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Jen Gotch, THE UPSIDE OF BEING DOWN

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Jen Gotch, THE UPSIDE OF BEING DOWN

Jen: The book itself was, I wanted to share my stories in the hopes that it would help people that are struggling with mental health issues feel less alone, also speak to entrepreneurs. I share a lot about building my brand, Ban.do, and then offer up some potential solutions along the way. Really, the intention was just to build self-awareness in the reader. I feel like after twenty years of therapy, I had some wisdom that I wanted to impart and to do it in a way that -- I feel like my approach is probably more lighthearted than most for a difficult subject matter but still in treating it with respect. I just wanted an accessible mental health memoir.

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Janice Kaplan, THE GENIUS OF WOMEN

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Janice Kaplan, THE GENIUS OF WOMEN

Janice: One of the wonderful women I interviewed, Meg Urry, who had been a NASA scientist and was hired away by Yale to be the first head of the physics department, she was telling me about a meeting she was at at Yale with a group of tenured professors. She started the meeting by asking them all to mention -- it was a group of women tenured professors -- by asking them to all say what they were an expert in. She said the meeting started and the first woman said, "Well, I wouldn't call myself an expert, but my field where I'm really good is..." Each woman did some version of that same comment. Meg said she was outraged. Being a tenured professor means you're an expert in a field. The currency of academia is expertise. Even in something as straightforward as this, women are afraid to say, "Yeah, I'm darn good at this." It's something that I learned as I was doing this book. I've always been self-deprecating. I've always thought it was a way to ingratiate yourself and to make people like you, to be a little bit self-deprecating. I'm not going to do that anymore.

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Stephanie Wrobel, DARLING ROSE GOLD

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Stephanie Wrobel, DARLING ROSE GOLD

Stephanie: I first found out about Munchausen by proxy, which is what Patty has, from my best friend who's an elementary school psychologist in Colorado. She unfortunately has experience with this syndrome through her work with her students and their parents. She told me about it. I was immediately riveted and horrified. I went down this rabbit hole of research. I was really surprised to find that the perpetrators are typically women, and often mothers. We think of this mother-child bond as sacred, but it's not in these cases. I wanted to explore why that was. Even though Rose Gold is the titular character, it was really Patty who I was interested in getting in her mindset, figuring out, does she know that she's lying? Does she honestly believe she's doing what's best for her kid? It was the why behind these people's behavior.

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Anne Bogel, DON'T OVERTHINK IT

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Anne Bogel, DON'T OVERTHINK IT

Anne: When I started writing, I thought that I would write the things I knew about and the stories that I had that I wanted to tell. I've realized over the year that I write to figure out a certain topic or I write to figure out what I think, this is a topic, as you know, as you've read, this is a topic that has mattered to me for a long time.

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Cécile David-Weill, PARENTS UNDER THE INFLUENCE

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Cécile David-Weill, PARENTS UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Cécile: The point of the book was to share my experience as a parent and to have it cross-examined by the specialist to which I talked during the very serious research I did for years. I put all this in very regular mom words. The book is about the huge gap between the usual stuff we're told about parenting, things like all you need is love or trust your gut, and the reality of parenting which I found out from my own experience is much more complicated, anyway for me. Of course, love is totally indispensable. It's crucial, but it's not enough. You need also, as in any relationship I think, guidelines and advice and work because love can hurt even if it's well-intended. As for the gut part, I thought it was the expression of our love for our children when I was thinking, trust your gut. In fact, I found out that it is more the reproduction of our own upbringing.

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Glory Edim, WELL-READ BLACK GIRL

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Glory Edim, WELL-READ BLACK GIRL

Glory: This all started from me developing this community, Well-Read Black Girl, online. I had this love for books that I had read in my childhood and at my college, Howard University. I wanted to share that same feeling of being this well-read, educated, vivacious, curious black girl in the world. I felt like there weren’t enough representations of black characters. By starting a book club, starting this online platform on Instagram and Twitter, I was able to pull everyone together. We were just sharing the love of our first books, whether it was Toni Morrison or Alice Walker or Maya Angelou. We were having these great conversations about what it means to be in a black woman in the world and what it means to be sometimes feelings a little bit isolated and how we can come together and change the perceptions of what it meant to be a black woman. It really, really started because my partner made me this shirt that said Well-Read Black Girl. I would wear it on the subway. People would start having conversations with me and talking to me. I was like, there is something here. I want to really elaborate and expand what this means to be a well-read person. Now it's turned into this whole literary movement from that one shirt and that one idea. It's really grown into this whole other new experience.

