Rebecca Sacks, CITY OF A THOUSAND GATES

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Rebecca. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss City of a Thousand Gates. Congratulations on this novel.

Rebecca Sacks: Thank you.

Zibby: This is a literary achievement. This is a big deal. It's interwoven stories, people's lives intersecting, great prose, different characters. It's an epic journey. Congratulations.

Rebecca: Thank you so much. I actually just got the bound copy.

Zibby: Ooh, let's see.

Rebecca: Here. I don't know if you can see.

Zibby: So good.

Rebecca: I know. I'm someone who's very attached to the book as an object, so just holding it and feeling the texture of the cover. I noticed I've been dressing to match it ever since I got it. [laughs]

Zibby: These are great colors. In fact, this would be a great blanket, perhaps, maybe curtains. I think this could be some sort of textile you could involve in your home.

Rebecca: I really loved the design. Harper did such a great job, my publisher, in really listening not just to me as the author, but reading the book carefully. Everything surrounding the book has reflected that so much. This is my first book, my first novel. I had no idea what to expect. The cover, to me, it has that sense of multiple narratives, doors opening and closing, lives intersecting. I was so taken with it. I'm very grateful to them, actually, for hearing me and reflecting the work so beautifully.

Zibby: Tell me about writing this book and when you started it. I know you've had multiple -- Bread Loaf, you've got all these fellowships and retreats. You've been at this for a while. Everybody obviously keeps identifying your talent. When did this start? How did it change and take shape over the years?

Rebecca: It almost feels like we grew up together or something, this novel and I. I'm thirty-four now. I think in a way, I started writing it even before I knew I was writing fiction. I was about twenty-six. I left New York City. I'd been working in magazines. I really lucked out after college. Right after college, I got a job at Vanity Fair. It was the best education you could ask for.

Zibby: I interned at Vanity Fair.

Rebecca: Stop!

Zibby: I did, yes.

Rebecca: Oh, my gosh.

Zibby: You probably were not even born. No, I'm kidding. I'm forty-four. I interned my freshman year of college. When was that? 1995, that summer.

Rebecca: May I ask, were you working directly with anyone? I have such [indiscernible/crosstalk] feelings for that time.

Zibby: I rotated departments. I started in special events. At that time, I had no idea who anybody was. I had to answer the phone.

Rebecca: Sara Marks?

Zibby: Yes, Sara Marks.

Rebecca: So cool, oh, my god.

Zibby: Aimee Bell would walk in, and [indiscernible/crosstalk]. I actually emailed with Aimee Bell recently. I was like, I was an intern. You were there. Did not remember me, but that's fine. Then I moved to the feature department for a little bit with Jane Sarkin.

Rebecca: Oh, my gosh, I love Jane. Wonderful.

Zibby: I remember so well. I'm sure she doesn't remember me either. I was there for like a week in her department.

Rebecca: I was the same. [laughs]

Zibby: I'll never forget because she was on the phone as I was filing slides. I don't know what I was doing for her. She was trying to schedule her c-section based around the Hollywood issue. She must have a child now that was born in 1995.

Rebecca: Wow, what a power move. That's amazing. I really admired everyone I worked with there. I was probably really foolish to leave, but I did. Not long after, I worked very briefly at a travel magazine. It was very cool, a lot fun, Departures. Then I moved to Israel. I thought I was doing a master's in Jewish studies. I was doing a master's. I thought that's why I went. I think really deeper down, I wanted to get lost. I wanted to get lost. I didn't know any Hebrew. I grew up in a very secular home, generally speaking, sort of reform. My mother wasn't born Jewish and didn't convert. We were just raised in this secular, nebulous zone. I didn't have strong feelings one way or the other on Israel. I didn't speak any Hebrew except I knew the brachot for the Hanukkah candles.

Zibby: Good to know. If you're going to know any of them, that's a good one.

Rebecca: I think I wanted to go to a place where I had to articulate everything anew to myself. I had to learn new languages. I spent years studying Hebrew and Arabic. There's all these boundaries, all these divisions. I had to articulate them to myself and learn how to hear them and see them. At that time, I began writing essays for a couple different outlets. The ones I'm most proud of, for sure, were published in The Paris Review's website, The Daily. In a way, I think I was sort of starting the novel at that point in the sense of I was coming to know and to explain to myself, the landscape I was in. A lot of times when you're drafting a story or a novel, the very, very first draft is you telling the story to yourself. Later drafts become ways in which you are telling the story to an audience. You are making it legible to an audience. I think the first draft is a story you tell yourself. In the first drafts, it was a story I was telling myself about a place that had at least two different names for everything, at least, maybe one in Hebrew, one in Arabic, one the UN uses. That's three, at least, different. Eventually, I lost interest in myself as the center of these stories. I felt that I was so limited in the kinds of stories I could tell if I was the narrator and if my body was at the center. I did what I love most. I got lost in other characters, in other lives. That was the story of the novel and I think why it took a good -- gosh, I don't know; I should have these numbers handy -- let's say, six years to write, maybe, and really a process of learning to hear, learning to see, and then learning to disappear into other lives and to let these characters, and as you know, there are quite a few of them in this novel, but let them tell the story of their lives in this place.

Zibby: Wow, that's amazing. Wait, tell me then after you spent all that time how you ended up selling the book, the publication.

Rebecca: I'm sure many people think that they have the best agent, but I have the best agent.

Zibby: Who's your agent, then?

Rebecca: Her name's Joy Harris. She is wonderful. She read this novel. I made a great decision in about 2016. I was living in Israel. I was living in Tel Aviv. I had begun what I thought maybe could be a novel, but I didn't even really know what shape it would have. I almost just had some scenes that felt important to me, some of them based on things people had told me or incidents friends, siblings had told me about that I fictionalized. By fictionalized, I mean maybe they had a narrow miss. What could’ve happened didn't happen, and so I fictionalized it by pushing it farther. What if the worst thing did happen? What would the consequences have been? That kind of thing. It was all really just very early drafting. I came to understand if I really wanted to do this, the best thing I could do for myself would be to go to an MFA where I had full funding where I could write for two, or if I was really lucky and got into a three-year MFA, for three years with full funding, maybe get a little teaching experience. This would be the way that I would have concentrated time to work on the novel as opposed to doing it in the morning between five AM and seven thirty before I went to work. I would definitely still have been writing it, which is fine. That's a very good way to write a book. I wanted more time to devote to it. I wanted to get lost, again I suppose, in the work.

I applied to and got into the MFA at UC Irvine in Orange County just south of where I am now. There's a lot of debate in the writerly world. Do you go to an MFA or not? What does that mean for how it shapes your writing? Who gets in? What are the problematics of these institutions? All very worthwhile discussions. For me personally, it was the best thing I could've done for my work, mostly because I had all of this beautiful time, the ultimate commodity for a writer. One of my teachers there, Michelle Latiolais, she had told her agent about my work, which was very lucky for me because then when I eventually did send Joy my novel, she was at least expecting to see it. I didn't have to wait a few weeks or even months until she got to it in her stack. That was nice. It was nice to arrive at her door, as it were, with a letter of introduction. She became my agent because she loved the book. She was one of the first people I'd spoken to who read it from start to end. She was actually the first person outside of my MFA program. It was just amazing to be read exactly how I hoped I'd be read, someone who was reading the book with her heart. I could feel it. I didn't think about it long.

She's a pro. She was much more ambitious for the book than I was. I didn't think we would go to a big press. That just seemed outsized. I guess I was limited by my own imagination or ambition. She had her own idea. We were going to go to Harper. When people ask me now, maybe friends who are going through the process themselves of looking for an agent, I always say you want someone who is just in love with your book. That's the most important thing, more important than maybe -- there's a lot of other considerations. They're all important too, about the access that person has. Maybe I don't know how long they plan to be working or how long they have been working. Of course, these are all considerations. More than anything, you want someone who is in love with your book and who can share that with anyone that they bring that work to. For anyone who's thinking about agents or shopping, I would say that's what makes your agent the best agent, loving your work very much.

Zibby: That's true. You have to have some sort of meeting of the souls over a book.

Rebecca: What a beautiful way to put it. Totally. Yes. I love that and will use it and quote you.

Zibby: Thank you. Great. [laughs]

Rebecca: I love that.

Zibby: That's awesome. You are a citizen of Israel and the US and Canada, everywhere. You speak languages. You're all over the planet. Tell me about your identity yourself. You're a world traveler. Where do you find yourself at home the most?

Rebecca: I was talking to a friend about this recently, or what feels like recently, but time has been, for all of us, so slippery. A few years ago, I was talking to a friend about this. I was asking him, I was saying, "It's so hard to know where I belong, in a sense." I was in New York City. I moved to Canada, first to New Jersey and then to Canada, all with my family. Then I went to college in the States. Then I moved to Israel. Then I briefly left Israel. I thought I would go to divinity school, not to become a member of the clergy, but to be an academic in religion. It was so funny. I kept dropping out of my translation classes -- this was at Chicago -- to take fiction classes with the novelist Vu Tran. I was like, I think I need to rethink what I'm doing. That was an important few months for me when I was living in Chicago. It was also when I formerly converted to Judaism even though I was raised in a Jewish home. I think I wanted to feel like I was fully embracing not just my Jewish identity, but my place in a Jewish community. Of course, being formerly a Jew is very important for things like being counted in a minyan. It depends, of course, on your denomination whether a woman would be counted. I'm a conservative Jew, so that's all kosher. [laughter] My converting rabbi, a wonderful man named Rabbi David Minkus, a really generous, thoughtful person who never dangled his own power over me in this situation in which you are vulnerable as someone converting, he said a couple wonderful things to me. One was, "You were always a Jew. I'm just making it official," which I thought was sweet.

Another was, it was very interesting, he's like, "You'll always feel like an outsider because we all do," which I also thought was interesting, that even when you make official steps to be embraced by your community, that everyone always, everywhere, feels a little like an outsider. So do I at times. I've wondered if I feel most at home when I have foot in and one foot out of something where I'm a little on the periphery, a little standing back watching the moment happen rather than inside the moment, for example. I've wondered if that's where I feel at home. The friend I was speaking to about this, I was saying it was kind of funny. I was speaking specifically about my status as a Jewish person in Israel where according to, for example, the state of Israel, I am Jewish -- I was granted Israeli citizenship through the law of return which dictates who is eligible for Israeli citizenship based on Jewishness -- but not Jewish according to the Rabanut, the rabbinical authority of the state, which is orthodox. I'm sort of inside and outside there, which is an odd place to be as a person, but a perfect place to be as a writer, I have to admit. Having at once full access and yet being a little excluded is sort of the ideal position to write a novel from. I was speaking to this friend of mine. His name's Benjamin Balint. He wrote a superb book on the fate of Kafka's letters and papers after Kafka died. He said, "Maybe you're at home in the text." I don't know if it's true, but I love the way it sounded.

Zibby: It does sound good. That sounds great.

Rebecca: I think my identity is, in some ways, a little fractured, perhaps. Yet I think because I grew up very much between things, between countries, religions, at times even languages a little, that I feel very purposeful in the choices I've made about the parts of my identity I've chosen to embrace and the communities I've chosen to make myself part of it. None of it feels particularly incidental. It all feels like I made choices about where I wish to belong.

Zibby: That's interesting. I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. When I was getting remarried, my husband converted to Judaism because my kids are Jewish and blah, blah, blah. I am familiar with that whole process and what that's like and what you have to learn and go through and the commitment of it. We have not gone to Israel. I have actually never been to Israel in my entire life, which is really embarrassing to say. This is on my wish list.

Rebecca: It's hard. There's so much going on. There's so many strong feelings that people have. I completely understand almost the instinct to put it off a little, like a difficult conversation you keep putting off.

Zibby: I'm just going to blame my parents. They should've taken me.

Rebecca: They should've.

Zibby: We went to Italy instead, I guess. I don't know. [laughs]

Rebecca: Wrong side of the Mediterranean.

Zibby: Although, it was a great trip.

Rebecca: I'm sure. When you go and you want recommendations, please don't hesitant to ask.

Zibby: Thank you. Yes, you'll be my go-to on that. Are you at work on another project, or are you just like, oh, my gosh, I finally finished this and I'm putting it off to the side and taking a deep breath for a while?

Rebecca: No, I need to be at work, always. Maybe that's where I'm at home, working, writing. I love that question. I think I'll think about that for the rest of the day. Where am I at home? I'm working on something new. It's interesting. I'm writing in first person which I haven't done in years and years now. It's a very unused muscle. In fact, sometimes I'm finding I have to write in third person as the novel -- I should say to anyone who hasn’t read it yet, the novel is written in a very close, close third where I'm switching to all these points of view. Writing in first person, all these sentences with I, I haven't done it in a while.

Zibby: Did I even ask you to describe what the book was about to listeners?

Rebecca: Oh, with pleasure. What a fun challenge.

Zibby: I usually start with that. Maybe I missed that question. For the people listening, tell them what the book is actually about now that we've talked about your entire life and everything else.

Rebecca: I've enjoyed the attention. [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, good. I had a pleasant time myself.

Rebecca: The book, which I'm holding again because I'm so excited to finally have it, it is set in the present-day West Bank and Jerusalem, so in a place where Israel and Palestine are always in contact in these places. It is a narrative that is, I suppose, not unlike myself, quite fractured in that it follows, my last count, it was about twenty-nine characters that we're following in the aftermath of two tragedies, two ethically motivated murders, one of a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, Yael, who lives on an Israeli settlement, and in retaliation, a fourteen-year-old Palestinian boy who has no relation to Yael's murder who is brutally beaten in a mall parking lot. These two horrible events reverberate and echo in the lives of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis and Americans in Israel and a German journalist trying to make her name on some newsworthy tragedy. Trying to show the echoes and the iterations of these events in the lives of different communities and families. I'm especially concerned with family life and the way that the political enters family life and shapes it, and within marriages and between parents and children and lovers. Every family, I think, is its own little country in a way.

Zibby: I love that. That's a quote I will use and credit you.

Rebecca: Good. We can trade.

Zibby: That's great. Perfect. Do you have, just as a last question, any advice for aspiring authors? I know that you've already given a lot, particularly with regard to finding agents and not giving up and all this other stuff. What's your advice?

Rebecca: A few things. One is slow down in your telling. In actually writing, so often, we have a place we want the narrative to get to. I do this as well. I don't know how I'm going to get there, but I know I want these two people to have an encounter in this bus or at this checkpoint. I know that's where I want it to go. I can catch myself rushing in the writing to get there. Life happens in the moments on the way, of course, in the sensual, sensory details. Letting yourself go word by word, sentence by sentence to get where you're going. Let the story surprise you. Let yourself find some pleasure in that. It's not always a rush. I would say that would be advice also to myself as I work on something new. It's such an amazing pleasure and honor to hold your own book, but take your time getting there. It'll be worth it.

Zibby: Lovely. Awesome. It was so nice chatting with you today.

Rebecca: It was such a pleasure.

Zibby: I feel like we were just off on some retreat or something. You've taken me out of the sirens and everything here in the city. I feel like you have this sense of Zen or calm to you in the way you speak. I feel much more relaxed now.

Rebecca: Oh, thank you. I can say for my part, I've loved this feeling of being sort of ensconced in your beautiful wooden library. There's such a warmth coming from you and from this room. Thank you. I really enjoyed my visit.

Zibby: If you were in town, I would've had you over here. I used to do all these in person.

Rebecca: I would love that. When that's possible again, I'll come by and I'll bring a copy of the book.

Zibby: Perfect. I will have one already, but I will take another one. [laughter] Have a great day.

Rebecca: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Zibby: Nice to meet you. Bye.

Rebecca: Bye.

Cherie Jones, HOW THE ONE-ARMED SISTER SWEEPS HER HOUSE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Cherie, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Cherie Jones: Thank you, Zibby. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Cherie, tell listeners, first of all, what your book is about and what inspired you to write it. It's so good. It feels like a book from almost another era, like it should be in the canon that you read in school under literature. It just feels like a classic book in a way. Talk about How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House.

Cherie: Thanks so much, Zibby. How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is set on a beach in an island a lot like Barbados in the mid-1980s. The protagonist, her name is Lala. She's a hair braider. She essentially braids hair for tourists on the beach. It's about this one summer when her life just changes in unimaginable ways. Without giving out too much of the plot, what actually happens, she has a baby. There's a murder on the beach. It's all about how those two things are connected.

Zibby: By the way, this seems like every potential parent's nightmare situation of having a child. Not to be graphic, but it starts with unexplained bleeding and then waiting in the ER forever and not getting the attention that she needs. Her husband is not there for her at all. She has to make her way home. It's the most unsupported woman going through pregnancy alone that I've ever read about.

Cherie: That is reality for a lot of women. That was the story that came to be about Lala. I hope that people can understand and appreciate that and just go with her on her journey because I think she does grow a lot through the novel. In terms of what inspired me to write it, I tend to be inspired by voices without -- I don't know how that sounds. [laughter] Essentially, I will hear a character's voice in my head. They will start telling me parts of the story. The process of writing is really about getting that down on paper. The initial process is just trying to understand what I'm hearing and somehow translating that into text that I can work with. Then the editing and the story development is really about getting to the story behind the story. In this case, I was on a bus home. I was living in the UK at the time. I was very tired after a long day at work. I just started to hear the voice of this character in my head. There were a lot of things that we had in common. As the bus ride continued, it just became clear to me that this was going to be the project that I would work on next.

Zibby: Wait, Cherie, I thought you actually sat next to this woman on the bus. I thought that she was bothering you. You're saying that was actually just an analogy. I literally thought you were on the bus on your way home and you sat next to a woman who insisted on telling you her story.

Cherie: [laughs] No, this is a woman who sat in my head on that bus ride.

Zibby: Wow. The whole time, I'm thinking, I wonder if she'll ever read this story. Did their paths ever cross again?

Cherie: That happens to me a lot in terms of my short stories and other projects. It tends to come to me as a voice. I just hear parts of the story. Then it goes from there. I was also inspired a lot by things that would've happened during the 1980s. I consider that the decade when I came into myself as I know me. There are lots of things that happened then that I was really inspired by that I wanted to include in the novel. Even the hair braiders on the beach in Barbados, that's something that was very much a feature of beach life in the 1980s. You hardly see those braiders anymore here. That was one of the things that inspired me as well.

Zibby: I have to say, I grew up going to Jamaica all the time in the eighties. That was also part of that life and culture, so I knew exactly what you were talking about. Of course, in the book, I would be in the house that you were supposed to hate the family. [laughter] I would be somebody that Lala would not want to be dealing with at all. Anyway, that was me. I was like the kid in that house. Not really. Nothing terrible happened to me there. Yes, the hair braiding culture and all the amazing things that beach life had to offer back then, it was so perfectly encapsulated.

Cherie: That was very cool. I was really happy to get the opportunity to go back into that time and space.

Zibby: What's the last voice you heard? Are you hearing any voices right now?

Cherie: [laughs] I'm not hearing any voices right now. It started off as a short story. There was the initial process of writing it out. It didn't start to become a novel until about 2013, 2014, somewhere around there. Strangely enough, about three years in, I just stopped hearing Lala anymore. It was as if she basically told me everything that she needed to say. There on in, it really was about crafting the story, trying to get to all the other things that she didn't say. I like to say sometimes that the characters who talk a lot don't always tell the whole truth. Part of my job then is trying to find out what the rest of it is and then just crafting that into what the real story is. That was what that was like.

Zibby: It's almost like you're the therapist of your characters. It's someone coming into therapy and they tell you their story, but you have to figure out what they're not saying to get the whole truth.

Cherie: Yes, exactly. It really is a lot like that.

Zibby: You're the therapist for the invisible characters. It's pretty cool. Who knew?

Cherie: I'm glad you think it's cool. Other people might have other words for it. It's great to know that you understand where I'm coming from.

Zibby: I think it's great. Look, writing fiction is an art. It comes from a place of the mind that nobody can totally explain. The more people I talk to about it to try to unlock the mystery of, how do you write fiction? there's no clear answer. It just comes. It can be in a dream. It can come in a voice. It just somehow gets into your mind and then gets on the paper. It's like magic. I don't think any explanation is weird.

Cherie: That is really what the process is like for me.

Zibby: There was a lot of painful emotions and situations that rose up in this book. Parts of it were tough. It was emotional to read it. Did you have to pull at all from your own life? Did you have any of this trauma in your own experience at all, or was this all from the voice in the bus?

Cherie: One of the things I would've mentioned earlier is that Lala and I did have some things in common. Being a survivor of domestic violence is one of them. I was able to draw certainly on -- some of the information about Lala's psychological state and process was perhaps a little easier for me to write because I would've identified with some of it. The actual experiences of violence were not mine. That aside, there were a lot of similarities, and not just me, but just from observing and listening to other women that I know. Yes, that did inform the narrative. Yes, it did.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. How did you get out of that situation?

Cherie: The thing about that situation, that's one of the things that -- people can try as hard as they can to help you, but something internal has to happen first. For a lot of women, it has to do with the welfare of the children who are involved. For many women, they won't leave or seek to change the circumstance even if they're suffering quite a bit, but they will try to change it because of a child. That's consistent with some of the trauma and the psychological impact that violence has. I think it's something internal that happens. It's helped by external circumstances. It's helped by a desire to do better or give better to your children. Certainly for me, that was a very big part of it. What's also important for people to realize is that it's often not a situation of just getting up and one day and deciding, okay, this is the day to leave or this is going to be end of it, and that's the end of it. It's often a cycle of running and returning, running and returning. That makes it even harder for people who are [indiscernible] to the situation to understand. I'd say it's something internal. In my case, for short, it was a desire to do better for my children and eventually myself. That's what it was.

Zibby: It's also another layer of difficulty. Even if the children are the driving force to getting to a better place, you still share children with the person who's committing the offense. You can never really extricate yourself a hundred percent when you share the most precious thing in both of your lives.

Cherie: Yes, that's a very difficult situation.

Zibby: Have you ever written about your experience in your own voice, not one of the character's voices? No? You're not interested?

Cherie: That's one of the things that made it especially hard to write this book. Mentally, there had to be that separation between whatever I might have gone through or experienced and the story I was trying to tell. Even in terms of being able to try to explore and understand the lives of some of the other characters like Adan, for example, or even Tone, that required a very big step outside of myself. Having had those experiences made it easier to write in one sense and then made it quite a bit harder in another.

Zibby: Wow. I'm glad you could use your experience to inform this particular voice and share. Being able to extricate is, as you mentioned, close to impossible for so many people. Seeing this up close in fiction might be the way to get through to others. That might be the way the story sinks in, which is so important.

Cherie: I really do hope so. Somebody asked me recently, who's your ideal reader? Who's reading the book? Who would you want to read the book? I thought about it for a bit because I couldn't say that I had written this story with a specific person in mind, or a type of person. When I was asked the question, I thought, maybe there's somebody who's going through experiences like Lala's. I really hope that at least one person like that will pick it up and read it, but it's for everybody.

Zibby: That's amazing. I'm divorced. I'm remarried now. I have four kids with my previous husband. I wrote an essay, not a book, recently. In terms of having someone in mind, there was this woman I met shortly after I got divorced. I was on a beach vacation with my new boyfriend who became my husband. We were all in love and happy back then. Not that we're not, but you know, now we're married. It was right in the beginning. She was there with her kids and all bedraggled. Her loser husband was not paying attention to her. She just looked at me and she goes, "Ugh. What I wouldn't give to have that." I was like, "No, no, I just got this. I was you a year ago," not exactly of course. Whenever I write about that or try at all, I think about that one woman and wonder. I'm sure she didn't even remember that moment. Of course, there's no ideal reader for anything. You just hope that somebody's life improves. I sort of feel like all you can do from the pain in the past is help somebody in the present.

Cherie: Exactly. I really do hope that somebody reads it and gets that type of value from it.

Zibby: Are you working on any new projects? Do you have more books coming out soon?

Cherie: I certainly hope so. Currently, I'm working on a collection of flash fiction. It's so interesting. While I was doing my master's in the UK, I had a pretty bad case of writer's block. A classmate suggested that I try flash fiction just as a way to get out of it and to get back into the projects that I was assigned to do. I started writing flash and just fell in love with it. My flash stories tend to be a lot more, I'd say surreal. I'm working on a collection right now. I'm also working on a new novel that's set on a cocoa plantation in Trinidad, mid-nineteenth century. That is requiring a lot of research. I'm really enjoying it. That's in very early stages.

