagnosed with cancer on my very last day of journalism school, and everything switched. At some point, I thought, maybe I can write. It's a career that I have and be home. I don't have to move to Northern Ontario and try to get a job in a small town and live up there away from my family. It just became a job that I thought I could do. I one day thought, maybe I'll try writing a novel. I wrote it. It was awful. Then I wrote another one. That one was not good either. My debut was actually my third book written. I guess I've actually written seven, no, wait, eight novels. Just two of them will never see the light of day.

Zibby: Seven, right?

Karma: Wait, seven? You're right.

Zibby: Two unpublished, five -- [laughs].

Karma: This is why I am not a mathematician or a scientist. I can't do math, even simple math. Yes, seven. It feels like twelve some days. As for where the stories come from, I read a lot. Because I'm a journalist also, I spend a lot of time scrolling through news stories and looking for interesting human stories that way. That's how I have found or had an idea perk up for my stories. Recipe for a Perfect Wife was different, though. It came out of those cookbooks. I just had this vision of, what was life like for these women? These cookbooks were really a legacy. They were often given to women at their wedding showers. Then those cookbooks would get passed down through the generations. At a time where women really didn't have much of a voice outside of their home, it felt like this really interesting legacy of what mattered to them and what they were doing and how they were really using their voice through their cooking and through these recipes. I just had this image of Nellie in the 1950s trying to choose a recipe. She's this quintessential housewife. On the surface, she looks very much like the housewife we would imagine from the fifties, but what did her life look like underneath that? That's where it started.

Zibby: I feel like there's an undercurrent of feminist message to the book as well. I know in the introduction, or maybe it was a dedication or something, you were saying to your daughter, you haven't finished doing the work for her yet. This is a step. Was that conscious? Tell me about that angle of it.

Karma: People have asked, wow, this book is really timely, why this book now? I'd been writing this book for five years before it was published. The realities of what women are going through now were true five years ago and ten years ago. We have come far from the fifties in a lot of ways, but we still have a long way to go. It was important for me in doing -- I could've written the whole book from 1950s perspective and from Nellie's perspective and just had that story be the story, but what I wanted to do is to look at the difference between those generations because we think we're so progressive now. In some ways we are, but in a lot of ways, we are not. I wanted to take Alice's character in particular -- it's much murkier than it is with Nellie's character. I've had a lot of hate mail about Alice, which I'm not surprised by. I knew that going in because, as I said, her story is murkier. She can come across as more selfish and self-centered. I feel like with her, she's going through this dilemma. She's young. She's making mistakes. She deserves to make mistakes. It takes two to tango, as they say. Her husband in the story, I get messages about how amazing her husband is and how she's so selfish. I want to say, no, he's not perfect. He's manipulating things as well and keeping secrets as well. I don't know why Alice is the one who always gets -- she's viewed as the enemy in the story versus him. I find that really interesting. Every time I get a message about that, I don't respond because that’s the rule, but I do want to say, why do you villainize her and not him for doing things that are quite similar?

I felt that while I was writing it. I do think that that is where we are in society still, where women don't get to make the same mistakes that men do. They don't get away with it the same way. I wanted to put that in the book. I'm a wife. I stay home. I work from home. I do more of the traditional, stereotypical things. I do most of the childcare, the doctors' appointments, the grocery shopping because logistically it's easier for me because I'm home. It's important for me with my daughter especially because she has commented before, "You're the dinner-maker. What's for dinner?" I always say, "Look, just because I'm female does not make me especially qualified to cook a meal." I need her to understand that being a wife and being a mother and being a woman, they are all really different things that all live within the same person. That's what I was trying to do with Alice and looking at Nellie. I get it. She's a little bit confronting for people. I have other people who love her. They really resonate with what she's going through. I find that the older generations, like the seventies-plus, and the younger ones, like the thirty-five and under, really resonate with Alice. It's that middle-age time where people are just like, her husband is so nice. Why is she being so mean to him? It's fascinating. It has been fascinating.

Zibby: Aside from not responding to hate mail, what is your advice to aspiring authors?

Karma: I read a lot. I think if you don't read and read a lot of different things like fiction, nonfiction, different genres that maybe are not totally your thing but you should give it a try, I think you have to read all the time, a lot, as an author. Write as much as you can. Be clear about why you're writing. There are some people who want to write because they really desperately want to be published on the shelves with a traditional publisher. There's other people who write to maybe work through a trauma or work through a part of their life, and perhaps publication is not the most important thing to them. It's to really understand why you're writing. To stay connected to your story, you need to write regularly. Also then, know when to give up and start something new. There are people who will say never give up, never give up on anything you're working on. I think sometimes you have to give up. That's why I have two books in a drawer that will never see the light of day. They weren’t the right story. They were practice books for me. They were helping me hone the craft and learn how to write a book that was going to get all the pieces I wanted in but also would be really great for the reader too, that reading experience. It's just, you've got to practice. It's like anything. You have to practice your craft and know why you're doing it.

Zibby: Love it. Thank you, Karma. I'm so glad we finally got together. I wish I could sit and talk to you for a lot longer.

Karma: I know. It went by so fast.

Zibby: I know. I looked. I was like, oh, no, it's been too long.

Karma: Thank you so much. Great questions. It was really nice chatting with you today.

Zibby: You too. I hope we can find a way to keep this up or meet in person or something.

Karma: Me too. Yes, one day let's meet in person. We'll have a nice drink somewhere and chat not through our screens. That sounds wonderful.

Zibby: I would love that. Yes, that would be nice.

Karma: Take care.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Karma: Thanks so much.

Zibby: Bye.

Beatriz Williams, HER LAST FLIGHT

Zibby Owens: Beatriz Williams is the New York Times, USA Today, and internationally best-selling author of The Golden Hour, The Summer Wives, The Secret Life of Violet Grant, A Hundred Summers, and several other works of historical fiction including her latest book, Her Last Flight. She is the screenwriter for the television adaptation of The Summer Wives which is currently in development with John Wells Productions. A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA in finance from Columbia University, Beatriz worked as a communications and corporate strategy consultant in New York and London before she turned her attention to writing novels that combine her passion for history with an obsessive devotion to voice and characterization. Beatriz’s books have won numerous awards, have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and appear regularly in best-seller lists around the world. Born in Seattle, Washington, Beatriz now lives near the Connecticut shore with her husband and four children, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.

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

Beatriz Williams: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: You have such an interesting background for an author having gotten your MBA and all of that. I actually got an MBA too. I wanted to talk to you a little about that and how your traditional, more consultant, strategy-type brain morphed and now started writing all this fiction. Tell me about that.

Beatriz: It's actually the other way around.

Zibby: Oh, no way.

Beatriz: I was somebody who never wanted to do anything but write books. What was I doing in the business world, getting an MBA, finance, and all that? It does help -- my father's an engineer. I was never that kind of writer who is allergic to numbers and science. I always loved numbers and science. In fact, a couple of my books have dealt with science-y issues. In The Secret Life of Violet Grant, I was in the world of physics in pre-war Germany. Actually, my current book that's coming out, Her Last Flight, deals with early aviation. Of course, I'm not going into long, technical explanations, but that whole process fascinates me, the science of flight and the various things that pilots would have to do in the age before GPS and sophisticated instruments to figure out where they were on the face of the Earth. This is all very fascinating to me. My love has always been literature and writing. I always wanted to do that. I think I was just scared, partly because my father, he's British, and having grown up in a post-war rationing Britain, really wanted to have me do something practical with my life. I went to college. I actually majored in anthropology. He was very proud. It was more like trying to get a liberal arts education and wanting to square that circle.

How do I find a way to make a living and yet write? Writing, you do have to have a lot of guts or else just an enormous amount of unjustified self-confidence. You're putting yourself out into the world kind of naked. People will judge you. They will say things to you that your boss would never say to you in a normal job. You just have to take it. You're not even allowed to respond back to criticism. You do have to go in there with a certain amount of courage. As my father would say, many are called, few are chosen. What if this thing that was supposed to be my big talent all my life, what if I'm not actually good at it? I had all these fears. Also, going to a college where people were very success oriented, there was no point in doing anything unless you were going to be wildly successful, I went into the business world, Wall Street. Believe it or not, easier to succeed on Wall Street than to succeed in publishing. Then I got married, had kids. I was home with the kids and I thought, okay, this is the moment for me to actually do what I really want to do with my life, which was to write. I started taking classes and learning the more technical side of writing and storytelling in particular and eventually got to the point where I thought I had something other people might actually want to read.

Zibby: That's amazing. I love that story. Thank you.

Beatriz: [Indiscernible].

Zibby: It's true. I feel like it really informs the reading when you know where the author's coming from and how you had to keep coming back to that passion of yours. I think it's really always nice to hear.

Beatriz: I had this enormous burst of creativity when I first started writing. You see I have so many books. I even had a pen name I was writing under. There are additional books there. It was partly because it was just, I had so much inside me, all this pent-up decades of stories that I wanted to tell. Now that kind of has slowed down a bit for me. I'm a little more measured about my books and just the sentences and everything that goes into them. There's a complexity there. That initial freshness, that burst of huge creativity, it's definitely transitioning for me into something more nuanced and thoughtful. I think the books are getting more complicated and not quite the sense of an ending that's obvious and pat. If you're somebody who doesn't like ambiguous ending, I'm starting to kind of transition into that. That sense of ambiguity to me is so fascinating because it's just so much of what we encounter in real life.

Zibby: I read you said somewhere that even though you write a lot of historical fiction, it's really just the people in those moments, it's the history itself that draws you to the stories. Tell me a little more about that.

Beatriz: I'm obsessed with history from my childhood. We were out there in suburban Seattle. My parents, we would go to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, every year. That was our family vacation. Everyone else got to go to the beach. I was watching Shakespeare plays. We had season tickets to the Seattle Opera, which was actually quite, certainly at the time and I think even now, a very innovative opera house. They had a really dynamic company there. Opera is historical fiction. They were doing historical fiction. Shakespeare was doing historical fiction even in his own time. To me, the past has always been a window into the present. The best way to understand what is going on today is to understand what happened in the past. I go back to [indiscernible] again. It was [indiscernible] who said facts are not important, which is heresy right now if you're a historical fiction writer. Facts are obviously important. You want to create that verisimilitude.

What is more important, because can disagree about the facts and the interpretation of the facts, to me, what is important is understanding how people lived and breathed and talked and ate and encountered the world around them in a particular historical era. I will do everything I can to make sure that the facts are right. If I need to sort of bend a few dates and so on for the purposes of storytelling, I will try to make it very clear in my author's note. You can read facts in nonfiction. There are some amazing nonfiction writers who do it brilliantly. What you're coming to with fiction is the human story and what it is like to exist within a certain historical environment. What we learn is not just that, wow, these people are the same as us, but that also history is repeating itself. We are so often making the same choices or faced with the same impossible, sometimes, choices that we were in the past. How do we get through that? How do we square human nature with the sense of civilization? Learning to become better human beings, to me, that's kind of the core of my project as a historical fiction author.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about Her Last Flight.

Beatriz: Her Last Flight kind of goes back to -- I keep talking about my dad, but he really did have an enormous influence on me as a child. He actually was a pilot back in his college days until they figured out he's actually colorblind. He was flying with, they called it the University Air Squadron. In the UK, it's like the ROTC for pilots going into the RAF. I always had a background of aviation going on in the household, loved to fly, and had read some books that were set in that period. I'm fascinated by it, and particularly by the pilots. Your chances of dying were so high. I wanted to write a book about a female pilot. My initial prompt was the Amelia Earhart mystery, which of course is one of the most fascinating mysteries in recent human history, what happened to her. I sort of posed a what-if. Then I went off and did research and realized that she was not the only fascinating female pilot out there. She just had a really good publicist who happened to be her husband. That's one part of the story, a female pilot who has a really good publicist for a husband and is not quite sure that this is the life she wants to lead. She wants to fly. All this other stuff going on, to her, gets in the way of the purity, the beauty of flight.

The story's actually told through the eyes of another character, a photojournalist. War-weary, she has been taking photographs in the European battlefield in the second world war. She was there during the trials at Nuremberg. She's at a moment in her life when she really wants to find something worthwhile. She goes in search of, actually, the pilot that had been this -- Irene Foster, her flying partner, who also disappeared around the same time. She goes all the way to Hawaii. She follows clues and ends up in Hawaii and discovers a woman who's living there who she thinks is actually Irene Foster, the vanished pilot. That's actually the starting point of this story. We go back and forth between Irene's story, which is told as excerpts of a biography written by our photojournalist, Janey Everett, many years later. We hear Irene's story through Janey's eyes. Then we hear Janey's story as she slowly starts to unpeel the layers and we start to realize why she's been so obsessed with these pilots and their disappearance.

Zibby: Wow. That's the best sell.

Beatriz: I just realized in the middle that I haven't actually done the sell speech yet, so I was really making it up as I went along. I hope it wasn't too convoluted there.

Zibby: No, it's great. I'm sorry. I always put people on the spot. I like to hear what people come up with.

Beatriz: Discovering the mystery behind what happened to this person. It's not Amelia. I certainly borrow some biographical details from Amelia Earhart because she is a fascinating person. So much is woven in there. There are all these other pilots. To me, that sense of, god, the courage it took to get out there and fly back then. Whether you were a man or a woman, the odds were good you were going to crash and die. What kind of person does that? Why do they do it? What's driving them? Where are these people today, by the way? What are they doing now, this type of person? To me, the psychology that is so fascinating, particularly when you're telling it -- I use that device of the biography, excerpts from a biography, because I wanted to tell that story a little bit from the outside in trying to understand this person as a public figure, but also the private figure behind that public figure. I wrote that part first, the biography first. I kind of knew Janey before I started writing her actual story on the page. That was a really interesting process as well, how I created a voice for a character that we hadn’t actually met yet because of course the biography is inevitably in Janey's voice, not that of Irene. I'm always trying to challenge myself a bit in terms of storytelling technique. This was certainly a fascinating challenge for me to get into. I was trying to understand two different women at the same time. I think that adds a certain layer to the story. You find out why as we get towards the end and the mysteries start revealing themselves.

Zibby: What does this process look like? Do you use notecards? Is it spread out all over? Is it all in your head? Where do you do all this work? It's in your head?

Beatriz: I have a notebook. I scribble things down in the notebook. There's the classic debate between the plotters and the pantsers. The pantsers plot by the seat of their pants. They make it up as they go along. I do a little of both. I know where I want to go. This is one book where I kind of knew what the twist was going to be going in, which was good because it's essential to the story. I visualize it in my head almost as a three-dimensional piece of architecture. I can see the scaffolding, but I can't see all the layers and the cladding and everything that goes on top. Gradually, everything gets -- you have this bare bones. Then you just keep adding flesh onto it and flesh onto it until it becomes a real thing. I am linear. In fact, I'm so linear, that's why I write that piece that takes place in the past first. Then I layer the other piece, the mystery-hunting piece of it, on top, because I need to know what happens from beginning to end, the actual mystery taking place. I need to know the solution. I need to know how it happens. I need to know who these people are before I can send my sleuth on the hunt and picking it apart. I know a lot of writers who do the dual narrative write back and forth even as it's written. I'm so incredibly linear that I have to do it literally from one, beginning to end, and then start the other one beginning to end. Everyone's got a process. Everyone's astonished when I say that's how I do it. I just literally can't imagine writing it any other way.

Zibby: You're clearly super smart. In fact, as an aside, I think one of the smartest things you did was decide to coauthor books with two of your good friends so that you could travel together on press tours.

Beatriz: The best idea ever. It is breaking our hearts right now that we can't get together. We're usually together two or three times a year. It's so much fun. We need to plot out our next book. We're managing to do it by Zoom, but it's not the same. Yes, it did start out as very much wanting to spend more time with each other, but also really loving each other's talents and getting together. Creating stories together is just the most incredibly creative process ever because there's three of us. We like to say it's like three brains in one body. When we're really tired, we accidentally say that it's one brain in three bodies, but that's a completely different scenario. I think the challenge with plotting on your own is that you can't foresee the problems that lie ahead. Suddenly, you realize you've written yourself into a corner and you've got to go back and rework something. When it's three of you, you've got everybody picking apart all the ideas as we go along so that by the time we finish plotting something out, and in this case we do actually plot the whole thing out very carefully before we start writing, we're able to sort of troubleshoot and foresee all these problems before we get to them in the writing. I love doing it because it's just a much more efficient process than using one singular feeble brain that needs a considerable amount of caffeination in order to work properly.

Zibby: You've written so many books. As you mentioned, you also have written a ton of historical romance and mystery. How many books have you written in total?

Beatriz: You know what? I kind of stopped counting. I wrote some books as Juliana Gray. There were two romance trilogies. Then I moved into more historical mystery. There's two of those plus a novella that connects. I like to have my worlds all sort of be the same, so there's a novella that connects the romance to the historical mysteries. I guess that's six, seven, eight, plus a novella. I left some threads dangling in historical mystery number two, so I would like to get back to that at some point. Then of course, we have now written three books as Willig, White, and Williams. Then I think Her Last Flight is my twelfth book as Beatriz Williams.