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Joanna Guest, FOLDED WISDOM

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Joanna Guest, FOLDED WISDOM

Joanna: Folded Wisdom is an illustrated story. I like to throw in the word illustrated to give people a sense of how much color is in the book. It's the story of the morning notes my dad wrote to my brother Theo and me every morning before we went to school. The notes started in '95, not to give away our ages or anything, but they started in 1995 when my brother was in preschool and I was in the second grade. They continued every school morning from then until we both graduated from high school. The book is obviously centered around my dad and the story of how he managed to write these notes and what the lessons were inside. I would be remiss if I didn't shout out the unsung hero of the whole thing who's truly my mother who managed to, after all these years, save them somewhere in the house. My mom sifted them all out and somehow - I think my back-of-the-envelope math says that he probably wrote us like 4,800 notes. We have a little more than 3,500. It's very wild.

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Alexandra Silber, WHITE HOT GRIEF PARADE

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Alexandra Silber, WHITE HOT GRIEF PARADE

Alexandra: White Hot Grief Parade is a memoir about the six months around the death of my father when I was eighteen years old. Beyond that plot point, I tell it in a very up-to-the-moment blogger voice. I break all the rules, I think, of writing memoir. There's a maze. There's a word search. There's things that are written as plays as well as more traditional prose. I think that's the parade. It's that when you're in the middle of a grief storm, it feels like one thing after another is hitting you. I wanted the style of the book and the format of the book to reflect that bombastic experience. It really focuses on my relationship to father, obviously, my relationship to my extended family. The real stars of the book are my remarkable eighteen-year-old friends and my mother. This point at the crossroads of childhood and adulthood, what does one do when they're hit with this thing that every culture fears the most? It doesn't even matter what animal you are, actually. Every time period, every era, every socioeconomic class, every language spoken fears losing someone they love. Yet it's this thing that we don't talk about very often. We don't talk about it very well when we do talk about it. On top of all of that, there aren't a lot of resources for people in between childhood and adulthood. I wanted to make a point that young adults are remarkable. The big question of the book, I hope -- I don't necessarily address it directly, but I hope it emerges. What does it mean to stand back up? We hear so many books about how bad things are, chapters and chapters and chapters of describing the bad. Then you get this fast-forward moment where it's like, ten years later, here I am and I'm fine. But what happens in that fast-forward? What is it like to stand up? This book, hopefully, is an homage to that because it's very universal.

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Suzanne Falter, THE EXTREMELY BUSY WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SELF-CARE

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Suzanne Falter, THE EXTREMELY BUSY WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SELF-CARE

Suzanne: When I talked to really busy women, women with small kids who were also working full time or sometimes even super busy retirees, remarkably, they all kind of had the same issue. We have this inner dialogue about how we have to push and strive and achieve and do more and more. Teal was all about undoing and being very present. One of the things she wrote on many pages in this journal was "Be, and you know" or "Just be." She used to say that to me. She’d be like, "Mom, just be." Needless to say, I had no idea what she was talking about it. It was very funny, that whole "Just be" thing. Now what I really know is that I am here to do this healing work because I've gotten so much out of it. My life is dramatically different. I'm in a great marriage now and living a blissful life. I can only put it that way. There's balance. I had to learn how to slow down and tune in and listen to myself and be able to answer the question, what do you need right now? a remarkably difficult question for some of us to answer.

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Dolly Alderton, EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE

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Dolly Alderton, EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE

Dolly: I've always had lots of different things on the go in my early twenties. In my twenties, I had an actual grown-up office job where I was a TV producer. Then I was a freelancer writer in the evening and at weekends. Then I went solely over to freelance writing when I was twenty-six. Beyond that, I started a podcast four years ago. Then I did a newsletter for a while. Then I also was writing scripts. I've always wanted to straddle lots of different types of writing and conversations and interviewing formats. One wasn't really enough to keep me stimulated initially. I'm like that across every aspect of my life. I've always been someone who really just wanted to do it all intensely and feel a lot, a lot of the time. I really channeled a lot of that ravenousness into pursuing lots of different avenues with work.

