Anne Helen Petersen, CAN'T EVEN

Zibby Owens: Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Anne Helen Petersen: Of course. Oh, my gosh, look at your beautiful library.

Zibby: Thank you. Pride and joy. [laughs]

Anne: It's great that you can have it as your background on your Zoom call so that more people can see it.

Zibby: It's true. I know. The rest of this pandemic, I've been out on Long Island. I ordered a bookcase because I had nothing to showcase books at all. This is my whole built-in library. I was like, what a waste, all those months. Anyway, congratulations on Can't Even. So exciting. I saw you were all dolled up on Instagram, which is always nice to be able to -- [laughs].

Anne: It was honestly the first time that I've done the full deal since May when I had to do a video appearance for an Adobe conference or something. I didn't recognize myself. I was like, what is happening? I actually think I should do it for no reason a little bit more often because it reminds me of a different face that I have. [laughter]

Zibby: Tell listeners, please, what Can't Even is about and how it was based off of an article. What made you want to write it? I know it flowed out of you. I know you talked about it in the book. It just came out of your fingers. Tell us a little more about how it all got started.

Anne: I was really, really burnt out. This was the fall of 2018 leading up to and then after the midterm election. I think I had been burnt out for a really long time. It's just that I refused to recognize what I was feeling as being burnt out. I was like, this is just how I work. I had reached a point where I was getting mad at my editors and crying. One of my editors was like, "You're burnt out. You need to take some time." I was like, "No." [laughs] I had taken two days, Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Of course I didn't need any more time. The thing that I thought was wrong with me is that I couldn't figure out how to do my errands, just the pettily stuff at the bottom of your to-do list. I just couldn't do it. I was like, I'll research that. I'll figure out what's going on with that. As I researched it, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm totally burnt out. All roads led to burnout.

Zibby: By the way, the things that you mention in the book on your to-do list that you weren’t getting to, they don't even make it onto my list. The things you were beating yourself up about, I'm like, resoling my shoes? What? No. [laughs] It's not even in the realm of possibilities. The fact that you even had it on a list I think was a step up.

Anne: I love these boots. I want to wear these boots for the rest of my life. They need to get resoled. Otherwise, the cobbler gives you dirty looks when you bring them in. I don't want the scorn of the cobbler. All signs pointed to burnout. Still, the diagnosis of burnout as it was clinically described did not match what I was feeling exactly. Clinically, they usually describe it as collapse. I wasn't collapsing. I was still going. I wanted to try to figure out how to maybe expand that definition to describe a more societal instead of just clinical diagnosis. I try to look at my own life and where I had learned to work all the time and really internalized that ethos and then extrapolated a little bit more onto the rest of my generation. It was a personal essay that was long. I thought that it would function like a lot of personal essays, a couple ten thousand people would read it. That was not the case. Seven million people read it. When I thought of the idea that I expand it into a book, it was really straightforward to expand it both in terms of historical rooting to look what happened in the economy and in changes in childrearing patterns and all that sort of thing in the post-war period that affected our parents and burnt out boomer parents, and then also expand it way past myself and try to decenter that white, middle-class experience that I had.

Zibby: You talked in the book about a lot of your own, as you mentioned, personal stuff. It started as a personal essay. Then you sprinkled in just a lot of experiences of your own like your parents' divorce. Tell me about how that exemplified this burnout, how systemic things in the environment and culture led to burnout culture now.

Anne: I read this really interesting book by Katherine Newman. It was published in, I think, the early nineties. It was about all of these different ways that boomer families oftentimes tried to compensate for ways that they were falling out of the middle class. So many boomer families, they had grown up in homes that had become middle class for the first time in the post-war period. Then just as boomers were entering the workplace in the 1970s, that economic stability started to disintegrate through a series of rolling recessions. You had these families -- she follows this one family, I remember, that had been a Wall Street banker, got laid off, but still lived at that level even though he was laid off because they didn't know how to live any other way but middle class, and went into significant credit card debt. I think that story will be familiar to anyone who's had financial insecurity but cannot fathom not living the way that they're living. I don't mean lavishly, necessarily, but just having the accoutrements of middle-class lifestyles, so a house that you own instead of rent. If you're living in a city, this is different. A house, cars, new clothes and gadgets and stuff for your kids, computers. There are ways that you could be so much more thrifty and really decrease your cost-of-living footprint, but that is unfathomable once you've come to that middle class. It's a real psychological burden to shift classes, to go downward.

To connect this to my parents' divorce, she has this whole chapter that is about what happened to women who got divorced during this period. They have incredible downward mobility because a lot of these boomer women stopped their jobs. This was one of the first generations that went, en masse, into the job market, but then many of them had taken a step back from the job market in order to raise their children and allowed their husbands' careers to take precedence. When they got divorced, whether the kids are in elementary school or in junior high, the income -- the wife doesn't necessarily have a career and can't restart her career where she left it or didn't have one in the first place. The husband still has a career and can just continue going on. They're living in two different houses, but they have to pay rent for two different spaces. The income level of that secondary house -- usually, the kids would either be primarily custody with their mom or splitting custody. The experience of being a kid in one of those households, it just teaches you as a millennial, as a gen Xer, it teaches you a lot of lessons about, this is what happens if you don't have a plan for yourself at all times, if you don't know how to work at all times. At any moment, this marriage could go under and you could find yourself financially afloat. I certainly internalized that idea. I tried to expand on it in the book.

Zibby: I know at the end you say you don't want to give an overwhelming list of tips and that those are kind of useless also. You do such a good job of outlining the hurdles. I feel like you did it with some -- you were sort of pissed off writing this book.

Anne: Oh, yeah.

Zibby: You were, not venting because it was so well-articulated, but it was more just like you're angry at the situation. You feel that there is sort of no way out unless everybody changes everything. That's tough. What do you think can actually help, or are you doomed? [laughs]

Anne: No, I don't think we're doomed. I don't think that every last thing about our lives have to change. We don't have to leave our homes. I just think that there are palliative things that we can do in our own lives to decrease our own personal burnout. You can try to institute better borders between the workspace and the rest of your life. You can have better digital hygiene in terms of, I delete Twitter off my phone on the weekend or whatever. All of those things are Band-Aids, ultimately, if you're fighting against this larger system that is broken. It is always going to be the stronger force. The burnout inherent to that system is going to swallow you no matter what armor you put on to resist it. I think that there are those smaller things that we can each individually do. As a society, I hope that that anger and that frustration is contagious because I think that as millennials we have been taught to, despite our reputation, to kind of put our head down and be like, I guess I just need to work all the time. This is just my life. Instead, we can look at our lives and say, it doesn't have to be this way. How can we together say that loudly and then also decide that we want change, not just incremental change, but societal change?

Zibby: What's something in your dream scenario here, not to put you on the spot, that if society were to change -- I know you reference everything from pensions and social security and parental burnout. I know there's a lot of stuff. What's one thing, maybe, that could happen that could make things better?

Anne: Mandatory paternity leave. We don't even have mandatory maternity leave. The chapter on parenting burnout, I think anyone who reads the book will see just how angry all of these moms are. They're just so tired and so angry. There's a lot of resentment. A lot of it has to do with the fact that you're doing all of these things that society has told you to do to be a good mom. Then you also just feel like in your home, in your heterosexual home, that it is really difficult to find anything close to an equitable labor split even with the most progressive of husbands or the most feminist of husbands. One thing that has been shown in other countries and to some extent in the US to actually sustain equitable splits of labor in the long term is if a father stays home for an extended period of time by himself with kids. What that does is it teaches fathers everything that has to be done in order to take care of children and run a household. That is something on a societal level that we could do to pretty radically reorganize the way that labor is split in the home that could have ramifications across society. Then also, government subsidized and funded affordable childcare would be a huge thing. Every parent I know is stressed out about finding reliable care. This is even pre-COVID. Reliable, affordable care, it's really, really hard. Other countries have shown it's doable. It takes a huge burden off of parents.

Zibby: I'm still trying to digest the idea of mandatory paternity leave. This will sound very antifeminist of me. As a mom of four, I actually wanted to be with my kids. I don't know that I could've been like, all right, honey, I'm taking off two weeks postpartum. I don't know what I'm going to do, but you're --

Anne: -- Not two weeks postpartum. A lot of places that do this, it's maybe from year one to year two, or year one to eighteen months, or eighteen months to two. It doesn't have to be in those early times. It's more just, it teaches -- it's not like the mom, necessarily, would have to go back to work, or if they don't work in a traditional setting or something like that. They can do anything that they want as long as the male is primarily responsible for keeping the child alive.

Zibby: And not call it babysitting. [laughs]

Anne: Exactly. You're not babysitting your own kid.

Zibby: Even in your introduction, it was interesting because you were saying you don't even expect jobs to last. You don't even have the expectations that were for so many of us, assumptions. Now you don't even have them. I feel like I don't know how you would maintain any sort of positive outlook and inner equilibrium if you felt that there was no true hope. I know there are things societally we can do. Aside from you getting up and running for president, which maybe you've thought of --

Anne: -- No, no, no.

Zibby: [laughs] I feel like there's still potential for joy and happiness in the context of societal frustration. I feel like I'm trying to make you feel better because I felt like you were so upset in the book. Now I feel like I'm answering your upset-ness. [laughs]

Anne: I think the problem with burnout is it swallows joy. It swallows all of those moments that -- for me, I knew how to find serendipitous moments of happiness in the corners of my life and that sort of thing. I think that both my exhaustion and then the way that we come to rely on our phones and Instagram as crutches during those moments, it takes your best intentions and cannibalizes them. That is the frustration. I was very careful to always ask all the parents that I interviewed for the book, I was like, "Tell me all these things that you're frustrated about, but also tell me the thing that makes you so happy about parenting." A lot of them were like, "There are all these things that I love about being a parent and I love about my kids. Because of all of these other stresses, all of these other instabilities, it makes it so hard to focus on those things." What I think a burnout cure does is it offers relief from those sources of precarity that rob you of your ability to feel just genuine, simple joy.

Zibby: Speaking of genuine, simple joy, you must have had some of that when you saw that you had seven million views of your article.

Anne: [laughs] It was very gradual. It accumulated over the course of several months. It's a weird thing to go viral on that level. One thing about burnout and about, I think, what a lot of millennials -- our experience is that there's not a lot of space to feel even those ups and downs. The way I try to describe burnout is that everything, the highs and lows, vacations, non-vacations, everything flattens. There's a lot that bears similarity to some symptoms of depression. Also, if you're just trying to get through every day, it's hard to feel catharsis. I think back wistfully all the time about my time in college when you would study so hard for a final and then take the final, and then you'd be like, and I'm done, just that incredible release. You'd always get sick. I would always get sick.

Zibby: I would always get sick, yes.

Anne: Your body is letting down its defenses. Then I would go home. This is a very rarified, privileged experience to be able to go home. I didn't have to work over break. I would just sleep so much and recover. Then it would be long enough of a total break that I would come back to school and be just so excited to be back. You really have that moment of incredibly hard work, achievement and catharsis, recovery, and return. How many of us have anything approximating that in our lives?

Zibby: I will tell you, I got divorced six years ago now or something like that. I split custody. I have more of it. Every other long weekend, I don't have my kids. In my head, I know that I have a point now where I actually can relax and get sick and do all that stuff, which I didn't have for years and years. My oldest kids are thirteen. No, I guess I wasn't divorced six years ago. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The point is, that was introduced into my life after many, many years of stay-at-home parenting. I was like, oh, my gosh, I finally have this little break from the rainstorm for just a few days so I can catch my breath. I found that I came back as a far stronger mom. If we're going to put our little wish lists out there for how to help society, I don't think mandatory divorce is the answer, but --

Anne: -- That's the problem. If the only way for you to get those moments is a divorce, that shows that something is wrong.

Zibby: That's true. More evolved couples, perhaps, could've had some sort of -- I don't know. I think you're right. I'll just get away from my own situation. Having the breaks now has been absolutely lifesaving to me. I don't think I could even have this whole creative pursuit in my life and all this stuff without the sleep and the regeneration. Not to brag.

Anne: Totally. You're not alone. Also, other parents have told me that they want to be better, more patient parents. If you're so tired, you're just kind of at this baseline of annoyance. You don't like the sort of parent that you become. That's hard. I find that sometimes in my relationship where I'm like, I'm not being the partner that I want to be right now. How do I try to fix that? Usually, it's take a nap. [laughter]

Zibby: I remember in college when I would get so worn out and so tired from studying and all this stuff and I'd be like, should I take a nap or should I go to the gym? Should I take a nap or should I go to the gym? I was like, I don't know, I only have thirty-five minutes. Now I have thirty-four minutes. Now I only have thirty-two minutes. Let me try to take a nap. Oh, no, now I can't sleep. [laughs]

Anne: That's the thing. This is such a great example of the optimized way that we approach our time. When you're like, I have thirty minutes to nap, that's the only time I have a nap, and it becomes such an overdetermined, like, I have to nap right now, that I can't nap ever because you're like, I have to do this thing right now. It doesn't work.

Zibby: This is why I never nap. This is literally it. Unless I am so tired that I somehow just basically fall over or I'm reading to a kid or I'm reading to myself and next thing I know all the lights are on and I'm sound asleep. Yes, that's a problem.

Anne: When your body tells you. Your body forces you to say, it doesn't matter if you don't have time for this.

Zibby: Naptime, ready or not, here we come. Oh, my gosh, that's funny. You have Can't Even out there, which is so exciting. What are your ambitions now? Do you want to be political? Not necessarily the president. Do you want to try to affect societal change? Do you want to keep writing? Do you want to focus on this? What do you think?

Anne: I'm not a policymaker. I like reading other people's policy suggestions, but that's not my expertise. People have a lot of expertise in that area, and familiarity. My PhD is in media studies. I love reading history and synthesizing ideas and trying to figure out what's going on. Why are we acting in the way that we are acting? I guess you could call that examining ideologies of a given moment, that sort of thing. I think that my next project is going to do with work from home and the brave new world of hybrid working from home and how you can prevent it from sucking your life into it. It could be a real way to even become more burnt out or it can help us think about how to reorient our lives away from work, which might be revelatory. Still trying to think through some of the first steps on that.

Zibby: I love that. I actually have found with so much more stuff going on at home that all of the stress of logistics and running around has taken a big burden off. I have all this extra time and energy now that I'm not racing from place to place and figuring out how to get all my kids there. Now it's like, okay, you do your thing right there.

Anne: I used to travel so much for work and for speaking stuff and that sort of thing. I think for a lot of people who have been slowed down by the pandemic generally -- obviously, when we can start moving around a little bit, I'm going on a vacation, having our actual vacation as soon as possible. I can't see myself returning to that level of franticness. It's one of the small silver linings of all of this, is some perspective.

Zibby: It's true. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Anne: This is what people always say, but I really think sometimes you get really precious about writing and are like, I have to be in the right place. It has to be the right kind of writing. It needs to be good as it comes out. I am a big proponent of just barfing on the page and then coming back and editing. Write a lot.

Zibby: Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and for our little therapy over anger and society and divorce and all the rest. Congratulations again on your book coming out.

Anne: Thank you so much. This was great.

Zibby: Bye.

Anne: Bye.

Terri Cheney, MODERN MADNESS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Terri. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about Modern Madness, which was so, so good.

Terri Cheney: Thank you. Thank you, Zibby, for having me.

Zibby: I have to say, I had seen the Modern Love episode on which this book was based, or on which the article -- I'm not even saying this right. You wrote a Modern Love article. It became a TV show. You've written a book. I started by seeing the TV episode, which was great.

Terri: With Anne Hathaway playing me. That was incredible.

Zibby: What was that like for you?

Terri: Every woman's dream to have -- I looked so good. I never knew. [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. How involved were you with that piece of this?

Terri: They were great. The producers realized -- I contacted them when I found out the article was going to be turned into an episode. I said, "This is about mental health and mental illness. It really needs to be accurate." They actually let me in on the process. I got to talk with Anne and with the director, John Carney. I think they did a really good job as far as portraying manic depression/bipolar disorder is concerned.

Zibby: It was a really gripping episode from the highs to the lows. You could just see how embarrassed, almost, that she was and having to cancel things. That was the TV. That was great.

Terri: That was wonderful.

Zibby: On to the book. In terms of timing, did you write the Modern Love piece and then you wrote the book? What happened?

Terri: I wrote the Modern Love piece back in 2008. Then a month later, my first book, Manic, came out and became a New York Times best seller, I think largely riding on that Modern Love piece because that reaches so many people.

Zibby: Now you're coming out with this having nothing to do, almost, with that. This is so much later.

Terri: Right, this is my third book now.

Zibby: I'm sorry. I feel woefully unprepared, but having read this book at least, so that's good. It starts with you talking about Michael Jackson's feet, which is not the way most books begin. The reader is immediately gripped and wondering, what is going on here? Talk to me about your high-profile lawyerly life and then having to deal with mental illness at the same time, bipolar, how you were able to fuse the two, and now where you are.

Terri: I started as an entertainment lawyer. I live in Beverly Hills. I represented people like Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, and major motion picture studios. That was for about sixteen years. That entire time, I was hiding a very severe case of bipolar disorder. I didn't tell anyone except my doctors. I didn't tell my friends, my coworkers, nobody, because I was just terrified that somebody would find out and I'd be fired, first of all, and then ostracized and I'd never find work or love again. Somehow, I did manage to keep it secret. I think it's because Hollywood is inherently bipolar when you think of it. It's a crazy business. It's very cyclical. Things are always happening. You want them faster, better, more, now. My manic episodes certainly fit in with that. When I was depressed, I would make up excuses or lies, frankly. I had all sorts of physical ailments that I pretended to have. Fortunately with bipolar disorder, you can make up a lot of the work that you miss because you go into this really productive mode where you can just churn stuff out. You're very charismatic and engaging and just at the top of your game. That lasted until I finally had a depression I could not hide anymore. I was hospitalized for that episode. I started writing then about my illness. First, I just wrote about the clinical stuff that I was learning. Then I thought, anybody can write about that. I want to write about what's really going on inside me, inside my body, and make it visceral so that other people understand what it's like. I found I started to get better with the writing. I just kept writing and writing and seven years later emerged with the book called Manic. To my amazement, a month later, it's a best seller. I've kept on writing ever since then.

Zibby: Why stop?

Terri: Why stop? I love it. I miss the money from practicing law, but I don't miss the lifestyle. I don't miss hiding out. That was the hardest part of my life.

Zibby: I think the corrosive power of secrets is one of the worst things. No matter what it is you're hiding, having to shoulder that burden I think [indiscernible/crosstalk] away at people quite a bit.

Terri: What I've learned is hiding a secret is often worse than the secret itself.

Zibby: I feel like a lot of books are an attempt to air those secrets and get them off of people's shoulders. That's just one way. It's like repentance of some sort.

Terri: It really does help. It's so cathartic to write about even the dark times. People often ask me, how do you go back to those suicide attempts and write about such horrible memories? For me, writing about it lets me own it. That's another subtitle to my book, An Owner's Manual. I think we all need to own our illnesses and learn about them, understand them, and acknowledge them in order to get better.

Zibby: You mention in the book later that you developed hypothyroidism and that in that instance it was diagnosed, and you got a pill and you went about your business, and how easy was that versus mental illness which comes with stigma and shame and varying medication and so much else, so much baggage versus a simply physiological issue.

Terri: I actually went around and told people, "I have hypothyroidism." I was proud of having something I could talk about as opposed to bipolar disorder. People were sympathetic.

Zibby: I always kind of am hoping -- I shouldn't say this. I'm always hoping that there's something wrong with my thyroid to explain weight gain. [laughs]

Terri: I know. A quick fix.

Zibby: I'll take one of those thyroid medicines, and I'll be fine. I'm kidding. It's true, the contrast of why we don't medicate in such a black and white way for something that is just as pronounced and specific [indiscernible/crosstalk] as all these other things is ridiculous.

Terri: I'm so glad you bring that up. If you look at mental illness, the brain is an organ. It's not in your mind. The mental illness is not really in your mind. It's in your brain. The brain is just a three-and-a-half-pound organ. Robin Williams said that. It is like any other organ in the body like your liver. You wouldn't tell somebody with liver disease to make lemonade out of lemons. You wouldn't tell Stephen Hawking to just snap out of it and get up out of his chair. It's really a physical illness. It needs to be regarded that way.

Zibby: Then you have the double isolation of, A, feeling it, and then B, being made to not feel validated in it.

Terri: Right. It is a double whammy, yes.

Zibby: You write about that so beautifully even in the very beginning when you were describing mania. Then later when you described depression, you were saying like this, "I thought faster. I wrote better. I could argue the devil out of his soul when I was manic. I was glorious, bionic, at the top of my game, and I knew it and used it against anyone who came too close. Sex was mine for the asking, money and influence too, and I owed it all to mania, including my proximity to Michael Jackson and his like. But no matter how lofty and impervious I appeared, depression could swoop in and lay me low without a word, without warning, the devil demanding a rematch. Then it was back to hiding all over again." Wow, so awesome. I mean, not awesome that it happened. Awesome that you wrote about it that way. These are so funny when you have all these things, the ten sacred rules you have to abide by when you're bipolar.

Terri: My manic cheat sheet.

Zibby: Change into something sexier. Wear granny panties and flats. Party do's and don'ts. It's so funny have such a great sense of humor about all this.

Terri: I'm so glad you say that. Of all the compliments I ever get about my writing, I love when people apologize for saying, "I'm really sorry, but I laughed throughout your book." That makes me feel so good because I know I touched them the way I wanted to. So much of mental illness can become extreme. In extremity, there's absurdity. You have to sometimes stand back and just say, this is ridiculous, what I'm going through. It can be funny, in a very dark way, but nonetheless.

Zibby: In a very dark way. It's similar in a way to grief. It knocks you off your feet. Yet there are moments where you can't help but find the absurdity and humor. You just have to laugh.

Terri: You feel a little guilty about that. I don't know quite why one would feel guilty about relieving yourself of the doom for a few seconds, but sometimes they do.

Zibby: We can find ways to feel guilty about everything. If you can't, just call me. I'll find another way to [indiscernible/crosstalk] it. You talked about depression saying that you always knew you were depressed when you couldn't manage to get into the shower.

Terri: The shower is my nemesis. I just have the worst time. I suffer from something called psychomotor retardation when I'm depressed. That means my body and my will are paralyzed. I'm looking at pen right now on my desk that's about a foot away. If I wanted to pick up that pen, I would have to stare at it for fifteen or twenty minutes just to get my arm to move over to the pen and pick it up. I'm noticing, COVID-19, a lot of people are complaining about lack of productivity. That's what it feels like. You just cannot do what you need to do. Showering, for me, is the number-one worst thing I have to do. I hate it. I hate getting wet. I like being clean, but I hate everything else about it.

Zibby: It's so funny. My mother-in-law had these two dogs who are now staying with us. One of them hates to get wet. You're just like, okay, the dog doesn't need to get -- you just won't shower them. If you're a human being, you can't be like, I don't like getting wet. [laughs] Doesn't fly so easily.

Terri: I really do like being clean. That's what's so ironic about it.

Zibby: They have dry shampoo now.

Terri: Believe me, I have stock in it. [laughs] I know.

Zibby: You wrote in the book too, sadly, as you referenced earlier, about times where you really wanted to die and how depression is just like fighting death. It's the death march in a way. You were in the snow, and then your body actually is the one that made you snap out of it. Tell me about that moment a little bit.

Terri: I was in New Mexico, in Santa Fe. My father had died. After that, I had attempted a very, very serious suicide attempt which I shockingly survived. I wrote about it in the first story of Manic. I'm walking out after I got out of the hospital in the snow at night. I come to this park. I just realize I can't go any further. I don't want to go on. I thought, maybe I'll just freeze to death in the snow. That's got to be an easy way to go. It probably doesn't hurt very much because you're frozen. I lay down in the snow. Sure enough, it started to really hurt. Unconsciously or subconsciously, I just started flapping my arms up and down, and my legs, to get the circulation going. I stood up. I looked around. I realized I'd made angel wings in the snow. That was such a beautiful moment. I thought, you know, there is a reason I survived that suicide attempt. It's got to be that I'm supposed to give witness to the pain of what other people are suffering with this disease. It's hard to remember that now, but it was a moment. It was an epiphany.

Zibby: I'm sorry that you have anointed yourself the storyteller for this, but you write about it really poignantly and beautifully. If it had to be anyone, life picked a good storyteller.

Terri: I think the reasons were given. The gifts were given. That had to be mine.

Zibby: When you're doing the actual writing -- first of all, do you still go through the highs and lows in the same way? Have you found some medications that have stabilized things completely or more? Then what happens when you're writing? Can you still write through one of the hypo-paralyzed states? Tell me about that.

Terri: I'm pretty stable now, relatively, compared to what I used to be. I don't have the extreme highs that I used to or, fingers crossed here, the extreme lows. I do sometimes get depressed, mostly in response to external triggers like relationship problems. Who doesn't get depressed? It can trigger a chemical depression. My medication is working. I'm really lucky. I work closely with a psychopharmacologist who manages the medications especially. As for writing, I can't write when I'm depressed because that involves the moving the pen thing, and I can't move. I try to write when I'm manic, but I write in this really tiny, tiny, tiny, illegible script that you can't hardly see or else my fingers fly so fast over the keyboard. It's just rubbish. There's a sweet spot. Fortunately, I've been in the sweet spot for a while where I can write and make sense and have some perspective about my illness.

Zibby: Wow. What do you do to get through the pandemic? What do you do now? Are you working on another book? How do you make sure you don't slip? Do you carry that fear with you all the time? I feel like I would be very nervous.

Terri: That's a really good question. I'm always afraid of depression. You said earlier it's like battling death. I don't think I ever thought of it in those terms before. I may just have to steal that from you. That's really powerful. It is like that. Yes, I'm afraid, but for some weird reason -- I'm not the only person with a mental illness who feels this way. I've had a lot of readers write in and tell me that, I feel like I've been in training for COVID because I'm used to isolating. I'm used to binge-watching Netflix. I'm used to eating everything in my refrigerator and not talking to people on the phone. I have my coping skills that I developed during depressions. I'm using them to good stead now. I think I'm doing pretty well. Surprised me.

Zibby: See? Silver linings here.

Terri: Definitely a silver lining.

Zibby: Did the writing and the style and all of it just come naturally to you? Did you get any sort of training or writing classes or anything like that?

Terri: I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl and my father read to me every night before, I think, I could even speak. I've always wanted to write. I've always written. I went to Vassar College and was an English major, had a creative thesis there. Somehow, I just got derailed with the entertainment litigation. That was the wrong direction for my life to go in. Even while I was practicing law, I was taking classes. I belong to a wonderful writing group that I've been in for about fifteen or twenty years now. Writing has always been a huge part of my life. It's how I stay sane.

Zibby: You're the accidental litigator.

Terri: [laughs] Yes. That may be the title of my next book. Thank you.

Zibby: Great. Just take the transcript of this and use it for whatever you want. Be my guest. That's funny.

Terri: I'm writing it down.

Zibby: What about reading? Do you love to read? Were you always a reader from a young ago too?

Terri: I'm a book hound. I'm looking at your living room or wherever you're sitting right now and absolutely devouring the books behind you. You have such a wonderful library there.

Zibby: This is my whole -- all the way around.

Terri: Oh, my god, that's my dream. That is my dream. I have books everywhere in my house, but you can't see them from my Zoom feed. I do read, yes.

Zibby: I believe you. [laughs]

Terri: They're all under my bed, too, gathering moss.

Zibby: Do you gravitate toward memoir? Do you have a genre you like?

Terri: I tend to read nineteenth century and before. I'm very much the Jane Austen girl. I love Fitzgerald too. I love people who love words. I love an author, Nabokov, anyone who can just make me look at phrase and say, oh, that's what language is supposed to do. That gives me a thrill. I think that's almost as good as sex. It's great.

Zibby: [laughs] Sentences versus sex. Who will win? Do you have any advice for, twofold, one for aspiring authors, but also for anybody out there who might have a mental illness and maybe hasn’t been as forthcoming as you have and is still more in the hiding phase?

Terri: First of all, I think everybody who has a mental illness should at least be keeping some kind of mood journal where you track your episodes because that's the only way you can really get a handle on something as tricky as bipolar disorder, is to see the pattern of it as it plays out. I can only go by my own experience which has been, before Manic was published, the night before, literally, I wanted to call my editor and just call the whole off. I thought, what am I doing? This is crazy. Nobody's going to understand what I'm writing about. The response to coming out of the closet, which was a very deep closet for me and lasted for many, many years, has been incredible. The support, the compassion that people have shown me, I never would've guessed in a million years that people could be so understanding. I'm always hearing about my courage. I just felt backed up against a wall. It was either stop hiding or die. Those were my choices. I don't know how much courage was involved in that.

Zibby: Maybe you're selling yourself a little short.

Terri: Maybe.

Zibby: I think maybe courage isn't the right word, but it still takes such a strong sense of self to be able to articulate it all and share it.

Terri: I think that's where writing comes in too. The writing group that I referenced, we write our personal stories. We learn to find our own voice. That's been really influential for me to just keep digging and digging and digging. I am surrounded by journals. You can't see them right now. I still journal every day.

Zibby: I have all mine hidden under here from when I was a kid. My mom cleaned out my room years ago and was like, "Take everything."

Terri: Don't ever get rid of them. They come in so handy when you decide to write your memoirs. Believe me.

Zibby: They're all pre-twenty-two or something. Now I'm debating if I should share them with my kids. I better read them. [laughs]

Terri: Oh, yes. Read them first.

Zibby: There's some stuff I'm not so sure I'd want them to read. For people like you and me and so many other people who do write to sort things out, not having that, I don't know how anybody else does it.

Terri: I know. How do they have a conversation, even? I would have the words floating around in my head just like a jigsaw puzzle if I didn't write. I don't know how people function.

Zibby: Even for my podcast, I used to write out every question first. Now I don't do that because it's more a conversation. I wanted to have it all clear. Everything had to be clear and out of the chaos. [laughs]

Terri: When I was a litigator, I wrote every single thing I was going to say to the court down, including "and" and "the." I was very, very much that way.

Zibby: I get it. Thank you. Thanks for chatting with me today and coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Terri: It was so fun.

Zibby: I have to go back now and read Manic. That’ll be my next Amazon purchase. I shouldn't say Amazon. Whatever independent bookstore purchase that's open.

Terri: There you go.

Zibby: Anyway, thank you. I really enjoyed chatting with you. Again, your book was absolutely beautiful and so important.

Terri: I'm so glad you liked it. Thank you. It was really great chatting with you.

Zibby: You too. Have a great day.

Terri: Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Alexandra Elle, AFTER THE RAIN

Zibby Owens: Hi.

Alexandra Elle: Hi. Hello.

Zibby: Hi. How are you?

Alexandra: I'm good. How are you?

Zibby: I thought we were waiting for naptime to kick in. [laughs]

Alexandra: She went down sooner than I expected, so that's great. My husband is now wrangling our two-year-old. Our twelve-year-old is upstairs on Zoom school. We should have some good chat time now.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. I have four kids, so I totally understand how it goes. None of mine are that little anymore. Thank you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." As is evident, you really don't have time to read or to write. [laughs] I feel like I need to whisper.

Alexandra: I have to make the time.

Zibby: You have to make the time.

Alexandra: No, it's okay. You're in my AirPods, so it's okay. I can hear you up close.

Zibby: Very smart. The twelve-year-old you mention who's upstairs, is that the one from the book who was -- is that the one who was in kindergarten when you decided to -- there was something you decided when she was in kindergarten, to change your job.

Alexandra: Yeah, to quit my job.

Zibby: To quit your job and all that. So now she's twelve.

Alexandra: She's twelve now, yes. Our two-year-old is Ila who is the -- I talk about our TTC journey with her, and then Maximus is our third daughter who was our surprise, at the end of the dedication.

Zibby: Amazing. Can you please tell listeners what After the Rain is about?

Alexandra: Oh, my goodness. After the Rain is my fourth collection of work. I've been joking and saying it's like my big girl book because while the other books are very near and dear to my heart, After the Rain really gives this memoir experience of the different lessons that I've learned throughout motherhood, throughout my life so far. I've been thinking about the words to put with, what is After the Rain? For me, it feels like a collection of hope and a collection of camaraderie. I want people to be able to see themselves in the pages no matter how different their experience is from mine, but just knowing that there's this collective healing that's possible throughout the book.

Zibby: It's amazing. You talk a lot in the book about how you yourself have overcome trauma. That's, in part, how you found all the tools that you needed to get through your life and that you're now so generously sharing with the rest of us. You touch briefly on some of the ways in which you felt like you were not loved as much as a child, which broke my heart when I was reading, sitting on the steps and the gold flap of the mailbox while you waited for your dad and then he never showed up and how that broke your heart and made you feel like you were unlovable. Take me back, if you don't mind, to some of the experiences that you felt were really difficult for you as a child and made you not feel like you could love yourself.

Alexandra: I always had this on-again/off-again relationship with my biological father. I have not had a relationship with him for the past, I would say, seventeen years. It's been a very long time. In that regard, that's just been the norm. Mostly what I talk about in After the Rain is my relationship with [audio cuts outs] since she was my primary caregiver. She did the best she could with what she knew. Our relationship has come a long way. She's an amazing grandmother to my girls, an awesome mother-in-law to my husband. We are now at this stage in our mother-daughter relationship that we can really lean into our relationship from two women's perspective versus this mother-daughter dynamic. It feels really supportive. Also, good boundaries are in place for the growth of a healthy relationship now as a thirty-one-year-old woman. Growing up, she didn't really have the tools to love me, I would say. I'm able to see that clearly now as an adult. Instead of penalizing her or judging her for what she didn't do, I'm able to see that she had her own experiences, her own traumas, her own stuff that she was going through.

When we don't tackle those things, it's hard for us to love our children in the ways in which that we should. Becoming a mother, I knew that I wanted to -- I needed to love myself in order to give my then one daughter and now my three daughters the best of me. Self-love was definitely a bloom-in-process, I like to say, but also, my greatest teacher in a way because now I'm able to not only mother my children from this place of love and understanding and attention and presence, but from a self-mothering standpoint, which I find is really important. We don't often talk about how motherhood also gives birth to us in a sense. Being able to do that three times over now and really learning the different methods of care for self, I'm able to show up and care for my kids in a very different way and love my children in a very different way from how I was raised. That is really the greatest lesson in all of it. No matter the trauma I went through and the triggers and the hardship, what did I do with those lessons? It has spilled over into how I show up in my motherhood today.

Zibby: That's beautiful. I was going to get to your mom. I wasn't only going to talk about your dad. I promise.

Alexandra: I just don't have a relationship with him, so I'd rather not.

Zibby: I get it. It was just the disappointment. It was just that feeling of disappointment and sitting there. Parents always end up disappointing in some way or another. That was such a moment. Then your mom screaming at you in the car when you were trying to scooch away the day that she was in a bad mood. I get it. You're only thirty-one, oh, my gosh. I'm forty-four, and I'm finally getting to a place where I'm like, okay, maybe it's their issue and it's not directed at me.

Alexandra: It's not mine. Right.

Zibby: I feel like you have a full-on leg up on the world from a maturity standpoint, which is great.

Alexandra: It's been a long time coming. That's absolutely for sure. [laughs]

Zibby: I don't know. You still are ahead of most of the world in terms of that sort of self-acceptance and all that. What makes you want to share this? You've learned so much. You've reparented yourself, as a therapist would say. Why share it? Why give it to everybody else? Why not just go about your life? I know you love to write. You've been writing for your whole life and all the rest of it. What is about this message that you really want to just get out there, and why?

Alexandra: Community and letting folks know that they are not alone in their struggles and what they go through. I think it's really important to share stories that folks can see themselves in or that they can feel like, man, I'm not the only one who went through that. Man, I'm not the only one who went through something. Now I can be on the other side of that. That's the big messaging in After the Rain. What comes after the rain? The light comes. The rainbows come. The clouds part. We can see hope and resilience and triumph. Also, knowing that we're going to have stormy seasons in life. It's not just going to be after the rain and then, boom, we're just going to have these sunny days. No, as human beings, we move through things. Our storms are what teach us something. While a lot of what I share in this book is absolutely personal to me, it's also really pivotal to my growth and the type of woman I am, the type of person I am, the type of woman I continue to strive to be, which is one who is able to greet not only self with compassion, but others with compassion. To know that you don't have to pretend to be perfect. You don't have to pretend to have it all together. You can show up flawed on the page. You can show up flawed in life and still be worthy of moving through whatever it is you're going through. I think that that's really special and important. I find that a lot of times, we are chunked in this circle as women that we have to be strong and not have any traumas and not have any triggers. If we do, hush, don't say anything about it. That is not supportive to the collective to hoard these stories that have shaped us and maybe that have hurt us, but also that have shown us the benefits of healing and facing things head on.

Zibby: I totally agree. I do feel like, and I don't know about you, at least on social media, I feel like there's been a shift to people sharing a lot. Some people are still caught up with perfection. Here I am on the beach. Look, I'm so amazing. I'm like, I can't even look at this bikini right now. Other people, I feel like are really like, my husband just told me he's gay. Now I have to live with that. Here's how I'm crying on my pillow. I feel like there's been a shift to sharing the most intimate. I don't know. Do you feel like that? Not that your book is exploitatively sharing. It's a perfect balance. I don't know if you've noticed too, or just anecdotally.

Alexandra: I've noticed people's vulnerability being more accepted. I think that that's special. I do think there is a line in which we have to be mindful of the stories that we're sharing because, yes, they're our stories, but they are also other people's stories. I let my mom -- she read the first copy. I bookmarked every chapter about our story. I wrote her a beautiful letter. We had a really healing moment before anyone else got the book. I got my husband's blessing to share about our hardships from the fertility to the infidelity that we faced prior to getting married. We have to be very mindful of the stories that we hold in our bodies, but also other people's stories that we decide to walk into and tell. That is something that I find extremely delicate. It's not something I take for granted at all, especially as a writer knowing that I have multiple stories that don't just include me. It's not just about me. That goes back to my work as being really centered around community and how it's so important that we are mindful of what we say, how we say it, and what we share.

Zibby: Very true. How do you stay so mindful? How do you keep all of these principles that you espouse in the book that are so awesome? Then there you are trying to get your kids down for a nap. Life keeps coming up.

Alexandra: Life will continue to come up. [laughs]

Zibby: How do you keep it top of mind? How do you make sure that in the moment you're remembering all the things that you know deep down and you don't let it -- I know there was a scene at the beginning of the your book where somebody at your office said something super rude to you that I honestly couldn't even believe. You were on the street. You were trying not to scream back at him. You managed to pull it off in a very clever, awesome way, but you just wanted to scream and rage on the sidewalk. How do you pull it back?

Alexandra: How do I pull it back? I used to be really bad at pulling it back. It's interesting. I think it's important how we leave people and how we engage with people. Maya Angelou has a quote that's along the lines of, people will remember how you treated them. They will remember how you left them feeling. Even when someone is like that boss in that chapter, Change, that you're referring. I could've easily been just as awful back, but what would that have done? Nothing. It would've made me look like a jerk just like it made him look like a jerk. It's not worth the energy. Linking this to holding it together while in quarantine, while mothering three, while also being a wife, while also working from home, it takes a lot of practice and self-awareness. I know when I'm on edge. Everyone in the house knows when mom's on edge. My husband knows. He's home full time with me. I understand the privilege there. I'm able to literally step away and say, hey, I need a moment. All of this really requires being self-aware enough to name what we need and putting some of our baggage down and letting other people help us.

In motherhood, that can really get challenging because I kind of feel like sometimes we just get it done. That's what we do. We get it done. Also, our partners, if we are in partnerships -- in my position, my husband, he can also get it done. I have to be able to name what I need. I think that that's really special. That's how I'm able to keep myself together. I can be like, hey, I need five minutes. Hey, I need ten minutes. Hey, I'm going to go take a drive. I need to go run these errands. Then also recognizing that in my husband too. When I'm working all day and he's hands-on with the kids all day, making sure he's getting his time. It's just a community effort. Holding it together requires me to take care of myself so I can take care of others. I often say this in my work, self-care as community care. If we look at taking care of ourselves as an extension of showing up in our relationships, in our work, etc., then we're really able to find that balance. It's not always perfect. It's not always pretty. It's definitely a practice that's worth leaning into.

Zibby: I hear about self-care all the time. I feel like we need a new name for it. Self-care sounds indulgent. Self-care sounds like I'm kicking it and being selfish, almost, but it's not like that. It's essential. You have to do it. I feel like if there was a different name, maybe I wouldn't feel guilty doing it. [laughs]

Alexandra: I've just been shifting to taking care. Then also, self-care as community care is how I teach it when I'm teaching workshops and when I'm on my podcast and when I'm showing up in these community spaces where it does feel like self-care is a selfish thing. Audre Lorde says it best. It's not self-indulgent. It's a political statement at that, especially for women, to be able to even take five minutes to go pee in peace, to go wash your face, to take a second to get back into your body. It doesn't have to be a latte or a manicure or a face mask or a massage. There are these other means of refueling and renourishing that are also extremely important.

Zibby: It's more like baseline emotional regulation.

Alexandra: Exactly.

Zibby: It's getting back to basics. This is not an option. If you can't pull your emotions together enough to finish bath time, then you need to do something, versus screaming at the kids. I feel like so often those intense feelings, snapping -- even just loading the car up yesterday or whatever with all the kids and the dog and the bag and the this, I could feel myself snapping at everybody. I'm like, I'm losing my patience. Why? Where do we have to go so badly? We were just going home.

Alexandra: It's a balancing act. It's hard. It's not easy. It's not pretty. I know Instagram makes self-care look so beautiful, but it's really the nitty-gritty is when you're deep in it.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about writing this book. Tell me about how long it took and where you wrote and your process and all of that.