Zibby: Amazing.

Beatriz: After a while, it's not that I don't want to count, it's just that it doesn't matter to me. It's not something I keep a tally board how many books I've written or how many words I've written. It's really the stories. Some of them connect. Some of them are a little more stand-alone. I have three books that literally were a sequence. They're not exactly a trilogy because they're three different women, but they're sisters. The stories flow a little bit into each other. That's the most connected books. Then I've got my Wicked City series as well, which is a definite series, Wicked City, Wicked Redhead. The next one is still in my head. I tend to see the books that way rather than, oh, I've written my twelfth book. I have to literally count them up when we do the biography for the book jacket and be like, okay, how many is that?

Zibby: What does writing do for you? What do you get out of it?

Beatriz: It's a little bit like what I hope my readers get out of it when they're reading, which is not so much escape as just immersion in a different world. I think that when I'm writing well, I'm writing fast, I'm writing in that flow state that we all try to get to when we're writing, which is just a total immersion in a story. That is what keeps me going through the harder bits when it's just not working and I need to figure out why it's not working and get these characters where I know them well enough that everything that happens to them just seems preordained. It is really that process, getting myself into that flow state and creating that world that is what motivates me, what gets me in front of my laptop every day. I don't want to make this sound magical, but to a certain extent maybe just the way some people are born mathematicians -- they have a knack for mathematics. They see something more in mathematics than we do. They see the story that is in mathematics. They see the truth that is inside the numbers. When you're laboriously graphing out what -- you're graphing an equation, and so these numbers actually mean something real and tangible. They translate into things. I think that you're somebody who instinctively feels that or not.

I think with storytelling, you're somebody who -- when I write a story, it's like the words on the page are maybe ten percent of the story that is in my head. All the details of a person's life and personality and so on, it's really distilling that. I think a part of that is just innate. I think our DNA kind of gives us certain jobs that we're good at because that's what I was -- here, here's the anthropology major speaking here. We need storytellers. We need mathematicians. We need inventors. We even need a couple of sociopaths to sort of make the tough moral choices that we don't want to make. That's why, whatever, five to ten percent of the population is technically psychopath. I think we kind of need them in some way. We just have to channel that evil energy into good. I think that's what my role is in the hunter-gatherer group. I'm the one who -- we're by the campfire. It's nighttime. We need to process and understand what's happened to us today or the past few weeks, and so you spin a story that helps people come to terms with what has happened and who they are and literally put that to bed.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Beatriz: Read. Definitely, read. Read widely. I'm on deadline right now, but I do try to get some fiction in in the evening. I finally started Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Maybe it's just because my brain is so occupied during the day because I'm also, by the way, running a B&B for -- I've got four kids at home. Three of them are teenagers. One's almost twelve years old, plus my husband and all these pets and everything. I don't know these people who are like, lockdown is so boring. I'm like, are you kidding? I am on my feet all day long. Then I get these little pockets of time to write in. I was trying to read. I was like, you know what, I need to read something more fun right now. My lovely friend, Eloisa James, wrote her latest -- I haven't read a historical romance in actually quite a while. I was like, I'm just going to read something that is fun and engaging and romantic. She always delivers. I started that last night. I felt so much better. I actually learned a lot from romance authors. They're just good storytellers. They know instinctively what certain elements of human relationships are irresistible to us and also how to tell a story to keep the reader engaged on the page.

I would say read everything, romance, mystery, literature fiction, classics. I find reading novels that were written in the period that I'm writing about are just so much more useful than many other sources. You get the feeling and the rhythm of human interaction and storytelling. Read all you can. We spend so much time worrying about the words. I feel like the words come when the story is there. You need to think about, what is the story you're trying to tell? Why would be people be interested in this story, anyone other than you yourself? Those are my two pieces of advice. Read all you can and really think of yourself as a storyteller. Worry about the writing later. The writing obviously comes with the editing. Focus on the story. Think about why it is you're telling this story and why it's important and why people would care.

Zibby: That's great. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your life experience and your technique and all the rest of it.

Beatriz: Thank you so much. Like I said, I've been sitting in front of my laptop, so talking to somebody outside my family is just a really exciting moment for me right now. I appreciate it. [laughter]

Zibby: I agree. I'm glad we got this to work. By the way, like you, I have four kids. I loved how you said that you write while you're not doing laundry because I feel like I do laundry all day, every day. That's what I do.

Beatriz: I've got a load right up there. As soon as I'm done here, I have to go put that in the dryer and make sure the right stuff is hung up. I could hand it off to somebody, but I just don't trust anybody else with the laundry.

Zibby: No, me neither. Anyway, thank you. Hang in there.

Beatriz: You too.

Zibby: Send me any laundry tips.

Beatriz: We will get through this. I love the microphone, by the way. I need a microphone like that.

Zibby: Thank you. Blue Yeti. Have a great day. Thanks again.

Beatriz: Thanks so much.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Leah Franqui, MOTHER LAND

Zibby Owens: Leah Franqui is the author of Mother Land: A Novel. Leah is a graduate of Yale University and received an MFA at NYU-Tisch. Her first novel, America for Beginners, was an Indie Next pick. A Puerto Rican Jewish native of Philadelphia, Franqui now lives with her Kolkata-born husband in Mumbai.

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

Leah Franqui: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited.

Zibby: I'm so excited to talk to you about Mother Land, which was so well-written by the way. I loved how you did it, the immediacy of everything, how you're in her brain from the minute the novel opens. You're immediately relating. Anybody who's had a mother-in-law can relate, not to say anything ill about my mother-in-law. I've now had two mother-in-laws. They're both great. I love how you just threw the reader right in there and immediately related. I just love books that start like that.

Leah: Thanks so much.

Zibby: Will you please tell listeners what Mother Land is about and then what inspired you to write it?

Leah: Mother Land is about a young woman, Rachel, who moves to India with her Indian-born husband. She's hoping that the experience will give her life a new start and an adventure. She's lost in her life and hoping this big change to a country she's never been to will spark something for her. When she moves to India, she's pretty overwhelmed. She's even more overwhelmed when her mother-in-law decides to leave her father-in-law and her life in Kolkata and comes and moves in with Rachel and her husband in Mumbai. She's even more thrown when her husband has to go away for work and she's stuck with this woman she doesn't know very well in a city she doesn't know, in a country and a culture she doesn't know. The clash between them about how to live life in Mumbai and how to be in the world eventually turns into a friendship that benefits them both.

Zibby: I love how in the beginning, when the mother-in-law shows up on the stoop and she takes the suitcase inside for her mother-in-law and she thinks, maybe this was it. Maybe this was the moment. What if I hadn’t brough the suitcase inside? I feel like that's something that I always do in my head. What if that one thing had been different?

Leah: I know. The spirit of looking back and being like, that was the moment. I could've changed it all. I do that too. I think I put that in that character because I do that too.

Zibby: I figured. How did you come up with this story? What made you write this?

Leah: This story came out of a lot of life experience and a lot of imagination, so it's both in equal measure. I live in Mumbai. I moved to Mumbai with my Indian-born husband, who also happens to be from Kolkata, in 2015. Before that, my mother-in-law had come to stay with us for about a month right when we got married and moved in together. We did both at the same time. I'd never been to India before I moved to India. I didn't know a lot about India before I met my in-laws. The whole process was condensed by being an international family. I did have this incident where I had a moment of incredible anxiety, which is where a lot of my work comes from, where I was in my tiny Brooklyn apartment and my mother-in-law had this fight with my father-in-law over the phone. My husband, in Hindi, was talking to her. I didn't understand what they were saying. Then he turned to me and he was like, "Mom's going to stay another month." [laughter] I was like, um, what's that? It was sort of a joke. They were kind of trolling my father-in-law. I had this moment of, what if she just stays forever? What if my mother-in-law just moves in with me and lives with me forever and this is my life now?

Then I moved to Mumbai and got to know my in-laws better by visiting them in Kolkata and had this whole life experience of moving to Mumbai for similar-but-different reasons than my protagonist in this novel, but faced a lot of the dislocation and isolation and culture shock and trying to figure out how to navigate my needs, my identity, all the me in this new collective country filled with so many cultures, so many things that were so unfamiliar. I had so many anxieties about what this international move would do to my marriage, what it would do to me. I have had incredible experiences in India. I've had difficult experiences in India. It's challenging. It's been wonderful for me. It's been wonderful for my marriage. I do write a lot from the what-if. What if it hadn’t been? What if it hadn’t made my relationship stronger? What if had kind of defeated me in these other ways? What if my mother-in-law lived with me forever? Spinning out those anxieties into fantasies, into new characters and new people is kind of where the novel came from. This is not my life. This woman is not my mother-in-law. I'm not Rachel. There are elements of the real experience of living in Mumbai, integrating into an Indian family who have been nothing but incredibly wonderful and accepting of me, and also being challenging in terms of what I thought the world was living in one country versus the wonderful perspective-breaking thing living in another country does. It comes from all of that and more.

Zibby: In Mumbai, do you live in the area where you can smell the fish and have a view of the fish?

Leah: Actually, I do. I live in a neighborhood above the neighborhood I set it in. This whole area is along part of the coast. There's these fishermen who dry the fish out along that coastline. If you live anywhere near the coast, there's fishermen along it in Mumbai. You'll smell that at some point.

Zibby: I love how that becomes your character's alarm clock that it's five o'clock, basically, the smells.

Leah: That's real. I work from home a lot. I would lose track of time and then suddenly be like, oh, I guess it's five o'clock.

Zibby: There's this neighborhood ice cream truck where we are right now that comes by between five and five thirty every day. It's the same thing. I'm like, oh, my gosh. I have to get up. I have to get off of my desk chair. Time to go for a walk because it's going to be dark. I better move for the day. I love those external markers of time. You have a really interesting background. You're half Jewish and half Puerto Rican. How did your identity, combining those two pieces, combining your parents essentially, how did they inform your own sense of identity in the world?

Leah: My father, his parents migrated from Puerto Rico in '49, '50, which was part of this wave of migration from Puerto Rico. Then my mom's parents are a mix of first and third generation immigrants from what is now Russia. My grandmother was directly from Russia, but she grew up in [indiscernible]. I think that growing up, that didn't seem that crazy of a mix, I think because I grew up on the East Coast in a school, in an environment where a lot of people were some kind of mix. I think that I didn't know too many people who had a Jewish/Latino mix, but I have met them over the years. Mixture where I grew up in the United States seemed more normal than being of one thing. I do think that the negotiation of identity as I got older, as I got into high school and college, and the idea of what it meant to be enough of anything became a big part of how I got into writing, actually. I think that the idea of being Puerto Rican enough or what enough meant or being Latina and what that meant to me and also being Jewish and what that meant to me, deciding that I needed to start taking more responsibility for my own religious philosophy -- if I was going to perpetuate a belief in Judaism, it couldn't just be because I'd grown up going to synagogue, I'd grown up with my mother telling me to go to synagogue. It had to be something I started choosing or not choosing as an adult. I think that college was a time when I really decided that that was important for me to explore what either of these two things meant for me and how I was going to deal with them.

Writing became a great way to do that. I came into fiction as a dramatic writer. A lot of the work that I wrote before and during graduate school talked about a relationship to Puerto Rico, a relationship to being Latina, the way I understood my family, trying to come to terms with my large Puerto Rican family and the life I'd spent visiting them and connecting with them but being separate from them, and also coming to terms with my family history on all sides. I think that the interesting thing about moving to a third-party country that has no context for either of those things is that then your identity gets reimagined again by the people you meet. When I first met my in-laws, they had no context for Jewish, certainly. They had no context for Puerto Rican. I definitely live as white. I come from fairly European Puerto Rican stock. Although, of course there's a ton of mixing. I present as white. I am white. All of those things that had made up my identity in the States then became, not erased, but totally not as contextualized in India. Then I had a whole new identity being a white person in India, which has added a third layer of information about myself and how I operate in the world. It's been a journey. It continues to be a journey. [laughs] I guess it taught me that no matter how much you self-define, there's so much about how other people see you that you can't really control. You just have to recognize what you've come to terms with as yourself and do your best to be that.

Zibby: You have to have a really strong fundamental sense of who you are regardless of your background and your parents and the shade of your skin and all the rest. I am who I am whether I'm dropped down in the middle of a vegetable market in Mumbai or I'm on the subway in New York or whatever else. Otherwise, it's just so confusing.

Leah: Yeah, and you'll let the world tell you what to be. I think that's something that we think about a lot in the US, what I carry with me and what's important for me to bring everywhere I go. That's a great thing about immigrant countries. You have to personally decide what matters to you and what you want to carry with you rather than let your environment decide that for you. I've hosted a seder every year I've been in Mumbai for Passover because I realize, wow, that's really important to me. That’s an important thing for me to do, for me celebrate, even though there's no resources for that. There's no structure around that. It's just something that matters to me. You learn who you are.

Zibby: Is there a Jewish community in Mumbai?

Leah: There used to be larger Jewish communities in a lot of major Indian cities, including Mumbai. There's a couple really beautiful historic synagogues. It's really decreased since independence for many reasons. There are still a couple active synagogues. There is a Chabad house. I have been to services at one of the really beautiful historic synagogues in Mumbai. It was historically a Baghdadi Jewish population. That's really interesting, really interesting migration pattern, real interesting food. They speak Ladino not Yiddish. They're Sephardic. It's really tiny. I've met maybe one or two Indian Jews in Mumbai.

Zibby: It's so interesting. The seder is such a special moment because you're forced to always think about all the people around the world doing the exact same thing. Now when I have my next seder, I can think about you in India. It really is all over the place. It's very special in that way. Tell me a little more about the process of writing Mother Land. How long did it take you to write? Where? Were you over there? Tell me when and where you wrote it and all of that good stuff.

Leah: I'm a big drafter. I've realized that over time. I have come to terms with that. That's my process. I'm a fast writer who writes many drafts. So far, that's what's served me. I was already living in Mumbai when I started writing Mother Land. I started writing it about six months before my first novel, America for Beginners, was released. I worked on the first draft in Mumbai. Then I was really lucky. I got a writer's residency in Italy, which was an incredible experience. I worked on the second draft there, which was also very interesting to work on this novel that's very much set in and embedded in Mumbai in an idyllic vineyard in Italy. That was real cognitive dissonance there, but incredible. Then I worked subsequent drafts with the help of my incredible agent, Julia Kardon, who's always just so great at really seeing the things that I'm trying to do and failing at doing in my novels and helping me actually do them. Then eventually we sent this to my editor. Of course, she had incredible feedback, incredible edits, as Rachel always does. By the time it finally sold, it had been about a year that I'd been working on it. Then of course, there are subsequent drafts after my editor agreed to publish it with her. I think that it probably, all told, the first time I put fingers to computer versus final copy, probably around a year and nine, ten months, about two years.

Zibby: That's not bad.

Leah: No.

Zibby: That's fairly fast on the continuum.

Leah: This is a book that really came out of me fairly quickly. I knew these two characters really well. I had an idea of the story. It's really about these two people. The intricate plotting that you sometimes do was not as much of the labor as, how do I most authentically really layer these people such that they both feel complete and total and really true?

Zibby: Now that it's out in the world, are you already attacking a new project? Are you focused mostly on publicity and all the rest that comes with releasing a book into the world, especially during this time?

Leah: Boy, during this time is a whole other -- I think that all of us in the world are like, what are we doing during this time? I think that all of us creatively are, we're all having parallel experiences of, has this made us incredibly productive? Is this a creatively rich time? Is this a creatively draining time where that's just not possible? Those are both totally fair responses. There's no right way to be an artist. There's certainly no right way to be an artist or person right now. I'm always working on a lot of news things. My husband likes to joke -- I met my husband in graduate school for dramatic writing. One of the arts of dramatic writing is distillation. When I got into fiction, it was such an incredible release because you don't have to be as distilled in fiction. My husband jokes that of course I've become a novelist because I have so much to say. He's right in many ways. I do, I have so many stories I'm interested in. I have so many things that I love writing. Right now, I am working on a new novel. I'm working on several TV scripts. I finished the first draft of a new play I'd been working on for a long time. I think that I'm really motivated by having multiple stories happening at once. They lift the weight of wanting to say everything in one place on the other. Actually, for me, spreading it out frees the work up to be what it wants to be rather than me trying to cram everything I'm thinking into one place at one time. I'm always working on a lot of things.

Zibby: That's awesome. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Leah: Oh, boy, so much. Then also, who am I to give advice? I feel both things very strongly. [laughs]

Zibby: It's okay. You are completely in the right to give advice. I am holding your novel in my hand. That means that you can give advice.