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Sarah Hurwitz, HERE ALL ALONG

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Sarah Hurwitz, HERE ALL ALONG

Sarah: Totally. So many of the trends in modern spirituality, we've been on that in Judaism for thousands of years. The first prayer that traditionally observant Jews say when they wake up in the morning, it starts "Modeh Ani," which is "Grateful am I." Literally, the first word you utter from your mouth is grateful. You basically sing a prayer that says, I am so grateful for my life. Gratitude journals are great. I'm so glad that people have joined the party, but we've been here for centuries, if not millennia. Meditation and mindfulness is great. There is a Jewish meditation tradition as well that goes back thousands of years. Just realizing so many Jews like me, citing myself, we kind of think, oh, Judaism, it's old and stale. It's not meaningful. We go to all these other traditions to find meaning, but we have it right here in Judaism.

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Andi Buchanan, THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING

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Andi Buchanan, THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING

Andi: I had to do a lot of research on my own life. I had to look at medical notes from doctors' visits. I had to look at the CT and MRI and other procedure results and interpret those. I had to look back on emails I'd sent to my family in moments of lucidity just giving them updates. I had some text messages I'd saved. When I was trying to look for clues about what exactly I'd experienced, I even came across some writing I'd tried to do, which was completely nonsensical. I didn't even remember having done it. I had to do a bit of investigation. Out of these breadcrumbs, I had the dates and times of appointments, and emails to friends and family about the results, and some other things that I'd jotted down at the time. I was able to kind of recreate that journey. It was tricky. For me, it called into question what I think is the real fundamental question of memoir anyway, which is, who is telling this story? How much of it is true? What is truth? What is the self? Who's the I that's doing this storytelling? I talk about that a lot in the book because it's so interesting to me and because my experience was very much about that, that questioning of, who am I if I can't think, if I can't use words? I'm a writer. Who am I? If I'm not there, who am I?

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Shonda Moralis, BREATHE MAMA BREATHE

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Shonda Moralis, BREATHE MAMA BREATHE

Shonda: I was a skeptic when I started. I started mediating when [my daughter] was about three. I was a very devoted meditator. I took a class where the homework was to meditate for a half an hour every day. I'm a recovering perfectionistic and people-pleaser, so was like, okay, absolutely. I'm going to do my homework. I did. After just a few weeks, what I started to notice was that by slowing down just a notch, I was actually more productive and more efficient. I was a hard sell because I like to get things done, and I still do. Writing these books, we tend to write what we need to read and remember for ourselves. It's still that reminder for me too. I have to remind myself to hop off this hamster wheel and pause and take a few deep breaths or take a mindful break because if we don't, then the pace of our day just feels so frantic and urgent.

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Gigi Levangie, BEEN THERE, MARRIED THAT

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Gigi Levangie, BEEN THERE, MARRIED THAT

Gigi: It's basically a funny take on a ruthless Hollywood divorce. It's about a Hollywood writer who one night finds herself locked out of her own home. Afterwards, she has to navigate a high-stakes divorce with her OCD producer husband with the help of her jailbird sister. At the same time, she's dealing with perimenopause and a prepubescent teenager. Basically, it's hormones and divorce all at once. Yay.

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Siena and Mark Siegel, TO DANCE

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Siena and Mark Siegel, TO DANCE

Siena: To Dance is a memoir. It's about a ten-year period of my life growing up as a young ballet lover who started taking ballet and then fell in love with ballet and wanted to just continue doing it as much as possible, and coming to New York to train at the School of American Ballet, and doing that at a very interesting and unusual time in the history of ballet where George Balanchine was still alive. He was still running the company that the school is associated with, the New York City Ballet. People were coming to New York from Soviet Union and defecting. It was all these amazing dancers arriving there at that particular moment in time. I was this little girl just swept up into it all and getting to dance with some of them in the same performances as a child at New York City Ballet.

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Dan Peres, AS NEEDED FOR PAIN

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Dan Peres, AS NEEDED FOR PAIN

Dan: As Needed for Pain is about my struggle with a massive addiction to opiates, prescription painkillers. The major part of my addiction, which lasted for about seven years, overlapped with my time as being the editor-in-chief of Details magazine, which closed in 2015 but was published by Condé Nast. I had this really great and exciting job in media that had me visible to the world and interacting with lots of people, but I had a huge secret. I was a drug addict.