Zibby: I am going to sound really stupid now, but what is flash fiction?

Cherie: [laughs] Flash fiction, people call it by different names. No, you don't sound stupid at all. When my friend first suggested it, I thought, what's that? What are you talking about? I think a lot of people maybe don't know a lot about it. It's also called micro-fiction. It's essentially a much smaller word space in which to write a full story. A full story has to be developed in a small space. It tends to be three hundred words or less for one full story. Other people have different word limits. It's a very short, short story. I think that's the best way to describe it.

Zibby: Wow, that's tough, a whole story in three hundred words. Actually, that's kind of what Instagram is all about. It's like a little post. Turns out I'm a flash story author. I didn't even know it.

Cherie: Who knew?

Zibby: Who knew? This is great. I'm going to put it in my bio. [laughs]

Cherie: That's really what it is. It's really challenging to try to develop and execute a full story within a smaller space. A lot of it is about distillation. It's about not only what you say, but what's not said and so on. I really enjoy it.

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

Cherie: My advice to aspiring authors would be, one, read a lot. Read as much as you can. Read as widely as you can. Then I would essentially say just keep working and keep developing your craft. If it's an aspiring author who wants to be published in the traditional way, then I would say everybody's journey is different. Just [indiscernible] to appreciate your journey is yours. Just keep at it. If you're meant to be writing, you're going to write whatever the circumstance is. Whether you're published or not published, whether people understand your voice and your perspective at any particular point in time is not going to stop you from writing. The point is just to keep getting better and developing as you go along. That's what I'd say.

Zibby: Excellent, and to listen for the voices that you might hear.

Cherie: [laughs] Yes, and to listen for the voices if that's your process. I know that's not the same for everybody, but it certainly is for me.

Zibby: There you go. Thank you, Cherie. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for your fantastic novel. I can't wait to read your flash fiction. Best of luck with everything. Thanks for dealing with all of my interruptions here.

Cherie: No, that's fine. That's absolutely no problem. I understand totally. I have four kids of my own. I know how hectic it can get. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Cherie: Take care. Buh-bye.

Lauren Fox, SEND FOR ME

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

Lauren Fox: Thanks so much for having me.

Zibby: I am excited to discuss Send for Me because this book is gorgeous and heartbreaking and just so great. It's so well-written. It was just really, really great. I loved it. I really loved it.

Lauren: Thank you. Thanks.

Zibby: Tell listeners, if you don't mind, a little about Send for Me and what inspired you to write it and what it's about and all the good stuff.

Lauren: All the good stuff. Short answer is that it is about a family, four generations of women, starting in Germany on the cusp of World War II and then jumping ahead in time to Milwaukee in the nineties. It's about family separation and the twin traumas of the Holocaust and that family rupture. I don't know if I think that there's a main character, but I kind of think of Annelise as the main character in the book. As the Nazis are coming to power in the 1930s, she is able to leave Germany with her husband and young daughter, but she has to leave her parents behind. The book is partly about her parents desperately trying to leave Germany and how she, in Milwaukee, is trying to have a life there and trying to bring her parents over. Then the contemporary timeline is about Annelise's granddaughter, Clare, who discovers a stash of letters in her parents' basement that were written by Annelise's mother, Clara, to Annelise as they were trying to leave Germany and how Clare, the granddaughter, is trying to live her life and trying to figure out how to pry herself away from her history and trying to figure out how to be in the world knowing her family's intense and traumatic history.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I understand that you actually found the letters. I shouldn't say understand. It's written in the book. You found the letters that your grandmother -- tell the whole story so I don't mess it up.

Lauren: The other half of the question is what inspired me to write the book. That is what inspired me to write the book. It's fiction. It's very much fiction. All the characters are sort of a mishmash of my family. I'm a fiction writer. I made them up, but the story is my family's story. When I was in my twenties, I found letters in my parents' basement. My grandparents had recently died. They had been living with us for years, so all of their belongings were in my parents' basement. I was going through them one day. I found -- I still remember this moment so specifically. It was a little brown box with a pink ribbon around it. In it were about seventy-five letters written on this crumbling onion skin paper. They were in German, but they were also in this German script. I can't describe it. It's like knife scratches on paper. It's just up and down. It's an old-fashioned German script that hardly anyone can still read. I found these letters. This moment stands out for me so vividly in my memory. I just knew that they were going to be important. It was almost magical. I just knew that these letters were going to be a key to unlock questions that I had had growing up.

I knew my family's history because I live in the world and I had learned about the Holocaust, but they really didn't talk about it. Trauma affects people in different ways. Some people process and talk about it. My family was so tight and so loving and so connected, but they just did not like -- my grandparents gave me little snippets of information throughout my life. I can count on one hand the number of times they talked about it. I was able to get these letters translated. It's kind of a process. I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I stumbled on a professor. He was in the German department. He had survived the war. He was half Jewish. He had survived the war in Berlin passing. That was a whole nother story. He took personal interest in my story and helped me translate the letters. It took us about a year. I would go into his office once a week with a couple of letters. He would read them out loud into a little tape recorder. Then I would go home and transcribe them. That is the inspiration for this book. It was really immersive. It was a really immersive project.

Zibby: Then you wrote in the letter in the book to readers that you tried to write it as memoir and then waited almost twenty years. Now you've come out with it as fiction. What was it like writing it as memoir? Now I want to read, by the way, the memoir version.

Lauren: No. [laughs]

Zibby: I don't want to read it?

Lauren: No one would read that.

Zibby: I don't care if it's good or not. I want to know more about your family after reading this. These were the actual letters, though, right, that you interspersed?

Lauren: Yes.

Zibby: How is their story different?

Lauren: It's different in so many ways. The emotional foundation of the story is the same. This is insignificant, but my grandmother's family owned a butcher shop. My grandfather was a cattle dealer. That's how they met. I've been a vegetarian my whole life. I was like, I'm not writing about a butcher shop. I placed it in a bakery instead. It was much more fun to research. That's not the significant way that the story is different. I always say fiction writers are like magpies just grabbing bright, shiny objects wherever they see them. It's such a weird thing to describe the process of taking a true story and fictionalizing it. In a world where there is such a thing as Holocaust denial, I felt a very strong obligation to tell this story, to tell it truthfully. I promised myself I would not change a word of the letters. In the process of reading them, transcribing them, editing them, every word of my great-grandmother's in my novel is true. Those are her words. Other than that, in order to get into my characters' heads I had to give myself full permission to imagine them. Basically, the long and short of it is the outline of my family's story is absolutely true. Then all the details are a combination of true and fiction and research.

Zibby: I'm glad you changed it to the bakery because those were some of my favorite scenes, and all different confections. Maybe you've already done this or whatever, but in conjunction with the launch of your book, you need to make all those things.

Lauren: Oh, no. I do not. [laughs]

Zibby: You don't?

Lauren: Not me. Someone else.

Zibby: Let me rephrase. You need to find all of those things and have them all displayed. The different confections that you referred to throughout the book, I want to know what they all look like.

Lauren: My grandma was a really good baker. My kids are like, "Mom, the reason your stuff doesn't turn out is because you're always like, oh, that won't matter." I did not inherit her talent.

Zibby: I know. I'm like, well, we don't have buttermilk. Let me just google and see what I can throw together.

Lauren: You can make buttermilk. I've done it.

Zibby: Yes, I've done it too. I made brownies the other day. We didn't have any vegetable oil, so I used avocado oil.

Lauren: That's not good. No. I would do the same thing.

Zibby: My kids were like, "Ugh, what's wrong with these brownies?"

Lauren: You're like, nothing, they're great.

Zibby: You got some extra healthy fat in there. Oh, my god, they were terrible. I threw them away. Some substitutions do not work. Like you, the urge to bake does not come with a lot of forethought. It's just like, let's do it right now with whatever we have.

Lauren: That's exacerbated by the pandemic. I'm not going to the grocery store, so let's make do with this rancid butter that I just found. [laughs]

Zibby: Totally. We'll just wait for the next delivery of food from FreshDirect in a few days. Okay, fine, you do not have to bake all these things now. I take it back.

Lauren: Thanks.

Zibby: No problem. What was it like writing this book? First of all, the words -- I dogeared all these different sections to show how great you are at even just describing things. Oh, gosh, when you were talking about the heartbreak with Annelise and Max at the very beginning of the book, this is just a scene where, in a teenage love, a guy decides he doesn't love someone. This is not that big of deal. Yet you write it in such a way. Let me read a couple lines. "Two days ago, she was a perfect composition of face and limbs and breath and heart. Now she's a ragdoll, lumpy, mismatched, stitched together, and stuffed with old cloth." Then she keeps going. Basically, she wanted to touch his hand, and he kind of pulled it away. "This moment is nothing, really. Her heart will mend. Even as she can practically feel it cracking, she has an inkling that it will eventually glue itself back together. Maybe it's even starting right now, the delicate process of repair. This is not a devastation like the ones that will follow, nothing like those great gasping winged monsters of ruin that will come later, the ones that will try to pick her up in their claws and fling her to her death. It's nothing like those, obviously. But still, years from now in another country with her handsome husband, this life irrevocably left behind her, she will remember it, the smell of coffee beans and cigarette smoke, the clink of dishes and the laughter drifting over from other tables, the sudden rearrangement of their relationship reflected in Max's face." So good. Let me find one from later. I probably shouldn’t. I don't know why I turned this down. Oh, that was funny about the polar bears. By the way, my daughter has a fascination with polar bears. I like when you said -- this is much later. You said, "How could you know the heart of your beloved before you married him? Courtship was a confection." I love that line. "Courtship was a confection. Crisis brought out the best in people or the very worst." Then you went on to say more. What a line. All of these lines. It's funny, when I pick up a book from Knopf, I know that it's going to be beautiful. I know the language. It's going to be literary and beautiful. I'm going to cling to every description of a detail. This was just so great. Tell me more about your writing. I keep looking because I kind of want to read another passage, but I can't decide.

Lauren: Now I just want to sit here and have you read to me from my book. This is weird. [laughs] It's very satisfying.

Zibby: I love this too. Let me just read this one passage. So interesting as we talk about men needing to be strong emotionally and this whole "man up" thing that people are finally rising up against, essentially. This was an ode to the tenderhearted man, which is great as I have some of those in my life. You wrote, "Julius knows he is tenderhearted. He comes from a long line of tenderhearted men, fathers who cry when they hold their babies for the first time, who tiptoe into darkened bedrooms just to touch the soft cheeks of their sleeping children, husbands who at times are filled with so much lighthearted gratitude and affection for their tired and faithful wives that they will, without suppression or regret, pull those surprised wives into their arms and hold them for a moment. Sternness is not in his nature. Discipline is not his forte. He has never tried to be something he is not." Beautiful. You know everything about this man now. It's great.

Lauren: That was easy for me. That was easy because I come from a long line of just that kind of man, my grandpa, my dad, really unusual men of that era, just so soft and lovely.

Zibby: That's amazing. Tell me about writing and your learning to write like this and your writing of this particular book and just how you craft your sentences and all of that.

Lauren: It's so funny because I think about this question while I'm writing. Of course, every writer is like, how will I capture this in the interview that is yet to come? I think about this all the time. Then also, I have no idea. There's some weird alchemy that happens. It's not like it isn't a ton of work and laborious crafting, but there's also just this -- it's the only time in my life when time goes by and I don't notice it, is when I'm writing. It's a weird thing to try to describe the process of writing, which I'm sure you know. Also, this story has been living with me for over two decades. I really gave myself permission and also just was so in the moment of this story. This is my fourth novel. More so than any of the previous three, I was so immersed in it. The first version of this novel was, as we said, a memoir. It was composed of lots of really, really short scenes, some of which were half a page long. I really gave myself permission to try to craft the sentences. I spent a long time on the sentence level part of the story. That carried over to the novel. My last three novels were much -- I wouldn't say they're lighter because the last one I wrote is about a woman and the death of her best friend. It's not like the subjects were lighter, but my writing style was a little more contemporary and light. This one, I just really allowed myself to write it the way I wanted to write it and craft the sentences with as much time -- my last book came out six years ago. It took me a long time to write this book. I don't know if I can describe it on a more granular level because in some ways, it's just a distant memory.

Zibby: That's okay. Where did you like to write? Did you outline it? How did you structure the story?

Lauren: I always outline because it gives me this probably false confidence. I feel like if I outline the plot, then at least I know step by step where I'm going. I'm free to change it, but at least I have a map. I forgot the first part of your question. How did I structure it?

Zibby: Also, where did you do it? Were you at where you are right now at this desk, or were you somewhere else?

Lauren: Exactly. Right here at this desk. Also, back in the days when my kids were in school, not upstairs in their bedrooms in school, I had the house to myself from eight AM to three PM. That was my writing time. I could just walk around. My floors were very clean because I would sort of Swiffer and think, just wander around the house, pace and walk and think. A slightly messier version of what you see is where I write.

Zibby: Swiffer as ultimate writing aid. I like that. Ode to the Swiffer, essay coming next. [laughs] How old are your kids?

Lauren: They're eighteen and thirteen, so they're all grown up now, kind of.

Zibby: I have a thirteen-year-old upstairs and two other ones also in school, so I get it.

Lauren: That's really fun.

Zibby: Really fun. [laughs]

Lauren: They're old enough to do it on their own, but it still sucks.

Zibby: Yeah. Are you working on anything else now?

Lauren: Just Swiffering. No. I am not working on anything else right now. I think it was Rick Moody who said writing a novel is like burning down your house. You have to rebuild from the ground up. I have a couple of ideas like tumbleweed floating around in my brain. Right now, not much else. This one was such an exorcism for me. Because it's my family's story and because I sat with it and it lived in my head and my heart for so long, it's really weird right now to feel like, what's after this? I have no idea.

Zibby: That's okay. What did your family think about this book? It's, in part, your whole family's story.

Lauren: My brother's just reading it now. It's been radio silence on the other end, so I'm eager to hear what he has to say about it. My mom has read it three or four times. She'll be like, "Honey, I'm reading it again. I'm crying again." My parents are just like, what a great job you did tying your shoe. They would support me no matter what. My mom and I talk all the time, but not so much about this. I think she feels really pleased that I've taken on this project. I think she feels like our family story has been honored in a way by the writing of this novel. I hope she feels that way.

Zibby: It's true. It has. All these lost stories, time is going by. What's great about this book -- I read a lot of Holocaust-era stuff, as most Jewish people do/are, and also just readers in general. I find this time period very -- I'm drawn to it. I keep trying to understand it. I never will. I'm like, it must be different. They must have felt different. The thing about this book is you're like, no, nobody felt different at all. It was just like as if we were there. You write about it, even little things like the objects. There's one part of this book where Annelise is feeling guilty about it, but even mourning her chandelier or something like that. When so much has been lost, how can she mourn the beautiful things that she used to have in her life, or a special carpet or anything? Her life before was very much like lives today, all the details you had. That's one of the things I found that set this book apart, is the detail, you're crawling on your knees feeling the carpet fibers type of detail versus, life was fine when I walked back and forth to the bakery. That doesn't sound right. I've read a million great other books. I'm not trying to say anything. There was just something about how real it felt and how it could so easily be right here, right now.

Lauren: I'm thinking a couple things as you're saying that. One is I came to this book when it came to light that families were being separated at the border and that children were being put in cages. I was like, oh, this is still so relevant. How is this still so relevant? I think that the fact that it's such recent history and we're still trying to -- it's a futile attempt to try to figure it out, but that's what this book is, an attempt to process it. The past is still with us. It hasn’t gone away. I thought a lot about those physical details because our lives are made up of those domestic moments, the lines of a vacuum cleaner as you vacuum your rugs and the beautiful lamp that you have that has a crack down the middle. Our lives are made up so much of those physical details. Those really weren’t any different. I did so much research on this time period. Really, what it comes down to is it was just our lives without the technology.

Zibby: I think about even the ashtray with the two dogs with their backs together, oh, my gosh. I feel like now I've seen that. If I saw it in a store, I'd be like, oh, that's that one.

Lauren: That's the one. Somebody said fiction writers aren't any more insightful than anyone else, they're just really good at observing. I actually feel that way. I'm just looking at stuff and seeing weird things. That's my writing process. [laughs]

Zibby: There's also this inherited trauma which people talk about and which comes, obviously, from not just Holocaust-era survival stories, but from many ways that people have had family members go through things or pass things down. When there's something around you even if it's not spoken about, what does that do to future generations? Here, even when you talk about -- now I'm forgetting the name of the granddaughter.

Lauren: Clare.

Zibby: Even the fact that Annelise's granddaughter, Clare, goes through this whole moment where she's going to weddings and feeling left out and wishing, how do you find the love of your life? and all of that, maybe there's something to the heaviness that she doesn't even realize she has that she's carrying around with her and that's informing everything. What do you think?

Lauren: Absolutely. I was reluctant to write the present-day character because, weirdly, it almost felt too easy, that part. The inherited trauma, I feel that. It's kind of hard to describe because it's so much in the air you breathe when you inherit this kind of history. I'm just going to pivot and talk about my personal life because so much of me is in Clare. I'm super close to my mom and very strongly feel this obligation to take care of her in a way. I used to joke when I was in my twenties that all I wanted to do was move back to Milwaukee, have a couple babies, and just hand them straight over to her. Of course, I wasn't joking. That is what I did. There's a feeling when you inherit this kind of rupture that you want to write a new story of your own. I tried to piece this together for years. What part of my psychological makeup is whatever? What part is just me? What part is what I was given? In some ways, it's the same for everybody. What's the difference between who you are and who your family is and what they gave you? Maybe that's just intensified for people who inherit a particularly difficult history. I wondered it for years. Was I just depressed, or was I feeling this familial, generational trauma? I guess it can be both. I still don't really know. I just think the question is really interesting.

Zibby: Me too. I feel like it's hard to get around. It's in there. It's just hard to sift out, if we use our baker's analogy, as we turn that little flour thing. That's as close as I'm getting to baking today.

Lauren: Thankfully.

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Lauren: Whenever I'm asked that question, I have the same answer. I say it to myself all the time. Look up from your phone. Look around. Pay attention. I'm always head down looking at my phone too like we all are. I often wonder what the next generation of writing is going to look like because I feel like the most important thing to do is to pay attention to the world and be really just wide open to it, eyes and ears and all senses. Look up. Pay attention. This book has been a part of me for over two decades. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Work as much as you can. I don't write every day. I would love to say that I do, but I can't. I don't. As much as possible, put your butt in the chair even if it's terrible. Often it is, but the writing process, it's not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be work. You have to do it every day. Well, you don't have to do it every day, but you have to do it as much as you can.

Zibby: All good advice.

Lauren: And read. Read so much. I've heard people say, I'm a writer, but I don't like to read. You can't. You have to read. You have to be a part of the conversation with other writers and other readers. That's my favorite. I'll take an hour during the day and just read and be like, nope, it's my job, I have to, as you well know. [laughs]

Zibby: I do that too. I'm the same way. I'm like, yeah, sorry, I'm just going to sit here.

Lauren: It's work.

Zibby: It's work. Do you have a genre you like the most?

Lauren: Right now, I'm reading a lot of historical fiction because those are the conversations I've been having. I was never particularly drawn to it before, but I'm loving it now. I love contemporary fiction. I'm so Catholic in my taste. I have one book in my office, one book in the living room, and one book upstairs. I'll just read wherever I am and whatever is good.

Zibby: I'm the same way.

Lauren: I know you are.

Zibby: I've now made this into my work or whatever, but I've been like this forever. There's always a book [indiscernible]. It's very comforting to know that no matter where you are in your own life, you can escape into someone else's in a moment's notice.

Lauren: Completely. You'll never be bored. You can tune everything else out.

Zibby: Bored, lonely, forget it.

Lauren: I know. It's a secret. You're never bored or lonely. Why doesn't everybody know that?

Zibby: I know.

Lauren: My kids are like, "I don't like to read." Okay. It's their rebellion.

Zibby: I asked my son who's six and is obsessed with the iPad because obviously with COVID, that's what happens, I'm like, "You used to like to read last year." He's like, "Yeah, but it's not as entertaining." It kind of broke my heart. How can a graphic novel even compete with the bells and whistles of his video games?

Lauren: Just pretend you don't care. Just act like that's fine. Then he'll be like, maybe I should read.

Zibby: I do restrict the time somewhat, so I'm hoping that -- I don't know about you, I've never wanted to force reading on my kids because I don't want it to seem like one of those things. I never want to be like, now you have to read, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.

Lauren: No, I don't either. How can you? My kids, they don't do anything I say anyway, so that wouldn't go over. [laughter]

Zibby: Good point. Very good point. Lauren, it was great chatting with you. Congratulations on this beautiful novel. I'm really excited for you. I hope it finds a home with lots of people because it is quite different, I feel, than the widely written-about time period. I feel like this book is different. It really stands apart. I hope people delve into it and meet your lovely women.

Lauren: Thank you so much.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Lauren: Thanks. You too.

Zibby: Bye, Lauren.

Lauren: Bye.

Brandon Hobson, THE REMOVED

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

Brandon Hobson: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Your latest novel, The Removed, is a beautiful story, so well-written, about all different characters as they relate to the loss of a fifteen-year-old boy, Ray-Ray. Tell me a little more about what inspired you to write this novel. Where did it come from?

Brandon: It came out of a question. Chekhov says that fiction should begin with questions. The question is always what I begin with in my work. The big question here was, how do we grieve and how do we heal? I'm also really interested in the question of, what is home? I think that applies to this book as well as some of my other work. That's the starting place for me, examining those questions and then taking it from there.

Zibby: I feel like you tapped into so many different things. If somebody had an issue going on, it's probably in this book. Someone with Alzheimer's, someone with an opioid addiction, someone with loss, all of these things are so relevant to everyone. Yet somehow you even weave them in and threw in a foster care child to boot. You packed so much in. Yet it all interwove seamlessly by how you divided the different points of view into the different chapters. How did you decide to take this view by all the different people in the family and shifting the camera lens, if you will, around to different places and perspectives?

Brandon: For one thing, one of the things I like about fiction writing is getting inside characters' heads. Here, it was an opportunity to take the Echota family and get inside their heads. The different points of view are all first person. That means trying to have very distinct voices. I don't know whether I pulled that off as well as I could've. I don't know. That's part of the fun. It's sort of like acting. I heard Ottessa Moshfegh say this a few years ago. I went to read her reading. Then afterwards, we went out to dinner and talked a little bit. One of the things that she said, and I think it's certainly true of me, is that it's sort of like acting in that you're getting inside a character and really seeing how they respond to certain situations. That's a big part of the pleasure of writing, is doing that and playing with voice and circumstance. This family, I had the mother, Maria, she was maybe the most challenging because she's an older woman who's lost a child. I wanted to try to get that voice somewhat distinct and specific. I actually talked to a friend of my mom's, and my mom's in her seventies, a friend of hers who, many years ago, had lost her teenage son. I talked to her a little bit about that experience, which was hard, but it needed to be done.

Zibby: That's true. I should've added this to the many themes that you touched on in the book, which is also police brutality in a way or, really, racism and targeting people on first glance based on how they look, which is what happened with Ray-Ray in the story. So many powerful, powerful issues to be explored. It's really amazing. When you sit down to write this book, okay, fine, we have Chekhov's question. This is the question you're doing. How did you decide how to craft all of these characters and what you were going to tackle in their passages? Obviously, you did research by talking to your mom's friend. Did you research all the characters? Did you outline the whole thing? Did they just appear in your head?

Brandon: That's a very difficult question. Where do characters come from? I don't necessarily outline. I start more with an image. Sometimes images will come that I'll see. I'm not sure what the scene is or when it takes place, but I'll see a character doing something. For Edgar's part, which is probably the strangest of all of them because he does have some addiction problems, I wanted those sections to be the most surreal, the most strange not only because of his drug use, but also because he finds himself in a sort of mythical place called the Darkening Land. The Darkening Land is out of old Cherokee stories. That's a specific place. In this place, I kind of had free reign to create it however I wanted to. I really wanted to hone in on the strangeness of this place and hopefully parallel it to the strangeness of the country we're living in right now in terms of, look at the way that racism is so prevalent today and the way that video games are used, and virtual reality. Edgar becomes a target of a game that he fears for his life, a real shooting game. That was really exciting because that was, again, crafting out of an alternate universe, a very dreamlike, surreal place. His sections were really fun. I knew that I wanted Sonja to be very obsessive and obsessed with romantic -- she's a very strong woman. She's very confident. She finds herself involved with a guy who is not native who becomes very dangerous. I knew that I wanted Sonja's character to be in a situation with someone who was dangerous. She's placed in danger. Edgar's placed in danger in the Darkening Land.