Leah: One of the things I often credit pursuing training in dramatic writing doing for me as a novelist is that, whether you do a program for it or not, I think the act of pursuing dramatic writing pushes you very hard to be un-precious because you write a lot of things into the void. You are encouraged in that field to write a lot of things and then discard them and write something news. Often in a dramatic writer's portfolio, they might have anywhere from five to ten scripts that they’ve worked on. Say you're a TV writer. One of those might get you onto a writers' room, and none of them will ever actually be made. They're the samples you made that you hoped would go somewhere but they didn't. Then you move on and you move on. There's a lot of throwing things out and moving on, throwing and moving. I think that that's especially in more commercial programs. I would say NYU is both an artistic and a commercial program. That's the graduate school I went to. There is this push towards anti-preciousness. I think that there's a time in your process to fall in love with what you have to say. I do it every time. There's also a time to throw a lot out the door, especially if you're a writer like me. I think the best advice I have is, there's this impulse to write one thing and put so much weight and love into it that the idea of writing another thing feels like a horrible waste or incredible pain. What you might end up with is one very beautiful thing that nobody wants to publish or serves you at a certain point in time and doesn't serve you later.

I think that the best advice I have is just to write lots of things. Write lots of stories. Yes, of course treasure that big novel inside of you that takes ten years to write. One of the things that writers who spend a lot more time on a project than maybe I have right now is that they also had ten other things they were writing in that time. When we talk about a writer who's spent ten years on a book, they’ve often written and done so many other things that kept fueling that, kept fueling that one big thing. The myth of, I worked on a novel for fifteen years and then it was Swann's Way, I think it tricks people into feeling that all of their mental energy should be spent on this one thing, and then it'll be perfect. Maybe there are people who work like that, and that's incredible. For me, the most fruitful thing to keep myself writing, keep myself excited, because you want to fall in love, you want to be excited about the work, is to write multiple things at once and let yourself remember that you have more than one story in you.

Zibby: I love that. Leah, thank you so much. I love the fact that we can talk across the entire planet, basically, about your book and that words can unite so much. It's so great. It just feels so neat to be able to do this from where you are and have your words here in my home and you're so far away. It's very cool.

Leah: I love that. I love that about story. When I first met my husband, we were talking about this. He had this anxiety about the kind of stories he wanted to tell. Who's going to care? Who's going to care about this story set in Kolkata? We're in a grad school in New York. Who's going to care? I asked him, "What are some of the stories that you've loved the best? Do they all come from exactly your life perspective?" He was like, "No. I love the Blue, White, and Red trilogy. I love Oldboy. I love all of these things that come out of my context but helped me see something in my context." I think that's the incredible thing about story.

Zibby: That's awesome. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Leah: Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

Zibby: I can't wait to read what you have coming up. I never read America for Beginners. I'm going to go back and read that. Looking forward to your next batch.

Leah: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's been an incredible pleasure.

Zibby: 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.

Debra Jo Immergut, YOU AGAIN

Zibby Owens: Welcome to day four of my July Book Blast. Today, I am going to be calling this Thrilling Thursday. There are a bunch of thrillers and suspenseful reads that I thought you'd really enjoy and that would make great summer reads. A lot of these came out during the pandemic. They're really worth your time, so I wanted to get them out. I hope you enjoy them.

Debra Jo Immergut is the author of You Again. She's also the author of The Captives, a 2019 Edgar Award finalist for Best Debut Novel by an American Author, which was published in the US and in over a dozen other countries. She has also published a collection of short stories called Private Property. Her essays and stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Narrative, and The New York Times, among others. A recipient of Michener and MacDowell fellowships, she has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Western Massachusetts.

Zibby: Debra, You Again, first of all, tell listeners, please, what You Again is about. Then I want to hear about the impetus for writing this book and everything else.

Debra Jo Immergut: You Again is about a fortysomething-year-old working mom in New York City who is coming home late from work one night and looks out her taxi window and sees her younger self coming out of a nightclub that closed years ago. It is really about this woman who is literally haunted by this younger self and what these encounters mean, how they change her, how they throw her life into complete upheaval, and how she comes out the other end of it.

Zibby: I know this is not your first book, but tell me how this particular book came into your head. Were you in a cab by the Hudson tunnel? Is it not called the Hudson Tunnel? I'm losing my mind. Hudson Tunnel, right?

Debra: Holland Tunnel. [laughs]

Zibby: Holland Tunnel, oh, my gosh. I've been out of the city too long. Did you ever see yourself while you were in a cab or somebody who looked like you and then that sparked the novel? That's my theory, but probably is not true. Tell me.

Debra: Not exactly, but not far off. What happened was I was walking through my old neighborhood in Greenwich Village with a stroller holding my one-year-old son at that time. I just happened to be in this area where I had lived when I was in my twenties. By this time, I was in my late thirties or mid-thirties, about thirty-five. I walked by my old building. I just happened onto this block, hadn’t been there in a long time. I just had the strangest sensation that I was going to see my younger self coming out of the door. The block is one of those landmark blocks, so nothing had changed. The old tenement building was still there. I just felt like I could see her coming out. Then I thought, what would she say to me? Here I am pushing a stroller. She wanted to be a novelist. I have not yet managed to get that novel out there. What would our conversation be like? What would I tell her? What would she say to me? That moment stuck with me for a long time. At that period, I really wasn't writing. I think that was part of the reason that I felt this encounter might be somewhat difficult. As soon as I did get back to writing a few years later, that story, I thought, I need to just start writing it and see what the girl says.

Zibby: That's so cool. Now I'm thinking in my head, wow, at what times could I really have used the me now to go back and say something encouraging to the me then? That would be so nice if you had those kind of touchstones throughout life to get you through the harder times. Wait, but tell me -- so you started writing and then you took a break for like twenty years, essentially. Then you came back. Tell me what that journey was like.

Debra: I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and got off to a pretty nice start, sold a story collection half-finished. It was really the first handful of stories I'd written in my life. That was probably not great. I was so green. I really did not have a clue about what I was doing as a writer, as a published author. I was unprepared. I was young. It kind of threw me for a loop. I thought, wow, this was a rocky journey and not what I expected. It was kind of a difficult publishing experience. As I know now, and since I know so many authors and friends who are writers, pretty much every publishing journey has a lot of bumps in the road. That's how green I was. I didn't know that. I needed to retreat from it a little bit. I did write a novel that got rejected. That even more sent me a signal, I need to step back from this. At the same time, I became a mom. I needed money. I got a job in the magazine business. I just thought, let me set it aside for a while. Then in those twenty years, it was not that I wasn't writing. I did go back to writing. Among other things, I was working on this concept of the older self/younger self novel. I was doing it slowly as a full-time working mom and kind of feeling like I love writing, but maybe I'm just not thinking about publishing at this point. That's where I was for a long time. Then I slowly made my way back to publishing when I knew I was ready. This time out has been really different.

Zibby: I bet. It seems like things are going well.

Debra: Things are going well. That novel that I was rejected all those years ago, I took out of the drawer. I put a lot more work into it and sent it out and got an agent. Then it was sold within two days of going out on the market. That was just so far beyond my expectations. That became my first novel, The Captives. Then the second one, I brought this other novel, what has become You Again.

Zibby: For The Captives, you taught writing to prisoners, men's prisons, and got to know them and channeled that into your first book, and then now switching gears to a New York-based harried mother for the characters here. [laughs]

Debra: Exactly. One of the things I was doing in all those years was teaching writing in incarceration settings of various kinds to both women and men and became very interested in those lives. The Captives is about a prison psychologist. He's about in his thirties. One day a new client comes in, and it's the girl he went to high school with who he had a huge crush on from afar the whole time. She's incarcerated. It's about what happened between the two of them. It's funny, both of these books have these intense duos who go back in time and who are now coming back into each other's lives. I seem to be really drawn to that dynamic.

Zibby: Is there a point in your life that you wish you could go back to and change? Aside from the being green and the publishing journey, is there more of a personal moment or something that you wish had gone differently or that you would love to go back and redo?

Debra: I would say about my publishing journey, now I feel like it could've have gone better than it has gone. We come to things, ideally, when we're ready. I was not ready that time. This time, I am. I'll also say as a writer at this point in my life, I have so much material to work with. When I was in my twenties, you're sort of scraping the barrel a little bit. I feel like I have this deep well. I really wouldn't change that piece of it. What I would do is go back to that ambitious young writer and really tell her, you know what, it's going to be okay. The disappointments that feel hard right now, it all smooths out with time. I always used to be skeptical about how you get better with age, but I really do feel like life does get better when you have a little bit more perspective for the ups and downs. I think I had very, very little perspective then. I would love to be able to share that with my younger self just to say, take a deep breath. You can't believe it now, but this is not that big a deal.

Zibby: That is good advice in general. The one scene in your book that I felt like I related to the most is when the main character is going to Dr. Singh with all these complainants like fainting, headaches, vomiting, dizziness, aching. He kind of dismisses her and says, "Are you under stress?" Then he says, "All the mommies are under lots of stress," and is like, "Go about your business." I feel like you hear things like this often. You present with some complainants, and everyone's like, no, it's stress, it's this. Then you find out that it ends up being all these other things. In your book, it was a very complicated unraveling of a lot of different factors that I won't go into so as not to reveal anything. I felt like that was such a classic moment that I'm sure other people have experienced as well.

Debra: He says to her, "All the mommies have so much stress." Then he tells her to go get a massage at the shiatsu place down the block. He thinks that might do the trick. Of course, it doesn't. She goes down the block, though. She takes his advice. Of course, what stressed-out working mom doesn't like the idea of having an excuse to treat yourself to a massage? She does go there. While she's in the waiting room waiting to go in, she sees her son outside -- she has a sixteen-year-old -- in a street protest. She never ends up getting that massage. She has to go out there and mix in a little bit. I won't say more than that. In some ways, that might alleviate her stress a little bit more, getting out into the street with the angry protestors for a moment there.

Zibby: By the way, I was reading it and I was like, wow, this is so timely. The antifa movement and everything that's going on in Seattle right now, I'm sure I'm just totally naïve and in my own little bubble, but I had not even heard of that particular movement before it's been plastered all over the news. Then it's all over your book. This is so of the moment, the protesting, all of it. It was like you had a little bit of ESP or something of what was to come.

Debra: I'm quite amazed by that too. I was aware of them, mostly because when I was in my twenties to early thirties -- my husband is a journalist. We lived in Berlin for a few years. The antifa had been there in Europe really since the 1920s in various forms. There have been lots of these, what we now see as antifa, these black-clad young people, very far left. That's been all over Berlin for many, many years. They always grabbed my attention and fascinated me. They were so wild and kind of intimidating looking. Also, often you'd see them, it looked like they were having fun. As a twentysomething of a very different variety, I was just like, well, look at those people. I just always noticed them and remembered them. Then around Trump's inauguration, that was really where I saw them here for the first time. I don't know if you remember. They turned up on inauguration day in Washington in a small way. I thought, oh, look, it's the American antifa. I always wondered if that would ever take hold there. As I was starting to work on You Again, I knew that my sixteen-year-old character was going to get into trouble of some kind of and pushing the boundaries and pushing the envelope. I thought, given everything that's going on in the country and the crazy atmosphere of the last few years, I just had a sense that that might be a coming thing and a bigger factor as time goes on. We are really polarized. The extremes are very activated at the moment. That's where my sixteen-year-old ends up. Actually, my fortysomething ends up delving into it, I'll say, really brought in by her son and trying to figure out what it is and what it means and how it even reflects on her own life, but without endorsing it in any way. I would say personally I'm fascinated by them, but in a neutral way. [laughs]

Zibby: Got it. You just mentioned your husband a little bit. I wanted to bring up your Modern Love piece from early May this year, which was fantastic, about needing the space to breathe in your marriage and how Burning Man became a piece of that. The last line of that, "It takes fresh air to feed a fire," just gave me goosebumps. It was so good. Tell me about selling that to Modern Love and also what it felt like to be needing that kind of recharging and how Burning Man fit into everything.

Debra: There's some common themes there in You Again and my Modern Love piece, which shows you how personal this book really is. It is kind of my statement of being a woman in a very long marriage and having really worked hard raising a kid, paying the bills, all of those things that we have to do. Yet somewhere in there is still that teenage girl yearning to break free. I think that's what Abigail goes through. That's because that's what I have experienced in the last few years too. Yet I am crazy about my husband. He is wonderful in every way. We have such a deep, long connection at this point that I knew that I didn't want to walk away from it if I could in any way help it. The Burning Man piece is really like, what can we do to get some of that freedom into our tight bond without breaking that bond? The Burning Man adventure was one way that we decided to try to do that, something that I was really reluctant to do. He was curious about it for years. When I came into this point of my life of feeling like I needed freedom, I thought, this is something I can do for him and it might help us. It did. It was amazing. I wouldn't say it was like, and then everything was completely different. As you well know, marriage and having a family is an ongoing project. It's always changing and moving and evolving. That was kind of a crisis moment that I wrote about that we got through by just having a great adventure together and something really out of our comfort zone. It was fun. It was really fun, I have to say. I don't know if we'll go back. We might. We're not hardcore Burning Man people. What we found out is doing something really out there is good for us.

Zibby: It's probably good for everyone. Now doing something out there would just mean leaving my house. [laughs] Burning Man could probably really shake things up.

Debra: That is true. Going to the grocery story these days feels like pushing the envelope. It's amazing how two years feels like an eon ago.

Zibby: I got my hair done for the first time in four months.

Debra: You got your hair cut?

Zibby: Yes. Going into a salon felt like, oh, my gosh, this is a whole new world, all these people and smells and sounds. [laughs]

Debra: You're making me a little jealous, I have to say.

Zibby: It was pretty awesome. It was pretty much the most awesome three hours I've spent for not too much of a change, but it's okay. It was just nice to get a little trim and all the rest. All to say that our standards and what constitutes really exciting things, out of the ordinary, can shift very quickly.

Debra: Absolutely. I would just add for all you long-married folk out there, Burning Man is not necessary, but maybe thinking about how to add fresh air, I think it's a really good question to address together. I guess maybe what really came out of that whole experience was the honesty of our conversations. I think that's really what changed. It was even just hard to address that this was an issue, that we had to really look and work at our relationship which really had been very easy for many years. Even that is a great step to take every so often.

Zibby: It's really great you shared it because I feel like marriage is one of those things that people only discuss on the surface sometimes. When you actually open up and talk about the real stuff, all it does is help other people through whatever they're going through. Thanks for doing that. Tell me a little more about your writing process. When you were writing You Again, how long did it take to write? Where do you like to write? Do you sit right where you are now? We're on Skype. I'm looking at you on this cozy little couch and beautiful light streaming in.

Debra: I actually sit on the other side of the room here right in the center of my house. One thing I've discovered about myself over the years is putting my writing space really sequestered somewhere in a corner of the house makes me not go there. I finally set up my office and my desk right in the center of the house. I have one child. He's been in college. Of course, now he's home. That's a fantastic bonus of what's been a really hard and awful time. I never thought we'd have him home for, I think it's been going on four months now. He's around. That's fantastic. I really do write in the midst of my family. I try to at least touch my work every day. I will say, I do believe in intermittent persistence, and especially for women who are trying to write and juggle many other things. I would say I've gotten two novels out there and a collection of short stories and a bunch of other essays and things writing persistently but with breaks. It's okay. I think sometimes there's a machismo in the writing world about, you must write every day. You must do so many words every day. When I'm able to do that and my life allows, I do that. There are other times when I have walked away when I need to. I go back, and it's still there. I just like to put that message out for women who are trying to write. I think intermittent persistence is a good strategy if you can't make it every day.

Zibby: I like that. It takes a little of the pressure off. Do you have other advice to aspiring authors?

Debra: I would just say you need to find your core stories. You Again, coming out of this moment in my life, it just felt like a very urgent question to answer, how to make it in a long marriage, how to grapple with unfulfilled ambitions or sidelined ambitions. I think you can't shy away from going there, to those hard, core, deep issues. That's the well. It doesn't mean you have to write openly and blatantly about them. I sometimes think of it as method acting, like when the director needs a child actor to cry and he goes up and whispers in his ear, remember when your dog died? That's what you want to be thinking about. The scene may concern something completely differently. I think you need to tap into those emotions. Then write a spy thriller if that's what you want to write, but try to locate it in your core. That works very well for me.

Zibby: That's so great. Just going back to structure for two seconds because so much in this book -- I loved, at one point, there was somebody who was like, let's go over all the facts right now. You outlined them all step by step. Here's what we know. There were so many different pieces. It was a kaleidoscope of what's true and what's not true and who believes what and which transcript and whatever. How did you assemble that? How did you do it? Tell me how you made that work. I'm very impressed.

Debra: When I began the book, I really just had that vision that I talked about before with me and the stroller and the girl coming out of my old apartment building. I had no idea what the explanation for this could be, how this woman could be seeing herself. I just wrote with a fair amount of fear and trepidation. How am I going to explain this? One thing I knew for sure was I didn't want it to be like, she woke up and it was all a dream. I really said to myself, if you're going to tackle a woman haunted by her younger self, you must have some plausible explanations for why it happens. Yet you must maintain mystery and depth, not overexplaining. That was scary as I got further and further in and was really committing to the story not knowing exactly how to do it. What I've found is -- I'm sure you've heard authors say this before. Your subconscious is smarter than you are.