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Angela Himsel, A RIVER COULD BE A TREE

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Angela Himsel, A RIVER COULD BE A TREE

Angela: It's a memoir. It's about growing up. I'm the seventh of eleven kids. I grew up in Southern Indiana in what some people might consider a cult. Let's call it an alternative kind of religion. It was called the Worldwide Church of God. We believed that the world was coming to an end any second. We were going to be spirited away to Petra in Jordan when the world came to an end. I grew up that way. Through many twists and turns, I ultimately converted to Judaism. It's about that particular religious journey. I would hope that it's also about the possibly of change in any sense of the word.

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Jennifer Gefsky & Stacey Delo, YOUR TURN

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Jennifer Gefsky & Stacey Delo, YOUR TURN

Stacey: One of the things we've found is that in our business, Après, we focus primarily on women who have taken career breaks and helping them get back into the workforce regardless of how long those breaks have been. What's interesting is when you look at the data, there are fifteen million working women with children under the age of eighteen. The press focuses a lot on maternity leave and the need for paid leave, which we strongly agree with, and then that return back. Then we focus a lot on women returning to work. Yet there is this large swath of women in the middle, in that messy middle as we call it in the book, who are trying to make these decisions about whether to take a career break, whether to go part time, whether to go freelance. Often, they're left feeling very stressed about those decisions and what the opportunity costs are going to be when they make those decisions. Like Jen said, if you see the cover of our book, it's a career dial with many stops along the way. We wanted people to understand that they can turn it. You can go part time and still get a full-time job later when you're ready. You can take a career break and still get back into the workforce. Giving women these options and understanding that they have them and then how to make those decisions is really what the book is about.

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Caroline de Maigret, OLDER, BUT BETTER, BUT OLDER

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Zibby Owens: I'm here today with Caroline de Maigret who is the author, with Sophie Mas, of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are from 2014 and most recently, Older, but Better, but Older. She is an international model and has been a Chanel ambassador since 2013. Caroline is also a music producer at Bonus Track Records and a fashion video producer. She is a children's and women's rights activist. Caroline currently lives in Paris with her twelve-year-old son.

 

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

 

Caroline de Maigret: Thanks for having me.

 

Zibby: Caroline just got off the flight from Paris, through an hour-and-a-half line at immigration, and has landed at my desk. This is major bonus points for you for doing this. I am so impressed.

 

Caroline: I didn't want to miss the opportunity to see you. You have to be nice to me because my mind is a bit in the clouds still.

 

Zibby: I will go very easy on you. I just like listening to your beautiful accent. That's the best part. I don't think anybody else from France has been on my show. Sorry for whoever I just offended. [laughs]

 

Caroline: You know what? I thought the writer from The School of Life.

 

Zibby: Oh, Alain de Botton.

 

Caroline: Alain de Botton, he's not French?

 

Zibby: He's British.

 

Caroline: He is?

 

Zibby: Yeah.

 

Caroline: He just has a French name.

 

Zibby: Maybe his family was from France. He definitely lives in London now.

 

Caroline: He went to Cambridge or studied in Cambridge or teach.

 

Zibby: He identifies as British. Let's go with that. Anyway, please tell listeners about your latest book, Older, but Better, but Older. This is your latest book. What is it about?

 

Caroline: It's about how you're just living your life. You're in your thirties. Then suddenly you have little surprises one after the other of the dark signs of age, might it be from people around you or society, but also just you and your body. The idea was to give an honest and fun way of seeing it. There are some great sides about aging. There are some not-so-fun sides. We are always aware of what it is when you become old, like in your sixties, you know biologically. You learn about it at school. People tell you what happens, but not the forties. It's a strange feeling that's not always very nice.

 

Zibby: I agree. I'm forty-three.

 

Caroline: I'm forty-four.

 

Zibby: There you go. In reading this, basically everything I was agreeing with in the whole book. I'm like, oh gosh, oh yes, oh this too. There were so many funny things. I want to talk about how you decided on the format. I found that super interesting about your book. It's almost a multimedia type of book in that you have, not multimedia, but a range of formats. You have poetry. You have essays. You have lists. You have photos. You have guidebook options to Paris and back. You have all sorts of different things. Then you have pictures almost like Instagram Story-ish posts. It's the perfect book for an attention-starved busy person, which is part of why I liked it so much. How did you come up with this idea and this way of telling this story?

