Charlotte McConaghy, MIGRATIONS

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

Charlotte McConaghy: Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely.

Zibby: Your novel, Migrations, oh, my gosh, so good. Lots of questions. First, please tell everybody what Migrations is about. Then also, what inspired you to write this as your debut novel?

Charlotte: Migrations is the story of a woman who decides to follow the migration of the last flock of Arctic terns on their journey from the Artic to the Antarctic. This is probably going to be their last migration because the book is set in the very near future during the peak of the extinction crisis when most of the animals have either gone extinct or they're headed that way quickly. It's the story of Franny's life and all the moments that lead her up to taking on this journey. In terms of inspiration or where it came from, it's a hard one to pin down. It didn't really come in any kind of formed pieces. It came in a lot of different fragments. I knew that I wanted to engage with my concern around the climate crisis, but I didn't really know how to do that. First, I went traveling. I went exploring Ireland, which is where my ancestors were from. I went to Iceland, which is the most beautiful place. I fell in love with the greylag geese. That got me thinking about migratory bird and the incredible journeys that they take and the type of people that study these birds. That's how Fanny, the ornithologist, came into my mind. I was imagining how amazing it would be if we could actually go on this journey with the birds. Then as I got to understand Franny, I started to realize what kind of world I needed to place her in to really be able to tell her story with impact and also safely engage with my own fear around the climate crisis. That's how the environmental side of this book got slowly drawn in. That was to support her.

Zibby: Wow. By the way, you’ve gotten already just such amazing press about this book. It's just fantastic. Everybody's so excited to read it. It's already such a hit. I hope that is making you feel good.

Charlotte: Thank you. It is.

Zibby: I know that a lot of it is focusing on the environmental piece, which of course is a huge part of this novel and differentiates it from so many others. I feel like not enough has been said about the character and the relationship and the mother-daughter drama and her abandonment issues and dealing with her parents and her grandmother and how that affects her relationship later in life and remorse and trauma. There's so much here. The migration, that's part of it, of course. It's almost her own migration through her own life that is so spectacular in this book.

Charlotte: Yeah, that's right. As I said, Franny was the one who came first for me. It is a story of family more than anything. That's the touchstone that I always came back to when I was writing it. She's this real lost soul. She's a wanderer who moves from place to place through her life. She's searching for home and family and a place to belong, but it's probably something that's part of her contradictory nature. It's hard for her to have those things because she does have this instinct to drive, to be moving, and to be leaving. We see that really manifested in her passionate but troubled relationship with her husband. Because she didn't grow up a family, she found one instead in the natural world. That makes her keenly aware of its loss. For me, it is a relationship story more than anything. I wouldn't know what to sink my teeth into if I wasn't writing about relationships.

Zibby: There was a lot of dunking into cold water. I feel like I needed a blanket after I finished this book in part for all the times that poor Franny was underwater and all the rest.

Charlotte: But she loves it. It's fine.

Zibby: She loves it. I know. She's like a fish of some kind of. She can survive when others can't. I'm like, oh, my gosh, she's back in the water. Tell me a little about the sleepwalking and the sleep torturing, essentially. Where did that piece come from? Franny has this darker side where she has these habits that are very not only self-destructive, but externally destructive. Then it comes out on herself a lot as well. Tell me a little bit about how sleepwalking fit into that. What made you choose that as a device to harness her anger in a way?

Charlotte: I suppose the idea was that she's such a migratory person when she's awake that even this kind of drive to always be moving was afflicting her while she slept, that idea that she couldn't control her wandering feet. This became a really difficult burden for her. It also meant that she wasn't just hurting her husband emotionally by going off and leaving him, but she was sort of threatening him physically because she lashes out as she sleeps. She kind of enacts this lifelong trauma that she's had around being abandoned and things that I don't want to give away because they're part of the secrets in plot that she means to reveal to the readers. There's a lot of stuff that she's buried down really deep. I think the sleepwalking and sleep-acting out is a way of that just manifesting, really. I think that that's something that happens potentially when we don't deal with our trauma. Franny's certainly someone that doesn't deal with things. She runs and tries to outrun them. I think there's a point where you can't get away from it any longer.

Zibby: Tell me a little about all these dual timelines that you interweave so seemingly effortlessly and different places and different times and backwards and forwards. The way you just played with time was really amazing. Tell me about the writing of that and how you kept track and structure and everything.

Charlotte: The story's told in, as you said, the two timelines, the front and the back story. One's set in the present day with the ship journey. The other timeline goes back and looks at the big moments of Franny's life. I actually wrote the book as you read it. I didn't separate out the two timelines because it felt important to write it as you read it just to keep a sense of the pacing and the rhythm of it all so that I could be feeling how it would be read. I chose the nonlinear structure for a couple of reasons. The first one's really simple. I just get bored easily when I'm writing. The thought of writing an entire novel from a single first-person point of view in a linear structure just wasn't maybe challenging enough for me, or maybe it was too challenging. It's a more natural space for me to move around a bit in time. I think it allows you to experience those major moments in Franny's life in a really intimate way with her. Instead of getting told about them in dialogue, you can kind of feel them because you're inside them. It's a great way to build tension as well. You can establish a clear transformation between her past and present. She used to be like that. Now she's like this. I wonder what happened to change her in the middle. You can seed in little clues. Then you can build to these really climatic reveals and information. That's ultimately to create catharsis for the reader. The only thing I would say about doing that is you just have to keep them linked by a theme. If they reflect each other and explore the same thing, then you can do as many timelines and as many characters as you want.

Zibby: It takes a lot of skill to pull it off really well. Hats off to you on that.

Charlotte: Thank you.

Zibby: How did you even start writing? Did you always know you wanted to write? Did you always want to write a novel? How did we get to this point where I'm holding your book in my hands?

Charlotte: I actually started writing when I was fourteen. I started books. That was my first novel. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I was a huge, huge reader and lover of stories. When I was fourteen, at the time I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, so that's what I wrote. I was very lucky that that book got picked up a publisher in Australia. That started me on this journey of publishing. I did several series for YA readers. They're fantasy and sci-fi epics. I think I was about twenty-five when I decided I needed to learn more about story craft. I did two degrees in screenwriting at the film school here, which sounds a bit of an odd choice, but it was actually excellent in terms of teaching me about structure and character transformations and theme and all that really juicy story craft stuff. Then after I graduated, that's when I went traveling. I decided I wanted to challenge myself to write something really different, which is how I came to Migrations. It was certainly the hardest thing I've ever done, the most difficult project. There were definitely moments where I thought I'd never finish it and I didn't know what it was about. I think it was the training that you get when you write every day for a decade that prepares you and teaches you the discipline you need to be able to understand that there's ebbs and flows and highs and lows while you write. You've just got to ride it out and really stick with something and finish it. I guess I got that practice because I spent most of my school life writing instead of doing homework or studying for an exam. Maybe I got a head start.

Zibby: It's so funny to think that writing is really like cheating on school when the whole point of school is to educate people who can be brilliant enough to write.

Charlotte: It was a bit like that. I made a decision early on when I got out of school and I didn't want to go straight to uni, which was a bit of surprise for most people. I just wanted to focus on writing. I don't know if that was the right thing.

Zibby: What about in your own life? I know in Migrations, there's a lot of really difficult family stuff. I won't go into it, but there's just a lot of stuff that happened to Franny and her family and all the rest. I was just wondering if any of it came from any personal space, if there had been some sort of trauma in your life or some mental illness even, perhaps, in your family. I'm being very personal. You can totally ignore this question. I was just wondering if there was something on a personal level that inspired any of this.

Charlotte: That's a really interesting question. I guess it's the idea of how much of me is in Franny. Look, I've been very fortunate in my life that I haven't gone through the same losses and griefs that she has. She had this really difficult life. My life's been great, really. [laughs] I've had a really loving family. There were difficulties. My parents split up when I was young. I had a single mom. She moved around a lot. We worked out by the time I was twenty-one I'd lived in twenty-one different houses. That was by no means traumatic at all. It was just a different experience. I suppose that it made me a little unsure about where I belonged and where my home is. I guess that's one of the reasons that that infused Franny's character. She's this wandering searcher. She's made up of a lot of things that I wish I was more of and a lot of things that I'm really glad that I'm not. A lot of her damage is, instead of it being a way for me to explore my own personal trauma, it's more of a way to explore a larger grief about what's happening to the planet. That sounds strange. I had this real concern and fear for the wildness that we're losing and a longing to have wildness in my life. I didn't quite know how to explore that. I brought it to bear in the internal pain of a person and hoped that that would be how we could access that feeling to make it more intimate and personal, if that makes sense.

Zibby: It does. It totally makes sense. I can see that reflected in the story. You had one line where you said, "The rhythm of the seas' tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed." I feel like that set the tone for the whole thing. You can see the sea going in and out, and in and out, and yet all of the things around it in fast-forward shapeshifting quickly, quickly, and not in good places. I know this is such a passion of yours. How do you approach this aside from obviously raising so much awareness with this book, for instance? Not how do you sleep at night, but what do you do to change it? What can we do to change it? What's your strategy and plan? What do you think in terms of activism or education or all the rest?