Slowly, explanations started to emerge as I brought in other characters, as I brought in Abigail's history and the whole backstory and what's happening with her younger self. The explanations were sort of embedded in the facts of her life. We discover that the things that happen to the twentysomething lay the groundwork for this haunting. That's about as much as I can say without really giving too much away. It was embedded in there for me, but I had to get about two-thirds into the first draft before that started to take shape. Then all those other pieces that you're talking about, the mosaic of explanations and facts and twists, that comes in revision when you really see, okay, I need to account for that plot strand. Again, I would look at the groundwork I'd set with Abigail's story. There were things that I could draw out, possible explanations, possible factors, and weave them in. It's a mysterious process. You really do need to trust yourself when you're writing a novel. If you do that enough, I don't know, there's some magic to it. It comes together.

Zibby: That's really exciting.

Debra: I take a lot of notes too. I ask myself questions. I have a notebook for each novel, and ask myself questions, sleep on it. Again, I think it kind of comes out of the subconscious if you allow it.

Zibby: I can't wait to hear what comes out of your subconscious next. Are you working on another book? What are your plans after you celebrate the book review?

Debra: I am hard at work on novel three. One of the lessons I learned from my earlier publishing rough seas was that, just be working on new things and really going to that beautiful, magical, imaginary place. That's why we do it, to be able to spend time creating and living in our imagination and trying to make dreamworlds that will please our readers. That's the fun part. I really learned, publishing, the best antidote or counterbalance is writing. I've been writing a lot the last few months as I get ready for You Again to come out. It is set partly in Berlin drawing from those years in the nineties when I lived there, which was a really exciting time, and partly in this small college town, which is where I live now in Massachusetts. There's a mother and a daughter in it. It is sort of an older and a younger again, and a past story and a present story. I'm really starting to see my patterns. That's okay. William Faulkner wrote variations on very similar stories. He won the Noble Prize, so I guess that's okay.

Zibby: What's that expression? If it's not broken, don't fix it. Just keep at it. It seems to be working.

Debra: The subconscious, that must be what its shape is for me. Go with it.

Zibby: Go with it. Love it. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for your Modern Love inspirational piece and this beautiful dreamlike state of novel. Thank you.

Debra: Thank you, Zibby. I just want to say, huge thank you to you for all you're doing for writers and readers during this time, and before that also, but especially now. It's just fantastic. Thank you. I can say on behalf of everyone who's trying to write, we thank you.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice of you. It's my pleasure. I love it. Thanks. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye, Debra.

Thanks for listening to this episode from Thriller Thursday, part of my July Book Blast to get great authors into your hands while the summer is still going on. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

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.

Amy Jo Burns, SHINER

Zibby Owens: Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland, and Shiner, a novel which just came out this summer. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Gay Magazine, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad.

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

Amy Jo Burns: Thank you so much for having me. So happy to be here.

Zibby: You have written not only Shiner and a memoir and so much else, but your personal essays, we have to talk about because they are so good. I just kept reading one after another. I know that Shiner is your latest book, so let's talk about that first. Can you tell listeners, please, what Shiner is about?

Amy Jo: Shiner is the story of a fifteen-year-old girl. Her name is Wren. She lives secluded in the mountains of West Virginia with her parents. Her dad became this local legend when he got struck by lightning when he was young. He became a snake-handling preacher. One summer, Wren witnesses her father perform this really strange miracle that goes terribly wrong. As a result of that, all of her family secrets that she had no idea about start to unravel. The book is told from three different perspectives. One is hers, of course. Another is a lovelorn moonshiner. Then the last is a reclusive housewife. Those voices all work together to tell this story that is the true story behind this mountain legend.

Zibby: Wow. What inspired you to write it?

Amy Jo: A lot of different things. I think that this story has been growing inside of me for such a long time. I grew up in Northern Appalachia. The landscape has always been incredibly special to me and inspiring. I think the actual roots of the story started, and it really started to feel alive to me, was after I finished publishing my memoir which is called Cinderland. It's a story about what it's like to be a young woman who has to keep a secret. As a result of publishing it, I had so many people come forward and just share with me these stories that they had been keeping for decades. It was such a moving experience that I realized that I wanted to tell the second half of the story. I wanted to talk about what it's like to be a woman who has a story that has gone unheard. I also wanted to write about what a great act of compassion it is to bear witness to someone else's story. That's where the seeds of this story with all these different histories and winding trails came together for me, was how you can find the bravery within yourself to tell that secret that you thought you never could.

Zibby: Now that I've read all your personal essays, I know your secrets.

Amy Jo: You do. They're all in there. [laughs]

Zibby: Are you comfortable talking about some of this stuff from your past that may have informed this book and everything?

Amy Jo: Absolutely. Happy to.

Zibby: You wrote really honestly and beautifully about what happened when, not even so much in the moment of what happened with the abuse of your piano teacher, but then how you kept it a secret. When it came out that you had not been the only one -- maybe I shouldn't tell your story. When you were not the only one and then your parents confronted you about it, how you handled it and how that experience impacted your life, can you talk a little about that and even your decision to share what happened with you?

Amy Jo: What happened when I was ten was this really beloved piano teacher in my hometown was accused by, it started with one girl and then another and then another for assaulting them during their lessons. I like to use that word, assault, because I think it's something that only came into play within the past few years. I'm really grateful to be able to use it because I feel like it's an accurate description. Basically, a few girls started to come forward about what he'd done during their lessons. A lot of the people in the town chose to support the piano teacher instead of these young women. I was somebody who saw all this happening. These young girls, we were ten, eleven, twelve years old, they were vilified by the town, accused of conspiracy and a bunch of other ridiculous things, not by everybody, but by a lot of people. What ended up happening after that is that it was put in this vault and nobody talked about it. I grew up having this huge secret. I saw what had happened. I decided to lie about it to the police. I just held that secret.

I didn't really remember it, actually, until I'd left home and was in college. I was out in the woods one day and it just slammed me in the face. I thought, oh, my gosh. It was one of those moments you have where you just feel like everything changes in your life. I remembered. To tie it back to what I ended up writing about was I realized that it wasn't only the event itself that had caused a lot of harm. It was the silence around it and the weight of keeping a secret. I wanted to write about what it was like to hold it and the cost that came not only to me as a young woman, but to my whole hometown and also this generation of young women that felt like we couldn't talk about it. That was the basis of the book. I did not see Cinderland coming. I always had dreamed of myself as a novelist, but every time I sat down to write, everything I wrote, it was just not very good. Sure, that's normal. Everybody's got a learning curve and things like that.

I came to point personally where I realized if I didn't tell the truth about what had happened firstly to myself, that I was going to be writing around it for the rest of my life and that everything I wrote was just going to have a huge blind spot because there were a few things that I was really afraid to be honest about in my life. I thought it was going to cost me everything. That's what I had been taught when I was ten, was that if you tell the truth about this, you will lose everything that you have. What ended up happening is that I just started to try to tell one true thing after another true thing after another true thing. Then eventually, I had a book. I couldn't believe that my first book was going to be a memoir. Now that it's been out for about five years, I'm so grateful that it was my first book because I feel like it's such a foundation that reminds me of what's at stake when you sit down to write, whether it's a story you're imagining or if it's something that happened to you. There's real stakes about putting your story out there and inviting other people to kind of sit in it with you, you know?

Zibby: Totally. I have to go back now and read your memoir, seriously. I also am just so struck, I've talked to so many people who talk about the damage that keeping secrets really does to somebody, especially a child. There seems to be no worse thing than telling a child to not own up to something that's happened in any context, not just sexual abuse. I feel like there should be some sort of deep dive into the damage of keeping secrets. I'm sure it has been done.

Amy Jo: Absolutely. You know what one of the saddest things for me was? Was when I was an adult and I realized that keeping that secret made me feel like I was this guy's accomplice and not his victim. That was something that I really had to work through. Part of writing Cinderland was me saying, you know what, it is okay for this man to be held accountable for what he did. It's not wrong. It's not the "Christian thing" of me or the "female thing" of me to let it slide and to offer forgiveness. There's a real importance to say, no, he can be held accountable for what he did. That's a lot of what that book is about. It's also about a longing for home and all those things that I thought I had lost as a result of what had happened. Some of the things ended up coming back to me. A lot of friendships I thought I had lost actually returned to me after I published the book. That was a really wonderful thing too.

Zibby: When the pandemic ends and if this ever can work out, I would love to have a conversation between you and Adrienne Brodeur who wrote a book called Wild Game. She had to keep a secret from about the same age as you. Although, it was the fact that her mother was having an affair. She became an accomplice to that. I feel like you guys would have a really interesting chat about secrets.

Amy Jo: [Indiscernible] conversation. I would love to.

Zibby: Anyway, as an aside. Also, I wanted to talk about your love of ballet and how you called yourself a Rust Belt ballerina, which was so great and I feel like should be a children's book, by the way, Rust Belt Ballerina. You can start working on that. [laughs]

Amy Jo: I'll add it to my list.

Zibby: Okay, good. Tell me about that and how you found your love of ballet and what that did for you growing up.

Amy Jo: It's funny. My first ballet lesson, I think I was maybe six or seven. My mom took me. It was in an old community center. I didn't even have a pair of ballet slippers. I think I had an orange pair of Chuck Taylors. I went. We didn't even have a barre. It was just a row of folding chairs. We listening to a recording on an old boombox that was a recording of a recording of a recording to this piano music. It was very static-y and things like that. Yet even in all of that, I just found such a grace and beauty about the art form of ballet. What it became for me was, it was a way for me to express myself that I couldn't find through words. I couldn't find it through anything else. Now of course looking back, I can see this young girl and this young woman who was wrestling with all these things she couldn't articulate. Ballet became that weekly thing I did where it was like my body was just able to speak for itself. That was why I loved practicing ballet, but I never wanted to perform it. It didn't hold that draw. Typically, you hear about ballerinas loving the lights and the stage and all that. For me, I loved that solitary practice at the barre, up and down, the predictable rhythm of it. It became something that was a real anchor for me when I was young. Please know I'm five-foot-tall, never a professional ballerina. It was one of those things that, it was so lifegiving to me at such an important time.

When I think about it now, I see myself performing ballet in the middle of this town that was literally in the midst of a steel collapse. The building we had it in I think was next door to this empty steel mill. The only reason we were able to practice was because nobody could use the building anymore. When you're a kid, you don't pick up on all that stuff. Then when you're an adult, you think, oh, my gosh. There's a sadness to that, but there's a real beauty to it too. That is one of many things that I loved about growing up there even though the rest of the world looked at it and thought, this town is past its prime. To me, I thought it was beautiful. I still think it's beautiful. I think that also shows up in Shiner, this idea of what the rest of the world thinks is true about the mountains in West Virginia and if it's cautionary tale. The people who live there say, we refuse to be written off. We're living very complicated, very vibrant lives regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.

Zibby: You said somewhere that the expressions that people used to describe you, I can't remember exactly what they were, you had never even heard until you left home. They were somehow derogatory. You're like, what do you mean? Why are you describing me that way?

Amy Jo: Yeah. My name's Amy Jo, obviously. I never realized it, but when I went to college, people wanted me to explain my name, and that was how I realized having a middle name like Jo or going by a first and middle name at all signifies maybe that you're from a certain region of the country or that maybe you're a hillbilly or a redneck. That was some of the questions I got asked. I would be in class and they would talk about this area that's known as the Rust Belt or this area that's known as Appalachia. I'd be looking at a map. I was like, oh. [laughter] It just was such an interesting thing how people academically try to slot you in some category. If nothing else, it was fascinating to me, but then also like, oh, when you realize that doesn't really match what I felt or what I experienced. I think that, probably more than anything else, is a common thread throughout everything I write. You think you know the real story, but I don't think you do.

Zibby: Tell me a little about your process and how you tackled both the memoir and the novel, if you do outlines or how you organize yourself and how long it took to write those books.

Amy Jo: Lord, it is a mess. [Distorted audio] books that I have written, it just was such a mess. I had to learn to just be okay with that because anytime I tried to organize my mess, it would sort of circumvent the whole process and I would have to start again. I think that when I start writing something, whether it's an essay or the memoir or a novel or something like that, my subconscious is my best friend. It's trying to work something out on the page. If my inner editor comes in and tries to have an opinion about it too soon, then it just sort of goes off the rails. Logistically, my process for everything, whether it's something long, something short, true, not true, it's pretty much the same. I will have a notebook. I will write down a bunch of just -- they're not even sentences. It's just phrase, images, things. I will fill up an entire notebook that does not make any sense to anybody but me. I realize at this point that that's my first draft. It's sort of like getting a bunch of patchwork pieces all together. Then you step back and look at it. Then you can make a quilt from it. My second draft is usually trying to match up all the quilt pieces. Then I go from there. It takes me a long time. Cinderland, the difference with writing that, that probably took me two or three years. The big difference with that was that I did not have kids when I wrote that book. I was able to sit down and just work for five, six, seven hours straight. I felt like I had gone into that material so deep. I was so in it in a really interesting way. Then I had two kids. As you know, you don't even get an hour. [laughs]

Zibby: I know. You don't get a minute.

Amy Jo: No, you don't. Much of Shiner was me sitting down, I would get my laptop all set up, and my pen and my paper, then I would run and try to get my son in his crib and cross my fingers and then run downstairs and maybe get forty-five minutes where I would write something. I thought every day, I was like, I am never going to finish this. Then I would just let myself say it. Then I would write two hundred words. Then all of a sudden -- I say all of a sudden, but it was a lot of rewrites and things like that and having another baby. [laughs] But then it was done. It was done in these very forty-five minutes here, maybe an hour and a half there. That's how that book was done. I feel like that's so important to mention. I think it's scary for a lot of people to think, how do I make this creative life with kids? It does change. I won't lie and tell you I don't miss those deep dives into the material that I had before, but I'm so happy with how Shiner came out. I think there's something special about it that I probably wouldn't have been able to capture if I didn't have kids. I see a lot of evolution of myself as a person in Shiner that came about because I couldn't work the way I once did. I just had to roll with it and let my creative energy figure it out.

Zibby: That's amazing. Amy Jo, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing about Shiner. Thanks for sharing your deepest, darkest secrets with us and just glibly talking about them in the middle of the day.

Amy Jo: I'm so happy to do it because I think that it's really important to say it's not the secrets themselves that should cause us any kind of shame. It's something I'm always happy to dive into in the middle of day. Thank you for asking me and hearing me out.

Zibby: Of course. Great talking to you.

Amy Jo: You too.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Amy Jo: Bye.

Elizabeth Kay, SEVEN LIES

Zibby Owens: Elizabeth Kay is the author of Seven Lies which is a fantastic debut thriller. Seven Lies, when it made the submission rounds for the publishers, it became one of the most sought-after novels of the year and was immediately sold all over the world at the London Book Fair. Now there's already a TV deal in place. Publishing rights have been sold in twenty countries. It's gearing up to be a really exciting, much-anticipated summer read, so I had to get it out so you guys could hear about it. Elizabeth Kay works in the publishing industry under a different name. She currently lives in London and has a first-class degree in English literature.

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

Elizabeth Kay: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: I love your accent. I always love doing podcasts with these beautiful British accents. It sounds so official and everything. [laughs] Seven Lies, your book took the world by storm at the London Book Fair. Now it's going to be a TV and movie. It's so good. First of all, tell listeners what it's about and then what inspired you to write it, which is a great story too.

Elizabeth: It's the story of seven lies that lead to a death. It starts with two best friends, Jane and Marnie, who've known each other since school. It is organized by the seven lies that Jane tells to Marnie throughout the novel. Along the way, we find out what this death is and how their friendship falls apart and the various strings that have been pulled and released as their relationship has evolved. For me, it was about how childhood friendships can evolve as we become adults and what that can look like and how female friendships can be intense and very overwhelming. That can be a brilliant thing, but it can also be a difficult and very complicated thing at the same time.

Zibby: It's so true.

Elizabeth: The inspiration for it, how I came to write it.

Zibby: Yes, please.

Elizabeth: On a practical, how-did-I-write-it note, I'd been writing something else for about three years. I felt like I'd been working at it for absolutely ages. I had rewritten it again and again and changed whole parts of the plot. I never really felt like it was particularly exciting or very strong. It took a long time for me to have the courage to say, actually, I'm going to stop trying. I'd always been told, keep persevering. Keep persevering. Don't give up. It felt like a bit of failure to put that one away. But as soon as I had kind of drawn a line under it, I was able to start thinking about something new. I knew I wanted to write about female friendship. I knew that I wanted it to be very dark and very sinister. The main character is Jane. It's all told from her perspective. Her voice came to me straight away. I so enjoyed being in her head. Once I had her and I felt like I knew her and I knew how she spoke and what she wanted to say, I felt like I was on to something that felt exciting to me.

Zibby: It's also so great how you have Jane talk directly to the reader. I always love when that happens in books.

Elizabeth: Me too.

Zibby: It's so neat because then you're just so in it. You feel complicit in whatever she's doing and thinking. It's an intimacy squared something. [laughs]

Elizabeth: I totally agree. That's something that I really enjoy. I really like a first-person narrate. As you say, that sense of being part of their story can be quite enjoyable.