 

Caroline: I think I know no other way to do it. That's how my life is. I'm a music producer. I write books. I won't say I'm a writer, but I write books. I'm a Chanel ambassador. I'm a mother. I direct videos. I do all these things. I love to play with formats and do long things and short things and having ideas and put them down. That's why sometimes I want to tell a long story and sometimes I just want to make you laugh with really short poems. I don't know. [laughs] That's how I am.

 

Zibby: How was the collaboration? This is your second book that you wrote with Sophie Mas. How does that work? Do you sit in a room with her and write it all down? Do you email each other? What's the actual process the two of you go through to write these books together?

 

Caroline: What we do is we meet each other. We start talking about life, what happened last week and then the months before, stories, love stories, stories at work. Little by little, you realize that lots of things you're going through, like neuroses and fears, are often linked to your age. That's why it was very interesting. When you talk, you realize that sometimes most of your actions will be dependent on your age. For example, you've learned how to live with your neuroses, but sometimes you don't. It's a process. We do this. Then she'll go, "I want to write about [indiscernible]," because she went through it. I'll give her anecdotes I have from friends, stories. That's how we do. She's going to go and write it at her house, then send it by email. I correct it. She does the same for my text. It becomes like one voice.

 

Zibby: That sounds great.

 

Caroline: What's good is when you talk about a subject that's so large, the age, it's nice to have different voices to make it a bit more round.

 

Zibby: To have a sense of humor about it is also really helpful.

 

Caroline: That's the only thing I've found to make it okay. It's life. It's the pass of life. It's completely fine. You just have to get used to all the new surprises all the time. If you learn how to laugh about it, then it makes it easier.

 

Zibby: Do you think that because you were this international modeling superstar, that your aging has been harder? Nobody's looking at me or most people, I would argue, critically about their looks as intensely as they might somebody who had made a profession out of how they look. Do you think it affects people who are more forward-facing in their appearance?

 

Caroline: I don't think so. I think it affects the teenager in me. Suddenly, I'm not part of the youth club anymore while I still think I am. The fact that I'm still being taken, my photo, and do Chanel campaigns and stuff actually helps me. I'm like, I'm still okay. If they still want me, I'm still okay. At the same time, it makes me proud as well to be -- I'm still really young, I think, to myself. That's how I feel. It makes me proud to keep on going and to still be a woman that other women can look up to as an example, like, you're still okay when you're forty-five because you're still in fashion and your pictures are being taken.

 

Zibby: What's been the hardest part of aging for you aside from not being in the club?

 

Caroline: While I was writing the book, I had a midlife crisis. It was a few different things. The main thing was I felt one day that it was the last chance for me to change everything, to change of boyfriend. I've been with my man for fifteen years. We have a son. I was like, oh, my god, I'm going to be with the same man all my life. I can it be the goal of some people, but to me it was so frightening. It's my last years of being sexy, of being able to do whatever I want or whatever, to change jobs, to change everything. Then it took me a year to went through it with anxiety attacks and all this. It was all crazy. I was going out every night. Then I was like, wow, actually I'm fine. [laughs] It's fine to be with the same person. I can change if I want to. I realized how it was all cuckoo. It was almost like a hypochondriac. It was very megalomaniac. I understood it was something, I was going from a woman to the next woman. I do that every ten years. I always have a little burnout every ten years.

 

Zibby: Did you decide to stay with him, or you broke up?

 

Caroline: Yes.

 

Zibby: You did? You're still together?

 

Caroline: Yeah, we're still together. He's amazing. He's been so nice. I feel so much more alive since all those questions I went through. It was very interesting.

 

Zibby: You started the book with the section, which was hilarious, called "You know things aren't the way they used to be." Then you add all these things. Some of my favorites were, "You no longer know who the hip singers and actors are." I read Us Weekly. I basically stopped reading it because I don't know who anybody is. I feel terrible. My twelve-year-old daughter is telling me who the people are.

 

Caroline: I have to say, I kind of lie to my son sometimes.

 

Zibby: That you know?

 

Caroline: Yeah. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah.

 

Zibby: I should do that. She sees right through me, though. I'm the worst liar.

 

Caroline: I don't think we should. I'll get over it at one point and I'll be completely [indiscernible/laughter]. It's just strange because age is a number. It's your bones and your cells aging. Your mind, your mind is aging. I learn so much. I love where I am. The serenity of it is amazing. Knowledge is the key of everything. I love where I am, but it's just so strange when your body is aging to someone else while your mind is still, it's not aging. It's getting knowledge, but it's not really aging. That’s the problem.