Alexandra: It took me a year and a half, two years, to write this book. I was eight months pregnant with our youngest when I turned in my manuscript. I remember my editor saying, "We will try to give you some time so you can be in postpartum." I was like, "I'm putting a boundary. After I have this baby, y'all cannot email me for like a month." It's just funny. We laugh about it. Not only was I writing this book, I was growing a baby. I was giving birth to two things simultaneously. I did a lot of writing here at home. I also had to get through. I kind of got stuck in the middle. It was really hard. My husband was home with our two. I went to a hotel, back when you could do those things, not in COVID. I went for a weekend. I just knocked it out. I remember feeling really, really accomplished that I was able to do that in a quiet place, in an unrushed place. Writing a book from home is really hard when you have kids. Our middle child, she was still very little. My two youngest are twenty months apart. It was very intense. I needed that time. To be able to go and finish in peace and in quiet was really amazing. It took a while. Then once I was in flow, it was just like, boom, here it is. Then by eight months pregnant, I was ready to turn in the manuscript. It was great after that.

Zibby: Wow. I love how you sprinkled in quotes. It's such a great book, inspirational. Even if you don't have time to sit and read every single word, your quotes, even just getting a quick dose every time you open it is just fabulous. And a great cover, which always helps everything.

Alexandra: Thank you for that. Isn't it beautiful? I love it.

Zibby: It's beautiful.

Alexandra: They did so good. It's so beautiful.

Zibby: It really is.

Alexandra: Funny story about the cover. We went back and forth on the cover, oh, my gosh. We finally got it to where everyone was like, "You know, I think the first one that we looked at was the one." It's just hilarious, the things you have to go through when the manuscript is done. You still have to get the little things together like the cover. Where is the gold foiling going to go? Is it going to be debossed or embossed? and all those things. Then you get it. It's like, oh, it was worth it. The one we first started with was the one that we ended up going with after like twenty other mockups later.

Zibby: Your first books, you self-published. Now you're in the traditional publishing world.

Alexandra: My first two books, I self-published. Then I was with a different smaller publishing house for Neon Soul and Today I Affirm. Neon Soul was a collection of poetry. Today I Affirm is a journal. Then I got picked up by Chronicle for this, for After the Rain and then a partner journal that's coming out. It's called Encourage. It's really amazing. Being self-published at first was definitely wonderful. I learned so much. I was able to build my audience and build my readership in a really authentic way. I'm four years into the traditional publishing world. I really love who I landed with for After the Rain. Chronicle is just -- they're wonderful.

Zibby: That's great. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Alexandra: Write the story. Just write. I tell this all the time to the folks in my journaling courses and who come to my workshops. Just write the story. Just put it on the page. Everything else will fall into place. Something that really supported me when I first got into publishing my work eight years ago was a friend told me, "Stop hoarding your story. You never know who's going to need your story." I remember thinking, no way. She was like, "Yes way. Just put it on the page." Since then, I keep that at the forefront of my mind, especially when I'm sharing things that are intertwined with adversity and uncertainty because we never know who needs our story and who will benefit from it. We're never alone in our struggles. I think that that's really important to center in our work.

Zibby: I'm literally writing it on a sticky to put on my computer right now. You never know who needs our story. I love that. I'm putting it right here next to you. That's great. Alex, thank you. Thank you for using your precious naptime moments to chat with me today. Thank you for your lovely, soulful book that I'm sure will help countless people out there. Thanks.

Alexandra: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care. Buh-bye.

Alexandra: Bye.

Deborah Tannen, FINDING MY FATHER

Zibby Owens: Thanks for coming on my show. I'm excited to talk about your latest book. Would you mind telling listeners what Finding My Father is about? Although, I'll just read the subtitle, and that gives a clue. His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow. Tell us more about the book. What inspired you to write it? Although, you include that in there, so just tell everybody else.

Deborah Tannen: My father was born in a Hasidic household in Warsaw in 1908 and came to the United States when he was twelve. He lived to be ninety-eight. He died two weeks before his ninety-eighth birthday. He, after he retired, was almost obsessed with talking about his past, especially his childhood in Warsaw which he remembered in astonishing detail, but his entire life, really. I would trace two things about this to my wanting to write this book. One is the very personal reason. The other is the broader perspective. The personal reason is that when I was a child, I adored my father. He was the parent that I felt connected to. I felt he understood me. I could ask him anything. He would answer with patience and precision. He loved words and language, as I did. I felt like if I said something to him, he would understand it the way I meant it, whereas my mother I felt often didn't or might get annoyed by what I was saying. But he was absent more than he was present. The way I put it in the introduction is the strongest presence that I felt in the house was his absence. I felt like I was spending my days with my mother missing my father. That really went on pretty much into adulthood. We can talk later about his work life, which is a saga in itself. He was gone far more than he was there. I think that was often true of parents at the time. It was mostly fathers. Now it could be fathers and mothers.

After he retired, his wanting to spend all this time talking about his past meant that if I talked to him about his past, I could spend time with him. I'm kind of a workaholic. Once I decided that I was going to write a book about him, I could spend hours talking to him during the day which I otherwise would never do. I recorded our conversations. Once he realized that I was doing this, he encouraged it. In fact, I found notes in which -- I should say, he saved every piece of paper that came into his life. He left me many, many, many different kinds of documents and letters and notes and memories that he wrote for me. Once he began doing that, I had more and more material that I felt gave me a perspective on the entire century. His life really is like a walking tour through history. He lived in this World War I Jewish community of Warsaw, Hasidic community, before, during, and after World War I. He really captured that community. In the beginning, my thought about the book -- and his too because I have a copy of a letter he wrote to someone back in the early eighties, "Deborah is going to write a book about the Jewish community of Warsaw based on my memories." I was thinking of it that way. Then I realized his entire life reflected these different cataclysmic events of that century.

The Bolshevik Revolution, which had a tremendous effect on his mother's siblings, especially her younger siblings whom he lived with because he had no father -- he was living in his mother's nuclear family, which was grandfather, grandmother, and many, many aunts and uncles, nine that were living there when he was there. I can name fourteen of them and what happened to them, tell you their life stories. A few of them, I do tell in the book. The younger ones were caught up in the Bolshevik Revolution and became passionate communists. The one who influenced him the most, the youngest of all those aunts and uncles, was only six years older than my father was and more like an older sister that he admired. By the time he came to the United States, he told me years later, he already was identified as a communist and an atheist, which he says happened to him, he converted, when he was six following his aunt around. Then his whole experience of work just captures one Jewish immigrant experience. He quit high school at fourteen, went to work in the garment district in New York as so many immigrants did, and yet managed to go to law school at night, become a lawyer. Then it was the Depression, that other cataclysmic event. There's something almost ironic or maybe appropriate, this book coming out in a pandemic, because the fact that he finished law school in the Depression made it impossible for him to then support -- he was the sole support of his mother and sister, having no father. Because of the Depression, he could not work as a lawyer.

When he was fifty, when I was in junior high, he did start to work as a lawyer and established a workmen's compensation firm -- at the time, we said workmen's; now we say workers -- which actually ended up being the largest workers' compensation firm in New York City, which means, he liked to point out, the largest in the world. He did so many different things before he could do that because of the Depression. I think many people today are suffering similar consequences. Their future is so changed and so much more challenging because of the economic situation. I'll make one last comment here. It's so much helped me understand the contrast between his way of looking at the world and his life and relationships between women and men. There's also drama about who he married and why he married my mother and not another woman he might have married. When my father sat down to write about his life, he began by listing all the jobs he had held. To him, that really captured his life. That was the summary of his life, the work that he did. When I thought about his life and when I think about my life, I begin with relationships: who was important in my life, who influenced me, who I loved, how those relationships developed. For him, it was work. I came to understand that, really, family and work were inextricably intertwined in his mind. Family meant obligation to support the people you loved. How you went about doing that was both a summary of his life and also proof of his devotion to the family. It was because of that love that he couldn't go to work as a lawyer and let his family starve or have a difficult time while he built up a practice.

Zibby: Wow. It's amazing because I feel like people in their fifties think it's too late. Somebody in their forties the other day said to me, "I got started. I thought it was too late to write a book." I'm thinking, no, no, no. Look at this. Your dad, even back then, launched a whole new career so late in life. Yet it was only half his life. He still had half to go. It's very encouraging and empowering to think that at any moment, just start following your dream. It's not too late.

Deborah: Yes. In his case, it was opportunity. The brief summary of how it all happened, he did all these different things during the Depression. Then there was a civil service exam he was taking, he said many, many civil service exams. There would be thousands of people taking an exam for a few jobs. Late in the Depression, things were starting to open up. He got the offer to be a prison guard in the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, not the kind of job he thought he was going to consider, but he went, tried it out. He was very happy there. He loved the lifestyle that went along with it. He had always lived in cities, in Warsaw and then in New York City, always in apartments. For the first time, he lived in a house. There was a beautiful yard. Everybody who talked about it, talked about it with such longing when they were no longer there. Everyone in family -- that is, my father, my mother, my sister who was alive at the time, my oldest sister was a little girl at the time -- talked about the beautiful weeping willow tree in the backyard. He was doing very well at it. He was promoted to parole officer very quickly. Then he got an offer based on another exam he had taken, civil service exam, to be an alcohol tax inspector with the treasury department chasing bootleggers. It offered a bit more money. He felt he had to take it because it was all about doing what you had to do to support your family. When he told the warden that he was making this change, the warden was beside himself. "You are doing so well here. You are going to be a warden very soon, in a year." He thought that was ridiculous. He said, "No, there's no way that a Jew will be a warden. There are no Jewish wardens." The warden said, "That's because there were no Jews in the system. Now that there are, of course you'll be promoted."

He didn't believe it. He did not believe it was possible. He made the switch. It turned out that the person who was given his job as parole officer became a warden in a year. That person was Jewish. That realization that he could've had that comfortable life became especially upsetting to him because the job as alcohol tax inspector, the job was okay. He didn't love it. It was all right. The family had moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where nobody was happy. They had no communities they had had in Danbury. That word, Danbury, was like a garden of Eden I heard about my whole life, the wonderful life they had in Danbury, the miserable life they had in Providence. My mother became pregnant with me, so of course I always felt guilty about this, and they moved back to New York. She wanted to have the baby in New York. As a stopgap measure, he took a job in a factory as a cutter. It was supposed to be just a brief time while he became very active in politics. He was no longer a communist. He became disillusioned with communism in 1939 when Stalin made a pact with Hitler. He became active in New York Liberal Party, a party somewhat left of the democrats. He was promised a political appointment within a year. It took thirteen years. Each year was, next year, next election, after the election, wait for the election. That contrast of these thirteen years working in a factory when he could've been a warden and have a comfortable life and his family would've been happier, that always was a shadow over his life and over the family, though he did not give me the sense how much he disliked working in a factory. I did not sense that. He never allowed us to see how unhappy he was. He certainly talked about it after when we had all these conversations.

Zibby: How did it make you feel to hear about how he had been feeling and hiding all that time?

Deborah: I'm grateful to him for that. There was one anecdote he wrote about. He started writing his memories for me as well. There was one he described in something that he wrote. I guess he wrote it in his eighties, but then he retold it in his nineties when we talked face to face. After my mother died, he moved to an assisted living facility where we talked many, many, many hours. He remembered -- this is before he passed the exam and got the job in Danbury, so it was during the Depression -- having no job. He was, every day, looking for work. He always worked, but it would be temporary jobs trying to find something that would work out. He passed his mother sitting outside her apartment. He had supported his mother from the age of fourteen until he got married at the age of twenty-four, so ten years he was sole support. It turned out that she was putting money away all those years. He would keep out a small amount for himself for car fares. She would go through his pockets, if she found it, and take it. She was a piece of work. He passed his mother and asked her if she would lend him five dollars. She not only refused, but began berating him that he was a spendthrift, that he was irresponsible.

He wrote, "Even now when I think about it, I feel like crying." He felt so humiliated by this. I don't think it was so specifically about his mother. I'm sure that was part of it, but that having sacrificed so much to get a law degree, pass the bar -- he was lawyer. He should've been working as a lawyer. Here he was penniless. Then he wrote that he did manage to get a job the next day. He was able to borrow a small amount of money from the bank, which apparently was part of the way he kept things going, he said, "where I had an unblemished record." The thing about the way he wrote about it that really was so fascinating to me and so enlightening, he said he felt so terrible because his situation was financially so bad and he said, "the need to hide it from my family, that I felt that way." I realized, yeah, that's what he did. My first thirteen years of my life when he was working in a factory, he completely hid the negative feelings he had about that. I was shocked when I asked him in one of our conversations when he was ninety-seven. He was alert until the end. "How did you feel about working as a cutter?" He said, "I hated every minute of it." I had no suspicion.

Zibby: I wonder if this has informed all of your work on communication. That's such a central part of what you investigate, is how to ease that communication between all different types of people. Do you think it has something to do with that?

Deborah: Yes, absolutely, on two levels. People ask me, why did I write and how did I know how to write for general audiences? I was trained as an academic. And why did I want to? I always say, I wanted to write a book that my mother could read. Really, it's that I did grow up in that working-class background. My father's friends who were factory workers as he was, my mother's many siblings, some were what we would now call middle class. One person owned a small factory. Others worked in factories. I grew up talking to people who did not have a college education and even a high school education and would not have understood the way I talked to my academic colleagues. Also, really from my father, I got this perspective on language. After people left when we'd sit around and talk and gather, he was the one who would say, "Did you see how she said that and how her expression looked when she said it?" He would draw conclusions from the subtle, subtle wording. I had hired somebody before I began interviewing him. Hired someone somebody told me about that interviewed older people about their histories, about their past. I hired someone to interview both my parents. At one point, she asked my father about his grandfather. "How do you like to remember him?" He said, "Like it or not, I remember him as...," picking up the phrasing that she used. I was amused that he was kind of subtlety questioning it, criticizing it even. He had that sensitivity to language. I think I did pick that up from him.

One last comment about that that I'll tell you. Because he had been raised in this Hasidic background, he had been sent to what was called [indiscernible], the religious school, from the time he was four, all day until he was old enough to go [indiscernible]. Then he had tutors at night and went to secular school during the day. He had this training in Talmud from the time he was studying religious texts from the time he was very small. He hated it. He had so many stories about how much he hated losing his childhood to [indiscernible]. The teacher was cruel, as many of those teachers were. The first academic paper I published, I was still a graduate student, I sent it to my parents. My mother wouldn't read an academic paper, but my father would. He called me. He started by telling me how much he admired it. Then he started how, "The way you pull apart all the meaning of the words and look for the underlying meaning, that reminded me of how I was trained to study Talmud and how we had to look for the meanings." He started getting worked up remembering how much he hated all that. Finally, he got to one point and he said, "I don't know how you can stand it." We burst out laughing. Many linguists, by the way, are Jewish. I think that Talmudic tradition is probably a part of it.

Zibby: Interesting. You included in this book, why you did not write a book about your mother. You kind of poked fun at her gently and how she would talk. Can you speak a little more about your relationship with her?

Deborah: My mother tended to be very unhappy. She would take that out both on my father and on the kids, especially me because I was kind of difficult. I think I inherited some of that tendency to be unhappy, so I was not an easy kid. There was the fact that my mother didn't want a third child, which I always knew. My father did. Apparently, he talked her into leaving it to fate. After one night, she said, "No, I don't really want that," but it was too late. I always knew that. My mother was not contemplative or introspective. She didn't tend to take a step back and ask questions about the way the world is. She wasn't interested in talking about her past. Because I was recording all of these conversations, I actually captured it on tape. At that time, it was a cassette tape. Some of the conversations in the book are transcribed from actual conversations we had. She was often envious that I spent all this time talking to my father. She didn't like it when I was alone with him. She wanted the attention for herself.

One time, she came in and she said, "I'm going to have to think about my past." I said, "Yeah, I want to know about your past." I started asking her a question. I think it went something like, "Do you remember the house you grew up in?" "Yeah, sort of. We had a house." "Do you remember the furniture?" My father gave all these detailed descriptions. "Do you remember dinner?" "Dinner?" "Yeah. Do you remember what dinner was like?" "No. I know there was a table and a chair." "Did you have friends?" Again, my father had these stories about all the other kids he knew and their life stories. "I know I had friends." "Do you remember any particular friends?" "No." Then she would get impatient very quickly. She said, "We came to this country. We always had enough to eat. Really, nothing special. That's it."

Clearly, there's many ways that that's wonderful that she didn't get obsessed with the past. She was very impatient with my father being so obsessed with his past. Apparently, she made a rule in the house, no talking about dead people. [laughter] He always wanted to reminisce about his grandfather and his past. He made fun of himself for it. He said, "She's interested in the present. To me, it isn't real until it's past." I couldn't write a book about my mother because she didn't give me the material. My father gave me these mountains of words, journals that he kept, letters that he kept, notes that he kept, memories he wrote down for me. He learned to use a computer when he was seventy. He learned to use email when he was eighty. He was sending me these long letters that he typed and long emails, so much material to work with, too much in a way. That was part of what took me so long to write it. I do talk about my mother in the book. You're wearing that about mothers and daughters. I have a lot of anecdotes about her there.

Zibby: How long did this book take you to write?

Deborah: From one perspective, it took me forty years. I did write quite a few other books in between. I got quite serious about writing it in the mid-nineties. I actually proposed it to my publisher at that point. I said that I wanted to write a book about public discourse, The Argument Culture, and this book about my father. They said, "If you want to write The Argument Culture, then the other one has to be about relationships." They didn't want the book about my father. I said all right. I wrote The Argument Culture. Then I wrote a book called I Only Say This Because I Love You about adult family relationships. Then that had a book about mothers and daughters, a chapter that people liked very much, so I wrote the book about mothers and daughters. Then my mother passed away while I was writing that book, so that delayed that a bit. I was very close to my mother when she got older. The tensions were no longer there. Then somehow in the mid-nineties, I got quite serious, had all that material, had all those notes, but I did move away from the idea of actually writing it. I got more serious about it around 2012, '13. I had a year; I had a sabbatical. I did come out with a draft at that point, but didn't really start shaping it until a couple of years ago. Again, wrote another book in between, my book about friendship, I Only Say This Because I Love You. In a way, I needed that much distance from my father. It's now fourteen years since he passed away. I guess I was finally ready to bring it all together and shape it.

Zibby: Do you now feel a sense of closure now that it's come out into the world and it's done and it's here?

Deborah: Oh, yeah, understatement of the year. I'm so thrilled that I got it done, that it's published. I promised him I would write it. He was pleased that I was writing it. We talked about it. He sent me things with that in mind. "I hope you have a file for this. Keep these things together in a file." We were very lucky. As I said, he was really healthy until the end. There was just one week. He had a heart attack. He was in the hospital. He seemed to be recovering. Then he had a stroke. After the stroke, he wasn't responsive. The hospice people assured us he could hear. They said, "Talk to him about all the good times you had." I thought, I think I'll tell him what I think he would appreciate hearing. I said, "I promise you I will write the book about you." I'm glad I kept my promise.

Zibby: I'm glad you did too. That's really nice. That's so special. I'm glad you got to tell him. I sort of believe that people know on some level even if they're not with us, which sounds a little woo-woo. I do believe that it's out there and it's acknowledged in some way.

Deborah: I think I do too. Although clearly, he was an atheist, so he didn't literally believe in the afterlife. One of the conversations we had really stuck in my mind. This is when he was ninety-seven. We were talking about how long I would live and how I would like living that old. I said, "I guess I won't know until it happens." He said, "You'll have to tell me when I'm up there. I'll be watching you from up there." I feel in a way that he is.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. That's amazing. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Deborah: The advice is pretty much advice that I was told and inspired by many years ago. Just write. Don't wait until you've got it all right. All those notes that I was writing all those years, I did eventually incorporate, not all of them of course. I couldn't, but many of them. If I had waited until I knew what shape the book was going to have, I would never have written it because it was so hard to know what shape it would have until I started writing. Then having all of that material, it was certainly challenging to figure out how to shape it, what to include, what to leave out. Maybe that was the hardest, deciding what to leave out. Having been writing and having all that material to start with I think is what made it possible.

Zibby: That's amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on my show. Thank you for sharing your beautiful stories. I feel so great knowing that I got to hear just a sliver of the backstory of this beautiful love letter to your dad. Thanks.

Deborah: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Deborah: You too.

Victoria Montgomery-Brown, DIGITAL GODDESS

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

Victoria Montgomery Brown: Thanks, Zibby. This is a great pleasure.

Zibby: This is so nice. I think you are my third classmate from HBS to be on my podcast. I had Lea Carpenter and Charles Duhigg and now you. Look at this. It's great.

Victoria: Charles interviewed me maybe three weeks ago on Big Think, actually, for the book. I was like, who could be a great interviewer? Charles.

Zibby: He was awesome. That's great. You all are just so accomplished. It's a pleasure to be able to talk to you. Now you've written this great book, Digital Goddess: The Unfiltered Lessons of a Female Entrepreneur, which is amazing. You were just telling me I'm seeing this before you even saw it. I'm seeing this before you. This is the copy of your book, at least the advance copy, which looks great. Congratulations. Victoria, you've already founded this amazing company, Big Think. Why also write a book? What made you want to sit down and share all your lessons with the rest of us? By the way, thank you. I appreciate it.

Victoria: You're welcome. I think it was because, essentially, over the years, probably mostly in the last five years, I've received lots of emails from young women who are aspiring entrepreneurs. Obviously, it takes a while to build a successful business. Big Think is doing well now. We reach about forty million people a month. I think because of that, women started to reach out to me and ask, I have an interest in being an entrepreneur too, how did you do it? My business partner, actually, Peter Hopkins, was the one who really encouraged me to do it. He's like, "You have a unique perspective. There are female entrepreneurs, but not a ton of them. A lot of them don't become the CEO. I think it would be good for you to write a book and explain how you did it or how we did it, especially for young women," but it's really for entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs at any stage or age.

Zibby: As you were talking, by the way, I realized I also had Jeff Norton on my podcast who was also in our class. Anyway, okay, enough. [laughs] Thank you for women CEOs and entrepreneurs. Could you share the story that you wrote about in the book, which was hilarious, I mean, scary in its own right as well, but when you were called into the police department and had to share with your investors all the craziness of what happened after your prior job incident?

Victoria: Yes. I say in the book that I was arrested, but I actually was talking to my criminal defense attorney who is my friend now from years ago. He corrected me and said I was not actually arrested because there's no record of it. All of it was expunged. In the moment, I was arrested, but not legally. In any case, it was November or December of 2007, so literally a few weeks before Big Think was about to launch. A big story was coming out in The New York Times I think on January 7th with Larry Summers who was the former president of Harvard and former treasury secretary talking about why he had decided to be an initial investor in Big Think. This was a huge deal. It was maybe the second page of The New York Times Business section. I was walking out of Union Square subway station. It was the era of flip phones, unbelievably. I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. Typically, I don't answer phone calls from numbers I don't recognize, but something told me to answer this call. I did.

I picked up the phone. There was a guy's voice with a strong New York accent and sounded kind of laughing, like a laughing tone. He introduced himself as a senior detective from the NYPD and told me that I needed to come into a specific precinct. Me being naïve or something, I had never had any dealings the police or anything like that, and so I just put on my good girl hat and was like, oh, my gosh, I've got to get into a car. I went directly to the police station. I called my dad on the way. He said, "What are you doing? You don't even know why you're going. Get out of the car." But I kept going. I arrived at the precinct. There was a man there dressed in civilian clothes, I guess you'd call them, waiting for me. He was just totally laughing, but it was a big deal. I was arrested; again, whatever, expunged later. I sat in a room with a one-way mirror for maybe three hours. I think it was just intimidation tactics of some kind. Somebody that I had previously worked for was not pleased that I had left and called into a flurry of activity, basically, the New York justice system. It was terrifying.

As I say in the book, I could have basically just hidden this from our investors or denied it, pretend that it didn't happen. As soon as I came out, my business partner and I started calling our investors. I called the majority of them -- Peter actually called Larry because he knew him better at that stage than I did -- and just fessed up to what happened. One of our classmates is actually the lead investor in Big Think, David Frankel. He was the first person I called. I had no idea what to expect from any of these people. Would they be mad? Would they disavow me? Would they want to divest? They had no idea what the outcome was going to be, nor did I. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised. They all supported me. It taught me a lesson that has been fundamental for the entire duration of Big Think and being an entrepreneur. Get out in front of the bad news as quickly as you can. Be as honest and as blunt as possible. People will support you. I mention in the book at some stage, the story of Elizabeth Holmes. Once you start digging into yourself a hole, it's really difficult to get out. You actually have to dig deeper. I learned immediately that you have to be honest. As much as it's painful, that's the thing to do.

Zibby: It's so true. Even with my kids, it's like, "I'm not even that upset that you stole the cookie. I'm more upset that you lied about stealing the cookie." It's the same thing. Somehow, the lies themselves make whatever it was almost pale in comparison to the fact that you then can't trust the person. Once you don't have trust in your relationship, what else is left? Usually, you don't have to learn it in such a dramatic Law & Order-type way, but I'm glad that you lived this for the rest of us. That's crazy. Just for the people who aren't familiar with Big Think, do you want to explain what it is and why you founded it to begin with and what people can get out of it?

Victoria: Big Think is a global knowledge forum with leading thinkers and influencers. We say to be on Big Think you have to be at the top of your field or disrupting it, everybody from Nobel laureates to business leaders, politics, artists, academics. We've had everybody on from the likes of Elon Musk to Richard Branson, Larry Summer. It's global. It's international. We reach around forty million people a month. The large majority of it is free. It's short-form video and also articles. Then we also have a subscription side of it which is much more focused on professional and personal growth and development. We've been around since 2008. It's growing. It's something I'm very proud of. When we started it, the dearth of thoughtful content on the internet -- we pitched it to our investors as Davos, democratized. For people who don't know, Davos is thing which is probably not happening this year, but that happens next year in January in Switzerland where notable business leaders and world leaders, and Bono, get together. [laughter] I think he's always there. I don't know. I've never been. They get together in the Alps. They talk about global issues.

All of these incredible people get exposed to other incredible, notable people, but the likes of me and other people don't get to go and participate. We thought, why don't we create a scenario where regular people have access to the minds of incredible thought leaders? We created Big Think. We pitched it to initial investors as Davos, democratized. It's grown from there. The fundamental principle of it hasn’t changed. We really do want to expose incredible people to our audience and in ways that is not of the moment. It's not about what's happening politically today, yesterday, tomorrow. It's really, what can this person, whether they be a politician or a business leader or an artist, teach you or I that we can put it into our own work or lives and make ourselves and our lives better and those around us? We say that it has to stand the test of time. Now, are there moments when we do do something that's of the moment? Yes, but ninety to ninety-five percent of the content we create is evergreen.

Zibby: Excellent. Do you go on it and tune up on certain topics yourself?

Victoria: I absolutely do. For instance, we had recently, I suppose it was one of our last in-studio interviews before COVID, with Robin DiAngelo who wrote White Fragility, the book, she gave a masterclass for Big Think on confronting racism. That, to me, was really profound and interesting. Yes, I do go on and learn about topics that I didn't know about all the time. At the moment, it's interesting for us because we're doing a lot of this type of interviewing where before, we'd had people come into our studio. What's been interesting, and I don't know if you've found this, it's been much easier for us to have access to guests. I interviewed Penn Jillette, the magician, about six weeks ago. Typically, it would take maybe six months to book him. He lives in Las Vegas. Getting a plane to come to New York or us going to Las Vegas, big barriers to entry. Now doing things like this, it's been so much easier. Next week, we're interviewing Malcom Gladwell. We've done him. We've interviewed him maybe three times before. Again, it's typically a six-month or so booking process. This was a week or two. This has changed things, not that you asked, but it has.

Zibby: Well, now I'm just going to call Malcom Gladwell next. It sounds like he has plenty of spare time. I have noticed that, actually. My access to authors, of course, has expanded because it doesn't matter where they are. I used to really insist that people, not insist, but I used to request that people come over. That was so nice. I really got to know people really well one on one. We would sit right here. Now this is so much more efficient. I can fit in more interviews. There are pros and cons to everything. I would still, if I had my druthers, sit here next to you instead of on the computer. It's lovely this way too. You had so many great tips in your book. I'll just pick out a few that I thought were pretty great. Here's one. This is from HBS. I'm not even sure I learned this. You said, "Here's something major that HBS taught me. You don't need to know how to do things. You need to know how to ask people to do things for you. This is something at which I excel." [laughs]

Victoria: It's true. I was thinking back to this a few weeks ago. I was in a study group, actually, with our classmate and friend Lea Carpenter. I helped organize the study group with Lea. There were probably eight of us in the study group. I was the only one who was not a Baker Scholar. Maybe Lea wasn't. I'm not sure. Everybody else was. I managed to assemble this incredible group where I probably contributed, academically, the least, but I managed to learn from incredibly bright people around me. I think that is something to not be ashamed of. People have different skills. When we were putting together the business model and the plan for Big Think and Excel spreadsheets, I suck at Excel, I was like, why do I have to do this? I can find somebody who knows how to do it. It's going to be a whole lot better than anything I put together. That's the approach I've taken. It's definitely been humbling over the years to realize how little I do know. Then it's also freeing to understand that there are people out there who can help you and not to be ashamed to ask. HBS really did teach me that because I did feel oftentimes, I think there is an expression, the diversity admit. I came from an artsy background. I was seated next to a banker, first year, from Goldman Sachs and a Navy Seal. It's like, how do I belong in this situation? That did teach me that I did bring something to the table different than these people. It's not shameful to ask for help.

Zibby: We were there just to make their experience better. [laughter] I actually have a really hard time delegating anything. That's probably one of my weaknesses. I just feel like by the time I find the right person to do something, I could've done it fifty times over myself. It's my own issue.

Victoria: I do feel that sometimes myself. I feel if it takes me longer to ask somebody for help or do something, I'll just do it. Over the years, I've realized so many people I work with can do things far better than I. I have a company that focuses on video production. Do I know how to set up the camera? No, I do not. Do I do any of the editing? No. CEOs of most companies, they should understand the process of what they're building or the product, but they don't need to have to build it themselves.

Zibby: That's true. You can't do everything. You had another great idea here where somebody took a thousand sticky notes with tasks that had to be accomplished, put them all over, and then each day just pulled down one to take off the to-do list, so to speak. I was putting that on my sticky notes. Tell me about that and if you've actually tried it yourself.

Victoria: I have tried it myself. I should be doing it more these days, actually. I think it can be really overwhelming when you think to yourself, I have to build a business or I have to build this product or something. The finality of it is really overwhelming. Versus, if I just call this person today or do one little thing, it feels like you're moving forward. The building of momentum is fundamental to achieving whatever it is you want to achieve. It's so easy to just say, I want to run a marathon or something. If I just go out and walk a hundred feet today and then tomorrow I run five hundred feet or something, you're building the momentum for it. Taking those sticky notes off the wall really does feel like you're like accomplishing something and I think pushes you forward versus, just as I said, the finality of the overwhelmingness of the large project or whatever it is you're trying to do, seems insurmountable versus one little thing at a time.

Zibby: Although, I feel like I would take one down and then think of five other things that I had to do. We'd have to start another wall. I feel like you'd have the first wall, and then you'd have to tackle the second wall [indiscernible/laughter] or something while things just keep building up. I love that visual element of it. I feel like crossing it off the to-do list is sometimes not as rewarding as if you were to pull it down.

Victoria: There's actually a book that a friend of mine, Kate Millican, suggested for me which I bought a couple of weeks ago which is called Best Self. Do you know that?

Zibby: No.

Victoria: This is something which I think is really amazing. It's a thirteen-week plan for a goal or three goals that you want to achieve. It's very, very direct. I started it yesterday. It's called Best Self. It's a very good book.

Zibby: You started the book, or you started the thirteen weeks to achieving something?

Victoria: It's a book that is thirteen weeks to achieving something. It's not like you read this book. It's activities every day to get to a goal.

Zibby: Oh, I see. What are you trying to achieve?

Victoria: I'm trying to achieve, basically, how to be in my -- I'm a very anxious person. I've been through a lot to cause anxiety and stress. For me, it's living in the moment and appreciating the daily things in life versus constantly striving. My achievement is actually being about less achievement at the moment and just being in the moment and calm.

Zibby: This is what it's like going to Harvard Business School. Our goals are to achieve less than we're capable of. [laughter] We're just that amazing that we have to slow ourselves down. It's just too much, oh, my gosh. You kind of slipped in there that you had been through a lot to create anxiety. What are some of the things? Is there anything you were thinking of in particular? Was there some sort of experience in general that you feel like has caused a lot of anxiety in your life? Or was that just a lot meaning the business and all the rest of it?

Victoria: Overwhelmingly, for the past thirteen years it's been the business. I do want to say that it's given me a profound amount of joy and happiness too. I think my tendency is to revert to an anxious state of being and a stressed state of being, hoping for the best but planning for the worst. My go-to is always, this positive thing that happened, and then I think of ten negative things that could derail it. That's a real challenge for me. Over the years, I've gone into many downward spirals when positive things are happening around me. All I see is doom. It was maybe 2013 or '14 that I was in San Francisco with Peter, my business partner. We were seated at Yerba Buena, this coffee place. I started talking about all the problem things that were potentially going to happen to the business and what the investors were going to say and our clients and our employees. He sat there with no joking at all and said, "If this is all going to happen, why are we doing this? Why don't we just quit? What's the point?" Then he pulled himself together and said, "You know Victoria, it's been really difficult to be around you for the past six months. It's all negative all the time. I know that your role as CEO is to see the negative things in potential, but you're also supposed to see the positive and be encouraging people and being a cheerleader versus planning for the doom scenario. You really need to go and get help. I'm not going to just sit back and observe this any longer."

At that stage, I had been seeing, casually, a therapist to just talk about the daily ins and outs. I found that in therapy I tended to be a comedian and my job was to essentially make the therapist laugh. I would emerge from these sessions being like, what was the use of that, really? I wasn't very honest. [laughs] I was about comedy. Anyway, I ended up going to see a psychiatrist. I was placed on or put myself -- I don't know. He placed me on antidepressants and antianxiety medication, one in the same. I think it's Wellbutrin. That really helped me and kind of broke the cycle of the downward doom scenarios. Now, has it made me be the life of the party and the joy and light and airy all the time? No, but it certainly did break a cycle of doom. I would encourage anybody to do that. That was kind of the end of the road for Peter that really helped me. I suppose it's like addiction. Somebody has to do an intervention sometimes for you to take the steps.

Zibby: That's great. How great that he did that and that you were open and receptive to that feedback as opposed to storming away from the table, which I could maybe see myself doing in a similar situation, like, what do you mean?

Victoria: It wasn't easy. I could also know in myself that I wasn't happy. That feeling, it was inward panic that was twenty-four hours or whenever I was awake and the feeling of something bad is about to happen in your stomach that just wouldn't leave. It was really unpleasant for me in my own body as well.

Zibby: I'm really sorry. That's no fun at all. I'm glad you found a way to manage it. Yes, I think therapy is the greatest thing. I wish I had been a therapist myself. Instead, I get to hear about other people's therapy journeys and not have to do all the work, so I get some perks. What was it like for you going back and reflecting on all your time and then sitting down to write this book? What did that feel like? How long did it take for you to write the book? What was that process like?

Victoria: It was actually much quicker than I thought because obviously -- well, not obviously. I've never written a novel. I think that requires way, way, way more effort. What I was writing was what I'd experienced and what I know. The most difficult part for me was figuring out the structure of it. As I began writing, I was like, is this even interesting? It's my story. I was in some ways thinking, who is going to care about this? The most challenging part for me was the structure of it, kind of like in high school or college or whatever, writing an essay, getting down the parts that you want to talk about and then figuring out the order that you're going to tell them in and then the parts that you need to cut. I put together a proposal in June of 2019, oh, my gosh, and didn't think anything about it. I submitted to around ten agents, cold. I finally got one. As they say, and it is true -- I'll encourage anybody who wants to write a book. It just takes one. Nine of ten publishers rejected it. The tenth selected it. It took me three months to write the whole thing.

Zibby: That's fast.

Victoria: Because of the election coming up, it was either going to be pre-election released or post-election released. I didn't know this before writing a book, but the editorial and publishing process is very long. The whole thing was finished by December of last year. Then obviously, there have been tweaks and things to it and then choosing the book cover and things like that. The bulk of the work and all the writing was done by December because they needed it done by that. It was a very, very quick writing process. I will say that I think had I been given a year or something, I might not have done it. It's kind of like cramming for a test or something. The fact that I had to do it in such a short timeframe meant that I actually did it.

Zibby: It's like that saying, if you give a busy person something to do, they’ll do it fast. If I have a thousand things to do, then throw it in. I'll make that call. I'll send that email. On a lazy Sunday, if I'm not doing anything, I can't even send one email sometimes.

Victoria: I remember graduating from HBS in 2003. As I wrote in the book, I didn't have a job until November or something of that year. I was staying at my sister's house in New York, or apartment. I remember in the morning, getting out of bed and having been at HBS being busy all the time, I found it a struggle to even plan to go to the gym. It seemed like a huge effort and ridiculous.

Zibby: Yes, I felt the same way. I still sometimes feel like that. Going to the gym is hard. [laughter] I see what you're saying. So what's coming next for you? You have this book coming out which is so exciting. You're running your business. What else? What else is coming up?

Victoria: In this book, Best Self, there's this thirteen-week bucket list which I'm trying to put my mind to about things I want to do. I really do want to expand into other areas personally as well. I'd love to learn Spanish, which I have never done. I grew up in Canada and studied French for twelve years. I'm in no way fluent in French, which tells you about learning languages in schools. [laughs] I have to go and immerse myself somewhere. At some point in the next year when the whole COVID thing hopefully ends, I'd like to go to Spain and learn Spanish and also just be much more open to things other than work. That doesn't mean that work isn't going to be front and center, but it will be alongside other things. That's really it.

Zibby: This is great. I feel like I caught you at this major self-improvement moment in your life. You're trying to do all these different things. It's amazing. It's so great. You mentioned already, it only takes one as advice to aspiring authors. What other advice would you share?

Victoria: Just keep going. The hardest part, even for me, is getting the first few words down. Then once you start writing, it's easier. The blank page, I know much better writers than I even struggle with that. It's just literally starting. That's even what I said with a business. It's just taking the leap and saying you're going to do it. That's something else I write about in the book. If you tell people that you're going to do it, it's really hard to not do it. If I said to you, I'm about to start writing my second book, and in two months you called me and asked how it was going, I'd be slightly abashed if I hadn’t even started it. I'm not writing a second book at the moment. [laughs]

Zibby: I do that too. I'm like, I'm going on this eating plan. I'm telling everybody I know about it. Then maybe it will work or something. The more you can get it out loud, the more there's a shot at it. It's good to apply to this. I feel like so many of your tips apply not just to the workplace, but to every aspect of life. It's really user-friendly. I feel like women are entrepreneurs even who don't work in the workplace. Just running our lives and for people who have lots of kids, everything can be like a business. All the tips are super relevant in any context, so thank you. Thanks for the book. Thanks for chatting today.

Victoria: Thanks so much, Zibby. This has been wonderful.

Zibby: Thank you. Take care.

Victoria: Bye.

Zibby: Bye, Victoria.

Heather Land, A PERFECT 10

Heather Land: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Zibby Owens: Oh, my gosh, I'm thrilled to have you. I've been really excited to do it.

Heather: Thank you. You've given me a reason to get up this morning and put on a bra, so I appreciate it.

Zibby: That might be the most useful thing I do for anyone all day.

Heather: It's a reason to live.

Zibby: That's good. [laughs] Congrats on the release of your latest book, A Perfect 10. So exciting. Look your I Ain't Doin' It mug. Look at that.

Heather: Got to represent this morning, right?

Zibby: Yes, exactly. I think I saw that your shirts were sold out or you're rereleasing your shirts. Aren't you doing something with merch or something? Do you have a new T-shirt?

Heather: Yeah, we have a new 2020 I Ain't Doin' It. They sold out in two hours. We were like, oh, we grossly underbought. We've got to rethink this. We've got to make a new order. That's a good problem to have.

Zibby: It's a good problem to have. For people who aren't as familiar with your trajectory to becoming this sensation comedian, Instagram, author, everything, can you talk a little bit about how you got started and how you ended up here?

Heather: It's kind of a crazy, weird phenomenon, really. I had just gone through a divorce after almost fifteen years of marriage. I had been in ministry my whole life and leading worship. My ex-husband was a youth pastor. When you go through a divorce in the church world -- church work is very emotional. It takes heart and soul. I just didn't see a way to continue doing that at that point. I was really broken and needed to heal. I moved home from Colorado. I was in Colorado. I moved home to Tennessee. Moved in with my parents for about three months, me and my kids. That was great fun. Then finally got a little rent house. Got a job. A really good friend of mine gave me a job doing some administrative work for him. Then ended up creating a refinance department, essentially, for his company. He put me in charge of it. I'm like, "Listen, I can barely do simple addition. Are you sure?" He really took a gamble and gave me a good job with some stability.

In the meantime, my kids had turned me onto Snapchat. I found the ugliest filter I could find on Snapchat and was just making really stupid videos between me and a couple of my friends. They were like, "You need to put these on social media." I said, "Absolutely not. I'm single. This is not the way to get a date." I wouldn't do it for the longest. Then finally, on a dare, one of them dared me -- I can't even remember what my reward was for doing it. It was evidently something really great, so I finally posted my first video to Facebook, to my personal page. People started watching it. They were messaging me saying, "We love your I ain't doin' it videos. Is that what they're called?" I was like, "They're not called anything. I don't even know what you're talking about, I ain't doin' it." I didn't even realize that I had said it. I had to go back and re-watch it. I was like, oh, I did say I ain't doin' it. People were asking me for more. I was like, okay, yeah, we'll make some more I ain't doin' it videos. I made two or three more. Then Susannah Lewis, Whoa! Susannah, she reached out to me. She actually was one of my neighbors, but I never knew her at the time. She just said, "Can I post a video?" I said, "Sure. I've got a big girl job, so I don't really care. You can do whatever you want." She said, "You're going to need to start a fan page because people will start following you." I didn't even understand what she was talking about. I was mortified to start a fan page. I said, "Absolutely not. People are going to think I want to be a comedian. I've got a real job. I'm not trying to be a comedian." She said, "I'm telling you, you're going to want to start that page to keep people away from your kids and all that," so I did.