Zibby: Yes. There was a passage, the way you write about female friendship -- as a woman, I adore my female friends. I've thought a lot about friendship over the years, as many people have. There's one passage. Hold on, let me just get to it. You wrote, "There is something so enchanting about a first best friend at twelve. It is intoxicating to be so needed, to crave someone so acutely, and to have that feeling of being so completely entwined. But these early bonds are unsustainable, and someday you will choose to extricate yourself from this friendship in the pursuit, instead, of lovers. You will extract yourself limb by limb, bone by bone, memory from memory until you can exist independently, until you are again one person where once you were two." So great. It's just so captivating. That is what happens. You're so enmeshed. My best friend passed away on September 11th.

Elizabeth: I'm so sorry.

Zibby: Thank you. At the time, we were so -- I try to explain now, and I explain to my husband, "You know how we're so close now? That's what it felt like then." In your early twenties, your best friends are your everything. They're who you talk to. You're just so entwined. When I read this passage, it just made me think of my friend Stacey. It doesn't have to be at twelve. It can be at any point in your life when you meet someone and you become totally hooked together in a way.

Elizabeth: You find you're talking to them all the time. There's nothing about your life that they don't know. They know more than your parents, your siblings. Everyone else feels kind of boring by comparison. You just want to be with that person. It is like falling in love, I suppose. I think particularly when you're in that teenage phase, I guess the hormones and everything else make it all that much more intense anyway.

Zibby: It's so true. So how did you come up with this structure, which I love also by the way, of the seven lies and each chapter is a lie? How did you come up with that? Was it just a natural development when you were writing it?

Elizabeth: I suppose it was a conscious decision. The book I had been writing before had felt really wooly and like I skipped all over the place. I never had enough structure or momentum. I knew I needed to be quite strict with myself this time and not allow myself the space to run away into various ideas without focusing on a central plot. Seven lies felt like an interesting way to hold myself to account. I could never travel too far away because I always had to get back to the next lie in the story. It started for me as quite a practical tool. I'm not really a planner instinctively. I sort of had a vague idea where the middle would be, a vague idea where the end would be. It served as a bit of a roadmap to stop me losing my place.

Zibby: That's awesome. I read somewhere that you were inspired by some sort of Broadway show to write this particular story. Did I make that up? [laughs]

Elizabeth: No, you didn't that make up. My husband, we were in New York for his birthday in 2018, I think. We went to see Waitress. There is a song in that, "Take it From an Old Man," which is one of characters -- I don't know if you know it -- saying to the other, life is short. Do what you want to do. Have a go. It doesn't matter if you fail. That was the point at which I was like, I have to put down the previous book. I have to draw that line underneath it and I have to try again. It was just one of those moments. The song kind of pushed me to take that leap and to trust my gut and to start afresh.

Zibby: Very interesting. Start to finish, how long did this book take?

Elizabeth: All in, I think it was about a year or fifteen months including editing, so not too bad given the other was three years and it didn't get very far.

Zibby: You work in publishing also.

Elizabeth: I do. I'm an editor for Transworld Publishers which is part of Penguin Random House in the UK. That is where I have that editor hat Monday to Friday, and then writer hat Saturday/Sunday.

Zibby: Wow. So when did you find time to do this? Was this a before work, after work...?

Elizabeth: It was only weekends, actually. I was always really knackered after work. I can never really think creatively or carve out the time for it. I sat down every Saturday and Sunday morning and wrote until I couldn't bear to write another word. Eventually, there were enough words on the page for me to start editing, which is what I prefer doing if I'm honest. Getting the words down felt like a bit of a slog. Then I started to enjoy it from there.

Zibby: Your whole life is now books. You're an editor.

Elizabeth: I had a baby four months ago, so that's kind of shaken the book bit to the side for the moment.

Zibby: Congratulations.

Elizabeth: Up until then, it was very much all books.

Zibby: Was it something that from a very young age you just knew you loved and wanted to do? How did you discover? I know you had a pivot earlier in your career when you weren’t working in the book world and your husband suggested that you do it, right?

Elizabeth: I wrote a lot as a child. I loved writing as a child. I think I stopped at some point in my teenage years. It just stopped being a priority. Then when I was studying, it was always other people's books and thinking about language and form and never writing creatively. It wasn't until after I left university and I started to think, what do I want to do? What sort of job do I want? I found myself in a job that I hated. My husband said, "Well, you like books." I thought, let's give that a go then. I was really fortunate, actually. I landed on my feet in many regards. I managed to get a couple of work experience placements. One of those companies was then hiring for a PA. I was able to apply for that job and then move up from there. It was once I was back in the book world when I was working in books and seeing people writing creatively and doing that as a career, and I suppose seeing how publishing works, I thought I wanted to try it from the other side as well.

Zibby: Now that you've done both, what do you think? What was the most useful thing from being on the publishing side that you took into your experience as a writer?

Elizabeth: The importance of being able to pitch a book really succinctly. When I'm trying to acquire a book as an editor, I'm always trying to pitch it in one or two lines at the most because I know that the publicists have to go out and talk to the media and be as picky as possible, and the sales team to retailers. It's so, so hard to stand out. That little focus for what that book is and how you can sum it up really briefly and make people feel excited by it, that was something I was aware would be great if I could manage to do that.

Zibby: Excellent. What sort of advice would you have, then, to aspiring authors aside from a short and exciting pitch?

Elizabeth: I would say based on my experience, don't be afraid to just put something down and start again. If it starts to feel boring, genuinely boring -- I think everything feels boring and hard work at times. That's not necessarily a reason to stop. If it's not exciting you anymore, start again. Try something different. Don't be afraid to do something else for a week or two weeks just to see if that feels like a better fit. I think if I had taken that advice earlier, I probably would've saved myself a lot of time trying to edit something that was never really going to be good enough.

Zibby: Tell me about the experience of the sale of this book and what that was like for you emotionally.

Elizabeth: It felt ridiculous at the time. It felt so surreal. I was really excited when I signed with my agent. I think she's brilliant. I'd been impressed with her and thought she was wonderful long before I had a relationship with her professionally. I knew that she had done brilliant things for other debut authors. I felt excited that she was going to be the one to send it out. Still, I think I was managing my expectations. When we started getting offers from various countries, it was so hard to make that feel real. I'm still not sure it does feel real, if I'm honest. It feels still very, very strange. It was such a thrill that other people liked it because for so long it's you and a keypad writing away at a laptop. Then to have an agent like it was amazing. Then editors coming on board too is so exciting.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about the film and TV news around the book.

Elizabeth: Again, that feels crazy. You never quite know if it will come to fruition. It's been optioned. There is a writer currently working on a pilot here in the UK for a potential TV series. Fingers crossed. Who knows? It might be on TV at some point.

Zibby: That's so exciting. It's such a perfect transition to a limited series with seven episodes.

Elizabeth: I hope so.

Zibby: If I were a TV producer, that's what I would do.

Elizabeth: I think that's what they’ve been talking about, trying to keep the structure and see what happens. It's one of those things. You hand it over to another creative team and say, do what you can with it. I hope it works for you and it feels exciting and you can do something fresh. I'm just hoping that it will happen. Fingers crossed, certainly.

Zibby: What has it been like now having a baby? Are you still trying to write? How has it changed your creative output?

Elizabeth: I'm trying. It's not as easy as it was to carve out big chunks of time. I think we're getting into a little bit more of a pattern, getting more sleep now certainly, which means a bit more mental space for thinking, if not actual time. We will see. It feels a very different way to be writing my second book than it did for Seven Lies.

Zibby: Can you share what your next book is about?

Elizabeth: It's very much in its infancy. I think it will be a similar dark story looking at women in particular. I think it will be focusing on women and anger. It's something that's interested me for quite a while and how we think quite negatively about women who are angry. It's seen as a weakness, perhaps, and kind of an ugly quality in many ways. I feel that there might be something there. We will see. If I can get the words on the page, we'll find out if there is something there after all.

Zibby: Fantastic. Thank you so much for chatting with me about your book. I can't wait to watch and see as your career progresses. I feel like you're so young. I don't know how old you are, but you seem young to me. This book is so good. Just the way you wrote it, you don't get lost in the sentences and yet they're still really interesting sentences. They're not too self-conscious. It's clear enough and yet it's still literary, but not in a way where you feel like you're ever out of the flow of it, which I really appreciate. Sometimes the sentences themselves can be a little distracting in their prettiness, almost. This is not like that. You're just so immersed. I'm very grateful for books that really capture my attention and draw me in and get me out of my own mind. Your book is a check plus. Truly, I can't wait to see all of your output. It's exciting.

Elizabeth: Thank you. That's so nice to hear. I always say that I can be a bit of a lazy reader sometimes. If I'm not into it really quickly, I find it quite hard to persevere. To know that this was a book that kept you going is lovely.

Zibby: Yes, amazing. I see why there's so much attention around it. Anyway, it's very exciting. I'm wishing you all the best.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Zibby: Making sure not to tell any lies because as you point out in the book, the first one, hard to stop. [laughs]

Elizabeth: Hard to stop. Thank you very much.

Zibby: Bye.

Brooke Fossey, THE BIG FINISH

Zibby Owens: Brooke Fossey was once an aerospace engineer with a secret clearance before she traded it all in for motherhood and writing. She's a past president and an honorary lifetime member of DFW Writers' Workshop. Her work can be found in numerous publications including Ruminate Magazine and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut novel, The Big Finish, was published from Penguin/Berkley. When she’s not writing, you can find her in Dallas, Texas, with her husband, four kids, and their dog Rufus. She still occasionally does math.

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

Brooke Fossey: I'm so excited to be here.

Zibby: Can you please tell listeners what The Big Finish is about? Congratulations on your debut novel. It's really exciting.

Brooke: Thank you. The Big Finish is about an eighty-eight-year-old named Duffy Sinclair. He's living his last days in peace at Centennial Assisted Living except it's all disrupted when his roommate's troubled granddaughter climbs through their bedroom window. He has to reassess his legacy and his past and make some decisions as chaos ensues.

Zibby: I was so interested that you would choose to tell a story from the point of view of an eighty-eight-year-old man. Tell me about that. How did you come up with the idea for this book?

Brooke: I always say I have an eighty-eight-year-old man living inside of me somewhere. I'm like an old [indiscernible/laughter]. Truly, I came up with the idea when I was visiting my grandpa at the assisted living. I would bring all of my kids. Like you, I have four children. It was chaos. It was controlled chaos. I did a lot of just collecting them, trying to make sure they didn't run away. I was inspired because everyone there, despite their age, had such rich histories and such fantastic personalities. I decided they all deserved a book. More than that, they deserved to be the heroes of the book. That was the seed. I loosely based my main character off of my grandpa. Josie, who's troubled but also brings a lot of joy, is kind of my kids, basically, is how it happened.

Zibby: I feel like a lot of trouble and a lot of joy is a good description of basically any kid. [laughs]

Brooke: A hundred percent.

Zibby: I saw the picture of you with your four kids seeing your book in a bookstore for the first time on Instagram. That was so great. How exciting.

Brooke: I had one teenager that was underwhelmed by it all, but what are you going to do? [laughs]

Zibby: I have two almost thirteen-year-olds. I relate to that montage. Did you give your grandfather the book? Did he get a chance to read it?

Brooke: You know what? He passed before I had finished. In fact, I think I may have finished a draft, but he did not get to see it published. I know he's smiling down on me. He's probably pretty proud.

Zibby: What was the process like writing this novel? Why write a novel now? Where did that come from in your life?

Brooke: It's really funny. I was an engineer by profession. I got two degrees in it. I worked at Lockheed on the joint strike fighter which is a [indiscernible] thirty-five plane. Then I started having a bunch of kids. After four of them, I decided I was going to stay home. I really am glad that I made that decision. At the same time, I was slowly going insane because I had four kids in five years. It was a little bit of luck here. During a naptime, I opened up my computer and I started writing. I couldn't stop. I would look forward to these naptimes because I would start going into a different world. I finished a couple books. I started to practice the craft and really get serious. It took me about ten years to get here, but it's been fun. It's basically a very late-in-life passion that I discovered.

Zibby: Wow, that's amazing. I feel like such a waste of space when I talk to so many authors like you who use their kids' naptimes to write books. I emailed. Why did I waste all those naps? I tried to catch up on thank you notes or whatever else I was doing, bills. Everybody else is sitting around writing beautiful novels or practicing the craft. [laughs]

Brooke: Well, you should see my house during that. I could've been doing something else also productive. That was my outlet. It was fun for me.

Zibby: That's awesome. How has it been? I know this is such a crazy time in the world, A, and to have a book come out, B. What has this whole process been at this stage having worked for so long to get this out into the world?

Brooke: There's been an expectation gap, obviously. I'm glad that my family and I are very adaptable. We've just kind of rolled with it. I mean, what are you going to do? You just have to accept it and keep moving. It was disappointing. We canceled the parties. We canceled all sorts of event. Then I learned how to use a lot of technology. I did more online stuff than I ever imagined. I'm well-equipped now at the house. Although, you couldn't tell it by looking at me at the moment.

Zibby: I know. I'm like, if we ever do go back to real life, now I have all these skills. Throw me on a platform and let me find my way out. Oh, my gosh. After working on that book, are you working on another novel? Are you constantly thinking of new ideas? How does the writing process look for you?

Brooke: I am working on another novel. It's cooking. I'm what they call a pantser. I don't like to plot. I just like to explore and surprise myself as I write. I hope that shows up in my writing because as you read, you might be surprised a time or two. I can't say too much about it because I'm not a plotter. I can say that there are some soap operas involved. I think it's an homage to soap operas in a way because I'm Greek American, and my great-grandmother, she learned how to speak English by watching soap operas. I've just taken that and ran with it. Very little has to do my family besides that.

Zibby: How did your family end up in Texas from Greece?

Brooke: I'm third generation, so my family has been here for a while.

Zibby: Got it. Sorry, random question.

Brooke: No, you're fine.

Zibby: I was just thinking, if I was coming from Greece, how would you end up in Texas? I don't know.

Brooke: The American melting pot is an amazing thing.

Zibby: Yes. So what kind of books do you like to read? Do you like to read fiction like this? Who are some of your role model authors or books that you've read lately that you've really enjoyed?

Brooke: I love all books, basically. Every book I read, because I never took a proper writing class, I underline a lot when I see something that's interesting. Basically, every author that I'm reading at the moment is my favorite because they're teaching me. I love Peace like a River by Leif Enger. It's one of my favorite books. I'm a Dave Eggers fan, Ann Patchett. I love Tana French. I like a lot of literary-ish novels that are accessible, is how I would put it.

Zibby: That's a good way to put it. I might steal that to describe categories of books.

Brooke: Once you add ish to something, the umbrella gets bigger.

Zibby: When you write, so you're a pantser without any outlines or anything, where do you like to write? Do you like to write at home? Are you the type of person who can write anywhere? Are you very much like, I have to be in this corner of my house? What's it like? What's your process like?

Brooke: I'm like a dog that was trained. As I was writing during naptime, it was basically quiet and it didn't matter where I was. I just had to have some time by myself. That's what it's turned into for me. I will drive a kid to practice, and I will sit in my car and do it then. I will get everyone into bed, and I will sit and do it then. My only requirement is honestly that it's quiet and that nobody's bothering me because as I write, I have a tendency to talk out loud like a crazy person. I can't go to bookstores or coffee shops. Some of my friends will invite me for little writing dates. I'm like, I can't. I look like a crazy person.

Zibby: What are you saying out loud? Are you writing it and then reading it out loud to see how it sounds?

Brooke: Yes, I do a lot of audible stuff. In the writing workshop that I belong to, we do a lot of read-alouds. I think that's also trained me just to listen to what it sounds like, what it's going to sound like to the reader, basically. To be fair, I also do a little acting, I think. [laughs]

Zibby: A little acting?

Brooke: Sure. Why not? So you can get their gestures and their tone and how they're going to say something.

Zibby: Did you end up narrating the audiobook for your own book?

Brooke: No. A really excellent voice actor did it named Mark Bramhall. He did a fantastic job.

Zibby: Probably better to be a man. [laughter] I was just thinking that you could use that skill. I actually just interviewed a voiceover actor. I was like, wow, it never occurred to me. I should've tried out for that job. There's so many jobs out there that you don't even know. It's silly.

Brooke: It's fascinating. I agree. I think I explore that a lot in my writing because my career choice has kind of taken a left turn. I do, I see so many jobs out there where I'm like, that would be interesting. Now, that would be interesting. So I feel that.

Zibby: How do you think your engineering mind works well with fiction? Do you feel like any of the strengths of that apply when you're crafting narratives? Do you think this is just another skill set and you just have different parts of your brain that jump in at different times?

Brooke: I think it's twofold. I think it helps me because I think a book is just a really long equation or a big puzzle that you're trying to put together. In that way, I feel like I'm solving a problem. On the flip side, I feel like my engineering does me a disservice because in math there's always a right answer. I can get to the end of a scene or the end of a book even and think, is this right? There's no way to know, really, because it's art. It just depends on which side of my brain is dominant at the moment.