 

Zibby: My dad is in his seventies. He says he looks in the mirror sometimes and is like, "Ah! What's with the white hair?" Inside, he feels like he's twenty-five. Then sometimes he looks at me and he's like, "How can I have a daughter your age? I feel so young." It's true. Some days I'm like, aren't I still twenty-two?

 

Caroline: It's completely fine. It's just to have to get used to it, to all those ideas of not being a youngster anymore. It's fine. That's what the book is about, is taking a fun look of it.

 

Zibby: You also had this whole section which I think was my favorite, "All the times you tell yourself you're exercising when you're actually not." Today, I was literally at the Natural History Museum with my five-year-old son.

 

Caroline: I love this place.

 

Zibby: I was like, this is great. I'm getting a little workout here walking around to the cafeteria to buy animal crackers. [laughs] This is not a workout. I used to work out all the time. Oh, my gosh, it's amazing what you can convince yourself to do. Do you still work out? You must.

 

Caroline: No, I've never worked out. I started now because I understood I had to just to be healthy, and healthy in my mind as well. It feels good to the brain and just for the body to be not too stuck. No, I've never done it before. I hate it. I take no pleasure whatsoever in exercising. People tell you with time it will come. It never did.

 

Zibby: Was it you or Sophie in the book who's the one doing the yoga? Is it you? One of you said that in one of the tradeoffs -- there were all these catch-22s. The tradeoff is the pain of having to do yoga and the boredom that comes with it.

 

Caroline: It was me. I did a lot of yoga when I had my burnout ten years ago. Oh, god, I sound like a crazy woman. I did it. It was so good. I felt so good and so relieved. Every time, it was hell to go there. I hated it. I was so bored.

 

Zibby: Not for everybody. It's not for everybody. I also found it really interesting, your chapter on owning your insecurities. Maybe this was Sophie, about her butt. Was that you?

 

Caroline: No, it's me. That's how I found my style.

 

Zibby: You opened the chapter by saying, "I don't like my butt. I just don't. I've disliked it since the summer I was seventeen when a guy accosted me at the club to inform me that my ass hung low."

 

Caroline: [laughs] It's true.

 

Zibby: Some random guy just came up to you?

 

Caroline: Yeah, I think he was flirting. You know how you take the power over someone by saying something not nice, so then they're actually cool people because they're nice enough to talk to you while you're not that good? They break you to take the power. That was his strike.

 

Zibby: I was going through this whole essay thinking, oh, my gosh, if she hates her butt, the rest of us are just doomed.

 

Caroline: No, no, I hide it really well. It's fine. It's actually a section in the book on style and how you grow from flaws to find yourself. You hear what people say to you. You should not listen to guys in clubs who say stupid shit.

 

Zibby: You pretty much probably should not listen to guys in clubs, period, full stop. [laughter] Go on.

 

Caroline: It's more about how you listen to how people react. It's a style section. This guy who told me about my butt -- I had never looked in the mirror. I've never really looked at myself in the mirror. It was more about seeing if I had toothpaste around my mouth after brushing my teeth. Then I realized, oh, my god, it's true. Then I became really aware of that. I started making a whole masculine androgynous look. People reacted so well on it that I was like, wow. It was actually quite a good idea to go on that look, just to find bigger pants but that was not baggy pants. I went men's pants. It went really well. People were all excited. I was like, okay, that could be a look. It's fun that it went from a flirt line in a club to actually my style that I kept for the last twenty-five years.

 

Zibby: You have a whole philosophy of the difference between fashion and style which your first book dealt with more, correct?

 

Caroline: Mm-hmm.

 

Zibby: What's the difference, fashion and style? How do you keep your own style?

 

Caroline: I think style is about who you are and how you want to be perceived. It's part of the knowledge you have, I reckon that the books you read and how you feed yourself, watching movies and the exhibitions you go to or the painting you see. It feeds, probably unconsciously, your taste and your knowledge. I know that quite early, Katharine Hepburn had an impact in me aesthetically, style-wise with her high-waisted pants and her white shirts, always a little bit masculine actually but yet super sexy but very empowering. It's funny how it just melts on you. Knowledge melts on your taste. You understand better, who you are and how you want to look like. I would say that's the difference. It would be knowledge and being true to yourself and who you are.

 

Zibby: Okay, I'll try to do that more. Are there any items that you can't live without, either clothing items, makeup items? What do you depend on the most?