The mother, Maria, is really the one that is trying to pull everything together. She's dealing with her husband's Alzheimer's. Her husband Ernest is just really suffering from his Alzheimer's. Then they take in this wonderful little boy named Wyatt who almost feels like he begins to heal Ernest because of, look at how closely he resembles Ray-Ray from fifteen, twenty years ago. At the beginning, it just was taking off. I was doing each character separately. I was writing. Here's the way I knew that I was writing Sonja's, her thread, and I was writing Edgar's thread. I knew with Maria and Ernest, their threads just started taking off. I think that's often what happens when you start writing and you really get to know your characters very intimately, very well. They sort of start doing things on their own. You just follow along. I don't really outline much. All that sort of stuff comes with editing afterwards to help with the structure and shape after the draft. I think the most fun part is the very first draft because you're just -- Charles Johnson, he wrote this fantastic craft book. He was a student of John Gardner's. Charles Johnson, in his craft book, talked about the pleasure, the fun of writing. Finding that pleasure really is where I feel, for me -- I feel very strongly about that and its importance to my work.

Zibby: How many times do you think you've started novels at this point? Have there been others that you've started that haven't been finished?

Brandon: Oh, yeah. In my twenties, back in the nineties, I had several novels. It took me a really long time. I've been writing since I started college, for thirty years. I wasn't writing as a kid. I started writing fiction in college. It's been a long time. It's taken a long time to develop an understanding of how to do it.

Zibby: Writing novels takes so long relative to a round of tennis. If you only played five rounds of tennis, you wouldn't be that good, especially your first round. Because novels take so long sometimes, then they think because of all the amount of work and time invested, it should speed up or something, but it doesn't. You still need the practice. Another author I was talking to said, "It took me twenty-eight novels to get to number one on the best-seller list." That makes sense to me. If you do something over and over and over and get better and better at it, then it stands to reason you might have your most success at your twenty-eighth book versus your first. Not to say that there aren't -- anyway.

Brandon: There are great, amazing, young writers. It just is amazing to me when you have someone in their twenties, which is really young to be so good. They're out there. I think that's great. It is a lot of work. I don't have a whole lot of other hobbies, really. I have two kids here. My hobbies are usually spending time with them and shooting baskets with my thirteen-year-old or my seven-year-old. There's an obsession about it, I think. That's probably true of anything. Like you say, tennis, I think one has to have an obsession in order to really, it seems like to me -- I don't know. There's probably a lot of natural ability in sports. I don't know if that's true with writing, this natural ability.

Zibby: I think people have natural ability, but I think that some people who don't can get really great at it. I think some people who do can squander it.

Brandon: That’s true.

Zibby: I have two thirteen-year-olds and a seven-year-old. I also have a six-year-old. I find that that makes my ability to ever write or be productive a little bit impaired. How has that been for you, especially with the pandemic? How has that affected your writing to be parenting with everything else?

Brandon: It's really strange. My thirteen, as you know, they're pretty self-sufficient. The math, my wife has to help him. I don't remember seventh grade math being that difficult. I like helping my seven-year-old, especially with the art projects. We went out and found leaves. I live in the desert. There are not a lot of leaves out. We went over to a tree and found some leaves a few months ago and were able to make birds. Those have been fun. My writing, especially during the pandemic, I haven't been able to write during the day. It's been between the hours of ten PM and two or three AM, usually. During those four hours that I sit down to really think, this is my writing time, I'll try to get as much done as I can. I tell myself it's a success even if I just go through and edit or write half a page or a page. That's a success because you can go days and days without writing. During the day, I'm always trying to think about it. I'm kind of a night owl anyway. I will sleep a little bit later and stay up late, but I've always been like that.

Zibby: Interesting. Did you feel like, after your book got nominated for the National Book Award, that you had anxiety about starting another book, or did that fuel your resolve to write something else amazing?

Brandon: I don't know that it really gave me anxiety. There's so much out there. There's so many books. Part of it, for me, I published a couple of books with small presses, and I'm used to people not paying that much attention that I don't think so much about it when I work. I think had that been a debut novel, like the first thing I ever published, it might have created some more anxiety. Most of my anxiety -- I do have anxiety. It comes more along the lines of when I'm having to be in a social situation with people and talk about it. With you, one on one and I'm at my house... But talking about the book in front of large groups of people gives me significant anxiety. Then I find myself having one too many glasses of wine or too many beers to try to overcompensate. Then I may embarrass myself. It's gotten better.

Zibby: I feel bad. I said the thing about anxiety because I was literally just putting myself in your shoes. I worry about everything all the time. Then as I was saying the question, I was like, okay, this is my own issue that I am now asking him. [laughs] It just happened that you also have that same thing.

Brandon: You know what? I do. I have severe anxiety. When I was a kid, I had such social anxiety so bad. I just wouldn't talk for long periods of time. It's gotten way better now. I've talked to a therapist my whole life, so that helps.

Zibby: I had a lot of social anxiety as a kid as well. I went this one entire summer on a summer program to France where I just didn't talk. I was supposed to go learn the language and live with the family. I spoke a little in French, which now of course I don't remember a word of. With my peers, I was so shy. I didn't open my mouth the whole summer. What I found during that time, which I think of a lot -- I don't know if you do the same thing. I spent so much time analyzing language because it seemed so natural for other people to just talk. I was so struggling with the ability just to talk and figure out what would come next. I just listened all summer. I think about that sometimes now as I ramble or write my heart out or whatever, how at times it's so hard to even form a sentence and how that ease of conversation, it's sort of stayed with me.

Brandon: I went to Paris for the first time the summer before last. I taught for a week-long writing workshop. That was the best, most amazing trip I've ever been on. It was so great. I love the language. I love the city. I loved everything about it. I'd never been out of the country. I'd been to Mexico once in my entire life. I'd never been anywhere else. I walked around a lot. It was just amazing, an amazing experience.

Zibby: Interesting. Are you working on anything else now? What is it you're doing in the middle of the night?

Brandon: I am. There are a couple of things I'm working on. One, it's too early to really know what it's going to form into yet. I'm going through this first draft. It’s not much yet. It's not much at all. Then I'm working also on a children's book, not as in real young, but as in middle grade. My son's a seventh grader. I've started that and hope that that -- I just like to do different stuff in terms of writing. Stuff is a weird word. I always like a different project. We'll see.

Zibby: Got to keep mixing it up.

Brandon: There's always something I'm working on, always.

Zibby: That's great. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Brandon: One of the most important things is just, this is what everybody says, but to read a lot and read widely with a very open mind. Writing, it's almost like, the more you do it, the more fun it becomes. If aspiring writers are not in a program or have taken a workshop or a class, sometimes those get really bad -- I don't have an MFA. I didn't go for an MFA. I have an MA in English. Then I went on and got a PhD. There's something to be said about being around a community of other writers and people who are in the same space with you and you're all looking at each other's work and helping each other. There was a time in my life where I didn't have that at all. When I did, I became very grateful. I think that that was largely what helped me become a better writer on a craft level, is having that community of people. I would just say other than reading widely, get your work among a community of readers that you can share each other's work and talk about what's working and what's not working.

Zibby: That's great advice. I feel like especially now with the whole world on Zoom and your local habitat opening up to everybody else, it's easier to find those like-minded souls than it was before when you were sort of confined by the people around you who may or may not share your interests at all. Now you're in the desert somewhere talking about writing. I'm in New York City. It's so neat.

Brandon: One thing I didn't talk about in terms of the new book was, there's an ancestral voice named Chala. One thing I did want to mention, if it's okay, was that Chala, in the book, is based on a real man named Chali. What happened was he was killed for refusing to leave the land when Andrew Jackson ordered removal. Before the migration, what's known as the Trail of Tears, some people refused to go. There was one man who, with his son, died. This Chala, this ancestral voice, is based on him. He's speaking to the Echota family in the book trying to weave in -- here's, again, that question. How do we grieve? How do we heal? He incorporates the traditional Cherokee stories. It was also fun because I also had a couple of my own that I just write.

Zibby: Was one of yours the -- who had the one about the deer, the doe, talking to the guy in the woods? He had to run. Then he stood where the -- I'm not explaining this well. Then the leeches would get him.

Brandon: The leeches, that's based off a traditional story. Him rescuing the wolf and the wolf speaking through his eyes, that was me. That's not necessarily from a traditional story. To return to the pleasure of writing, to go back for aspiring writers, I really think there should be a lot of enjoyment and a lot of pleasure. I like the strangeness of it. It's Coleridge who said great art should incorporate some type of strangeness. That was Coleridge who said that, so I don't know. Take what you will. I do feel very strongly about the pleasure of writing. If it starts to feel like it's not pleasurable and it's just work, then it's maybe time to just put it aside and start something else.

Zibby: Excellent, excellent advice. This is great. We started with Chekhov. We ended with Coleridge. This is fantastic. I feel like I just had a little English throwback class here today. Thank you for dusting off the volumes in my mind.

Brandon: That's what getting a PhD does to you. It makes you throw these names out there, I guess.

Zibby: Might as well get your money's worth out of that PhD. If not now, when? [laughs]

Brandon: Exactly.

Zibby: Brandon, thank you so much. It was really a pleasure talking to you. I hope this wasn't as anxiety-invoking for either of us as perhaps some other settings.

Brandon: No. Thank you.

Zibby: It's been a pleasure to talk one on one with you here today.

Brandon: Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was fun.

Zibby: Good. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Brandon: Thanks. Buh-bye.

Rachel Ricketts, DO BETTER

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

Rachel Ricketts: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. By the way, I know listeners can't see this, but you have the coolest glasses pretty much ever that I've ever seen.

Rachel: Thank you. [laughs]

Zibby: Listeners, head over to YouTube so you can check out Rachel's awesome glasses after this. Your book, Do Better, can you please tell listeners what it's about? Then we're going to discuss some of the ins and outs.

Rachel: It's about spiritual activism and ways in which we can all work towards dismantling white supremacy from the inside out.

Zibby: There we go. Rachel, in your introduction you basically say, white women, this book is for you. I want to change your mind. I don't want you to think of me as angry, but I feel so passionately about this that I am writing a whole book about it. Here you go. Did I summarize, mostly?

Rachel: A little bit.

Zibby: A little bit. [laughs]

Rachel: The discernment is really important. It's written to white women but not for them. It's for black, indigenous, and people of color, specifically, black indigenous women and femmes, but addressed to white women because white women, in my personal and professional experience, have caused the most harm and have the most work to do. I have no problem with people finding me angry. I am angry, justifiably so. We need to tap into our anger and be able to withstand the full spectrum of our human emotions. That resonance, that acknowledgment is really, really crucial for black, indigenous, and people of color who are constantly marginalized others and ostracized. Our anger is used against us. That's really important for white folks, specifically for white women, very specifically for white cis women, who need to learn how to tap into their anger so they stop taking it out on black, indigenous, and people of color.

Zibby: In your own experience, and I know you included a lot in the book, why do you feel that white women in particular are sort of the worst perpetrators of this?

Rachel: Many reasons. The most succinct and potent one is they have a lack of an ability to really acknowledge and be with their identity as oppressed oppressors. I believe all of us are oppressed oppressors in one way, shape, or form, but some are on a spectrum. White women are obviously very much oppressed by patriarchy. If they occupy other marginalized identities, then heteropatriarchy, ablism, etc. They also oppress black, indigenous, and people of color by virtue of being white and perpetuating white supremacy. That inability to acknowledge and be with that identity results in a lot of harm. There's also a really deep need to be good and right or at least perceived as good and right. All of that is very much tied up in patriarchy which, to me, is all under the guise of white supremacy. It's all tied up in oppression. This need to be good and right, which, again, I believe most of us have, but it shows up in a very specific way for white women, specifically cis white women, but this deep need to be good and right automatically prevents you from being able to authentically engage in racial justice because you can't be good and right and be in this work. You're going to get it wrong. You're probably going to feel bad because you're going to have to acknowledge the harm that you've caused to yourself and to others.

Zibby: We are looking at each other. I am obviously a white woman. You are obviously not a white woman. We are having this dialogue together. You have a whole book. For me and other white women who happen to be listening who haven't read your whole book yet, and hopefully they will, what's something that you want all of us to know instantly aside from what you were just describing? If there's something that somebody's only listening to two minutes of this podcast but they need to know and you need to tell them, what would it be?

Rachel: That racial justice is your work. It's not something that's happening out there. You and I are talking the day after white terrorists stormed the Capitol of the United States of America while police watched idly by and/or opened gates or took selfies with them. There's a lot of that othering that continues, like, oh, those people. It's not a those and them. All white people, every single white person on the planet, perpetuates and benefits from white supremacy. That will never change unless you're willing to acknowledge that, address that, and do the inner work that's going to be required for that to actually change, period.

Zibby: Everybody is the same? How can there be any massive generalization about an entire group of people? What if I have done the work? Maybe you wouldn't know just by looking at me.

Rachel: The work never ends. Even that statement I think is indicative of the fact that there's more work to be done. There's a constant need to be able to acknowledge the power and privilege that you have by virtue of the position that you hold racially, gender identity-wise, ability-wise, or otherwise. That really requires being able to understand your position and the ways in which you cause other people harm.

Zibby: In your book and in your bio and everywhere else, you share a lot of personal experiences that have led you here to this book, to some of your beliefs, but also just who you are in the world and what's shaped you in the past. One of the shaping moments in your life was the loss of your mother. I was hoping you could talk a little about that and how her decade-long battle with MS and how you coped with the loss has affected your day-to-day even now. I'm so sorry, by the way, for your loss.

Rachel: Thank you. It's very much informed the work that I do, not only her loss, but all of the experiences that we had leading up to her loss. There was a large spectrum of losses that occurred along the way. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I am an only child. She was a single mother. We are both black women. On top of all of the experiences that we endured that would be hard for anyone across the board dealing with challenges with the healthcare system, with social systems -- we're based in Canada, so also acknowledging the privilege that we hold as a result of having access to healthcare and social welfare systems that we wouldn't have had if we were in the United States and still identifying and acknowledging the additional challenges that we faced, straight-up discrimination, oppression, and harm that we endured as a result of having to do that as black women.

In supporting her and just being someone who lives as a queer, multiracial, black woman-identified person, that deep need for equity, for justice has always been very top of mind for me, which is why I went to law school and then very quickly realized that law has nothing to do with justice, which was an upsetting realization. Then when my mother actually passed, when I supported her in ending her own life -- she and I both felt she had no options left to live in a way that would be fulsomely free from pain. When she was physically gone, I was left with not only the massive grief and loss of her physical absence, but all of the losses that we had endured along the way as a result of the oppression and discrimination that we faced. It was after she died that I really recentered and regrouped and was left with such deep grief. I just think we're very ill-equipped as a culture to deal with grief across the board. I think we really began to realize that more in 2020, the many ways that grief manifests and the ways in which we're ill-equipped as a society and as individuals to cope with that. I dove deep into grief work. Then very, very promptly, that led me back to racial justice work because the most grief I've ever endured in my life is as a result of being a black woman.

Zibby: With the small losses and the affronts that occurred along the way with your mother's illness, would you mind sharing one or two things that keep you up at night or that you have the most feeling about still?

Rachel: The one piece that really hurts the most -- it's hard to pick one. There are so many. We didn't even have support when we needed it in terms of allowing her to transition with dignity. That was a fight. I always say that was the most important and relevant use of my law degree to date, was literally having to fight the medical system to allow her to die with dignity, to allow her to have free rein over her own body. That fight took up all of my time and energy instead of being able to just be with my mother in hospice and support her emotionally, spiritually, physically as she transitioned from this realm to the next. I was there every day, day in, day out, trying my best to do that, but instead, the priority was doing my best to support her in having her needs met and her wishes met and ensuring that she was free from pain in executing that desire. We had to bring in a medical ethicist and the whole thing. When we finally "won" her right to be fully supported and kept pain-free -- she had to starve herself to death. That was the only legal option for her. When we finally won that battle to allow her to be fully supported by the medical system in her decision to do that, it wasn't a win. Then I was left with, right, now I've won this battle where my mom gets to die. The fact that she even got to that place is a result of the oppressions and discrimination that we faced. She may never have needed to get to that place if we didn't live in such an ableist, capitalist, white supremacist society at all. To really be with that is horrifying, truly, and part of why I do the work that I do because I don't want anyone else to have to endure what I did and what we did.

Zibby: I know that part of your mission, you do so much to be giving back to other people now. You have all sorts of certificates and degrees and everything. Part of that is in helping people with grief, not only in all the seminars that you lead on coming to terms with white supremacy and doing the work that is required, but even just the grief work. I shouldn't say even just. Grief work is so important. Like everyone else, I've had my own share of grief. Who hasn’t these days? When you say that people are ill-equipped, which I completely agree with, tell me a little more about that and how you think we can, as a culture or society or just as individuals, become better equipped to deal with something that will affect everybody at some point or another?

Rachel: This is the crux of my book because I believe that the work has to happen on the internal, cellular, individual level before we can actually make societal collective shifts that will reflect the changes that need to occur. This isn't work that happens from the neck up. We live in a society where that's a lot of the work that we're doing. That's the work that seems to be prioritized. Grief, to me, isn't really an emotion. It's an experience. Until we have a more fulsome understanding of our own emotional landscape, which requires us to do inner work, then we don't have the tolerance or even, really, ability to recognize, oh, this is grief. I would say most people on the planet in this moment are grieving. There's so much happening, whether in the United States or not. A global health pandemic, everything is different: the amount of uncertainty; if you have children, the amount of uncertainty for your children and that you're probably witnessing in your children. There is a lot that we are handling, or not, that we're trying to handle. All of that is grief. When we live in systems of oppression, which we all live in, then that word, even, often is seen to be hyperbole. Oh, it's not grief. That's really dramatic.

When we can't even really be with what it is we're experiencing, how can we ever start tending to the healing that needs to happen? We can't even have an understanding like, I'm angry and that's okay that I'm angry. I don't need to be shamed or gaslit for my anger. I'm grieving. No one needs to die for me to be in grief. There didn't need to be a global pandemic for you to be in grief. In fact, things don't even have to be negative for you to be grieving. When you get married, when you become a parent, when you start a business or get a promotion, these are major changes that occur in your life. When major changes occur, grief can also come along for the ride because it's a huge shift. We don't allow space for that reality, to acknowledge that. The work is really an inner one. It's an internal landscape. It's shadow work. It's ego work. It's the hardest work you'll ever do because this is really challenging to really sit with the ways in which we have caused ourselves harm, the ways in which we've caused other people harm. Resting and being with ourselves is incredibly challenging in a culture that is constantly telling us that we need to produce, that we need to do, do, do, and that our worth is completely enshrined in our output, not in just being who we are.

Zibby: It's so true. In terms of doing better, what do you think you're doing better today than you were doing, say, last year at this time?

Rachel: I'm really trying to learn to rest, especially as a black woman who is constantly expected to show up for everyone, to do the work for everybody personally and professionally. Resting is a real act of resistance and real revolutionary act and one that's honestly quite painful because it brings up so much trauma. It brings up so much about the ways in which I've been conditioned and have conditioned myself to do and to prioritize everyone else and everything else in front of and instead of myself, which isn't sustainable. That has been a real challenge. I'm doing my best to do better at that. I'm constantly always doing my best to do better at owning and acknowledging my privilege and the ways that I cause other people harm as a result of the privileges that I possess, for example, being light skinned, living in Canada in this moment, being highly educated, English speaking, cis in a hetero-passing relationship. All of these privileges cause people harm, especially when I'm not acknowledging them and addressing them. That's the work. The book's called Do Better. I'm absolutely included in the need to do better all the time.

Zibby: Do you feel in a way consumed by this mission of yours? Not to say it's only your mission, but do you feel like it is what you eat, drink, live, breathe? Is this something that you wake up in the morning thinking about and go to bed at night thinking about and work on all day? Everybody has their things that they feel incredibly passionate about. Is this something that colors every moment of your day and this is the lens through which you see, how can I improve this? How can I help these people? Do you know what I mean?

Rachel: Yeah, it's more a mission. It's my life's purpose. It's why I'm here. It's not work. It is work because this is hard shit to do, especially when you're doing it from the inside out, but it's also my lived experience. I am a queer, multiracial, black woman. I am up against systems of discrimination day in and day out. I am constantly met with harm. For me, it's imperative that I'm doing the best that I can do to create more liberation for everyone and right now, specifically for black indigenous women and femmes.

Zibby: What's the last thing that has happened either as a result of your involvement and passion, or not, that has made you feel just super happy and grateful for someone?

Rachel: I would say I wouldn't have survived 2020 without the support of other black women. I mean that in every sense of the word. It was a really challenging year and continues to be a really challenging time. I'm so grateful for the black women and femmes that I have my life who really show up and nurture and support me so that I can continue to hold space and support this work.

Zibby: Do you have any close relationships with any white women?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I talk about it at length in the book. It's very important that we are able to have relationships with everybody else. That's the purpose of this. When we are doing the work from the inside out, then we understand the ways in which we have caused harm and the ways in which we can help mitigate that harm and have deeper connections with ourselves and with others, especially people that have been made most marginalized and people that we have oppressed. For me, I have a lot of close white women. Those are all women who are constantly doing their work, checking themselves in their power and privilege, and able to acknowledge the ways in which they have caused harm, continue to cause harm, make repair, and mitigate that harm moving forward and spend their power and privilege, as much as they possibly can, to help create collective liberation for everyone.

Zibby: Tell me a little about the writing of this book. How long did this book take? Where and when were you when you wrote it? Did you have to outline it at first? Just tell me a little more about the process of writing.

Rachel: I always say this book has been written from when I was in my mother's womb, so a lifetime. The actual process of sitting down to write, pen to paper, was about six months, which was a lot in the midst of a pandemic as well. It was really challenging. It was really challenging to write because I pulled out the most traumatic experiences of my life to put onto the paper as a means to illuminate the ways in which we cause each other harm and how we can do better. Obviously, not an easy thing to do for me personally. Also, a lot of familial trauma and stories came to surface in the midst of me writing this. Really, really challenging. Then at the same time, I felt so connected to my ancestors. I'm not saying anything new. No black activist or any anti-oppressive activist really is saying anything new. A lot of this has been said time and time again. Specifically, black folks, we've been saying the same thing for hundreds and hundreds of years. My ancestors had a lot to say. I'm honored that I was a vessel that got to be the conduit for this to come out. I wrote chunks of this actually all over the world. Chunks of it were written in Sweden where I was living for a chunk of time. Parts of it were written in France and Morocco and Indonesia back when we could travel. The bulk of it was actually written in Toronto, Canada, which is not where I'm from, but it is actually where my mother's side of my family moved to from Jamaica in the fifties. I really reconnected with a lot of that energy. I really felt that side, my matrilineal side of my family, as I wrote. It was my first time ever living in Toronto. Being there to write this book wasn't a coincidence. I think it was important to tap into that energy as I wrote.

Zibby: Have you ever thought about a career in politics?

Rachel: When I was in law school, I was like, I'm going to be a politician. This shit needs to change. That's how I'm going to do it. Then I promptly was like, that whole system is not one that I could endure at all. I would rather be on the outside trying to create a more equitable system overarchingly than engage in that one.

Zibby: It's such a shame because I feel like all the brightest people don't want to go into government. The people who should be doing what they can to change the world from the inside are so up against an intractable system that it seems pointless to even try, which is the saddest part of the whole thing.

Rachel: It doesn't feel pointless to try to me. I just think there's many different ways to try. I think we're slowly beginning to see the ways in which we can shift the system and very much seeing the ways in which that system absolutely must change. My deep hope is that the system looks completely different soon.

Zibby: Well said. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Rachel: To the best of your ability, be clear on who you are and what your voice is before you ever try to fall down the path of actually publishing because you're going to be met with a lot of resistance in a lot of ways, especially if you occupy a marginalized identity. If I had tried to write this book ten years ago, I don't know what kind of book it would've been. I am very different. Also, I wasn't as embodied in who I am and what I need to say and how it needs to be said. I've had to fight a lot along the way. I think that's a really common experience for authors, so you need to be very, very sure of who you are and what you need to say.