Charlotte: Education comes first, obviously, and starting the conversation. We want people to be aware of what's happening. That's one reason I wanted to write about this just to try and give voice to some of what's happening and my own concerns around it. In terms of the way I live, I'll try to do as many small things as I can because they all add up. If we're all doing the small things, they add up to major change. When I say small things, I am talking about, I don't eat meat. I know that’s not something that everyone will be able to do. If you can reduce your meat eating, that's amazing. Things like composting, worm farming, switch your energy to renewable energy providers. Ride your bike instead of driving your car, if you can, or walk. Lots of those smaller things, think about the products that you're buying and whether you can recycle them. Try to reduce the waste so things aren't just going into landfill. The biggest thing that we can actually do is contact our politicians because the change has to come from above, unfortunately. We can do a lot of smaller things. They do work. But we really, really need to change the systems that are in place because they're not supporting the planet. They're actually doing incredible damage.

Zibby: My daughter, she's thirteen, but from the time she was born she's been obsessed with polar bears.

Charlotte: Aw.

Zibby: I know. Who knew that over her, even, lifetime that the risk to polar bears would've escalated as much as it is? She's become this big advocate, preventing climate change and all of this stuff. I'm intimately aware. It's funny to have it brought to forefront by a child instead of necessarily by me. I do feel that this next generation is so aware already, not that I wasn't growing up. There was Greenpeace and all this stuff. It's not like I wasn't aware, but I think there's a newfound dedication to preventing their globe from losing all these species and everything.

Charlotte: It's wonderful to hear that your daughter is really aware of all this stuff. We are in good hands with them, with the next generation, but that doesn't mean that we can rest on our laurels. We've got to start slowing this down now because by the time it gets to them it might be too late.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, do not wait for my daughter. [laughs] Certainly, do not wait for her, the little impact she -- I'm kidding. The fate of our country certainly cannot rest on her. That's for sure.

Charlotte: You never know. She might wind up being the first female president.

Zibby: She might. You know, you never know. You never know. So tell me what you're working on next. I feel like you sold another book. Am I right about that?

Charlotte: You are right. The next book's coming out this time next year. I've spent the last year and a half writing and editing it. It's called Creatures, All. It's the story of a wolf biologist who is charged with reintroducing wolves into a forest in the Scottish Highlands in order to rewild the ecosystem. It's a love story and a mystery. Ultimately, it's a story of the healing power of nature, which is recurring theme for me apparently.

Zibby: I see that. It's good you know. Sometimes I talk to authors who have written ten books and they're like, it turns out it's all about my dad. [laughs] At least with nature, it's pretty clear-cut.

Charlotte: It makes sense that people return to the same themes, the ideas that they love or that fascinate them, or maybe they're trying to work through some terrible issue of themselves.

Zibby: Yep, that's so true. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Charlotte: Firstly, I would say -- this is a cliché, but it's really true. Write from your heart. Write about something that you really, really care about, something that matters to you because you have to sustain interest in this thing for a long time. You've got to sustain your passion. It's so easy to just start something on a whim and realize halfway through that, actually, you've lost interest or you don't care about it anymore. That's probably the main reason that so many start and don't finish books. Chose something that matters to you. Chose something that isn't necessarily about what the market wants or what you think people will enjoy because it's much more important to write about what you enjoy. Write the book that you want to read. That comes through to readers. They can really feel that passion. That would definitely be my main piece of advice. Practice heaps. Build the skill. You don't have to necessarily write every day, but you do have to write a lot. Otherwise, you're not practicing a skill. It's a skill like any other. Just be determined. Don't give up. Don't take no for an answer. There's a time for everything. If you're having trouble with one book, then maybe it's time to start a new one. I could go on all day about this stuff, but they would be the main points.

Zibby: I think another thing you should add is always end your chapters with a bang. I feel like your chapter endings were always, they were so good that you had to keep going. I just feel like that's always really important in moving things along.

Charlotte: Totally. Also, especially if you're moving timelines because sometimes people hate that. It really annoys them. If you can leave them on a note of wanting more, then they're really happy to come back to that timeline or that scene. That's a really good point.

Zibby: I'm just adding tips for you there. [laughs]

Charlotte: Please do.

Zibby: Charlotte, thank you so much. Thank you for your book and for all of your advice and for raising awareness for such an important issue for everyone on the planet and just for taking the time to talk to me today. Thank you.

Charlotte: Thank you so much, Zibby. It was lovely to chat. I really appreciate you having me on.

Zibby: My pleasure. Have a great day.

Charlotte: Thank you. You too.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Raven Leilani, LUSTER

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

Raven Leilani: Thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: I totally agree, except perhaps memoir.

Raven: Right, which is writing as a medium.

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

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

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

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

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

Raven: Yes. I feel that so hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: That's okay. [laughs]

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

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

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

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

Raven: No, not at all.

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

Raven: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Raven: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Jennifer Dahlberg, LAGGING INDICATORS

Zibby Owens: Jennifer Dahlberg was born in Rockland County, New York, and currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden. She is the author of two novels, Uptown & Down as well as her latest book, Lagging Indicators.

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

Jennifer Dahlberg: Thanks so much for having me. It's such a pleasure.

Zibby: We had so much fun on the comedy of errors book club that you joined where my sound stopped working and my husband ended up hosting and all the rest, so thanks for rolling --

Jennifer: -- I thought he saved the day.

Zibby: He did.

Jennifer: He did. I think he's hilarious. I actually watched when you did your Kyle and Zibby thing together. I think you guys are a great team.

Zibby: Thank you. I know. I have so much fun doing it with him. He kind of misses doing a show together. I think that's why he was so happy to hop onto our book club.

Jennifer: I love how supportive and how he's really invested in what you're doing. I think that's fantastic.

Zibby: It's so nice. It is. It's really awesome. I love what he's doing. It's just this whole creative whirlwind. It's really fun.

Jennifer: Absolutely. That's nice, kind of feeding off of each other, which is great.

Zibby: Yes, it's true, which is awesome. Speaking of creativity, tell me about your really interesting way of gaining research and writing Lagging Indicators. I had the mistaken assumption that you had been in this financial world. Really, you're just an awesome researcher. Tell listeners more about what Lagging Indicators is about. Then tell the story again from book club about how you put it all together.

Jennifer: Basically, I was inspired by the financial crisis of 2008. Prior to that, I had been surrounded by people that worked in finance. We were living in Greenwich, Connecticut, for my husband's job. We were there on a five-year ex-pat assignment. I live in Stockholm, Sweden now. I'm from New York, but I live in Stockholm, Sweden. I was just surrounded by all these finance people. I was used to much more diversity in terms of different careers. I just was like, okay, everybody works in finance here. That's interesting. Everyone's kind of a guy working in finance. I'm not meeting so many career women. Like myself, I had taken an offramp to raise my kids like a lot of the other women did that were living in Greenwich at the time. Then when the financial crisis occurred, it was horrible from an economic standpoint, of course, but I felt like I was watching drama in real time. You couldn't make some of this stuff up. All the different personalities and all the earth-shattering things that occurred, I have to say, I found it very intriguing.

I thought, let's see if I can maybe craft a story around that but from a female's perspective. I didn't want to dive into the 2008 crisis. I wanted to do it a year later, someone who had survived the financial crisis and thought that her job was secure but only to discover, not really. There was still barbarians at the gate that were out to get her. I didn't have any financial background whatsoever, but I did work as an executive recruiter for many years. I'd been exposed to the corporate arena and the different finance types. My husband is a banker. I just did extensive research. I enjoyed it. I think sometimes when you have been a stay-at-home parent, any opportunity to learn something new, you totally dive into it, which is what I did. I composed all these questionnaires. I gave it to female friends that I knew who worked on Wall Street. I just bombarded my husband with questions. I read every article I could find. I think the thing that really helped me the most is I would watch CNBC every day, every day. I felt like I knew them. [laughs] That's basically how I taught myself as much as I could. It's still very difficult because I don't have this innate ability in the financial world. To hear you say that you felt it sounded authentic actually means a lot to me. Thank you. I've had some other women tell me as well that they felt that I kind of captured the essence of that industry from a female perspective.

Zibby: I do think it sounded super authentic. That said, I've never actually worked in any firms like that. I've only read other books about firms like that.

Jennifer: But you have an MBA.

Zibby: I have an MBA, but I was in marketing and brand management. They would slam the door in my face at a finance firm if they saw my spreadsheet ability.

Jennifer: That's how I feel. I'm just not wired that way. I'm so not wired that way, which was what was fun to inhabit this other character because it wasn't me. Then when you don't have anything about a certain character that's similar to you, you can just go to the races with them.

Zibby: Totally. It's like you use all your observational prowess and just turn it into a story. You don't have to learn how to calculate -- now I can't even think of a single term to even say as a joke. [laughter]

Jennifer: You don't censor yourself because you're like, I'm just going for it, which is what I did.