I started a fan page. I went to work that morning. It was September the 6th, 2017. I started that fan page. When I went to church that night -- we still go to church on Wednesday nights in the South. I went to church that night. There were 750 followers, which I thought was amazing. She had posted her video, obviously. When I came home, there were 55,000 followers. It just kept going up and up and up. After a month, the page was at a million. I had my two cousins and a girlfriend answering thousands of messages every day. They would report back, "I'm sitting here typing at work. They're just blowing me up on my phone. People want you to come to their churches and their events and their theaters." I'm like, "What do they want me to do?" They wanted me to do comedy. I told my friend Tasha, I said, "I am not a comedian." She said, "Yes, you are. You just don't get paid for it. Do you want to try to get paid for it?" I'm like, "I don't know." Two weeks later, I quit my job. I sold my brand-new house that I had just built. I moved in with some friends in Nashville for about three months until I found a place, sold a bunch of T-shirts to get me by for a few months so I'd have a paycheck, and here we are. I went on tour. I've done a couple of tours now. It's the weirdest life I've ever lived, but I just am loving it. I'm taking it in stride. I'm like, okay, whatever's next. Let's see.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, that's amazing.

Heather: It's been super [indiscernible].

Zibby: I saw on your Instagram that you met -- your husband was your production manager on your tour.

Heather: Yes! We're getting married in twenty-four days. He was my production manager on my first tour. My manager introduced me to him and said, "This is your production manager for this round." We jumped on a bus and just fell in love pretty immediately. We've been inseparable ever since. Now he is really my road manager, essentially, if I can ever get back on the road because of COVID. We obviously get each other and our line of work. We love being on the road. We love traveling. It's been awesome all the way around, just really sweet, redemptive story after going through quite a bit. It's been a relief and a joy.

Zibby: It's amazing. We get a sneak peek at a happy ending already.

Heather: Right, for me too. Every day, I wake up -- this morning, I said, "We're getting married in twenty-four days." Every day is just so exciting. I've never lived that life. It's very weird and wonderful. I just love it. Loving it.

Zibby: I have to say, as I was researching you and reading your book and learning about your story, I feel like there are some parallels. I also got divorced. I was forty when I got divorced, or around there. I had four kids and had to start over again. That's actually how I ended up starting this podcast, which came out of nowhere for me. Now it's become a whole thing. I actually got remarried a couple years ago now, but totally fell in love, my own sort of redemptive story. Anyway, when I was looking at your pictures and getting all ready for the wedding, I was thinking back to my wedding and getting bridesmaids dresses for my little girls and my boys. It can happen.

Heather: Can we have coffee off the record soon so we can talk about all that?

Zibby: Yes, please.

Heather: I would like to dig into that a little more. It's interesting. Like I said, I did ministry my whole life. Once I went through a divorce, it opened me up to a whole new group of people that I never could relate to. Really, it's like half of the population. I'm like, oh, wow, this is a new ballgame. People have gone through a lot when they’ve gotten divorced. I had no clue. It really does change the whole game. You start over. You have to check the divorced box on your taxes. That was a tough one for me. It is a stripping away of everything that you thought represented stability to you. Really, I feel like even though I have tapped into this new side of myself that I didn't even know was there, I really have found who I am through divorce. It's been such a beautiful experience on this side of it.

Zibby: I feel the same way. That's why sometimes I feel like I want to shout it from the rooftops. I'm like, I'm me again. I had lost me for so long. I didn't think I was coming back. Now this is just who I am. Now every day I get to talk to people and record it. [laughs] It's not just in my professional life. It's in every area. My mom says your sparkle comes back.

Heather: You're alive again, really. Hopefully for me, it seems like this is your story as well, that you have a partner now who lets you be you and gives you the freedom to explore who you are and all the changes of who you are. That's really what Steven does for me. He loves me every phase. Whether I'm a comedian or not, he doesn't care. At first, I thought, oh, gosh, he only knows me on the road. Is he still going to love me off the road? Then COVID hit. I went, okay, here we go. This is going to test the waters. We've had the greatest time quarantining together. We just love each other's company. He really lets me be me. It is just so refreshing.

Zibby: That's amazing. How is it with your kids?

Heather: Quarantine or new stepdad?

Zibby: Well, both. I mean with him, incorporating a new guy into the scene.

Heather: It's been wonderful. They absolutely adore him. They're thrilled about the wedding. I'm kind of like you, I'm picking out my son's -- we went and got his suit and getting my daughter's dress. They absolutely adore him. He doesn't have children. He's never wanted kids, but he always potentially saw himself marrying someone with children. He loves the older age, which I know nothing about. I'm all about that baby phase. Now I've got a seventeen-year-old and an almost fourteen-year-old. I have no clue what to do with them, not to mention we are virtual schooling and I am the most technically challenged human being. Steven left to go send off some T-shirts. I was like, "Please don't leave me alone with Zoom." He looked at my phone. He said, "You don't even have Zoom on your phone." How have I been surviving? All to say, he is the technical guru of the family. Right now while they're both virtual schooling, I am not parenting. I just lay around and drink coffee in my pajamas while he parents. You know what? I'm like, "Listen, it's your turn. It's your turn. I'm tired. I'm tapping out." It's really been a great partnership from my perspective anyway.

Zibby: [laughs] My husband is the same. He didn't have kids of his own. He just walked into our situation and embraced it. Now he cuts all the kids' hair. He does all the cooking.

Heather: I need to meet this guy.

Zibby: He buys a lot of their clothes, like the coolest this and that, and things that I just don't know. He's up on all of it. It's such a gift.

Heather: A gift, yes. Zero to four, man, he deserves more than a pat on the back. Good for him for embracing it. That's so wonderful. I love that.

Zibby: Before we even got together, I was like, "Okay, just don't even kiss me because I have four kids. I'm not having any more kids. You could go meet some pretty young thing and have lots of babies and have your life. Just let me walk down the beach the other way." [laughs]

Heather: You are so funny. I said the same thing to Steven. I said, "Listen, you don't have to sign up for this. This is a lot. I've got baggage. I've got kids. I've got a lot of history. Save yourself. Run." He just wouldn't. Every day that he stayed, I think it made me love him so much more, you know? You do know. You get it.

Zibby: I totally get it. It's funny because I don't often meet people in the same life stage situation hardly ever. I'm trying to think if I know anybody. Anyway, it's nice.

Heather: I want to interview you. I want to ask you more questions. We need to continue this at a later date, for sure.

Zibby: Yes, I would love to. I would really love to. Oh, my gosh. By the way, I read in your book that you grew up with a payphone in your house. I thought that was one of the most memorable details I've read lately. [laughs]

Heather: Yes. It's one of my most memorable details of my life. It's turned out to be a great memory, actually. At the time, it was not. Obviously, you read my mom lived only thirty minutes from her family, but it was still long distance. She was running up that phone bill. My dad was not having any more of it. He told her if she didn't quit, he was putting in a payphone. He stuck to his word. We had a little bowl of dimes sitting on top of it. We'd have to stick a dime in there every time we wanted to talk. Then the chord was maybe a foot and a half, so you weren’t going anywhere. Everybody was listening to your convo right there in the hall. It was -- wow. I don't even know what to say about it. It was scary, not fun.

Zibby: You said in your book that you were always the kid from the very beginning who would try to entertain the grown-ups. As an only child, that would be your thing, making people laugh or entertaining them. That's who you are. Is that just how it was?

Heather: Mostly, I entertained them with my hairbrush. I would sing. That was my gig as a kid. Whenever anybody asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be a singer. That's all I cared about. My parents kind of pawned me off as the singing entertainment. I was petrified every time, but I always loved it. I always did it. That's where it started. Always growing up, I was the one who always tried to get a joke in under the radar. Sarcasm really got me through life. I touched on it just a little bit in this new book because I'm honestly trying to just test the waters with it. I talked a little bit about growing up with an addictive parent in the house. I think sarcasm really helped me muddle through that, unknowingly. I didn't even realize that was a coping mechanism that's now turned into a career. I do think that's what it was. It was just a way to cope. I've always been, interestingly, very melancholy. I cry a lot. I also am super sarcastic and optimistic at the same time. It's quite the conundrum, quite the split personality. The comedy side just helped me through life. It still does every day.

Zibby: That's what they say. You just have to have a sense of humor.

Heather: You got to laugh or you'll cry. That's what we say in the South.

Zibby: That's a better expression.

Heather: You got to laugh or you'll cry.

Zibby: So tell me about how the writing entered into your life. You started the viral videos. Things started blowing up. Then when did this become a writing thing?

Heather: I think it was actually a few weeks before I even posted a video, I really felt in my heart -- I'll never forget where I was. I was sitting in my bedroom in my house. I was writing on my computer, just like a little blog entry except that I had no blog. I thought, you know what, I think I'm going to start a blog. I remember texting a friend and telling her that. I feel like I'm supposed to start a blog. I don't know why, but I'm just going to throw it out there and see what sticks to the wall. Started a little WordPress free blog spot and started just posting a few random entries. Once the videos went viral, I got approached by some literary agents. I didn't even know what a literary agent was. I read the emails. I was like, I don't really know what this means. A friend of mine was like, "They're wanting to try to get you a book deal." I'm like, "A book deal?" I was just so new to all of it. I thought, well, okay. I've got a blog. I know how to communicate. Let's give it a go. As you can see from my writing, it is very conversational. There is nothing fancy about it. It is exactly like I would sit here and talk to you. I think it works for a humor book and for comedy. It's relatable. It's pretty dumbed down. Anybody with a third-grade reading level can snatch it up and get through it in a day. [laughs] It's pretty simple. That's how it started.

Zibby: You are playing the book down tremendously. By the way, being able to take what's in your head and get it on the page is not something that everybody can do. That is actually a skill.

Heather: You're so sweet. You know what? Sometimes I think, and I've said this to Steven, I've said, "I think I just need to go write my thoughts down because I'm better on paper." If I can write you a letter and tell you how I feel, it will come out so much more accurately and eloquently than if I try to muddle through the millions of thoughts in my brain. For some reason, it's almost a better means of communication. Too bad I can't put tape over my mouth and just put a pen in my hand.

Zibby: My husband Kyle is finally like, "You cannot email me anymore. Stop emailing me these paragraph-long things."

Heather: Can't get through them.

Zibby: I'd be like, "Here's how I feel." He's like, "I'm sitting right --" He'd be on the couch. It's so much easier to say it right and get it down.

Heather: And delete. You can delete before it's out there for everybody, before you can not take it back. That's the beauty of it. You get it.

Zibby: He's like, "I don't even have time to read all these." [laughs] After a while, I'm writing him books.

Heather: Put them in your memoir.

Zibby: Exactly. [laughs] Got to save those. Dig them up somewhere.

Heather: That's right, girl.

Zibby: Then how did you find the whole experience? Tell me about the first book versus the second book. How was it with the book out there, your whole life out there, your kids, people responding to it, and all of that?

Heather: It's interesting. The first book, I had this well of blog entries to draw from. I knew that I wanted it to be just an essay book, standalone chapters. You don't have to read it in order, simple stories. The first one, I think there was so much momentum behind -- I was on tour. I would watch Steven. He's on the stage working during the day. Of course, I don't go on until the night. I would sit up in the balcony at whatever venue we were at and I would just write. It was a really fun, easy experience for me. Like I said, I think the momentum of the time kept me going, kept the juices flowing. The second one, if I'm being totally honest, the first thought that came into my head was, I don't know how in the world I'm going to write a second book. I have nothing to say. I'm so tired. I did pinch-hit a little bit with this book. One of my best friends -- if I was having a bridal party, she would be my maid of honor. She is throwing me a bridal lunch and doing the whole thing. We're not having a wedding party. Anyway, she's a great writer. Her name is Heather Leonard. She's in Mississippi. I asked her to help me with this book. We kind of tag teamed it. She did most of the heavy lifting with my stories. We talked through it and rewrote and had fun girl weekends where we got together and wrote. It was really nice to have a little bit of help from somebody on the outside that was pulling things out of me.

The book is very similar in style. It's another essay book. It's standalone chapters about nonsense and just more stories of growing up Southern. I do write a whole chapter about Steven and how we met. I write, like I said at the beginning of our convo, a little bit about growing up in addiction. That is something I really do want to write more about and talk more about. I'm trying to ride that fine line of being a comedian and telling my story but without embarrassing or disrespecting anyone. That's definitely not in my heart to do. I've really tried to find the balance. I wrote a little bit about it, which was just me tiptoeing in to see how I felt and to see how it was received. It's nothing too deep, but I do want to get that part of the story out there because I think people will relate. It's honest. It's real. A lot of people go through it, people that we don't even realize. I want to give people the freedom to share that part of their story. That's why I wrote about it. My kids, when it comes to writing or comedy or anything that I do, they just think I'm an idiot. They are completely unimpressed with me. My son constantly says, "I cannot believe you make a living doing this." It is baffling to him, and to me too. They're not impressed. I wrote in the first book, I dedicated it to them or I wrote in the acknowledgments to them. They don't care. They're like, "That's sweet. Thanks." They just want to go be with their friends, for me to buy them a skateboard so they can skate, give them money to go shop. Typical teenage life, unimpressed with mom, which is awesome. I wouldn't have it any other way, really.

Zibby: How else would you stay humble?

Heather: Absolutely. [laughs]

Zibby: How did you monetize the comedy? Was it going on the road and selling tickets? Not to dive into your personal finances here.

Heather: It's a totally fair question. Doing live events, that’s the way. I have no money anymore because I haven't been on the road in a year. I've done one show this year. It was on Valentine's Day. That's what has brought in the money. Merch helps a little bit. It helps just monthly, pay the bills. I'm very grateful for that. Very ready to get back on the road not just because that's my livelihood, but I really love the people. Every time I get on the stage, I feel like I'm in somebody's living room. It's scary, but it's so fun. The relationship that I'm able to somehow develop between me and the people overrides the nerves. Writing a set is very daunting. I don't know about you, but my creative process is weird. Everybody's is different. I have a friend who's a songwriter. He tells me you have to schedule in creativity. You have to schedule it. I try to do it. I try to do it his way, but it doesn't work for me. I'll go to writing sessions. I still write songs. I've got some buddies that I write with. If I'm not feeling it, nothing comes out of it every time. The minute that I'm feeling inspiration, and eventually I always do feel it, I'll just say, I got to go. I got to go write. I'll get in the car or I'll get in the bathtub. Those are my two best places to think and write. It's the weirdest thing. It just comes out. The process is super weird. The payoff is being in front of people and doing the live comedy. Man, it's quite the thrill for me.

Zibby: You're bringing a laptop into the tub?

Heather: I've just got my notes out on my phone.

Zibby: Oh, the phone. Okay.

Heather: Yeah, I've just got my phone out.

Zibby: I'm thinking, this is a very risky writing habit here.

Heather: I do have one of those long things that goes across my tub and I can set my computer on it. I'm super scared. I'm better with just my phone. That's how it goes for me.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to aspiring authors now having written two books and all the sets you do and everything else?

Heather: Oh, lord. First of all, I am not one to be giving advice. Let's just throw out that disclaimer. Since you asked, this is my advice. Be honest. Be authentic. I just feel like that's what people want to hear. They want something they can relate to. I've been in church my whole life. I've sat through a million and one sermons. I've fallen asleep in probably three quarters of those. The minute somebody starts talking about something they went through or a personal story from their own life, I perk up. I think we all do. That's my advice. Start with the real thing, whatever it is. Tap into how you know what you know. Is it because of an experience? Yes. So write about that. Let me know how you went through that thing and how you got through that divorce and how you got through that addiction. People are sick of fake. I'm so sick of that. I have no room for it. Be honest. Push through the non-creative moments. Don't quit. It's pretty simple from my perspective anyway.

Zibby: Love it. Heather, thank you. Thank you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I really would love to keep talking.

Heather: I know. Me too. Call me back. Call me on my cell phone. Where are you? I don't even know where you are.

Zibby: I'm in New York. Where are you?

Heather: It's my favorite city. Hey, I'll come to you.

Zibby: Great.

Heather: I'll come to you. We'll have coffee. Can we go to Chelsea Market? It's my favorite place in New York.

Zibby: Is it still open? I wonder if it's open now.

Heather: I'm sure it's not. Once COVID's over, I'll come to you.

Zibby: I would love it. Let's do it.

Heather: That sounds great.

Zibby: Where are you? You're in Nashville?

Heather: Tennessee, Nashville.

Zibby: I've never been there. It's the top of my list.

Heather: Okay, well, you come to me too.

Zibby: I would love to come there.

Heather: That sounds great. Thank you so much. I've enjoyed it.

Zibby: Bye.

Heather: Bye.

Arden Myrin, LITTLE MISS LITTLE COMPTON

Zibby Owens: Welcome to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," Arden. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Arden Myrin: Zibby, I was so excited to be asked. Thank you. I'm a fan.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. First of all, the care package you sent with this, it was months ago now, I was like, this is going to be so fun. [laughs] Anybody who's cool enough to put their worst middle school or lower school picture on a puzzle is my kind of -- that's really awesome. Little Miss Little Compton, really awesome.

Arden: Thank you so much. That was what I actually wanted for the cover. I did recreate my sixth-grade photo. I begged for them to put that on the cover, and they wouldn't. I actually love the cover. I think I got the right cover. I think they were right, but I was excited. I was like, I can't have recreated that and just have it go nowhere. I was like, I'm going to do a meet-the-author with me and my cat, Mittens.

Zibby: It's perfect. I love how you got it in there. It was perfect. Also, when I watched you jumping up and down on Instagram and you were like, "I wrote a book. I wrote a book. I wrote a book," literally, I wanted to applaud. That was so cute. You can just tell how proud you are. You should be that proud. It's an amazing accomplishment.

Arden: For anybody out there who is an author or a first-time, so somebody who's never written a book or is writing, I have to tell you, I am so short attention span theater, the sheer fact that -- I've always been, in life, I could make magic in a short period of time, but I've never been the long-distance race -- if I can't finish it in one sitting, I generally wouldn't do it. I will say for anybody out there that is an author, I had this fantasy that if you sold a book and you wrote a book, that an author gets up and they have their breakfast, and then they log in at ten and they're done at four. Then they go on a walk and then have a brandy and watch some classy thing on television. Particularly in the beginning, it was almost like, you stay in your corner, I'll stay in mine, page. The blank page, I was cautiously approaching it like a caged animal. I would, in the beginning, just do twenty-five minutes a day at first. I would time it. I wouldn't go online. I wouldn't check my texts. I wouldn't be calling anybody. It was just facing myself. Then eventually, I could go a little bit longer. Anybody who knows me, it is a huge accomplishment to actually just allow the process. I started with the word count. I had a pretty aggressively structured proposal which gave me the format. I was so overwhelmed. I started with the word count. I printed it all out. I organized everything. Then I just allowed for it to be a terrible first draft like I was going to Michael's crafts and I was getting glue and felt and yarn and sparkles and to trust that I had to just get the material. Then when I had all the words out, then I went through chapter by chapter and really made sure to tighten and shine each one up and then made sure the flow of the arch of the narrative made sense.

Zibby: Wow. It came off as one really cohesive story. The part that I found really interesting -- it was all awesome, your description of where you grew up and your dad, Willy. He was right off the page. I feel like I got to know him so well, his foibles and his strengths and weaknesses and all the rest. It's almost how the book developed unintentionally because you were talking about your life and then things happened through the writing so that you could even say, "While I wanted to make this like a beach read, now it's serious," but so poignant and moving. I don't want to give anything away that happens later even though it's your life. [laughs]

Arden: It's an interesting thing. This was a book that I'd been trying to sell for a while. I had this unusual upbringing. It's a small-town life. My parents married on a dare. I had this very salty dad. He's a great literary character, maybe not so great in person as a dad, but a great literary character. [laughs] I thought I could this tell this funny story. If you read it, there's a twist at the end that was not part of the original plan. I thought it would just be a fun, female comedian, here's all my most embarrassing stories. Here's my quirky upbringing. Here's my Dorothy going to Oz, how to go from a town with a general store and make it onto a sitcom. Here's all that fun. Then an event happens on the day that I find out that I've sold the book that alters the entire DNA of it and I actually think made it a better book. I mean, made life trickier.

Zibby: I agree, not that I would wish that to happen.

Arden: I know what's going on with you. I know you know what that's like. It's an interesting thing. We can talk. What do you think? Is it giving stuff away?

Zibby: I don't know. It's hard to say because it's your life. I guess anybody who knows you would know what happened.

Arden: It was sort of this fun beach read for a while. It's this funny story. In it, my dad had passed away. I was writing about that. It took me about a year, but I was feeling better. The proposal had been getting shopped around. I'm on this show, Insatiable on Netflix. We were back filming in Atlanta. This is eighteen months after my dad had died. Nobody could get in touch with my mom. She had just died making breakfast. She just died. I had to go home. On the way to the funeral in this tiny town, I got this email from a publisher that was like, "Hope you're having a great week. We're so excited to do this book with you." This has been something I've been trying to sell for a few years. Then it was so strange that of all the versions of what the book could be, she was barely in the proposal because she wasn't quite as noisy of a figure. I think it became her book. Then my friend who read it, she's like, "Arden, it's not your memoir. It's your mom-oir."

I'm sure you're going through something similar. The experience of when somebody dies, and when somebody dies who's fun and beloved, people tell you stories about them. All of these stories were told to me that I didn't know. I didn't know that she was the den mother of my brother's cub scout troop. I didn't know that she’d made a flipbook. I grew up in this town with fisherman and lobsterman. It's as small as you could possibly imagine. She was like, okay boys, today I'm going to teach you how to put on a Broadway musical. She made a flipbook. Just things like that that I would never have known. It really became a fun tribute to -- all it takes is one person rooting for you. My parents married on a dare in Manhattan. They never went on one date. They married on a dare for vacation time. It was this odd upbringing. It just takes one person who's like, protect your light, go for it, encouraging you.

Zibby: Your mom was, I want to say, such a hoot. Do you know what I mean?

Arden: She was a hoot.

Zibby: She was so funny, even the clips that you put on from when she would call in and you would talk about her as a real estate agent. She just seemed so funny. You clearly had such affection, not just affection like mother-daughter. I feel like it's such a general term, like, oh, my mother this, but it doesn't do justice to the crazy people these people are in the world. She was quirky and funny. Then you build her up so much in the writing that when you get to the part with the teacup on the counter, you want to just cry with you.

Arden: It's an interesting thing. You're one of the first people who've read it. I've had a few friends who are comedy friends. They’ll text. They're like, "Ha-ha, I'm reading. Your dad is eating his sheet cake diet." Then I'll get a text that's like, "Oh, my god, I'm in tears." I thought, you know what, for me personally, I'm proud of that. I'm not trying to make my friends cry. It's an interesting thing growing up in New England. You're sort of taught to, not keep secrets, but for me, I grew up keeping things funny. Then I actually will say it was my podcast -- even in my comedy, I was never super personal in my standup. I host this very silly Bachelor podcast. I don't know if you're having this experience now. Both of my parents died in season. Both of them died on Saturdays. The Bachelor airs on Mondays. Then I record on Tuesday. I've always been fairly private about my personal life, but there was no way to hide that I wasn't in the studio and that I was in my family den. I'm with my brother.

I allowed myself to cancel anything I wanted to cancel. I wanted to do that. I felt a real kinship with my listeners. We chose to do the podcasts. It was interesting. I was worried I was going to freak people out, that it was going to be too much, that people were going to be frightened by that information, that they're like, lady, we just want our Bachelor news. We don't want to hear that your dad died. Are you a psychopath? People were like, thank you so much for talking about what's going on. It helps me. I have stuff going on. It helps me to see that you're still moving forward. I was pretty honest about my path there. On the page, I feel like each time, the universe or the creative spirits or whatever I think are encouraging me to feel safer and safer exposing more just of my heart or the truth. It doesn't have to be malicious, but that by telling your story it doesn't have to just be the funny parts. That makes it a better story.

Zibby: I agree. You can still appreciate the funny parts. It's like looking at a very pretty tree but you don't see the roots or something. Once you can see the whole thing, then it's even more majestic that it can rise. That sounds ridiculous. There's something about seeing the whole thing, seeing what maybe other people can't really see all the time. Then it makes it deeper. Then you enjoy the comedy more or something.

Arden: The people I appreciate sort of lay themselves out. The world is so bonkers, and even before 2020. Life is a journey. Just to know that everybody grew up with some stuff, everybody has stuff, even if it looks the best, everybody has a few cards in their hand that are complicated that was dealt to them. I feel like just the humanity and the connection -- I have a very close friend who's this wonderful playwright, Tom Diggs. He's my classy friend. He was nominated for a Pulitzer. I kept calling him as I was writing this. He has two things he kept saying to me. I have written scripts and things. He kept saying to me, "Arden, each piece reveals to you how it wants to be written. It's not the same strategy for each piece." Then when I was debating -- my dad was tough. He was entertaining if he wasn't your dad. He was funny. He was beloved by friends and neighbors, but he was a tough dad. I was asking him, "I don't want to throw somebody under the bus. I don't want to throw somebody under the bus that's not here." He just kept encouraging me to be like, is it necessary? Check your motives. Why are you telling it? Is it your story? How much can you reveal, not to be Pollyanna, but like a lady? You're letting people know sort of what's going on without having to throw somebody under the bus. That was one of the things I'm proud of. My brother hasn’t read it yet, so we'll see what he thinks.

Zibby: Oh, no.

Arden: I kept asking him if he wanted to read it. I said, "The part that might be hard --" He was tricky. My brother, he's so sweet. He's like, "Look, I know he was a tough dad." It's that balancing act of, here's the real story. Here's the story.

Zibby: You did include a nice, my brother's a great guy and he turned out great. [laughs] I feel like you said something like that towards the end.

Arden: It's so funny about my brother too because I just love my brother. Did you grow up with boys?

Zibby: I have a brother, yeah.

Arden: To me, if you grow up with boys -- we wrestled. We were both equally horrible to one another. We were both tiny. No one was in danger. We were both the runts of the liter. That's sort of the fun of having a brother. Some of the people, I think, did not grow up with boys. I think they thought that I had this tough brother. I'm thinking, no, that's just a brother. I have to say for any women out there who didn't grow up with a brother, this is a very nice person. This is the eighties. In the eighties, you're like little Peanuts characters just rolling around. That's the deal.

Zibby: Totally. My brother used to hit me all the time. I remember telling this to my husband. My husband's like, "He was three years younger than you. What are you talking about?" [laughs] I'm like, "I don't know. That's just what happened all the time. We just fought."

Arden: It's kind of fun. Who else on earth can you fight with?

Zibby: Of course, now when my kids fight, I'm like, stop! What I was going to say about your dad is when you talked about how your mom wanted four kids and he didn't want any kids and they compromised at two, but your dad was like, if you want to have kids, that's your thing. Then you said, my mom, my brother, and I were like a threesome, and my dad was just there, which paints the whole picture. He just didn't deal. It wasn't even personal. Yet he was aware, and this is what happened, almost.

Arden: He would just be like, "I told your mother if she wanted to have kids, she had to deal with you." You're like, okay. When you're little and that's the house that you're in -- I don't know if it's also dads of that era. I didn't really know a lot of my friends' dads. I think mine was harsher about it. If you don't grow up in a different house, you're like, okay, that's a dad. Thankfully, my mom, my brother, and I were such a team. We had so much fun. It literally felt like the three musketeers, and then there was a dude that lived in the den, which was fine. You just didn't go into the den. I just hang out with my buddies. That was very openly the deal.

Zibby: Then you even say everybody gets dealt a different hand in life. Some people just aren't meant to love or they just don't know how to love that well. That part made me so sad. That just made me sad. That hurts.

Arden: That was what was interesting when my dad died. It's an interesting thing. Look, I certainly didn't think my book would be coming out in a global pandemic, but I actually feel like it is a good book for this time in that I do think it's a fun, funny, lighthearted read. I do think there's an honest -- I feel like the world is collectively grieving, and it's different. Everybody has different experiences. With him, I thought it would just be a relief because he'd been sick for so long. It was the grief of failure to launch. There was never that come to Jesus at the end where, I'm so sorry. It just didn't happen. Just wanting to tell anybody out there, I just speak for myself, I am okay. It doesn't mean that there's not hurt in the heart for that. There's other people in my life that love me. He just couldn't do it. Even with what happened with my mom this year, I know a lot of people are walking through all sorts of things right now that no one could've imagined. The way it went with my mom, it was literally my worst nightmare and what I pictured. I got to tell you, there was a weird grace to last year even though my world was on fire. I would say there was certain gifts to it which I write about in the book too. I'm such a people-pleaser. I found that with both parents, one of the gifts of grief was I literally felt like I had no skin. The upshot of that was it was very clear to me who I wanted to be with, who I didn't want to be with -- I still knew I needed to have a little fun -- what felt safe and fun and what was like, no freaking way. I couldn't force myself to say yes when in the past, as such a people-pleaser, I would've made myself or gone, I should do this. I don't want to hurt their feelings. It wasn't that I was rude about it, but that one of the gifts of it is that I felt like it really separated the, what is it, the chaff from -- I don't know.

Zibby: The wheat from the chaff?

Arden: Yes. It just became clear. What can I eliminate? What makes my tail wag? What is joyful? What feels good? I really loved the grace of that. You're very present. Time takes on a different quality, which I think is happening globally right now anyway. I just have to really slow down and listen to next indicated action. What do I need? I'm such a doer. I get things done. How about half speed? How about just lowering the bar? How about your best is good enough? It may not be perfect. Done is better than great. Maybe you're going to be late to your little gym class. Maybe you didn't send that email, but okay. You're doing the best that you can. There was some magic to that that I wouldn't wish on somebody, but that if god forbid your world gets set on fire, you'll be okay one day. This too shall pass. It won't always feel like this.

Zibby: I feel like you've just been dropped down to talk to me directly. I'm pretending like nobody else is even listening to this conversation, so thank you. Your book and grief island and all the stuff you went through, it helps to hear someone else's story. I'm sorry you had to go through it all. I'm really truly a hundred percent from the bottom of my heart sorry. Being able to share it and tell it and experience your own version of something you couldn't have imagined, it just somehow helps everyone else.

Arden: It's so strange. Again, this book was supposed to be a fun --

Zibby: -- Not to say it's not funny.

Arden: It is very funny.

Zibby: It's super funny. I'm sorry.

Arden: If you don't want to get to the sad part, stop after I go to England.

Zibby: Literally, most of it is hilarious and funny and whatever.

Arden: Eighty-five percent. Most of it, it is the fun beach read. Just stop after chapter eighteen. Just skip the last two chapters. There's even hope in that. I will say, growing up in this very WASP-y New England family that doesn't talk about emotions and doesn't talk about feelings, I really felt for whatever reason, the timing of the sale of this book, that this would've never been my path in life, but somehow normalizing grief. Nobody talks about it. It's okay to feel sad. You don't have to feel not sad right away. I can't handle the, "She's in a better place." That one was the one, I was like, I can't do that. I can't do the better place one right now. For me, each one took about a year. It was like, oh, boy, here we go. My friend likened it to getting strapped -- you go to Six Flags and when you go on one of those rollercoasters that the things come down and lock you in, it's like, I didn't sign up for this ride, but it's taking me. I have some tips in the book of how to survive your own grief island and maybe even have some joy in it because there was some grace.

For me, the key was being around people where I could be not okay. That actually made me feel more okay. Debbie Ryan, who wrote my forward, the delightful star of Insatiable with me and the star of Jessie, who would've ever thought that this wonderful twenty-five-year-old Disney star would be the person that -- [laughs]. She just showed up. We were in Atlanta filming. She wasn't afraid of it. We would go roller-skating. We'd go out for tacos. We'd go to the roller derby. We'd go do karaoke. It was okay if I was a little bit out of it. I didn't have to be on point. For so much of my life, I think particularly growing up in kind of a quirky household, trying to look normal or trying to fit in like everybody else, there's such a grace of just being with people who are like, come as you are, girl. Put on your sweatpants, but here's some glitter roller-skates. We know you're not great, but come on. We're not scared of you in sweatpants. Come on. We love you anyway. Come on, honey.

Zibby: It's so true. The people who end up coming through in times of loss, not coming through, but the people that you feel the most connected to are never, not never, but are rarely the ones you expect. It could be total strangers.

Arden: Sometimes the ones you expect can't handle it. You don't know. Honestly, it was all of the kids on Insatiable. It was the entire teen cast. There was a boy on the show that was this teen heartthrob who is absolutely adorable, Michael Provost. By the way, ninety percent of this book is not this. Don't be afraid. This boy, Michael Provost, one day he showed up at my Airbnb. He texted me. He was like, "What are you doing today?" I was like, "I'm supposed to be writing my book." I'd say no to all these fun things. He showed up at my doorstep. This sweet teen dream had made me a lasagna. He goes, "Look, I didn't know what to say to you. I thought about it. I remember when somebody in my town would pass, my mom would make them a lasagna, so I went on YouTube last night and I learned how. I baked you a lasagna." He borrowed his mother's baking pan, and he made me a lasagna. He showed up. He was twenty-one years old, eight million Instagram followers. He could've gone to a bar legally. He's super popular. This young man went inside and baked his grieving adult lady costar a lasagna and brought it over. People can be -- there's so much goodness. You don't know who.

Zibby: Yes, that's the best part of the whole thing, is seeing all the good and all the connection and all that behind the scenes, so to speak. It could be Behind the Music of -- [laughs].

Arden: The Behind the Music of teen dramas on Netflix. True story.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, Arden, I feel like I could talk to you all day. I feel like we're just scraping the surface. I had so many quotes and all the rest from your book. Anyway, I loved talking to you. I love that you gave so much advice along the way of people, what they should do when they're writing a book and all of the rest and your journey and loss and humor and how it all combines. It was just a true pleasure to chat with you.

Arden: Thank you so much. Can I have a little giveaway for your listeners?

Zibby: Yes, oh, my gosh!

Arden: Premiere Collectibles does a thing with authors. For the first 250 people, you can get a signed book and a little Little Miss Little Compton tote bag for the cost of the book if you go to ardenmyrinbook.com, A-R-D-E-N-M-Y-R-I-N,book.com. For the first 250, you get the tote and the signed book. Then the second 250, it's just the signed book. Get them while they last.

Zibby: I'm releasing this when your book comes out, so I'm worried that maybe they’ll be gone by then.

Arden: Then go to your local bookstore and support an independent bookstore.

Zibby: Or maybe they’ll still get it. We'll try.

Arden: We'll try.

Zibby: Thank you so much.

Arden: Zibby, you are a delight. You're so much service to so many authors and so many people. I was so excited to come on your podcast. I hope to meet you in person one day.

Zibby: I hope to meet you in person one day soon.

Arden: Hang in there.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Arden: Bye.

Jeff Hobbs, SHOW THEM YOU'RE GOOD

Zibby Owens: Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and talking about your latest book, Show Them You're Good. As I mentioned to you over email, I also loved your first book. Welcome.

Jeff Hobbs: Thank you. That means a lot.

Zibby: Show Them You're Good, can you tell listeners, please, what it's about?

Jeff: Show Them You're Good, it's about a group of senior boys at two different high schools in very different neighborhoods in Los Angeles applying to college and going through their last year of high school.

Zibby: What inspired you to tackle this topic? It seems like you're very interested in how different lives along the same timelines can veer off in different ways, from this book, from Robert Peace book. What's that about? Where's that coming from?

Jeff: I wrote The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace about a really good friend of mine from college who passed away. That book was very hard and personal. I didn't really think anybody would read it because it is hard. When it came out, something sort of terrifying happened, which is that a lot of schools started asking me to come visit and talk. You can already tell after two minutes that I was never meant to speak in public or really speak in general.

Zibby: Oh, please. [laughs]

Jeff: I went to schools from Ivy League schools to juvenile halls and a lot of spaces in between, I would say mostly city public high schools, and had these conversations with young people. We were talking about race and education and access and entitlement. There was something about Rob Peace and his story that brought young people, particularly young men, to share their own stories or even just fragments of their families and their aspirations. I carried those home from these different places. It was meaningful. I just started thinking that maybe there's a way to tell some stories about what it looks like and feels like to be eighteen years old in America right now.

Zibby: What was your experience at eighteen like?

Jeff: It was unremarkable. I played some sports.

Zibby: What part of the world did you grow up in?

Jeff: I grew up in the country in Pennsylvania, so a small school where you go to school with the same fifty people for fourteen years, very different from going to high school in Los Angeles. This project in no way was me trying to relive the glory days, sort of the opposite.

Zibby: How did you find the guys in your book like the character, not the character, the actual person Owen whose parents were in the film industry, and so had such reputable careers themselves. Then you have the boy whose parents are Chinese immigrants. You have all different kinds of boys, let me just say that, for all different backgrounds. How did you find them? Why did you pick them?

Jeff: I didn't really pick them, so to speak. I undertook this project and started reaching out to schools. My wife thought I'd lost my gourd. Maybe I had. Very few schools want some awkward journalist roaming around their hallways, if you know what I mean, mainly because schools get dinged a lot by journalists. These two schools, I'd visited both of them before to, again, speak at assemblies and do book groups. I knew some teachers. The principals took a chance and opened their doors. They just sent an email out to seniors and said, "There's going to be this guy hanging around. If you would like to meet him, come to such-and-such classroom at such-and-such time." These guys came. One of these schools is in South LA right outside of Compton, which is a neighborhood a lot of people have heard of and even think they know what it's like. The other school is Beverly Hills High School. If you watched TV in the nineties, you might think you know what's going on there. These four or five guys in each school came. Then they kept coming every week. The center of the research was just these roundtable conversations I would have with these groups once a week for two or three hours at a time about what was going on with their lives. I think they came because I brought food.

Zibby: That will bring most young men anywhere. [laughs] After spending all this time with all these guys and analyzing all their interactions with their family and their grades and everything, you went into so much depth, what was the main takeaway? I feel like people are very down on the youth in the US today, and what kind of life are we giving them? and all this. Do you feel that sense of pessimism? Do you feel more optimism? What's your outlook on the next generation, if you will?

Jeff: I'm optimistic. I always risk sounding a little bit kumbaya, maybe. I got to know these guys really well over the course of a year. What I found is it's an exceptionally interesting generation because these guys know that they're the ones who are going to be dealing with a lot of issues that for older people, we talk about them and get outraged about them, but they're still kind of abstract, whether you're talking about climate or politics, race, all those things. I think these guys know that it's on their shoulders, and not abstractly. What ended up coming out of these conversations is the idea of self-determination. It's our national ethos that if you want something and dream big and work hard, you can get that thing. Particularly in schools, that is something that’s a notion that's drilled in pretty hard. It's in every graduation speech I've ever heard. I've heard a lot at this point. A lot of that year as they applied to college, again, from very different backgrounds, very different levels of privilege and family circumstances and levels of help, it was them learning that those lines are not straight. Life is messy. Things go wrong. The way they adapted to that messiness of being a human being is what makes me optimistic because that is resilience. Resilience is the other thing that's drilled in high school.

Zibby: When you were writing this book and doing all the research, what was your process like? How long did you take to do the research versus the writing? How did you sort through the piles of transcripts? How did you actually do it?

Jeff: That's just a lot of work. For the year, this was the 2016/'17 school year where these guys gave me a lot of time when they didn't really have much time. I probably spent a hundred hours or so with each group. I went to classes and dances and sports games and plays and proms. That's a tall stack of transcripts. I recorded most of it. You take that home and type it out and start rooting through it. Really, the hard thing was editing what was probably two thousand pages of single-spaced transcripts down to a book. You get very attached to people. You get very attached to their stories. You have to leave things out. That's hard sometimes.

Zibby: It's true. Did you always know you wanted to investigate and be a journalist and a writer and all of that? Was that something that you always had in your mind?

Jeff: Writer, yes, to the point where my older brother was playing baseball games and my dad would be yelling at me to get out of a tree and stop reading. But journalism, no. That was something that happened when my friend died, Rob Peace. It's not as if I went to his funeral thinking I was going to write a book. I went to his funeral, and people did the things they do at funerals to celebrate a person. Mainly, that is to tell stories. At the time, I thought I'd just write down some stories maybe for his high school newsletter or the Yale magazine or something that nobody would read but might speak to his life more than his death. That undertaking, I call it a eulogy that got out of hand. Through that process, I just learned I was a good listener in that I like listening.

Zibby: I like listening too. Maybe we should have a podcast where we both sit here silent and just hear the background noise and see how that goes.

Jeff: Listen to the kids banging around.

Zibby: Yeah, you could drag in a dog if you wanted. [laughs] So what project are you working on now?

Jeff: I spent the last year on a project about juvenile halls, sort of similar, some different schools. They are schools, jails/schools. I've just been spending time with young people going through those systems.

Zibby: Exciting. Why does your wife think you're out of your gourd for focusing so much on this age group and basically reliving your youth that you didn't really have in this way? What's that about?

Jeff: I think you just said it. It's odd to tell your family that you're not going to be cooking dinner on Friday night because you're going to a Halloween dance in South LA. I thought the stories were just really powerful. They're kids, but they're making these adult decisions. You mentioned Owen whose parents are very successful in Hollywood. He's kind of the perfect picture of this privileged Beverly Hills kid, but his mother's bedridden with an illness. He knows how little the world really cares about privilege. He knows randomness. He's trying to figure out how to be a good person knowing nobody really cares if he's a good person because he's a rich kid from Beverly Hills. A kid named Carlos who was applying to Ivy League schools and DACA at the same time and carrying that social narrative of upward mobility, all these kind of tropes we have in our world that when you get underneath them a little bit and look at the humans, they're pretty complicated. They're hard narratives for these people to carry.

Zibby: It's true. I felt so terrible for Owen's mom with not being able to find a diagnosis for so long and ending up in a wheelchair and all of that without knowing even really what was going on with her.

Jeff: There's a really touching scene, to me, when he's in all the school plays and he was practicing a song and dance number for Putnam County Spelling Bee, was the play's title. At night, he would sing and dance at the foot of his mother's bed while she harshly critiqued him.