Zibby: If you could have a sneak peek -- I don't know why I'm asking you all these what-if questions. Thank you for indulging my little interview experience here. If you were going to pick up a book in the library and it turns out it was the book that you wrote ten years from now, what would be in that book? What would be happening?

Rachel: Um...

Zibby: I've stumped you. [laughs]

Rachel: You've stumped me because even now, I'm like, I wonder what my next books are going to be like. Things change so quickly. It was really hard to write this book because I was like, this book could be outdated by the time it -- I am shifting and changing. The collective is shifting and changing very, very quickly, not quick enough unfortunately. Again, when we are dialed into actually doing this work from the inside out, the transformations are huge and they are quick. I'm really curious about what I'll be writing about and talking about and sharing about ten years from now. I think it will look very different because the world will also look so completely different. It's not something I can fathom. I say that in a really positive way because my hope, and I talk about this in this book, my hope is that we all can envision a world that looks completely different from the world that currently exists. That's really, really hard to do. That really does require us doing our own internal work and really trying to step outside of the systems as they currently exist as best as we can because we're all inside of them, myself included. What does it look like to really be rested, be well, be nourished, be taken off, be taking care of each other, be in equitable communion with other people, especially people who have less power and privilege than us? When we can start to really do that on a larger collective space, then I think what we can imagine and envision for the world is boundless and so phenomenal, but I can't begin to fathom what that actually looks like right now.

Zibby: I just want to say one thing to your fear that this book could be outdated at a certain point. Some of the things you share are so timeless that it could never be outdated. The personal emotion and feelings of loss and just the raw feelings are something that connects people and so universal and so timeless, this sense of grief and loss and all of it. This is not a book that will be soon not a timely matter. The stuff you shared is timeless. That's all I'm trying to say.

Rachel: Thank you. That was really important for me, not on the timeless piece, but on -- I didn't want to write a how-to. Some people laugh when I say that now because they're like, Rachel, this could very well be perceived as a how-to. I wanted to share my perspective and experience, one, to white folks because I think it's an honor and a privilege to be able to really read that and have a deeper understanding of the impact of oppression and white supremacy, and two, for black, indigenous, and people of color, specifically black indigenous women and femmes, queer and trans black and indigenous women and femmes, to see themselves and have an understanding of, oh, I'm not alone. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm not broken. Those are the kinds of thoughts we're conditioned to have, and certainly the way in which I was conditioned to think. That lack of connection, that lack of belonging, that constantly being othered and ostracized and made to feel like something was inherently wrong with me, that is why I wrote this book because I don't want anyone else to have to feel that way, truly anyone else, but obviously especially people who have been made most marginalized.

Zibby: I'm sorry that that was your experience. I'm sorry for everything you went through with your mother. I'm sorry for the ways in which you have felt that the world has failed you. My heart kind of breaks for you on that behalf. I'm sorry that that's happened.

Rachel: Thank you. I'm not alone.

Zibby: I'm not trying to say you are alone.

Rachel: No, I know.

Zibby: I know you're not. The world has not been fair to many, many people in many different ways. I was just trying to express that I'm sorry that's happened to you, from me to you. That's all.

Rachel: Thank you.

Zibby: Thank you for coming on this podcast. Sorry for my bizarre line of questioning today.

Rachel: No, not at all.

Zibby: Thanks for encouraging me to do better.

Rachel: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. It was a pleasure.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Rachel: Bye.

Anna Malaika Tubbs, THE THREE MOTHERS

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

Anna Malaika Tubbs: Thank you for having me. It's really an honor.

Zibby: It's an honor to talk to you. You're such a genius. This book was amazing. Your book is called The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. Can you please tell listeners what this is about? Even though this cover is amazing and the title is amazing, I still think it's about far more than just those women. This is essentially -- you know what? I'll let you do it. [laughter]

Anna: No, you were doing great. I was like, keep going. It's about the mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin were their names. It's also about what they symbolize in terms of black American womanhood throughout an entire century of American history and what they lived to witness, but also what they lived to inspire through not only raising their children, but also through their teachings outside of their families and their communities and in the many ways that they still inspire us today even though so many people don't know their names. It's all about telling their story, taking them from the margins, putting them in the center away from the shadows into the spotlight like they deserved to be all along.

Zibby: That's amazing. You also go back and give us so much rich history of so many places, people, generations. Some of the things, even from something like Deal Island and how that started or the immigration from one country to another, you painted such a picture of history in general. When I was reading it, I was thinking, this is like the textbook -- that sounds negative because textbooks are terrible. Now I feel bad. If you're a textbook writer, I don't mean your book is terrible. How about this? This should be required --

Anna: -- They're not usually as readable. It's a little harder to get through them.

Zibby: Yes. Required reading on the history of black America in general, especially from the lens of women. Still, you have so much information in here. Yet you wove it together in a narrative form to make it highly digestible. I thought that was awesome.

Anna: Thank you. That was a big goal of mine. It was an important one. I wanted it to be a text that people could refer to in terms of learning about American history through this perspective of three black mothers and how that changes the way we view events like the Great Depression, thinking about the Great Migration and actually getting to know participants in it, all of these things that we think about, both of the world wars. There's so many different things that they lived to see, multiple different presidents and the way their policies affected them differently in each of the three cases because of their own access to resources and education. I think it allows you to better understand history. I appreciate you taking note of that.

Zibby: It's great. People are always like, we should rewrite history. You did it. There you go. [laughter]

Anna: Thank you.

Zibby: I like how you threw yourself in the mix. Another way that you made this book so relatable, literally starting by talking about whether or not you're getting your period. I'm like, oh, okay, wait a minute, this book is not what I thought it was going to be. She's open. The author is open and talking to me like a friend. Now she's going to tell me a story and teach me. It's like when a great teacher stands up. Of course, that's probably what you're doing. You're getting your PhD and everything, right? Are you trying to be a professor? What's the goal there?

Anna: It's so interesting when you said that comment about textbooks earlier because I agree in many ways that they can be a little boring, is the only thing. I definitely respect them for what they are. They're such important tools for all of my academic colleagues who do want to be professors right away.

Zibby: Yes. I'm sorry.

Anna: No, but for me, I'm actually not. I'm much more interested in public intellectual work. That's why I wanted to produce a book that was very readable, very accessible while also being a tool that could be used for education, but just in a way that's more fun and that you can connect with. It feels personal. I believe that black feminist theory, gender theory, critical race theory all were meant to help us better understand our world and to survive our world and change it. It wasn't meant to be exclusive or kept within the academy. I am grateful for my time in the academy. I am definitely a nerd. I love my degrees. I loved doing all the research to earn them, but it isn't where I necessarily want to stay for now. I'm much more interested in talking to general audiences about what they think and contributing to current conversations because so much is happening so quickly. Sometimes when you're an academic and you're only talking to other academics, you feel like you're kind of missing out because it takes years to develop certain articles and get them published. Then it's only other academics who are reading them. That's just not currently what I'm interested in doing. Maybe down the line I would become a professor. I love just talking to everybody about what they think. That's what I'm most excited about with the book, seeing what all these different people get from it and what they gain from it.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, you're going to have the most amazing conversations. There's so much in here. I was hoping I could just read this one point that I particularly loved. It's all the way at the end. I'm sorry. It's part of Our Lives Will Not Be Erased. You said, "I cannot fully express just how much hurt and frustration the erasure and misrecognition of women and mothers, especially black women and mothers, causes me. In my own life, I've experienced others demeaning me and questioning my abilities simply because I am a black woman. How many times have men threatened my sense of safety, hollering at me from their cars? How many times have I heard I was only given an opportunity because of the color of my skin? How many times has another person's looks or comments tried to make me question my worth? I cannot say. There have been too many." I'm reading one more paragraph. I can't stop. Sorry. "I also cannot tell you how many times people have been surprised by my intellect and my successes because they assume I am dumb and that my biggest accomplishment was marrying my husband. My own work has often been hidden behind his, not for lack of his appreciation, but because we still live in a world where women of color are not fully seen." Then you say, "Now that I'm a mother, this erasure takes place on new levels. I have stood at events right next to my husband while he was congratulated on the birth of his son." Then you keep going on and on from there. Wow, that's super powerful stuff right there. That's amazing.

Anna: Thank you. I think so many women relate to it and can feel -- I would love to hear your own experiences of that as well. So often, we're taken for granted, especially moms. It's this weird balance of everyone expecting us to do everything and get everything done. If we don't, then we're blamed for it, but we're never thanked for being the ones who are running the operation in so many different ways. Of course, that's different in different families. In general, women are underappreciated. We see this in the way that we're treated and lack of safety and general toxic masculinity. I think part of it was adding my own personal experience to that so that people understand why this book mattered so much to me, but also to be someone who's saying, I see you. I see all of us who are going through this. I hope that this book can be a part of changing that.

Zibby: Even your dedication, I started getting the chills. Wait, hold on, I have to read this too. Then I'll stop reading.

Anna: No, I love it. This is so fun. [laughter]

Zibby: You said, "This is for all the mamas. You deserve respect, dignity, and recognition. I honor you. I celebrate you. I see you." I don't know if you were talking to me, but I took it.

Anna: Yes, please do.

Zibby: I know this is geared -- well, it's not geared towards black mothers, but it's mostly about getting the facts out into the world so that they are seen in a way that they have not been in the past.

Anna: It truly is for all the mamas, though. I actually define motherhood even more broadly than biological motherhood. Patricia Hill Collins calls mother work the kind of work we do that's caring for others, the way we're bringing others up. Teachers are doing mother work, doctors, nurses, so many of our essential workers. It is definitely a celebration specifically of motherhood, very specifically of black motherhood, but also for all of those that are doing work on behalf of many and who feel unappreciated, feel unseen. It's our time. We need people to give us the appreciation that we deserve. There is nothing that they're going to lose by giving credit where it's due.

Zibby: Ooh, maybe there's some tie-in here with my podcast. It's our time. I love how you say that because that's also what I try to say about listening to this podcast. I don't mean just moms. There are caretakers in so many ways, shape, and form. Not that you even have to be a caretaker, but mom itself, the word, is so limiting, whereas it's such a broad spectrum of people caring for others these days. Content is for whoever wants to ingest it. I believe it'll find the right home.

Anna: I'm excited about that part of the conversation too, just thinking of the different ways and the different mothers. This is especially common in black communities, communities of color, the mothers that you have even outside of your own moms because of this it takes a village to raise a child mentality and practice and tradition that is so beautiful and wonderful. It's very western to do this as an individual journey that everything falls on the one person and that they shouldn't ask for help or they shouldn't admit when something is hard for them. Even when we're having conversations about postpartum depression, so much of that can be avoided or helped and supported if we have more people around that central figure, but also if we just see her. In so many cases, it's going to be a woman who is not seen, who is not given the supports and resources that she needs. We can really change that and make it easier. It's better for our kids and better for society. I'm all about the more you support women, the better society and communities do. I also hope that it contributes to that as well. I have a lot of goals for the book. We'll see how many I accomplish.

Zibby: You should. I believe it will accomplish a lot. Let's talk about these three mothers in particular. You probably know more about these women than anyone, as you spell out so clearly. Even things like the date that they were born is two different dates for certain of the women for their birthdate and just so much conflicting research because they weren’t even deemed worthy of recording in a way. You went and must have torn apart every library and every website looking for everything you uncovered. First, I want to know about your research and how you did that. I really want to know -- maybe, let's talk about this first, if you don't mind. These three women who went through so much and overcame so much, it's unbelievable, yet they produced these leaders. Is there anything as a main takeaway for other mothers if you want to raise a leader and someone who can speak their mind and effect change in society? Is there anything you feel like they did that we can all do?

Anna: Wow. There is so much that I could say to answer that question because, of course, the book is filled with those lessons on how did they do it day to day with all of the challenges that they were facing? I like to celebrate their differences even more than what they had in common because of this notion that we try to categorize black women as if we're all the same. A big part of the book is celebrating how different all three of the mother's approaches were to accomplishing something that in the end, we have these three incredible men despite the many differences in their backgrounds. One thing I think that they all had in common was this combination between both vulnerability and bravery and the way they saw themselves and what they were going to teach their children about themselves and how that allowed their kids to understand humanity better. To break that down a little bit, so often, moms feel that we have to put on this brave face all the time. We can't let our kids see us cry. We can't let them see that we're struggling to do something because we feel like we have to be those superhero moms.

In all three of these cases, they were willing to say, hey, this is difficult for me. Alberta King was constantly worried about Martin Luther King, Jr. going out into the world. That was very real for her. That was her son still. No matter what she wanted him to accomplish, no matter how she had faith in what God's plan was for him, she worried about her baby. We see it with Berdis Baldwin when she loses her own father. She cries in front of her son. She is able to show some of the things that are difficult for her. Louise Little, again, filled with examples of her showing that things could sometimes be very scary. What do you do in those moments where you have sadness, where you have some fear, where you have some worry? You continue to push forward. You ask for help from others. You form communities around you. They all were examples of that balance, vulnerability and strength and being this whole human being that I think allowed all three men to have a really deep understanding. One of the reasons they were all three incredible orators and organizers was they had an understanding of humanity that others did not. I think a big part of that was that their moms were very willing to be honest with them about their own human condition.

Zibby: Okay, I can do that. [laughs]

Anna: It's hard, though. It really is. My son's still really young, so I'm not sure he's going to remember all of my own emotions and my journey of being his mother. I think that honesty is crucial, especially with sons. When they see women in their full humanity in true light, it can make them better human beings.

Zibby: That's great. Nothing like getting some parenting advice here in the midst of --

Anna: -- I want all your parenting advice.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. If your kid has a rash, I will know what it is. I have four kids. I feel like I need to set up shop, a little corner in my pediatrician's office and just be like, why don't you just come through the triage center here? I will let you know what's going on. Then you can leave.

Anna: That is hilarious. That would be actually really effective for hospitals. Just have some moms sitting there ready to talk to new moms.

Zibby: Right? Maybe I should do that. I actually am on the board of something called the Parenting Center at Mount Sinai Medical Center. It's a lot of parent education and all that. I've never thought about just plopping myself down one day and being like, all right, listen. [laughter] Let me tell you how it is.

Anna: He's fine. They're fine. I love that.

Zibby: They're fine. My biggest parenting lesson that I feel like I probably say too much is that you don't have as much influence as you think you have. I think that my kids, each one is born the way that they are. They're all so different. Their genes may be the same, generally, but they're completely different people. I just am here to watch them. With my first kids, I was on top of them. What are you doing? What are you doing? How can I make you better? At this point, I'm just like, look at this. My son's redesigning his room. How about that?

Anna: The creativity, how wonderful. To that point, with these three moms, they had several other kids. We so often only talk about their famous kids, but that's another really cool way to see even how they approached their different kids and their personalities and what they wanted to do with their lives. I think we can gain a little bit from those lessons as well.

Zibby: There was this show that I used to watch. It was only on for one or two seasons. Then it was canceled. Now I'm going to forget the name again. Something like Bob &... It was about when JFK and his brother Bobby were boys. It was trying to show, what did you see in them when they were boys? It was a lot about their mom and how she was raising them. You should try to dig it up.

Anna: I love that. That feels like it's up my alley.

Zibby: It was so good. Oh, it's called Jack & Bobby. I feel like the only person who watched it. I think maybe I was pregnant. There was some reason I was home watching a lot of TV. It's sort of the same theme. What was it in their childhood? That's not exactly what you were doing, but it's always so interesting to look back and see, could this have been the influence? What about this? How did she handle that? Or is it in spite of your parents that you end up becoming a leader?

Anna: That's definitely the case sometimes, for sure.

Zibby: Go back to how you dug up all this information and wrote this book. Your son must be one and half or something at this point?

Anna: Now he's fifteen months.

Zibby: Pretty close.

Anna: Full-on toddler mode. He's just running around and talking and has some declarative statements. We have no idea what he's saying, but he's really emphatic. [laughs] It's a really cute stage.

Zibby: How did you do this whole book at the same time? You must have done a lot of it before. Tell me about that.

Anna: I started the research before we were expecting my son. Started with my PhD program. Definitely, the journey of becoming a mother while moving through the different stages and then having my son while I was editing the book gave me this very rich, deep, personal connection to the three women that I'm really grateful for because motherhood can be an incredibly scary journey as much as it is really exciting. Especially for black women in the United States, seeing what they were able to push through, but also the way they were able to transform their communities to better meet their needs brought me incredible inspiration. In terms of the nitty-gritty of actually finding all of this information around their lives, it was really hard. I say in the book that it was finding a needle in a haystack. Even if you just take one paragraph, you'd have to break it down into almost each sentence that I had to find a different fact in order to complete that one paragraph because information about them was so scattered. Then there were conflicting documents on what one person said versus another scholar versus all of these things. That's what adds to the complexity of their humanity. It's definitely a challenge that I appreciated.

What frustrated me most was how little there was out there because there's so much more about their lives. I hope maybe the families will be more willing to speak about them now. One of the problems -- maybe it's not a problem, but it's a challenge. They wanted to protect their moms. These are three families who had been through so much scrutiny, so much inquisition from different sources, whether that was scholars or journalists, etc. I definitely felt their need to keep this person who was so important in their life guarded from that kind of scrutiny. I am excited, though, now that they're able to see what the product was and what I wanted to do all along that they feel proud of it and they're happy with what I was able to do. Hopefully, that will allow us to hear even more stories about these three women. So much of it was going through all of the men's works first, then anything that people had written about the men. There is so much. It's incredible. Every single year, there's a new book about one of these men, which I find incredibly brave by these writers because what else is there to say? I don't know how brave they are to go in and say, I have a whole new thing about these three men that we've already learned so much about. There's nothing wrong with that. I just hope we can have multiple books about the moms as well and taking them, like I said earlier, from the margins and bring them to the center. If there was just a small mention, I would take that.

I had to really go away from my computer. I had poster boards all over my walls with these really huge timelines. I was filling them in with Post-it Notes. Then I could see where I had really big gaps which actually tended to be towards the beginning of the women's lives before they were married, before a man made their life worth recording, really. Unfortunately, that's kind of how it appeared and what it symbolized when I had this huge gap between maybe they were born this year, but we know for sure they married their husband that year. This is when they had their famous sons. Going back and filling that in with historical context and going really on a deep dive into Grenada's history and Deal Island's history and Atlanta's history, that's how I just filled it all out and took little parts where other people had said -- Maya Angelou had described Berdis Baldwin, so finding her name in one of Maya Angelou's speeches and learning that she was really short and that Maya Angelou had to bend to half her height to kiss her on the forehead. That was how it all came together. Then I called different historians around the country. I was also able to work with some researchers at different sites who helped me find birth certificates and marriage certificates and doctor's notes, even, from some scholars who studied the men and had archives that no one had asked to see before about the moms. They just shared those with me. It was an incredible journey, really difficult, but also a really beautiful one at the same time.

Zibby: Wow, and a fabulous final product. I feel like, and maybe this is already in the works, but shouldn't this be a three-part series on HBO or something like that?

Anna: I would love that. I really would. There's definitely some interest in it. I do have a film and TV agent, so we will see how that goes. The way I picture it is Netflix limited series, maybe two episodes for each mom, and just getting to better understand, again, what we were saying at the beginning, the context of US history. That's the thing that really connects them because all three of these moms never met each other. Their sons would meet each other eventually, which I think is really a beautiful part of the book as well. To see how something might happen nationally and then you get the scene through that mother's life I think would be really beautiful. We'll see what happens.

Zibby: Okay, fine, it won't be three parts. I've now expanded my order to perhaps a six, seven, or eight-part miniseries.

Anna: Even a musical. I think a musical would be beautiful.

Zibby: Musical?

Anna: Yes, like a Hamilton but where the characters are actually people of color. That would be cool.

Zibby: I miss the theater so much these days.

Anna: Me too.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I didn't think I would miss it so much.

Anna: Then you can't go. You're like, I want to go so badly.

Zibby: Right? Anyway, wow, that would be really interesting too. So much you could do. I feel like I want to pause life right here for a minute, fast-forward twenty years, and see what you're doing. I feel like you're going to do really amazing things in the world for so many reasons. I'm just really excited to watch how you end up harnessing your intellect and hard work and perspective and empathy, all of it combined to effect change.

Anna: That means the world to me, Zibby. I really appreciate that. Hopefully, we'll have more conversations. Twenty years from now, I'll have another [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Zibby: When you are whatever you want to be, whether you're the president or whatever -- do you have giant aspirations, or not really?

Anna: It's so crazy because in many ways, I'm living the dream that I've had for so long. I wanted to write books and travel and speak about them. The travel aspect is definitely being hindered by COVID right now, but that's okay. I'm getting to travel from my living room, which is a lot of fun. I really did just want to produce my writing. I do fiction and nonfiction. My next one is going to be a novel that I'm finishing up and hopefully will be able to pitch this year. Just talking to people about it and getting everybody excited about things that can be complicated and theory that people feel maybe is overwhelming and that pushes them out of the conversation but that actually brings them into a welcoming environment where we can sit and talk about things that are affecting us as a nation. We'll see. Maybe that turns into a TV show at some point. I don't know. I'm excited to see. It's fun. Hopefully, maybe having some more kids. I think that's a huge part of my journey as well. I don't know what the future holds, but I'm really enjoying the moment. This is where I've wanted to be for a long time. I cannot believe the book is now out.

Zibby: So exciting. Enjoy it. I didn't mean to not give this moment its due. I was just curious.

Anna: No, I appreciate that. I'm excited too to see what happens. What about you? Where do you want to be?

Zibby: I just want to keep doing more of what I'm doing. I want to just expand all the things I'm starting. I don't know. I just want to see where it all goes.

Anna: It's such a good position to be in where you're like, I love this. Let's just do more of this on bigger levels, bigger scales.

Zibby: If I could just replicate myself, that would be good. [laughter] Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Anna: Wow, yeah. For me, I always talk about the fact that it was not an easy journey, necessarily. I am young, but I also applied to PhD programs four times. Didn't really find where I wanted to be. Didn't get into all the programs I wanted to get into. It was really sad. Every time I got these rejection letters, I was like, but everyone told me that I had done what I needed to do to make it to the next step. I've done all the work. Then it just was perfect where I ended up and being at Cambridge and having the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and being able to compete my PhD within three years. I had become really obsessed with doing an American PhD program that was going to take me seven years and when I wasn’t getting into those programs, felt really dejected and felt like maybe I was not understanding what I was supposed to be doing with my life. Then now fast-forward to finally getting into a perfect program and having my book out. You just have to really push forward past those rejection letters. There's going to be so many of them. Even if you want to not necessarily -- self-publishing is a different route. If you want to work with an agent and you want to get a book deal, some agents aren't going to work with you. They're not even going to reply to your query letter.

You'll find the ones who believe in you. Then from there, the ball just keeps rolling. It's probably very cliché. I think everybody says this. It's so much easier said when you've accomplished the thing than when you're in the middle of the struggle. Definitely, from somebody who received a lot of rejection letters and who, at times, felt like maybe I wasn't doing what I really in my heart felt I was supposed to be doing, just to keep pushing, but also being understanding with yourself. Then with the novel that I'm hoping to pitch this year, I've been writing it for four years. It's a long, long process. I remember other writers telling me that at the beginning. I didn't really believe them. I was like, sure, you maybe had to wait that long, but I'm going to have this book out so much sooner. I'm on my sixth round of edits. It's getting closer and closer each time, but it is a journey. Just stick with it if you really love it. It's definitely worth it once you're able to show the world your work.

Zibby: Perfect. Great. Anna, thank you so much. Thanks for the coming on the show. Thanks for your amazing book and all of what you have to teach in so many different ways.

Anna: Thank you so much, Zibby. I really appreciate the time.

Zibby: Take care.

Anna: Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Dr. Harold Koplewicz, THE SCAFFOLD EFFECT

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

Dr. Harold Koplewicz: It's a pleasure, Zibby. Always a pleasure to be here.

Zibby: This is such a treat because you and I work so closely with the Child Mind Institute which you founded in 2009, and which you run amazingly, which helps everybody in the world with childhood mental illness. Do you mind talking just for two seconds about Child Mind Institute before we talk about your amazing book, The Scaffold Effect?