Zibby: That's awesome. Having this glimpse, this analytical, observation glimpse into this world so you could create your character who then exited the world and tried to figure out what to do, and I won't give anything away, but what are your thoughts on women who actually are in this industry? What do you make of it now? What would you tell them?

Jennifer: I do definitely believe that if a woman is interested and passionate about this industry, the financial world, she should absolutely go for it and work to get a seat at the table because that's really the only way we're going to make any kind of change. Through some of my research, as women, we are perceived to be less risk aversive than men. A lot of research show that perhaps if more women had been in positions of power during the financial crisis that we would've had less exposure. Women have different kind of risk assessment and decision-making processes. I just think that you need the diversity of voices in every aspect. I definitely encourage women to go into that field. I wish I could've had like five different careers. I would've loved to work on Wall Street for a couple years just to dip your toe in different things and get a sense of what it's about.

Zibby: Tell me more about your story. You're from New York.

Jennifer: I'm from New York.

Zibby: Which part of New York? Then what happened? Pretend I'm interviewing you for a job at a finance firm. Take me through your bio here. No, I'm kidding.

Jennifer: I grew up in Rockland County, New York. I'm actually a first-generation American. My parents are Haitian immigrants. They came to the United States in the late sixties. My sister and I were both born in New York. I grew up in Rockland County, but I always wanted to leave. I always wanted to go to New York City. I got into college in the city, had a fantastic experience. Then I started working, as I mentioned, for a search firm. I also met my husband, a Swed. We met through mutual friends. We dated for several years. Then he proposed and asked if I would want to move to Stockholm. Although I enjoyed my job, I wasn't passionate about it. I always knew I wanted to write. When I was an executive recruiter, my favorite part was writing the candidate profiles. More and more partners would give me their scribbly notes and were like, "Jen, do something with this." That was actually my favorite part of the job. I felt that writing was something I definitely wanted to explore. I had the opportunity to do that when I moved to Stockholm. My husband, being super Swedish and very strong work ethic, said to me, "You can write, but you have to treat it like a job. You have to do it from nine to five every day." I was like, okay, I guess I will. I have to do that.

I sat for two years working on my first novel. Uptown & Down is what it eventually became. Then I, the old-fashioned way back then, the late nineties, early two thousands, I queried agents. I went through that book, the Literary Market Place book and everything just trying to do the whole thing. I think probably the last agent I queried agreed to take me on. Then within a year and half she sold the manuscript to Penguin, NAL. They had a division called New American Library. The book came out in 2005. It was a dream come true, want to write and then to be published. I had children, small kids. It was hard to write another book. They had an option for a second story. I didn't really deliver. Thank god they didn't take it because I think I would've been embarrassed by it now. I found it really hard to write when I had small kids. I admire every writer, so many who come on your show. I don't even understand how they do it. I listened to J. Courtney Sullivan. I don't even understood how she wrote her book [indiscernible/laughter].

Zibby: Right? I know.

Jennifer: She would write in the middle of the night. I could not do that when I had small kids. I could not do that.

Zibby: When I opened her book, I'm like, oh, this woman is in it. She is living this right now. You could just tell. It wasn't an observational situation. This is someone who's holding a baby as she's typing this at this second.

Jennifer: Exactly. I have that book. I have the book on my Kindle. I can't wait to read it. When you said that, I thought to myself, my gosh, I was not even in that frame of mind whatsoever. I just wanted to sleep.

Zibby: I know. People are like, I wrote it while my baby napped. I was like, oh, my gosh, I did a thousand other things. I couldn't nap when my baby napped. I was like, why do I always have so many emails? I always have stuff. There's always stuff.

Jennifer: I was the same exact way. As a result, my writing suffered. When I was ready to tell another story, I feel like the publishing world had kind of passed me by. I had written this story. I felt really strongly about it. I thought it was timely, but it couldn't find a home. My agent couldn't sell it. I kind of gave up. A number of things happened at 2016, everyone was saying it was going to be the year of the woman, and 2017 with the whole Me Too movement. It just convinced me that this story could resonate with an audience and maybe I should consider releasing it myself, which is what I ended up doing.

Zibby: Wow. What was that experience like?

Jennifer: It was fantastic. Imagine being in a total creative drought where your self-esteem is at the bottom because nobody wants to publish your book. I used a self-publishing service. I worked with an advisor. He totally got what I was trying to accomplish. It was suddenly from riding a low to having a collaboration with somebody. I was just so eager to be part of the process. I learned so much. I have absolutely no regrets doing it. I've met so many fantastic people, both in real life and online, on your community for example. I started following you soon after my book came out. I kept seeing your name on different people I followed in the bookstagram world. I was like, who is Zibby Owens? [laughter] Then I started following you. Then I started following "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." It's literally been a fantastic experience, just having that connection. On top of that, my living in Stockholm makes it so that I don't come in contact with anybody in the American publishing world, so it's been fantastic.

Zibby: I'm so glad you came to my book fair. That was so awesome.

Jennifer: Yes, that was wonderful. It was so great.

Zibby: I long for days where we can get rooms of people and friends and authors and everybody. Hopefully, soon.

Jennifer: I know. You were so generous opening your home to all the writers and readers and book enthusiasts. I don't know what it's going to be.

Zibby: Now I look back and I'm like, germs, germs. Germs everywhere. [laughs]

Jennifer: I know, which I can totally understand. I almost don't want to hold my kids. I'm like, wait a minute, what have you been doing? [laughs]

Zibby: That's a good point.

Jennifer: Here in Sweden, we've been much more open than you guys have been in the United States. My kids have, potentially, much more opportunity to come in contact with germs.

Zibby: What is it like being a Rockland County transplant in Stockholm?

Jennifer: It's been fun, I have to say. It's been fun. I was definitely one of those people who wanted to try the Europe thing, but I always thought it would be London or Paris. I'm really grateful that my husband introduced me to Stockholm because it's a beautiful country. It just has the right amount of edginess. It's far, though. It's far. The climate gets to you after a while, cold and dark. Now it's summer and gorgeous.

Zibby: More time to write, I guess.

Jennifer: Exactly, more time to write, extending the day.

Zibby: Are you working on any new books now?

Jennifer: I am, actually. I'm working on a new novel. It's a mother-daughter story that takes place in the Swedish archipelago. We have place out on one of the islands. The Stockholm archipelago, it's thirty thousand different islands and [indiscernible] and all these different little small communities. We have a place in one of the islands. In the book, it's a fictional place, but it's very similar to where we have a house. My daughter went off to college last year. That's got me thinking a lot about motherhood and that relationship. I just wanted to tap into that. It felt much more genuine in terms of where I was in life. It is a fictional story, though.

Zibby: Fiction in quotes? [laughs]

Jennifer: I try to keep these as fictional as possible because otherwise I find that I censor myself. Then you're always worried people will think I'm talking about myself. I have to say, no, it's not me. It's a character.

Zibby: People are quick to jump to that conclusion. Who just said to me yesterday -- someone just said recently their agent's advice was to just quickly write a second book as fast as possible so that they would realize that the first book wasn’t autobiographical.

Jennifer: Oh, my gosh, that's really good advice. That's probably what my problem was. I didn't jump on it as quickly as I should have. I think there's definitely elements of who you are and where you are in life in whatever you write. I had a friend who's a documentary filmmaker say to me, "I think that writing is us trying to sort through whatever issues that are going on in our head or something that is just on our mind." I think that to some degree all of my books have been that. With Lagging Indicators, my issue was I've been a stay-at-home parent all these years, what does that mean? What's next for me? Will I be able to do anything else? Whereas this new book is about, my first-born is fleeing the nest, what does that mean?

Zibby: Totally. I think that's why I love interviewing authors so much. People are really just writing about what they're feeling. It's just a ruse to talk to people about what's going on in their lives. Books are just the intermediary between us to talk about our experiences to people we don't know, really.

Jennifer: I think so too. That's what makes it even more special when it resonates and when someone connects to it. Somebody who you least expected can connect to something that you've written and you're like, really, you saw that? Wow. It is very special.

Zibby: I wrote this one silly article on HuffPost a number of years ago called "A Mother's Right to Sanity." I sent it around. I was just basically, not complaining, but the management of kids takes so much time that I had no time to even be with my kids and certainly be with my husband and all the rest of it. This mom at my kid's school sent me email. She had read it online somewhere or whatever. Maybe I sent it to her. I don't know. Anyway, she was like, "I didn't think I had anything in common with you." It was actually a little bit antagonistic now that I think about it, but whatever. She was just like, "I didn't think I had anything in common with you and your life. Your experience is different from mine. When I read your article, I laughed out loud because I was doing that same thing too with my husband, and all the same stuff." We never would've necessarily realized that. She wouldn't have known that inside -- if you write it down, then people can say, me too, I've already done that, or I feel the same way.