Zibby: Wow. How great to be able to have them both. So many people are like, I'm only this type of thinker. How involved are your kids in your writing? Have they read your book? Are they really excited? Do they not really care?

Brooke: They haven't read it. I told them I would prefer them to wait only because I want them to appreciate it. I don't know that they will right now. It's not that it's inappropriate or anything like that. There's some themes that have to do with life and death. When you are a kid, you are invincible. I think that you need a little perspective to appreciate it. Generally speaking, I don't think they care. [laughs] Oh, well.

Zibby: I know. If only there was a way to get the kids to really -- I'm like, hey, guess what guys? They're like, yeah, do we have any more milk? All right, whatever.

Brooke: You're talking to a famous person? Who cares?

Zibby: [laughs] That's awesome. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Brooke: I think my only advice is to give yourself permission to write. This is from my own personal experience. All by itself, it feels like a very silly endeavor to sit and write made-up stuff. It does. I think that our adult brains kind of can stop us from just going there. If you want to write something and you have a story on your heart, all you have to do is give yourself permission to go ahead and start writing it. Don't worry about the critics or your inner critic saying this is silly. I have a good friend that always tell me when I'm like, "My story feels silly," or my short story, he's like, "Describe the Wizard of Oz to me." I'll say, "It's about a girl that gets sucked in a tornado and lands in a weird world." It sounds so silly if you really think about it. I think that's it. Just make your adult mind be quiet and go for it.

Zibby: You did just offhandedly mention that you wrote many novels as you were on your way to this one. You didn't even say it in a way like, it was hard, these novels didn't sell, or whatever. It sounded like you viewed them as practice. Those were just the things you had to do to get to where you were. Is that the attitude you took all the way through it?

Brooke: The writing workshop that I belong to was very informative as far as that goes. They celebrate rejection because it means you're putting yourself out there. I liken to if you pick up the violin and decide you want to play in an orchestra. You don't get to be in the pit. You have to put in the time and earn your stripes before you play. I think writing's a strange thing because everybody can write. Everybody can write a sentence. In a way, people are like, well, I could write a story, but there's a craft to it that you actually have to learn and practice before you can metaphorically play in the pit. Yeah, I wrote a bunch of books, but some of them are really terrible. They won't see the light of day, and that's okay.

Zibby: What makes a book not a terrible book in your mind? How did you fix whatever it was you felt you were doing wrong?

Brooke: I think that as you move along you start learning different parts of the craft. One book, I got really good at dialogue. Then the next book, I got really great at characterization. For me, my most difficult thing is plotting. Obviously, my pantser tendencies don't help. You just build on your skill set every time you write.

Zibby: That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your process and your book and all the rest.

Brooke: Likewise, Zibby. I'm so pleased to be here. When I saw you had four kids, I thought, we are kin. We're secret kin that we don't even know each other, but now we do.

Zibby: I know. I felt the same way when I read that about you. I was like, ah, okay. There's a lot we understand without even having to say.

Brooke: Yes. I love it.

Zibby: Have a great day. Thanks for coming on the show.

Brooke: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Aimee Agresti, THE SUMMER SET

Zibby Owens: Aimee Agresti is a novelist and entertainment journalist. A former staff writer for Us Weekly, she penned the magazine's coffee-table book, Inside Hollywood. Her work has also appeared in People, Premiere, DC magazine, Capitol File, The Washington Post, Washingtonian, the Washington City Paper, Boston magazine, Women's Health, and The New York Observer. Her latest book is called The Summer Set. Aimee has made countless TV and radio appearances dishing about celebrities on the likes of Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, E!, The Insider, Extra, VH1, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and HLN. The author of, as I mentioned, The Summer Set, also Campaign Widows and The Gilded Wings Trilogy for young adults, she graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism and lives with her husband and two sons in the Washington, DC, area.

Aimee Agresti: Hi!

Zibby: Hi. [laughs]

Aimee: I'm so excited to meet you. I'm such a fan, as I told you. I just love what you're doing. I'm so grateful as a reader even. I love the interviews that you do so much. It's just so exciting to get to meet you and be on, so thank you.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, it's my pleasure. By the way, when I was reading some of the blurbs, I feel like I know everyone who blurbed your book.

Aimee: I think you do. I know. I got so lucky. I have the world's best blurbers. Oh, my gosh, I know. You've talked to all of them.

Zibby: Yeah, I think so.

Aimee: They're all amazing. I got so lucky that they took the time to do that because they're some busy women, those amazing writers who were kind enough to read. I'm always so grateful. I always feel bad asking for blurbs because I know everyone's in the middle of their own work. To switch gears and read somebody else's and then have to write something about it is hard to do, so I'm always grateful. You've got great people on all the time. I was like, oh, my gosh. I was lucky to get those ladies.

Zibby: Oh, stop. [laughs] The Summer Set, congratulations on the launch and everything. It's so exciting. Tell listeners what The Summer Set is about.

Aimee: The Summer Set is about an actress named Charlie Savoy. She was a Hollywood "it girl" and an ingénue in her early twenties. Then she flamed out and disappeared from Hollywood. When we meet her at the beginning of the book, she is almost forty years old. She's been in sort of a legal scrape and she's forced to go back to the summer Shakespeare theater where she got her start as a teen and where her ex, Nick, is the artistic director. Drama and hilarity ensue as they spend this summer together. It's about a Hollywood actress, but I really think it's a universal book because it's about old friends, old flames, old rivals, and second acts. I think that's something that a lot of us can relate to, especially the age that I am, early forties. A lot of us are sort of reinventing ourselves, whether we become moms or when we get to this stage in our lives. I think it is sort of a universal story.

Zibby: Totally. I'm all about reinvention in your forties.

Aimee: Right? [laughs]

Zibby: What inspired you to write this book?

Aimee: That's a great question. I got my start in magazines and entertainment journalism. I was at Premiere Magazine right out of college. That was a great movie magazine. It was just such a great place to be. David Foster Wallace wrote for them back in the day. Then most recently, I was a writer at Us Weekly. I've always really loved the entertainment world. It's funny, I think the seeds were really sown early for this book because back in high school -- I grew up in this very small town, Olney, Maryland, outside of DC. We were really lucky to have this great theater there. It was a professional theater. They cast all the actors from New York. They came in. The really cool thing about this theater was that the actors stayed on the grounds in their own residence together. I've always had an overactive imagination, as novelists tend to have. Even back then in high school, I was volunteering there, always off stage, way off stage. I would volunteer and I was always thinking -- the actors, a lot of times they were young and beautiful and living together. I was like, who's friends? Who's enemies? Who's getting together? What's going on? I always wanted to know. I think that has always been in my head a little bit. I really love being around that world. I think it's really inspiring. My mom, back then, was in charge of the welcoming committee for the actors, which was so much fun. She would enlist me to help her throw parties when they arrived. We would bake them cookies and have lunch for them and make little baskets for their rooms and stuff. I was always watching everybody wondering what was going on, how they were getting along.

Zibby: What was it like writing for Us Weekly? I always read those articles with so much interest and intrigue, but almost feeling guilty about it because there I am just trying to pry into people's private lives. Tell me about that. That's so interesting.

Aimee: It was so much fun. It was a great place. I always said, at least back in the day when I was there, the stories really were true. We had a very solid fact-checking department. It was a lot of fun. I really got my start at Premiere. Back then when it was all really new to me was extra exciting. I was twenty-two, had just come out of school. Because I was that age, I was often interviewing the up-and-comers, which was really cool. Sometimes they would be my age and in their first thing. You were talking to them before they're famous, before they know they're famous, and they're really real and genuine. You know you're never going to get them that way again. That was always really fun for me because then I feel like you spend a little time with someone and even if you don't talk to them again after that, you kind of always want to follow their career and see where it goes. With that, some of them went straight to the top. Some of them took more winding paths to success. Then some of them hit road bumps that were really rough.

It always made me wish that we actually were friends, that I could call them and be like, are you doing okay? What's going on? I saw what happened. But you can't. You feel this connection from the moments that you spent interviewing them about their life, but then this huge disconnect because then they're gone and you can't get back in touch with them. To watch these different paths that they took I thought was really eye-opening for me. It was fun because I got to be, back then, a party reporter, which I didn't even know was a job back then. I felt like I should be paying them. I would go to the premieres and stand on the red carpet and ask the questions and then go to the movie afterwards and then go to the party and drink champagne and talk to the stars again and go home and write a story, and it was a job. It was great. It was a lot of fun. I tried to get all of that excitement and passion about Hollywood and that industry into the book because I think we all love it, right?

Zibby: For sure, guilty pleasure. I know you've written three YA books and two novels. How did you switch from that into writing books?

Aimee: I always wanted to write books. I've always loved books. My mom's a librarian, so I grew up reading everything in sight and just living at the library. You know how it is? It's one of those things that you feel like -- I didn't know anyone who was a novelist. It felt very unattainable. I'm a practical girl. I love writing, so I went into journalism and went into magazines and things. I was always writing on the side. Then when we left New York at one point -- my husband's in politics, and we came back here when Obama came to town. I was freelance writing and I thought -- I had written a novel before that. You know how these paths of a novelist -- everyone has that one that's tucked in a drawer that will never see the light of day but you learned how to write a book from it. I have that book that is the book that I wrote that got me my agent who I'm so grateful to have found so long ago. It just wasn't the book that was going to be published. It just didn't work out, but I kept going.

When we moved back here to Washington from New York, I was like, I'm going to try this again and write something very different than the book I had written before. Everything is timing. It happened to be that time when grown-ups were reading Twilight and Hunger Games and all of that. I always tend to write the book that I most want to read at any given time. Everyone was reading that. I was having this real feeling of, I'd like to try writing the kind of book that I would've loved as a kid. I read so much. I always loved mystery and romance and adventure and strong girls. I cobbled together all those elements. That became that trilogy. I got lucky. It was the right time for that. It's funny. When I wrote that book, the first in the trilogy, Illuminate, I had the idea for Campaign Widows, which was my first adult book, at the same time. I was debating which one to go with first. I had just gotten back to Washington even though I'm from here. The city changes with each administration. I felt like I wanted to live in the city more with the Obama years and really see how that was going to change the city before writing it, so I went the trilogy instead. I'm glad that I did that. It was funny. I had them both. I was like, which one do you go with first? It's hard to decide. I got lucky. I'm very grateful. Anytime a book gets published, you feel very lucky. It's a crazy business, as you know.

Zibby: I know. It's amazing. I want to do a whole nother show, I'm just making this up, of all the people out there who wrote books and they can't be on the show because they never got published. Maybe they're just not quite here yet. They’ve written their first book or their second book. I just feel this obligation to tell people, you have to write at least a novel or two before you can even contemplate having success. It seems like everybody has to write them. You have to have the ones in the drawer.

Aimee: It's true. I feel like they're the ones that get you to the one that actually works out. It's all worthwhile. I always like writing because I feel like it's something that you get better at as you go. It's not like at some point you have to stop doing it. If we had decided to be gymnasts or something, you'd have to probably stop that at some point. Writing, you can keep going, get better and better.

Zibby: Totally. You can just keep getting better, get better and better. So what are you working on now?

Aimee: Now I'm supposed to be writing the next book. [laughter] I've not been the best multitasker in quarantine here. I know what the next book is. I'm mapping it out. I'm a big outliner. I always feel like I need to have the whole thing mapped out before I actually start writing because then the writing process actually goes pretty fast. I'm sorting out the pieces right now. I've got the major stuff, but I have to actually just sit down now and start the writing. Again, not the best multitasker. I think you need to write a book about time management and multitasking because I would be the first in line to get that. I don't know how you juggle all the things that you do. I'm always very impressed and inspired by you.

Zibby: Thank you. I don't know how I do it either. Every day is different. I feel like I don't do a lot of things very well. I'm cutting a lot of corners these days. As we were talking about before, I've had to email my kids' teachers a couple times, more times than I could admit, being like, we missed this, or I'm sorry about that. I do the best I can. I do things really quickly. I don't know how I do it. [laughs]

Aimee: Well, I'm impressed. I'm also glad to not be the only one who's emailed the teachers a bunch of times and been like, we're doing the work. I promise. We'll be on the call, I think.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. You've already given such amazing advice to everybody. Is there anything else you would want to say to aspiring authors aside from everything else?

Aimee: I always say just keep writing because it's true. When you're writing and you're not having the success and the luck and having people pick it up and publish it and stuff, you feel like, how do I keep going? You just never know when it's going to work out. You're getting better all the time, so just keep writing. That's the one thing I feel like we have control over in the publishing world, is just to keep writing and keep making new work. Then you just never know what's going to be the one that strikes a chord with somebody. Keep going.

Zibby: We talked at the beginning about reinvention in your forties. How do you feel that you have reinvented yourself in the last couple years?

Aimee: I love that. I feel like the biggest thing is when you become a mom. It changes everything about how you live your life and do your work and everything. That has made me a more efficient person, for sure. It's also forced me to sort of figure out how to do my work the best that I can when I can do it. Everything has changed about the way that I work. On the first book that I wrote, I thought, I'm kind of a fast writer. I wrote this pretty fast, but no, no, I just spent every possible minute and didn't need to sleep much. I used to have really useful nighttime hours writing. I found it very peaceful. I don't know how you are with your kids, but I have all this adrenaline right before their bedtime. Then as soon as they go to bed, I'm like, I'm going to write all these pages. Then I fall asleep, often with my laptop. Sometimes I fall asleep with my laptop on my lap. I'm sitting in bed. You know you're not going to get work done, but I'm like, I can work in bed. The laptop falls on the floor. I've had everything happen. Now I try to sit down to write when I know that my head is really there and I can crank some things out. For me, it's always most important to end your writing time excited to go back to it rather than hitting a word count every day. I've learned a little bit how to change my writing habits and my work habits to be more efficient. I think we're learning every day as moms and as writers.

Zibby: I totally agree. Thank you. I'm so glad to have spoken to you, Aimee. I hope I get to meet you in person sometime. I feel like I need a picture of -- maybe I'll take a picture with my phone -- of your amazing backdrop here. It's insane. I think you did a great job with the technology. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Aimee: Thank you so much for having me. This is so exciting for me. Thank you. Keep doing all the amazing stuff that you're doing. We're so grateful as authors.

Zibby: Thank you. Have a great day. Bye.

Aimee: Thanks, bye.

Sonali Dev, RECIPE FOR PERSUASIAN

Zibby Owens: Sonali Dev is the author of Recipe for Persuasion as well as several other books. She is a USA Today best-selling author who writes Bollywood-style love stories that let her explore issues faced by women around the world while still indulging her faith in a happily ever after. Her novels have been on Library Journal, NPR, Washington Post, Kirkus Best Book of the Year list, and she's won the American Library Association's Award for Best Romance, the RT Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Contemporary Romance, multiple RT Seals of Excellence, and is a RITA Finalist. She's been listed for the Dublin Literary Award. Shelf Awareness calls her “not only one of the best, but one of the bravest romance novelists working today.” She lives in Chicagoland with her very patient and often-amused husband and two teens who demand both patience and humor, plus the world’s most perfect dog.

Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about your latest book.

Sonali Dev: Yay, thank you for having me. This is very exciting.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. You are a Bollywood, passionate -- you're just obsessed with the Bollywood theme. Tell me about how you started writing about all of it. Just tell me everything. Tell me about Recipe for Persuasion and everything.

Sonali: Great, my favorite thing to talk about. I grew up in India. I moved here many, many, many years ago, but I grew up in India and basically was raised watching Bollywood and Hollywood both. There's this concept that we have in India about being film-y, which means basically treating your real life like it's a film or a movie. [laughs] It fits the Indian state of mind very well because it essentially means being very dramatic and, as my kids say, extra. Bollywood films definitely are very much woven into who I am as a person, but not only in terms of being dramatic. I think that it's really a way of looking at the world or dealing with relationships. It's where the emotional lens is just a little bit more aware and dialed up. I say a little bit, by which I mean very. Of course, I'm being facetious here. Bollywood films, over time, have been such a great way to trap the Indian psyche. They're always community set. The families are always huge influences. No human stands alone in terms of being part of a community.

Stylistically, I think in terms of storytelling. I very much consider my style of storytelling a Bollywood style. By that, I don't mean ridiculous. There is one kind of melodramatic, ridiculous component to it. What I mean is just seeing story through a lens of emotion and seeing story always through a lens of community and every character being individual, but their individuality being entirely wrapped up in family and community. That's the impact it's had on me, and then of course seeing your world as ridiculous, wanting to really feel things. I think a lot of people who watch Bollywood films, the most fun part of it is that you actually feel things. I don't mean even that you're forced to feel things, but you're just in there. Even the musicality is just these songs bursting in your head when something terrible or something fabulous happens. It's almost a way of processing stories and a way of processing life. For sure, my books are very much that.