Zibby: Wow. None of my kids are running around doing full-on dance recitals for me like that. Maybe I have to figure out a way to get better acting output. [laughs] Anyway, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Jeff: No, it's usually just kind of a clumsy process of stumbling around, I find, my particular work which I guess is called immersion journalism. I don't know if it exactly fits. Like we said, it's just kind of sitting and listening. Different issue, but I'm a white guy who grew up pretty easy. My work brings me around people who don't look like me and didn't grow up easy. That's a complicated thing. A lot of them trust me to tell their stories. I take that seriously. A lot of them don't trust me to tell their stories. I take that seriously too.

Zibby: That's great. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for talking about your new book. I'm sorry, I read your last book a while ago. I should've reread it before we talked. All I remember is how much I loved it. I'm sorry if I messed up any details. It was a while back.

Jeff: You didn't mess anything up.

Zibby: Sometimes I just have a feeling. I see book covers, every cover, I feel a feeling. I remember loving it or not really liking it or not even finishing. Some books really stand out on the shelf, but I can't always say exactly what about it was what -- anyway, sorry for not bringing up any details, but I know it was amazing. This was a really interesting portrayal of a whole group of people.

Jeff: It means a lot that you would remember it and that you would have me.

Zibby: No problem. Good luck on the juvenile hall thing. If you get all the way back down to kindergarten, I have one of those lurking about. If you get there, you might need a therapist alongside. I don't know. We'll see what happens.

Jeff: That sounds treacherous. I have a first-grader, so I'm sort of in that all day anyway.

Zibby: Got it. Thank you so much. It was nice to chat with you today.

Jeff: You as well. Thank you.

Zibby: Thanks. Buh-bye.

Meredith Masony, ASK ME WHAT'S FOR DINNER ONE MORE TIME

Zibby Owens: Thank you, Meredith, for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm sorry for having to reschedule from [indiscernible/crosstalk]. I'm really sorry. I'm delighted to be talking to you today about Ask Me What's for Dinner One More Time: Inappropriate Thoughts on Motherhood, which was basically the bible of my life here, so thank you.

Meredith Masonry: I'm glad you enjoyed it. I love your shelves and how your books are color coded, sort of. I was like, am I seeing something? Then I was like, no, there are definitely colors.

Zibby: They are, yes. I've had it like this for a couple years.

Meredith: It looks great. It makes an extremely pleasant viewing experience.

Zibby: I'm so glad. I'm glad I could brighten the day a little bit with that.

Meredith: You did.

Zibby: There's so much to talk about in your book and your whole journey to becoming a YouTube sensation and all of your success in general. I wanted to start, if you don't mind, with the worst part, I'm guessing, of your life when you were dealing with your esophageal cancer, it wasn't cancer, your tumor, and what happened then and how it made you basically have a whole new approach to life.

Meredith: Everybody has an origin story. That would technically be mine because it did, at the time, feel like I was being punished, but it ended up being this gift. I had been sick for a while, and I just ignored it. I think as moms, we have a tendency to do that. We ignore. We say, I'll get to it later. You end up coming last because you have to take care of everybody else's needs. Finally after several trips to the doctor and them just upping my heartburn medication, I finally demanded a scope. I said, "I need you to look inside." I was starting to have a problem where I wasn't even able to swallow my food. My food was coming up. My pills were coming up. I got him to do the scope. "We noticed something. There's a lump." What does that mean? What's a lump? Why is there a lump there? What do you mean? Next scope, he just handed me off and said, "I can't even be your doctor. You have an esophageal tumor that has broken through your esophagus which is why you aren't able to swallow food right now. You have to see an oncologist."

It went very quickly from there. I was thirty-four, three small children, and basically handed off by a doctor who had ignored me for over a year. I panicked. I started to panic. You start to have all of these thoughts. You're like, if I die, who's going to do the laundry? Who's going to cook for these kids? Who's going to do all the drop-offs and the pickups? Who's going to do all the jobs that I do? On top of the relationship that is with your spouse. You panic. I did a lot of closet drinking and crying, if we're being honest. Then I also realized after I panicked and cried about all of those things, I grieved about a life that I hadn’t lived, which sounds so selfish. Part of it is selfish because you didn't get to do the things that you wanted to do. Then people will scold you and say, you got to be a wife and a mother. It's like, yes, but that's part of what I wanted to do.

There were lots of other things that I wanted to do that I put on the backburner because I assumed I'd have time. Now you're telling me after I did that part that there's no time? That became this quiet shame I held because I was mourning a life that I was possibly not going to be able to live and then felt guilt about that because I think as women and wives, we feel guilty about everything. Luckily, the tumor ended up being benign. They were able to remove it. I had to have three reconstructive surgeries. It was this blessing because it opened up my eyes. It made me realize that if you want to do something, do it today. Do not wait for tomorrow because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Not to sound too dramatic, but you could step off the curb and get hit by a car. There are so many things that could happen that nobody thinks about. It could be it. That could be it. I was given a gift. It completely changed my perspective on being a mom, being a wife, being a woman, eventually becoming an entrepreneur. It changed everything in my world.

Zibby: Wow. I'm sorry you had to go through that, but I'm happy for all the benefits that it yielded and the way that you're able to reframe what could be a negative experience and turn it into such a positive. That's the essential A+ therapy move. [laughs]

Meredith: The thing is, it's not like it was positive while I was going through it. I'm not going to lie and tell you that I was like, oh, a tumor, we'll get through this. No, I cried. I screamed at God. I said, why are you doing this to me? What did I do? What mistakes did I make? I know I was probably awful to my parents. Is this punishment for that? Is this punishment for acting out as a teen? What is this punishment for? You assume, when this happens, I'm being punished for something, as an ex-Catholic. I'm a Catholic light, so to speak. As an ex-Catholic, I assumed this was punishment. God was rendering some justice on my life. It was difficult to wrangle with that and look at these kids and think -- when the doctor looked at me and he said, "I have to operate now because if this is cancerous and I go in and I go to remove it and it has spread, you're not going to be here for Thanksgiving. You don't have that time to wait," that was just like, holy crap. What do you mean I don't have the time? Of course, I'll be here at Thanksgiving. Why would I not be here at Thanksgiving? It's August. You don't know that. It was very trying during the time. From the moment I opened my eyes and my husband looked at me and said, "It wasn't cancer. You're going to be okay," I had just this relief and this feeling of a million pounds being lifted off of my chest. I said, I've got to do something. I have so many things I need to do. I want to do everything that I said I was going to do from when I was five years old until now. I'm going to do all of it. I've taken lots of risks. I've been told no a million times. I have failed. I have also been so blessed to get to do so many of those things that I wanted to do from when I was a little kid. I'll take it.

Zibby: What are some examples of those things? What's something you always wanted to do?

Meredith: I always wanted to be a comedian in some way, shape, or form. I loved Saturday Night Live. I feel like we, people our -- I'm not going to speculate on your age. I'm going to say people my age, because I just turned forty, we got a really great crop of SNL actors that ended up going and doing so many things in their careers that are noteworthy and spectacular. I got to watch that growing up. I always said, I want to make people laugh like that. I want to do something that makes people laugh. I also loved writing. I am shameless and I will tell you that I got a five on my state writing assessment when I was in high school. I was like, I'm going to be published someday. I used to write for the local newspaper. I always said, I'm going to write a book. I didn't know what the hell I was going to write about, but I was going to write a book. I've been able to check some of these things off my list. No, I've not been on SNL, but I'd like to think that the videos I make and the content that I create is seen -- I have videos that have been viewed hundreds of millions of times. I can say, yeah, I didn't make it to SNL, but I don't care. I've been able to make videos that make people laugh. That makes me happy.

Zibby: It's amazing. That's the comedian. I want a few more examples. Anything else? I'm trying to think now that you're saying this, what would I put on my list if I had two months, for instance? That's a tough question. Are there things now that you still haven't done or that maybe have come up since that you're like, now these are next on my bucket list?

Meredith: What is shameful is my workspace. I can tell you that I'm looking down at my desk right now and I have eight notepads with eight different lists. Every day I decide I'm going to do something else and there's going to be another project. I already have the idea for book three. Whether or not somebody is going to buy that, I don't know, but I already have it. It's ready to go. I'm itching to write it. I also love to make T-shirts. I'm a T-shirt designer. I love to put my sayings and do all of that. I want my T-shirts sold in major retailers. I am pushing and working hard to do that. We also have a podcast, my cohost and I. We'd love to get this podcast out to as many people as we possibly can. It's called "Take it or Leave it: An Advice-ish Podcast for Parents." I have all of these things that we're doing. It's my goal to -- always at the center of every one of my "businesses" is to make sure moms are being heard and seen and feeling less alone because the struggle is real. We do face it each and every day. I think the pandemic magnified that. In no time in history that I can think of have parents and children been locked together for such an extended period of time where they weren’t either going and being social with other kids or going to school or the parents leaving the kids with a sitter or at a daycare or whatever. I don't think that's ever happened. Being able to be a voice to say to women out there, hey, totally cool that you lost it today and you're probably going to lost it tomorrow and you lost it eight times last week, none of this normal, but we're here together. Let's talk about it, the disaster that is virtual learning, the disaster that is keeping our kids separated from their friends, celebrating COVID birthdays, which suck, all of those things. I think it's great that I get to fill a role in helping people feel better through this process.

Zibby: I was trying to think of other times in history. The only time I can think, and this is not to make this time -- I feel like this will strike the wrong tone. I feel like in the Holocaust, parents and children were stuck. I actually, during the pandemic, thought about that a lot when I was having the feel-sorry-for-myself days at the beginning. How did people do that with the fear of death if their kids even spoke? It's not like people were so different. They were just like us, just maybe far less electronics. It's not like people were built differently or had more patience. They were just moms like us but trapped and hiding. How on earth did people get through that? Then it made this pandemic like, oh, for god's sakes, so I have to mop my nice house. It's okay.

Meredith: That's the thing. We were given a pandemic in a time where we had Netflix and grocery delivery. I did talk about that a ton. Yes, we're pushed together, but there is an upside to this. We're being told to sit on our couches and watch TV. Yeah, our kids are driving us nuts, but by gosh, would I take this over other things that happened in history? Of course, every single time. Then it became so political. It became so much about everything other than what it simply was, which is we have to try and contain a virus that is spreading like wildfire across the globe. Even places like social media where we could go to escape, it became a spot where you couldn't even go to do that because everybody was talking about those things. I don't talk politics at all, zero. What I can tell you as a person who believes in wearing a mask when they go out in public in order to keep somebody else safe and keep myself safe and paying attention to logically what we're doing to minimize risk, these things are important. You can't even talk about it without igniting a massive fire on social media. To me, that's crazy.

Zibby: I could not agree with you more. I posted about masks and everything myself a couple days ago because I had been sort of hiding out on Long Island this entire time and recently came back to New York City to put my kids back in school. This is where we live. I came back. I was afraid to come back. People were wearing masks, but not all people. I'd say maybe three quarters. It depends on the day, the time of day, where you are.

Meredith: Wow. That's great, though.

Zibby: I was horrified. I came back. I posted it on Instagram and Facebook expecting everybody to be like, no way, that's awful. That's what a lot of people who didn't live in New York said. A lot of people who did live in New York were like, we've been here the whole time and I don't think you saw that right. That's not what it's like in my neighborhood. What are you talking about? I got such pushback. It's not like I was alone. I was with my husband or I was with my daughter. I was like, am I losing my mind? Then the next time I got in the car, I was like, I just counted twelve people in two blocks who weren’t wearing masks. Did everybody see that? [laughs] Come on. I am seeing this. Why is this political at all? If somebody were walking off a street corner, I would say, watch out, if a car was coming fast. That's exactly what I feel like I'm trying to do now. I'm trying to scream it from the rooftops. Yet people are like, no, no, no, it's all good.

Meredith: It's been very weird to watch that as a mother too because we want to be like, this is going to help you. This is going to protect you. I need you to do this. I need you to listen. This is what we're doing. Believe me, I posted one thing once, and it was such a fifty-fifty divide. I was like, whoa, okay. This is political, apparently. I don't believe it to be political, but we're not going to fish in those waters because I do believe that I fall underneath the entertainment umbrella. When people come to our page, they want to be entertained. That's what it is. That's part of my purpose. I say, okay, not a problem. We can do that. I can do my best to entertain you. It was also hard to be in that headspace when you were freaked out about every decision that you were making as a parent and a human being. We all had decision fatigue about everything. Can we go to the grocery store today? Should we not? I don't know. I heard on Facebook that three people at the Publix had COVID. Should we even go out? I don't have any Lysol wipes left. I don't have spray bleach. What should we do? What should we do? Then other people who were just like, it's not real. That's not what's happening. You just would shake from the panic, the questions.

Zibby: I feel like it hasn’t totally ended. I was outside today and there were kids playing on the playground. I just don't feel comfortable with that. It's one of those times where, back to your whole point about parenting and how we each learn how to do it, I feel like this is also magnified, the fact that you just have to go by your own compass. Everyone's going to have different ways they raise their kids. Everyone's going to have different ways they approach the pandemic. There's no right or wrong. If you feel deep in your gut that if I really don't feel comfortable sending my kids to the playground, I just have to listen to that even if my friends say don't be silly.

Meredith: That's the thing. I don't think there are a lot of situations right now where you can be silly. To you, these decisions, and to 99.9 percent of the people, it matters. I got scolded. We walked past a playground. I didn't even let my kids on it. I was doing an Instagram story because I took them to the tennis court so they could just hit the ball back and forth. Nobody was there. It was a court with a net. I walk past a playground. "How dare you take those children." I was like, I didn't even take them to a playground. It's just the way people feel. Because they're feeling this way, they want to then tell you how they feel. Then it just snowballs. We've been doing distance learning for several weeks. We're in Florida which has been a hotbed for this after New York. You guys had it first. Then we had this massive spike. Our schools didn't shut down. My kids have been begging me from before school started, "Let us go back to school. Let us to go back to school." We are in a very small county in Florida that isn't, knock on wood, having a spike. I started to get really torn. I was like, should I just send them back? Virtual schooling isn't working at all. They're not doing what they need to do. I am on them screaming constantly, "Get [indiscernible] to your Pearson Math." "I can't find it." "Well, I don't where the hell it is." I'm in there trying to find the folders that the teacher set up digitally. I can't understand the apps inside of the program inside of the whatever. I'm looking at this agenda. I don't know where any of these things are. I finally called her. I said, "I need to schedule a Zoom with you because I don't know how to find the stuff you're telling my kid to do. That's not an excuse because he should probably know where this is because you do Zooms with him, but I can't even find it to tell him to do it. I don't know how to do it." I technically own a tech company, so that's scary.

Zibby: It should be intuitive enough that a bright forty-year-old woman could figure it out.

Meredith: I sat there and I was like, I don't see Pearson Math. I assume there would be an icon that said Pearson. It's a textbook. I know Pearson textbooks. I couldn't find it. It was buried inside of each daily folder, not an app on the thing. I'm looking for it. Then I said to him, "I need you to do the last twelve of these." He goes in and he did them. He's like, "Can I go outside and play now?" It's like, I guess. I don't even know if I should be mad about this. We have been on the fence about sending them back. Of course, masks, hand sanitizer, talking to them about the way they need to act when they're at school. I even asked, can I go to the school and watch the kids change classes? No. Okay, you don't want me on campus. I get it. I've even thought about sneaking around the school during the day to just peek. I assumed I'll probably get arrested for that. I think I'm leaning towards sending them back because the environment we have here is not conducive to learning. They're not learning anything. Then you feel guilty about that.

Zibby: [Indiscernible] to convince you in any way, it's been two days of school for my kids. I was scared to send them back. I was like, really, just for socialization? Isn't survival so much more important than that? Where is the line? How do you balance? My kids' schools did let me go in and see. Well, one of the schools did. I have a kindergartener, a first grader, and two seventh graders. The little guy's school, I got to see. They're doing a really good job. One of the schools, I was more worried about the parents on the street in pickup. They had thought everything through for the kids and not necessarily the parents. I sent an email to the top five administrators being like, here are twelve free and easy things you could do to make this pickup and drop-off better and safer. That night, they sent an email out to the whole school saying, here's how we've changed it. I was like, okay, I made a difference. Good. All the touchpoints have to line up.

Meredith: Exactly, and those aren't the things that you're thinking about in a normal world where we're not freaked out to be within six feet of someone. It's so weird now. I've noticed I'm playing a game of freeze tag in the grocery store. If somebody comes the wrong way down the aisle and going to reach for something, I just immediately stop. I stand frozen until I can see which way they're going to go. Sometimes people just get right up next to you. Then you're panicked. You're trying to walk backwards while you're frozen. It looks ridiculous. God forbid I'm asymptomatic and you're eighty and I'm breathing. I have my mask, but I don't want to give you something. I would feel terrible if I found out in some way, shape, or form that I perpetuated this. I'm doing my best. It's weird because we don't even know how to act in public anymore. I think we've scared the children enough in the sense of the mask stays on no matter what. You're not the uncool kid if you keep your mask on at the bus stop. It is totally the cool kid thing to do. Keep the hand sanitizer in your pocket. I'm going to refill those, make sure that they're full to the brim every day when you go in. Make sure that you're washing your hands frequently. I know they're doing that at the schools. I know they're making the kids wash their hands in between classes or at lunch, at least at the elementary level, because I did get an email about that. The middle and the high school, you got to hope you've given them that knowledge. I have a sixth grader who's a middle schooler. Then I have a high schooler. I just have to cross my fingers and believe that my kids are going to do what we've been doing from day one, which is making the best choice we can for keeping ourselves and others safe. They're kids.

Zibby: My mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law passed away from COVID over the last couple weeks.

Meredith: Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry.

Zibby: We had a whole medical odyssey with my mother-in-law that lasted six weeks, three in the ICU, three in a regular hospital. It was awful and gut-wrenching. My kids were aware of it the whole time. I think we're particularly sensitive to norms.

Meredith: I would say so.

Zibby: It's so crazy. I run into people who don't know. Yes, I posted about it, but not everybody's on Instagram and not everybody reads everything. I run into people and they're like, "Aside from the whole COVID thing, how was your summer?" I'm like, "Not good." [laughs]

Meredith: Because of the whole COVID thing.

Zibby: The whole COVID thing affects people. It might affect you. If you would just take three steps back, maybe it wouldn't. [laughs]

Meredith: To your point, I have seen posts where people said, I don't even know somebody who's had it. It's like, well, you follow me and I have friends who have had it. So you do know somebody, whether it's just on social media or not. I have several people in the blogging space who have come down with it and have been public about having it. If you want to just talk about the celebrities that have come out, you do know. Saying I don't know anybody or it's not affected me is not really a true statement in that sense because we do know people. Three doors down, our neighbor, before we had moved in here -- we moved during the pandemic. The whole neighborhood was on lockdown because the neighbor down the street had it. His wife never got it. His kids never got it. He worked at Amazon, and he got it. You know people. Even if you think you don't, you do.

Zibby: Now you know me too, and I know people.

Meredith: Right, now you're listening to this. That's tragic. This is absolutely tragic. Any way you want to slice that, this is a tragic event that your family endured. It can't be taken lightly. We have to mitigate risk where we can.

Zibby: I'm glad to find a kindred spirit on the whole thing. I feel like people are so different in different ways. It's nice to speak to somebody who's so aligned. That’s great.

Meredith: I feel it.

Zibby: Meanwhile, we've barely talked about your book, Ask Me What's for Dinner One More Time: Inappropriate Thoughts on Motherhood. I feel like we've gotten such a sense of you. There's so much in here like mommy martyrdom and sex and parenting. You have so many funny things and poignant things, raising an autistic child. There is a lot in this book. We obviously don't have time to talk about it all, but it was really amazing of you to share yourself like that with readers the way you do all the time in your entertainment, so to speak. It was really awesome. I just want to ask at least, would you have any advice for aspiring authors having written this and now onto your third and all the rest?

Meredith: I would definitely say the hardest part, which most people say, is actually just starting the book. I said for a while, I'm going to write another one. I'm going to write another one. It wasn't until I just committed to saying I'm going to put pen to paper, so to speak -- you have to get started. Once you get started, whether you self-publish, because I did self-publish my first, or go with a publishing house, you really need to take whatever you're -- like I said, the idea of this book was to say to moms, you're not alone. Here are some examples of how we probably share a lot of the same things, how we've gone through a lot of the same things. Then you've just got to figure out how to chunk that out. I looked at this book, and I think how I'm going to look at future books, as chapter books for moms because moms don't have a lot of time, especially to read books. The Audible version of this book actually performed very well which I was excited to see. Anybody who picks up this book, you can open it to any section and read a story. This doesn't have to be a start to finish. This is, pick it up almost like those -- do you remember the books as a -- I just bought my son these for his birthday. It was Choose Your Own Adventure. You could be, oh, I've got to go to page eighty-seven now. We're going to meet a dragon. When I was writing this book, I thought about that.

I was like, I want a mom to be able to pick this up and say, I've got ten minutes. You can go to any chapter in any section and read and have a story. You don't have to keep reading if you can't at that moment. Then I have people who have reviewed it and messaged me and said, "I read it in four hours. My husband let me have the whole night off." I loved how she said that. I giggled because I could feel that one in my bones. She read the book cover to cover. She's like, "I laughed. I cried. I laughed. I cried. I laughed more. I cried more. I pissed my pants. I laughed." I was like, okay, great. I did my job. That was my job. I did it. I felt a lot of relief and excitement and kind of a euphoria from that, from reading these reviews. I got some shitty reviews. I'm not going to lie. I don't know if I can say that, sorry, poopy reviews. One woman told me that I am not funny and I should rethink my entire career, so there's that. Overall, it was such a wonderful experience to read through those. I would tell any author who's getting ready, make sure that whatever the core of why you want to write this, get to that and stick with it. Don't let anybody divert you from that path. At first, it was like, "You definitely need to have around four hundred pages." I said, "Of what? Nobody needs four hundred pages of this. This is a chapter book for moms." "Moms don't read chapter books." I said, "They will. Every mom wants a chapter book because they don't have time for this. We're busy." I stuck to my guns with that. I think it did what it was supposed to do and hopefully will continue because I really would like to see this as the book that people give at the baby shower, at those types of events. It's the stuff that people don't necessarily want to talk about, but we all go through it as moms.

Zibby: It's so true. Thank you, Meredith. Thanks for sharing all this. Thanks for writing. Thanks for helping so many moms.

Meredith: Thank you. I appreciate it. I was very excited to see you holding the book and talking about it a little bit and have the review for GMA and everything. It was great. I didn't even know you had a copy of it. Then when they emailed me, I was like, really? I ran and I found you in the feed. I went, yes, this is so exciting. It was great. Then when they told me we'd do the podcast, I thought, this is fantastic. I was so excited.

Zibby: Good. Awesome. Me too.

Meredith: Thank you very much. It was wonderful speaking with you. I appreciate that you read it and enjoyed it. That makes me happy.

Zibby: Good, I'm so glad. Take care, Meredith.

Meredith: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao, FAMILY IN SIX TONES

Zibby Owens: This was one of the funniest podcasts I've ever done. I did it with a mother and daughter and watched them as they were fighting and rolling eyes at each other and all the rest about their beautiful memoir. It really spoke a lot to their communication. I found it pretty hilarious. I hope you will too. You can also watch this on YouTube, as you can all my episodes now. Anyway, it's called Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter. It's by Lan Cao and her daughter, Harlan Margaret Van Cao. Lan is the author of Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm and most recently of the scholarly work, Culture in Law and Development: Nurturing Positive Change. She's a professor of law at the Chapman University Fowler School of Law and an internationally recognized expert specializing in international business and trade, international law and development. She has taught at Brooklyn Law School, Duke University School of Law, University of Michigan Law School, and William & Mary Law School. Her daughter, Harlan Margaret Van Cao, graduated from high school in June 2020 and is now attending UCLA, although as she tells us, remotely. She's not happy about that. She was born in Williamsburg, Virginia and moved to Southern California when she was ten.

It's so nice to be with both of you.

Harlan Margaret Van Cao: You're so pretty.

Zibby: I am? That's nice of you to say. Thank you. This is called Family in Six Tones, as you know, I'm telling this to viewers, not just you, A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter. This was so beautifully written. Your words, both of you are amazing writers. Do I pronounce it Lan or Lahn?

Lan Cao: Lahn.

Zibby: Lan, your writing is just -- I mean, both. Now I feel like I'm being rude to you, Harlan. Your writing is so gorgeous. I was searching in my bedside table for a pen so I could underline some of the things that you said. Anyway, why don't you guys tell listeners what this book is about. Also, what inspired you to even sit down and do this memoir and to do it together?

Harlan: The publishing house actually approached us for it because they had heard an NPR interview that was released on the Tet Offensive that had actually been recorded years before where I would ask her questions about her time in Vietnam. By the time it came out, I was about fifteen, sixteen. She had a lot of connections there from her first two books. They contacted us. They said, "I think Harlan's of age now. Maybe we could make this a coming-of-age book that also links to themes of immigration." Obviously, my mother, her first two books are greatly based on the war. To have two people, it's important to have both of us because I think it created something most people can relate to on some level. It's not just something totally separate. It's also about growing up under completely different circumstances, also how the immigration experience affects the family and how the family affects the next generation's life.

Zibby: What was it like collaborating on this project together?

Lan: It was unstable. [laughter] I wish I could say it was cathartic, but I think during the time when we were going through it, it was very turbulent for us because it's hard to collaborate with another person even if you're writing non-personal stuff. I do a lot of legal writing. I have many, many legal articles. Only one was a collaboration. It's hard because you have to take the other person's point of view into consideration. When it's something so personal, and especially between a mother and daughter, when the wires are there that connect us but they can also fray very easily and electricity is conducted through the wire, sometimes it feels like the insulation part of the wire somehow dissipated and we're just now frying each other. It was hard because we had to decide what to include, what not to include. Also, Harlan wanted to include things I didn't want to include. We had to come up with a compromise. The reason why we came up with a compromise was because I felt like it's her first experience writing, so I didn't want to silence her even though she wanted to write about things that were hard for me to write about. In the end, everything that's on the page was a product of a back and forth. We also didn't even write together. It was very hard -- right, Harlan? -- to write in the same space. We were totally separate. We only came together towards the end to read it. At first, we read each other's, and it was explosive.

Harlan: We only read each other's stuff at the end when we had to. It was a requirement. She came to me and she would tell me, "It's time to read each other's stuff." She seemed scared to tell me. It was already difficult for me. At the time when I got the book deal, they wanted it to be greatly centered around my mom's previous two books, meaning the brand is about talking about the war. I don't have a lot of say about it except for what it's done to my life. I can't speak for everybody. I don't want to sound entitled or anything. I also had that mindset of a teenager. I have so much more I want to say, so why can't I say that? Then when I agreed to direct it all toward a theme and then on top of it, she was nervous to write about certain stuff, it made me upset because I felt like I was in a box. There's only one thing I could write about, and that's so hard to expand in an interesting way. I never imagined I'd be writing for adults, even though kids don't really read anymore, which is really sad. It's hard because I'm thinking probably women -- I'm not going to guess your age. That's so rude.

Zibby: I'm forty-four. It's okay. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I am fine. I am at peace with my age. It's okay.

Harlan: Adults, everybody's read it. It's not any age that I expected I would ever write for when I was little thinking I was a writer. That definitely brought out a lot of confusing things for me. It wasn't just the writing process that made it hard to collaborate. We were just totally in different parts of our lives. I'm going through high school. Everything about us is different. I would write at two in the morning. She would write throughout the day little by little.

Zibby: Wow, are you even speaking to each other? [laughter] I feel like I've intruded on a family squabble like there was a huge fight before the camera went on and now you're pretending like everything's fine. You don't have to pretend for me.

Lan: We're in quarantine, so we're stuck. She's doing her college online. You can imagine. It's all pretty eerie.

Zibby: Aren't you at UCLA, or did I make that up?

Harlan: Yes.

Zibby: So they're not letting anybody go?

Harlan: No. It's actually very depressing for me. I picked UCLA because of -- you pick the school because of what it looks like. If you have two options that are kind of the same in what it will do for you, the campus was important to me. I chose UCLA over Berkeley, but now Berkeley moved people in.

Zibby: UCLA is in a beautiful part of LA. I love LA. You will have the best time. This time will pass. It's a blip. You will get there. It was the right decision. Don't second-guess. I took a writing class at UCLA right after I graduated from college. My husband always makes fun of me when we drive by it. We spend a lot of time in LA now where he works or he used to work. Every time we drive by, he's like, "Look, your alma mater." I'm like, "I did not go there. I took one class." I wrote some essay about my first bra-buying experience with my mother. That does not make me an alum of there, but thank you. Anyway, I know it's a really tricky time for everybody. That was so sad to hear you say that nobody reads anymore. Do you really feel like none of your friends read?

Harlan: Not really. We like to get information very fast. A lot of kids nowadays, it's insane, have ADHD and stuff from the technology. I think it all bleeds into one. It's been shown phones might cause ADHD or something. A lot of kids, they don't have the attention span. They prefer movies and short articles. A lot of the news that we get now is on social media. The social media page will give it to you as quickly as possible, like five words and then that's it.

Zibby: That's a little disheartening.

Harlan: The only time that we really do read a lot -- I'm talking about the people that I know.

Zibby: I get it.

Harlan: We will read if there's -- do you remember The Fault in Our Stars, for example?

Zibby: Yeah.

Harlan: The movie came out. Then everyone's like, okay, I'll read it now because it's trendy. That's when someone would read.

Lan: That's very disheartening and depressing for me. When I first arrived in this country, my only solace was books. That's why I wanted Harlan, let's say, to love music. I feel like music and books are things that you can always turn to when other things that are not within your control are upside down. There will always be something you can't control that hurt you. It could be a person. It could be a wider event. You could always go to that part that is the music part, the book part. You can immerse yourself in a different world. If you don't have that, it just seems -- maybe they're different and they don't need that. It just seems very different for me. That was my solace. I was just hooked on things like 1001 Arabian Nights because it exposed me to distant shores. It's also a form of traveling too.

Zibby: I completely agree, especially now. Especially in the very beginning of the pandemic when we literally could not leave our house at all for week after week after week, I feel like, oh, look at this, now I'm having coffee and a glass of wine on a terrace in Tuscany. Here I am in China in this little apartment. I feel like books could take me everywhere. I totally agree with you. No matter what you're going through, you can just open up a book and you're immediately somewhere. It's this empathy and escape. That makes me sad. I bet there's a way, now this will be my new mission, of how to get -- I also love social media. [laughs] I have to get myself off Instagram with a hook. There has to be a way to keep that writerly escapist --

Lan: -- [Indiscernible] books, I hope that will work for the youngsters.

Zibby: Yes. Hopefully, this podcast will change everything. I try really hard. I hadn’t been targeting young people, necessarily, not that I'm so old, but that hadn’t been my mission. It was more just to keep people reading who are already reading or who miss reading because life is so crazy. Books are, I just think they're the coolest. I think everybody should be doing it. All right, I'll tackle that tomorrow. [laughs] Back to your book, some of the stories in here -- Lan, I just wanted to talk to you about being thirteen and having to leave your country and coming over here just with a family friend and finally realizing that you weren’t going back and watching Saigon fall in 1975 and the whole thing and how you picked yourself back up. How do you recover from something like that? How do you deal with that separation from family and home and homeland and just go about your business? How does that work? Maybe this is your way, still writing about it and everything, but tell me a little more about that.

Lan: I think that my parents had two different approaches. My father was always telling me -- it seemed paradoxical what he said because the one statement has a paradox within in. Remember what's important and forget it immediately. So just don't focus on the past. Yet I find that that is a very hard thing for me to do because my mother was always dwelling on the past. As I read more, I hear things by Faulkner like the past is, it's not dead, it's not even past. There's always the past. I don't think that one really recovers. Just like if you have a death in the family of somebody very close, yes, you will move on, but it's not like that part is not forever inside of you. The notion of losing something, of having the rug yanked out from under you because you never expected certain things to happen, they were very spectacular. They took a very spectacular form for me because suddenly leaving the country and starting a new high school was spectacularly different. It helps me to compartmentalize, to just do this and this and this, but never recovering because I know that I can be easily brought back. I feel sometimes like when I'm walking my dog and I had a retractable leash, I feel like I am the dog. Anybody, actually, can just press that button on that leash and it will bring me back to '75 or '68 even though it looks like I'm farther away now. There's this leash that takes me farther away from that part but can be brought back very easily. It'll be startling for me. I have been thinking of myself, I'm farther away from that now. How did I get back so easily to that vulnerable spot again?

Harlan: How did you recover?

Lan: Never recover. Just sort of move on to the next thing or doing the next thing, but it's not really a recovery. I know, let's say, even when I'm dealing with Harlan, I know that the way I parent her is very much based on that experience that I have not recovered from. I'll push her to always do well in school. Maybe all parents do that, but I think mine is more urgent. I feel very much like if she were to lose everything, one thing that nobody can take away from you because it's inside you is your education. A fire can come and burn down your house. You can lose all of your possessions. You can lose everybody you love. If you have your education, it is the foundation that is portable. It's not geographically anchored towards any place. While education maybe for other parents can be, this is a way for you to move forward in life, mine is, yes, of course, but it also has this no one can take it from you feeling, which I felt happened when our life was taken from us and we had to start a new one. In that sense, I can see how the fact that I've never really recovered even affects something like the emphasis I place on certain things for her, which can be very frustrating for her because she does not have that experience.

Zibby: How do you feel about that, Harlan?

Harlan: I've always been very conscious of -- I think it's just because I'm really interested in psychology and people. When I was really little, from a really young age, I figured out that my mom parented because of her experience. Also, it's very easy to call her overbearing or controlling, which she is sometimes, but it's hard to be angry about it because it comes from a very innocent place. She doesn't mean to do that. I'm not saying any mom means to come off as controlling, but she literally can't help herself. I can tell. We'll have a conversation or an argument, and we keep talking over each other. I'm like, can you give me two minutes? I'm just going to say something. Just be quiet. She's like sitting on her hands. She can't even stay still. It's true.

Lan: Somebody is stating something, if they're going to have two minutes of conversation and the piece that follows the first statement --

Harlan: -- She said what I say isn't true, but it's true to me. It's not true to her because she's so defensive. What I'm trying to get at is that in the past, most of the time, kids can tell their parents, this upset me when you did this to me or this hurt my feelings. With my mom, she doesn't want to hear that it hurt my feelings because she's defensive. People who are defensive don't admit that they're defensive because that's the first trait. It's a thing that goes back and forth. I know she's not defensive because she sucks as a person. She's defensive because her whole life has been about being on defense. Even when I talk about her being defensive, she doesn't want to hear it either. It's totally true when you hear the conversation. A lot of the time, an argument, even about the book, will start at something where -- I don't really try to start the argument. I'm good just being quiet the whole day. As the parent, she wants to correct and make sure that I'm good when I leave the house officially and start my own life. She'll start a conversation a lot of the time and even in that conversation I see her psychology. That's not to say I'm so much better. I'm a kid, but I know so much. No, that's not what I mean at all. I mean because we know each other pretty well, I can tell where each thing comes from. I really want to help her. I started in therapy, actually, when I was fifteen from stuff that was going on in school. When I was in therapy, the therapist's job, you kind of love and you hate your therapist because they open you up. They pry you open. It bothered me sometimes. She would tell me things like, I'm seeing a pattern and this and that. I'm like, you're obviously scorekeeping in a hostile way. I took it as an attack. She was actually just pointing out that I'm just like my mom. I didn't want to hear that because that's the worst thing possible even though she's great.

Zibby: No matter how great your mom might be, nobody ever wants to hear that.

Harlan: Nobody wants to hear that.

Zibby: In part, it almost feels like you're fighting -- you have all these natural feelings about your relationship. Yet there's this invisible thing you're fighting with also. You understand it logically, but I feel like emotionally it's hard to really digest. You know your mom had this experience, but still, you're annoyed, right? [laughs]

Harlan: Right. I always thought, why can't she have the experience and leave me alone? [laughs] We talk about it. We suffer through it together. Then she can trust me to live my own life. I was always resentful of, she'll expose me to everything that can possibly go wrong. Then she'll show me the saddest parts of the world when we travel. Not the saddest parts. We go to nice places. She'll tell me a story. She'll read me a book. She'll make sure I'm really educated. She'll make me into someone who had an adult mindset, but when it comes to my own life, I'm four years old suddenly. It's very interesting how moms, they always say, just go explore. But when it comes to the kid exploring, they're really scared to do that.

Zibby: I don't think I've ever felt like I could relate to both sides of an argument more than I feel right this moment. On the one hand, I'm like you. Then I'm the mom too. I have four of my own kids, and so I totally get where you're coming from. As much as you love and want your kids to go off, it's like a part of you. It's like your right hand is out there walking around. It's a part of you. You don't mean to, necessarily. It's like if you're about to touch the fire, you want to grab your hand back. It's just, you do it. It's instinctive. Coming from a past like yours, Lan, where you've had all of this trauma before you were even a teenager, essentially, it's a lot. It's a lot to bring into, what should we have for dinner? I'm actually amazed that the two of you got this book done now that I've talked to you. [laughs]

Harlan: So are all my friends that had to hear about it for two years.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Does this now make you still want to be a writer, Harlan, or are you over it now?

Harlan: I do want to write movies more. If I'm being honest, I think movies are more my thing, if I could get up the nerve. Also, I really just want to make a lot of money and then give it to a lot of animals. That's important to me too. I would write one by myself. Maybe one day when I'm older, it'd be really cool to end a career -- starting it with a memoir and then ending it with a memoir. Maybe when I'm sixty I'll write about what it was like to write with my mom. That would be cool.

Lan: She's very good with conversation. I think a movie script would be good for her because it's back and forth.

Harlan: I hate writing description. I like dialogue. I don't like descriptions.

Zibby: Lan, did you just write like this from when you first started writing, or did you learn to do it? The way you even describe things is so beautiful. You can tell even the way you speak with all of your analogies, how you think about thing in terms of just the beauty and how you can talk about it. I'm trying to find a quote that I had. Of course, now I cannot find it. Maybe we could talk about your detachment, that your mother -- that was actually a Harlan passage. Never mind. [laughs] I had [indiscernible] passages picked out, and that's because I didn't have the thing. Here, I'll just read this one. "It might seem strange that being a refugee and being a mother feel so similar to me, but both involve a torturous and lifelong drive in search of home and security: in one case, for one's self; and the other, even more furiously, for one's child. The journey of a refugee away from war and loss toward peace and a new life and the journey of a mother raising a child to be secure and happy are both steep paths filled with detours and stumbling blocks. For me, both hold mystery." That's beautiful. I had never heard being a refugee compared to being a mother in quite the same way before, which you do throughout. Tell me a little more about your actual writing. Maybe your novel writing was the practice you needed.

Lan: I think I wrote basically because I read. I love to write. I'm not talking about legal scholarship. I like to write, the kind of writing I do for writing, because it's very unruly. To me, it's like a dreamscape. Even in this book, which is very much based on our lives, it's the stuff that is underneath the surface that I'm interested in. A lot of times when you write even a memoir where you know things that happened already, I feel very much like I enter into a world that I normally don't enter in my awake life. It's like going to sleep and you dream. You can never tell yourself what dream you're going to dream. The act of writing is very similar to me. It unravels. It unspools. It taps into a part of the self that is a little bit more of the unconscious digestion of what happens in the surface of daily life. I think that from having read so much, it helped me to write. I didn't take a writing course, per se. If you read, you just know what works for you. In many ways, writing is very similar to other forms of creativity. For example, Harlan likes to watch movies. Also when I watch movies, I see -- this helps me with writing. I see the angle of the camera. I see how the director places an object which maybe recur in the next scene. These are devices that are very helpful when you're trying to construct a story. In the movie, it's visual. In writing, it's less visual. We all use the same device, which is a premonition, a foreshadowing, recurring images. I combine that with more of the dreamscape.

Zibby: If both of you would give advice to aspiring authors, what would you say?

Lan: I would say that it helped me when I first started that I knew nothing about the business. Having that beginner's -- I remember there's a book I love called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. A lot of times we think of knowledge as something we accumulate, and the more, the better. Sometimes removing excess is also really good, things that are just baggage. I think knowing too much, actually, about something can be a hinderance because it makes you feel overwhelmed. Then you don't get to the core. If the core is, I want to write, then you should just write and not worry about the next step. Shedding knowledge, actually, for me, was good for writing. If I had known how complicated the business is, I don't think I would've had the innocence.

Harlan: When someone writes, it's important to understand that -- I can only speak for the memoir, fiction, or something, not research. You're writing just about life. When you write about your own life or you write about an ordinary life, it's not superhero or something like that, it's something that is possible for everybody to go through. Every book is really just about different human relationships. Everybody's going to experience that at one point or another. Your job is just to say it in a way that's aesthetically pleasing, that people like to read about. I guess to just keep as much reliability as much as possible and remember that even though your writing is different and you're talking about something different, you are very similar to everybody else.

Lan: You have to have something universal. I think all human yearnings are universal. When you write about your yearning and how it relates to the world, I think that it will create that connection with the reader, which is what you want to do because writing is so solitary. You're just writing by yourself. It feels very, very disconnected sometimes. If you know that there is this connection you're going to make, then it's very helpful.

Zibby: I can tell you I felt super connected to both of you having read this and hearing your innermost thoughts and how literary they were and your anger. It's great. It's really good stuff. Then to be able to chat with you is [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Lan: Thank you so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Thank you. Family in Six Tones. Thank you so much for all of your time.

Harlan: We have such a busy schedule. We have time.

Lan: We'll follow you on your Instagram too. We'll do that.

Zibby: All right, great. Have a great day. Buh-bye.

Catherine Gildiner, GOOD MORNING, MONSTER

Zibby Owens: Catherine Gildiner is the author of Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery. Catherine was a clinical psychologist in private practice for twenty-five years. Her best-selling memoir, Too Close to the Falls, was published to international acclaim. She currently lives in Toronto.

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

Dr. Catherine Gildiner: Thank you for inviting me.

Zibby: Good Morning, Monster, this book captivated me, interested me, horrified me. Wow. I'm particularly interested in Laura and Madeline. I can't stop thinking about their stories and all the stuff they went through as kids. I have so many questions. First of all, can you just tell listeners what your book, Good Morning, Monster, is really about? What inspired you to write this?