Jennifer: Definitely. That's how I felt a little bit about Lagging Indicators. Here I was writing about a black woman working in finance in New York City. The bulk of my readership has been other Swedish women. I thought to myself, how would they relate? What about this story? First of all, I was just so happy they were interested in reading it, and then how they connected to so many of the themes even though on the surface Mia is so different and her life story is so different. There were still so many parallels and areas where they saw common ground in this character who I thought was completely different from any of these women. That's what I like about it, the universality of writing and how people can just relate and that empathetic quality. That's why I think it's so important.

Zibby: Totally. You're absolutely right. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Jennifer: Definitely, to read a lot. I know that that's always one that other writers say, but you gain so much from reading and exploring the different styles out there. I also think to just be really disciplined as well. I think that there are so many distractions nowadays. That's what I've struggled with. Even during lockdown when there was nothing else to do, it was hard to concentrate. I think that just being really disciplined and believing in yourself. For me, I had so many moments of doubt when I felt that other publishers or just the industry as a whole didn't want what I had to say. It took a lot for me to build my confidence back up again. I really think it's important to believe in yourself and believe in what you have to say. There are other avenues out there. I'm still a big proponent of traditional publishing, for sure. But if you have something to say, don't be afraid to explore other avenues.

Zibby: It's so true. What was the name, by the way, of the service you used to self-publish that came with an advisor?

Jennifer: It's called IndieBookLauncher. They're actually based out of Canada. I really connected with one of the guys. He was just fantastic in terms of really guiding me along.

Zibby: Amazing. IndieBookLauncher in Canada. You're in Sweden. People are everywhere. This is an international novel.

Jennifer: People are everywhere. We're back to the online community. You just click on something and you don't know where people are coming from, which is pretty cool.

Zibby: It is pretty cool. Good luck. I know you're locked away in this shed trying to finish this book. It's a beautiful shed. [laughs]

Jennifer: Thank you. It's a nice wall happening.

Zibby: It's lovely. Anyway, good luck finishing. I don't know if you still are being held to the nine-to-five restrictions that your husband sort of set into place, but good luck cranking it out and all the rest.

Jennifer: Thank you so much. I think the day is much longer now. I feel like I'm breastfeeding again. I'm waking up in the middle of the night. I'm on a different rhythm right now.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I have PTSD from that whole period of time in my life, I can't even, when the nights were not my own and I felt like I was the only one in the world. Anyway, thanks so much. Have a great weekend.

Jennifer: Thank you so much, Zibby. Thank you so much for all you do. I look forward to continuing to follow your success. It's awesome.

Zibby: And yours. Bye.

Jennifer: Thank you. Bye.

Amy Poeppel, MUSICAL CHAIRS

Zibby Owens: Amy Poeppel grew up in Dallas, Texas. She graduated from Wellesley College and worked as an actress in the Boston area appearing in a corporate industrial for Polaroid, a commercial for Brooks Pharmacy -- oh, gosh, I remember Brooks Pharmacy -- and a truly terrible episode of America’s Most Wanted, along with other TV spots and several plays. While in Boston, she got her MA in teaching from Simmons College. She married a neuroscientist at NYU. For the past thirty years, they've lived in many cities all over the world from San Francisco to Berlin and had three sons. Amy taught high school English in the Washington, DC suburbs, and after moving to New York, worked as an assistant director of admissions at an independent school where she had the experience of meeting and getting to know hundreds of applicant families. She attended sessions at the Actors Studio Playwrights/Directors Unit and wrote the theatrical version of Small Admissions, which is one of her novels, which was performed there as a staged reading in 2011. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, Working Mother, Points In Case, The Belladonna, and Literary Mama. Her novels include Small Admissions, Lime-light, and Musical Chairs.

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

Amy Poeppel: I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Zibby.

Zibby: Congratulations on your latest novel, Musical Chairs. So exciting. Can you please tell listeners what this book is about?

Amy: Absolutely. I actually just received the hardcover.

Zibby: Oh, look at it.

Amy: They're just so pretty. That's always exciting, I have to say, even three books in. That is such a thrill when your books arrive. This is a book about a woman who is spending the summer at her ramshackle country house in Connecticut. She's in a piano trio, a classical piano trio, with her very best friend in the world who is a man named Will. They’ve hired a new person to be the violinist in their trio. All they have to do is survive the summer. They're going to have a new, fresh start in the fall. Bridget goes out to her house in hopes of spending a very romantic three months with the new boyfriend that she has. It's getting kind of serious. He breaks up with her over email, partly on the advice of his ex-wife who thinks that maybe they should just take things a little bit more slowly. That's just a disappointing way for Bridget to start her summer. From there, her adult kids move back him. Her ninety-year-old father announces he's getting married. It's just a summer of everybody having to rethink and reinvent themselves and figure out how they're going to move forward under changed circumstances.

Zibby: I didn't really like Sterling from the beginning, though, I have to say. I was kind of not upset when they broke up. [laughs] You introduce him as sending a, "Read my email right away." I didn't think he really cared enough when she was accidentally electrocuted right at the beginning when she first went out to her house. I don't know. I feel like things happen for a reason even in fiction.

Amy: Probably most of us will feel like that was a good riddance situation. Even when you're in those situations, it's hard to see it sometimes for yourself. I've had a lot of friends and family and serious relationships, and in the moment, it just seems like the worst thing that could possibly happen. Then you rethink. Yeah, I think sometimes you come out better for it. I think in Bridget's case, you're absolutely right. I agree.

Zibby: It doesn't make it easier for Bridget, of course. She doesn't have the luxury of the distance from us reading about her or even of her character friends in the novel who can maybe see it for what it is. That's one of many things that she goes through this summer. I love, by the way, how you structured the book, how you had it over a course of a summer with the prelude, and then June, July, August, and a coda in September. That's just so perfect. I love when there are clever structures to books that echo the content, so check plus on that. [laughs]

Amy: There was one other little structural element that I don't think readers would pick up on, necessarily. It was just something that was important to me in my own brain to work it out. It's a trio. Every series starts with Bridget. You get a chapter from Bridget. You get a chapter from Will. Then there's the empty chair. That third chapter is filled by Gavin, who is their first-ever violinist, once in June, once in July, and once in August. Every other third chapter, you get a surprise voice. For me in my head, it was kind of representing Bridget and Will as the two stable anchors in this trio. That third seat always is rotating. I wanted to mirror that in the structure of the book. It's not something anyone would necessarily see when they were reading, but it was really helpful for me in writing it to have that blank third chapter.

Zibby: See, I thought I was analyzing it, and I missed it. I'm sorry. [laughs]

Amy: That overarching structure was exactly what I wanted. I wanted the prelude. I wanted the coda. I wanted the three months in between. Then as a little miniature structure, I put the every three chapters structure in on top of all of that. No, you got it completely.

Zibby: What is the role of music in your life? You obviously know a ton about it. Did you research it for this book? Are you a musician? How did you learn so much about it?

Amy: Zibby, I cannot read music. I don't understand music. I can't carry a tune, to be honest. I'm a huge appreciator of music. Somehow, I raised three children who are very musical. Two of them so far are sort of following a career in music. I got a lot of help from them. My youngest son is a classical pianist. He's studying musicology and composition in college. He helped me so much. Every time I would have an idea and I'd sort of feel like I needed to be listening to something or I needed to be rehearing something, I would research, go to my son, get somebody to help me. It was a really fun world to dive into, but it was also nerve-wracking because I wanted to make sure that I got things right. In an early draft -- I think this happens to a lot of writers. In an early draft, I sort of went too far and it was just so infused with music that my publisher and my editor said, "That's great. Now let's just pull back a little bit for readers who are not classically trained musicians like me." I feel like there's enough of it in there now to really put you in that world. If you don't know anything about classical music, that is not hinderance to understanding or reading the book. I would say, though, that there are some nice references to pieces of music that if you have your Spotify nearby while you're reading, it might be fun to plug in some of those titles and composers and take a listen. The stuff that I chose to put in there, the pieces that I chose, were selected carefully. They're beautiful.

Zibby: Spotify now has playlists you can make. You can always just make a playlist.

Amy: I know. I think it's actually a really good idea. I think I'm going to sit down and go back through the book and find every piece of music that I referred to and make a playlist. Thank you, Zibby. That was such a [audio cuts outs] idea.

Zibby: No problem. I love how you had to interview, essentially, your own children to get the research done for this book. It's actually a genius way to bond with your kids. I'm writing a book about something that I know interests you more than anything, so you're the one who's going to have to help me. That must have made them feel so great. Did it bond you guys in the process? I would think that it did in a way that you couldn't necessarily get at in another way.

Amy: Absolutely. It's really amazing that you spend so much of your life teaching your children how to do things, tie their shoes, use a spoon, manners, all the things that we try to teach our kids. It is so much fun. The first time this happened to me was -- I lived in Berlin for two years. When we got there, my kids didn't speak German at all. I spoke really terrible German, really, really. I can massacre that language like nobody. When we got there, knowing that my kids -- they went into school. They went into German-speaking school. They really struggled. I was helping and teaching, and helping and teaching, and helping with their homework. Then all of a sudden, that flipped on its head. Their German was so much better than mine, and I was constantly asking them for help. We would go into a store. I would say, "Can you help me ask this saleswoman this question?" They were suddenly the experts and able to help me. I just remember thinking, that's what you want as a mom. You want to see your kids get even better, like way better, than you at the things that they excel at and have interest in.