Harold: Sure. In 2009, we decided, a group of us, that we needed an independent nonprofit that was exclusively dedicated to children's mental health disorders. If you think about it, this country has done this before with other disorders. St. Jude's Children's Hospital, for over fifty years, has focused with laser precision on childhood cancer. While that's a very important thing, there's only 15,000 kids in the United States who have cancer. There are seventeen million who have a mental health disorder which means that everyone listening knows and loves one of these kids. It's one out of five. If it's not your child, then it's your niece and nephew or it's your best friend's child. We thought that we needed that independent nonprofit that would play with everyone and collaborate with everyone but only be focused, no matter what, on the mental health needs of kids first and foremost in the United States and now, frankly, globally.

When COVID hit, we had to close the doors to the Child Mind Institute's physical sites in California and New York. In forty-eight hours, we became a tele-mental-health product. We now seen over three hundred kids every day on screens and a few kids in person in both sites. More importantly, we recognized that parents were desperate for information during COVID on how to deal with distance learning, how to deal with kids' anxiety on their demoralization because they're losing so many things big and small. We produced over 160 Facebook Lives on parenting during COVID. Every day, we had one for a while in Spanish and in English. Now it's once a week. We started to realize that parents want authoritative, scientifically sound information. Because of that, we don't take money from the pharmaceutical industry, from liquor, from tobacco and guns so parents can trust childmind.org. It's turned out to be very rewarding because the need is there. Parents, more so than ever, are reaching for information that can make them better parents and make their kids have an easier time.

Zibby: It's so great because you have this amazing website, childmind.org, which has been such a resource for me. You can google anything. It's always Child Mind that has the right answers. Then of course, you do all of this work to combat the stigma of childhood mental illness, which is so important, and the research to find a biomarker.

Harold: It was really interesting with stigma. For years, we've run a campaign called #MyYoungerSelf. You get important, influential individuals who will discuss in a minute or two, their struggle as a kid with either ADHD, anxiety, depression, dyslexia. This year, we went with #WeThriveInside. We got forty remarkable movie stars, politicians, poets who were talking about, how were they managing their mental health while they had to stay inside? What was going inside their head? Believe it or not, Zibby, we got two hundred and fifty million eyeballs, not only four or five billion media impressions, but two hundred and fifty million people came to watch one of those videos. COVID has been a horrific experience for so many kids and so many parents and so many families. It also forced us to be innovative and recognize that there had to be a new way to get information out there to parents and to give kids hope that this too will pass.

Zibby: Amazing. It's amazing. I'm so honored to be a board member. I know I'm not doing my part enough, but it's not for lack of loyalty. [laughs]

Harold: Zibby, as we are about to talk about The Scaffold Effect, one of the most important things -- we talk about childcare -- is self-care. You amaze me because the word juggling and being a master jugglery -- I know you have four kids. I know you're married. I know you're a dedicated daughter and granddaughter and sister. On top of that, you're an entrepreneur. You're a philanthropist. You really not only talk the talk, you're walking the walk. The fact that you're doing this, I think it's perfect because you're one of the moms who does find time to read so that the other moms, and dads by the way, who can't read can get some wisdom from you. I've always been a big fan.

Zibby: You're so sweet.

Harold: That's why it's an honor for me, A, to have you on the board of the Child Mind Institute, but to spend time with you.

Zibby: That's just so nice. Yes, I have to say, and you will be proud of me, that when I read the whole section on self-care yesterday morning, I was like, I am not doing any of these things. I was imagining myself talking to you and you were saying -- here, I have to find the right section. You would be saying to me, are you doing this? Are you eating greens? Are you exercising? Are you sleeping? Are you eating well? I was thinking, I am not doing any of those things. I finally got myself on the Peloton yesterday because of your column. Here, self-care checklist. This is for parents, by the way. "Exercise, sleep, green food, affection, nature walks, playdates with friends." I'm never too old for a playdate. "Alone time, creative time, romantic time, laughter, music, hobbies, volunteering, meditation." I don't know any mom out there who is finding time for all these things. If you are finding time for every single thing on this list, call me.

Harold: Think of it as a Chinese menu. You can just have a few, or à la carte. You can pick from the top or the bottom. I have to tell you, every time I'm on an airplane and the flight attendant says, please put the mask on yourself before you put it on your kid, it just seems wrong. If, god forbid, I was on an airplane and the oxygen was missing, I would race to give it to one of my sons. It doesn't help. You give it to your son, and then you might not be able to put it on yourself because you'll be dizzy or you'll be unconscious. The idea that we have to take care of ourselves is not in our DNA, but first ourselves so we have the strength to take care of our kids, and more than one kid sometimes.

Zibby: This just goes to the whole theme of your book, which is so brilliant. I can't believe it hasn’t been thought of before as the perfect analogy, this whole notion of scaffolding and that, really, it's your child that's being built, and the blueprint and the foundation and everything. You are just around the outside. You're just trying to help as it grows. Then once it's fully formed, you can start taking down the scaffolding, which I would like to have taken down --

Harold: -- And if you're child's been paying attention, they’ll know when to put the scaffolding back.

Zibby: Yes, when they need it.

Harold: They go off to college and they're struggling with essay writing, they’ll go to the writing center to get some extra help. That's a scaffold. If they need a tutor in math, they will get one. It's not that you're hovering all time. You've built a confident, strong building. I think the one part that we have to always remember, though, is that as you're building that scaffold -- you use pillars, structure, and support and encouragement. Then you have planks. The important part is to recognize that the building sometimes has decided to become a ranch, not a skyscraper. We can't force that. Otherwise, you're all going to be very disappointed. It's not going to be a sturdy structure. I always think about the fact that my oldest son was great at science. I wanted him to be a doctor. Now, I never said it out loud, but it just made sense. You're good at science. You're good at math. I love being a doctor. Why wouldn't I want my kid to be a doctor? At a certain point, it became very clear, he actually said it to me in high school, he said, "I hate blood, Dad. I'll have to become a psychiatrist if I become a doctor. I don't really like kids, so I'll always be the wrong doctor Dr. Koplewicz." He then, at a certain point, decided that he loved being a DJ. So totally out of character because he's a socially reticent guy. Okay, we're building a split-level. That's what we're getting. He was a white Jewish DJ, Mark Ronson, DJ Cassidy, and DJ Josh K. He was really into it. It looked terrific. He was at Brown, which is a perfect match. He was going to go off to LA afterwards.

The summer between his junior and his senior year, he went and worked at Goldman Sachs, which didn't make any sense to me whatsoever. It was kind of a cultural mismatch. He was still DJing. He was producing a documentary called Pigeon Men about Irish convicts who competitively fly pigeons. The whole thing didn't make sense that he was going to Goldman. At six weeks, they gave him a review. They said to him, "By the way, you're a bad communicator. You're not enthusiastic. You're intellectually not curious." To his credit, he stood up and he said, "You know, I could be a better communicator. I'm biochemically not enthusiastic. I don't smile enough, but I'm always intellectually curious." He ripped apart the five deals. They said, "We're surprised." For the next four weeks, he was a maniac. He would go to work in a taxi screaming at himself in the back of the cab. "Smile! Smile!" Why? It didn't make any sense to me. Of course, at the end of the summer, he calls us and he says, "I have good news and bad news." I said, "What's the bad news?" "I have to tell you the good news. The good news is I got a job offer from Goldman Sachs. If I sign right away, I get ten thousand dollars." "What's the bad news?" "I got a job offer at Goldman Sachs." I said, "This seems like a cultural mismatch."

I can't get over the fact that he decided, no, private equity is what he wants to do. He's running a private equity firm today. It's an example, Zibby, of recognizing I'm not getting a skyscraper. I've gotten used to getting this split-level. Then he says, guess what? I'm building a ranch. If you want to be a good parent, if you want your kids to feel confident, you still support, you still structure, and you still give encouragement. I find it fascinating because he speaks a different language. He spoke a different language when he was a DJ. Now he's talks this finance talk where I'm nodding my head pretending I know what he's talking about. That's what a good scaffold does. It moves around. It doesn't say it's set in cement, you have to do this. It happens to all of us, by the way. I think if you remember the pillars, structure, support, encouragement -- then there are planks that really are very important. The one plank that I have so much trouble with is dispassion. There's part of me that feels like, what the hell are you doing? Snap out of it. That just doesn't work, too much crying, too much yelling, too much laughter. It has to be their building, not your building.

Zibby: I feel like you were hard on yourself when you told the whole story of your son going to camp and how you brought your own emotions about your separation and your unfortunate time at camp. Actually, I found you beating yourself up. I was like, I don't think you did anything wrong here, personally, by telling your kid how sad you were about it.

Harold: The only problem was that my wife, their mother, loved camp. From the time she was seven to the time she was fourteen, she couldn't wait. She actually swam in college and played tennis in college. She was a natural athlete. I wasn't. I was also separation anxious. That's what it was. I missed my mom and dad so desperately. It was hard to sleep. It was hard to concentrate. My kids were really good athletes, not because of me, because of the genes they inherited from their mother. When they went to camp and I came up there, Joshua was really struggling. He said, "I want to go home." When we walked into the woods, he said to me, "Dad, there's no one here to love me," I felt like, oh, my god. He knows how to throw a ball. He knows how serve in tennis, but he's got the separation anxiety. I literally got weepy. He then was comforting me. The fact that he then started comforting me was the part that is not dispassionate. It's all right to show your kid that you're upset, that you empathize, you have warmth, but it's not his job to say, "Dad, don't cry." It's my job to say, how are we going to work through this? How are we going to figure out your life at camp so it's easier, that it's more fun? There are times where you say, okay, we declare victory. You're coming home. Parenting, in my opinion, is the best thing you could ever do. I remember distinctly holding my first kid in the delivery room and thinking, this is amazing. All that oxytocin is in the air. Everyone's so euphoric. The baby actually looks like my father-in-law and my mother. It's this weird sensation. Then you realize that there's no book. There's no test. There's no license. Yet it can be the most rewarding experience. It truly changes you. Yes, getting married changes you, but all of a sudden, it's this one-way street where you realize you are the scaffold. They're not scaffolding you. You really have a terrific job in letting them be who they're supposed to be and just help them guide the building along.

Zibby: You also bring up this really important point which I think has not been articulated quite as well before about parent burnout and how to tell if you're -- you have all these great ways for parents to identify what's going on with their kids. You have how you know if it's a normal level of anxiety versus a problematic level of anxiety versus an anxiety disorder. Then you let us do it as parents too, and how to know if you're actually going through burnout. You have normal, problem, disorder. "Several times a day, you think, I'm a bad parent. That means you have parental burnout disorder." Oh, my gosh, I must have it. "You are exhausted." Well, I don't feel any resentment. "When you look at your child, you don't feel the same connection you once did. You feel extreme irritation and frustration as a parent without reason. You react with verbal or physical abuse --" no, of course not -- "to your child." Let's talk about parental burnout for a minute because with everybody at home with their kids for eleven months now...

Harold: Zibby, I didn't write the book thinking about COVID. You better than anyone know how long it takes to come up with an idea for a book, write the outline, get a publisher, write the book. Then it takes almost nine months for the publisher to publish the book. This wasn't what I was thinking about. Now since we're in the middle of COVID, more so than ever, I think everyone has to scaffold their kids, and they have to scaffold themselves. I think that most of us wake up, and it's Groundhog Day. Again? Again with the mask? The news is so disconcerting because we're going in the wrong direction. We're going in the right direction. We're running out of vaccine. It's really important to stay in the moment. If there was ever a time to help you prevent burnout, is to just worry about the moment. Breathe one breath in, one breath out. I think of the fact that I love to hike. I was hiking in Chile. Lots of young people are around me, ten, twenty years younger. Someone said to me, "Oh, my god, it's so much fun hiking with you because you're so determined and so gradual." I'm thinking, I'm trying to get one breath in and one breath out. [laughs] I'm walking slow because I'm barely breathing.

That's how we have to deal sometimes. I'm in the moment. I'm going to appreciate the flowers and the sounds of the birds. I'm going to get one breath in and one breath out. I will get through this. I will take breaks. I will step back and say, I need a second wind. I think that right now, to prevent parent burnout goes back to great childcare is self-care. There's so many easy ways to restart yourself. Can we get back into sleep hygiene? Can we try to get close to eight hours? Can we force ourselves to turn off everything at twelve o'clock and stay asleep until eight o'clock? Okay, seven o'clock? Or can we go to bed at eleven? Can we get on a routine? Routines work for kids, but they also work for us. Even if we just do a minute of mindfulness every day, just sit with our thoughts for sixty seconds and no matter how disturbing the thoughts are, don't judge them, that in itself will help. I think we also have to be kind to ourselves. My intern has just said to me, "Be careful. After COVID, there'll be three types of people, hugs, chunks, and drunks."

Zibby: That is so funny.

Harold: I've never had so much liquor brought to the house.

Zibby: Wait, say it again.

Harold: Hugs, chunks, and drunks. If I'm not careful, I'm going to be a drunken chunk. You can't, tomorrow, lose ten pounds. You can take a walk every day no matter what. If you can't take a walk, you can get on the elliptical. If you can't get on an elliptical, you can at least do some stretching. Simple, bite-size pieces. Just think about it. You're not only doing it for yourself, you're doing it so that you can be a better parent. If you don't want to just do it because you deserve it, you're doing it because without having strength, without having sleep, without eating well, without also having some fun -- this is the hard part of COVID. It's really hard to have fun, especially for extroverts. People like me, it's one thing talking to people on a screen, but it's so nice to have human contact. It's freezing cold here in the Northeast, so you're not going to be able to have a meal with someone. You're going to have to have a brisk walk. There's ways around this if you know what you need. If you take care of your own needs, then I really think, again, you'll have the energy to offer structure, support, and encouragement for your kids. This is hard. I don't want to minimize how challenging it is to be a very good parent.

Zibby: Can we talk for just two seconds about anxiety in the time of COVID? I know this isn't even in your book. I hope that I've made a good case for everybody to read The Scaffold Effect. The subtitle is Raising Resilient, Self-Reliant, and Secure Kids in an Age of Anxiety. I just want to talk a little more about anxiety. Typically, anxiety, and an anxiety disorder in particular, is when you have irrational levels of fear about something. That's part of it. There is actually something to be super afraid of. When my daughter says she's really worried and talks about it a lot, I'm like, I'm also really worried about it, but who knows because I also have so much anxiety I don't even know what to say. [laughs] There is actually a big deal. It's not like we're on a plane worried if it's going to crash and the odds are not really high and it's irrational. It is actually possible. It's happening to everybody. Especially in families like ours where we've lost people in the family like Kyle's mom and grandmother, we've seen it up close. How do you deal with a combination, basically, of anxiety of PTSD when things in the world are literally anxiety-provoking? Does that still mean you have anxiety? Is it abnormal?

Harold: I think it's normal, but how do you manage anxiety? Again, the scaffolding works even if you have an anxiety disorder. More so than ever, I think we need to scaffold ourselves and scaffold others. What do we say? We're wearing a mask. We wash our hands frequently. We do social distancing. We are doing everything possible to avoid getting this virus, but it's a very catchy virus. If that happens, things are better today than they were last March. The doctors are better at treating it. Even if we get it, we will be able to get a different type of treatment than we had before, but we're not going to get it. We're going to try every possible way but still live our lives in a new way. We're clearly not going to go to a big party. We're clearly going to only go to people that we know are following the same rules and regulations. It's normal to be scared. I'm uncomfortable also, but I'm getting used to this new normal. It reminds me, after 9/11, I was doing the Today Show a lot. Katie Couric was the host. We actually were friends. We were neighbors. I was doing a piece with her. I said, "The president's in charge. Nothing bad is going to happen. We learned from our mistakes." Katie actually said on the air, "How do you know?" I said, "Because we learned from our mistakes." I thought, is she going to say, "Chicken Little, the sky is falling"? Once we were off the air, Katie said to me -- her husband had passed away just a year before. She said, "I feel like Jay just died again. The kids are back in my bed. We're so regressed. I'm on TV four hours a day instead of two hours."

It can overwhelm you. It can distort your cognitions because you get so anxious you think to yourself, I'm going to wash my hands one more time. You have to balance it with saying, I'm going to do everything that I'm supposed to do to keep my kids safe and keep my husband safe and keep me safe and, if possible, my parents, but I'm going to live a different kind of life. I'm not going to indoor restaurants. If I do go into an indoor restaurant, I know there's a certain amount of risk and I'm willing to take it. I think that's what we have to do with our kids. Schools are struggling with this. They're in session. They're out of session. They're online. I think I told you that my wife teaches middle school students art. It is so challenging on a screen. I hear her. It sounds like a reality television show. The kid, Jason, has fallen off the screen. "Jason, where are you?" Then she's doing stretching. Why is there stretching in an art class? "Everyone stand up and stretch." She's not accepting, which I keep saying, everyone has to readjust their expectations for this year. It's like talking to a wall. No, she is going to still teach the kids perspective. They're going to make Greek masks. How are you getting the material to all the kids? She's writing progress reports. She actually will tell you, "I'm doing it because I think it's good for the kids to know that there's still a routine. We haven't given up yet." There is limitations. I think that's all right. That’ll make you less anxious if you think to yourself, this is not a year where I'm expecting everyone to get As. Some of us are driven to always do our best. That's part of the anxiety. This is one of those years where best is actually going to be different. Zibby, being a podcaster, this is a year for podcasts. This is a year for reading books. This is not the year to go to the theater or go to movie theaters or go to the ballet.

It's a different year. Managing that for our kids and modeling that for our kids is really very, very important and very hard because you don't want to tell them, don't worry. You have to say to them, what are you worried about? The other thing that I have to tell you that in The Scaffold Effect I would hope people will take away is there's one piece where we're talking about awareness. It's very interesting to tell kids and tell ourselves what is wrong. We're hardwired to fix things, particularly parents. If you could remember, can I catch my kid doing something good? Can I say three specific positive things to my child for every one critical thing? By the way, as a husband of forty years, it's not a bad thing to consider with your spouse. I forget it all the time. It's kind of like, where's the coffee? Where's this? Is no one going to iron my shirts? No, no one's going to iron your shirts. [laughs] It's this kind of rapid complaining, complaining, complaining. After a while, it's very hard to hear the good stuff when you say, god, you smell great or you look so beautiful. I think that if we consciously are aware that we have that negative tracking -- it's part of the things that we do all the time. We are looking to fix things, so we're always watching what the kid's doing wrong. Then the second thing we do is confirmation bias. We're watching only Fox. We're only watching MSNBC. Most importantly, we see certain children as bad and certain children as good. Then they can't get out of the box. We have to pull back. That's the whole concept of making a new blueprint. I think that's so important, Zibby. Otherwise, COVID is just going to make parenting extra hard. Scaffolding is going to make it somewhat easier. It gives you that structure, no pun intended, to try to make things easier for you on a day-to-day basis. It's a do-over. I love the idea that parents are allowed to say, I think that was a mistake, I'm taking a do-over. It's not written in ink. It's written in pencil. We're erase. We'll do it again.

Zibby: I love it. That's one of things that was so effective about this book. Instead of just giving theories or general ideas, you give such specific advice that is really actionable. I think that's something that we're all -- I speak on behalf of parents everywhere -- very grateful to receive in such a non-judgmental way. It's awesome. Thank you. Thank you for coming on this podcast. Thank you for this amazing resource, The Scaffold Effect, for parents everywhere. It is a must have on your bedside table, really awesome, particularly now. Congratulations on the book.

Harold: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you so much for having a conversation with me. It's always a pleasure.

Zibby: Now you see why I am often too busy for board meetings. [laughter] Because I do this all day long. No, I'm kidding. I'll be there next time. Bye.

Harold: Thank you.

Adam Grant, THINK AGAIN

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

Adam Grant: Thank you, Zibby. I'm thrilled to be here, but you should really reserve your enthusiasm for the end because we don't know how this is going to go.

Zibby: You're right. I might change my mind a hundred times. I'm going to rethink the whole thing as we go.

Adam: Maybe you should. In fact, maybe you shouldn't have invited me at all.

Zibby: I have been debating that. [laughter]

Adam: Maybe there are some things you shouldn't rethink.

Zibby: In case anyone is confused, we are joking like this because that is the topic of Adam's book, The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. I personally have found immense validation at the whole premise of this book being that it's okay to rethink because I literally rethink every decision I ever make to the distress of everyone around me because I am constantly changing plans. Everybody has sort of viewed this as a weakness. Now I'm going to view it as a strength.

Adam: I'm not sure I really meant to come and just validate all of your analysis paralysis and all the ways that you might drive yourself and other people crazy if you rethink everything. [laughter] I do worry, Zibby, that we live in a world where people are expected to stick to their convictions and we think that consistency is a sign of strength. Every time I hear people say that, I think, if you never change your mind, how are you ever learning or growing?

Zibby: It's so true. I was actually talking about the topic of your book with a friend of mine and what it was about. She was like, "I'm so glad someone said that because I always feel bad for politicians when they have a different belief about a certain topic ten years later. Why are they not allowed to change their mind? I change my mind on lots of things," she said.

Adam: I've been thinking a lot about that lately because we see so many headlines about flip-flopping. I do think there are times when we should be critical of that. If you're changing your mind just to please your tribe or if you haven't actually changed your mind but you're towing a party line, then we probably shouldn't give people credit for evolving. If people have reflected deeply on an issue, if they’ve looked at the evidence, if they’ve had conversations that led them to question some of their convictions, I think that's a sign of progress in many cases.

Zibby: Yes. I didn't mean to suggest flip-flopping to cater to the whims of popular vote would be a positive, but just that people are allowed to change their minds, as we do about lots of things in the course of daily life.

Adam: Bring it on.

Zibby: [laughs] Your book talked about so many different amazing things. One thing that I loved was when you talk about kids and when people ask them what they want to be when they grow up. I have been taking issue with this question a lot lately when people ask my kids. I'm thinking, not only did I not know for sure, although I wanted to be a writer, I've changed my career and my job a hundred times. Not a hundred times. A lot. I don't think it's even a fair question anymore. People don't know, necessarily, even when they're our age what they want to be. Things are constantly evolving. Tell me about that and your whole discussion of it in the book.

Adam: I think it's a great way to get kids trapped in plans that don't actually make any sense for them. I remember as a kid being asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? The only acceptable answer was something heroic. I had to say an astronaut or a filmmaker. I had no idea what I wanted to be. It never occurred to me until much later that I didn't have to define myself solely in terms of work. It's not an acceptable answer to say, I want to be a good dad, or for you to say, I want to be a good mom. It's also not acceptable to say, I want to be a person of integrity or generosity. This is such a peculiar American thing. If you go to Europe, people don't ask, what do you want to be? They don't even ask you, what do you do? when they meet you because it's considered rude. They'd rather talk about what you love to do. At some level, Zibby, I think it would be a lot kinder to kids if instead of saying, what do you want to be when you grow up? we asked them, what are all the different things you want to do? and allowed them to recognize that they can have many careers and many identities. What they think is exciting to them might change over time. Maybe even the job that they want doesn't exist yet.

Zibby: Totally. I mean, podcasting, what is that? What are we even doing right now? Zoom, podcasting?

Adam: This was not a job when we were kids.

Zibby: No. Would've saved me a lot of rethinking of what I wanted to do had I known [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Adam: You can talk to people, and that’s work? Really? Sign me up.

Zibby: I know. It's amazing. It's like a total joke. Speaking of kids, by the way, how great that, I think it was your daughter who came up with the cover idea with the match and the water. Awesome.

Adam: Yeah. Joanna's twelve. It was such an exciting moment for me because I knew we needed a cover that would get people to think again, but nothing we tried was working. I just happened to mention offhand one day that we were looking for a cover idea. Joanna says, "What if you had a match with water instead of fire?" It just clicked instantly. It really made me rethink where I get my ideas. My process was way too linear. I was like, we need an optical illusion, but a lot of them have been done before. They're clichéd. Then the new ones we tried just didn't work. They were too confusing. Joanna said, "Rethinking is about doing the opposite many times. Let me think about opposites." She said, "Water and fire." She didn't even know that the opening story was about firefighters. I just thought, this is perfect.

Zibby: I was going to ask if it was based on that and how perceptive she was. That was amazing.

Adam: Complete coincidence.

Zibby: Wow. I've gotten my kids involved in my anthology book covers by having them just pose, but yours are now the idea generators.

Adam: This is the next step for your kids.