Catherine: Good Morning, Monster is following five patients who've had a really traumatic life. I got sick of reading all these sad cases all the time about how people just bottomed out. I thought, wow, I've had people who've lived through absolute hell and they've managed to cling and maintain their sanity. I wanted to write about psychological heroes. Heroes are always these action figures. I wanted to write about how these people -- to be a hero, you have to fight against something that's much bigger than you. Otherwise, you're not a hero. These people managed to do that. They managed to come out with their sanity. I wanted to say, you know what, this is heroic. I think it was when Alana said to me one day, "I'm such a screwup," and I wanted to say -- she said, "I taught this guy computer science. Now everyone knows him, but I'm the one that taught him." I said, "You know what? He had two parents who sent him to Harvard. He had all these opportunities. If you lined up everybody who had been treated the way you've been treated, they'd be in back rooms of mental hospitals. You aren't seeing people that have been treated the way you have. You would see that you're a real hero." I wanted them to see. People compare themselves to other people who've had advantages or normal parents. They say, "What's wrong with me?" I wanted people to see a lot can go wrong and you can still pull it out.

Zibby: Wow. This is not your first book. In fact, you talk in this book about how you left your practice for a while, you wrote, and then were dragged back in by a very persuasive Duncan. You couldn't take no for an answer. Tell me about the intersection in your life between therapy and writing. What made you stop therapy for a while, start writing, and now meld the two like this?

Catherine: I joke that at age fifty I ran out of empathy. I had just worked too hard. I also wrote a column for Chatelaine, which is kind of like Redbook or Good Housekeeping in the US. I wrote it in Canada. It's giving unwanted advice to people that haven't asked for it. I wrote that for fifteen years. People said, "You have a turn of phrase. You should do this or that or the other thing." Then I was at a dinner party once and someone said, "I was sixteen years old and I was so terrified to go to camp," and blah, blah, blah. I thought, wow. I said, "Didn't your parents ever have you get a job?" They said no. She said, "Never, because they liked me to take courses in the summer." I said, "I don't understand that because I worked full time for the age of four." Then people said, "Oh, my god. You should write that up." So I wrote my first memoir. I was shocked. It was on the best-seller list for a hundred and fifty weeks or something. Then I wrote the second and the third. Then my life ended at twenty-five when I married, so I didn't write any more. [laughs] Life is over when you have children and marry, as the title of your blog says.

Then I wrote a novel about my PhD because I was interested in the philosophy of science on Darwin's influence on Freud. I think I was so burned out from being a therapist that after twenty-five years I started thinking about all these people. They kept coming into my mind. I was walking down the street one day with a friend. There was a guy, a very sad man, lying on a grate trying to get warm, homeless. She said, "Look at him. He's able-bodied. He's twenty-five years old. Why can't he walk in and ask somebody for a job?" I just thought, you have no idea what this person has gone through. If they didn't have arms and legs, you'd feel sorry for them. You don't see what's going on in somebody who's had a horribly difficult life. If you could see their brain or you could see all their memories, you'd say, oh, that poor thing, but people don't. I thought, I am going to write that book. People like Alana kept coming back to my mind, so I wanted to write it. I needed a long break before I wrote.

Zibby: How did you pick these patients? I know you said some are composites and you didn't use real names. How did you come up with these five for Good Morning, Monster?

Catherine: It's really ridiculous. I'm a quantitative person, so what I did was I said, I have to go over every patient that I've had. First of all, I sat down and made a list of these five when I thought of writing the book. Then I went and went over every file, said, maybe I should do this. Maybe the demographic would be better if I did that. I went through all this stuff. Then I just did the first five that were still in my heart. I went through all the marketing stuff and all that. I thought, it doesn't matter. If I don't write about people that are still in my psyche after twenty-five years, it's not going to work. Those were the five people that I came up with.

Zibby: I thought it was really interesting that you said that good therapy, there has to be some sort of connection. You can't not like your patient. Like is the wrong word, but you have to feel that bond with them in some way to go through it. Tell me a little more about that.

Catherine: When I say you have to like your patient, you have to bond in some way to that patient. For a number of years, I worked in a psychiatric hospital in forensic. Those are psychiatric problems, but also criminals. Even if they said, I killed my mother, I couldn't take another second of my stepmother, I had to sort of empathize with that. I had to say, oh, okay. I had to see it totally from his perspective. Sometimes you can't see other people's perspective. For example, I don't see obsessive compulsives because I just don't relate. They obsessively talk about the same thing. I try to not to see people where there's something a little bit wrong with their brain. With obsessives, they usually are born that way. I would much rather see somebody who is perfectly okay and then just got off the path. Then I like to work together to bring them back. There are people that you just don't click with. Actually, I was saying this the other day. Sorry, they cut the grass today and I think they put napalm on it or something. [laughter] It's killing me. What my editor pointed out, which is silly because I'm a psychologist and I should've seen this myself, is that every single one of those women in the book were raised by their father. I was too. I thought, oh, my gosh. I didn't see that, ever. I thought, how could I not have seen that? It's true of all the women. The mothers are distant figures or troubled figures. The father is the major parent. I think unconsciously, I related to that.

Zibby: I feel like this book is also one of those truth is stranger than fiction examples. If you had made this up, it would've been too farfetched that, for instance, that a father could leave his three kids in a cabin in the woods and have a nine-year-old take care of them and even that a couple could go off to Russia and leave their eleven-year-old daughter alone in the house for months. Some of these things, I'm like, could this really happen? Yet it did, and you have to deal with the aftermath. I thought another really interesting part of this story was that some of the things that seem so obvious to us as, not to call myself normal in any way, but as a regular reader of this could obviously see huge holes in the parenting and the detriment done. Yet the patients themselves saw it as just life. They didn't know any different.

Catherine: Absolutely. Look at Laura. When the father left her, she said, "What is the problem? I was already eight years old. I could handle that." I had to spend a lot of time explaining what an eight-year-old could do. I took her to see eight-year-olds.

Zibby: That was so great. I loved that.

Catherine: She saw all of them. She's kind of funny in her own way, amusing I mean. When we got in the car, I said, "Well...?" She said, "They were immature." It took her a long time. The father was like, "I need you to be an adult." She said, "Okay. If you love me, I'll be an adult." That was their deal. He never criticized her, but she had to be the adult. Her childhood wasn't that hard. What was hard was when she was an adult and she began looking for men to be with. She always picked people that she had to take care of because she was bonded to that behavior. She misunderstood bonding for love.

Zibby: I feel like you're so good, obviously, at seeing all these patterns that the patients themselves can't even see, even Madeline in terms of how she staffed her company, that you can recreate -- which is something I had never really thought about before. You hear about people marrying spouses that have some of the characteristics of their parents that they're still sort of wrestling with. It hadn’t occurred to me that people do this in the workplace, that you could have people work for you who have the same thing. Tell me a little about that.

Catherine: That was something that Madeline and I worked on all the time. She always made the point that they -- she was in a very specialized field. She said, "He's the only person in the world that can do this." I would say, "That's ridiculous. He's rude all the time." If he would see me, he'd say, "Oh, are you here again?" This is ridiculous behavior. She said, "No, we all have to put up with it." I said, "No, you had to put up with your mother because you didn't have a choice. Yes, he is the only Hungarian that can understand fourteenth century religious iconography, but I'm sure there are others." She surrounded herself with incredibly difficult clients like people that were in the mafia in other countries, etc. It was just awful. Who has millions and millions of dollars? Some very good people and some people that are bad. They would then not pay their bill. I left all of that out because I didn't want to be killed myself. [laughter] She recreated her family.

Zibby: Her family, the insanity that happened with her biological mother, and then Kathy, who her father ends up with next, it's unthinkable that her stepmother would essentially break all of the antiques in her childhood home, not let her back in, and that this went on.

Catherine: And that the father would tolerate it.

Zibby: Yeah, that it just kept going on. He's like, "Sorry." [laughs]

Catherine: That's when she had her huge collapse, was after that antique thing. Then I think he felt so guilty that he actually followed me to a coffee shop every day and said, "Please be her therapist." I said, "I'm retired." He's a successful businessman. He wore me down. I finally said, "Okay, I will do it." I wanted to include Madeline because people think people that have a lot of wealth are happy and that money really makes you happy. It's so trite. What they don't realize is that very often -- he was from a very independently wealthy family, goes back generations in Canada. His name is a very common name in the newspapers and everything. There were gold-diggers after him. It's an old-fashioned term. This in the thirties. This is before women had a chance to be what they wanted to be. Your only chance in life was, marry this wealthy guy.

Her mother sent her to the Hamptons and said, "Don't come home unless you're engaged to him." You can say, why would you marry someone so awful? She put on a really good act for about four or five months. Then she recognized that he wasn't the type to get a divorce. "We don't divorce in our family," that sort of thing. Also, wealth covers a lot of pathology. The editor pointed this out to me. That's when I included it in the book. Laura was abandoned in a tiny cabin, but Madeline was abandoned too. Her parents went to Russia. Then the alarms went off, the alarm from a storm. The police came. The police were terrified of the family because they lived in a huge estate. They said, "I guess you'll be okay." If they lived in a housing project, they would've immediately called CAS and gotten help for her. They were insulated by this wealth. Then neurosis didn't appear as neurosis.

Zibby: It's so interesting, oh, my gosh. I couldn't believe that whole scene and that the neighbor had to get her housekeeper's daughter to come visit.

Catherine: That housekeeper's daughter is still with her.

Zibby: No way. Wow.

Catherine: She's made several moves with her. That is an interesting bond.

Zibby: It was also funny to me that you admitted several times, mistakes that you felt like you had made in your treatment. I guess you know that therapists must make mistakes, but I had never really thought through how much that would stay with you or what you would view as a mistake and why. Tell me about some of that and the regret of some of the ways you've handled things versus all the great things.

Catherine: When I wrote the book, I wanted to show how much I had grown as a therapist. When you first start out, you don't know anything. You know everything in books. You can get straight A's and feel really competent. My first patient was Laura who walked in and said, "I'm not giving a history. Forget it. Those are the village idiots. I'm not giving a history." I thought, oh, my god, this isn't like school at all. Every single case I saw, you'd say, I'm collecting a history. Even if they were psychotic and said they were the Virgin Mary, they gave a history. I thought, I'm the one that has to make this happen during the hour that it's happening. It's only fifty percent academic. The rest of it is finding a way to deal with people's defenses. I thought the whole thing would be, I'm going to show how I learned with each case. Then by the end, I'll be a pretty good therapist. The opposite happened. I made the majority of mistakes in my last case, which was the Madeline case. I just couldn't figure out what I had done wrong.

Then I realized everybody has transference. Duncan was like my dad, starch shirt, vest every day, tie. He ran a business as well. She was an only child. They never ate at home. We never ate at home. Sometimes the mother would be so bad that both the father and the daughter would run into each other in the basement and they would eat Cheerio's together. My mother wasn't bad at all, but I recognized all of these things that were similar. I never held him responsible. I'd say, well, he can't do it. I guess he just can't get his second wife to -- I never really laid into him about that. He brought me into this chaotic scene of flying to New York with all of these distractions all around me. I shouldn't have allowed any of that. Then when I went and examined it, I realized he was like my dad. My dad had a brain tumor and lost his mind at forty-five or fifty. He was my father before everything fell apart. I was protecting him. One time, somebody was looking at the paper and they looked at the picture of Duncan and said, "Gee, that looks like your dad." It wasn't just me that thought that. I did finally go and get my own therapy and said, "What's going on here?" He said, "It's so obvious. It's psych 101. Father attachment." You have to be really careful of making those kinds of mistakes.

For the Danny thing, Danny is -- I don't know if you know that in -- you probably do. In the US, everything is a black-white race problem. That's the big problem. In Canada, it's native-white issues. That's the news every night. We have way more natives. There's been a huge amount of residential schools where everybody hasn’t been parented. That is sort of Canada's national problem, Canada's national disgrace. With Danny, the hard part for me was actually learning everything that I had to know about native culture, not that I learned everything. I had to then really hit the wall and not let my ego get the better of me and say, you know what, I can't cure him. I can take him to a certain spot. Then he has to go to a healer. He has to go and deal with all of this stuff with natives. I had to say, "This is as far as I can take you." I don't think I would've taken him anywhere if I hadn’t had help from a native psychiatrist at Harvard who really helped me. I'd say, "Why won't he talk?" He said, "He's getting to know you." I thought, really? Two months and this guy has not said a thing. I joked about it five years later when we were a lot closer. I said, "Yeah, like not talking for months." He said, "That didn't bother me." He said just what the guy told me. He said, "I was getting to know you. I wasn't going to talk to somebody until I knew them." I said, "How did you know me without talking to me?" He said, "That's just one way to know people."

Zibby: Wow. That's crazy. It's amazing, the way you've been able to get at all these people and get them past their circumstances and get them out of their own heads and get them to see. It's really like magic. What do you think it is about the people who have become heroes in your practice, and even sometimes in their own families, the other people, like in the case of Laura with her younger brother and sister whose lives did not follow her same trajectory? What is it that makes somebody able to withstand horrific circumstances whereas somebody in the same family might not? There's probably not an answer to this.

Catherine: Look at Laura. Her brother and sister really didn't do well. They did what you would expect from a life like that. Remember, her father, even though he was neglectful, he was always singing her praises. When she worked on the chip truck with him, he always praised her. He was like, "I knew you'd take care of things." "You're my number-one man," he always said. She was loved in a conditional way, like, if you do this for me. She thought he was kind of exciting and that that's what a man was. She thought, what is the big problem here? Why is everybody all upset about him? It wasn't as though he ever put her down. I think he did once when he was in jail and she wore jeans that he didn't like. I said, "Wow, your father criticized you one time in your whole life?" He didn't like the other two kids because they didn't have guts. She was born with a type A personality. He needed that. He reinforced that for his own needs. Her ego was built. It looks like she was neglected, and she was, but neglect is just one thing. Look at Danny, the next case. What about Danny? First five years were fine. Father was fine. Mother was fine. They lived in a happy home. They were hunters and gatherers. They lived out in the woods. They were a functioning unit. There was no alcoholism. They were a perfectly happy unit until he was taken, put in residential school, sexually abused. Parents lost their way of living. They said they couldn't live out in the woods anymore. They had to come into a reserve. Then there was no job he could do because he was a hunter. Then he became an alcoholic. Everything fell apart. The first five years, everything worked.

When you look at someone like Madeline, Madeline really saw the father, she finally recognized in the end that he loved her. He had some sort of weakness with psychopathic women. That was his weakness. He couldn't stand up to them. It's shocking that he would have a second one after the hell of the first one. Then saying, okay, that's his weakness. Can I forgive him? That was part of her issue. With the mother, I said, "It's not important to forgive your mother. What's important is to see that she was a very damaged person. She was so damaged, she couldn't love anyone." She said, "Then why is she so mean to me? I could live with not being loved." She went to private school. She was on the tennis team and on the debating team. She's gorgeous. She just couldn't be perfect enough. I said, "You know what it's like to be a mother and not be able to do the job?" You're watching all these other mothers, which she called mother hens and overprotective when they were really just being mothers. Naturally, you become hostile to this child who has needs and you have no idea how to fulfil them.

Zibby: You had one quote. I don't know if I can find it or not. You said something about how at one point you realized that you can stop being angry and upset with your mother and just feel sorry for your mother. That transition is such a key point in the therapy too.

Catherine: Yes, absolutely. It's because your mother no longer has power over you. When you say, she's just a sad case -- it used to be like when she would do this stuff of going to Florida to visit her and the mother would forget to pick her up, all that kind of stuff. She just stopped doing it. She just said, "I don't have to do that anymore." Then she started going out with a very nice person, a nice man who was kind and good. She married a very wealthy guy who she thought would be just like the dad, and he wasn't. She married her mother. He turned out to be awful. Toward the end of the therapy, she finally realized, oh, I can love this nice person. I didn't realize that I could love him. I thought I just could be friends with him.

Zibby: The way that you told these stories was so great. Each on was un-put-down-able in its own right, the unexpected twists and turns that actually happened and then the way you handled it. It was so interesting. Tell me a little more about the writing of it, the way that you crafted the stories. Did you use all your notes? How did you make them into these great standalone stories?

Catherine: I went back and looked at my notes. I thought they would be completely organized. I thought, fantastic, I'll just put these notes in a book form and it'll be perfect. I hadn’t said anything. It said things like, "Very upset." I just thought, these notes aren't helpful at all. Then once in a while I would look at the notes and say, oh, my god, I forgot that the father killed the cat. I forgot that. I repressed some of the awful stuff. The conversations had to come back to me. That's why you have to be kind of attached and bonded to those patients to remember those things. When you see somebody for five years, you can pretty well predict what they would say in different situations.

Zibby: You must have enough stories to fill a hundred more books. Are you going to write any more books? What's your plan?

Catherine: My plan now is I'm writing -- I grew up in a house in Lewiston, New York, which is on the Niagara River connecting to Canada. I grew up in the New York side. My family's home was involved in the Underground Railroad. Then the house next door has seven basements that go down to the river. I'm writing from the white abolitionist point of view. I hope that works in this time. I'm doing that now. The publisher wants me to write a book like Good Morning, Monster but with more cases and lighter.

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Catherine: Write. I have people all the time saying to me, "What's a good topic? What's hot today?" You go into your heart and just write for two hours a day, at least. If you have another job, just write for two hours a day. Everybody starts writing when they have another job. They have to support themselves, usually. I wrote for two hours before I went into my office. Just write and don't worry about any of it. Don't reread it. Don't do anything. Just let stream of consciousness take you. Then go back and you can read it. Don't stop yourself at the end of each sentence and do all that. The most important stuff comes from your unconscious. Most of it pours out. That's the only thing that we all have in common. We all have a collective unconscious somewhere, so says Jung, so says Freud. Why would people relate to a memoir of my four-year-old delivery girl delivering stuff with a black delivery car driver? Who cares? Only because the thoughts I had are the same thoughts they had when they were four. Just get all of that out. Don't try to polish it. Then later, come back. I find a lot of people, they write two pages and then for four weeks they try to make it perfect. By then, you've lost it. You've lost all of your creative juices.

Zibby: That's great advice. Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Gildiner. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your treatment stories with these incredible patients and for showing us what heroes really can look like. Thank you.

Catherine: Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye, Zibby.

Zibby: Bye.

Sara Evans, BORN TO FLY

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

Sara Evans: Thank you for having me. I love this title.

Zibby: Thank you. I loved your book. I literally woke up really early one morning and took it outside and sat in my favorite chair with no one bothering me and read it cover to cover and loved it.

Sara: No way!

Zibby: Yeah. Usually, I'm interrupted. I have four kids. I'm usually interrupted all the time and things happen, but I just was able to do it, I guess because I got up so early.

Sara: That's awesome. What did you think?

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I loved it. I really loved it. I have to say, I feel like I keep making mistakes because especially the parts about the parenting, I'm like, oh, no, I think I'm going against one of Sara's rules today. I don't have a napkin. [laughs]

Sara: Do not let them sit down and eat without a napkin. Otherwise, they’ll wipe it on their pants. Then you'll miss a grease stain and it'll set in their shorts and stay there forever.

Zibby: I know. I know. I know all the things you say are so right. Then sometimes I don't do them.

Sara: As long as you're not spoiling your kids to the point where people don't like them. That's the main thing.

Zibby: That's true. People still like them, I think. [laughs] There were so many things to talk about in your book and your career and how you built your life and your family and all of this inspiring, amazing stuff. What I was particularly drawn to was your whole blended family, perhaps because I'm remarried. I have four kids. I loved all the stuff you talked about about being a stepparent and how the role of a stepparent is not to act like a parent and how you say the press likes to think that you're a mom of seven, but really, you're a mom of three and a stepmom to four, and how there's such a big difference. I was hoping you could talk a little more about that.

Sara: That part was really important to me to write because having been a child of divorce myself and knowing how difficult it was when my father moved out and then he remarried -- he had a stepdaughter that was the same age as me. That was incredibly hard for me to know that I wasn't able to live with my dad and have him all the time, but this other girl who was my same age did. It was heartbreaking to me. My dad did not handle it right. My stepmother did not handle it right. Then they ultimately divorced. He remarried and had two stepchildren. Here it is, two other sets of families got to have my dad and I lost him at twelve because of their divorce. It's been one of the most painful aspects of my life, anytime I think about my dad and the way that I felt so abandoned by him. I really wanted to write about stepparenting.

I knew that when Jay and I got married, his kids would be having all of those feelings. Our dad is now raising three other children and living with three other children. He's going to be closer to them than he is with us. I really wanted to make sure that that was not something that they felt. I talk about how one of the things I did was get all their names embroidered on their pillows so that when they came to our house every other weekend and every other week in the summer and holidays, that they would know, this is my space, my spot, it's got my name on it. Having that visual for them, I just tried to do little things like that. Mainly, I never tried to be their mom. I wasn't looking to have four more children, raise four more children. I have three children. I never wanted to assume, I'm your new mom. When you come here, I'm your mom and you need to call me mom and act like I'm your mom. I really didn't want that. I wanted it to be exactly what it was. I'm married to your dad. It's my job to facilitate you having an awesome weekend with him.

Zibby: That's so nice of you. You should be the spokesperson for stepmoms.

Sara: I really should. I really could be. Also, I never had the situation of my kids because my ex-husband never remarried and my kids almost never see him and saw him. I didn't even have to go through that experience of having my kids be with another woman, but I was sensitive to that. It did bother me every time the press would try to paint this picture that I'm raising seven kids. How do you do it? I'm like, I'm not raising them. Their mom is raising them. Jay and I have them every other weekend. It was something that I didn't want to offend their mom. That was a tricky situation to navigate through. The main thing I did was just play sports with them and have fun with them. Also on the flip side of that, it's hard to be a stepmom because you don't ever, ever get the nod that the real mom gets. No matter how much you do for them or try to make them feel loved and try to let them know that you're not trying to take their dad, that your kids aren't trying to take their dad from them, you never will ever get the true nod that they give to their own mom, which is perfectly normal. But sometimes you feel like, wow, I'm doing so much and making such an effort and getting nothing in return. [laughs] There were those emotions too at times. Everybody, and especially the children, are innocent victims. The bottom line is divorce is just a very destructive thing, very destructive. You should avoid it all costs.

Zibby: [laughs] Too late for me.

Sara: Me too.

Zibby: And half the population, so I don't feel that bad, I guess.

Sara: You shouldn't feel bad. I'm just saying it's definitely something that should not be taken lightly and not be done quickly.

Zibby: Yes, I completely agree with you. It's really horrific. One of the other things in your book that I thought was so awesome was your complete ownership of the fact that you're athletic because so often, women just don't talk about that. You could either be some sort of a female athlete and then the athletes talk about that in their books, but somebody like you who's basically a rockstar, it doesn't always come out that, hey, you know what, I'm a really awesome softball player or I can play tennis really well or whatever. I just loved that.

Sara: Thank you. It's kind of a running joke because I do always brag about what a great athlete I am. It's funny because people tend to box you in. They think of me as being a singer, and that's it. You're a great singer. It's fun to sometimes say, I have other talents too. I absolutely love playing sports. I love to play tennis. I love to play basketball. I love to play softball. I was doing an interview about an hour ago. I talked about how I'm such a great athlete. The guy was like, "And you're very humble too." I'm like, no, I don't see it as bragging. Like you said, it's just an unknown fact that is fun to tell people about.

Zibby: That's not very nice. [laughs]

Sara: I know. I hate when people say that. Oh, and you're humble too.

Zibby: Right? Oh, my gosh, I think it's amazing. My little daughter is in here with me now, and she hears. It's great. I want to raise daughters who feel awesome about being athletic. It's really important to have role models who don't just sing. There are plenty of role models who are amazing in that regard. To do both, that's amazing. It's just great.

Sara: I find that a lot of athletes and musicians, they kind of are connected. A lot of times, if you're a great musician, you're also a great athlete. If you're a great athlete, you have a lot of musical talent. My husband is a former NFL football player. He's the most amazing athlete I've ever seen, but he also is very musical. He can dance so well. He has perfect rhythm. He can sing. I think there's something in the brain that says, my brain is telling my body, do this. You do it. Being a singer is being an athlete. I just went and got my vocal cords checked last year to make sure everything looks good. He was like, "Your vocal cords are pearly white. They look like the vocal cords of a twenty-year-old." He said, "You're basically a professional athlete because your vocal cords are a muscle. It's just like a throwing arm. Your vocal cords are doing something basically athletic." It's just interesting to me, the ties to that.

Zibby: Yeah, for sure. The brain is such a funny thing. I've found other things. I've found a lot of writers are also great photographers. There are all these things that kind of go hand in hand.

Sara: Exactly. Like if you're a makeup artist, usually you're an incredible painter and you can draw. All the connections there, fascinating.

Zibby: It's kind of not fair. It's like, really, your husband gets to be an NFL athlete and also all the rest of it? [laughs] Maybe he could've scattered those skills around to other people who can't do either thing.

Sara: But you know what? Those are really the only two things I'm good at, music and athletics. Also, I think I'm a great mom.

Zibby: That's great. I bet you are a great mom. You certainly, not shamed me, but you've given me great advice in this book that I feel like I needed to hear.

Sara: I'm so glad. What's the biggest piece of advice that you feel like you needed to hear? I'm interviewing you now.

Zibby: I know. Your whole keeping the kids humble doing chores around the house, not letting them just sit around, you go get stuff, don't let them be complacent, all of the -- like I said before, just even something as simple as a napkin or sitting down and having a meal and enforcing all of that. I mean, I know it all. It's just, I don't know. [laughs]

Sara: I can't remember who, what speaker it is, or if I got it from the rules that George Washington wrote. What were those called? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Zibby: No, not really. I don't know what the name would be.

Sara: It's a famous little book that he wrote as a kid. It's basically good manners and what to do and not to do, common sense. One of the things is, don't make extra noise or whistle or tap your fingers on something when you're around people because that's annoying. That's something that George Washington thought was important. One of the other things was, I think this is where I heard this or read it, but he said don't ever stop doing the things that are important. In other words, it is important to get a plate and sit down with a meal. Do things that are proper as often as you can so that you don't just totally make your life be so basic that -- not basic because I almost want to go back to the basics, I guess is what I'm saying.

Zibby: In your book, when you were saying -- I'll just read you a passage that was particularly relevant. You said, "So all you're doing when you refuse to discipline is ensuring that your precious child will have a hard time in life and in relationships. Why would any loving parent do that? Because they are being selfish, in my opinion. They are being lazy and parenting in ways that make them feel good, like letting your child play Xbox all day. Why do some parents do this? Because it's easier than making them stop." That's just so true. At the end you say, "When kids are little, they're going to cry. So let them cry. You're doing your JOB," all caps. "They will thank you for it later. When you don't push back on a child who's being willful or disrespectful, they sense that you don't care, and that is heartbreaking." Meanwhile, I read this, and my son was playing video games all day. Now he's back in school, so I feel better. I was literally like, oh, gosh. She sees that I'm now letting my kid [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Sara: It's so true. Your child is born this blank slate. It's so sad to me when you see parents who won't discipline their child, afraid to upset their child. They are parenting in ways that make them feel good. With so many divorced families in the world, there are so many divorced dads who aren't raising their children when they have them in the time that they have with them, who aren't raising their children the way that they would've. Now they're raising them out of guilt, out of, I don't get much time with them, so I want everything to be great. That's selfish on your part because the child did not ask to be raised in a divorced situation, and so you still need to be that dad. Be hard on them. Discipline them. Spank them if they need a spanking, all of those things. You can't parent in ways that just benefit you emotionally. You have to parent in ways that benefit your kids long term.

Zibby: It's so true. Another part of your story that I related to a lot was how you talked about your weight gain when you had kids and the pressure to get fit again and just your lifelong relationship with your body. Where do you stand on that now?

Sara: I'm not any better. I have a daily struggle with food. I feel like I really do have somewhat of an eating disorder in the sense that every time I eat, I'm mad at myself. Every time I eat, I guilt myself, even if I'm starving and just about to drop over from hunger. Then every time after I eat, I have this remorse and fear. I hope I didn't just gain weight. Now am I going to look fat for the rest of the day or tomorrow? It's a very unhealthy relationship with food and a very unhealthy body image. I work on it a lot. Since I wrote this book, this past May, both of my girls decided to sit me down and confront me about it. It was very difficult for me because I had to swallow my pride. I can't be a hypocrite. I talk in the book about, you have to apologize to your children when you've done something wrong. You have to not be afraid that that will undermine your authority because it won't. It will make them trust you more. They basically said, "You have to stop talking bad about yourself. You have to stop talking about, I'm fat or I'm skinny." They really got onto me hard. They said, "You have two teenage daughters. You cannot do that. You're beautiful. You're our mom. We only see beauty when we look at you. Every time you criticize yourself and criticize your body or criticize that something about you is aging, that hurts us. It's also probably causing harm to us psychologically, so you have to stop." I really have tried a lot. I try to be so mindful when I'm around them not to ever say, ugh, I feel so fat or I'm trying so hard to be skinny. I'm a work in progress. I'm not at all where I should be.

Zibby: There are no shoulds on this journey. It's a lifelong thing. Most women are struggling in some way, shape, or form. It's easy to say I should be over this by now, but that's not the way it works. I think that's amazing. It shows what kind of mom you are to raise daughters who would then sit you down to have a conversation like that. That's really self-aware and mature of them to be able to talk to you about it. Were you sort of proud of them at the same time? I feel like I would be hurt and proud.

Sara: I was. I was hurt. My feelings were hurt. I was tempted to be defensive. I wanted to defend myself and be like, you have no idea what it feels like to be in your forties. You guys can eat whatever you want and you're skinny. Both of my daughters are stunningly beautiful. They have very naturally skinny bodies. I wanted to be defensive. You don't know what it's like. I basically just was pinching myself the whole time. This response could mean everything. I responded with, "You're right. You're right." [emotional] I don't know why this makes me cry. Sorry, I'm probably just exhausted.

Zibby: I understand. Look, it's hard to admit our vulnerabilities. It's hard for our kids to see our weaknesses. Yet they're on display in front of them more than anybody else.

Sara: That's right. In some ways, I feel like I'm just entering this. I feel like I'm losing even more control of how my body responds to food as you age and your metabolism slows down. In some ways, I'm like, oh, my god, I'm just beginning this fight. Now it's a whole new fight. I used to be able to say, I'm going to starve myself for this video shoot so that I look great. It's hard because models and actors are rail thin, yet women are told two things at the same time. You should look like this in order to look like this model does in this Free People dress. At the same time, we're shamed for talking about our bodies. Oh, you shouldn't talk about that in front of your daughters because it might cause them to be anorexic or whatever. We're given two messages at the same time. It's not fair. If they really want to make young girls have a healthier attitude about their body image, then they need to use more realistic models for their clothes. They're not going to do that because the clothes won't look as good. It's a really, really tough thing to overcome and figure out.

Zibby: I couldn't agree more. I'm forty-four years old. I'm like, I used to be able to eat this cookie every night, or whatever it is I'm currently treating myself with. I used to be able to go a couple days without working out and nothing would happen. Now I'm like, huh, everything is tight today. Really? Just because of that same cookie? [laughs]

Sara: Absolutely. I feel like in all these years of not eating and then eating and not eating, my metabolism is really shot. Honestly, two days of overeating or even eating like a normal person can potentially undo any strides I've made and just make me feel totally fat. Again, it's a really, really tough thing. I don't know that I'll ever be over it. All of my best memories in life were times when I was skinny. All my worst memories in life were times when I was fat. That's how I divide it. It's terrible. It's crazy to think that way. When I'm skinny, life is great. I love clothes. When I'm skinny, there's no stopping me. I'm on top of the world. If I feel fat or I am fat, then I feel like a complete loser. I probably need therapy. [laughs]

Zibby: I could recommend a few people. I'm really interested in all of this and have had close friends and everybody really struggle with inpatient eating disorders, to be honest. In college, I worked at the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders and almost became a psychologist. Of course, I've had my own struggles with my own body forever. I'm not like you, I'm not on stage. How I look, who cares? I'm behind a microphone here. I don't have a public persona like you do, so it's totally different. Just as a woman, I'm kind of like, you know what, am I happier thinner? I'm pretty happy right now. I'm definitely not at my low weight. Maybe that's not the answer. Maybe I am going to be this way. Maybe now I'm thinner than I'm going to be. Maybe eventually I'll wish I looked like this. [laughs] I did this whole study a couple years ago for an article I was writing where I -- because my grandmother is still -- she's ninety-seven. Until a couple years ago, now she's starting to have dementia, but we would be having dinner and she’d be like, "Oh, god, I shouldn't have that cake. Oh, my gosh, do I look as fat as that woman?" I'd be like, "Gadgi, come on. Does this never end?" Then I started wondering, does it ever end?

Sara: I don't think it will ever end for me. I was raised that way too. My granny was always talking about, stay thin. Don't get fat. My mom would say, you're just ten pounds away from being famous. That, of course, was a joke. Have you seen Marvelous Mrs. Maisel?

Zibby: Yes, of course.

Sara: You know how she would get up every morning and measure her waist, every morning, to make sure that she had not grown an inch or gained any weight whatsoever? My weight and my body is probably what I think about more than anything all the time on a daily basis. It's not debilitating in any way, shape, or form, but it’s definitely distracting.

Zibby: We all have our things. Everyone has their things. All we can do is just work on it. It doesn't mean we're going to fix it. It doesn't mean that sometimes our innermost struggles aren't publicly showing. That's the thing with weight too. Maybe addiction or other things, you can hide. Weight, if you're having a bad week or three or eight months or whatever, people see it.

Sara: Exactly. Being in front of the camera all the time definitely adds to it, and having to be on stage. If I see a bad picture of me on stage, I talk about this in the book, it can ruin my day. I'll never forget -- I'm sitting here with my manager right now. One time, he and my stylist and I were on the tour bus. This Country Weekly magazine came out with a photoshoot that I had done and an interview for the magazine. They didn't give us final approval on the pictures. One of the pictures in there was absolutely terrible. It was from the back. I had on really tight jeans, so I had back fat. It was so devastating to me. They both couldn't really grasp why. I think even my stylist kind of laughed about it. I went back to the room in the back of my bus and sobbed. I sobbed in my bed because I was so embarrassed, so embarrassed, by that.

Zibby: I think that it's so important to be talking about this because here you are, we started off talking about how great you are at sports and how athletic a body you have. You're so good, your vocal cords and your athleticism and your singing. You have all these amazing skills and things your body's given you. Yet a little thing like a bad picture -- I understand why it gets to you because I feel the same way. I get it. It's just such a shame that so many of us feel this way, especially given all you've accomplished. I feel like so many people out there would be like, if only I could be Sara Evans for a minute. Here you are looking at one picture and crying. It breaks my heart, honestly. What do it mean to be a success? What does it mean to be a successful woman? All that stuff.

Sara: There are definitely different aspects and different levels. Your life is like a big circle. You've got all these points to your life and then all the stuff in the middle. That is just one aspect of my life. Overall though, honestly, I'm incredibly grateful for having been given this talent to sing and this life that I've had. My children are the biggest blessing in my life. I am incredibly grateful. Again, like I said, it's not debilitating. It's just something that will probably always be a part of who I am. I want to be skinny, and that's it. I think so does the world, so do ninety percent of the women in the world. I felt it was necessary to talk about in the book to say to other women, I get it and I'm right there with you.

Zibby: That's amazing. It's great. I'm so glad that you did it and that you're opening up the conversation. It's really, really important. In addition to all your other stuff, you've written this great book. It's a really great book. It helps people relate and feel less alone and all the rest of it. Having written the book, would you have any advice to aspiring authors out there?

Sara: Oh, gosh. I don't know that I'm qualified to give advice to an author because I can't even imagine writing an amazing novel. I recently just read East of Eden again. I've read it like four times. I can't even imagine the talent that it takes to do that. I would just say, with an aspiring anyone going into anything, my biggest lesson that I've learned in life is that you have to be fully committed to something and willing to work very, very hard. Also, you have to surround yourself with great people, people who truly understand you and get you and love you and want to support and advance your career, but at the same time understand who you are as a human being and what your priorities are. Whatever you aspire to do, make sure you connect to really great people.

Zibby: That's excellent advice. That's really great. Sara, thank you for talking. I'm sorry I made you cry.

Sara: Oh, it's fine. [laughs]

Zibby: I'm really happy that we got a chance to talk. I find your candid thoughts about this personally just super helpful. It's something that doesn't get talked about enough, really, especially for women our age. Thank you for opening up. Thanks for writing the book.

Sara: Thank you. This was like a therapy session. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Of course. It was my pleasure.

Sara: Have a great day.

Zibby: Bye, Sara.

Sara: Bye.

Caitlin Moran, MORE THAN A WOMAN

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

Caitlin Moran: It is my absolute pleasure. It is true. Moms don't have time to do anything. I'm presuming yours are probably doing something dangerous in the kitchen. I don't even know what mine are doing. They’ve made it to this old and they're not dead yet. I've got to presume I'm doing something right.

Zibby: I have the perk of being divorced, so they're with my ex-husband right now. I assume that they're okay, but they could be burning up the kitchen, just not in my house right at this moment.

Caitlin: You've got to tell me. I have been married for twenty-five years. Obviously, divorce, traumatic and difficult and all this kind of stuff. At the same time, I am so jealous of my divorced female friends because when the kids are gone with their dad, they're gone. That time is yours. That seems like a considerable upside on the whole financial, emotional heartbreak thing. That's a definite up, isn't it?

Zibby: It is a definite up. I have a teenager daughter like you. She FaceTimes me every twenty minutes or something crazy. She already forgot all her underwear. It's always something. It's not like it's ever done. I'm still coordinating everything. They're just not right here.

Caitlin: How often do you have this conversation? They go, "Mom, where are my shoes?" You say, "In the coat cupboard." They go, "I've looked there." You go, "Look again. They're definitely in the coat cupboard." Then thirty seconds later you hear, "Oh, yeah. They are." Look properly the first time. Use your eyes.

Zibby: We have a lot of "where is my phone?" panic. Now the Find my iPhone is constantly going off. More than the phone is the Find my iPhone ring.

Caitlin: Nine times out of ten when they cannot find their phone, they're sitting on it. You'll be on the sofa. Then you have to get up. It's hard to get up once you get to forty-five. I find it quite effortful. I'm like, this is going to be a bit of a job to get off the sofa. Then I'm looking everywhere. Then they stand up, and it's underneath their bum. They're like, "Oh, here it is."

Zibby: Totally, I know. I sit down and I read books on the bed with my son. He's like, "No, no, not this Mr. Men book. I want that one." I'm like, oh, gosh, I've got to stand up now. Can I hold onto the bunk bed? If I hold onto the bunk bed with my left hand and pull myself up, will my knees hurt less? [laughs]

Caitlin: You need some advance warning for that. I like to be told a good ten minutes before I've got to stand up. I need to prepare for it like some kind of Olympic athlete. I've got to make all the ooph sounds. It's exhausting.

Zibby: Do I do the rollover, try to get up on my side? Should I just go straight up? Sometimes if I pull my knees together, I find it hurts less. I'm trying everything new just to stand up.

Caitlin: When you tell younger women this is what you've got to look forward to, they're like, I don't want to hear it, I don't want to hear it. They can spring off a chair and go and dance. I can't do that anymore. You enjoy it while you can, ladies.

Zibby: We're not even old. I feel like we're the same age. I'm about to be forty-five. You're similar at...?

Caitlin: Forty-five.

Zibby: It's not like we're eighty-year-old women sitting having this conversation. [laughs] It happens really fast.

Caitlin: It's because you spend so many years hunched over breastfeeding and then hunched over a laptop that actually, standing up is quite a rare event. You just lose that ability quite quickly.

Zibby: It's true. To your question about how great it is, the perks of divorce here, your chapter on when your kids go to school -- what did you call it? It was so clever. The whole thing was amazing, how you're basically a drug addict beholden to your children. Oh, called The Hour of Missing Children, could not have been more apt. I read it. I underlined it. Then I print out some pages. Then I read it again. It's amazing. It's so good and so true. No one's thought of it that way. It seems so obvious. Tell me about this whole thing, the drug addict model, even the Superman/superhero model, all of this.

Caitlin: It's so weird. As a female writer and stuff and writing about being a woman, when I actually look around at the amount of stuff that's written about motherhood, it'll either be practical advice like this is how you put them to sleep and make them have this mashed carrot or it'll be a traumatic memoir about how painful a birth was. I've done both those things. That's fair enough. No one ever writes about the emotional, creative, psychedelic, physical, druggie aspect of being a mother. It's a crazy thing. It's because it's women. In the years where you can remember what it's like, you're too busy being a mother. Then by the time you'd have time to write about this, then you've forgotten it because you forget everything. It really occurred to me that when my kids were little that I just couldn't wait for them to leave. You need to go to school so I can do literally everything before you come back. You're already not at school long enough for me to do everything I need to do. I'm working real fast here.

Then within two and a half hours of them leaving, I'd go to the toilet and then I'd find myself, without even consciously thinking about it, getting into their little bed and sniffing where their head had been on the pillow and picking up a little toy that now suddenly seems so sad, now a child isn't playing with it, and being really tearful and going, I miss them, like physically miss them. I need to smell them. I need to touch their stuff. I just started thinking, our kids are our drugs. We are physically addicted to them. It is a chemical process. Getting pregnant is a chemical process. Breastfeeding, growing a baby, giving birth, it's oxytocin and all these hormones and estrogen and all this stuff. That continues all the way through motherhood. When you hug your baby or your child or even your teenager, you sniff them and you get high and relaxed off it. When they're gone, after two and a half hours you are like a junkie just clucking going, need to smell the baby smell. Feel really tense now. Just need to sniff the baby. We find ourselves doing this. Again, so little is written about the weirdness and wiggy-ness of the emotional aspect to being a mother. I was just thinking, obviously if men got pregnant and had babies, we would have movies about it all over the shop. It's basically like Alice in Wonderland. You take on this magic substance, sperm. Then your body changes. You grow an extra organ. You’ve suddenly got these superpowers. You can stay up for five nights straight looking after a baby and then get your work done. All you want to do is save the kids. You're utterly selfless. Everything is about saving the kids. I said, why aren't there any films about this? There's no films about what it's actually like, this psychic quest that you go on as a mother.