That was a lot of fun, especially with my youngest, Luke. He's the one who's really the most classically trained. Saying to him, "You are the expert here. I am not. I need your help," he was very generous with his time, really slowed things down for me. He would read my drafts and he would explain, "That is not what a rehearsal process is like. That is not the way a musician would ask that question." He would even say to me, "That sounds like a non-musician trying to talk about music." I would be like, "Help me. Help me. Help me get that so that it sounds right," especially in dialogue because dialogue is really important to me. I finally asked my kids for their help again. We just filmed a book trailer. I'm in Connecticut right now in a house that is somewhat dilapidated, we'll say. I needed help. It was an all-hands-on-deck kind of project. The whole family came together. We filmed this book trailer. It should be out, I hope, in about a week.

Zibby: That’s exciting.

Amy: The last hang-up, the last holdup of getting this book trailer out in the world is the music. There's certain places where it needs to get louder and it needs to get softer. My oldest child is a sound engineer. He's twenty-six and works in music studios all over New York City. He's got the file right now. He's doing all of the adjustments to make sure that the sound is right and that the music that's in the background is right. I am so lucky I have these experts right in my house.

Zibby: Totally. You could easily start a podcast, you know. You could just have your son help you with the intro/outro music. You could do free production. Maybe I'll call them. [laughs]

Amy: He's really good. He was hearing in the background music in the book trailer -- he kept saying, "Do you hear that hum?" I was like, "I don't hear a hum." He's like, "Just listen." I would listen. It's my old lady ears. I was like, "I don't hear a hum." He's like, "I have to take that out. That sounds terrible." [laughs] I'm happy to have him.

Zibby: That's awesome. I love this part in the book, speaking of adult children. Bridget is the protagonist of this book. You said, "Bridget did not want to get high with her children. She never had, never would. Nevertheless, her feelings were hurt that they hadn’t even invited her to join them." Then they asked somebody else. You said when they asked Jackie, "Bridget would've said no anyway, but they could've at least included her just to be nice. When they came back to the porch talking loudly and laughing uncontrollably, she left them out there and went into the kitchen where all three dogs who were soggy from having wadded into the pond twice were underfoot and pacing in search of dropped food. She’d lost control of the evening." [laughs] Has that ever happened? That's such a funny -- my kids aren't that old, so I haven't thought about what happens when your kids start doing things like that or that you would feel left out or anything like that. Tell me about that scene.

Amy: I think there are times when your kids are really little and you think that there are things that could never happen or would never happen. Speaking of life imitating art, I came out here and of course when quarantine hit, all three of my adult children moved back home. This was long after I had written the book. The book was submitted ages ago. Here I am for three months now, I've had all three of my kids, twenty, twenty-three, and twenty-six -- the twins in the book are twenty-six. They’ve all moved back home. On two levels, it's funny to me. One, it's just a strange thing that I never thought would happen again. I just didn't think I would ever have a situation where there would be this extended period of time where my kids would be living here. They both regress sometimes to sort of what life was like when they were younger. Then at other times, they're so grown up and so mature and I don't have to take care of them at all. That's just been funny. Then the fact that it's exactly the situation that happens in the book. It's been really funny.

Do my kids engage in behaviors that I sometimes don't approve of? Yes, they do. They probably would invite me. I'm just way too anxious a person for that to be my drug of choice. Yes, these things happen. These things definitely happen. I wrote a piece that's on a comedy site called The Belladonna, which is hilarious if nobody's ever looked at it. The Belladonna is really a great for-women humor site online. I wrote a piece, I can't quite remember what the number was, but it was "Your Growing Child." It was sort of like What to Expect When You're Expecting, but it was the 209th trimester and beyond. It was just a humor piece about what to expect when your kids are eighteen and up. I had a scene in there where your little tike might have Tinder date sleepovers. What do you do when you walk in and there's a man in boxers in your kitchen making pancakes? [laughter] I wrote that just for fun. Then somehow being here with these three very grown boys/men, it's been really enlightening and fun.

Zibby: You have another character in the book. I just wanted to read this quote. You said, "One of Isabelle's biggest flaws she’d be willing to admit was that she was convinced she could straighten out everyone else's life while her own was, to the objective observer, a shit show." That just spoke to me because I can so relate to always wanting to have the answer when I don't necessarily have the answer myself. Is that something that you tend to do as well, or was this just you've seen this so many times from other people?

Amy: I think we've all done that. Other people's problems, you have some distance. That distance gives you clarity. It can sometimes be so easy to look at somebody else's problems and just be like -- I always joke with my husband because he sometimes says, "You know what you should do?" I said, "You should have a podcast called You Know What You Should Do?" [laughs] I think we all could because I think we all feel like we have this sense of, I know what you should do. When it comes to your own situation, it's just always so much more complicated to look at your own problems and sort through what to do. That's why we have friends, though. That's why we run our problems past other people because they can so often give us a little bit of insight that we somehow miss ourselves because we're too close to the problem. It's the same with writing. The reason that you get beta-readers and people is because you get so close to your own material and your own circumstances and your own situation and issues that you just can't see what's really happening anymore, so you give it to somebody else, let them take a look at it. Then they say, "You know what you should do?"

Zibby: I say that all the time, by the way. I say that in probably half the podcasts. This is a great idea. You should do this. Like the playlist, I just said that. It's so obnoxious of me, really. I don't know what I should do. [laughs] It's the same thing.

Amy: I think we all appreciate it. Especially when it's friends and experts and people who really know what they're talking about, who doesn't want to hear a fresh perspective on your own situation? I think it's helpful.

Zibby: Sometimes when I have a problem, I usually write when I'm really upset about something, not for anybody, just to sort out my own feelings. I often will say, pretend that this is a friend's problem. What would you say to the friend? I'm so much more lenient on my friends than on myself. I can see it. But when it's me, it's so different.

Amy: We're so much harder on ourselves. I think that's absolutely true. I actually think "You Know What You Should Do?" would be a great title for a podcast. I think it would be so perfect. In Isabelle's case, she has that sense that she always knows what somebody else should do. Her life, really, when you lay it out on paper at that stage of the book, it does not look great. She is really in turmoil. You do find out toward the end of the book, what was the origin of all of this. I also wanted to tap into a little bit of humor for moms. When our older kids get really proud of ourselves for something that they’ve done that they think is very empowering and very wonderful, we look at it as the mom and we're sort of like, are you sure that was the right thing to do? Are you positive? In this case -- this isn't a spoiler because it happens quite early on. Isabelle has quit a job that was a very good job. You know how we all feel about good jobs, especially these days. She just felt she wasn't quite living her best life. She just quits, burns bridges, just walks out, and then says to her mother, "I'm so proud of myself right now." You don't want to say to your kid, "Are you sure you should be proud?"

We're trying to instill confidence, but I think we may have taken that to such a big degree that we somehow have told our kids that they should be proud of almost any step that they take. That can be troubling. I do think even in Isabelle's case, by the time you get to the end of the book, you feel she's probably done the right thing because life is short. We have to put ourselves in, if we can, and this is not always the case, but if we can -- we don't always ask our kids to think, what do you want to wear to work every day? Do you want to be suited up when you go to work, or do you want to have a more casual lifestyle? This is a ridiculous conversation to be having in this day and age where jobs are just so hard to come by. When I was writing the drafts of this book, we were in a slightly different era. I felt like for Bridget, she could look at that and think, you just walked out of a good job, what were you thinking? Isabelle would think, oh, something else will come along. That's a very privileged -- Jackie says that, that they are very privileged kids and that that seeps out of lots of conversation. She sees it.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about your writing process. How long did it take to write Musical Chairs? Where did you write it? Did you write it in the house that you're in now? I know we're on Skype in this Connecticut, in need of fixing up -- although, it looks perfectly beautiful to me from what I can see.

Amy: This is a well-curated background. [Distorted audio], you'd be like, oh. I did write a lot of the book here. I'm actually just starting Susie Schnall's book, We Came Here to Shine. I was just listening to her speak about her writing process. I know we're not comparing ourselves, but it really makes me want to be Susie Schnall and Fiona Davis who writes such beautiful historical fiction.

Zibby: They were both on my podcast too, so we can listen.

Amy: For anyone who doesn't know, they are both planners. They plan, plan, plan. It's not shocking to people who know me and my personality that I am not a planner. I am not a planner. I go into these books with situations in my head and people in my head. Then it takes me a really long time to figure out who these people are. I know they say we start with drafts and then we throw them out and have to rewrite them as we get to know our characters. That's, of course, true. I do wish I could be a little bit more like them and map things out a bit more from the get-go. I did not do that with Musical Chairs at all. I threw out about fifty thousand words of Musical Chairs in the process of writing it. That's, for people who don't know, easily half a book. That was actually in one of the major rounds, so it was probably more like seventy-five thousand words if you look at the entire course of writing the book.