As for Recipe for Persuasion, it is my homage to Jane Austen's Persuasion. Of course, it stands completely alone. I use the term homage because it's not a retelling, really. You won't be able to find scenes that directly translate. It's not Jane Austen's Persuasion set in the Indian community. It's its own story that pays homage to what I learned from that story as a young girl. That was that you can make mistakes and there's always a second chance, that mistakes are not absolute, that hope is a real thing, which I don't think until I read Austen I was seeing a whole lot of in classic literature. It's my homage to what I learned as a little girl from her. As a story, it's the story of this chef in Palo Alto who is trying to save her father's fine dining Indian restaurant. For twelve years since her father died, she's been trying to rescue this restaurant. As a last-ditch effort, she goes on a Food Network show called Cooking with the Stars. Of course, since it is Persuasion, the celebrity she gets stuck with is the man whose heart she broke back in high school. He believed it was under familial pressure. He's back for closure. She needs her own closure with her issues with her family. All of that gets tangled up.

While it's a love story between her and this man who's gone on to become a World Cup-winning soccer player, it's also a love story between her and her mother. It's these two parallel stories of second chances that are entangled because who Ashna is and what she allows into her life has to do with these two relationships which have been almost the stone around her neck, so to speak. It's a fun story, but it really also is a story that explores familial relationships and especially mother-daughter relationships when a mother is a woman who refuses to do what society expected of her. We are, as women, continuously taught that if we slip up, if we're not good mothers, if we're not good wives, then we destroy the family structure. We destroy our children's lives. It actually happens because that's the situation we're put in by society. When a woman stands up and says, no, I'm going to put my own desires before everything else, then there's collateral damage. Ashna, who's the chef and our protagonist, is the collateral damage. It's these two women navigating that distance.

Zibby: Wow. There's a lot in there to discuss. [laughs] You keep coming back to this idea of second chances. Is there a time in your life that you really wanted or needed a second chance? Does that come from something personal, or not?

Sonali: Growing up in India at that time, there was this sense of absolutes. One mistake could throw -- at least, this is what we were told. I think it was a completely nonsense narrative. What we were told is that if you slip up, then your entire life is going to go off the rails. Say you get involved with the wrong man, your honor is gone forever. If you don't get the right grades and get into the right college, then your career is gone forever. You do the right thing at the right time was this overarching motto that we were raised with. It was all around us. Somewhere in my heart, I knew that was not true. Books and stories which focused on reinforcing that, I gravitated towards. Yes, absolutely, I feel like the one truth in life is that there is always a second chance no matter how much it feels like there isn't. That's why we say things like everything happens for the best. It's a stupid thing to say when really awful things happen, but it's really not because something good is going to always come, maybe not from that one thing. You always have the ability to make something good happen again no matter how badly you mess up. So yes, it's very personal.

Zibby: Sonali, when did you start writing? When did you know you wanted to be a novelist? Have you always loved to write? How did you embark on this part of the career and the business of writing?

Sonali: I always loved to write since I was a very little girl. In fact, there's a story in my family where I was doing my math homework. This was back in kindergarten. Instead of doing my worksheets, I was writing couplets about the cover of the worksheet, the plus and minus signs. I was making up these little poems based on that. Instead of yelling at me for not doing my homework, my mom got on the phone with her sister and raved about how, "You should read these cute poems Sonali wrote," which explains a lot. I think one of my oldest memories and a lot of my coping mechanisms as a child were always related to writing. I always kind of identified as a writer. Growing up, it wasn't something that was deemed a career that you could use to feed yourself. It was very sensibly not deemed so because it is a hard career to use to feed yourself. It takes blood, sweat, and tears. Even then, it doesn't happen for a lot of people. So that was wise. I went to architecture school. I have several degrees in things. I have worked as many things.

This was the overriding dream. I really got obsessed about it or it became a thing that I thought I really wanted to do after -- [laughs] This is the drama that I was talking to you about, the Bollywood-style drama. About ten years ago, I got TB. I was quarantined. It was for six weeks, ten weeks. I was basically stuck in the home for a very long time and feeling very sorry for myself. I had been trying to write. I had already gotten into the whole, I'm going to write a novel someday. I was trying to write a very complicated novel and really failing at it. It had become this big thing that I didn't know how to do. Then when I got sick, a close friend said to me, "Why don't you write something you love? Why don't you write something you'd love to read?" I had this love story sitting in my head. It just poured right out of me. Those three months when I was stuck at home, I fell in love with the story and wrote it. From that point on, I became obsessed with publishing it. Of course, the publishing journey is a different beast from the writing journey. It took me a good two years to finish that novel, another two years to sell it. That's basically where it started. Once you have created a world and a character and been part of that magic, I think it's impossible to back away from it. That was how I felt.

Zibby: What advice do you have, then, to aspiring authors who don't have TB and can't dedicate themselves for -- although, I feel like as a society now we have all been through, in part, the experience that must have been so unique to you and so awful and isolating at the time.

Sonali: Unfortunately, yes. Of course, when it becomes a community experience, it's a whole different thing. [laughs] Let's talk about the writing advice. I do want to stop and say those three months were just the time I vomited that story out. It was not anywhere near ready for public consumption. It wasn't like I got those three months, I wrote that story, and I was done. I did have, at the time, two children who were in elementary and middle school, a husband who traveled five days a week, a large extended family, so a very full life. If you love to do this thing, you have to start becoming very focused on what you're willing to drop off your plate because you do have to. We're not going to be quarantined forever, and none of us want to be. Time in isolation is never going to be handed to you. It is something that you have to choose and curate your life to make space for that. That's the first thing.

Then one of my favorite quotes is if you can stop writing, you should. I do believe that the only reason anyone should really be doing this is -- because it's such a heart-wrenching and hard thing to do in the first place, if you're doing it for any reason other than the fact that you really simply cannot not do it, then it's going to be that much more of an uphill battle. Why would you want to do that? My advice is learning how to distribute your energy and learning how to focus your time and making space for this thing which needs a huge amount of emotional energy, even more than time. One thing that these past months have taught me is that isolation and solitude don't equal productivity. Productivity is a factor of how you manage your mental and emotional energy for a creative endeavor. We all also live our lives. Without lives, you can't create meaningful story. You have to find that balance of what you're willing to let go of in terms of your time and energy and what you're willing to focus on. I think once you have learned that, then most everything else follows, is what I want to say.

Zibby: All right, I definitely need to be a little more conscious of how I'm expending my energy. That's my main takeaway here.

Sonali: It's not like I'm great at it either. It's a day-to-day struggle. I sound like I've got this, but I don't. [laughter]

Zibby: At least you know what you're working on. That always makes it better. Sonali, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for sharing Recipe for Persuasion and all of your great stuff. Thank you.

Sonali: Thank you so much, Zibby. It's a great show. Thanks so much for all the support. Stay safe and healthy.

Zibby: You too.

Sonali: Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Amity Gaige, SEA WIFE

Zibby Owens: Amity Gaige is the author of three novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize in 2014. Now she has just released her latest book which is called Sea Wife and has been launched to great acclaim. Published in eighteen countries, Schroder was named one of the best works of 2013 by New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Kirkus Reviews, the Women's National Book Association, Cosmopolitan, Denver Post. There are literally ten other ones, so I'm going to stop. Amity is the recipient of many awards for her previous novels including Forward Book of the Year Award for 2007. In 2006, she was named one of the Five under Thirty-five Outstanding Emerging Writers by the National Book Foundation. She has a Fulbright and a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Literary Review, The Yale Review, and One Story. She lives in Connecticut with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.

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

Amity Gaige: Thank you for having me, Zibby. I'm glad to be here.

Zibby: Your novel, Sea Wife, by the way, was in the window in the only bookstore I've seen in real life in the last two months. You got prominent placement for your beautiful cover.

Amity: I am so happy to hear that. It is such a pretty cover. It's this robin's egg blue. It kind of sticks out.

Zibby: It does. It's great. It's very peaceful too even though there's a lot that goes on. [laughs] Can you please tell listeners what Sea Wife is about?

Amity: It is about a family of four that decides to scrap their conventional life in suburban Connecticut and go on a boat in the Caribbean for a year. It's told from two perspectives, and finally three. There's the husband and the wife and then their little daughter who pipes in towards the end. It's written in a unique way in that the husband and wife alternate a narration as frequently, sometimes, as every other line or every other paragraph. It's kind of telling the story together. You realize as you read on that they're telling the story from different timeframes. It's really Juliet, the mother and the wife, the woman, the protagonist, it's really her story. There's so much you don't know as the narration starts. All you know is that she's reflecting on their time at sea. You get to read Michael, the husband's, perspective as well. It alternates between the two of them for most of the book.

Zibby: And you know that she has a penchant for closets. [laughs]

Amity: Who doesn't? Yeah, she does. She's sitting in a closet at the beginning of the book. It was just a lot of questions about why. You know she's undergone some sort of loss. Her children are fine. Her mother is there helping. The rest of the story's unpacking what happened as she looks back on the journey.

Zibby: I love how when you were describing how she lost her closet to begin with, you write, "But I am a mother. Gradually, I just gave them all away, all my spaces, one by one down to the very last closet."

Amity: I wondered if you related to that. [laughs]

Zibby: I completely relate to that. I also related when you said about the husband, Michael, how he was morbidly funny and how he got funnier and funnier "while I, who had been funny, got less funny." [laughs] That was so spot on.

Amity: Right? I know. We used to be funny. What happened? Thank you for saying that. A lot of those lines are definitely culled from my own insights or from, certainly, friends. A lot of this book is inspired by so many conversations with so many women. I'd had a friend of mine, Susan Choi who wrote that great book Trust Exercise, we were talking about Sea Wife and she found another line. A couple of other women have mentioned the one about "Even though we were both educated people and we understood things about gender roles, we just signed up for the same kind of stereotypical gender role set we thought had been consigned to the cultural ash heap." She and a couple other women have brought that up. Little nuggets throughout the book about how it feels to be in a contemporary marriage, to be a woman, a working woman, a mom with her own ambitions, a lot of stuff about that.

Zibby: Here's just one more line when you wrote, "We're just a hyphen between our parents and our kids. That's what you learn in middle age. Mostly, this is something a mature person can live with, but every once in a while, you just want to send up a flare. I too am here." I feel like, Amity, I am now reading your diary, is what's going on here.

Amity: [laughs] It's so funny. You're picking out a lot of the lines that I definitely really relate to. There's a lot of that in there. There's also stuff that I don't. There's stuff that since I had to represent different points of view, I really had to imagine my way into especially Michael's consciousness. He's my male character, and I wanted to give him a lot of depth too. The line you just read is from him, so there we go.

Zibby: Wherever they appear on the page, we know where they're coming on. [laughs] No, I'm kidding. Obviously, it's fiction. I'm not trying to suggest that this is all what's actually in your head. I'm really just poking fun.

Amity: Let's admit it. We always think that the author is the same as the characters. I do too. We often imagine that, that they're the same. Of course, they're not. My family is all intact. We never left suburban Connecticut. It's more of an imagination than anything else.

Zibby: I heard that you did learn to sail so that you could write this book.

Amity: I did.

Zibby: How was that?

Amity: That was a nightmare, but I am a better person for it. Walking that back a little bit, I started with this idea that I really wanted to set a book at sea. I love describing things. I love books with a strong sense of place. I definitely think that Sea Wife is kind of in that category. The setting is so important. I did my best to certainly learn everything I could about sailing and about maritime life. I interviewed many, many families who live at sea. I visited them. At a certain point, I knew that I needed to sail on my own -- not on my own. I ended up going to the Caribbean to Grenada for a ten-day sailing course, which frankly wasn't a lot, but I learned everything that I needed to know to write Sea Wife, which is not just how some of those parts of the boat work. Sailing is very complex, so I did need to know what a winch and sheet and stanchion are. It was more that I really needed to feel the wind at sea and hear it and hear a whistle in the rigging. I needed to feel what it feels like to try to walk when you're below or try to sleep in a storm, all of those sensory aspects of things. That's what I got when I went on that sailing course. Since we did meet some weather, I also really needed that to inform some of the later scenes. Basically, the last quarter of the book is one long journey into the middle of the sea. It was very necessary that I went and took that journey myself. Also, my characters are really novice sailors. They're not pros. It helped that I wasn't trying to be an expert about sailing. They were more like me. Juliet is more like me in the sense of, she was like, "Okay, I'll do this for you, honey. I want to try to save our marriage. I'm depressed myself. I need to have an adventure and maybe try something new." She was extremely weary and skeptical. I think the real journey of the book is really hers, which is that she needs to break out of that fear and indecision, and sail. Really, that's what she ends up doing.

Zibby: Wow. Your structure, as you mentioned before, is complicated in that one point of view is at the end after the adventure. One is at the beginning from a different character's point of view. Then you interweave a third. How did you keep that all straight while you were writing? What did your desk look like? Do you have it all in your head? Do you have notecards? What was the process like for you?

Amity: That is a really good question. It was kind of controlled insanity, I would say. It was definitely my most ambitious thing that I'd done. Not only was it quite difficult to try to write about the sea when I'm not a sailor, but also to structure the book exactly as you said where it's back and forth in time. It also has a strong narrative, but it has these moments of meditation. Say one characters comes under Michael, he meditates on helicopter parenting. Then Juliet comes and meditates on poetry and women poets. I thought of the book, I like the metaphors of waypoints in sailing. In sailing, there are waypoints, which are just legs in a journey. Sometimes those waypoints are in the middle of nowhere. If you're going to cross the ocean, you still have to aim for something, but that point might be just coordinates in the middle of the ocean.

It was very similar in writing the book. Let me just get to this waypoint. Let me get to this waypoint. I'm going to sense or intuit my way from one to the next. I hope that we are going towards -- I knew where I wanted to go, but I did not know the waypoints. I was constantly pushing towards the final goal in the journey, but there was a lot of movement on the way. One thing I hope about the book is that the reader feels both those things too, both the narrative tension in terms of the total journey, which is across the sea, and also the momentum of these waypoints and these pauses where one character remembers or reflects on things. Those are also quite important. As you're reading the book, there's a sense of forward movement and also pausing. I think they're both important. Of course, if somebody wants to read it all in one sitting and just power through it, I love that. I've gotten some readers saying, I stayed up all night, or I lost sleep to read this book. I think that's a huge compliment. There also are these poetic moments of stillness in the book.

Zibby: And also with Juliet being a poet and having her own poems. It's perfectly fitting.

Amity: Right. She loves her poetry. She's studying it and trying to be an academic. She also just is a sensitive person hoping to understand her own life experience through poetry which is something a lot of us do.

Zibby: After you write a book like this -- I know this is not your first novel by any stretch. I think it's your fifth. Did I get that right? Your fifth or your fourth?

Amity: This is my fourth. For a second, I was like, oh, my god, did I write another book and forget about it? [laughs]

Zibby: I'm sorry. I have it front of me, but I was not -- anyway, sorry. Okay, your fourth. After delving deep into what happens with a family away at sea and really going into the relationships, how do you then go back to your own family? Does that make you feel any differently about your own marriage or your own parenting or anything having examined this other fictious family's life for a while?

Amity: That's a great question. For sure. I think I felt that mediating on my own life and choices throughout the whole process of writing the book. As I was researching, I was meeting families who were living in nontraditional ways. I started out the book thinking these people are crazy. As I said, I'm not a sailor. As time went on, I realized that there was actually -- I've always admired people who take risks and adventurers even if they don't succeed, and sometimes especially if those adventures don't succeed. I was moved to see these people taking these risks -- not reckless. These are very good sailors. They know what they're doing. The children are extremely safety-conscious and everything. I admired them. It didn't make me want to go and set sail, but it reminded me how much it matters that a spirit of adventure is in my own life and to not live a life out of fear. Of course, you don't need to go sailing to prove it, but a spirit of adventurousness even in smaller ways. My own parents, one great thing they did with me is they were great travelers. We went to some strange places in the world. That made a huge impact on me because I had more perspective. I would get out of my narcissistic little box that we're all born in. That's very valuable. I want to bring that to my children. I want to be able to have them be brave in nature, and spiritually. I do want to do that. Then like everybody, I often don't and can't do those things. It's an aspiration and something to keep in mind and to do whenever possible.

Zibby: #Goals. [laughter]

Amity: Also, I will say, of course I thought a lot about marriage. I have a beautiful, supportive husband. Nobody ever believes that because there are these stressed marriages in my novels. [laughs] I would say that, of course, this sense of marital stress, it's quite common, especially when children arrive. It hits men and women quite differently, the arrival of the children. I think it's always so important to remember that the other person is a human being with their own dreams and to try to honor that, each spouse honor that in the other. I think that that's something that Juliet and Michael, they fail at. They try, but they don't do it in time. I guess if there was sort of a message that the book gives, it would be to try to do that while you can. Love each other while you can. Try to communicate while you can. Don't let the past or other wounds rob you of connection with your spouse or with anybody.

Zibby: Now that you have all that relationship advice out there, any parting advice for aspiring authors?