I suddenly went, hang on, this is basically the plot to all superhero movies. The superhero takes on this magical substance, in our case, sperm. In their case, a radioactive asteroid or gets bitten by a spider. Then their body changes. Suddenly, instead of producing -- we produce milk. They produce web out of their wrists. They're suddenly strong and superhuman. All they want to do is, in our case, save the baby, and in superheroes' cases, save mankind. Also, the other thing is with all superheroes is that humankind having been rescued by the superhero over and over again is never grateful. You are a secret superhero. You never get the thanks. All of New York doesn't go, thanks, the Hulk, for saving us. You get no credit at all. That's being a mother. You're constantly saving the world over and over again. The kids never go, wow, that must have been hard. Well done. I realized that Hollywood has basically taken the whole story of motherhood and just given it to usually teenage or young white men and made it superhero movies instead. They’ve just carefully disguised a couple of the little details. They're telling our story with Spidermans and Batmans. That's not fair. We did that. That's our story. [laughter]

Zibby: Co-opting the story of motherhood, Marvel Comics, watch out. Lawsuit pending. [laughs]

Caitlin: They have appropriated the thing we do. It's so unfair.

Zibby: It's so funny. Your whole thing about the chemical and smelling, I literally posted on Instagram like two weeks ago the last time my kids were gone about how I picked up my daughter's little fluffy pink slippers at the bottom of the stairs and just sadly -- also, to your point about things left at the bottom of the stairs, when I'm home with just my husband, I have to carry this stuff upstairs. Anyway, I put them into her bedroom and plopped them down. It's just the saddest feeling. Yet as soon as they come back, within a minute it's gone. I'm like, okay, when are they going again? [laughs]

Caitlin: Literally, that. The process of being particularly a mother is constantly either saying go away or come back. That's it. The only other people who do that are shepherds with their sheep. It's that constant, go away, come back, go away, come back again. That's what we are. We're shepherds just telling our children to go away and then come back. Mommy misses you.

Zibby: I just wanted to read what you wrote in the beginning of this chapter. You wrote, "Five hours, that’s all it takes, just five hours. At eight thirty AM, I am desperate for the children to leave home. By one PM, I miss them again. This is the push and pull of young children, wishing them away, wishing them back again. It's either too much or never enough. Parenting small children often makes you feel like Richard Burton married to Elizabeth Taylor. She drives you to distraction when you're with her, always wanting things, always arguing, always creating drama. But every time you get divorced, you end up staring out of the window sighing, you know what, I miss that crazy bitch. It's no fun without her. Both your child and Elizabeth Taylor are the most beautiful things in the world." Then you say, "I leave my laptop to go to the loo, and afterward, without even realizing what I'm doing, I find my wandering into the girls' bedroom like a lovesick homing pigeon." [laughs]

Caitlin: Right? That's it. The whole thing about parenting is none of it makes any sense at the time. It doesn't work. All the way, particularly with small children, you're going, this doesn't work. Yet you make it happen every day. You just never really properly make sense of it. That was one of the pleasures of being a writer. My job is to think about this stuff and write it down, being able to go, women with small children, I see you. I know what you're going through. I'm going to put it in a book because you don't have time to do that. That's my job, so I'm going to do that for you.

Zibby: I know you mentioned Jerry Seinfeld in your book with the whole, men are not really thinking about anything. They're just wandering around picking things up. Literally, that's the end of the inner dialogue. I feel like you are like the female Jerry Seinfeld. You are so funny in terms of all the observational humor and a new way of thinking about everything. I was just like, this is perfect. You're like the Seinfeld for women. It's perfect. Not that he's not for women, but you know.

Caitlin: I will take that. Thank you. One of the reasons that I write what I do, the TV shows and the movies and the books and stuff, is that so much of women's lives just isn't written about. We're too busy doing it at the time. Still, the things that are thought to be women's things and a women's world, it's a combination of boring and so ordinary. There's no need to write about it. That seems to be the general cultural feeling. It's like, no, we are literally making the people that will populate the earth. Without us, it all just ends quite quickly. There is no bigger job on earth than being a mother and making children inside you and then just getting them to adulthood without them falling off a cliff. We deserve a couple of books about that. We're really busy. We've worked really hard. Why doesn't anyone just turn around and go, I see you, thank you?

Zibby: You pointed out in your book so many times, all the other books that should've been written that weren’t. You were trying to tackle them all, even about caring for aging parents and what it's like to suddenly be in that role. Why are people not writing books about this? This is a huge life shift that everybody has to deal with. Yet nobody's really talking about it all that much.

Caitlin: Totally. The weird thing when your parents start getting frail and then when they start dying is that you suddenly become top of the family tree. They have been the matriarch and the patriarch, and you are the child. When they get frail and ill and then when they die, they become the children. You're looking after them. Suddenly, you've got to climb to the top of the family tree. You're suddenly the matriarch in charge of the rest of the family. I don't know if it's your experience, but I've generally found that it's my female friends that have to go and look after the aging parents. For some reason, brothers are just like, you're better at that, or I'm too busy. You're like, I'm not busy? They're just like, it feels like that's a woman's thing. You should deal with that. We talk about it in terms of [indiscernible] or [indiscernible]. It's very common to have small children and ailing parents at the same time. Then you're still trying to be a human being with a job and a relationship and friends in the middle of that. We are just squeezed. We are extraordinary. We deal with this. No one notices it. No one thanks us. No one pays us. I just felt constantly when I was writing this book, I always have this thing that I'm just putting my arms around women going, mate, this is hard, isn't it? I see you. I'm going to write down what you're doing so people know how brave and brilliant you were at this time. I see that as my job, to just say to women, I see you. You're amazing. You're doing so well. Carry on.

Zibby: This is the book I want to give to every girlfriend that I have. It is so spot on. I feel like being in our mid-forties, there's suddenly no guidebook. I don't know what I'm doing half the time. I have to say, your book was so funny. I was laughing out loud at parts. Then when you went into all the struggles you were having with your daughter and her eating disorder, oh, my gosh, I couldn't believe it. Then I'm crying over your book. I couldn't believe it and all the stuff you've had to go through. Every parent has something that they're out of control with their kids. All you want to do is take on the pain yourself, but you can't.

Caitlin: That's where it goes wrong as well. It's so great getting to forty-five because you can look back and go, where did I make mistakes? How could I have learned? Is there any knowledge I could pass on with my daughters? I was, I would say, briskly badly parented. People ask me what my parents' parenting technique was. I say it was basically that of salmon. They spawned extravagantly. They laid all their eggs. Then they just sawm away. My parents had eight kids in very quick succession. Then that was it. We were not parented again. I cobbled together a personality based mainly around watching classic musicals staring Judy Garland. What Judy Garland taught me was that whatever your problems are, you stay cheerful. You crush all your bad emotions down and you just crack on and do your thing. That has worked very well for me and got to me to where I am.

As a parent, that became a weakness because if you've got girls, or boys but I've got two girls, you are sad and anxious. You keep making a joke or singing a silly song or, come on, just crack on, just crush all your emotions down and it'll all be fine. There comes a point if they are very sad and very unhappy and very anxious where that becomes quite dangerous. In my daughter's case, it metastasized into an eating disorder. I realize now that's kind of like a communication. If you are not taking this unhappiness seriously, then if it became a medical thing, then you will hear that I am sad. It took me a long time to realize that, for the first year and a half of her illness, that I was scared of her sadness and her anxiety and her depression. I was trying to make it to away. I was just saying to her, come on, just make yourself better. She couldn't. That was a huge thing that I had to learn, to sit down and go, I'm not scared of your sadness. I'm not scared of your depression. I'm not scared of your anxiety. We're going to do this together. Do you need to hear me say that I love you no matter what is happening here? I'm going to say that. We are going to do this together. Once I'd learned that, then she started to recover. Now she's fully well, touch wood, and incredible.

That was another reason why I wanted to write about it in the book. I think particularly for people of our generation, eating disorders were quite secret and shameful. Any mental illness was not spoken about in our generation. Her generation, they don't have that stigma. They talk about it. When I started to write the book, she was like, "Please write about my illness. I want you to be able to put that advice in there for other parents. You would be able to help. It's not a secret. It's not shameful. I was ill. It was the same as breaking a leg. You would want to put advice for how to treat a broken leg in a book if you knew how to do that. Then it's exactly the same here. See if you can help other people." It was definitely the hardest thing that I have done without a shadow of a doubt in my life. Those three and a half years were brutal. I was frequently on my knees with it because you're so racked with shame. If you don't know how to help your kid, there is no failure like a child that won't eat. That's the most fundamental thing that we want to do. As soon as your baby's born, you feed it. To suddenly have a child that's going, no, I will not eat, it's just like being electrocuted constantly. You can't handle the pain of it and the worry of it.

Thankfully, we had a happy ending. I wanted to write about it because also when I was trying to find books about eating disorders, every one that I found had a sad ending. They were, she didn't recover, I'm still ill. If you are lucky enough to have a happy story, put that out there and give people hope because god know you need it if you're dealing with that. If anyone out there is dealing with it, I absolutely salute you. There's a book by a woman called Eva Musby which gives you scripts of how to deal with an ill child, things that you need to say. You can't parent them anymore. You have to be a mental health professional. She gives you scripts of what to say. The transformation when you say the right things is extraordinary. I would heartily recommend that if anybody's unfortunate enough to be going through that right now.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. That's the thing with parenting. Whatever gets thrown your way, you have to adapt. I interviewed a women's whose daughter was born with a developmental disorder. She was like, then I had to learn how to become an occupation therapist. As you're saying, you then had to become a mental health professional. Whatever your child needs, you have to learn that skill set. That's it. That's all you have to do. You can't even think about it.

Caitlin: The state of being a parent is, it's the one thing you cannot walk away from. You do it every day without a break. Every day you have to turn up and do this stuff. There are no days off. It's every day for the rest of you're life. There's a bit in the book where I talk about how before you have kids you have no conception how long it will take. You're just kind of like, I'm sure I'll cope with it. Then you get five years into it. You're like, this is going to go on forever. There's one bit where I go, if I now type the word long and I just put so many O's that it fills the entire book, an entire book just full of O's, long, that's still not even one thousandth of how long it takes to be a parent. It's so incalculably long. It's an endurance sport, parenting. [laughs]

Zibby: I know. I loved that. I was just thinking you should have this little companion piece where you literally put just the O in the book.

Caitlin: There were days when I was writing the book, I thought, could I just keep my finger on the O? That could be the book. I could finish that quite quickly. Cut and paste, bang, we're done. No, I put other words in there as well. There are 87,000 other words other than the word long. [laughs]

Zibby: You also had so much -- and thank you. I feel like I didn't properly acknowledge your talking about your daughter. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you to her for sharing it. Thanks for offering up your story which is quite personal and emotional to help other people. I think that's the biggest gift we can give others as parents, as women. Just sharing our stories is the key to sanity for everybody. Helping others, it's all we can do.

Caitlin: Literally, if you're going to go through that, then what is the one good thing that you could do that would turn the negative into a positive? Just tell people what you learned. Just hope that you make their illness one day shorter, make one day a bit better. If you're doing that, then it's not worth it, but at least you managed to find something good in the horror.

Zibby: Thank you. Thank her too. It's really beautiful of her to share it. Back to the funny stuff for a second, you also wrote about marriage, particular long-term marriage, in a more brilliant, funny way than I've read about ever, especially the fact that people don't talk about their marriages. Once you're in a marriage, you just sort of stop talking about it. You said, "You have become replete and also silent now. Once the door has closed on the marital house, no reports can emanate from it. If the marriage is good, then the marriage must also be silent. That is one of the rules. You do not gossip. You do not share. A good marriage is mysterious to everyone around it. What happens in there? Who are those people who walked into it on their wedding day and then pulled up the drawbridge? If a marriage is successful, you walk in there in your teens, twenties, or thirties, and then only come out again in a coffin, the partner who outlived you standing there waving goodbye." Then you said, "For we don't write novels about long and happy marriages. We have big blockbuster stories on how to raise children. We don't show the endless everyday business of domestica. We have no template for that."

Caitlin: Right. Again, when I started thinking that -- so this is a sequel to the first book, How to be a Woman, which is about your younger years of making yourself. When I finished that, I thought, that's it. All the hard years are done. The rest of it's going to be really easy. I know everything. I've put it all in this book. I am done. Then ten years later, you're like, no, no one talks about middle age. Particularly since the book came out, we know about younger women's lives now. We've got Girls. We've got Fleabag. It's all about hot messes and masturbation and pubic hair and having to get an abortion and bad luck love affairs and stuff. We know quite well what a young modern woman's life is like now and the problems and joys of that. Then suddenly, it just stops. If you are in a successful relationship, I'd walk down the street and you go past every single door and you're like, what is going on in there? There are adventures in there as epic as any ring quest in Lord of the Rings. People, they are battling demons. They are facing heartbreak and joy. They are having to be a team. It's a business.

We are supposed to be silent about this. It's seen as disloyal to talk about a marriage. I just wanted to throw all these doors open, the format of the book is twenty-four hours in the life of an average middle-aged woman, and just go, what is happening every hour? What are you dealing with every hour? How are you making this work? What is making it difficult? To just be honest about that process, once you've realized that you're writing about something that other people generally haven't written about, it's so exciting. Anything you put in there, people are going, yep, that was me. Oh, my god, I can't believe you said that. I didn't even know you were allowed to say that. When I was talking about sex in a long-term relationship, even I was going, is that disloyal to my husband? Am I breaking some kind of marriage code to talk about how difficult it is to keep an exciting sex life going over twenty-five years? All the advice that you're given, it's generally for a younger woman. It's all the, have you tried spanking and sending texts? First of all, if you and your husband or long-term partner are spanking each other and you've got children in the house, you will hear a scared voice on the other side of the door going, what's that clapping sound? Mommy, I'm scared.

If you're sending each other illicit texts, then almost every family has it that their phone is linked to another device in the house. Suddenly, you've got a scared child who's watching Peppa Pig going, Mommy, a text has come up and it looks like it's two hams pressed together. You're like, no, I shouldn't have sent that belfie. That was wrong. Particularly women are supposed to be endlessly inventive and questing in their sex lives and bringing grapefruit and whips and all this kind of stuff. That completely misunderstands the average heterosexual man who's just happy to have some sex. If there's a naked lady in front of him and he's got twenty minutes with her, more than nine times out of ten he's going to be perfectly happy with that. Instead, we're like, I need to put the spice back into my relationship. If you try and put your spice back into a twenty-five-year-long relationship, it's going to be terrifying. We tried roleplay. I was like, could you be a naughty sexy pirate? If my husband were a famous character actor, if it was James Gandolfini or Mark Rylance, then maybe he would've workshopped that character and it would've been good. The accent was questionable. He kept saying, what's my motivation? You can't suddenly start being sexy pirates twenty-five years into a relationship, and you don't need to. You don't need to. Just have a normal, straightforward shag. It's perfectly fine. I relieve you all of the responsibility of having an exciting sex life. It's just twenty-five minutes. Say thank you to each other at the end of it. On with the rest of the day. It's done.

Zibby: Everyone can take their eye patches and just chuck them over their shoulders.

Caitlin: It's not going to work.

Zibby: Caitlin, how did you even get into writing? How did you begin this journey in your life? Did you know you wanted to write? How did this all happen for you?

Caitlin: I read a lot as a kid. My parents were very clever. They were generally terrible parents, but they did one clever thing. They had a suitcase under the bed that was full of classic children's books like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women stuff. From a very early age, they were like, "You're too young to read those yet. When you're old enough, you'll be able to read these," and so made books seem like this incredible thing that one day I'd be clever and special enough to read. When they finally opened the suitcase and went, "You can read these," it was like, now I feel honored. This is the good stuff. Usually if you're a writer, you're a reader. I think it's a bit like the digestive system. If you put enough words into you, then you probably start pooing them out. I don't want to give away the magic of what writing is. [laughter] You read something and you either go, I disagree with that, now I've got something to write, or you go, they were so right. When it happened to me, it was like that. I want to write my version of this. To be chin-stroke-y for a minute, if you're a writer, you're in a constant conversation with all the other writers that have been before. You just want to join in their game and go, I could do that too.

We were home educated. We didn't go to school. By the time I was thirteen, it was very apparent to me that with no qualifications and no schooling I would probably have to work out what my job would be and then get on with it on my own, so I just started writing a book when I was thirteen. I finished it when I was fifteen, it's a children's novel, and sent it off. It got published. There were a couple of interviews with me at the time because it was like, a teenager has written a book. The Times newspaper saw the interview and asked me if I wanted to write some pieces for them. I said yes. They gave me a column. By that point, I was seventeen. They gave me a column, which I now realize isn't the normal way that you get a job. I was also working as a rock critic on a music magazine at the time. I was still living at home. By night, I'd be at a gig smoking cigarettes and drinking cider and hanging out at rockstars'. Then at half past eleven, I'd creep home, get into the bed that I shared with my little brother because we didn't have our own beds, and then wake up in the morning, write the review, look after the kids, and then that night go off and be in the world of rock and roll again. It was quite unusual. It's not a template that I think anybody else could follow, so it's kind of useless me telling you. That is how I did it. [laughs]

Zibby: I don't think it's useless. It's highly entertaining. Then what came next? You had the column. Then what?

Caitlin: I had my kids really, really young. I'd met my husband when I was seventeen. Thank god that was one problem that I didn't have to worry about. We had kids really young. I was twenty-four and then twenty-six. I was just writing the column on The Times for ten years. You don't realize how long a minute or an hour or a day is until you have to sit under a child and not move. The first thing that I learned from breastfeeding other than it hurt was that as soon as I didn't have to have a sleeping child on me, I would do stuff. I was not going to waste any more time. The first day the youngest one went to school, I was like, I'm going to do stuff. That was when I started writing How to be a Woman, which was sort of trying to explain feminism to a young generation and tell dirty, funny stories about life. Then I did a couple of novels. I did a TV series about my childhood. I've just done the film of one of the novels, How to Build a Girl, starring Beanie Feldstein who is an absolute delight. She plays the teenage me. She's better at being the teenage me than I was. We have a little WhatsApp group. She's as obsessed with dogs as I am. Whenever we see a cute dog, we take pictures of it and send it to each other like, this is a good dog. Look at this noble fellow. This is an adorable one. It's a pretty sweet life, I have to say. At forty-five I'm like, wow, if I could tell my thirteen-year-old self that it was going to work out this well, I'd be pretty pleased. I would be, certainly, less anxious.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to people who might not have this fall into their lap? Not that you didn't earn it, not that you haven’t earned it. You're incredibly [indiscernible].

Caitlin: I was so lucky. It was a much easier time to be a writer and get paid. Everyone can be a writer now because you can blog, but you don't get paid for it. There's necessarily a class barrier now. If you're young and you've got parents who can support you, you can write full time. You can blog full time. If you have to get a job, then you're not going to start writing until you get home probably quite tired and start writing. There's an immediate class and economic barrier put to writing these days, which is sad. If you are a writer, it took me quite a while to realize that if you're writing what you think -- you look at the game and you go, this is what everyone's writing about. That's what a column would look like or a book would look like. I should do something like that. If you do that, you're trying to get into a very crowded field. You're going to have to be absolutely excellent to compete with people who are already established and have contacts. If you do this thing where you turn 180 degrees and go, what aren't people writing about? Where's the gap in the market? Where is the silence? Where are the taboos? Where are the stories that aren't being told? Suddenly, you're going to be more in demand. You've got more of a market value because no one else is doing that.

That's where things that would often be seen as a disadvantage, like being of color, being LGBTQ, writing about middle age, whatever it is, become an advantage because those are areas that are not serviced that well. We don't have that many writers talking about those things or those kind of lives. Once you see that what you might perceive as your weakness is actually your strength, then hopefully that will give you the courage to go, no, I will be doing something useful if I write. That's a lovely thing to think of as a writer. You're not being indulgent. It's not like writing poetry and hoping people will cry. You're going, no, I'm being useful. I'm going to tell people things. I'm going to ask questions. I'm going to try and work out why these things happens. I have a purpose now. Once you feel as a writer that you've got a purpose, so long as you are determined enough, you will find an audience in the end because people like you will need to hear your stories because no one else is telling them. You’ve got to be resilient. Whatever you think is your weakness is your strength. People need what you are going to be writing about.

Zibby: I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on this show. I am such a huge fan of yours. Loved this book. Can't thank you enough. It's just been such an awesome experience talking to you.

Caitlin: You are absolutely fantastic. I love your bookshelf. It's giving me such joy. My eyes are so happy looking at it. Thank you so much, darling.

Zibby: You're welcome. Buh-bye.

Caitlin: Buh-bye.

Catherine Cho, INFERNO

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

Catherine Cho: Thanks, Zibby. I'm so glad to be here.

Zibby: I really cannot wait to discuss this book with you. Ever since the publicist sent me the title of this book, I was like, ooh, I'm going to love that. I really did. I couldn't put it down. It kept me up at night. It was just great. Can you just tell listeners a little bit about Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness and how this came to even be a book?

Catherine: Inferno is about my postpartum psychosis when my son was three months old. The title comes from my psychosis, actually, when I thought I was Beatrice in Dante's Inferno and that my husband was Dante. I started writing the book very soon after my experience when I was in the process of recovery. I'd never heard of postpartum psychosis until my experience. I was initially thinking of writing an article, maybe. Then I realized that in order to know the full context of a mental breakdown, perhaps then you need to know what was there to be broken. I thought, actually, you need a full book to get that kind of picture. I started writing it in the summer after my experience. It all came together very quickly, actually. I was just very focused. I really wanted to share the story.

Zibby: Wow. You had a notebook that you reference many times throughout the book where you were actually writing in it while you were in the inpatient unit. Did that actually get into the book, some of those notes? Or were they more just notes?

Catherine: Yeah, some of it. My husband had left me a notebook in the ward which I was really grateful for. It really helped me figure out who I was and ground me and give me something to do while I was there. Some of the bits that are in the book from the notebook like the passages about who I was, what was real, what was not real, that was from my notebook. I tried to take as many notes as possible. It gave me something to do, to observe. They were mostly notes, so obviously are kind of fragmented. I had to work from them to put them into the book.

Zibby: You said in the beginning of the book that when you were first pregnant, because this all happened obviously postpartum, you were so focused on all the things that were happening to your body. It never occurred to you that anything could happen to your mind. Tell me a little bit about that and all the preparation that went into the pregnancy and how this threw you for a loop.

Catherine: That's something that I did want to talk about in the book. It's such a physical change, what happens during pregnancy. For me, I know my preoccupation was with how I would recover after birth, what could potentially go wrong like preeclampsia or prolapse. I had an emergency c-section, so just recovering from that. I was so focused on the physical aspect that I didn't consider that kind of mental or psychological shift of actually becoming a mother and how it would change you and your identity.

Zibby: I was glad when you said in the book when your son Cato was born that you didn't feel this instant connection and instead it felt like someone was handing you a stranger because I have to admit that kind of happened to me as well. I was like, who are these kids? Why is everyone calling them by the names that I've picked out for these fictious kids who are in my head who don't look like these kids who are now in my arms? [laughs] I was like, am I supposed to feel this way? It was nice to hear that I was not the only one who had a moment to get used to the whole thing.

Catherine: I think because in your head you expect when the child is placed in your arms, you'll feel this rush of connection. I'm guessing it does happen to some women, but it definitely didn't happen to me.

Zibby: It wasn't so much the lack of connection as the surprise at meeting a total stranger. I didn't expect my babies to feel like I was meeting somebody because they felt such a part of me when they were brewing. I had twins to start. It was more like, where did these guys come from? By the way, I feel like in this book you have had every complication of everything from getting sepsis during your pregnancy to mastitis and thrush when you were nursing. I just feel like every bad thing that could happen as a byproduct, you had. It was terrible. I felt terrible for you as things kept unfolding physically, oh, my gosh.

Catherine: I think because I had such an uneventful pregnancy, everything just started happening once I was in labor. Then it just kept going from there.

Zibby: You also wrote so hauntingly and beautifully about your horrific abusive relationship with Drew. One of the things you said in the book that I found so interesting is at the beginning how everybody kept telling you how he was such a good guy. He's such a good guy. He's such a good guy. He's so popular. He's so this. You said, I wish that I had paid attention to that and heard it as a warning. Why were people saying that so much? Do you think people were really covering up for what they kind of knew about him? Do you think everybody knew that he was abusive in his relationships?

Catherine: I think they did. It's something I thought about a lot in retrospect. After I left the relationship, I did talk to some of his friends. They would all say he's not a good boyfriend, but he's a good friend. They would make that distinction which I always found a bit surprising. I do think they were trying to warn me without -- I guess they wanted to give their friend the benefit of the doubt that actually maybe he could be a good person. Actually, he wasn't. He was violent. He couldn't help that. It's such an interesting thing to me in that I was so puzzled at how someone could be so popular and have so many friends but just be such a violent, abusive person to his partners.

Zibby: The way you talked about even his mother's response to his abuse was also interesting. I feel like nobody ever writes about that. That you had even the compassion after all the stuff he put you through and being knocked unconscious, essentially, oh, my gosh. I was reading this book and I was like, [gasp]. My husband's like, "What? What?" I was like, "The girl in my book, she's being beaten up. It's awful." After all that you went through to then put yourself in his mom's shoes and say, what would it be like to know you've raised a child like this and what do you do in that scenario? Tell me a little more that and the empathy you're able to have for his mother.

Catherine: That's the thing. Often when we think about abusers or people who are violent, you tend to think of them one-dimensionally. Actually, Drew is a son. He's a brother. He has a family that really loves him. They know about his very serious [indiscernible]. I thought that was really fascinating. His mother, I could tell how torn she was because it really upset her that he was this way towards women. She also loved him unconditionally. At the end of the day, he was always going to be her son. She just wanted him to be happy. That was a very strange thing for her to come to terms with. As I say in the book, I kind of used her as a scapegoat often. When I probably should've been blaming him, I was blaming her. As I was pregnant with my own son and thinking more about that and how I would deal with it if, god forbid, he was that type of person, it just made me consider her more and think more about how she was trying to process it. Of course, she couldn't abandon her son or turn her back on him. I'm sure the way that she dealt with it, at least I hope I wouldn't deal with it like that.

Zibby: Wow. You rebound from this abusive relationship and probably did not get a lot of therapy, I'm guessing, because you spent your weekends going to the arrivals terminal just to see the connections other people have and that emotion and then got a job at an Alzheimer's facility. You said something so beautiful about why, and maybe you didn't realize at the time but when you reflected on it now. Hold on, let me just get to this page which of course I can't find at the exact time I want it. You said, "I was drawn to their stories. But mostly, I was drawn to this place where time didn't exist. It was a place of memory, of loss, but each memory lasted only for the moment." It's so interesting that when you're trying to forget a traumatic event you end up surrounding yourself with people with no memories at all. Tell me a little about that.

Catherine: I do think as I was reflecting on it, it is part of the reason why I included that, those experiences in the book. It was such a strange place. It was, as you say, a home of people who didn't have any memories, who didn't have any stories but were in this place and [indiscernible]. They were definitely trying to remember things, but they couldn't. I definitely didn't get any therapy after the relationship. I tried to put it behind me. I just thought, this is a chapter in my life that's closed. I don't really need to talk about it with people. At the time, I felt it didn't affect me that much, which in retrospect was very naïve. I do think I was really drawn to this retirement home. It was specifically for people with dementia and Alzheimer's. I could really sense that they were untethered from the past.

Zibby: Then you meet the love of your life. I feel like now I'm giving away the book. Maybe this is too much. You and James meet, fall in love, have Cato. Then next thing you know, your baby has demon eyes and the walls are closing in and spinning around. You're seeing refractions of everything. Everything just breaks in your brain. I know you wrote about it so vividly, and that's amazing. To go through this experience, just tell me a little more about that moment, especially when you could feel your brain slipping but you didn't know what was going on.

Catherine: It was completely terrifying. I can't lie. I had a sense that something was wrong. I describe it in the book as the trigger is when I look at my son and his face wasn't his face. It was a devil's face. It was so strange because I kept trying to right myself. I knew something was wrong. I didn't know what was wrong. I didn't know what was real. I didn't know if I was imagining something. I didn't know if I was dreaming. This all happened within a period of a little over a day. Throughout that day I just kept trying to reposition myself and be like, this is fine, it's not fine, until so much of what I was seeing and experiencing convinced me that actually I was in hell and in a simulation. That thought or belief where eventually I did lose all sense of time and reliving things again and again and again where I thought I was stuck in this hotel room, it was completely terrifying. At some point, you just kind of have to surrender to it. For me, I just felt like this is my reality. I'm actually dead. I'm in a simulation. There's nothing I can do.

Zibby: Then you spent a bunch of time in a facility where gradually we see you coming into your own mind again and righting yourself enough eventually with the help of medication or whatever that you could leave and pick up your life again. Here's my question. I want to know what happens after the book. What happened when you went back? What's happened since? What has happened with your relationship with your son? You obviously became a beautiful memoirist. What else has gone on? Give me the unwritten epilogue.

Catherine: It was a really long recovery. I think part of the reason I didn't write that much about it is it's so hard to write about because it was so gradual. I came back to London. I'd gone through this psychosis. Then I had fell into a really deep depression where I was essentially bed-bound for several months and went on medication. During that time, I really couldn't interact with my son at all or touch him. That's something I really sometimes grieve over because it's just so sad that I didn't have that bond. I would say it took a good year before I started feeling that relationship and connection with him again. I ended up going back to New York pretty soon after the experience.

Zibby: Wait, I'm so sorry. My phone is ringing. This never happens. I'm so sorry.

Catherine: That's okay. [laughs]

Zibby: I'm sorry. Of course, it's just my daughter who's calling me from upstairs. Anyway, I'm so sorry. Say that little part again if you don't mind. I apologize.

Catherine: It took a good year for me to have that bond with my son again and to connect with him. I went back to work pretty soon after and classically didn't tell anybody I'd gone through it, what I'd gone through. I just showed up and did my job. In the meantime, I'd already been working on my book. I'd found an agent for it. My son is almost three now. We have a really good bond, a really good relationship. I'm expecting another baby.

Zibby: Yay!

Catherine: Yes, thank you. That's been a whole process as well, talking with my husband about whether or not we should have another child. I'm expecting a baby in November. That has made me think again about what we went through, what I went through, and how to prevent it from happening again. It's been incredibly positive. The whole process of publishing the book has really shown me how much the things that I went through are actually very universal and very commonly experienced by so many women and mothers, obviously not to that extent. Just the fear and changing your identity I think is very universal.

Zibby: Not to be totally overstepping my bounds here, but I hope you have a really good therapist on your case this time before you go --

Catherine: -- I do.

Zibby: Okay, good. Phew. If not, I was going to introduce you to some people and maybe make sure the psychosis doesn't happen. Are you worried about that? I would be so worried.

Catherine: I remember they told us that the statistics are fifty percent if you experienced psychosis the first time. When my husband heard that, he was like, "We're not having another baby." I have a very great psychiatrist who the NHS -- once you've gone through this kind of thing, they assign you to a team. It's just incredible what they do. She was talking me through it. Actually, the fact that my psychosis happened three months in makes it more situational and more stress-induced versus for many women, it happens a few days after birth. I feel much more prepared and aware that I could at least control some of the factors in the surroundings to prevent it from happening again.

Zibby: I'm taking it you're not taking a big United States trip this time?

Catherine: No, I'm not jumping around.

Zibby: Although, I felt terrible that you kept blaming yourself that this trip was the cause of it. I feel like you have so much guilt and self-flagellation going on in your brain about your decision. It could have had nothing to do it, really, right?

Catherine: Yeah, I think the guilt is kind of inevitable. I really felt the trip would be such a great thing. Then once we were on the trip, we were like, five cities with a two-month-old, that's a great idea. I still feel a bit like, that was just really silly.

Zibby: Who knows? Who knows what would've happened if you had stayed? You just don't know. Now that you've written this up, is writing something that you fell in love with doing, that you'd want to keep doing? Was it more like you had to get this story out?

Catherine: I've always written. I do work in publishing, so I work with writers a lot in my day job. I have really enjoyed the process of writing. I've been thinking I would love to write something else. To be honest, my mind is just blank. [laughs] I don't know what else I would write about. For the moment, I haven't been writing anything. I do think for the book, it was very purpose driven. It was about sharing that story. It came much easier.

Zibby: Especially given your position in the industry and as an author and both sides of the fence essentially, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Catherine: I'm an agent during the day. That is my day job. Still, very much my primary role is to help authors and writers showcase their stories. It's very much a privilege to do so. One thing this whole process has taught me, and it's been a very humbling one, is that it's so vulnerable to put yourself out there and to share your writing. I definitely have a greater sense of empathy for any writer who submits something to someone. I guess just to keep going. For me with finding an agent, obviously I knew how the process worked. That definitely gave me very much a head start. I ended up revising the book half a dozen times, maybe even more than that, even once I had my agent. It was just about pushing it and making it as best as it could be. That really showed me how collaborative the writing process can be. The whole rewriting and editing process is just as important as the initial phase of putting it down on paper.

Zibby: Do you have a type of book that you gravitate towards as an agent?

Catherine: Most of my books that I work with are fiction. It's funny because I was thinking about this recently. I think almost all of them deal with some question of identify, often. The genre doesn't matter as much as it's very character driven, voice driven. Usually, at the heart, at the center of it is a question of identity.

Zibby: Maybe I'll send you my novel. No, I'm kidding. I have an agent. I'm kidding. Maybe people will listen to this and you'll be getting floods of submissions. Watch out. [laughs] Thank you so much. Thank you for this book, which I really could not put down and was so immersive and emotional and just awesome, and for telling me more about it and coming on the show.

Catherine: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care. Bye.

Catherine: Bye.

Lisa Donovan, OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER

Lisa Donovan: I'm glad to meet you.

Zibby Owens: I'm glad to meet you too.

Lisa: I admittedly have been so far up my own ass with this book for the last three or four years. [laughs] I am just finding spaces where I'm like, I can't wait to read this blog. I can't wait to watch this. I'm just glad to know of you now. All of the connections that get made when you come out with a book are really special, so I'm glad to know that you're out there.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. I feel like I've gotten to know so many people. I used to be a big reader anyway, but not like this. Now every memoir, every book I open, I get to know so much about people that our paths might not have crossed in life. Now look, it's like magic. I love it.

Lisa: It feels like a really special time in that arena. I was just talking with someone. We were having a little pre-interview. He happens to be a really good friend of mine. We were just talking. I said, one of the really great things about this has been making connections with other writers. There have been so many women writers who've written memoirs this year. They're all so different. Phyllis Grant is a really great example of someone who came out with memoirs that are very parallel. We've never met, but we've kind of looked at each other like, how have we -- obviously, we know. We were both doing what you just did this morning, which is juggling it all and creating this career and creating these lives for ourselves and our families. We kind of are all coming out of the woods at the same time like, there you are. I knew you were out here. I was just too busy to find you. Now we're telling similar stories, but in really different ways. It's really special. It's a really neat time.

Zibby: That's awesome. Even earlier today, I did podcast with an author, Alyssa Shelasky, who wrote a book called Apron Anxiety. It intersperses recipes and stories. Then Phyllis Grant also has been on my podcast, and you. I'm loving all these food, memoir, growing up, and experience. If this were real life, I would say let's all get together. I'm going to do an event with you guys, but you know.

Lisa: That would be great.

Zibby: Someday.

Lisa: I really hope that we can put a pin in all of those things and really make them happen next year. It's been very nice and relaxing to be able to do this from my desk and my bedroom. [laughter] That's been a nice energy restorative experience. Whereas the traveling, I used to travel a lot as a chef, it really starts to take its toll on you when you're traveling four and five times a month, especially when you're flying. I was definitely getting a little threadbare in that way. I really want next year to be -- I'm trying to keep a little ledger of every time I say that or someone says that to me, like, event with Zibby and Phyllis.

Zibby: Will you please put it in? We could something now. I just feel like it's not as great. It's not the same as when you get a group together. I love pairing people who have so much to discuss. Please write it down.

Lisa: An energy in a room is so nice. I'm really starting to miss that zeitgeist of people talking together and an audience listening. Admittedly, at the beginning of this, I was like, phew, I don't have to sit on a stage and talk about myself. Now I'm kind of like, but look at all these people that I can sit on the stage with and talk about what our work is. It's going to be a great opportunity. I'm keeping notes. I'm trying to remember all of the plans that we're dreaming of now and make them happen next year.

Zibby: Put me at the top of the list. Once the floodgates have opened and we can all come rushing forward and planning stuff, can't wait. Tell me more about writing your book. Tell me about when you decided your life would be a book. Then how did you take everything that happened and put it on the page?

Lisa: As cliché as it sounds, I think I'm one of those weird people that always was a writer even when I was a kid. That's how I processed things. I'm just a writer. Whether I'm good or bad is to be determined, but that's how I process my experiences. Did I ever think I was going to write a memoir of this caliber as far as personal exposure goes? No, not even close. I think that there was a time in the world that changed and became available where I started to realize that I knew I was going to use -- there are plenty of stories in my life that are great material for storytelling and that are good stories in and of themselves. In my head, I thought, that’ll be for a novel. That’ll be for short stories. That’ll be for screenplays. That’ll be for my creative process later in life. I'll use all these interesting characters in different ways as a writer. Then the world sort of changed. I left the restaurant industry and had a real significant experience, a personal experience, with myself of, the word is getting so overused, but a reckoning with myself of the ways in which I tried to maneuver the world and the ways in which that was effective and then the ways in which I know it was damaging to me and other women around me and the acquiescences that we make and the stories we don't tell, the stories we don't even share amongst ourselves as women and how private and shamefully secret a lot of these stories become for us as we move through the world.

Really started to take apart what the parallels were between the acquiescences and this very patriarchal infrastructure, patriarchal and racist system out in the world that we all try to ladder-climb in with this self-accountability of what I was doing to bring power to that world by keeping these things so private and carrying all of these things as if it were some sort of burden. My own life was a burden to the world. The space that I was going to take up with my stories was burdensome for the world. We get these ideas of the ways in which women are supposed to be accommodating. I really started to get frustrated by the boundaries that I had to live in because I was playing that game of not being burdensome to the world. I wrote the essay about the restaurant industry. It got categorized as a sort of Me Too essay in the larger zeitgeist of the conversation that was happening at the time. That was a moment for me where not only did I realize how good it felt to get all of that language out of me, the response was really interesting to me. How much people seemed to need to hear those small stories that were contained within that essay was a real awakening for me.

It was a real moment for me to realize that there's power in telling our stories. There's power in talking about sexual assault at a time when it takes forty women to bring one man down in our culture. That problem in our culture and society rests solely on the fact that we acquiescence and keep these stories to ourselves for so long. There's no space for us to have the conversations about rape and abortion and about what it means to be a woman in all the ways, beautiful ways, connective ways. It just felt like a really great opportunity to finally share what was a very true experience for one woman in the world. The more we can start opening up those spaces, I think that's how we can create societal change about how we treat women in this country. I didn't realize I was going to ever write a memoir in this capacity, but it happened. Here we are. [laughs] I look really forward to writing some fiction and some things that are a little less making me feel completely exposed to the world. There's that level of it too. I do understand, for me, why this was important. It's also difficult to lay it all out there bare.

Zibby: There's a lot in there. Some of the scenes, I was just like, oh, my gosh, Lisa, I can't believe it. The one with your ex and the baby on the bed, I won't go into it, but my heart was breaking for you, and then the way that his mother even handled your relationship after and just all of it.

Lisa: The trick of those kinds of stories is how frequent and common they are for women out in the world. Here I was, this figure of note in my arena, in my industry, and viewed as someone was no nonsense and strong and independent and hardworking and created my own -- all of the strong, independent woman tropes surrounded me. I thought, it's really kind of messed up that no one truly understands how a strong woman is built. They think that we just appear. I really wanted to give some language to what creates and builds these strong women out in the world. It's oftentimes, in fact, probably never ease and because they just plowed their way through. No, there was definitely something to build that strength and that power and that ability to manage greater circumstances that I think people just assume you were born with.

Zibby: It's like people working out in the gym. I'm envisioning this muscle man type of weight area of a gym. You can walk in. People have different baselines. You have to go through the pain of lifting for anybody to get stronger. You can be relatively strong, but in order to really get strong, you have to put in some sort of tissue-breaking hard work. For emotional strength, it's exactly the same. It has to come out of somewhere. You have to break something down to build it back up again, unfortunately. I wish it hadn’t have happened to you that way and all the rest. I have to say, when I started reading your book, your table of contents and the way that you structured each chapter, the title and the accompanying food, was so brilliant that I took a picture of that page. I have been meaning to post it, but of course I haven't remembered to do so. I get such a kick out of well-structured and creative, clever formats. I really loved how you did that.

Lisa: Thanks. I wasn't sure if I was going to have chapter titles. Then it just started happening really naturally where each chapter sort of became an essay in and of itself. The two words that had each chapter became for me almost like an outline. It just helped me stay on both a thematic structure as well as a feeling of that time. I'm glad you said that. Thank you. It just came about naturally. I was like, well, I'll just keep it.

Zibby: I loved it. When you were writing, take me through the writing process. You had these titles. Did you have a list of all of them first and then you filled in it, or as each one came? What was the writing process like? Were you sitting right there? Where did you write all this?

Lisa: This is where I did it all, and sometimes on the ground in a puddle. [laughs] The writing process was -- it's the first time I've ever done anything this big. I've written a lot of essays. I've written a lot of larger format sort of things, but I've never written a book. Obviously, it's my first book. It was an interesting process because I had to learn to be messy, and that's not something I'm good at. I can be. I am messy in my creative efforts, but I oftentimes don't share that. The part that was so hard about the writing process for me was presenting disastrous work to my editor so that we could work out of it. I spent a lot of time in those early months of starting this book being really cloistered and really trying to edit myself before I gave it to my editor. It took me some time. That's just a result, I'm pretty sure, of working in a pretty high-stress kitchen being a pastry chef. My standards for what I'm willing to present are very high. I hold myself to a very high standard when I'm engaging with another professional. In a kitchen, for example, if you're the pastry chef -- if you're a cook or a sous chef, it's a little different. As the pastry chef, as the chef of my department, I would get ideas and I would do all of that messy work very privately. I would figure it out and do the math and make all the equations work. Then when I had something that felt as close to finished as possible, that's when I would say, hey, I need you guys to taste this. It's going on the menu soon. I would take notes. Then I would tweak and do that kind of stuff.