I just think that's really inefficient. I think that writing those scenes that I throw out maybe teaches me something about writing. Maybe it's not a waste of time, but it is inefficient. I'm working on a fourth book right now. I have tried to do my version of an outline. It's just rough, but I've sort of given myself a little bit of a shape that I'm trying to follow. We will talk again in a year, let you know if it worked for me. I don't know how much of this is personality driven, how much of this is just your work style, your writing style. I just know that for me with my first three books, I really figured it all out as I went along. That's joyful sometimes. It's so much fun sometimes. It's also painful and perhaps really inefficient at times. There are good sides and bad sides. I am going to give the Fiona Davis, Jamie Brenner, Susie Schnall outline the old college try this time around. I'm just going to see what happens. I'll let you know.

Zibby: Keep us posted.

Amy: To avoid throwing out half a book again, I would like to do that. I just don't know if it's possible for me.

Zibby: It's an art, not a science. You'll just play with it and see, experiment.

Amy: I think in fact, it's a great thing to listen other writers, hear how they do things, see if you can't pick up on some of their skills and habits and incorporate them into your own process. I'm definitely up for trying to do that. If anyone's too rigid and too structured, I would say try being a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pantser for a little while because it can be really fun. I think it was Susie who also said that she writes out diary entry type things from her characters' point of view. I sort of feel that I do that as well. I like to really understand who that person is before I just start. I think I do a lot more work on the character side and less work on the plot side. That is fun, but it can get me into trouble.

Zibby: That was all great advice. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors in addition to all of that good stuff?

Amy: I would say just keep at it. Keep trying. Don't be afraid to write something terrible and throw it out. I very much believe in the Anne Lamott advice of just write a terrible first draft. You can't edit until you have something on the page. Don't be afraid. No one's going to see it. Don't worry about it. Just write a first chapter. Let it be awful. It might end up being the tenth chapter. It might end up being in the trash bin. You don't know. You can't move to the next step until you get that lousy first draft written and finished. Then the second thing, the other piece of advice that I would give, it's sort of two things combined. Develop a thick skin or a little bit of a wall between you and the criticism because there's going to be a lot of it. There's going to be a lot of rejection. Figure out, who do you trust? Whose eyes and sensibility do you really trust? Put yourself in that person's hands, whether it's a beta-reader -- I would not say a family member or best friend. They're going to be too nice to you. Find somebody who's willing to be mean to you. Let them read it. Don't take it personally. Don't say, they just don't understand what I was trying to do. If they don't understand what you were trying to do, there's a problem. Just learn to find people whose sensibility and aesthetic you trust. Then take the criticism. I go to bed sometimes for a day after I get a bad editorial letter. You just have to let it wash over you and accept it. Then you just get back in the chair. Resilience is key. Get back in the chair. Keep going. Resilience and get that first draft on paper. Just get it down in your laptop, in whatever. Just get it written.

Zibby: Love it. Thank you, Amy. Thanks so much for sharing your experience and your advice and your stories and the music and all the rest. Thanks for coming on.

Amy: Thank you for having me. Keep reading and doing what you do, Zibby. You're just amazing. Thank you for having me on.

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

Amy: Bye. You too.

Zibby: Bye.

Julie Pennell, LOUISIANA LUCKY

Zibby Owens: Welcome to day three of my second week of my July Book Blast. I guess technically this day eight of my July Book Blast. Today is Beach Reads Wednesday. I love beach reads. I wish I had more time to just sit on the beach and read, as I'm sure we all do. Instead of that, I'm offering up all these amazing beach read books which you should definitely check out this summer and beyond.

Julie Pennell was born and raised in Louisiana. After graduating from college, she headed to New York to work at Seventeen magazine. She currently lives in Philadelphia with her husband and young son and is a regular contributor to today.com. Her writing has appeared in The Knot, InStyle, and Refinery29. She is the author of The Young Wives Club and most recently, Louisiana Lucky.

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

Julie Pennell: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to chat with you. Big fan.

Zibby: Yay, that's so nice. I feel like I toil in my little room here by myself all day, so it's nice to hear. [laughs] Louisiana Lucky, tell us about this novel. What's it about?

Julie: Louisiana Lucky is about three sisters in small-town Louisiana who play -- they have a monthly girls' night. They play the lottery. They drink cheap wine and fantasize about how different their lives would be if they won the jackpot. Spoiler alert, they do. They win $204 million that they get to split between them. It follows the story of how they spend their money. Lexi is the youngest. She's just recently engaged, so she decides to plan a Hollywood-style wedding. Callie is a local newspaper reporter. The money gives her the confidence to go after her career dreams and also love. Then Hanna is our oldest. She's a mom of two young kids. She wants to give them everything that she possibly can to make their lives better. It follows that. Obviously, the story is fantasy. It's got your fun shopping sprees and makeovers. It's also got some realistic things of disaster and heartbreak. In between those things, there's also love and family and hopefully feel-good feelings. I've read this book a million times during my editing process. Every time, I come out with a fuzzy feeling at the end. I really hope that readers feel that as well. Especially in this time, I feel like we all need a feel-good story.

Zibby: It's like you knit yourself your own sweater or something. [laughs] You wrote your own book to make you feel better. Then it makes you feel better. It's perfect.

Julie: This is why we write. You want to write the book that you want to read. This is a book that I thought would be really fun to read.

Zibby: There you go. It's perfect. Then now you make it fun for the rest of us to read. I love how you jump around and do alternating viewpoints of the different sisters and how you just keep the story moving along and interweave everything. It's very cool. How did you come up with this idea?

Julie: Who hasn’t fantasized about winning millions of dollars and just changing your life? I just thought that would be a really fun backdrop for the story, just to have fun with it. Also, it could be a self-discovery story for the women in the story, but also for the readers. I hope that they come away with some kind of feeling about money. Is it tied to happiness, or do we already have everything that we possibly need? Especially right now with the pandemic and being sheltered in place and not spending money, I feel like we're all kind of looking at that within our own selves. I'm hoping that is also something that readers take away from it.

Zibby: What was your conclusion after going through the exercise of seeing what happens and the impact of the lottery win on all these women? I know I've read studies that it turns out that money doesn't actually buy you happiness. The lottery winners, sometimes they get depressed because their expectations are so high or they change their lives so rapidly that they lose touch with things that had given meaning to their lives before. Just curious if at this point, winning the lottery, good thing? Bad thing? What do you think?

Julie: What I didn't want to do -- I know I've heard horror stories of lottery winners. Their lives are ruined forever. I just felt like that was super depressing. I think that having money would be fun because you could do things with it. You could give it to charity, things like that. I didn't want these girls to have the worst lives ever after they won. You'll see in the end that they do realize that it's not about the money itself. It's about the people that are with them and what they can give to others and what others can give to them. I think that that's what makes you rich. It's like It's a Wonderful Life. You're the richest man because you have friends and because you have family and things like that. Also, money would be fun too. [laughs] [Indiscernible] and stuff, but I don't think that you need billions of dollars. I would hope that if someone had billions of dollars they would give it away to people who need it.

Zibby: How did you end up writing a book at all? Tell me about your whole writing journey. When did you realize you liked to write? I'm assuming you like to write, but that is a big assumption. Maybe you don't like to write.

Julie: I hate writing. [laughs]

Zibby: How did you become a writer?

Julie: I've actually been writing my entire life. I was writing little stories when I was a little girl. My mom still has all of them. Then when I was fourteen, I just randomly walked up to the local newspaper and asked them if there were any writing opportunities for teenagers. They randomly let me come in and intern for them. Then I wrote a weekly teen column for them for seven years, way past when I was not a teen anymore. It was really fun. I've always wanted to write for magazines, and stories. I worked at Seventeen magazine. Then I've always wanted to write a novel. I've tried so many times. I think a lot of authors have done this where you get in, you get really excited. I wrote twenty thousand words for a couple books. Then I just had no idea where I was going. Then I finally came up with my debut novel idea, The Young Wives Club, and plotted it out. I think that that made all the difference in the world. Then it sold. They're letting me do another one. I feel so lucky. I feel Louisiana Lucky right now.

Zibby: Aw. Are you from Louisiana? How did you place it there? You are?

Julie: Yep, I was born and raised there. I lived there through college. I went to Louisiana Tech for college. Then I ended up moving to New York to work in magazines after. There's always a special place in my heart for the state. I just feel that it's so magical and so special. I kind of just wanted to be transported back there when I was writing this book. I hope that it transports readers to this magical place with the wonderful culture and the smells and sights and sounds of one of my favorite places in the world.

Zibby: What are you going to write next? Are you already at work on your next novel? I'm sure you are.

Julie: I'm mulling over some ideas. I haven't put pen to paper yet. I just had a baby.

Zibby: Congratulations.