Amity: Aspiring authors, oh, my gosh. I'm a teacher. I've taught so many years. I love teaching. I think that aspiring writers should reach out and find community. They should find a mentor if they can or peers who are like mentors and get together and celebrate their writing. There is so much genuine community in sharing your work with others and hearing what they say. You don't need to wait for publication for that to happen. It's certainly one of the coolest things about being a published writer, is that suddenly that community really opens up and you hear from strangers. That's the coolest thing in the world. Until you can get to that place, you still share. Share. I think that's what we're looking for, recognition from others and to be seen by others when we write our stories. Don't wait.

Zibby: I love that. That was awesome advice. Thank you so much, Amity. This has been so much fun. I feel like now I want to go meet you for coffee or something.

Amity: I know. Maybe someday in better times.

Zibby: Someday, yes. In the meantime, Sea Wife, congratulations. So exciting. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Amity: Thank you so much. It was so fun.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Amity: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Christina Clancy, THE SECOND HOME

Zibby Owens: Christina Clancy is the author of The Second Home. She's actually a debut author, so she fits into my Debut Tuesday or my Beach Read Wednesday. Double trouble this week. Anyway, she loves Cape Cod. She enjoys living in the Midwest and grew up in Milwaukee. She now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and her two grown kids. She's a certified spin instructor and serves on the board of the Wisconsin Conservation Voters. She received her PhD in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and previously taught creative writing at Beloit College. She recently completed her second novel. That will be out in 2021. Enjoy our episode.

Christina Clancy: I'm truly so excited to be on your show. I heard about your show from Karen Dukess when she was on last year. I started becoming the most avid listener. Then when my book was coming out, my bucket list for my book is to be this podcast. I was so excited when I heard that I was going to be on it. You've made my day.

Zibby: Aw, that is so sweet. That's so sweet. Your book was so good. It was really, really good. It kept me up two nights in a row past my husband which almost never happens. I was like, I can't stop reading.

Christina: I'm so glad to hear that. I don't know how you read as much as you do. I'd like to turn the tables and just turn this whole interview where I interview you. It's amazing to me what you do with this podcast and all of your time.

Zibby: Thanks. I can't finish every single book. I just can't. I'm usually up front with the authors and say, you know what -- on the Instagram Lives, I blatantly am like, I didn't even open your book. I do my best. I love to read. I do it all time. I don't know. Every day is different. Anyway, that's really nice of you to say. Let's talk about your book, yay, The Second Home. For listeners who don't know what it's about, can you tell everybody what The Second Home is about? Then also, what inspired you to write it?

Christina: The book is about a family from Milwaukee. They're a very middle-class family. The parents are teachers. They own a house in Cape Cod, oddly enough, which sounds very fancy except it's been in their family for generations. The reason that the parents are teachers is so that they can spend their summers in Cape Cod. The house is kind of run down. It's from the late 1800s. Actually, it's older than that. It's from the 1700s. The house I've been talking about a lot is my grandparent's house which is next door which is from those late 1890s. The house is in disrepair. They go to the Cape each summer, and one summer with their two daughters, Poppy and Ann. They also bring along an adopted child named Michael who is new to the family and new to Cape Cod. He also has feelings for Ann. Ann has feelings for him, which as you can imagine creates some trouble. They get involved with another family. When they do, things go very badly. The family does not stay in touch. The siblings become estranged. About fifteen years later, the parents die. They have to come back to figure out what to do with the house. Everybody wants it. Michael, the boy that they'd adopted, has a legitimate claim to a third of the estate. He also wants to set the record straight. That's the book in a nutshell.

I was inspired to write it because I -- a lot of times when people ask me this question, I think I know how to answer it. Usually, I'll say that Poppy, the character who's the surfer, was the inspiration because I did meet a surfer when I was in Panama with my mom about a decade ago. She told me that she never went home. It bothered me so much. I wanted to bring Poppy home and figure out what could get her there. Then I think, really, the book is about when my own grandparents passed away. I think a lot of people with second homes feel this way, the house that everyone has so many memories of and cares so much about becomes very fragile because for a while we didn't know if we'd be able to keep it in the family. It made no sense for us. My mom and her sisters are spread all across the country like Jacks. They couldn't really agree on -- not that they couldn't agree. My mom had the first right of refusal, but who was going to take it? My mom was a single parent. We couldn't have a house on the Cape. Then my aunt lived in Michigan. She wasn't sure what to do at the Cape. Then my other aunt already lived on the Cape.

My mom was driving around one day with me and she said, "You know, it's just really hard when your parents pass away and you become the next generation. You have to figure out how to keep your family together or whether you will or what that family's going to look like." I was so struck by that comment and thinking about how that house kept our family together and the fear of losing it. It wasn't just the house that we cared about. It was about keeping the history of the family in one place. I think these houses can really become touchpoints for every person in the family. I think that's actually what the inspiration was, was that feeling, that fear that the house could somehow pass out of our family and we might lose our way. We might not have a reason to have reunions or stay together or look through the old photo albums in the den.

Zibby: What you did so well in the book was create such a sense of place and character, both. I could see this house. I could see Poppy and Ann and the parents and their house, but I could also see Anthony and Maureen's house. I could just see it, all of it, and feel it, and all the sensory things you put in. All of it just made it so real. Then with the parents and what ended up happening to them, I felt such a sense of loss myself. How do you think you did it? I know you teach creative writing and all that. What do you think it was that made these things just come alive so much?

Christina: First of all, the place, I know very well. It was nice to write about two places I know well, which is Milwaukee and then also Cape Cod. It was funny. It took me a while to realize that I could write about a place I know, to give myself permission to do that. I don't know why it felt like there was permission needed to write about Milwaukee. Originally actually, the story, it started out where the characters were in Evanston, Illinois, which seemed kind of like the near-east side of Milwaukee to me. Then I kept thinking I should go spend more time there so I can figure it out. A friend of mine who's a writing instructor said, "Why don't you just set it in Milwaukee?" It was such a revelation. I was like, oh, I can write about a place I know. Then even writing about businesses that I know or places that I know well felt a little bit like I was doing something wrong. I'm just going to name Shahrazad, this restaurant I like. I'm going to name the Urban Ecology Center because I was on their board. It was fun to do that. Then in Cape Cod, I gave myself the same liberty to write about all the places that I know and love there.

The only risk of doing that with place is that if you get one thing wrong, people will go crazy. They won't be able to get it out of their mind the whole rest of the book. A bookseller friend of mine was saying that somebody wrote about a car and they used the wrong horsepower for it within the first ten pages of the book. The whole rest of the book he couldn't even focus. I was very careful to try to get everything right. The copy editors were amazing too. It was fun to see how they would -- if I named a restaurant, they would actually pull up the sign for the restaurant and the menu for the restaurant to see if they put periods after each initial, like for PJs. It was fantastic to have them go through that level of detail also. The place really spoke to me. I think I live in my skin anyway. You can probably tell that from the writing. I just feel like I'm always almost more there than there, so that helped.

Then the characters, once I had them in my head and I went through my first draft and started redrafting, they became so alive to me. One of the most fun things I did with the book where -- after I sold it, my editor said, "Why don't you go through the last third and just add a few more surprises? Just sprinkle them in so that it doesn't read like where you're going to expect what's going to happen." That was so much fun. Then I thought, oh, I know what Maureen would say here. Ed could do this. Connie could -- I just started thinking about how the characters would surprise me. I think those are the magic moments in writing, when you get so immersed. You let the story wash over you. I just had that happen again with my second book. For a long time, I was just building it, building it, building it, struggling with it. All of a sudden, my head was so deep in it that I would wake up with these characters talking in my head. I just couldn't wait to write about it. As hard as it is to get to that point, it's amazing when it happens.

Zibby: Wait, what's your next book about?

Christina: It sounds different than the book that I just wrote, but my editor assures me it sounds like a Christina Clancy novel. In 1981, and actually in the '70s mostly, in a town called Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which is near Chicago, oddly enough there used to be a Playboy resort there. The women who worked there were the daughters of dairy farmers and slaughterhouse workers and factory workers. They had no experience being anything like a bunny. Suddenly, they were bunnies. I follow a woman who's from a neighboring town who gets a job. She's a very unlikely bunny. It follows her coming of age and her experiences with recognizing what it's like to inhabit a woman's body and be looked at and be the object and sometimes limbed by a male gaze. I had the best time writing it. It was so much fun. I think it'll come out next year.

Zibby: That's really exciting. I read your essay about your son leaving, The Washington Post essay about your son going away to school, and is it okay that maybe you're not going to miss him that much? I know that's not exactly what you said. [laughs] How there were all these support groups for the parents, you're like, well, he's ready to go. I'm ready for him to go. It's okay. That was great.

Christina: I wrote that. Then afterwards, I started feeling really sad. I was like, am I just a hypocrite? Now he's back home. He's at USC. Because of the COVID situation, he was in Greece studying and he had to come back home. Now we don't know if he'll be there in the fall. The emotions are totally different. I want him to go back. I want him to be able to resume his fun life as a student.

Zibby: It's tough. I also read your essay in The Sun, I think it was. That was your life, right? It was a personal essay?

Christina: Yeah.

Zibby: I was reading and reading. I was like, this is a book. This is another book. You should write that. Not that your fiction isn't fantastic. It's amazing. Your life story reads like fiction, really. It was hard to believe. The relationship with your dad, oh, my gosh, I couldn't believe how it ended.

Christina: That was a hard essay to write.

Zibby: I bet.

Christina: It was funny because when I worked on that essay, it was originally about the preppy movement and The Preppy Handbook. I don't know if you remember the preppy movement that much, The Preppy Handbook particularly.

Zibby: I do.

Christina: I never knew it was a joke. I always thought it was totally serious, like, you must be a prep. I lived in kind of a preppy community, as I write about. I reread The Preppy Handbook from beginning to end. Actually, if you haven't read it for a while, it's so interesting to go back and look at. The whole essay was about my experience being a prep. Then I just had a little bit of my dad in there. I sent it to the editors of The Sun. Most writers would give their eyeteeth to be in The Sun. They have such a devoted readership. When I got feedback from them, they said, "We love your essay, but we think your dad's really the story." I was kind of offended. I was like, no, I want to write about The Preppy Handbook. I thought they'd rejected it. Then later on, they were like, "Didn't you get our email? Do you want to write it?" I was like, oh, my gosh, you guys still like it? I worked on it. It was very cathartic to publish it, to have people from my high school read it and get back to me. So many said, "I had a bad high school year too. Nobody knew. People didn't know about my dad. I was really struggling. I didn't know how to say anything." They felt so grateful for that essay.

Zibby: Do you think that part of what you do in fiction to put together the family the way that you wanted it to be growing up that you never had? Maybe that's too simplistic or armchair therapist. What do you think the role of fiction is in helping you with your own issues?

Christina: One of my friends said that I waste my best nonfiction on -- or I waste my fiction -- I'm sorry. I need to rephrase this. He said that everything I put in nonfiction I should put in fiction. He's like, "All your best material, you're wasting on nonfiction." I thought that was really interesting. It's almost like a way to write a diary. The things you're anxious about tend to be what you write about. Even though you're turning it into a story about other people, maybe I was working on this book -- I never thought about this until now. The Second Home, my kids were getting older. Our family was about to change. Maybe that was just a way for me to hold onto us and what our life was like before everyone would go.

Zibby: Of course, it's actually not a home that makes a family. The home is just -- not that it doesn't have a lot of soul, but a family can transcend a physical place. It can't be destroyed by one demo truck or whatever else.

Christina: It's more just the memories, I think.

Zibby: It feels painful. Losing a place that’s important to you like in The Second Home, it's a loss. It's something that you can grieve in and of itself. It seems silly to say in the context of the craziness of the world right now, sitting around being sad about your family home, but I think it's a physical loss that you feel when a touchstone of your life disappears. It's a rootlessness, almost.

Christina: Yeah, and a place you go back to again and again and again. There's a certain cadence to your life, a certain rhythm. We have a summer cottage. It's very simple. In fact, I think it has the first toilet ever invented. We have to close it every winter. My life seems to make some sense when I go back every year and I go through all the routines of opening it up and having the well pump turned back on. I'm thinking about who's going to be there, all the people that populate it over the course of the summer and the memories that we have of playing Parcheesi and so on. I think it just makes your life make sense sometimes to have one place you go back to again and again instead of always going somewhere different.

Zibby: I agree. My mom and stepdad sold the house that we had gone to my whole life. All the books that I had even as a kid, now I have here with me in my house. It was almost as if I had finally grown up more because of that house going out of our family than I had getting married, getting divorced, getting remarried, having kids. The cleaning out of that particular room of mine that was, here at age -- it happened a couple years ago, but still in my forties. It's emotional, passing of a torch.

Christina: It can definitely make you feel [indiscernible]. It's kind of a new era when you let go of those places. You realize you're jumping into something new, which I think right now, given all the turbulence in our lives, maybe those second homes are going to be even more meaningful to people, just having one constant in a world that's in complete flux right now. I keep wondering how the second-home market is going to work this summer. I think most people are renting places for longer period of time, which actually I like. When I was a kid, we'd go to Cape Cod. We would get to know all the kids. We were there long enough. We'd go to the ponds. We'd want to be there at the same time the next day because maybe that cute guy from Connecticut was going to be there or whatever. I like that kind of repetitive visit and longer visit.

Zibby: So how did you end up writing a debut novel now at this time in your life? How did this happen now? Tell me about it.

Christina: I was writing a lot before. I have a PhD in creative writing. I've written essays in The New York Times or Washington Post or The Sun. I have published a fair amount of short fiction. I love short fiction. I'm a complete short story addict. I read them all the time. I kind of want to be buried with my short start collection. [laughs] I think that the craft of a short story, I just appreciate it so much. That's all I worked on, was short stories. Then people would say you're not really an author until you have a book. I'd kind of bristle at that a little bit thinking that, no, I'm still a productive writer. I have to say there is something super satisfying about writing something as big as a novel and tracking the characters and putting it all together in a way that there's an arch from beginning to middle to end that I don't know now that I'll be able to go back to short stories. It just took me a really long time to learn how to do that.

One thing I tell people is I've gone through multiple drafts on this book and then also another book that I worked on for my PhD thesis that just never really quite had a plot. It takes a long time because the first time you write a novel, you have to recognize one thing that you're doing, which is you're telling the story to yourself the first time. You're just creating this landscape. You're inhabiting it with characters. You're just kind of populating things. Then when you go back and you revise, that's when you start telling a story for your reader. I think a lot of people who try to write novels and think that they’ve failed or who give up, it's because they get frustrated at one of those points along the way when they're writing. It's just a sticking with it and getting back into it and trying to make that transition from telling the story to yourself to your reader, which I think makes a book -- that's where the magic takes place.

Zibby: Wow. That's really, really interesting advice. I've never heard anything like that before.

Christina: That PhD did something, huh?

Zibby: [laughs] I also loved, by the way, your Modern Love essay about your friend's ex-husband and his new girlfriend being in your spin class. That was priceless. You need to send these around again. You wrote in that 2014 or something, a long time ago. It needs to breathe new life because that's such a good essay. I'll put it in the show notes when I do this. At least I can do that. Wow, go you.

Christina: The Modern Love essay, one thing that I love about that essay is -- I'm sure a lot of writers can recognize this. Sometimes you just know a story. The minute they walked into my classroom, I was talking about, okay, we're going to climb a four-minute hill. It's going to be really hard, and whatever. That's what I was saying. In my head, I was like, I've got a story here. I cannot believe he's in my class. The funny thing about that essay is that the couple, they're really good friends now. I think that is really, maybe, in a way wasn't my place to enter that situation. At the same time, it kind of made it funny in a way. It was meant to be funny. I think a lot of us can relate to that feeling of when your friends get divorced you take it really personally. You can tell this from my book. I'm super nostalgic about things. I just want things to stay the same. Even though they both ended up in a really good place and they're totally at peace with what happened, I wasn't. The editor, Dan Jones of Modern Love, the day before it was published, he called me. We were talking about it. He said, "You know what I love about this essay?" This is right after he said about three million people read it. I was like, "What?" He said, "You just make such an ass out of yourself." [laughs] I was like, yep, I guess I do.

Zibby: It was really fantastic. Do you still teach spinning?

Christina: I do. Because of COVID, I haven't had my classes. I love teaching spinning. It's the best money I ever spent, was getting certified. You meet the nicest people. I never dread a class, never, ever. I never wake up and think, ugh, I have to teach a spin class. There's just this wonderful energy when you walk into a spin room. I don't know what the future of spinning is right now.

Zibby: I know, the future of anything. Christina, thank you so much. Your book, as I said at the beginning, I could not put it down. It kept me up. That doesn't happen that often. I just really, really enjoyed it. It's really a pleasure talking to you. I share that same appreciation of all nostalgic elements and not wanting things to change, so I get it. It was just really great. Congratulations on your pub day and everything.

Christina: Thank you for having me on the show. I truly listen all the time. It's just a total thrill to be on it. Thanks for all you do for writers, especially a debut writer like to me. To get my name out there through you means so much.

Zibby: Aw, it's my pleasure. Hopefully, I'll meet you in person one of these days.

Christina: Great. Thanks a lot, Zibby. Buh-bye.