I think I went into this book with that idea of, I have to get this right before I show it to her. It took me some time to get out of that training that my brain was used to. Once, she brought me closer and she was like, "You just got to brain dump, brain dump, brain dump." There was a lot of stories that just came out. I just let them come out. Then we found our structure from there of, look, what's our overall conversation here? For me, it was really important to make sure that the conversation was significantly and nearly entirely about how women engage and find and love and care for each other and all of the complexities of that. I'm really intrigued by the ways in which women move around this world together. It feels like we are all part of this -- it makes me think of, what's in the ocean? The channel that moves through the Gulf Coast, the Gulf Stream. It kind of feels like we all have this similar movement around this world and we all are tethered to this way of experiencing and communicating. There's something really powerful about that. There's also something very painful about that because of these shared experiences and traumas and things that we experience as women that, frankly, men I think can't understand on some level. It's not like men do not experience trauma, but I think women have very different experiences in the world. We're tethered together in all of these ways. That, to me, I really wanted to talk about the complexities in which women move through this world together and alone.

Everything became, is it useful to have this? Is this story useful to that bigger picture of talking about the complexities of how women engage with one another and also what I'm hoping to pass to my own daughter and how I'm hoping to leave her with less of all of this generational undoing and unlearning? That is a huge priority for me. That was a huge priority for the book. Also, just keeping to those themes. Then structurally, what happened was I just started taking each chapter like it was its own short story or a short essay, its own essay. Then after we compartmentalized it that way, we started to do a little bit of weaving so that they didn't feel so chopped, like it didn't feel, hopefully, like a short story collection. What we wanted was to weave them together. It was an evolution of how we could best get all of these things to work as a whole. It was a really beautiful experience. I have two editors. They're both women. It was just this really special, really truly wonderful experience. Penguin Press has been one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. I hope I can write for them forever. It's a really, really special house. I'm very proud to be one of their writers. They have taken such good care of this book. I can't even tell you. It's amazing to me.

Zibby: I'm so glad. That's wonderful. Has your daughter read this book?

Lisa: Parts. She's fifteen. She'll be sixteen in a few weeks. She's picking it up and putting it down, picking it up and putting it down. I think they're nervous. Both of my kids are a little nervous. My son is twenty. He's like, "Mom, I love you." We had a lot of talks before as I was writing these stories just about his comfort level and what he was comfortable with me sharing. For a while, it was mine and his experience. He's like, "No, I don't feel like that was my experience. I feel like this is wholly your experience. You worked really hard to make this not a thing I even have to recall. I feel so incredibly removed from any of these stories." He was fully supportive, but he's also not quite ready to read the book. He's like, "I think there are just some things I'm not ready to know." I'm like, "That is totally fair." Maggie has read, I don't think she's read it all the way through, but she's cherrypicked some chapters. I actually don't think she's made it to the last chapter, which is interesting because that's the part that when my husband read it, he just was sobbing.

I'm going to cry. He was like, "This is such a gift for her. It's going to be something that she keeps. She can revisit her whole life. It exists forever now. She can look at this when she's seventy and know this was something you felt when she was growing up. It's the best gift." I was like, oh, my god. You don't really think about that. You're not really thinking about your audience. There was a lot of retroactive -- if you think about your audience too much, you'll never write the book. You'll just be obsessed with, who's going to think what of what? It was really important to me to not blame anybody or indict anyone, even people that deserved blaming and indictment. It was really important for me for this to be about my own work, my own internalized undoing and unlearning and really taking some things apart that, yes, I can assign blame to. I think my grandfather takes the biggest hit here. It was really important to me to make this about what I learned and how I moved forward from these experiences. I hope that the messaging makes its way with ease. There's always more time to write books.

Zibby: Are you already thinking about your next book?

Lisa: Oh, yeah.

Zibby: Yeah? Memoir? Fiction?

Lisa: No. [laughs] One memoir is enough. I shouldn't say that. The next memoir doesn't have to be quite so guttural. When I think about Ruth Reichl and Nora Ephron, I think everything will always be a little obviously reflective of my own life. I value that so much in how women tell stories. I have plenty of material to use. I'm working on some other projects that are not nonfiction. It's exciting for me to take these stories and have a little bit of freedom. There's lots of rules with memoir. You have to really hold yourself accountable in every -- well, you hold yourself accountable, hopefully, as a writer anyway, but you're holding yourself accountable to truth and fact and data. You worry about, am I getting this right? Am I remembering? I was talking with Dave Chang on his podcast last week. He wrote a beautiful memoir. He sent it to her sister. His sister emails him saying, "David, I love you. I don't remember it this way at all, but I'm glad that you had a space to write it." There's that experience of what truth lives in each experience for each individual. You're faced with that reality of everyone's having their own personal moment that is very different than the person standing next to you. Memoir keeps you in these really rigid boundaries of making sure you're holding accountability to truth. Whereas if you're doing nonfiction, you have a lot more freedom. You get to play a little bit more. It was a good first exercise. Eventually, maybe I'll write more memoir. I would love that. I've gotten all the hard stuff out of the way, hopefully, knock on wood. Right now, it feels really good to be in a space where the creative part of my brain really gets to play and create character profiles.

Zibby: What is your relationship like these days to baking and chef-dom and creating and cooking and all of that?

Lisa: It's always going to be my first love. Writing is so much a part of who I am that it doesn't even feel like a vocation or a hobby. It feels so much a part of, again, just how I process and move through the world. Baking is really truly one of the first vocations and crafts and tactical work that I fell so in love with. That, I recognize in my husband. He's a ceramicist. His affinity and his education and his passion for the material is so familiar to me in the way that baking feels for me. It will always be that for me. I will always have a very deep visceral response and connectivity to baking. The food world is in a hard place right now, in a great place in some ways. They're having really important conversations about food justice. All of these things are incredibly important and timely and necessary. Not to say I'm peace-ing out because it's getting hard. That's not what I'm saying. I feel like it's a good time to let some younger people have the space in that world. There's a lot of really great energy happening from the twenty to thirty-five-year-olds coming up. They’ve got a lot to say. I am so happy to sit and hear what they are bringing to the table. I don't know that you ever age out of a conversation like that, but I am also self-aware enough to know that I'm learning a lot from these younger writers in the food space.

This quarantine has been a really great opportunity to chill out and listen and read and learn. Some of it, I'm really excited about. Some of it I think still needs some work. [laughs] I am really glad to be in a space where I've earned the opportunity to do work in a different way. I was always out in the streets. I was always front line of the hard conversations. I'm not scared of those things. I'm also getting to an age now where I want to do something that's a little bit more dedicated to something that builds and cultivates, and even in a really private way. I'm getting really comfortable with wholly being a writer, not a chef writer. It's been a real joy and partially a relief to hear people say, "This shouldn't even be in a food memoir category. It's hard to even call you a chef now because your writing seems to be so much your focus." That's been really nice to hear because that's sort of been my goal. You can't cook in a kitchen forever. I never made sense with the banks or the investors of how to open my own space. In this time, I'm really glad that I'm not saddled with trying to -- so many of my best friends are trying to keep things from just completely falling apart right now. It's a really hard time to be a chef and a restauranteur.

This lockdown, this quarantine time has given, I think, a lot of people the space to really refocus what their intentions might have been before life carried them away. I feel like I'm in that space. I don't think I ever would've given myself permission to stop cooking as a private chef or doing consulting or developing recipes unless the world had sort of made me stop. Just this little amount of time away from my perpetual insecurity of not losing potential income, I will never not have that. This time's even turned that on its head. You realize we don't need as much as we thought. We actually need a lot less than we're working so hard for. If the tradeoff is getting to work in my yard ten hours a week or getting to go on long walks with my husband or cuddling up with the dog for an hour a day, okay, I'm down. That's a good trade. I'll do it. I think my relationship to the food world is one that will always exist, but I definitely can actively say I'm working hard so that I can just write full time. Again, I'll probably always write about food in some way or my experiences as a chef because I think that's the well from which I draw my writing material. I want it to transcend this food media conversation. I'm growing less interested in that and more interested in making something beautiful out of the same kinds of conversations and making more cultural experiences for people than hardnosed, fuck it all. [laughter] That's starting to feel less useful to me than it once did.

Zibby: Lisa, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thank you for sharing all of your amazing thoughts. You have such a soothing, centered voice. I feel like I could just sit here and listen to you forever. Maybe a podcast is in your future. I feel like you should take it on the road. That could be really fun for you.

Lisa: The world is all of our oysters now. We can make [indiscernible] happen. Why not?

Zibby: Why not? Have a great day.

Lisa: It was nice to talk with you.

Zibby: It was so nice to talk to you. Please keep our event on the top of your list.

Lisa: I will.

Zibby: We will do it. Now it will be one of my post-quarantine goals.

Lisa: Good. Take care of yourself.

Zibby: Thank you. You too.

Lisa: Talk to you soon.

Zibby: Okay, buh-bye.

Kendra Adachi, THE LAZY GENIUS WAY

Zibby Owens: Kendra Adachi is the author of The New York Times best seller The Lazy Genius Way: Embrace What Matters, Ditch What Doesn't, and Get Stuff Done. She's also the host of "The Lazy Genius Podcast" and has a blog. In fact, all of this together she calls The Lazy Genius Collective, which I think I might have to steal. That's so genius. Kendra lives with her husband and children somewhere.

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

Kendra Adachi: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited about this.

Zibby: I am too, oh, my gosh. I feel like your book, it was like, here's how to live your life a little bit better than you're doing. Here are all my tips. I just took all those and I'm running with these now. Thank you very much. [laughs]

Kendra: I'm so glad. Who knew that we would also have a pandemic that we would need to manage? The timing is not great, but also really great. I'm so glad.

Zibby: I'm sure the timing for you is not great with the launch. As a reader, the timing is pretty great for the content. On balance, maybe it works out.

Kendra: Totally. I'll take that.

Zibby: The Lazy Genius Way: Embrace What Matters, Ditch What Doesn't, and Get Stuff Done, tell listeners, please, what your book is about. What inspired you to write this book?

Kendra: What inspired me to write the book was hearing myself and a lot of women that I was doing life with and writing on the internet for just so tired all the time. We're always just so tired. I was like, we were told to pair back our to-do lists and we need to say no more and simplify our lives. I saw a lot of people doing that, and they were still really tired. Just tried to pay attention to what was going on and realized that I think that what we are doing is trying hard at too many things and then often trying hard at the wrong things or things that don't really matter to us. Everybody gets to decide what that is. As I started to unpack that idea, I was like, oh, my gosh, I think we might have cracked a code here. I think we might have found something really great. The book, The Lazy Genius Way, it's not about doing more or less. It's about doing what matters to you. If you actually spend your energy on what matters and sort of let go of the things that don't and then also begin to accept and engage with people in your life who prioritize different things than you, that we have permission to care and to care about different things, what a world, man. The Lazy Genius Way is basically a self-help, personal-growth book for people who are just really tired of reading them and highlighting a few things and cobbling together a way to live a meaningful life. It's a guidebook of principles to help you live a meaningful life by your own definition.

Zibby: Love it. Let's backtrack. How did you become the lazy genius? Why you? How did you fall into this? How did you come up with this? When did the whole thing start? Did it start with the blog? Tell me the order of everything.

Kendra: I've been writing on the internet for over ten years. It's been very different stuff. I wrote about food. I was a cooking instructor for a while. Then I had a blog, sort of, that was celebrities and desserts paired together because those are two things that I really love. I made things like cumber cookies which were cookies inspired by Benedict Cumberbatch. It was very niche. [laughs] It was a very specific thing. It was so much fun. I've been writing on the internet for a long time. The through line of my life is perfectionism. I've always had the genius part down. I don't mean that in back-patty, I'm so good at things way. I just mean really, really focusing on trying so hard at being good or the best at everything and then just being worn down. That was my own personal journey. I had kids. You learn a lot about yourself when you have kids. By the time the third kid rolled around, I was like, wait a minute, I do not have energy for the things that I used to think I did. How do we do this? Living my own life, I sort of have a systems brain and then I'm a writer, and all of these things came together into this conflation of The Lazy Genius. Then my best friend who's a writer, Emily P. Freeman, she wrote a book called The Next Right Thing, she's really, really good at giving names to things. It's like a superpower of hers. It's really weird. She was like, "You're kind of like a lazy genius." I went, [gasp]. The floor opened up. It was beautiful.

Zibby: Her forward was so nice, by the way. I was like, if I ever write a book, I need to grab my best friend to write my forward as well. She was so nice about you coming to her aid and packing up her house and just jumping in and doing what needed to be done. It says a lot. Sometimes you can tell more from what a friend says about you than what you could possibly say in your own introduction. I thought that was pretty genius.

Kendra: I cried a lot when I read it, for sure. It was the nicest thing ever. It was really sweet. It's a pretty special thing. Like you said, what a special thing that my best friend got to write my forward and that she's a writer, and so that got to be a thing. It was really special, for sure.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. Then when did you start your podcast?

Kendra: My podcast started in -- well, I started the blog in August of 2015 because my daughter was born in April of 2016. I always start a business when I have a kid. [laughs] Every blog is matched to one of my kids being born. It's kind of weird. Then the podcast was June or July after that. It's been -- what is that? What's math? Four years, I guess, the podcast has been. At first, it was not just me. It was me interviewing people. I realized that I was doing that, and this is not true of everyone, but I was doing that because I was afraid of being the only one, that no one would listen to me because who am I to have something to say? It was an interesting transition. I did ten episodes of interviews. Then I took a break and reevaluated. Then I was like, okay, I'm going to do this by myself because this matters. I feel like these are important things to talk about. That was about four years ago. We're on 170-some episodes. It's great. It's a lot of fun. I love the show.

Zibby: Wow. I learned from your show some things about you that you shared in your latest episode about how you had never had a Double Stuff Oreo. How is this possible? Where did you grow up? In America? Anybody growing up in America must have -- not to shame people who haven't had it. Good for them for not succumbing to the double-stuff. I was surprised.

Kendra: It was surprising to me too. I grew up really poor. Whenever we did get real name-brand treats, it wasn't very often and you don't splurge for the extras. I don't even think there were Double Stuff when I was growing up. You just get Oreos. I'm kind of a brand traditionalist. I don't really veer off, like Extra Toasty Cheez-Its. I'm just original. If the box says original, I'll go for that. Then I had this friend of mine who brought me a pack of Double Stuff literally within the last month. I was like, I've never had this. I guess it'll be fine. It was like, where have I been? I was so upset at all the people in my life who had let me live this long without eating Double Stuff. Now we're a Double Stuff family exclusively. I will never buy original Oreos again ever. I'm so sad. I'm thirty-eight and I've gone this long without having them. It's a problem.

Zibby: [laughs] Oh, my gosh, you're so funny. Let's talk about some of the advice in your book because you give such great advice. One of the themes that you come back to over and over again is starting small and how sometimes you just try to do one downward dog a day and that's okay. I feel like in every chapter, whatever it was related to, again, it was, start small. Start small with the laundry. Start small with everything, every project, every everything. Tell me about that overarching principle.

Kendra: We start so big all the time, just the longest lists, so many checklists, tracking every single thing. I think there is something, maybe for a lot of us, is it about control? Maybe if things feel out of control, we have to cloak the entire situation in some grand scheme to make us feel okay. Starting small just doesn't feel like it does anything. We're not moving. There's not momentum. It's not making a difference. If I do one down dog a day, does that even count? Even saying it out loud, it seems so stupid. But guess what? I have been doing at least one down dog a day. It's going on four years now. That's a practice. Some days, it still is that. Some days, it's ten minutes. Some days, it's thirty. It's usually closer to ten. Thirty is very rare, but I'm doing it. It's part of my day and a part of my rhythm. If I had not started small, that embarrassingly small choice, I would still be whining to myself and shaming myself for not being good at yoga or whatever it is, fill in the blank of whatever yoga is.

I think that small choices, as long as they're small enough that you're like, oh, no, I can do that, I can do whatever it is, I can put my shoes by the door, I can cook one meal at home a week instead of seven -- if you're like, I'm going to become a cook and I'm going to cook for my family, but you don't cook, if you're always doing takeout and you try seven days, are you kidding me? You will not make it a week. Start with one breakfast. Just start small because small choices, it's easier to keep making them. Then you keep making them. Then you have that momentum. Then you don't stop. Then they become habits. The seduction of the big machine will get us every time. It just gets us every time. That's why we're all so tired, because we're trying to maintain all these stupid big machines that we built rather than just doing one tiny thing. Just do the one tiny thing. Do one small step and see what happens. What is the worst that can happen? You won't move. Well, you're not moving now anyway and you're just feeling bad about it. So why not not feel bad about? See if you actually want to move in that direction in the first place. I just think starting small, it gets such a bad rap because, again, it's not very grand. It's not very sexy, but it really works.

Zibby: It's so true. What you said at the beginning too about whether or not it counts, I'm always thinking about that too. Does it even count that I'm taking a walk for ten minutes? Then I have to stop and be like, who is doing the counting if not me and my own body? Isn't it better to walk ten minutes than what I would be doing which is sitting at my desk for ten minutes? Why talk myself out of it? At least it's something. I feel like that's my down dog. Although, I have no habit of it, so you're one step ahead of me.

Kendra: Thinking about the walk, there's something really important about naming what matters about even that small choice. If you're thinking about, I'm going to walk around the block, because that's not a minute thing -- if you live in a place where there's blocks. Not everybody does. If you're going to walk around the block and ask yourself, why am I wanting to do this? I think sometimes if we are truly honest with ourselves, it comes down to something that doesn't actually matter. I know for me for the longest time -- this is not true of everyone. Nothing is true of everyone. For the longest time, my pushing myself to exercise was to make my body smaller. Now I'm like, I don't care. I'm actually like, I feel good. I feel good in my skin. I have the energy. It's fine. I'm actually doing myself more of a disservice by beating myself up for not being thinner than I am for being in a bigger body and being comfortable in it. Then I just walk or run or do my daily down dog or whatever it is when my body goes, hey, can we move? I would really like to move right now. Just paying attention. Naming that, naming what actually matters about the walk or the run or the whatever, and exercise is just one example, when we really name what matters about it, then we're able to actually have a deeper motivation to do it or a greater conviction to let it go.

Zibby: Love it. All right, I'm going to try to distill the essence of my walk whenever I get a chance.

Kendra: You can do it on a walk.

Zibby: I'll do it on a walk.

Kendra: You're like, I'm going to go on a walk and figure out why I'm here. [laughs]

Zibby: Yes. I go on walks to debate why I go on them. That's just enough for me. You also in your book talk a lot about your house rules, which I thought were so genius. I should really institute more than I have right now. One of the ones I found most interesting was that you vowed to start a new book within twenty-four hours of finishing an old one otherwise you lose momentum and don't start books. Let's talk about that.

Kendra: Oh, man. I always get this confused. Have you heard the whole supply and demand reader thing? Some people are supply-side readers and some people are demand-side readers. Have you ever heard this?

Zibby: I haven't. No, tell me.

Kendra: I wish I knew who came up with this. It's such a bummer. I get it mixed up. One kind of reader will read anything that's in front of them, cereal box, magazine, it doesn't matter. It's good to put good things in front of them to read because they're going to read anyway. Then there's another kind of reader that will easily choose other things if there is not something good to read, so you lose momentum a lot easier. I am that kind of reader. I love to read, but I also love to watch TV. I also love to play cards with my husband. There are different things that I can do in those pockets of time that are not reading. I have just found if I lose that momentum, it's really hard to get it back, and I genuinely love reading. That house rule has been something that's been really helpful for me. When I finish a book, I need to start another one within twenty-four hours or I probably won't really start. Then it's harder to get back on the horse. It's a really, really small thing.

That's what I love about the principle of house rules. It's just one small thing that sort of keeps -- like when you line up a bunch of dominoes and one tips over the rest, if the rest are sort of negative things, like, oh, no, everything's burning, everything's falling apart, even in something like your reading life, a house rule keeps that first domino from falling. That is it for me. Just read something within a day of finishing the last book. That means that if I know that I'm coming to the end of the book -- at this point, I have a ridiculous in-my-house library where I could always reach for something because I've been building up and paying attention to what kind of books I like and trying to buy those at book sales and all that. Before when I would get to the end of a book, I'm like, I'm almost to the end of this, I want to still enjoy the end, but I also want to think ahead. What am I going to read next so that I don't lose the momentum? It's very, very small. Again, it's a very small thing. But doggonit, it really helps me keep going.

Zibby: I'm not sure anyone's ever said doggonit on my podcast before.

Kendra: As it came out of my mouth, I was like, nope.

Zibby: I love that.

Kendra: I feel like this is a unique situation. [laughs]

Zibby: It called for a doggonit. You gave it the doggonit. I love it. It's amazing. Thank you for that. So what type of books do you like to read?

Kendra: I'm still in a place where I don't want to feel guilty for answering that question in the way that I'm going to answer it because I don't love to -- my default desire to read is not to learn something. I do read to learn things. I balance it out. Seriously, my sweet spot is space, magic, circuses, a poor teenage girl sticking it to the man. She hates the patriarchy, but she falls in love with somebody who's part of the patriarchy. I am such a sucker for that stuff. It just ropes me in even if the writing's not great. I will see a good, interesting story that's world-build-y, I will see it through even if the character's fine or the writing's okay. Seriously, if there's a circus, I'm done. I'm so happy. [laughs] Or creeped out fairy tales, like reinterpreted sort of dark fairytales, anything that's fantasy. I like science fiction. Again, the patriarchy part is always fun as well.

Zibby: Got a real niche there. I'll be on the lookout for you. I will. Any book pitch that comes in from now on, I am thinking, does this have the circus, patriarchy elements?

Kendra: I will take it.

Zibby: So watch out.

Kendra: I have mentioned it before. I have a few episodes about reading. I talk about it on my blog sometimes. The people who have been following me for a while, they know, this is the stuff Kendra likes. It is really fun when I have DMs and they're like, hey, I just read this book, and I see the word circus. [laughs] Everybody's looking for circuses. Send me all the circus books. I'll take every single one. Ironically, terrified of actually going to a circus. I don't know what that says, but here we are.

Zibby: Here we are. Sorry, I wish I had been following you before. I hadn’t heard of you before. Now I'm like, I'm one of the people in the world who somehow had not. I'm so glad I did now and that the people who I know now are going to know about you and all of that. Tell me a little more -- this is kind of a big pivot. In fourth grade, your parents got divorced. You went through this tough time in your life. You referenced your childhood a little bit. Just tell me a little more about what it was like for you growing up. Then what about it do you think made you find your way in the world and had it be similar to this?

Kendra: That's a good, layered question. My parents split up when I was -- they divorced for real in fourth grade. They had split up a couple times before then. My dad had just kind of left. He just left a couple times before. I have a little sister who is seven years younger than I am. For a lot of the childhood, I was an only child for those early years. Looking back, when you're a kid, you don't really know what you're looking at. You don't always know what you're experiencing, but you might feel it a little bit. The way that you process your life is more attuned to what's really happening. Looking back, part of me is like, how did I not know that my dad was abusive to my mom and to sister and to me, but all in very different ways? It was a really hard thing, obviously. That's a stupid thing to say. [laughs] It was a really hard thing. But it was.

I honestly think that one of the things that has been the most galvanizing for me, maybe, from that time is I carried the -- this is quite a pivot from the circus conversation. I sort of carried the weight and the responsibility of the abuse that the rest of my family was victim to as my responsibility. If I had seen it, I could've stopped it. It was my fault. I really think that that was a huge thing for the first two thirds of my life, really, in feeling like I had to be the best. I had to be so dependable. I had to be the greatest friend that anyone would ever want. I don't know that it was trying to make up for failing my family. I don't know that I would really put it into those words, but I do think that there's a connection there. There's always been a deep responsibility in me to make sure everything else is going okay at the expense of myself. That expense looks like I don't do things unless I can be the best at them. It was just a very thin way to live. It was just a very hollow -- there wasn't a lot of substance to it. I just feel like if anybody blew too hard at me, I would break. I was working really hard to look put together and feel together, but anything could've knocked everything off its very shaky foundation.

Therapy is a real big help. I'm a big advocate of therapy. When I started going to therapy and I'd realized that responsibility I was carrying, that I think the root of it was my sister and mom, but it also was like a tree, just lots of responsibility branches going in lots of different directions, when I realized that, it made so much sense about how I look at the world, which is to fix it. It was always to fix it. I got to make it better. Now that I've kind of removed that negative responsibility off the table, that poorly rooted responsibility that's not mine to hold, now that I've taken that off the table, it's left the essence of my desire to make things better, but for you, not for my own protection, not for my own survival. This feels strange to say. I do think I have a gift for helping people see differently, to help people see how their lives, by their definition and their standards, can be better, not like, copy my life, my life's great. That would be dumb. None of us need to live that way. That's so ridiculous. I think that once I worked through that responsibility that I carried, it just left that real essence of who I am. I really do want to make the world a better place. I joke that I am Pollyanna, but with a clipboard. I'm like, guys, sunshine, hold hands, let's do this. Then here's a list of how. [laughs] It's a very specific vibe.

I don't know that I would've ever been able to really access that without having processed where my desire to make things better came from. That's why I love therapy. It's also why I love suffering. What a fun thing to say. I love suffering. That's the lesson that we can learn from hard, difficult things. There's a principle in the book called live in your season. It's not that we are supposed to push through our season and ignore that things are hard. I know that things are really hard for you right now. I've been watching your Instagram. It's not that we're just like, ignore it. It's hard. Who cares? Power through. That's not helpful for anyone. Also, to sit there and just drown in the emotional weight of everything and not tell yourself the truth -- or have eyes of gratitude sometimes. I don't mean that in a placating way, like, the trees are beautiful, it's fine that my mother-in-law's sick. That's not what this is. It's being honest about how you're feeling and also giving yourself permission to feel what you need to feel but not let it be in charge and to tell yourself the truth. All that to say, I think that that is one of the gifts of difficult seasons. They always have something to teach us, always. My parent's divorce took a solid twenty years to teach me something that I could put words to, but it did. I'm so grateful.

Zibby: Wow, I'm really glad I asked you about that. Now in turn, you've given me some therapy for the day. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Wow, I'm going to have to just keep calling you every so often and get my daily dose, the transitive property from whatever your therapist taught you or something. Thank you. Kendra, you are doing so many things. You're a mom. You're doing your podcast, your blog. This book just came out. I hate to even say there could be more that you could do, but do you have a big vision of where you're headed or what you want to accomplish or how you're going to help everybody in the world? Tell me.

Kendra: Man, I hope that this gives some permission to people listening because I did, and I think it's not that anymore. My dream for the longest time was I wanted to own a bakery. That's really what it was. I wanted to have a local place. I love feeding people. Everybody likes cake for the most part. I make good cake. That was my dream. I'm not sure if it still is. I'm in this place where I'm in the dreamland, but everything just went from clear to fuzzy. It's like a reverse Wizard of Oz. It was so colorful. It was technicolor. Then I'm back in black and white. I'm like, wait, where are we? I don't know. I think that that's just the nature of life. Again, funny sentence to say. We think that something is going to be really valuable. It doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't when it was, but things change. We change. For a long time it was to have a bakery. I think now it's just broadened. I don't know how it's really going to manifest.

I just want a physical place to gather people. Part of me is like, why would anyone come? How can I support my family and my staff by trying to get people to come and stay at this property that I have, or this building? Do I teach classes? What do I even do? It does feel overwhelming to think about that sometimes because I don't know what it is and I don't like when I don't know what something is, which is when I pull out different principles in the book. One that's coming to mind right now about the dreams specifically, there's a principle called go in the right order. You can go in the right order in cleaning your bathroom. You can go in the right order with anything. Really, the right order comes down to three steps. The first one is to name what matters. Everything starts naming what matters. The second thing is to calm the crazy. Usually when we're like, what is happening? something feels crazy. We need to calm it down. Then the third thing is to trust yourself with whatever comes next. For this, my order is naming what matters, is that I am present in the work that I am doing now. Also, I don't push down the dream.

I can be present and let the dream hang out in the room and be like, hey dream, you're a lowercase d right now. I don't know what you look like, but it's cool. You can stay. If you decide to get brighter or stronger or sharper and you can tell me something that affects my work right now, that's fantastic. Otherwise, I'm just going to let you hang out in the room. It's cool. That's what matters. Then the second part of calming the crazy is when I feel the, I don't have a dream, starting to spin out, which I do often, the calm the crazy of that is to usually call someone who knows my heart, to call Emily, to call my best friend, to talk to my husband, to call my sister, and just be like, hey, I'm feeling really sad about not having the dream about the bakery. Can you tell me some truth? Can you tell some good things? That kind of settles down my brain. The third step, trust yourself with whatever comes next, usually it's just to keep going. There's not necessarily a third thing. It's just like, yeah, you can live in this time where you don't know what your five-year plan is or you don't know what your big dream is. This might be what it is. That's okay. It's just being okay with being where I am. That was a roundabout way to answer, I don't know. [laughs] I don't know what's next, but that's okay.

Zibby: Honestly, in my disheveled set of notes here, calm the crazy was in all caps, underlined. I need to post it on my computer. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Kendra: There's so much good advice out there, things like write every day, write even when no one's reading, all of that. I think that my start small advice, honestly -- a lot of advice feels sort of in the clouds sometimes or the everyday part often feels overwhelming. Honestly, I would say read a book on writing that you feel excited to read. My favorite one is The Memoir Project by Marion -- what's her name? Marion Smith? Marion Roach Smith? Marion Roach Smith, I think that's right. I should look it up. It is a really beautiful -- even if you don't write memoir, there was something in reading that book that just made me go, oh. And to stop doing writing exercises. She was like, no more writing exercises. No more things to just doggy paddle around the idea. It was the good mentality perspective to get you compelled to write every day, to let other people into your writing, to pitch magazines to get your foot in the door, and that kind of thing. It was this really lovely permission giver, that book was, even though I'm not a memoir writer. She just writes about writing in such a way that was -- and it's so skinny. It's this tiny, tiny, little book. You can finish it in like an hour or two, but so rich. That would be my advice, is to read that book. That feels like something people can do rather than write every day. They're like, but what? [laughs] That's part of the problem. What do I write? Maybe reading Marion Roach Smith is a good place to start.

Zibby: Starting small, I love it. Thank you so much. I am so happy that I met you today through Skype and through this podcast and got to be entertained by your personality.

Kendra: Same.

Zibby: I feel like part of our brains are very similar. Hearing you say all that stuff really helped me. Thank you. I'm really, really happy we talked.

Kendra: Me too. This has been a delight. Thanks, Zibby.

Zibby: No problem. Thank you. Have a great day.

Deshaun Watson, PASS IT ON

Zibby Owens: Deshaun Watson is American football quarterback for the Houston Texans of the NFL. He played college football at Clemson and led the team to a CFP championship game appearance in 2015 and a national championship win in 2016. He was selected by the Texans twelfth overall in the 2017 NFL Draft. He was named to his first Pro Bowl in 2018. Deshaun, at age twenty-four, has already written a book, which is humbling to someone like me who is forty-four who has not written a book like this. His book is called Pass It On: Work Hard, Serve Others...Repeat. I have to say, I had to -- well, maybe I shouldn't admit this. I had to ask my husband Kyle, I was like, hey, have you heard of Deshaun Watson? He was like, oh, my god! My husband and my son thought that this was pretty much the coolest thing I've done on this podcast. I did it. Now I'm following him on the Houston Texans and spotting him on replays on TV. I had the best time talking to him about his life and the interesting relationship with his mom and Habitat for Humanity and how another football player whose name I'm forgetting who's super, super famous actually helped him get his first home at Habitat for Humanity. Now he's giving back to his community. You should definitely listen to this episode. Then you should get any football lovers in your life to listen to it as well, and they will think you are very, very cool.

Hi, Deshaun. Thanks for doing this. I'm really excited to have you on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I can't believe you're not even twenty-five years old and you've already written this book. What is going on? I was like, did I read this right? 1995? I was already in college. I feel like an old lady, oh, my gosh.

Deshaun Watson: Not at all. It's incredible. It's truly a blessing. It's a new experience even for myself, like you said, being twenty-four years old and already have a book coming out. It's something I never even thought of. With the right support cast and the right team I have, they inspired me to be able to take this next step.

Zibby: Wow. Obviously, you're an NFL quarterback. You've accomplished a lot in the football world. What made you want to write this book? Why shame all these people out there who have been trying to write books for their whole lives and come out from the starting gate and do it already?

Deshaun: Just because I feel like it was the best way to touch more people around the world. Of course, if you're a sports fan, then you know about American football. You have the United States and my testimony, you heard about me before. The people that don't watch sports, the people that are in Europe -- I love to travel. I love to travel to Germany. I love London. I love Amsterdam, places like that. Of course, they hear about American football, but they don't know anything about us. For me to be able to express my testimony and my story, I felt like this book can go global. Those people over there can actually read something and find it interesting and pick a nugget.

Zibby: Totally. Has this been a really hard time that you can't travel, being locked down?

Deshaun: It's definitely hard. I'm so ready to get on a flight and just go and have some free time. Definitely been hard.

Zibby: I feel like I will never be upset by an airplane delay again the rest of my life. I will be so excited to get on a plane. I don't think I've ever been in one place so long in my life. Who does this? Who sits around? I don't know. It's amazing. Let's talk more about your book. I didn't know much about your backstory at all. One of the things I was most impressed about was your telling the story starting from a young age when you got the house through Habitat for Humanity and then how as you've grown into this successful football player, now you've even gone back and you've started your own foundation, the Deshaun Watson Foundation. Tell me about that whole full circle of your life and how Habitat for Humanity helped you and how now you're giving back again.

Deshaun: Habitat for Humanity really changed my foundation of me and my family's life growing up in the neighborhood, 815 Harrison Square. I know a lot people see me write 815. That's what it is. It's not my area code. It's the neighborhood that I [audio cuts outs] my first birthday, everything, until I was eleven or twelve years old. It was a different environment. It was the norm for me, but it was a different environment. It was Section 8 apartments. You had to get it how you live and just go from there. My mom did a good job of really managing that. Then Warrick Dunn was able to bless us with that Habitat for Humanity home and put us in a different environment where we never even really experienced or thought we were ever going to have a chance to live. It just opened my eyes to more life. For me to be able to have this platform and do the same thing I watched Warrick Dunn do to change my life and help me get to where I am today, I want to be able to do the same thing, partner up with Habitat, writing the book, and get to these communities to be able to do the same. If I can change one person's life out of all the people that I touch and meet, it's a dream come true for me.

Zibby: What do you think it was about your life? You're someone who decides to give back to the ladies in the cafeteria line because you just feel like it. You started a foundation. You've done all this stuff so early. This desire to give back is amazing. What do you think it was? Is it your mom? She's obviously been such an amazing mom. I was reading your stories. I'm like, how do I be as good a mom as her? What do you think it was about your upbringing or whatever that's made you want to give back in this way?

Deshaun: I think it's because so many people, and I'm not afraid to say it, just so many people helped me along the way and steered my in the right direction. Even if I was falling in the wrong direction, there was always somebody to there to throw me a nugget. I listened. My mom taught me that, to be able to listen and observe everyone that you meet because you can get something good out of whoever you meet. Also, you can get something bad. You want to be balanced in the middle where you see both sides and you take the energy where it takes you and what really stirs in you. I'm a big energy person. I need to be able to do that. I've been at the worst of the worst and at the lowest peak. When I see somebody else that is struggling or needs a little help, I feel like it's my blessing, it's my purpose to be able to help them out in some type of way because I've been there before. I know what they're going through. I want to be able to help them out of that situation.

Zibby: That's amazing. The ability to be so empathetic is so important. It will serve you well, I'm sure, on the field and off the field and all the rest. When you talked in the book about when you were drafted -- that's probably not the right -- when you were the draft pick or whatever -- that's probably not the right way to say that either. I have actually watched the draft with my husband who's a huge football fan, so I could imagine what you were doing. When you read the letter from your mom and she said, we were not supposed to be here, and you were crying and all that, tell me about that moment and her cancer and all the stuff you guys went through. What was it like to get up there? I know it's still early.

Deshaun: I'm literally getting chills now when you mention that because I'm reminiscing about that night and that moment. I couldn't hold it back. There's only been a couple times where I actually just flat-out cried. That was a moment where it was just so much joy, so much passion, so much hard work. Out of twenty-three years of my life and my mom taking care of me and the other kids, it was the moment. She knows too. She's the one that instilled in me, hey, we wasn't supposed to be here. The numbers say we we're not supposed to be here, where we come from. You did it, son. You made it. We made it. We made it together from all the bad with all the good. We stayed focused. We didn't get too comfortable. We kept working. Now we're at this moment and your dream has come true. I used to always tell her as a little boy, "Mom, I'm going to play in the NFL. I'm going to get you in a house." I was always that little boy playing. Now that it came true, it's amazing. When she dealt with her cancer, the first thing she told me, she's like, "Hey son, don't change anything. Get closer to the Lord. Continue to be the son that I want you to be. Continue to go out and be the kid playing football. Don't change your perspective on how you look at life and try to take the street life. You focus on school, football. You focus on the Lord. We're going to be fine." Ever since then, that's what I've been locked in on.

Zibby: Wow. Again, your mom, hats off. I'm telling you. Tell me about your love of chess. I thought that was so interesting, how you called yourself some sort of nerd. What did you say? Hold on, I have a quote. You said, "A football in one hand, a chess piece in the other. How athlete nerdy can you get?" You talked about how chess really helps with football and strategy and your leadership ability. Tell me a little more about the role of chess. I've got my five-year-old playing, so now hopefully he can be a quarterback. [laughs]

Deshaun: I'd never really thought about playing chess. I've always saw it. My QB coach, Quincy Avery, he's got, I don't know if you call it master or professional. He's out in Los Angeles. They came together. We sat down and he taught me how to play chess one day. It was supposed to be thirty minutes. Next thing you know, I looked at the time and it was already three hours. I'm like, whoa, this is actually fun. I'm getting so much out of it. We include it into our workouts. I feel like what I get out of chess is, being the quarterback, I'm always making decisions. I'm always reading my opponent. I'm sitting across the table, I'm reading his move. I'm trying to think what he's thinking. I'm trying to see what he sees at the same time. When I'm sitting back there at quarterback, I'm doing the same thing against the defense guys and making sure that my guys on the right read are making very, very smart decisions at the right time, being patient. Sometimes I got to attack, but sometimes I need to be patient. All that stuff ties in together, especially with the position that I play. It's been awesome.

Zibby: How do you not get distracted? How do you keep all of it in and all those plays and managing where everybody is on the field and then having all the people in the stands? Or maybe not anymore. Who knows what's happening? How do you maintain your focus?

Deshaun: I get in the zone. Once I step on the field, I don't even hear the noise, honestly, especially on the road games. Even home games, I just block out everything. I'm so locked in and focused on that moment and what needs to be done and what job need to be done. I just block it all out. I've always had that way. Sometimes it's hard for people. Sometimes it's not. For me, it's just always been that way.

Zibby: This is how I know I'm not a real athlete. I play tennis. There's a lawnmower five houses away and I'm like, I can't. I just can't. You have stadiums of people and you're like, it doesn't bother me. Speaking of what makes an athlete, you talk about managing losses and how you don't know any great athletes who haven't tried to understand what it was that caused the loss. Otherwise, you can't be a great athlete unless you're really evaluating that and learning from it. Tell me a little more about managing losses and that strategy.

Deshaun: I feel like you get so much more out of the loss than you do a win. You realize a lot more problems or detail issues that happen that caused the loss. If you win, you're, okay, I won. I did this wrong, but onto the next thing. It's not too much correction. When you lose and you take that loss, especially coming into an NFL locker room on that Monday, it's not a good feeling. It's not a good energy. You evaluate every single play that you do. You point out everything. What caused it? What did I miss out? Should I study a little bit harder this week? Should I correct the way I look at different things and different situations? Losses, I look at them as a positive thing. It's really a negative. I look at it as a positive thing because I get so much more out of it.

Zibby: I was reading different parts of your book out to my husband. I'm like, "You know, this guy watches videos all the time." He's like, "That's what you're supposed to do." I guess you're constantly analyzing all the plays and what you can do and how other people find it boring, but you're like, no, no, no. Your brain is just constantly processing.

Deshaun: Yeah, I'm always thinking about football and different situations and always watching film. I've learned too, being in the NFL for three years, that you don't just watch the previous game or you don't watch two weeks ago. You're actually watching the coach that's coaching that team from 1995. I'm like, yo, I was born in 1995. He's still doing the same things? Yeah, he did it versus this player and blah, blah, blah. It's incredible the consistency that a lot of coaches stay and the film work that they do.

Zibby: How are you not afraid? In your book you talk about all your injuries and tearing your ACL twice and all these things that happened to you. How do you get back on the field and not worry? How do you have that confidence in your body that it keeps coming back? How are you not afraid?

Deshaun: I think it just comes with the preparation and the training that I do to get back. I trust in that. I just let it loose on the field. If I have a little fear or have a little doubt or worry, I feel like that's going to cause my injury or that's going to cause me not to perform at my highest level. Before I even step on the field, I make sure that I'm good, locked in. Then once I'm on the field, I just let it loose.

Zibby: You talked in the book several times about how you lined up all your toys as a kid and how everything had to be straight and organized and how that's led to this pursuit. I'm just wondering for all the parents out there who have kids who like to line up their stuff, does this give us hope that maybe we have athletes of your caliber? What do you think?

Deshaun: Your athletes are somebody that's very thoughtful in their decision-making or in strategizing different moves. I used to take marbles, to pencils, I used to break pencils and line them up in different plays, to my toys, to batteries that my mom used to throw away. I'd go through the trash can. I'd get them out. [Indiscernible] would play against each other. That's age four, five, six, seven, eight, all the way until, really, high school. Then I threw all that stuff away once we moved to the Habitat home. My whole time growing up, childhood, I used to always draw up plays and control everyone else was around me when we played football or any type of sports activity.