Julie: I'm just taking a little pause. I find that this is the time when I need to be thinking about it. I don't know, but we'll do it. I'll do it.

Zibby: You're going to have a whole new world of material now. Just wait. How old is your baby?

Julie: He's two months old. Then I have a two-and-a-half-year-old as well. I actually wrote Louisiana Lucky his first year. It's funny. I feel like I have a baby every single year I have a new book. [laughs] I was a stay-at-home mom for the first year and just wrote it during his naps and after he went to bed at night. I was really thankful that he was a good sleeper for that. I'm hoping this new one is going to be a good sleeper too. Then I'll be able to get another book out.

Zibby: That could be Louisiana Really, Really, Lucky. [laughs] Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Julie: Going back on the plotting, I definitely think that that's something that everyone should try if they're struggling like I was struggling. I feel like knowing where you're supposed to go in the plot is definitely going to help you get to the end. Of course, things change because these characters are crazy. They're actually real people. They have minds of their own. Things might change, but at least you have an end goal. Then my other piece of advice always is just to find time to write. It's so cliché, but like they always say, you can't edit a blank page. It's so true. You just have to -- like doing it during your kid's naps. On Twitter, there's a five AM writers' club where people get up at five AM and do it before their full-time jobs. Even if it's a page a day, sometimes it takes a while to write a book, but at least you've done it. If I hadn’t done it during the naps, then I wouldn't be talking about it right now with you. You've just got to do it. Everybody has a story. I think that everybody should try.

Zibby: I'm glad your first child napped so that you could write this book and we could chat. It all worked out. Thank you so much for coming on my podcast. Congratulations on this book. Good luck with your baby. It was great chatting with you.

Julie: Thank you so much. It was great chatting with you as well.

Zibby: My pleasure. Bye.

Julie: Bye.

Zibby: I hope you've enjoyed this beach read on Beach Reads Wednesday, part of my July Book Blast.

Liz Fenton & Lisa Steinke, HOW TO SAVE A LIFE

Zibby Owens: Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke have been best friends for over thirty years. They are the coauthors of seven novels including the Amazon Charts best seller, The Good Widow. Their most recent book, How to Save a Life, is a dark, heart-pounding love story with a Groundhog Day twist. Liz and Lisa host the popular podcast "We Fight So You Don’t Have To" and are monthly on-air contributors on their local news with Liz & Lisa’s Book Club. In their former lives, Liz worked in the pharmaceutical industry and Lisa was a talk show producer. They both reside with their families and several rescue dogs in Southern California.

Welcome, Lisa and Liz, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for coming on.

Lisa Steinke: Thanks for having us.

Liz Fenton: Thank you.

Zibby: Maybe just announce who you are. I can see because I'm watching you. Whose voice is whose?

Liz: This is Liz.

Lisa: This is Lisa. Thanks for having us. Excited to be here.

Zibby: How to Save a Life is your latest novel. Can you tell listeners, please, what it's about?

Liz: It's a dark, heart-pounding love story. It's about Dom and Mia. Ten years ago, Dom and Mia were engaged and they broke up. Fast-forward a decade. Dom runs into Mia at a coffee shop. He's never really gotten over her. He always regretted breaking up with her. He hasn’t really moved on. He asks her out on a date. It's Tuesday. He asks her out for Thursday. They go out Thursday night to the San Diego County Fair, and she dies on a ride. Obviously, he's devastated. He wakes up the next day. It's still Thursday. He has another opportunity. He's not quite sure what's going on. They have their date, but obviously he plans something else. He doesn't take her to the carnival. He's like, maybe we shouldn't go. She dies again. What happens after that is he's stuck in a time loop trying to save her life, trying to save what they had together. Then there's also different pieces of his life in that day that he's trying to figure out almost like a puzzle he's trying to put back together.

Zibby: How did you come up with this? It's Sliding Doors-ish. It's the same bad news over and over again and wanting to have a different outcome. Isn't that what they say the definition of craziness is? I feel like my therapist might have told me this at one point, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Lisa: Expecting a different outcome, yeah. Our last book, The Two Lila Bennetts, was a Sliding Doors concept. We had already tried that. We were on vacation. We were in the pool. We were drinking cocktails. We were trying to figure out what to do. We first were going to do a Groundhog Day twist but with more of a suspense angle like our previous books. Then Liz got to talking about The 7½ Lives of...

Liz: Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, one of my favorite books. I had brought it on vacation. I had just finished it.

Lisa: That book is a man who wakes up every day in a different person's body at a party. We were talking about that and just tossing it around. We eventually came to this just as a brainstorm goes. We wanted it to be lighter and more of a love story that we could play out in it as well.

Zibby: I was sort of struck, I feel like it's been a long time since I read a novel by two women from the point of view of a man. When it started about the bulge in his pants, I was like, wait a minute. [laughter] Who's telling this story? What's going on?

Lisa: That was Liz's line. She's notorious for the opening line in a book, I have to say.

Liz: Thank you, Lisa. Our debut novel, the opening line is "My mouth tastes like ass." You'll have to read to find out why. That was actually from a rewrite. That wasn't the original first line. Then when it went to edits with our publisher, we ended up restructuring the first one-third of the way we were telling the story. We had to jump off from their engagement. You know as a reader and also an author, the first page is so important to pull people in.

Lisa: We're hoping that pulls people in. It was also fun to write from a male point of view for the first time. I don't know if we were just shying away from it because we're not men and it's not as comfortable, but we just wanted to get out of our comfort zone and give it try. Then we both kind of ended up falling in love with him a little bit.

Liz: I have a major crush on him. It was fun. We get bored. I think it's why our first three books were magical realism. Then we went to suspense. Now we're back. We pivot a lot, for good or bad of our career. We pivot. With us, you never really know what you're going to get in a book because we always want to write what we love. We've just found when we don't do that, there's problems. We just write what we want to read and what we love in that moment. We hope our audience will come along for the ride.

Zibby: I feel like it's so easy to tell when somebody's not passionate about what they're writing about. You can feel the lack of fire behind it, really, even though it's sort of intangible. How did the two of you originally get together? What's your whole story? How did you decide to start becoming coauthors?

Lisa: We've known each other a very long time, thirty-four years or something. We're losing track at this point. Went to high school together and college together and roommates afterward and through the course of all that, just talked about it, but not really thinking it was ever going to actually happen. Just one of those things because we've always been voracious readers since we were very young. These authors inspired us. We never thought it was going to happen. Then one day out of the blue like fifteen years into our friendship, I brought it up again. I had written something. I sent it to her. The rest is history. We did not expect it, but we're so happy it actually ended up taking off.

Zibby: That's amazing. Talk about all of your external support for the book community at large and how you're on the San Diego show and all the rest of it, the original influencers essentially.

Liz: As Lisa mentioned, we're huge readers. We're huge fangirls of authors. We were championing books before we got our first book deal. Now we continue that. We're lucky enough to have, on our local news, we have a monthly book club segment every month where we get to talk about books. We have a podcast, "We Fight So You Don't Have To," which is about us, but we also talk about books. We bicker. We're like sisters. We're hoping people can learn from our mistakes. We're also partnering with Warwick’s bookstore in La Jolla who's our local independent bookstore for Couch Surfing Book Tour. We connected with them right when COVID happened. We're like, "How can we help? What can we do?" Twice a week, we have authors on and talk about their books. That's been really rewarding and really fun. It's fun to help the authors who have their books coming out. They're disappointed. It's been great to partner with Warwick's who we adore and hopefully drive some book sales for them, right Lis? It's been really rewarding in this dark time.

Lisa: It's kind of nice to be in the other seat sometimes because there's so many bookstagramers and people like you that are just so supportive of us. We're always thinking about what we can do to give back so it's a reciprocal situation because we wouldn't be where we are without the Instagram, bookstagram community, for sure. It is nice to give back a little bit too.

Zibby: Tell me about your fighting. [laughter] Let me hear some of these fights. Give me a few examples. How down and dirty are these fights? What are we talking here?

Liz: We've gotten a lot better. This is evolution. I think we've been writing together at this point about ten years. We've been friends for thirty-four. We're really like family. Lisa, I'll let you speak to this, but I think transitioning from a friendship to running a business together is a really interesting thing, especially with something creative like writing. Lis, you always do a good job.

Lisa: Thank you, Liz. That's a perfect example of how far we've come. There's been some door slamming. There's been a lot of emotions that we can't control over the years. It was never really in regard to what we were going to write about or anything like that. It was just other stuff. It's kind of like a marriage when you're fighting about the toilet paper, but it's not really about the toilet paper. It took us many, many years to figure out that this wasn't just a friendship. It was a business relationship too. We'd never sat down and had a conversation about how different we are and how that was going to play into our writing process. A few years ago, everything kind of came to a head. We talked about maybe not continuing because we couldn't figure out what the problem was. There had been so much tension. We'd had a really rough edit. Some other things had happened in our personal lives at the same time. It just all came together. We had to step back and just start talking about our business and our roles in that. Once we ironed all that out, we've gotten to a much better place. I'm not saying we don't ever have an argument, but we definitely have avoided many as a result.