Zibby: This is the next step, yes, a hundred percent. In your TED talk, you talked about how you're a pre-crastinator, which I loved. Tell me a little more about that.

Adam: Are you one too?

Zibby: I am one too, yes.

Adam: I had a hunch. I've always taken joy and pride in getting things done early. I was the kid in college who annoyed all my friends because I finished a draft of my thesis a few months in advance. When I have a deadline -- let me say this a little differently. When I'm excited about a project, I want to finish it as soon as possible because I have this image of how great it could be. Every minute I'm not working on it is a source of anxiety. It might not get done. It might be terrible. I know a lot of procrastinators who feel that anxiety at the last minute. I just feel it a few weeks or a few months ahead of schedule. Pre-crastinating is essentially feeling that urge to finish way ahead of schedule. Tell me about your pre-crastination.

Zibby: I make false deadlines to avoid the anxiety of running up against a deadline. Then as you said, all my anxiety spikes around my false deadline. I don't think I'm actually doing any good, so I felt relieved that there was now a term to describe this. Thank you.

Adam: I keep meeting people who say, look, I understand that it's probably worse to be an extreme procrastinator than it is to be pre-crastinator, but this isn't fun either. I'm always tricking myself into thinking that I have all this pressure on me to do something. It's actually taking some of the joy out of my work.

Zibby: Totally. Let's talk a little more about rethinking in general and why you wanted to write a whole book about it. Why is it so important that people know that it's not only okay, but actually beneficial to rethink and dig deep and poke holes in our own beliefs and come up with new theories? Why is this important?

Adam: There's so many reasons. The place I would start is to say that our first thoughts, our intuitions, are often not our best thoughts. There's some research on students taking tests showing that if they have a first instinct and then they change their answer, on average, they actually improve their scores. Yet when you tell students that, they still hesitate to rethink their answers because, I think in part, there's this regret that comes from saying, I had the right answer, and then I undid it and I made a big mistake. Whereas if you stuck to your first answer and you didn't rethink it, there's really nothing to second-guess. For so many of us, it's easy to prefer the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. Every time you question your own opinions or your own knowledge, you're saying, you know what, I might be living in an unpredictable world. I might lack some control over my life. I might be excluded from the tribe of people who sees the world a certain way. Yet we live in a rapidly changing world. As knowledge evolves, as facts change, if we don't update our thinking, it's pretty easy to get stuck in the past. I think we probably should put an expiration on a lot of the beliefs that we form.

Zibby: Is there a belief you have that you've changed lately?

Adam: I have so many. Where do you want to start?

Zibby: I don't know. Something about parenting.

Adam: I've rethought almost everything I used to believe about parenting. One of the big ones for me actually is a little bit of a twist on growth mindset. I was really heavily influenced, as I'm sure you and many others were too, by Carol Dweck's work and said, okay, we should praise effort, not ability, was the big thing that stuck with me.

Zibby: The power of yet. They can't do it yet.

Adam: Exactly, not yet. I haven't figured this out yet, such a key phrase. Yet then I read some research showing that in the realm of generosity, if you want to raise kids to be giving and caring, it's actually more effective to say you are a helper or you are a giver than to praise them for helping or giving. I've started to wonder if there's something about character that's different from achievement where when you say, you are a kind person, it actually starts to internalize it as part of their identity. Then the next time they have a chance to do something that shows compassion for someone else, they think, that's who I am. My wife Allison rolls her eyes at me every once in a while when she catches me saying, you're a giver, which just sounds really cheesy. I think the data are really interesting. Even as young as three, if you invite kids to be helpers instead of just to help, they're about twenty-five to thirty percent more likely to show up and help. Even that young, they want to earn the identity. That's something I've started to think differently about. What do you make of that?

Zibby: I love that. I think I'm going to use that to coerce them to do more chores by saying, you are the dishes helper tonight, versus, do the dishes. I'm going to try it.

Adam: I think there's potential there.

Zibby: I think there's a lot of room for growth.

Adam: I should say a caveat. Carol has some work showing that you still have to express disappointment when they don't earn that identity, though. When parents show disappointment and say, you know what, I know you're a helper, but you weren’t helpful today, that cultivates guilt. As Erma Bombeck put it best, guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.

Zibby: I love Erma Bombeck. I wish I could interview her.

Adam: Same.

Zibby: If anyone ever asked me that question, which no one has, but for the fictitious interviewer who wants to know who I would like to have dinner with who's not alive anymore, I would pick her.

Adam: That is such a great answer.

Zibby: Yes, to a nonexistent question. Thank you. I'm glad I lined that one up.

Adam: [laughs] People ask it all the time. In theory, you should always have an answer to that.

Zibby: Right. It's at the ready. Tell me a little bit about the power of listening because you write a lot about that in the book. I particularly loved this little illustration you have where it says, "Let me interrupt your expertise with my confidence," which is not only about listening, but also about the unbridled confidence.

Adam: I'm sorry. What were you saying? [laughter] I couldn't resist.

Zibby: I almost --

Adam: -- Close call.

Zibby: Glad I had coffee. I'm with it. I got it. Okay, yes, power of listening.

Adam: The power of listening. I was really profoundly affected by this work in counseling psychology on what's called motivational interviewing. It grew out of counselors who were doing work with people who were trying to overcome addictions. They found that preaching at people and prosecuting them for doing the wrong thing just didn't tend to work. It made people defensive. Suddenly, they realized you often are in a position where you can't motive someone else to change. What you could do, though, is help them find their own motivation to change. One of the best ways to do that is to do what we're doing right now, which is actually to interview them, to ask them questions about what changes they’ve considered and how they went so far and then reflect back to them, hold up a mirror and help them see, you know what, I have some reasons to stay the course, but I also have some reasons to consider changing my beliefs or my behaviors. Then if they express an interest in changing, you help them think through what their plan might be. This has really changed the way I have conversations with a lot of people, whether it's friends who are concerned about vaccines or it's students that I give advice to in office hours.

For so much of my life, I've felt like my job is to try to help people get closer to the truth and when I think I've already found the truth, okay, I need to enlighten you. It does such a disservice to their own freedom of choice and also their own expertise and experience. What I've tried to do now when a student comes into office hours, for example, and they ask me for advice on a tough career decision, I'll start by saying, tell me why you're here. Are you here because you just want validation for a decision that you've already made? Are you looking for someone to help you think through what the thought process should be? Do you want me to challenge some of your assumptions and help you rethink what might be a premature conviction? Once I understand that, I can just ask them a bunch of questions to say, what are your values? What are you trying to achieve in this career decision? Then once I understand that, look, it's your choice, but here's how I might think through the decision if I were you. Based on what I've heard, here are the criteria that seem to matter to you. I end up being much more helpful in those situations. I also learn a lot more because I find out that the reasons I had for preferring a different path are not necessarily their reasons.

Zibby: So interesting. I feel like you can apply that to couples counseling and other areas of times when people end up not listening to each other, especially, perhaps, if everybody's been home for almost a year because of worldwide pandemic and are having trouble getting along with the people they live with. Not that this is happening to me, but I'm just saying.

Adam: Hypothetically. It is interesting. Motivational interviewing's been applied in some of those areas. There's work on divorcing parents, for example, trying to reach a settlement about who takes the kids and what the schedule looks like. When the mediator uses this approach and says, I want to interview each of you about what your goals and your values and your intentions are, they're significantly more likely to actually reach an agreement. The work on listening, to me, is so interesting, that just sitting down with someone that you sometimes don't get along with and saying, hey, I realize I haven't always done a good job hearing you. I'd love to ask you some questions to better understand your viewpoint. I'm just going to listen for three, four, maybe five minutes. That is enough to create significant understanding between both people.

Zibby: It's so interesting. I've thought a lot about listening because I do this all day. I know I talk a lot too, but I really am listening. I listen to people. I hear them. I think about it all the time, and what it does just to have someone know that someone's listening. That alone, no matter what you say after, wow, somebody cares about what I have to say for half an hour. I really do care. I feel like it makes people so grateful for that simple act of just not being distracted and listening.

Adam: It's such a rare commodity, isn't it?

Zibby: I know. It's so simple.

Adam: It is. It's the most basic skill that we're supposed to have. You're a professional listener. It's surprising how rare it is for us to sit down with someone else and have a conversation where they're not just waiting for their turn to talk, but they're genuinely curious about who we are and how we got there. I'm reminded of some work I did studying astronauts. Their big challenge was to build trust. This is going to sound like a bad joke. It's not. There was an American, an Italian, and a Russian that were supposed to go to the International Space Station together. They didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things. There was some gender biases and some culture clashes. One of the things they did around a campfire one night during their training was they told their origin stories. They listened to each other talk about the defining moment when they realized that they wanted to go to outer space. All of a sudden, they realized, you know what, we have all these differences, but we also share a really uncommon commonality, something that only hundreds of people in human history can relate to. It was sort of a turning point for me because I realized everyone has an origin story. We've all had those defining moments that have shifted our ideas of who we want to be or how we want to lead our lives. How often have we actually shared those moments with the people that we interact with every day? I would say probably not often enough.

Zibby: Totally. Also, I find if you ask people even something simple about themselves when they're not expecting it, like how you met your spouse because I'm always totally curious about those relationship origin stories, you end up learning so much about the person in another context too. People just want to tell you. I really want to hear. It works out perfectly. Speaking of wanting to hear, tell me a little more about how you got to where you are and how, also, your professional diving experience somehow made its way into your story.

Adam: I'll start with diving. I fell in love with diving right before I started high school. It was probably a bad idea because I was afraid of heights. I was completely inflexible. I walked like Frankenstein. I had an incredible coach, Eric Best, who said, "I will not cut an athlete who wants to be here. I will invest as much time in coaching you as you put into the sport." He saw more potential in me than I saw in myself. My biggest hurdle in diving, aside from all the physical limitations, was I was just terrified of trying new dives. I would sit at the end of the board shaking waiting to -- I look back now and think, what was I doing? Why? I remember one practice in particular where I was supposed to do two and a half summersaults and a twist and dive in headfirst without getting lost. I just stood there shaking, frozen, for twenty, twenty-five minutes. Finally, Eric said, "Adam, are you going to do this dive one day? Are you ever going to do this dive?" I said, "Of course. I know this is a major goal of mine. It will help me reach some of the heights that I've really dreamed of for the last few years." He said, "Then what are you waiting for?" There were so many moments like that in my diving career that really helped me appreciate the importance of psychology. As I started coaching, and especially after I retired from diving, I found myself applying a lot of what I had learned from Eric with other divers and wanting to pay that forward. At some point, it clicked that if I became a psychologist, there was so much knowledge collecting dust in a bunch of boring academic journal articles that could actually help people live more meaningful lives and maybe have fewer regrets too. I think diving probably planted a lot of those early seeds.

Zibby: Wow. You did all the diving. You started coaching. You stumbled on psychology. You decided that was for you. Then what happened?

Adam: Then I was lucky to have a few professors who just transformed the way I saw the world. I took a social psychology class with Ellen Langer where every day I would come into class and I'd have an assumption shattered. Then I took an organizational psychology class with Richard Hackman who really turned upside my view of what it meant to have a motivating job. He got me to rethink what my career path might be. One of the things I hated most about the "What do you want to be when you grow up?" question was there were a lot of different things I wanted to do. I didn't see how they could fit into one career. As I listened to Richard talking about how he didn't know what he wanted to do, so he just got a job where he got to study all the jobs he found interesting -- he studied orchestra conductors when he wanted to be a musician. He studied airline cockpit crews when he wanted to be a pilot. He studied intelligence agencies and how to make their teams great when he wanted to be a spy. I thought, this is the perfect job. I'm going to try to study and improve other people's jobs. It really crystalized then.

Zibby: When did writing make its way into your life?

Adam: I've always loved writing. The first time I thought seriously about being a writer was the summer after freshman year of college when I started writing a novel. I was reading a lot of thrillers and mysteries and sci-fi books. I thought it would be fun to try to write one. Then I got busy and forgot about it. Then the next year, I read a bunch of books that really took psychology and made it mainstream. I started reading Malcom Gladwell. I read Csikszentmihalyi on flow. I read Cialdini on influence. I was mesmerized by the way that psychology came to life. I thought at some point in my career, maybe I want to do that. Then I forgot about it again and got very focused on doing research and teaching my classes. Then after I got tenure, I felt like I no longer had an excuse to only communicate to other professors and decided it was time to try reaching a broader audience.

Zibby: Then what was it like when Originals became such a hit?

Adam: It was sort of a shock. I had really taken the experience a little bit for granted. The short version of the story is, my first book, Give and Take, came out in 2013. I didn't expect anyone to read it. I promised my students that I was going to try to build a bridge from the ivory tower to main street. It got a lot more interest and attention than I expected. At some point during that process, I just started to take for granted that I was an author. Originals comes out. A friend calls me and says, "What are you doing to celebrate and mark the moment?" I said, "Nothing. I'm a writer. That's what we do. We write. I write books. This isn't a milestone." She said, "Really? Seriously? You poured more than a year of your life into this project. Shouldn't you do something to appreciate it?" After thinking about it for a little while, I realized I need to get better at getting in touch with my past self. What I ended up doing is thinking about, how excited would the me of five years ago have been if I had not only published a second book, but people actually read it? I would've been ecstatic. I've tried to keep that in mind every time I accomplish something that seems worthwhile or took a lot of effort, to say, I might not appreciate this now, but there's an old version of me that would've been overjoyed. I need to keep that in mind.

Zibby: The old version who was playing Nintendo so much that you got written up in a local paper. That version, perhaps? [laughs]

Adam: That version, yes, the dark side of Nintendo kid. Who would've thought, I guess I'm probably going to be a professional video gamer?

Zibby: Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Adam: Advice to aspiring authors, I think it's dangerous to take advice from people who don't know you at all, but I would say that the advice you give to other people is often the advice you need to take for yourself. If you're an aspiring writer, you probably know some other people who like to write, maybe even some people who write for a living. I'm sure they’ve come to you at some point asking for advice on what to write or how to overcome procrastination or how to improve their work. I would just say pay attention to the guidance that you give them and then apply it to your own writing.

Zibby: Love it. Adam, thank you. This was so much fun. Thank you for not making me rethink my decision to have you on my show and for spending the time with me today.

Adam: It was such a treat to be here, Zibby. Thank you for having me. I have to ask you, is there something you think I should rethink?

Zibby: Maybe how often you post about amazing podcasters. Maybe you should do that more often. [laughs]

Adam: Oh, I like it. I have not done that enough. That's a very good point.

Zibby: There you go.

Adam: I've been doing a whole bunch of fascinating interviews over the past week or two getting ready for book launch. I'm thinking about maybe doing a round-up post so that they're all in one place as opposed to saying, I'm going to do a one-off share of each episode. Then it's only going to reach a subset of an audience. Maybe I can amplify it by putting them all together. What do you think?

Zibby: I like that. I think that's great.

Adam: I'll run the experiment. We'll see how it goes.

Zibby: I'll be watching.

Adam: I really appreciate you having me. Thank you for also just doing so much homework. I can't believe you read the book and also watched the TED Talk. I hope it didn't ruin your day.

Zibby: It didn't at all. I found all of it super fascinating, truly.

Adam: Thank you. This was a pleasure.

Zibby: Take care. Bye.

Adam: You too. Buh-bye.

Laura Tremaine, SHARE YOUR STUFF. I'LL GO FIRST.

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Laura. I'm so excited to welcome you to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Laura Tremaine: I am so excited to be here, Zibby. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: As I was just saying before the podcast, I feel like I know you because of your amazing podcast and your new book, Share Your Stuff. I'll Go First.: 10 Questions to Take Your Friendships to the Next Level. The best part about this book was all the stuff that you shared, I think. I just wanted to know more and more about you. I was like, forget the questions. Tell me more about Laura. [laughs] Congratulations on the book.

Laura: Thank you very much. I'm super excited, my first book even though I've been writing for all this time. I feel like, finally, I get to have something I hold in my hands that's not just on the internet.

Zibby: That must feel amazing, right?

Laura: It feels amazing. It really does.

Zibby: Tell me about the inspiration for this book. What made you write it? Why did you package it up this way with questions for other people to ask? It has a little self-help component to it in the midst of the memoir, I would say. It's an assortment of bullets at the end and ten funny things or things you wouldn't know about you and then questions you can ask your friends. Tell me about the format choice.

Laura: It's funny because I always pictured and always wanted to write more traditional memoir or at least personal essay. I thought that was the more literary, sophisticated thing that a person should write. I did try to do that. It just felt forced. It felt like I was trying to be a sophisticated writer when actually, everything flowed a whole lot easier when I just did what I really do, which is just share my story and talk the same way that I would if I was talking to an audience on my podcast or on Instagram or something like that. When I changed up my mindset around it and stopped trying to be an essayist and decided to share the way that I am comfortable sharing, it just came out in this format. On my podcast, which is called "10 Things to Tell You," I ask a question every week. Then you're supposed to answer the question. They're often either introspective or you're supposed to take it to a friend and do it as a get-to-know-you conversation starter.

It made sense to structure the book that way. I came up with ten questions that, first of all, I actually wanted to answer, but also ten questions that I felt like come up a lot on my podcast or from my audience that they want to hear more about from me or from their friends or that they want to share about themselves. I came up with these ten questions -- some of them are deep; some of them are not so deep -- and just structured the stories that I wanted to tell within the format of those questions. Instead of trying to make this meaningful, thoughtful, essay, I really just wanted to tell you about this story that happened in my life. It just came out that way. It felt very natural. It felt much more natural. As I've gotten older, I've realized that what seems to flow is what you need to go with instead of trying to be this other thing. That's how I got here.

Zibby: That's amazing. The story that I've actually already retold now twice is when the scary van pulled up at the house when you were inside. You were so scared. The neighbor comes walking down the street. You throw yourself into his arms. Maybe you should tell the story, a synopsis better that I just did, and how that played into your anxiety, which you also talk about in a really impactful way throughout this book starting in the very beginning and coursing through from your hair-pulling to all these things that were manifestations of your anxiety. Then this one moment, I felt like, was the pinnacle of everything you've ever worried about, and the break-in, but we can talk about that after.

Laura: It was a huge moment in my life. I was a super anxious child. I write about that a lot, my childhood anxiety. I talk about that online. I pulled my hair out. I had bald spots. I had a lot of coping mechanisms. Growing up in the eighties in a tiny town in Oklahoma, there was no help to be had. I didn't see a therapist. I was just a little quirky kid. What it really was is I had a lot of anxiety and a lot of ways that that manifested. I was also a latchkey kid. Both of my parents worked. I was at home alone for hours every day after school starting in the second or third grade. We lived out in the country in the middle of nowhere. I would ride the bus home and then be home in the woods for hours. I was a little bit older when this story happened. I put it in the framework of the question. The chapter that this story falls in is, what are you afraid of? I feel like when you ask someone what they're afraid of, what their deepest fear is, who wants to talk about that? Why are we sharing about this? It seems like such a scary thing to talk about. For me, when I talk about things that I'm afraid of, it makes them less scary. The more that I can drag this dark thing into the light, it makes it less scary to me. It takes the power away from it. When I was a little kid and I was at home alone, the creepiest, most after-school special thing happened where a rusty white van pulled into the driveway where I was playing outside. We were out in the country. I just knew it deep inside my soul that there was something not right about it. Spoiler alert, nothing happened. I was not kidnapped, by the way.

Zibby: You're still here. You're here, so it all worked out okay.

Laura: It all worked out. It really did kick off, for an anxious child, the scary thing that happened that I just intuitively felt like was an evil thing. I guess we'll never know because, again, I wasn't kidnapped. It really did kick off a lot of things in me. I became really obsessed with true crime after that. I was young. I was pre-teen, probably, when that happened. Into my teenage years and into my college years, I got really into true crime before that was as popular as it is now. I really got very fearful. It was where my anxiety took a turn. Also, a deeper layer to that story that nothing ever actually happened in, but a deeper layer to that story was I told everyone around me that there was something evil about that van. Again, I was eleven, twelve. I'd been staying home for years. Things had happened. People had rang the doorbell. People had stopped by the house, strangers. I had never felt this kind of deep inner fear. It really bothered me when my parents or my siblings, no one believed me that there was something different about this situation. I felt like in that moment not only did I have a real twist and turn towards -- my fear took a real turn. Also, maybe that's the moment when I kind of became a self-advocate or something. I realized no one is going to believe me just on my word of it, just on my own intuition.

It really changed my life. After that, I stopped staying home alone. I would go to the library after school or other things. I had to make all those adjustments and all those changes myself. I had to be like, okay, if no one's going to believe me that I'm in danger out there in the woods, I'm going to have to take it on. I talked about that story in my family. It's sort of a family lore story. We still joke about it. No one in my family, still to this moment, believes that there was anything wrong with that van. For me, when I sat down to write my book, it was one of these primary stories of my life that I wanted to share. When I'm thinking of the ten stories I want to share in my first book, it was one of the major ones. I think that this happens to a lot of us in our childhood. We have this pivotal moment. Maybe it is a truly tragic moment or something really huge that you can point to. Maybe it's a nothing story like mine. A scary van pulled in. A scary van pulled out. That's the story, but it was a big thing for me. I wanted to share it also as a way to give the reader permission to take those kind of "nothing" stories and say, yeah, this has some weight for me. It doesn't matter if no one ever understands why, but this was a real moment for me.

Zibby: I think that's something just so relatable, when you have any sort of fear or doubt and you can't get people on your side about it or people minimizing the worry, which never helps. I'm so worried about -- oh, you'll be fine. You'll be fine. That makes it worse. That always makes it worse.

Laura: It was a really big deal to me that I wasn't believed. It also sort of set me on this path of listening to my intuition or not. No one used that kind of language with me back then. Really, it is a thing of, you have to trust yourself. If you sense that something is not right here, you have to believe that. You have to go with that.

Zibby: And PS, that's how you got all that time in the library. Perhaps that's why you even wrote this book and why we're on the Zoom together.

Laura: Thank you for connecting all the dots. Thank you. Thank you.

Zibby: Anytime. My pleasure. I also loved all your delving into your past relationships and how each chapter, not every chapter, but many chapters had little scattered Hansel and Gretel-type crumbs of your past relationships from the pastor to coercing your husband to marry you to your first boyfriend, all these broken hearts, everything. I felt like the way you unveiled your relationship history was very -- I almost felt voyeuristic, like, ooh. [laughs] I'm snooping here into her private life. I found it just so entertaining and awesome.

Laura: Thank you for saying that. I will say, that is something I'm, I don't want to say embarrassed about, but I have some vague vulnerabilities that I'm a forty-one-year-old woman, married happily, mom of two, and I am still writing about ex-boyfriends and things like that. I got to the end of the first draft and I was like, did I write too much about my exes? My publisher was like, "Maybe."

Zibby: Did you take some out? Is this the edited-down version?

Laura: Yes. [laughter]

Zibby: I don't know. I really like those parts. I feel like once we're all married and boring and all the rest, it's nice to hear about what the before was. It's similar to how I feel about meeting brothers and sisters of friends I made as grown-ups. Whereas when we're kids, you know everybody's family. It just gives a context to everything else. It gives more context to a person to hear about how they got where they are.

Laura: It does. The same as the white van story being a childhood story, in some ways, those early relationships, your first love or your first heartbreak or the person you almost married but didn't, all of those people, if you're lucky enough to have had such a trail, then they do matter to your life. One really bad heartbreak will probably affect how you interact in your next relationship or whatever. There is a connection to all of these things. After a certain age or after you've been married a certain length of time, you're not supposed to talk about that anymore. You're supposed to think that that is all dumb and young, immature stuff and doesn't really matter. That's just not true. Those relationships meant a lot to my life. They definitely affected the relationships after them, which then of course became a marriage. I don't think you should dwell on them. There's obviously an unhealthy, toxic place you can get to with fixating on past relationships. I have tons of girlfriends, and like you said, I could hear about their exes all day.

Zibby: Right? It's so juicy.

Laura: It's funny. It's interesting. Tell me all the ex stories.

Zibby: Totally. Plus, you include so much about what it feels like to be a transplant in LA and making that into your home and your whole blog, which of course is how you have turned this whole thing into the thing that it is. In fact, I want to hear more about that. You started the blog, Hollywood Housewife. Did I get that right, Hollywood Housewife?

Laura: That is right.

Zibby: By the way, do you know the author Helen Ellis? Do you know who she is? Have you read her work?