Zibby: I was going to say, if you're still playing with batteries, maybe I could offer up some other toy suggestions at this point if you run out that one. [laughs] You have incorporated all these principles in your book. You've obviously done a ton of work. I know you worked with a ghostwriter. I read up about her. She's super impressive in her own right. How did you two pair up? What it was like working with a ghostwriter?

Deshaun: We met my rookie year in 2017. I was at the Galleria Mall. She was at a hotel next door. We ran into each other. She hit up my agent. She was like, "Hey, I'm next door. I just seen Deshaun." We met at the hotel lobby. She sat me down and introduced herself, wrote books. She was like, "Your testimony, your story, I feel like you should write a book." At first, I'm like, no, I'm just focused on football. I'm not trying to do all that. I don't even like reading. [laughter] We kind of put that toward the side. She kept contacting my agent, contacting my agent. She was very, very -- it wasn't annoying, but she was very, very passionate about, hey, we need to get this done. I have a feeling this is going to be good. A year and a half later, two years later, we come to this moment and she's still calling. I'm like, yo, let's give it a try. We sat down again and really listened to her and thought out the whole book project. It was just the best situation. I felt like, yeah, you've been right a long time ago. We should've did this in 2017. I would've probably had three books out now.

Zibby: No, but you had so many more stories to include. Imagine your book when you're forty. You'll have shelves like this, like a hundred books by then.

Deshaun: Exactly. I just felt like it was the perfect time to wait and build more stories and build more of my professional career. At this moment at age twenty-four, the first book comes out. Then there's many more stories to happen.

Zibby: How did you do it? Did you dictate to her and she recorded it? What was your process like with her?

Deshaun: It was a lot of phone calls, a lot of FaceTimes, a lot of me talking to my agent when I'm at practice, what's going on, her sending questions to me. I'm filling out questions through emails. It was a lot of that kind of contact. Especially during the season, it was very hard for her to just pop up here. She didn't want to bother me. She wanted me to lock in, which was awesome. We did a lot of emailing and FaceTimes and calls and things like that.

Zibby: Wow, amazing. The line between annoying and persistent and passionate, it's a tricky line. It seems to have paid off for her. That's funny. Now you're going into a new season. Who knows what is going on in the world? You're so thoughtful in the book about outlining your approach to basically every way in which you're living your life, which is just so astounding for anybody, but particularly somebody your age, not to keep talking about your age. How are you taking all this in and managing the uncertainty with the upcoming season? What do you expect? How are you getting yourself ready when there's so much out in the world that we don't know?

Deshaun: Honestly, I had to change the way I process things. Like you said, the word expect, I haven't expected anything. I'm going with the flow now. I had to change that look on, I have a deadline, this is when we're reporting. This is what's going on. We're going to play this team in preseason. I need to be ready to hype it up. Now I have no expectations because I don't know what's going on. I don't want to be disappointed. I don't want to get too high and it brings me too low. I just take it day by day, step by step, but always staying prepared for the next situation and being ready to adjust as fast as possible. If I have that mindset approaching this season, then I think I'll be fine.

Zibby: Are you still training? Do you do all that stuff? All of it?

Deshaun: Yeah, training in an hour or so. I usually train every day and condition and throw and watch a little tape and things like that. Then I hang out.

Zibby: It's exciting. If the NFL season really doesn't happen, I don't know what my husband's going to do.

Deshaun: I don't know what I'm going to do either.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, a lot more tape to watch, I guess. If you were going to write another book, if you were to give advice to people writing a book, what would you tell them having gone through this process already?

Deshaun: I'd just say open up. Open up your imagination. Open up the experiences that you've dealt with growing up. Just tell your story. That's the biggest thing. Everyone has a story. Everyone has experiences, good, bad, adversity. Be able to open up everything that you have and be able to just let it loose on paper. It might sound crazy. It might be out of order. If you have someone like I had in Lavaille, who was my ghostwriter, they're going to organize it and get it on track. That's what we did.

Zibby: I have to say, when I first started reading your book, I downloaded it onto my iPad. There was the opening scene of you basically getting baptized in Israel. I was like, I think I downloaded the wrong book. [laughs] This must be something else. What is going on?

Deshaun: That was definitely a special moment of my journey.

Zibby: Tell me about the significance of that in the overall context. Then I'll leave you alone in a minute.

Deshaun: It was amazing. My QB trainer, Quincy, he's like my big brother now, they contacted him. It was like, "We want you and Deshaun to come out and train and get the experience and the tour." We decided to do that, spent the week in Israel. They were like, "Hey, you want to get baptized in the river that Jesus got baptized in?" We were like, yeah, that’ll be the coolest moment ever. We did that. It was amazing. The energy, the passion, the people that made sure we were good each and every day, and the food, everything was just amazing. It was probably one of my favorite trips I've ever been on.

Zibby: Wow, I've never been there. Now I'm inspired. For your last question, I'll let you go train and do everything else that's more important, but what do you say to people who are growing up and all have dreams of doing what you're doing? I know you're still in the beginning of your career and everything, but what advice would you give to people so they don't give up, so they don't give up to the point to get to where you are right now? What's the advice? What's your inspiration?

Deshaun: I would say don't have any doubt. Whatever your goals and your dreams are, if it's being the quarterback of an NFL team or being in a movie or whatever you want to be in life, don't have any doubt behind it. Go full throttle at it. Don't be afraid to take losses and make mistakes. That's one thing that I wasn't afraid of going through my path and my journey. I was always very confident in myself in a humble way. Also, I knew that some losses and some mistakes was going to happen, but I'm going to use it into a positive momentum and keep pushing forward.

Zibby: That's great. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for passing it on. Thanks for all of your advice and advice for people like my son and myself and everybody. It's just really awesome life advice. I can't wait to now follow you and see as you get to be old and stodgy like me, I'm kidding, in my forties, but what advice you're going to have over the course of your career. I'm excited to watch it all unfold.

Deshaun: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you having me on here.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Deshaun: You too.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Heather Cabot, THE NEW CHARDONNAY

Zibby Owens: Heather Cabot is an author, award-winning journalist, keynote speaker, and former ABC News correspondent and anchor. She specializes in narrative nonfiction story highlighting inspiring tales of innovation, enterprise, grit, and resilience. Her new book is called The New Chardonnay: The Unlikely Story of How Marijuana Went Mainstream. By the way, she says she is the last person on the face on the earth who she ever would've thought would've written this book. Anyway, The New Chardonnay tells the unbelievable story of pot's astonishing rebranding, pulling back the curtain to show how a drug that was once the subject of "just say no" warnings managed to shed its unsavory image and land at the center of a booming and surprising upstanding industry. She's also the author of Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech.

Hi, Heather. How are you?

Heather Cabot: Hi. It's so good to see you.

Zibby: It's so good to see you too. Thanks for doing this with me, inviting me to celebrate the launch with you. I'm so excited to be a part of it.

Heather: Thank you. This is really an honor for me because I love your podcast. I'm a huge fan. This is very exciting for me.

Zibby: I put on some of my special The New Chardonnay CBD lip balm. I have to say, I've been a no, no, no CBD anything for me. This one, I'm all in. I'm all in on the lip balm.

Heather: It's got some good moisturizer in there.

Zibby: Heather, I'm just going to ask you a bunch of questions so you can let everybody know more about your book, if that’s okay. What inspired you to write The New Chardonnay? What made you want to research the whole entrepreneurial life behind the cannabis industry?

Heather: There are a couple of inspirations. I know there are a lot of people watching tonight who've known me since I was a kid. I grew up in the "just say no" generation. I grew up in the eighties. I was never part or really had anything to do with the marijuana subculture at all. Growing up during that time, it just really wasn't part of my life. Now I'm a suburban mom of teens. I'm looking around and I'm seeing celebrities who are talking about marijuana as if it's just normal and Oprah Magazine featuring a THC-infused tea party with women wearing white gloves and hats. Martha Stewart is on TV with Snoop Dog in this pot-humor cooking show. I'm looking around and I was really surprised by it. The other aha moment is that my first book, Geek Girl Rising, a part of that book was focused on women investing in women-led tech startups, and so I was involved in that world. Right around the time that that book came out in 2017 I noticed that some of the female angel investors and venture capitalists that I had met during the course of reporting that book, that some of those women were investing in cannabis startups. I thought, my goodness, these are people with Wall Street credentials. They seem so straitlaced. I thought, why would they invest in anything that's federally illegal?

I couldn't believe it, so I started making phone calls. I started to learn about how this industry was just exploding. That was the beginning of it. Really, what sealed it for me was somebody who I'd interviewed who was an investor had said to me, "Look, I can't explain this to you in just a phone call. If you really want to understand what's happening, you have to go to the Marijuana Business Convention in Las Vegas this fall." You can imagine what my family thought when I said I'm going to go to the Marijuana Business Convention. They were like, what are you doing? Honestly, going there and seeing that it was just like the Consumer Electronics Trade Show, it was like any other trade show that I had ever covered as a journalist. I just couldn't believe that it was at the scale that it was and how professional it was. The people that I met were so serious about it. I just realized that there was a whole story there that many people didn't really know about. That just made me feel like, I've got to pursue this.

Zibby: It's so true. This is really an amazing business book. This is up there with James Stewart's DisneyWar. It's true. It's an examination of an industry and what happens and what makes an entrepreneur and how unpredictable characters become stars. This could've been about any industry. It could've been about the internet if this was twenty years ago. Instead, you found this new industry which of course has so much more associated with it than just a product. It was fantastic reporting, probably all your years as a reporter.

Heather: Some of it was having the time. I came out of local news. I had several years in network news. It was rare to actually have the time to work on a story in depth. To be able to chip away at something over years, that is an incredible luxury. I'm so happy that you say that you could really tell the depth there because not many people get to do that. It really is a privilege.

Zibby: And the way you were able to write it in such a narrative way. Beth Stavola is laying on her table. Now here is she at the pool in Arizona thinking, what did I get myself into? We're drawn into the narrative of it. You almost forget that somebody had to go report it. It's like when you see a war photograph and you're like, that's just a boy on the street. Then you're like, well, somebody must have been on that street to capture that reaction. I feel like that's the immediacy of this one. Tell me more about how you got all your research done aside from the one convention. How many trips did you take? How many interviews did you do? What was the process like?

Heather: Hundred of interviews. Part of that is because, first of all, just getting my arms around this industry, the learning curve was, I can't even tell you how steep it was. This is a topic, not only is it, it's complicated, it's controversial, but it touches on everything from business to politics, to science, to medicine, social justice. It's so rich. There's so many different facets of it that are really nuanced. In the beginning, it was really just working the phones and talking with people and figuring out what were the various threads of the story I might want to follow. It was a lot of talking to people and then traveling to meet them in person. I cannot thank my family enough, my husband. The book is dedicated to my husband because he did so much heavy lifting when I was traveling. Since adult use is not legal in New York, a lot of the folks that I needed to follow were out in California and Colorado and Canada and all these other places. I would have to go away for -- I usually tried to keep it to two or three days. If I was going to the West Coast, I'd try to just cram in a ton of interviews. My family on the West Coast, my two sisters, and my parents when I was in Arizona, everybody let me crash with them. That was always nice because I was able to fit in some family time too.

It was really a team effort because to cover this kind of a story where it's happening in so many different parts of the country -- it's such a fragmented industry. Every state is different. To really understand that, you have to go these places and meet those people and talk to people there on the ground. It was a total adventure. It was a lot of fun. I'm so thankful that I had the chance, again, the time to just learn and talk to people so I could absorb it all. I'm still learning. By the way, I'll just say, the industry changes so quickly. That was the other challenge with this story. It was like covering a news story. Certain characters in the book, I thought something was going to go a certain way for them. I thought I was going to go with one character to do something. Then that deal fell through. So many things were happening in real time that when I finally sat down to write the book, I really had to calm myself down because I kept worrying that I was missing something. It's a book, and you do have to stop writing at some point. I think that was the hardest thing.

Zibby: What was the actual writing process like after you did all the interviews?

Heather: Oh, my gosh. I was thinking about it today because I knew you were going to ask that. I think I started in May.

Zibby: I don't want to be predictable. This is depressing. I'm sorry. [laughs]

Heather: I want to say it probably took me, in total, about nine months to fully write it. What happened was it was due in September. I wasn't done yet. We had moved. I kept getting extensions. Then I turned it in in January. The whole process altogether was over three years. It took me a year to do enough reporting to actually put together a book proposal that I thought was solid enough that could really explain that there was a story here. There had been other books written about the cannabis industry. I wanted to tell this new story with these great characters. I really wanted to do a narrative. I needed time to find those people and find those stories.

Zibby: I have to say, I went and googled all the people because I was like, what do they look like? You created really great [indiscernible]. I was like, Chef Jeff, what does he have on the menu? He has [indiscernible]. I was like, ooh, my next party. I don't know. If we ever have [indiscernible]. Did you go to Kate Hudson's birthday party when you reported that, or did you just hear about that?

Heather: No. Actually, what was funny was I hadn’t actually met Jeff yet. The way I met Jeff is kind of the way -- this is going to give you a window into how I did the reporting. I met Jeff because I was reporting on Snoop and Ted's venture capital firm, Casa Verde Capital. For those of you when you read the book, you're going to find out about how Snoop and his business partner Ted Chung decided that they were going to create this venture capital firm, not to invest in growing or even selling marijuana. They actually were investing in the software and all of it, the tech behind the industry. They had incredible foresight. I had been interviewing the partners that actually managed those investments. I was telling one of them, this really nice guy named Yoni Meyer, I was saying to him, "I'm really interested in these cannabis restaurants." It was at the time that West Hollywood, I think they had just awarded the very first licenses for these weed cafes, essentially. They were going to be, really, the first ones in the country where you could actually dine in public and have some type of, whether it was a vape or whatever, paired with your food. I just thought that was really fascinating. I said, "Do you know anybody who's in this space? Do you know anyone?" He said, "Actually, I just invested in one of these startup restaurants. I want to introduce you to the partners."

We met the partners. I started talking a little bit more. Then they started telling me about Jeff. Then I found out he had a cookbook. I got his cookbook. There's so many recipes in the cookbook that were Jewish recipes for Jewish holidays. I was like, that is so funny. I just really wanted to meet him. The Kate Hudson thing actually happened, I think her party was probably two weeks before this time that I actually flew out to California to go to a private party that he was catering. I wanted to be with him in the kitchen because I wanted to understand all of his methods. Again, I'm a complete voyeur. I don't know anything about any of this. I wanted to learn from him and see his methods. That had just happened. Actually, it was top secret. No one really knew about it. Then I guess her people gave the story to E! It was out there, so he could talk about it. No, I didn't go to the party. She posted all over Instagram about it and it was written about, so I was able to glean some of the details. Then obviously, I interviewed Jeff too. It was fun to see him right after that happened too. He's cooked for a lot of people that he can't say who they are. He's been cooking for celebrities for a while.

Zibby: Wow. I love his pot-zaball, all these corny, funny pot-Jewish combos. Who knew?

Heather: I loved his mom. His mom Sylvia was so lovely and gave me so many great stories about him as a kid. That was my favorite part, was learning the backstory of all these people. What I really was trying to do was I wanted to write a book that would appeal to anyone just as a really great story. The fact that cannabis is the backdrop is just kind of the way it is. I was trying to find people that, their story, anybody could relate to. In a very human, universal way, they were characters, whether it's as an entrepreneur, whether it's as a parent or a mom who is going back to work after leaving her profession for a few years. They all had different reasons for why they wanted to get into the business. That really resonated with me. I tried to really bring that out. Interviewing Jeff's mom, for example, spending time with Beth's mom and her family, that was such a great experience. I'm so thankful that they allowed me into their world because it helped a lot.

Zibby: Ted Chung became one of the main characters in your book. You track him throughout his teenage years to being an Asian American. The way you describe him is sort of too laid back to fit into the stereotypes there and how he eventually went to this very WASP-y school and had to fit in with the blue bloods that he wasn't familiar with and then becomes this complete maven in this industry and ends up hanging out with Snoop Dog. How can you not tell a story about a trajectory like that in someone's life?

Heather: The thing about Ted that I always found so fascinating about him is he really is kind of a soft-spoken, stoic guy. Then once you get him talking, he really reveals a lot about himself. I just loved hearing about his family, his dad, what sparked this entrepreneurial zeal in him. What I also was struck by was how that experience of going to college and really feeling like he was on the outside, how that completely shaped the rest of his life and the marketing agency that he founded, Cashmere, which is all about marketing to multicultural markets. The reason why he did that is because he could see that himself. He felt marginalized. It was just so smart. I feel like he brought all of that to cannabis as well. He's one of those people that people will say he's a visionary. To talk with him about the insights that he had about where cannabis was going to go and then to see that he was actually really right on, that was really fascinating for me to see that and to be able to tell that story. In a lot of ways, this book is about marketing. It's about rebranding. It is a business book. I'm not necessarily saying that cannabis is the new chardonnay. I'm saying it might be. These are some of the people that are trying to make it so.

Zibby: So maybe it should be called The New Chardonnay, question mark? [laughs]

Heather: Could be.

Zibby: Maybe for the paperback. Tell me about what it was like also talking to couples like Mel and Cindy McDonald who had to deal with really traumatic stuff like their son Ben who was in a horrible car accident and having all these seizures and wouldn't eat and the power of marijuana to change his health and to save his life, essentially. Did that sway you in one way or another in your own personal views of the use of marijuana or the legalization or any of it? How did it make you feel?

Heather: For me, this was never an advocacy book. I always approached it as a voyeur, as a journalist. My feeling going in and as I finished it was that I wanted to shed some light on this industry and how it had matured so quickly so that people could make their own decisions about it. I thought it was really important to pull the curtain back on the amount of money that's involved it in and the injustice of it in terms of the communities of color that had been cut out of this industry and being able to profit from it and also, when you talk about Mel McDonald, the strange bedfellows, the people who you would never expect to be not only involved in it, but evangelizing. I stumbled into Mel's story because of Beth. I don't want to give too much away about the book, but their stories converge in Arizona in the early days of Arizona's medical market. I really felt when I had the chance to actually get to know Mel and Cindy that their story in so many ways crystalizes why we've seen cannabis go mainstream.

It's just this idea that for so many people, it really is medicine. I never knew anybody who used it as medicine. It was nothing I ever was exposed to. To meet them, these devout Mormons -- he's a former federal prosecutor, as you'll find out in the book, a Reagan-appointed federal prosecutor who ends up having this aha moment at a time that he never expected it. I just felt along the way as I was meeting people and reporting the book, there was so many people like Mel, people you would never expect would get behind this. When I was working on the book, actually right before I finished the proposal, that was when former speaker of the house John Boehner who was an incredibly vocal foe of marijuana -- he had once said he was unalterably opposed to marijuana legalization. He joined the board of one of the largest multi-state operators in the US. That was head turning. I couldn't believe it. There were all these things that were happening like that. I was so happy that I had a chance to meet Mel and Cindy because I think they put a face on this idea of change and people changing attitudes and why they're changing attitudes.

Zibby: What about this whole other group of people who aren't using it that way, but the chardonnay moms who you talk about who are happy that they don't have to spend the time even drinking it. It doesn't go to their waistline. This the new-new thing. They're all sort of tittering about it. What about them? You think this is going to be adopted by moms' night out?

Heather: I think we're already seeing that, certainly in the marketing to moms. If you go to California, you go to any place where it's legal for adult use, you'll see these products that are labeled as microdose. It's this idea of it's like having a glass of wine. It's not going to leave you hungover. That's how it's marketed. I think that there's an appetite for that among a certain group of people. They don't want a headache. They don't want to gain weight. I think these businesses are very savvy focusing on that. What I also write about in the book is that alcohol consumption has gone down in recent years. There was an opportunity there for these companies. As this spreads across the country, as you see more states approving recreational use, I think you're going to see more product innovation around that. Then the other part of it is the growth of CBD. CBD, it comes from the cannabis plant, but because of the farm bill, when it comes from hemp which is a very low-THC variety of cannabis, that's legal. That opened a whole door for all of these companies that had been doing more THC products to consider doing CBD lines.

That's why you're seeing it now in Sephora and Bed Bath & Beyond and your local drugstore. You can buy it anywhere now. It's only really been since the end of 2018. There's not a tremendous amount of regulation around it, which I think is problematic. I think you're going to see guidelines coming out of Washington. My point is that because CBD is not intoxicating, it is more appealing to people. There are potential therapeutic benefits that people talk about. It certainly needs more research. Women are using it in large numbers right now for insomnia, stress, anxiety. There was just a big report that came out of a company called BDSA in Denver that tracks sales. Women are driving this. Women are going and they're shopping for CBD for all of these kinds of things that, I don't know about you, but all my friends, we're all dealing with sleeplessness and stress and anxiety. You can kind of understand why there's an appetite for it, but also why these companies are seizing on that. They know there's an opportunity there. I think we're just in the beginning.

Zibby: We're like sitting ducks, we stressed-out moms here who are at the tail end of the months of this COVID stuff. They're like, see our market opportunity. Wow, that's amazing. Now that you've finished writing and now that this book is coming out into the world, is this a case-closed situation for you? Is it the kind of thing where you have Google Alerts and you're just fascinated and want to find out everything more that's coming? Did this whet your appetite or shut it down?

Heather: I'm kind of ready for something new. It was great. I've enjoyed it. I probably will continue to speak and write about it through the election and obviously through -- it is a fascinating topic. I really care a lot about the social justice piece. I will follow that closely. I will probably continue to do some freelance writing about that piece of it, the gender equality, gender equity, and racial and social equity pieces of all of this. Those issues are really complicated. I think that as you see more states looking at legalization, that’s something to pay attention to. It's something I care about. It's definitely from that perspective. Am I going to be a cannabis beat reporter? No. It was an intellectual challenge. It was a really meaty, really amazing topic that I knew nothing about that I had three years to learn about. I met some amazing people and incredible entrepreneurs who risked it all. The book, it's about that. It's about, what drives somebody to go for it when they could lose everything? I'm fascinated by those stories. I think whatever I do next is going to be around entrepreneurship again. I don't think it's necessarily going to be in cannabis. I'm sorry.

Zibby: That’s okay.

Heather: I'm announcing it now. [laughs]

Zibby: Do you have an industry you have your mind set on?

Heather: I have so many. Right now, I'm just focused on this because I want to get through the election too. I was saying earlier about how the story's always changing, even to do any of these interviews, I have to constantly prepare and stay on top of what's happening. For the political scene and the business aspect, it really is changing every day. I still read my diet of all the newsletters. My inbox is full of these marijuana business updates for now. That's because I really feel like I need to stay on top of it. I need to be able to speak intelligently about it. I don't know. It's funny. If you would’ve asked me, would I ever write about this? my family and friends couldn't believe it when I told them that this is what I was going to write about it. Now they’ve seen the book and they know why I found it so interesting. I don't know yet. I figure I'll have time. We're going to be in lockdown for a few months, a lot of time to think about it.

Zibby: I know you have teen twins. I have teen twins, newly teen. What's the takeaway for them? As a parent, now that you've learned so much more about marijuana and CBD and all of it -- I know it was a byproduct of the business side or the passion for the people and the players in the industry. Along the way, I know you've learned so much included a lot in it. What advice as a mom are you going to give your kids knowing what you know?

Heather: What I tell them is what I tell them about alcohol, which is that this is not for you. We've had some really great conversations about substance use in general, substance abuse. Many people, there's sort of a folklore that you can't become a habitual user of marijuana. That is not true. People who have a predisposition to substance abuse or they have it in their families, they can be at risk. Also, it's a new industry. The illicit market is still thriving. Even if you live in a place where it is legal, you need to talk to your kids about the dangers of getting it. You don't know what's in it. That's for adults too, frankly. It really is. We had some really great conversations about that. We talked about brain development and why substance use before your brain is finished developing, particularly THC and alcohol, not a good idea, just not a good idea. Even more than that, my most important conversations with them related to this book were really around the racial injustices of the drug war and really being able to, especially this summer as our country is going through this incredible reckoning on race, to have a conversation with them about my work and the relationship to systemic racism and what I found out about how drug enforcement in this country has led to really devastating consequences for communities of color.

That was really meaningful for me to be able to have that conversation with them as well. I said to people, my kids were actually really embarrassed that I was working on this book originally. They were like, "Don't tell anyone what you're working on." They really were not happy about it initially. Once we started having some conversations about what I was finding out and the people that I met along the way whose lives were touched by the war on drugs and had relatives that were incarcerated or who had experienced stop and frisk and that kind of stuff, it was just really meaningful to be able to give them practical examples of how we need to stand up for injustice. We need to be aware of what's going on outside our little bubble. That, to me, was probably one of the most important conversations that I had with them beyond the "just say no" conversation, which thank goodness we've been having for a number of years anyway. It's not just one conversation. It's also modeling good behavior. It's an ongoing conversation. You hope that that dialogue continues. I hope it does.

Zibby: It's probably the best thing you could've done. If your mom is into something, then it can't be off limits. When I grew up, my mom smoked. Then when my friends started smoking, I was like, that's not cool. My mom does that. Maybe this is the most strategic way to handle it, really.

Heather: It's like I knew too much about it. They're so young right now anyway. They're only going to be freshman in high school. The only other thing I'll say for the parents listening, one thing that I didn't understand and if there's one thing as a parent that you will take away from my book other than just the fun stories, I didn't know anything about concentrates. I didn't know anything about cannabis oil. I didn't know anything about these other products. That is something as a parent you definitely want to familiarize yourself with. I go into more depth in the book about it. Basically, there are derivatives of the cannabis plant that can be made into oils. That's the stuff that's used in vape cartridges. It can be turned into kind of a wax that kids can -- there's a thing called dabbing where, not kids, but people inhale it. That's used for edibles as well. It can be highly, highly potent. There was a report that came out of Colorado last week, which for the most part since legalization has not seen an uptick in overall teens using cannabis, but this report last week actually found an increase in dabbing and also in vaping, even after the vaping crisis. What that says to me as a parent, you just need to familiarize yourself with what's going on and the different ways, the different forms that this can be used. Those forms can be incredibly potent. Certainly, smoking it as well, but these are highly concentrated forms of THC. I just think as a parent, if you don't know about that, it is something to research and be aware of because those forms can also be much more subtle. You don't necessarily know that your child has that. I think that's really important, just to be aware that the products evolve. They're all evolving quickly.

Zibby: By the way, Jeff, on his website, teaches you how to make your own cannabis oil. If you ever want to start experimenting, you could start there. [laughs]

Heather: If you're an adult.

Zibby: If you're an adult.

Heather: And you live in a state where it's allowed.

Zibby: I am not advocating. It's just putting the information out there. I'm not putting out a point of view. Heather, thank you. Thank you to The Strand. Congratulations on your book, The New Chardonnay, amazing. Thank you for including me in the launch. Thank you for everybody who listened and asked questions and everything else. Please go buy the book for anybody who hasn’t yet. There's a little link at the bottom right there, purchase The New Chardonnay.

Heather: Zibby, thank you so much. This is a dream come true. I've been listening to you for months. To be able to be interviewed by you, it was the icing on the cake. Thank you so, so much for your time and for all you to do support authors and to encourage people to read. It's so important. Thank you. Thank you to The Strand also for this opportunity. It made the launch week for me, honestly.

Zibby: Yay! Thank you.

Heather: Thanks, everybody, for joining us too.

Zibby: Thank you. Bye.

Robert Weintraub, THE DIVINE MISS MARBLE

Zibby Owens: Robert Weintraub is the author of The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame, and Mystery. He has written about sports for Slate, Play, ESPN.com, The Guardian, Deadspin, and many more. He's the author of four books including The Divine Miss Marble and also the New York Times best seller No Better Friend. He currently lives in Decatur, Georgia, but grew up in the large shadow cast by Yankee Stadium in Rye, New York.

Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm so excited to discuss Miss Marble with you.

Robert Weintraub: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Zibby: The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame, and Mystery is a deep, deep dive into Alice Marble's life. As I was reading it, I was thinking, what was it about her that kept you so interested? You must have spent so much time on this book. What was about her that captivated you so much? What made you write this book?

Robert: A lot of time and a lot of miles back when you could travel freely without worrying about things. I was so impressed by Alice's stick-to-it-ivness, the fact that she got hit with so many obstacles in her life constantly. She always rose back up on her feet and came back stronger. She was a great player, but came from nothing. She had to start playing on hardscrabble cement courts in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and really came from nothing to become this great champion. Then just on the verge of her breakthrough, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was in a sanitarium partially and was out of the sport for two full years and came back from that to win what we would call today the US Open, then it was called the US Nationals, and became the biggest star in the sport. From then on, it was one body blow after another, whether it was other battles with health problems that were debilitating but she kept going through them and a lot of personal issues in her private life and the war which ended her career prematurely, World War II, which really kept her from being an all-time great who everybody would know about today. As I came across and discovered yet one more pitfall after another that she managed to get back from, I just became so impressed with her. I started to idolize her. It made the travel and the long days in the archives going through these dusty old manuscripts and materials, it was easy because I was fascinated by every step she took from then on.

Zibby: You mention at several points in the book how this is what she recorded, but you couldn't verify it anywhere. There was no backup, so you're like, this is what she said. We'll have to take her at her word. It sounded like you had a lot of skepticism about some of it. How did you end up feeling about her retelling of her story? Do you think it was all accurate? What really happened?

Robert: Where the facts met the legend, she liked to print the legend, so they say. You have to put it in context. She talked a lot this espionage mission that she went on during World War II at the behest of the army intelligence to reconnect with a former lover who was a Swiss banker who was working with the Nazis to launder their money. Her assignment was to go and find him in Switzerland, reconnect, and find any evidence she could of this nefarious duty and then come back to America with it. She says she found it and was shot for her troubles by a Russian double agent while being chased through the mountains of the Swiss Alps. It's an incredible story. There's just enough truth or unprovable falsehood in it to make it at least sort of believe. However, as you say, I couldn't really verify much of it. You have to understand, she was a woman who was at these incredible heights of fame during the Depression when everybody in the country was on their knees, really. By the sixties, she was a forgotten figure. She had very little money because she didn't get to earn any through her tennis greatness because it was all amateur in those days. She was a forgotten figure living on the margins in Palm Desert, California. I think there was a lot, this is who I was and if I have to embellish my tale a little bit to get people to remember me a little bit more, then it's okay because I've earned it. I think she did earn it. She always had this maxim, give the fans what they want, whether she was on the tennis court or whether she was singing in a night club, which she did; or appearing on the radio, which she did all the time when she was at the height of her fame; or designing fashions. She also did quite a bit of her own and then sported them on the court and in public. She did many different things in her life. She always did it to please her public. I think this tale of her World War II derring-do may have gone along the same line and she just exaggerated for effect, as we say.

Zibby: It's so interesting because when you talk to memoir writers, there's this whole debate about what exactly is truth? Is it your truth? What do you believe? Is it your perception? Then someone like you comes in who tries to make sense of all of the interpretation and try to squeeze out all the facts. It's a tricky job. It's sort of murky when you have to rely on people's memory or their depictions of themselves.

Robert: You are not kidding. It is. You always have to take the fifty thousand-foot view. It's not always easy because you want to believe the memoir writer. You want to go on what she says was her journey at all times. Memory is tricky, of course. You never want to believe the person closest to the action because their memories are the least reliable. I found that for the most part she was accurate for what she remembered and talked about. She actually wrote two memoirs. Another one came out right at the height of her fame. In both of them, there's a lot of truth in there. There's just a little bit extra involved that was done either to sell more books or to give her what she thought was the true, as you mentioned, this true life that she thought about in her head as opposed to the facts that you come across in the newspapers of the time. I tried to walk that tightrope very carefully and not not give her the benefit of the doubt but at the same time not crap all over what she saw in her own life. [laughs]

Zibby: One of the things that you said that drew you to her and what drew me to this story and to many sports stories, honestly, is the ability to persevere and what makes some people be able to overcome things in their life and flourish and use their physical gifts and translate it all with a perfect combination of mental toughness and physical agility to become a huge sports star, whereas so many others, most people, can't achieve that. Then when I was reading about Alice and even the rape scene at the beginning of the book, even if you just had that -- then she had so many people die and drop dead next to her and one thing after another and then coming back from a two-year break. Nowadays on the tennis tour, we hear about somebody gets surgery or Djokovic is out for a little bit or something. Back then, they didn't have all of that machinery to rehabilitate people. Anyway, that was my long way of saying, first of all, what do you think makes some people able to overcome this type of adversity? Second, why do you think we're all just so drawn to stories like this?

Robert: I wish I knew what made people be able to do it. I would do it myself. It's really incredible, as you say. I didn't even mention her sexual assault, absolutely. She lost her father when she was very young. It's an incredible portrait of somebody who just refused to lose, to use a cliché. I hate to do that. Michael Jordan's been in the news lately just because of this documentary about him recently. He's somebody else who just manifested everything around him to use to a single-minded purpose, which was win games. I think Alice was maybe not quite that single-minded, but had the same sort of mindset, which was, this is what I want to do. Not only am I not going to let things happen to me that will derail me from that, I'm going to use them as fuel. That's really rare. It's incredibly admirable. It's just something in the brain chemistry, I suppose, that makes them, these rare few, for better or for worse and mostly for worse, something to overcome, as something to push them day in and day out. When she was laid up for two years, she got out of bed and began a really rigorous physical training program that we would take for granted today, obviously, but at the time was just unheard of. People were like, why are you skipping rope every day and doing all this physical training? She said, I'm going to get back to the top. I'm going to do what it takes to be there. That's what I want to do in life. You have to really admire somebody who sets aside everything else like that and uses that kind of motivation to get to where they want to go. It's so rare and so hard to do that. As I say, that's what really in the end drew me to her and to her story. For all the things that she did that we might question in terms of memoir writing, it was overwhelmed by the fact that my admiration for her was so deep because of her amazing comeback abilities.

Zibby: This book felt very cinematic to me. It felt like I was reading the movie that I was going to eventually watch. Do you have an actress in mind who would play Alice if this were to become a movie?

Robert: Wow, that's a great question. I suppose the first person just who leaps to mind, maybe, is Charlize Theron because she has that combination of great physical presence as well as the beauty and grace and all the other attributes that Alice had but is very believable as somebody you could see running her opponent into the ground on the tennis court and then changing her clothes and singing in a night club or going out on the town with one of her many admirers. There's probably no shortage of actresses who could make it happen, but Charlize is the first one that leaps to mind. Obviously, that would be great if it ever came to pass, but I'm not holding my breath.

Zibby: Still, fun to think about it.

Robert: Yes, very much so.

Zibby: You write about all kinds of sports, not just tennis. Tell me about your love of sports yourself. Do you love to play sports? How did you end up becoming an avid sportswriter?

Robert: I think I followed the traditional path, which was I played avidly until I realized I was not very good at them, and certainly not good at them to continue playing beyond high school, at which point I switched over to covering them. I worked in sports television for a long time and then when I had a family transitioned into writing because it was a lot less travel and long hours. I've just always been really fascinated by the history of sports and the day in, day out competition of sports and the outsized personalities that come with it and the things that we are talking about. People who wind up achieving greatness have these incredible qualities that so few of us have. I think most of us, certainly myself included, are drawn to that. By writing about them, I get to sort of walk in their shoes a little bit. I get to feel at least a little bit how it must have felt for Alice to be at her lowest of lows and overcome all that to get to this incredible precipice. I think that's what draws a lot of us to sports in general, is the fact that you get to see these athletes who are performing at this incredibly high level and knowing how they got there, each of them with their individual stories intact. It's really something that's fascinating. It's a drama that never ends. When we get sports back someday, hopefully, that will certainly continue to be the case. I'll keep covering it until the day I die. I can't get enough of, really.

Zibby: My husband is such a sports fan. This quarantine, I swear, I think that's been the hardest part for him. Whenever anyone askes, he's like, "I miss sports so much."

Robert: Him and me both. It becomes part of your everyday life. It really does. We can talk in the abstract about how seeing these great athletes perform is so much of it, but it's also just a daily thing that's part of your life. It becomes as much a part of your day as brushing your teeth or walking the dog, turning on the ballgame and seeing how your team did. When you take that away out of nowhere, really, that's very tough to overcome for all of us. In a way, we're all Alice Marble right now and we have to overcome this body blow. We'll get there. We'll get back to the heights. I'm sure of it.

Zibby: It's true. I feel like it's a double whammy with sports because you have the community of shared rooting for someone. To be a fan, you're a part of something. I feel like it's hard these days to feel a part of anything, particularly now. Then to have that taken away, what does it mean if you're a Denver Broncos fan when nobody's playing? I'll just say we've had a lot of Tennis Channel reruns on the TVs around here. I'm ready for some new matches.

Robert: Very understandable. Exactly, these live dramas missing from the -- the matches may be great, but when you know who won already, it kind of takes away from a lot of the pleasure, unfortunately. I'm with you. I'm dying for the return of live sports. I'm a big New York Yankees fan and Cincinnati Bengals fan. It's part of your identity after a long time. Especially, as you say, you become a community with your fellow fans. To have that ripped away from you, you start to question who you are a little bit. The sooner sports can get back and make us all whole again, that’ll be a good day.

Zibby: It's true. How long did it take, by the way, to do all this research and write this book? It must have been a while.

Robert: Two-year range from beginning to end including the preproduction, as they say, trying to figure out if it was really a book. Then once it was and I had a way to tell it, there were a lot of ways to go with it, but I had to kind of insert myself into the story a little bit more than I usually would be inclined to do because of the mystery involved and because so much of it is trying to figure out what exactly Alice did and did not do. I turned it into a little bit of a mystery story where I'm the dogged detective on the case just figuring out what in Alice's life and what happened was real and was not real. That took a little bit longer than usual, but about a two-year range, which is pretty standard for me for turning a book around. Some people take a lot longer. Other people who write a lot faster than I do and I'm envious of can crank them out in less time. For me, it's about two-year range.

Zibby: Do you know what your next two years are allocated to at this point?

Robert: Great question. Nothing set definitely set in stone, so I probably shouldn't talk about it, but more interesting tales of a fascinating figure. Let's put it that way, not necessarily involved in tennis, but another rich human being. Let's say that.

Zibby: Great. Awesome. Do you play tennis, by the way?

Robert: Yeah, absolutely. I love to play. I don't play as much as I used to with the family and the wonky knees. I definitely enjoy playing. I live in Atlanta where there's a huge doubles league scene, so I've played for many years in the doubles leagues around Atlanta. It's great. It's the kind of thing I hope to get back to when we can all shake hands over the net again. That's for sure.

Zibby: Exactly. I love tennis. I feel like it's like you're having a conversation when you're not even talking. It's so fun. That's what I love about it.

Robert: Every stroke is another witticism or declaratory statement. That's right.

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

Robert: Boy, that's an open question. I'll tell you, yeah. I would say certainly if you think something is worthy of a story to be told at book length, do it. Like I say, I started in television. I was a big reader. I always thought I could write a book, but at no point did I ever say to myself, let's just go ahead and do it, until the time came and somebody encouraged me and said, "You can do it." I said, "Yeah, you're probably right. I can." There's no alternative to just sitting down and doing it and banging it out. I would certainly say if you're writing a book-length treatise there, don't think about the big picture. That gets too overwhelming. Just think about that day's writing. What's this small little chunk that you can bite off and finish in the near future? Keep your goals small and easily attainable. That way after a lot of those goals are achieved, you find yourself with a big goal achieved as well, a big book all ready to be published. It takes some doing, but it's not beyond any of you out there. I'd say that for sure.

Zibby: I think that's good life advice in general. Anything could seem overwhelming unless you break it down into small pieces.

Robert: Exactly. That's the best way to go, as you say, hour by hour. If you look at the big picture, boy, you'll just bury your head under your covers and stay in bed forever.

Zibby: Yes, particularly these days, particularly at the thought of perhaps not even having school in the fall. Oh, my gosh. How old are your kids?

Robert: I have a twelve-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy. They are enjoying the idea of not going back to school very much, but I'm dreading it. [laughs] Like most people, you get more of a parent/teacher role this fall. It's a cross we all have to bear, it looks like.

Zibby: Yeah. I have thirteen-year-old boy-girl twins. Then I have a five and seven-year-old. My little kids are fine, but my twins, my thirteen-year-old daughter misses her friends so much that she's willing to sit in school all day if she gets to hang out with them.

Robert: Exactly. That's the other thing, the social component. This is beyond the dumbing down of our kids. It's horrible for these kids not to be able to see their friends every single day. I feel so bad for them. Can't get them sick either, so it's a rock and a hard place.

Zibby: Right, I know. I keep thinking this is probably the ideal time in my own personal life for this to have happened where I'm happy not really being that social and getting all my socializing done over the internet by talking to friends and family and just hanging out with my kids and being very settled. At so many other parts of my life, this would've been a total disaster when things were up in the air or when I was trying to meet somebody. Anyway, whatever, I'm going on a tangent here.

Robert: I hear you. Listen, as a writer, I'm a natural shut-in anyway, so this is right up my alley. In that sense, social distancing isn't a problem, but all the other aspects of it are just terrible. The sooner it's over, the better, absolutely.

Zibby: Yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks so much for chatting with me today. Thanks for the entertainment of your book. I will channel Miss Marble as I'm playing tennis later today and the resilience that she had.

Robert: Good for you, very good. Wear shorts. That was her big thing. She chucked aside the skirts and put on the shorts and changed the game forever. I would definitely advise you to not play the game in calf-length skirts if you can avoid it.

Zibby: You know, I actually wouldn't mind playing tennis in a calf-length. I love long skirts. I'm wearing a tennis skirt now. I hate shorts. I feel like I should've been born in a different era. I would've been happy with --

Robert: -- You were a pre-Alice Marble type.

Zibby: Exactly. Maybe one of these days we'll meet in person and could play some tennis and all the rest.

Robert: No doubt. I'd love to have a conversation over the net with you at any time.

Zibby: Sounds great. Thanks so much.

Robert: Thank you very much. I appreciate the time.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Robert: Take care. Bye.

Amy Schmidt, CANNONBALL!