Liz: I think too, if I could add Lisa, I think one thing --

Lisa: -- You can.

Liz: Thank you. I think one thing we've gotten better at is -- I think it's like a seesaw and we lose the balance. Sometimes we're just all business all the time, and we kind of forget that we're best friends who like having a good time together. I think we've gotten better at balancing those things. It just became all business. We're still friends that need each other and need that support and need to talk about our teenagers being idiots or whatever. Sorry, teenagers, if you're listening.

Lisa: They're not listening. They do not care what we're doing.

Liz: They're not listening. They are idiots, at least mine are. [laughter] I think the best thing we've done -- honestly, probably just in the last six months I think we've gotten better. That's how we're always evolving, is getting better at that balance of friendship versus business. I think we're both a lot more fulfilled with each other. We sound like we're married and we're in therapy right now, Lisa.

Lisa: I know we do, or in couple's counseling or something.

Zibby: Tell me more about that. No, I'm kidding.

Lisa: Let's move on. Let's talk more about the fights.

Zibby: I had the lovely ladies who wrote the book called Work Wife on my show, Claire and Erica. You should maybe just pick that book up because it's all about this. It's about how to navigate the complexity of female friendship at the same time as running a business together.

Liz: I'm going to.

Lisa: That's going to be helpful because we're always learning.

Zibby: I also feel that creating, being creative together, is different. It's not like you guys are producing sweaters or something. It's stuff that usually lives in somebody's head. To make that a joint production, that's tricky. I'm in such awe of all coauthors. Who writes what? How do you do it? How do you actually do it? Do you use Google Docs? Do you get together in person? Do you split chapters? How did you do How to Save a Life?

Lisa: We do not get together in person. The Nanny Diaries girls told us once that they sit at a computer together and write every line together. Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen are on a call all the time doing their lines together. We're very different than that. We separately will write. I'll write a chapter. This is what we came up with years ago. It's just never changed. I open a Word document. I write a chapter. I send it to Liz. She'll edit it and send it back. We do keep passing it back and forth until we feel like it's in a good place. Then Liz will write a chapter. We'll just do the whole book that way. As far as what we're going to put in each chapter, we do sit and map out maybe five or six chapters at a time, but it's still very loose. It's up to the person writing the chapter. There's a goal to accomplish within it, but it's up to them how to get to that goal. It just works for us. I know there's fancy writing tools online and things like that, but we're old-school Word doc girls, until the very end and then we do move over to Google Docs.

Liz: I do use Dropbox.

Lisa: That's new, yes. That's new. Then we do Google Doc at the end because during edits -- we used to edit separately and send it back and forth. Then one day someone was like, there's something called Google Docs. We're like, oh, my god, that's great. I think it was one of our kids.

Zibby: The other day, I accidentally deleted my whole team's Google Doc with the entire schedule of every podcast and every everything because I had deleted someone who left our business. I didn't know that it was attached. Mental note, if you ever change your email address or something, save that document. You can get it back after the mistake for a little bit. Just heads up on the Google Docs. In terms of when you generate new ideas, I know you said this one, you were hanging in the pool and it just came to, is it always like that? It seems like you guys have an easy rapport that things just bubble up. Do you ever get stuck on one of you wants to write something really badly and the other is like, no, I don't want to write that book?

Lisa: The cruise ship idea, you could tell her about the dueling piano people. Anyway, I'll let you.

Liz: Typically, we'll throw out a lot of ideas. I think at this point she knows if I'm into an idea and I know she's -- she's mentioning the cruise ship. We went on a trip to Europe two years ago with our family. We were on a cruise ship. There was these dueling piano people. The guy and the girl, clearly there was something going on. I was really into it. Maybe I was just drunk every night when we were there. I could tell she wasn't into it, so I dropped it. She wanted to do this weird Blake Crouch rip-off book because I was in the pharmaceutical industry for twenty years. She knew I wasn't into it. We don't argue. We kind of just move on because when the right idea -- I'm getting goosebumps as I say this. When the right idea comes, we both know. It's something that intangible. I don't even know how to explain it, but we both know. It's like, yes, we're writing that. Let's go. Lisa mentioned earlier, the creative is not what we fight about. We fight about someone sending an eyeball emoji in a text. You're like, what are you trying to say? The eyeball emoji? We're dumb. We fight about stupid stuff when we're cranky or frustrated with our kids or something. We take it out on each other.

Zibby: I love how in this book your character Dom is always wondering what people are thinking, analyzing the relationships between everybody else. I'm always doing that myself. If I'm on vacation, you're like, ooh, is that the nanny? Who could that be?

Liz: We do that all the time.

Lisa: I was just on vacation. I had that exact "Is that the nanny?" situation. My husband and I, it was five days and we still don't know. Was it the nanny or was it the mom? We do not know.

Zibby: Sometimes I even do that to myself. What must people think? I wonder if other people are wondering if this is my nanny or if this is my sister and if they would ever be able to guess that it's actually my sister-in-law or whatever it is. It's so great to give a trait like that to the character as a journalistic tool for how he sees the world and everything, just very relatable.

Lisa: Thanks for noticing that. That was a fun little thing to put in for him.

Zibby: I know this is a bigger fate-based question, but do you believe that things are meant to happen, like, Mia's going to die every day no matter what happens and that's just fate, or that we are actually in control of what's going on on a fundamental level?

Lisa: I feel like this is more your wheelhouse, Liz.

Liz: Yeah, I knew. I was watching your eyes. I knew you were going to pass this one to me. I think it's both. I think that sometimes things are meant to be. I also think our energy and our attitude determines what we're attracting to ourselves. I tell my kids this all the time. If you say, I'm going to fail, or I'm going to do this, you're sending all that energy to there. I think it's a little bit of both. I think sometimes things are fated, but I do think we have control over attracting positive energy for positive results in our own life. It's something that we try to do a lot. You should see, we have a whole manifestation board. I'm pointing here because mine's right here. Really try to attract that positive energy and bring it to other people and situations because who knows, right? You might as well just be positive because we don't really know.

Zibby: Very true. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Lisa: I would say write what you want to write, first and foremost. Do not try to chase the market. Do not try to write what the latest hit book was. That was a mistake we made very early on. That's why it took us three manuscripts to eventually get there. That would be my advice. I'll throw it to Liz now.

Liz: I would say just keep writing. As Lisa mentioned, we got our book deal with Simon & Schuster on our third manuscript. It had been five years. We both were pretty successful in our own careers, Lisa in TV and I mentioned myself in pharma. I was done. Lisa really pushed that she wanted to write one more book. Had we not done that, we wouldn't be here. I was like, hey, I'm really good at this. This is a great job. I have two kids. I don't know if I need to do this. I think you have to push through that. I'm mentoring someone right now who's in their third manuscript. I'm really pushing her because she's talented. It just reminds me so much of us. I think people forget too that even as published authors, we're dealing with rejection all the time. I think they think once they get on this path of being a published writer they never get rejected again and it's amazing. No, no, no. You're going to still get rejected all the time in all these little ways. That's just part of life and part of this business. I think that aspiring writers need to remember that. You're always being rejected. It's just you've got to push through it.

Zibby: Very true. I've actually decided that I think I'm going to start taking a survey because it seems like everybody who sells a novel has had two rejected first. It just seems that way.

Lisa: Or a bunch of rejections before they ultimately finally got there, but it was fifty, sixty like a JK Rowling or whatever. It's true. You just have to keep pushing forward. I'm sure there's a lot of us who have manuscripts sitting in the drawer.

Zibby: What's your next project? What are you working on next? What's it about?

Lisa: We can't talk about it too much because we're just finishing it up and we're not sure what's going to happen with it. It is in the same vein as How to Save a Life. We don't even have a set title. It's in the same vein. We write a lot about regret and fate. Actually, to your question that you asked, it kind of asks that question. That's really the narrative question of the book. I hadn’t thought about it that way, so thank you. It's really, is something fated or can you control it? That’s the premise of the entire book.

Zibby: Ooh, I can't wait to read that one.

Lisa: We're excited for you to read it.

Zibby: Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for all the stuff you also do for authors. I am so glad to be joined by people who enjoy interviewing other authors as much as I do. I think it's super fun.

Lisa: Thank you for all that you do.

Liz: Thank you.

Lisa: It's amazing. We're so appreciative. Thank you for having us today.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care. Thanks, ladies. Bye.

Liz: Bye.

Lisa: Bye.

Jane Rosen, ELIZA STARTS A RUMOR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jane: It is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: It's so true.

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

Zibby: Are you in any message groups yourself?

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

Zibby: -- You had to research, right?

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

Zibby: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jane: Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: That’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: I did, yeah.

Jane: That's so exciting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Exactly. There's nothing.

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

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

Jane: Me too. Thank you so much.

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

Jane: Thank you.

Zibby: Thanks, Jane.

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

Zibby: Okay. Bye.

Jane: Bye.