Laura: Is she the American Housewife?

Zibby: Yes. She wrote American Housewife and Southern Lady Code and has a new book coming out. I think she's from Kentucky but lives in New York City. I feel like you jumped off from different places and landed on different coasts, but you're both very funny and witty. If I were still doing all my events, I would do one with the two of you because I feel like you'd have such an interesting conversation. Maybe I could just introduce you. I feel like you would be friends.

Laura: I would love that. She has been in my to-read stack for ages because I also sort of felt like maybe we would have something in common. I haven't gotten to her yet, but I will. I think I will.

Zibby: I don't know why I'm plugging another author in the middle of our interview. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to connect you, and not in a negative way.

Laura: No, I love it. I love it.

Zibby: So Hollywood Housewife, you start the blog. How does the blog become the podcast, becomes the book? Tell me that whole story.

Laura: There are a lot of steps in between. I started the blog when my daughter was just a few months old. It was 2010. I'd been reading mommy blogs in the years that I was trying to get pregnant and then while I was pregnant. The internet, not the internet as a whole, but blogs and personal sharing and all of this kind of thing was still a real novelty. I loved it. I've always felt like I was a writer in my soul. This removed all the gatekeepers. There was no publishers. You could just share your stuff online. I was obsessed. I actually started the mommy blog because that's what people were doing. I didn't have a whole lot of interest in actually writing about motherhood. I still don't have a lot of interest in writing about motherhood in general, but that was sort of the avenue for me to be able to write immediately. I started that in 2010. I was able to build a little bit of an audience. A lot of the feedback that I got from people was that they loved reading blogs like I did. They loved reading my blog, but they would never share themselves. They just wanted to read other people's stuff. They wanted me to keep doing it, but they would never.

That's a very strange, backhanded compliment. I think they actually did mean it as a compliment. Actually, what they were saying was they would never be so tacky as to put themselves on the internet. I just kept receiving that message, some version of that message, over and over. Then when social media started, there was all this shame around people posting selfies. I just kept seeing this message of women who liked other people to share, but they could never share themselves. It wasn't because they were deeply insecure or anything. There was all these reasons, these cultural reasons. Maybe there was some insecurity. It felt passive-aggressive. It felt like people needed permission to share. They didn't necessarily want to be on a stage, but they did want to share themselves. They did want to have connection with other people. My time at Hollywood Housewife, writing that particular blog which was very family focused, as my kids got older and I also started to tire of the name and the branding, it didn't really fit. It sort of was meant to be tongue and cheek during the Real Housewives franchise, that boom. Then it started to be like, I'm sort of embarrassed to say this, that this is the name of my blog.

I started to phase that out and decided to close that actual blog. By that time, I was a cohost on a podcast called "Sorta Awesome" which I had kind of done as a favor to a friend, to be honest. I didn't know anything about podcasting, but I was like, fine, whatever. I just loved it. As you might have experienced, I ended up loving using my actual voice. I loved having the good conversations. I had been trying to make this writing go in a more serious way. I'd been trying to use the blog to do that. When I closed the blog and started talking is when I felt like I really found my voice. It then became so much easier for me to write because I didn't have all these hangs-ups about the perfect sentence structure or anything. I felt like when I was actually talking and I was getting a response, I found a groove. I took what I had learned during that mommy blogging time of just seeing how lonely women were on the internet -- they were turning to the internet. They were turning to blogs and then eventually social media to watch women share themselves, but they weren’t actually sharing their own selves. They didn't know how.

I hosted a few of these challenges to get people to share. What I learned -- this is still true to this very moment. If you give people an assignment, if you're like, we're all going to share this thing, we're going to share our favorite reading chair, we're going to share a selfie, we're going to share what we learned this month, whatever, give them any kind of assignment, people will share. They feel a permission when they say, well, I'm participating in this online challenge, so I can share this. Whereas they would never in a million, gillion years just say, hey everybody, this is my favorite reading chair. They just wouldn't do that. If they have this thing that they're participating in, they will do it. They want to do it. I loved that. I'm like, great, I will give you all the prompts. We will do all the prompts if you will share, if it will get you sharing, if it will get all of us sharing. I had done this challenge called 10 Things to Tell You. That's what I called the challenge. It was so successful and made me so happy that then I decided to make that a weekly thing and make that be a podcast because by then I had discovered that I loved podcasting. The podcast was called "10 Things to Tell You." The challenge online that I still do is 10 Things to Tell You. Then when I pitched the book, I pitched it as 10 Things to Tell You, but it became Share Your Stuff. I'll Go First. I like that title better.

Zibby: There you go, or so we're going to tell the publisher. [laughs]

Laura: That's right.

Zibby: I love the title. I would've loved the other title too. It's great. It just totally tells you what type of person the author is and the willingness to be open. Then that's when people want to be open back right away. You go first, we're in.

Laura: Exactly. I hope that it gives people permission. There is a tiny bit of a self-help element to it. I'm not an expert in that. I don't have any degree. I hold all that stuff lightly. I enjoy self-help books and stuff myself. I love them. I love to talk through what I'm learning and how I'm growing. That comes out in the book a lot when I'm trying to encourage people how they can think about this question or this prompt. I also just want to be really clear with everyone that this is no expertise. I'm a self-help hobbyist.

Zibby: When I mentioned self-help in the beginning, I didn't mean to scare anybody that this is a true expert. I hope that you didn't take it -- the stuff with genre these days, there's so much overlap. I feel like anything that can help somebody else I consider sort of self-help.

Laura: Totally. I'm all about self-help. I love all of that stuff. I think this is categorized as self-help or motivation or some kind of thing like that, but a lot of it's my personal story in the book.

Zibby: Personally, I find that a lot more compelling than more research. Research is really interesting as well, but not if you're trying to spark a conversation, perhaps. Do you have more writing aspirations? What's coming next? What's your game plan here? Do you have one?

Laura: I do. This is a two-book deal. I am starting a new book in 2021, sometime. I don't totally know the angle, but it will be in the same genre, I guess we'll say. I do love mixing this personal essay with other nonfiction elements. It's a funny hybrid that seems to have sprung up out of internet culture, speaking directly to the reader but then also sharing personal things. Then like I said, it feels comfortable for me. As I try to hone my writing skills on and on, I do hope that I'm maybe writing something different in ten years. It has been a process to not be embarrassed to be a blogger, to not be embarrassed to be a self-help hobbyist, to get where I am and own it and be like, this is actually my sweet spot this year and where I am right now. Maybe I'll be a serious writer in the future, or maybe this is what my talent is. That's been a process. I think that was a process all through my thirties and as we slide into my forties, to be like, actually, what is prestigious anymore? It's kind of just what connects with people.

Zibby: Only one book a year can win the National Book Award. Let someone else win that book award. In other words, there are authors who, that's their go-to, is that style of writing and the obsession with form and intricacy and sentence and all of that. Let them have that if that's their thing. That might come as easily to them as you speaking from the heart comes to you. Everyone can tell when someone's trying to be something that they're not. This is how I felt in business school. There are people there who are dying to get jobs in marketing. I was like, oh, marketing is a fallback for me. This is how I knew I didn't really want to do that. It's the same kind of thing. The people who really want to write literary fiction can write literary fiction. It doesn't have to be you. That's totally cool. That's my philosophy.

Laura: I'll love to read it.

Zibby: I get it.

Laura: I love to read some really highbrow things. I love it. I feel smart. I'm amazed that people can do it. It's taken me a long time to be like, but I'm not going to do it.

Zibby: That's okay. You wrote a whole book. It's a great book. It makes everybody who reads it want to be your friend. How cool is that?

Laura: I hope so, Zibby. Thank you for saying that. Let's hope so.

Zibby: I think so. Now that I've pinned you as some sort of an expert in some way, what advice do you have to aspiring authors, perhaps aside from don't try to -- well, that was my advice. Don't try to win the National Book Award on the first try. Anyway, go ahead. [laughs]

Laura: I think you should try different avenues to find your voice. I knew I was a writer, but when I was writing -- they say you're supposed to write every day to become a better writer and everything. I did that. I wrote every day on my blog for years and years. Of course, it was an amazing discipline. I did learn a lot in writing for an audience by doing that. I had to take a few years and do something else, which was podcasting, which was using my physical voice. Then when I came back to the actual page, I was a much stronger writer. I don't think that, for aspiring authors, you have to be scared of taking some time to do something else, to try painting, to try singing. You're not losing your writing muscles when you go to try to find yourself or try to find a way to express yourself with a different medium. If writing is really what you want to do, it will come back to you tenfold.

I really worried when I gave up my daily writing habit that I was sort of giving up that dream. It was the complete opposite. I don't want to go on a tangent here, but I tried to get a book deal with my blog and all of that kind of stuff. It didn't go anywhere. I didn't get it. When I closed all of that up and I thought that was the end of a chapter, it was like the opposite was true. I needed to go do this other thing for a couple of years. Then when I came back and I was like, I really want to be a writer, I was shocked at how much more easily it flowed then from just taking the years of the disciple, but then taking the time to do something else. I hope that that makes sense to an aspiring writer because I know that it's scary. I definitely did not know that in the moment. This is me in hindsight, but it's really true.

Zibby: I love that. I totally relate. That's awesome. And relate to how much fun podcasting is and all the benefits. It's a writing-adjacent activity in a way.

Laura: It is. You're still having to express yourself articulately. It is. It's a thing.

Zibby: I'm hoping being articulate is not a prerequisite every day because I'm struggling to string sentences together today, but in general, self-expression and all that. [laughs] Laura, thank you so much. Thanks again for this awesome book, Share Your Stuff. I'll Go First.: 10 Questions to Take Your Friendships to the Next Level. I'm just wishing you all the best. I'm so excited you came on my podcast.

Laura: Thank you. I loved it so much. I love that you're holding it. It makes me so happy. Actually, can I take a picture? Is this too weird?

Zibby: No, I love that.

Laura: I'm just going to look so meta. I'm doing it anyway. Ah, you're so cute! Thank you for having me. This was super fun.

Zibby: This was super fun.

Sara Faith Alterman, LET'S NEVER TALK ABOUT THIS AGAIN

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

Sara Faith Alterman: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: I do know the name of my podcast, I think. [laughs]

Sara: We're all scrambling day to day. I wouldn't worry about it. I'm going to say some crazy stuff. It's fine.

Zibby: Can you please tell listeners what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Sara: My book is called Let's Never Talk About This Again. It is about my relationship with my father who was a very strict, vanilla person who did not want us to see anything that was beyond G rated, and then, as it turns out, had a secret career writing sex books, and not like clinical textbooks, but very bawdy, 1970s borderline-porno books. I found those books when I was a little girl. They taught me about sex and all kinds of other stuff. It is about my relationship with my dad and trying to reconcile these two dads that I knew about from a young age. Then when he was in his mid-sixties, he developed Alzheimer's disease. We had never acknowledged these books at all. Suddenly, we were talking about them all the time. It is about that journey. [laughs]

Zibby: You do such a good job, by the way, of taking us with you. First, you introduce us to your family so well that I feel like I totally get your dad and you and the whole relationship with the puns and all the rest. Then you see you going and getting your Sesame Street cookbook. By the way, I would really like to see what a Snuffleupagus meatball is, or whatever it was that you were making. It sounds horrific, but I'll just leave that alone.

Sara: [Indiscernible/laughter] does not look good.

Zibby: You're finally tall enough to reach the secret stash of books. You talk about it in the book. Then at the end of the chapter, you're like, and then I never talked about it for twenty-five years. What? How is that possible? Tell me about that.

Sara: My parents had what we called the duck room because my mother had tricked it out with all kinds of duck paraphernalia for no reason. It wasn't cartoonish. It was tasteful ducks. We had wallpaper that had a mallard pattern on it. We had chairs that were upholstered in very New England-y, dainty duck patterns. Then we had a little phone shaped like a duck. There was no reason. We called it the duck room. We had these built-in bookshelves at the back of the room. They had waist-high, for an adult anyway, cabinets with a counter. Then you could climb up on top of them and look through the books. My brother and I would do that all the time because we kept some of our books there like my Sesame Street cookbook, as you mentioned, and some of my parents' stuff like their yearbooks from high school and my mom's novels, my dad's [distorted audio], just all friendly stuff. I couldn't reach the top shelf until I was probably eight or nine. One day when I realized I could reach the top shelf, I just was like, everything else is for me, let's see what's up here for me.

I found crammed into the corner, this stack of large-format paperbacks. I pulled them out thinking, clearly, this is fine. The first one had a cartoon cat on it that looked a lot like Garfield. I thought, oh, this is comic strips. I opened it up. It was called Games You Can Play with Your Pussy. Being a little girl, yeah, cat book, obviously. I opened it up. It was very clear very quickly that it wasn't really about cats, but I couldn't understand what I was missing. Then I kept looking through the stack. I found all these different sex manuals that were, again, not clinical. They were sort of joke-y. They had cartoons, so these big-breasted women sitting in men's laps and all kinds of panting, sweating people mashed up together. I did not understand what was going on. Then I found some that were more and more risqué. Once I started to see naked real people, I thought, this is something I'm not supposed to be looking at, definitely. They made me uncomfortable but also a little turned on, which is weird. Then I saw my dad's name as the author on these books. It was this moment where, again, I didn't quite know what I was looking at, but I knew it was weird. I put the books away.

Then I just was so uncomfortable bringing it up to my father that I never brought it up ever until he was in his sixties. That was partly because -- actually, it was entirely because my dad was so G rated. We were not allowed to even watch kissing scenes on TV. If he saw people kissing out in public, he would make a huge scene to push us out of the way or create some sort of distraction by dropping something. It was very cartoonish. I knew, oh, my god, if I tell my dad, one, that I was looking around in stuff that I wasn't supposed to look at, and two, that had to do with sex or even kissing in any way, I was going to get either in trouble or he was just going to freak out. I just put it aside and never mentioned it. We had that kind of relationship through my whole life. When I told my parents that I was pregnant with my son, I was very uncomfortable telling them because it was acknowledging that I was having sex. Even though I was thirty-four and married, I still was like, oh, god, I have to acknowledge that my husband and I have been putting our parts together in a way that made a baby. That sort of defines our relationship. I could talk about this forever.

Zibby: This is great. [laughter]

Sara: Ironically, I can talk about this forever.

Zibby: Great. It makes my role here very easy. I just get to hang out and watch.

Sara: You relax. Have coffee.

Zibby: I have a coffee right here. Thank you. I'm just going to settle in.

Sara: Cheers.

Zibby: Cheers. I was surprised at the time that you didn't tell your brother because it seemed like you guys were pretty close. You kept that aside. Did you debate telling him?

Sara: He was a couple years younger. He is a couple years younger than I am. When I found the books, I was very young. I just didn't think it was something that he could wrap his head around either. It wasn't just that I was uncomfortable talking about sex with my parents or kissing with my parents. It was just talking about it in general. Even when I was a teenager and got involved with the guy that I ultimately lost my virginity to and did all the firsts with, I couldn't articulate to him anything at all besides -- this is weird. I learned a lot of my sexy talk from my dad's book, which is really messed up not only because that's gross and terrible, but also, these books were written largely in the seventies. I was a teenager in the nineties. A sixteen-year-old girl talking like a porn-y woman in the seventies, it's a very bizarre, wrong way to talk in general. I just couldn't talk about sex without feeling uncomfortable in any way, and I think in part because I conflated it with my dad and with his books. I didn't bring it up to my brother probably for the same reasons I didn't bring it up to anyone. I just couldn't say sexy or sexual words without getting super uncomfortable. I still feel that way a little bit, which is funny because I'm in my forties.

Zibby: And you're talking about a book that has this all over the place. You wrote a whole book about it. It's coming out now. [laughs]

Sara: Warts and all. Warts is a weird thing to say when you're talking about sex. Not warts. All the things. I really struggled and still sort of struggle with talking about sex in a matter-of-fact way. I think that I always kind of joked about it because I was uncomfortable. Actually, that's a note I got again and again from my editor on this book. She’d be like, "There's too many puns. I can tell you're uncomfortable. You're writing like a fifty-year-old Jewish man. You got to pull back on the Borscht Belt-y stuff about sex a little bit." I would make innuendo or jokey jokes about penises or whatever. She was like, "We're all adults. You got to move past it."

Zibby: Editor as therapist, if you will.

Sara: I feel like they always are. Especially when you're writing memoir, you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable even when it's really uncomfortable. I would get on the phone with her. Of course, this is about the illness and death of my father. Obviously, for most people it is a really difficult topic. I would get in a zone where I would be writing about some of the harder scenes like when he was ill or when he was dying, which is not a spoiler because I think the second sentence of the whole book says that my father died. Hopefully, no one feels spoiled. I would call her and we would have to talk through the scenes. I would have to really be honest with her and vulnerable in a way that I hadn’t really been with anyone else, even my husband. She would listen. She would, to her credit, be very sympathetic but also give me wonderful advice on how to write about something painful, which I imagine is a really hard position to be in because you're trying to comfort someone but also critique them and emotionally cradle them through a difficult time but still focus them in a productive direction. I give her a ton of credit. This would’ve been a totally different book without her.

Zibby: What made you start writing memoir and personal essay, all that? When did you start doing all of that?

Sara: I have a background in sketch comedy and also in producing and storytelling shows. One of my jobs is I produce, or one of the producers, on a show called Mortified. It is a live stage show where adults read from their teenage journals to the great embarrassment of themselves and the delight of an audience. I have spent many years performing myself in the show but also working with people to go through their diaries to pull out the funniest and yet also most vulnerable parts to make a story. A lot of people who've heard of Mortified think that it's like an open mic, you just show up and read your diary, but it's actually really curated. We don't make anything up, but we want to make sure that what's coming out of the mouth of a performer is relatable to and funny for an audience. I've been doing that show for about twelve years as a producer. I've spent over a decade working with people to tell their own stories.

Zibby: You have read all those people's diaries, essentially?

Sara: Yeah, hundreds of diaries. It's amazing that people turn their diaries over to me. Again in that sort of same relationship that I have with my editor, Suzanne, it's a real relationship built on trust and compassion and belief that I'm not going to exploit them in some way. Being on the editorial side of that but also the performer side of that, it just felt natural to start telling my own story because I help other people tell their own stories. Actually, this book came from -- obviously, it came from my life, but the idea for the book originally was from my performing at a storytelling show in San Francisco that's called Bawdy Storytelling, B-A-W-D-Y. That is a sex storytelling show. I, being really uncomfortable talking about sex, especially in public, did not want to do this show, but I know the creator who's an amazing woman. Her name's Dixie De La Tour. She was trying to get me on the show for years. After my dad died, I just felt compelled to talk about him and talk his books to try and keep him alive a little bit. I did a show where I told an abridged version of this story. The audience really liked it, not to... They really liked it.

I ended up, from there, crafting a book proposal. I've written two other books in my early twenties. I have the same literary agent as I've had -- she's been my agent for almost twenty years at this point. I had talked to her about, "Hey, I'm thinking about this germ of a book idea. Here's the audio of a storytelling show that I did. What do you think?" She was like, "This is the one." It began as me trying to vomit out my feelings on stage, and then from there over the course of a couple years, I ended up shaping into a book. I feel like I am a talker when it comes to writing. I get asked about my writing process a lot. I don't know why I'm doing quotes. I get asked about my writing process a lot. [laughs] For me, it's really talking out loud. I will monologue alone in a room to get out what is in my head. I work a story out, out loud. Then sometimes I'll record it, but sometimes not. Only when it feels good coming out of my mouth, that's when I sit down and actually write it. Taking the story from the stage to the page made a lot of sense to me.

Zibby: Wow. I feel like I'm the exact opposite of you. I can't even get a coherent sentence out until I write it down first. The idea of, I'm just going to try to randomly talk and maybe that will lead to something I write, I have so much respect for you for being able to do it that way.

Sara: Thank you. As you can probably tell, I am a talker. I can just go and go and go. There's something about talking out loud that, for me, helps me find the cadence of a sentence. That's just how it worked out. I don't know. Anytime I've tried to really sit down and focus and write by sitting at the computer, it's just not successful for me. I have to either talk out loud or handwrite. When I was writing this book, I would take a notebook and go to a coffee shop. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is tech central. I'd go to a coffee shop. There would be everyone on their computers. Some tables would be dudes -- it’s always dudes -- talking about their startup and how they're going to get funding. I was just surrounded by technology. I would be writing on my notebook. I got a lot of strange looks because I probably looked like I was writing in a diary or something. That's how I have to do it. I don't know. It's what happened. I'm not sure why.

Zibby: That's great. Whatever works. It's art. This is an art form, so you do it however you do it. There's no right way or wrong way. I read your New York Times article about when you were pregnant with the ice cream and the Mr. Misty or whatever it was. Then you were pregnant as your father was descending rapidly into Alzheimer's and your belly was expanding out. It was such a powerful visual as both of you expand and contract at the same time. Tell me about that experience and what it was like having to cope with something so traumatic while going through something physically very traumatic in a way too.

Sara: It was traumatic, both things. I talk about this pretty candidly in the book, but I did not want to have children. It's not as though I had my son against my will. It was just more, it took a lot of convincing. I had my reasons for not wanting kids. My husband had his reasons for wanting kids. It was a big decision that we made. It happened really quickly. I had gone to my OB. I was thirty-four. She had said, "It's going to take a while. Usually, women in their mid to late thirties, it's a process. In a year or two when you're not pregnant, come back to me." I was like, yeah, I have a year or two. This is great. I got pregnant very quickly. It was upsetting. Some people would probably think that's a horrible thing to say, but it was upsetting. I wasn't ready. I was already coping with the emotional trauma of coming to terms with the fact that I was going to be a mom before I was ready and the physical trauma -- you have four children, you understand -- of your body just taking over and there's nothing that you can do and this little creature inside of you, this little vampire creature just sucking everything out of you. That was hard.

My father was diagnosed right around the time that I found out that I was pregnant. I was dealing with the trauma of accepting that I was going to be a mom, the trauma of accepting that my father was dying. It was a lot. I was growing this baby as my father was becoming more of a baby, which was profound in a way that I have a hard time articulating. That process was just trying to focus on the good and the beauty of both experiences. I tried really hard to focus on the beauty of growing a child and the beauty of having an expiration date on my relationship with my father and saying all the things that we never said and really treasuring our time together in a way that I don't think I would have. I always treasure my time with my parents, but it just felt like every moment, every conversation, I really need to be the best that I can because I don't know how much longer I'm going to have these conversations with my dad.

Zibby: How did your mom and your brother -- how did other people in your life respond to this book and even just this piece of your dad coming out?

Sara: My whole family has been on board since the beginning. There are memoirs in the world that are salacious and kind of tell all. I didn't want to write a salacious book. I also am really uncomfortable writing about someone without having their permission, especially my mom and my brother and my husband. They all gave me their permission ahead of time to even write the book. Then they were really instrumental in helping me recreate -- not recreate, but help me remember things that had happened. They all signed off on the book before I submitted it, especially my husband because so much of the book is about our developing relationship. We spent a lot of time talking about, remember when we went on this camping trip together? Remember the lead-up to our wedding? We would work together to make sure that I was remembering things correctly and also representing him in a way that he felt was accurate. I did that with my mom and brother as well. There were a couple things that people were uncomfortable with, and so I just took them out or I changed the way that I talk about them because I wanted everyone to be on board with this book. I don't think that I could be comfortable with myself if I had written something despite other people's opinions, despite my family's opinions. They were happy. My brother is a very -- what's the world I want to find? He is someone who is very stoic and does not really talk about feelings. He was in the military, so I'm sure that's part of it. I sent him the book. He texted me a thumbs up emoji, and that was it. [laughs] I guess I have his sign-off. My husband really loved it. My mom was really proud. She feels like it is an homage to my dad. That's it. What more could I want, honestly?

Zibby: It was one of the Time books of the year. That was awesome.

Sara: Thank you. I was totally floored and grateful, especially because this year so many incredible books came out. You've interviewed so many of the authors of the incredible books that came out this year. Plus, what a year. What a garbage year for so many reasons. I felt really grateful for having that exposure or having validation from a publication that I really respect.