 

Caroline: Oh, god. Is my son an item? [laughs]

 

Zibby: Sure.

 

Caroline: I guess my leather jacket is like an armor. I always feel invincible when I wear that. Usually when I wear it, you know I'm not in a super good mood. It feels like nobody can hurt me or something. I'm not very attached to material things, to be honest.

 

Zibby: I like the insight into the jacket. I wonder if other people have those things, like big red flags to people who know them well. I'm trying to think if I have anything.

 

Caroline: I do have a few pieces. I think you do without knowing. You have the few pieces that when you are not feeling so good in the morning, you know those pieces will be okay. You know they're comfortable. You know they’ll fit you. A white shirt, I know is always --

 

Zibby: -- This is like my extra-large pajama pants and my son's extra-large school sweatshirt. That's my "I'm in a bad mood. Stay away" type of thing, which is not half as chic as your outfit. What's coming next for you? You're so busy. You have so many different things. What are you most excited about that's coming up?

 

Caroline: Directing. It fulfils everything I like, image and telling stories and people. I love it. I've never felt so at the right place than when I direct. I've done fashion films for now, for Chanel and other friends. Now I'm writing my first short movie. I'm producing it. I'm directing it quite soon. That's really exciting. It's a fiction. I'm very excited and very excited as well for future.

 

Zibby: What advice do you have for aging women who may not be supermodels? We're all going through the same thing at the same time, like you say in your book, finding the stray white hairs and all these little things that are creeping up, the wrinkles and all these very unpleasant, annoying, getting in the way of daily life things that are starting to happen. Do you have any advice?

 

Caroline: I'd say that first of all, perfection doesn't exist. Don't run after it. Take the pressure off. If not, you're just frustrated all the time. Get used to the idea of aging. Feed yourself with other things than looking at yourself in the mirror. When your centers of interest are stronger, physically doesn't become as important. Also, I say that a sense of humor in that always helps. First of all, it makes you shine. I think that's how you gain everybody in the room. I always say that, at least in fashion, all the biggest muses were never the most beautiful girls. They were the witty or the most [indiscernible] women. It's more into what you have to say and behave than your age, really. It's just a number. Also when you have a sense of humor, people can't talk about it because you talk about it first. When you laugh about your white hair or whatever, your diet, if you make jokes before everyone, they can't use it, which is a good trick.

 

Zibby: That is a good trick. I use that trick too. That's a good one. How about any parting advice to aspiring authors, somebody who's looking to undertake a project like yours?

 

Caroline: Parting advice?

 

Zibby: Any advice to aspiring authors?

 

Caroline: Sorry, I thought partying. I was like, whoa. Vodka. [laughs]

 

Zibby: No, parting like at the end of our -- we are about to part. Oh, partying advice. Do I need partying advice? No, I think I'm good. I'll read you this question. Do you have advice to aspiring authors who want to take on a book project like the one that you just did?

 

Caroline: I have never been, in my life, scared of failure. It doesn't do anything on me. What I love to do is create and do. I always do, do, do. There are lots of stuff that never went through, or that went through but that didn't work out. Just go for it. Do your things. When I lived in the nineties in New York, that's where I got that energy from, which is not French at all, which is just do. You can do it. Whatever happens, we'll see. You're allowed to do it. That's the biggest trick. Then you just put your ideas down and you go from that.

 

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

 

Caroline: Thanks for having me.

 

Zibby: I really appreciate it.

 

Caroline: Thank you.

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Dr. Mark McConville, FAILURE TO LAUNCH

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Dr. Mark McConville, FAILURE TO LAUNCH

Mark: It's a book for parents, and specifically parents of kids who are entering emerging adulthood, being eighteen to thirty, roughly. That first part of emerging adulthood is usually referred to as the launching substage. That substage has, actually, a curriculum to it. There are things we want to see kids doing. We know if they're doing them, it portends well for where they're going to end up by age thirty. When they're not doing them, I encounter parents who are just perplexed. The fact is there is no handbook for, how do you parent a twentysomething? Today's generation of parents are much more, I don't want to say saddled, but they are engaged with their kids longer because kids need support longer, given all of the particulars about education and the economy. They're left still being close to the action, seeing their kid's behavior, unless the kid is doing it on his or her own. They're stumped as to how to intervene, how to exert influence, how to do it in a way that is constructive rather than just creating conflict and friction.

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