Zibby: I wonder sometimes -- we all collectively spend so much time bashing 2020, myself included. Can't wait for 2021. We'll all remember it. I just wonder, in a decade -- obviously, you take some parts of memory with you. Others, you forget, like having a kid, that whole thing. [laughs] Of course, on a national scale, it’s been horrific. There have been horrific personal things. I just wonder looking back, will people say, wow, that's actually the year I ended up repairing these relationships with these people and reprioritizing my life? I don't know. I just wonder. Food for thought.

Sara: I completely agree with you. I sometimes feel a little guilty talking about silver linings that I have found because the year has been so difficult and painful for everybody, but to some people especially to a horrifying degree. I feel so bad for my older son because I'm constantly trying to find silver linings amid his existence, as I mentioned before. I've had so much time with him this year that I would not have had. Sometimes it's awful and stressful and difficult. Sometimes when I'm really getting down about this year, my husband will say, "Listen, Collin --" my oldest -- "is going to look back on this and remember he just gets to be with Mom and Dad all the time. He's going to be happy. I've really hung onto that and hung onto getting to know him and my youngest who's almost two, being around for him in a way that I was not around for my older one when he was the same age. I've been trying to hold onto that. Collin, my oldest, is also really asthmatic. Whenever he gets what would to other kids be a little cold, it's always emergency level. He's never had a little cold. It's always a horrible respiratory infection that lands us in the hospital. He has not been sick since February. It's the longest he has not been sick in his entire life. For me, COVID is extra scary because I have a little kid that is high risk. He hasn’t had anything. It’s been incredible. For me, those are the silver linings that I try to really hang onto. Being a mom, even though I was so reluctant to become one, has become a huge part of my identity. The thing that I am the proudest of is my relationship with my kids and that they seem to be turning out to not be sociopaths. [laughter] I hope to look back on 2020 and remember the good that came out of it for my family.

Zibby: Might as well. You referenced earlier when we were chatting that you have one writing project that you're working on. Otherwise, your stuff is sort of on hold. Can you talk at all about that writing project, or not really?

Sara: A little bit. I have been working on adapting my book for television for a couple years. I sold the option for the book at the same time as selling the book itself. I actually wrote a TV pilot and a book at the same time and was also pregnant with my youngest son. It was a very intense time. I can't talk too much about it. The book is in development for television. That's been a ride. It's been wild. I've been focusing all of my energy lately on that.

Zibby: That's really exciting. That's great.

Sara: Thank you. I'm excited. I also have started very tentatively to put together an outline for another book which I think is also going to be memoir about a time in my life that was bonkers. Right after undergrad, I moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which is a spring break destination. [laughs]

Zibby: I was there for my graduation [indiscernible/crosstalk] my whole college class. Anyway, go ahead.

Sara: So you'll understand why to me it's funny anyway that I moved to Myrtle Beach in an effort to really find myself and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Other people were going there to just get wasted and party. The book right now, the germ of an idea is a memoir about the search for finding yourself or the effort to find yourself in a place where people go to lose themselves. I have wild stories. It'll be personal and vulnerable, maybe not to the same degree that this book is. It was just a wild time in my life, but a different wildness than Myrtle Beach is for other people.

Zibby: It's like going on a yoga retreat to Daytona Beach or something. It's something that's so not what you imagine when you think of a place. That's great. I love it. That's awesome.

Sara: It was crazy. That's what I'm doing, and just mom-ing.

Zibby: I really love the way you write. Obviously, I can tell now you write the way you speak, which is even better, which I guess means I like the way you think in general, which sounds weird to say to somebody else. I feel like you could write a book about anything. You're just describing your point of view of experiences. I'm sure you'll have lots more books coming out of you over the years. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Sara: Yes. Two pieces of advices. The first piece is don't be afraid to be vulnerable, which I know I've talked about a lot already in this conversation. For me, it was a huge revelation to just lean into pieces of my life or pieces of my story that I didn't want to write about. I ultimately realized those are the pieces that are the most interesting or at least the most compelling. Don't back off of an idea or of a sentence or a story just because it makes you feel uncomfortable. Often, I think that's where the best stuff comes from. Also, don't be afraid to suck. I have gotten in my own way so many times just ripping a page out or deleting a bunch of stuff because I thought, oh, this is garbage. Then I get up and walk away. Because I would reread something that I wrote first draft and think, this is a piece of -- I'm not going to swear. This is a garbage sentence. I'm done. If I had just continued to erase things rather than put them out in the world, I don't think the book would be where it is. What am I saying? Don't be afraid to suck because your first draft, two drafts, five drafts are going to suck, but they are part of the process of getting to the draft that is good. I wrote this book -- I keep looking at it. That's why I'm looking down.

Zibby: Hold it up. Let me see it again. It's great.

Sara: Oh, my god, there's squirrels on my roof. Maybe you can hear them. [laughter] I probably wrote three full drafts of this book. The first draft was a totally different book. It felt different. There were different stories, the same characters, but a few extras. It was very dark and morose in a way that didn't feel good, but just felt like, this is what's coming out right now. It was awful. My editor was incredible at being shiny about her critique that it was terrible. I put this in the acknowledgements, but I made a lot of jokes about murder and death and trying to be funny, ha ha. She was like, "This is not good." Then the next draft wasn't great either, but they were steppingstones to getting to what the book is now. If I hadn’t accepted my sucky-ness, I don't think that I would've been able to polish stuff into the final version. Don't be afraid to be vulnerable. Don't be afraid to suck. Both of things will lead to greatness.

Zibby: Love it. Thank you. Thanks, Sara. This was such a fun conversation. Now I have to go back and watch your show and the stockpile from all your productions and everything. I'm really glad we connected.

Sara: Me too. Thanks so much for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Good luck with everything. Bye.

Gabrielle Korn, EVERYBODY (ELSE) IS PERFECT

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

Gabrielle Korn: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. I'm so excited to talk about Everybody Else Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes. Amazing cover. Love all these cross-outs. Instead of, I am perfect, everybody else is perfect. Fantastic. Congratulations on your book.

Gabrielle: Thank you.

Zibby: Can you tell listeners, what inspired you to write this memoir?

Gabrielle: I was the editor-in-chief of Nylon Media, a job that I got when I was twenty-eight. I was thrown into this world of having a high-profile position in a really visible industry. On the outside, my life looked really shiny and glamorous. The truth was that in order to reach that level of success so young, I totally sacrificed my personal life. I started feeling like I was surrounded by dualities. There was what my life looked like during the day. Then there was what happened when I went home, which was, I was a total mess. I was struggling with an eating disorder. I was dating people who didn't treat me well. I was just throwing my whole self into work and doing things like fighting for representation and body positivity and wasn't really listening to any of those messages myself. I realized that that was true for a lot of the women that I was working with. I started writing about this disconnect and the trap that women's media creates and how we had all become part of the machine even while we thought we were fighting against it.

Zibby: Wow, that was a great description. Love that. One of the pieces of the book that I found super interesting is, you wrote a lot about being a lesbian in this industry and how at times in your life -- I kind of wish you had put, and maybe in the final -- I'm sure you didn't. I kind of wanted a slide show of all your different looks because you often described how, at this point, your hair looked this way, and at this stage, you looked like this, and how now that you sort of can pass -- this is you, I'm not saying this -- as somebody who is straight, and so you wonder with some frequency when to bring it up. Is it weird to bring up in a work context? How do you handle that? You had this whole passage where you were ruminating on that, which I found super interesting. I was hoping you could talk a little about that, not to lead off with our first question talking about your sexuality. Let me just get right to it here with you, Gabrielle. I'm sorry. [laughs]

Gabrielle: No, it's important. I, especially when I was first starting out in media, was more often than not the only lesbian in the room. When I first came out, the first thing I did was cut off all my hair and within six months had just shaven my head entirely. It was really important to me at that point when I was nineteen to be visibly queer because it was such an important discovery and I didn't want to have to explain myself. Within a few years, it started to feel like a performance. It didn't feel natural. I had always been super feminine, at least aesthetically. I missed it. When I became a beauty editor, gradually, I slowly became more and more femme. What I lost was being read as queer. What I gained was being comfortable in my own skin. It eventually got to a point where I don't really care if people read me as gay are not. I know it'll come up. It's fine, but it used to make me feel really uncomfortable, especially in women's media which is, for lack of a better way to describe it, straight lady land. There I was feeling like I had a secret if I didn't tell people or just feeling like an outsider even though I was an insider. I just kept trying to change my exterior to make it feel more comfortable, but it was more an internal struggle.

Zibby: And so ironic that you were writing about beauty and a lot of your issues were about how you should get your inside out. I think this is something not just with sexuality, but with so much stuff that so many people deal with every day, whether it's some personality element or some part of your racial identity or any kind of thing that's inside because we all hold so much in our interior lives. How much do you want to broadcast that to the world? In what way are you supposed to do it? I don't know. I find it such an interesting question.

Gabrielle: Totally. I think with an identity that isn't read as neutral -- I think white heterosexuality is read as neutral. If you are anything but that, the choices that you make in how you appear to the world speaks volumes to what you think about yourself and what you think about your worth. It's a constant conversation for everybody to figure out. How vulnerable do I want to be? Do I want my body hair showing because I love having body hair, or do I not want it showing because I don't want to deal with people staring at me?

Zibby: And which people to let into that.

Gabrielle: Yeah, exactly.

Zibby: Some things, you can't necessarily hide, not that you would want to hide anything, but some things are just so obvious. Others, you get to -- I don't know. I had this idea. This sounds so ridiculous. There should be a line of clothing where you can put things like "struggling with ADHD" or "just lost my mother" or all these things that you may or may not want people to know, but they wouldn't know by looking at you. Then if they did know, they might have more compassion and empathy when they spoke to you as opposed to just making all sorts of assumptions based on maybe your blazer.

Gabrielle: Completely. I think as people grow up, we realize that absolutely every single person is struggling with something that you'll never know about. Realizing that allows you to have empathy for people and be kind even if it's hard. I think there's definitely a period of time that most of us go through when we don't realize that and we feel like we're the only person struggling and everybody is staring at us. It's just not true.

Zibby: Yeah. The T-shirt line would have to have lots of different options.

Gabrielle: Totally. Customizable.

Zibby: Also, so many of the issues that are hidden, it's the specific combination of those things that makes your own experience unique. I'm speaking in generalities. I'm sorry. When I read this part of your book, it just sparked this whole thought. Your eating disorder kind of feeds into this -- no pun intended. I'm sorry. That was terrible. I have not had enough sleep. That's why I can excuse myself and my bad puns today. Tell me about that part of your life and how it stands today. How did you get from there to here? How do you cope with having it all in the past? Go there.

Gabrielle: The thing about having an eating disorder is that until it's diagnosed, you don't know that it's an eating disorder. You just think that it's what you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to eat. I was really not aware of it for a really long time. Looking back on my life, I can remember different periods of time that I became really skinny because of things that were happening that were beyond my control. It probably started in middle school and came and went during high school and then came back right after I came out and was really struggling to figure out how to find my queer community, how to reimagine my place in the life I was already leading. The only representation I had access to was, of course, the women on The L Word who were rail thin and six feet tall. I was like, oh, that's what I'm supposed to look like, great, I can do that, and just kind of stopped eating. It came and went for the next ten years, I would say. It came back with a vengeance when I started climbing the ranks at Nylon. What was true was that the skinner and, to that end, blonder that I got, the more attention I got, the more money I got, the more I was noticed by straight style photographers. The correlation between my weight and my success was very, very real. I was chosen by my boss to be on camera and to be the brand face.

It really felt like if I wasn't this skinny, this wouldn't be happening for me. I'm not sure if that was untrue based on what I know about how the industry works and that particular generation of people who were making decisions for me. It just spiraled out of control during that period of time. What ended up happening was I got really sick. The person I was dating at the time who I was trying to break up with was basically like -- I had been in therapy. She was like, "You have to tell your therapist that you're not eating." I told my therapist. Then everything kind of fell into place after that. She convinced me that I needed to see a doctor. The doctor set me up with a nutritionist. I had this group of women that I really respected saying to me, "You have anorexia. You need to learn how to eat." I eventually just had to realize that it was outside of my control. I had lost the privilege of making decisions for my own body because I was doing a bad job.

I wrote about this in the book. The thing that really got to me was in analyzing my different levels, the doctor told me that my T3 was dangerously low. T3 is something you get from good fats like fish oils. It lines your brain. It helps the synapses connect. She was like, "This is affecting your thinking. It's going to take you two years from your recovery to fully heal from the damage you've done to your brain." I was like, my brain is the only thing that I believe in. Being smart is the thing that I've always had. If I lose that, I don't know who I am. It's not worth it to lose that. I committed myself to my recovery. It's an uphill battle. I think it's something that will always be with me. There's nothing like being quarantined for a year to really flair some things up. I also am in a loving, nurturing partnership. I'm in a better job situation. The things that felt like they triggered me just have been removed. What's really important to note about eating disorders is that they happen in context. People don't just catch anorexia. There are things in your life that make you feel like you have to be a certain way. Keeping that in mind, I've been able to really forgive myself for certain things. I wasn't doing these things in a vacuum. I was responding to things around me. If I can be aware of those things, then moving forward, it makes it a lot easier.

Zibby: First of all, thank you for being so open. I'm sorry for totally -- I feel like I have the right to pry, which I do not, just because I read your very private memoir. I feel like I get to continue the conversation that you had with me, but you didn't know you were having it with me.

Gabrielle: I'm glad you asked because it's important. There were moments when I felt like this is too personal. Oh, god, what have I done? I had some really great conversations with my agent about it. She was like, "This is not about you anymore. This is about the people who need to hear this." That makes it feel less scary. Since you're watching me over video, you can see that I'm someone who turns red when I'm nervous.

Zibby: I'm not trying to make you nervous. I hope I'm not making you nervous. I'm sorry.

Gabrielle: No, you're not. It's just vulnerable.

Zibby: I have so much respect for you for sharing with the world everything that you've gone through. I also feel like sometimes it's a little different when you write about it. I feel like I can pretty much write about anything because I'm just putting it on the computer in front of my own face. Then if somebody reads it and talks to me, even if it's something stupid like, "My son went to school and I feel sad," and then somebody sees me and is like, "Are you doing okay?" I'm like, oh, you know that I'm sad? [laughs] It's a nameless audience versus a face. Now here I am prying.

Gabrielle: No, it's great.

Zibby: I'm very interested in eating disorders personally. I studied them, majored in that in psychology in college, and worked at an eating disorder clinic. It's a personal interest of mine for various reasons. That's in part why I was interested. Actually, I don't know if you've seen Taylor Swift's new documentary. Have you watched that by any chance?

Gabrielle: I can't say I have. [laughter]

Zibby: I don't even know why I did. I have a teen daughter, among other children, who should've been watching it instead of me. My husband and I were like, "Hey, in the mood to watch a Taylor Swift documentary?" I was like, "I really want to watch it." In the documentary, she said the same thing as you, which is she didn't know she had an eating disorder either. She just thought that's what you were supposed to do. She was getting really famous and all this stuff. Everybody wanted her to be thin, she felt. She's like, "It was an eating disorder. I was not eating. It was an eating disorder." She had to then deal with it. Now she feels like people are just as judgmental with her for having recovered from it and not being as rail thin as she was before. Anyway, if you're super bored.

Gabrielle: Me and Taylor Swift have a lot in common. [laughter]

Zibby: It's one of those things. Actually, yes, we're all just people trying to make it through this crazy world. Even though she has performed in front of millions of people, she struggles with some of the same exact things. It's not so different in a way. Yes, we might not all have the same trappings. Off on my Taylor Swift tangent. Tell me a little bit about writing this book. I was saying how I felt writing, but maybe you didn't feel that way. How did you feel writing this book and putting your feelings out on the page like this? Was it really challenging, or was it something you felt just so needed to be said?

Gabrielle: It was both. I had moments where the writing came really easily and moments where it was really painful. I was like, I need to figure out how to do this, how to write about these things without retraumatizing myself, because you do have to sit in the memory of hard things and figure out, practically speaking, what is relevant and what's not relevant. How do I describe this thing? It's taking this objectivity to your trauma that I think is, in a way, really helping and in another way was awful. The hardest part was that for the majority of the book, I was working an insane job and had no time. Basically, the majority of what I wrote happened on the subway in my phone in my notes app because that was my forty-five minutes a day where someone wasn't asking me questions, hopefully. [laughs] It was hard to find time. Then when I had time, it was right after I left my job at Nylon and I had nothing but time. That was also hard because I had to write a new conclusion to the book. I think my feelings hadn’t fully settled about what had happened. I had to try to have empathy for my future self about how I would feel about the things that were so immediate. That was also really good because that kind of became my healing process too, was forcing myself to reach some sort of resolution and have a positive takeaway from things that ultimately didn't feel positive at all.

Zibby: Wow. That's the definition of learning and coping. This was your tool. We all get to hold it. What is your new job? You referenced that you have a new -- what's your new...?

Gabrielle: I am at Netflix. I joined the editorial and publishing team, which is kind of marketing. It's social media focused. I'm running the social media platform that is dedicated to the LGBT community.

Zibby: That's amazing.

Gabrielle: It's really, really fun. Social media was one eighth of what my job used to be, so it's really incredible to be able to just focus on it and know that I know how to do it and that’s just what I have to do. It's also really amazing that I didn't create this job. I wasn't the person who said we have to do representation. They already knew. They created the department. I'm just stepping into the role. It's so different.

Zibby: That's great. Do you have any social media tips? Anything I should do? I feel like you're the guru now on every level.

Gabrielle: I guess it depends on what your goal is. I think the most important tip for social media is to take break from it, honestly. [laughs] If you want to grow your platforms, you have to use all of the new tools as they're created. That's how the algorithm will prioritize you.

Zibby: I've heard that. Like the Reels and all that?

Gabrielle: Yeah. Personally, I cannot do Reels.

Zibby: I am not good at Reels.

Gabrielle: I just won't do it.

Zibby: I recorded myself walking through the house or something. I was like, this is not funny. Nobody wants to watch this at all, me cleaning up my kids' toys. This is so boring.

Gabrielle: It's such a specific kind of whimsical humor. I'm like, I'm tired. [laughs]

Zibby: I'm not good at it. Not that you're actually asking, but my goal is not so much to build my platform. It's to make it better. My Instagram is private. Maybe I shouldn't say this. I don't let that many people follow me because I put a lot of personal stuff out there. I was getting very nervous by some followers. I was like, I don't care if I have a zillion followers. That's not what I'm trying to do, at least for my personal page, but I would like to make it better and more engaging. I use it mostly to write. Like you were saying with your book, I have something painful happen and I put it -- I can't believe it's become this, but it's my real-time diary in a way even if it's a paragraph of how I'm feeling. I get so much immediate feedback. It's amazing. I have found it to be, not for my podcast page, but at least for my personal page, this untapped resource like a support group of sorts. Different people rise to the top of the bubble depending on what the issue is. That's interesting too.

Gabrielle: It sounds like you're using it in the exact way that you should be using it.

Zibby: Okay. Thank you. I'm glad. I can always do it better. I like to do everything better than I'm always doing it. I feel like you can relate to that.

Gabrielle: Of course. I'm familiar. [laughter]

Zibby: Just going to go out on a limb and say that. I'm sure you're super busy, but in terms of writing, where do you stand with writing in your life? How do you get that need met now?

Gabrielle: I have actually been doing a lot of writing this year, or in 2020. Just having reasonable work hours has been life changing. Not having a commute has been life changing. It's never been hard for me to think of things to write. It's been hard for me to find the time. I really committed myself this past year to filling my free time with writing instead of just thinking, oh, I should write that down. I started writing a novel.

Zibby: Ooh, that's exciting.

Gabrielle: Thank you. We'll see. It was the most fun I've ever had doing a thing. I'm hoping that it resonates with someone somewhere. In hindsight, I just wish that I had taken three weeks off from work to write Everybody Else Is Perfect. I could've saved myself so much sleep if I had just done that, but it really wasn't possible. I was so tied to my office. I'm really envious of people who are full-time writers who can just do that and live comfortably. I think it's a really hard thing to do. I like having my health insurance.

Zibby: Also, having heard from lots of full-time writers, the excess of time can be a constraint as well. It can be overwhelming when your day is cleared to write and be creative. The image of you writing on your phone in the subway is from another lifetime, the being packed together and holding up your phone and that whole thing, but you fit it in because you had to. It's like, give a busy person something to do... Like you said even still, when you had all day, that was also hard. I feel like some writers, although grateful, and I don't want to speak for other people, but it can be oppressive having that much time and having to produce something of high quality when so many other distractions are always around. It's always glass half full, I think.

Gabrielle: Totally. I think it's also important to be experiencing the world while you're writing about it. There is a really real reason why I didn't have any ideas for a book when I was twenty-two. That's because I hadn’t lived at all. If it weren’t for the experiences of the past ten years, I'm not sure if my perspective would be something that could fill a whole book. You have to have experiences to have something to say. I think that's also what makes it hard when you have nothing to do but write. It's just you. It's so solitary. You talking to yourself only gets you so far, at least for me.

Zibby: It's true, especially for nonfiction. That's completely true. Imagine how much more you'll have to say when you're my age. I'm forty-four. You're going to have so much more that's happened. Then I think of people who are seventy writing their stories. Every year, there's more material. Even something that I was thinking of doing before the pandemic -- I had left this half-finished book proposal. I looked at it recently. I was like, oh, because I hadn’t lived the last two parts of my book. Then I put them in. I was like, okay, now it’s done. What is your parting advice to aspiring authors? I know we've talked a lot about writing, but if you have any parting advice.

Gabrielle: The thing about writing is you have to just do it. I think within the aspiring, it's so easy to feel like if you just wish for it hard enough it'll happen. It's not going to happen like that. You have to just commit yourself to doing a lot of hard work and making time for it and putting yourself out there and pitching it.

Zibby: Yep, that's pretty true. That's great advice. Thank you. Thank you for your book, Everybody Else Is Perfect. Thank you for letting me talk to you -- I'm a total stranger -- about all these personal issues. Thank you for being brave enough to share them, and respectful and all that stuff. Thanks.

Gabrielle: Thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Zibby: You too. Take care.

Gabrielle: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Chelsea Clinton, SHE PERSISTED

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

Chelsea Clinton: Thank you so much, Zibby, for having me.

Zibby: Of course. It's my pleasure. You do so much stuff. I want to talk first about your amazing children's books and your new more middle grade, not even middle grade, slightly older kid version of your books. Why did you start writing children's books to begin with?

Chelsea: I wrote first for older kids. Then when I became a parent and so had very little kids in my life, I just was consuming so many kids' books and realized still how overwhelmingly male kids' books tend to be. We have male-gendered animals even, often more frequently. You'll have frogs named Sam or ducks named Peter. Both as a mom of a daughter and then a son and now we have a third son, I just wanted there to be more books centered on girls and women, written by female authors for my daughter and also for my son. I just see now, Zibby, how powerful this is. My son Aidan who's four, his favorite book is Counting on Katherine. He thinks Katherine Johnson was the smartest person ever because she skipped three grades and worked at NASA. While I certainly thought, oh, my gosh, we need more books about women, celebrating women, written by women for our daughters and our sons, I now see just in the little world of my family how powerful that really is and why that is so true.

Zibby: I love that. I heard you interviewed with Sarah Gelman of Amazon Books. She was on my podcast too. You were saying that not only are you excited for one of your kids to be imitating Simone Biles who was in your most recent book, She Persisted in Sports, which was awesome, but that your son was also emulating the behavior of one of the women athletes. How awesome was that? That's incredible.

Chelsea: It is very sweet, though. I do get a real kick, I have to say, out of my daughter Charlotte who's six who is tumbling around just at home now because obviously she's not going to gymnastics classes any longer in this pandemic moment. I think it's hard for little kids to do gymnastics on Zoom. Truly, god bless her PE teacher who I hear exhorting her to do jumping jacks. I hear the thumping, thumping, thumping of the jumping jacks or shimmying in place. She stills gets a lot of, thankfully, physical activity through school, but I think gymnastics would be hard. Since she can't go to gymnastics classes and I have no skills in that area, she'll still put on her little Simone Biles leotards and tumble around and be like, "Just like Simone!" I'm like, you got to start somewhere. [laughter]

Zibby: I have two girls who both love gymnastics. We have gone to the middle of New Jersey to watch some pre-Olympic something or other. We have Simone Biles stuff everywhere. Yes, I get it, especially in the Zoom life. We tried a lot of gymnastics on Zoom. I was like, no, someone's going to get hurt at this point.

Chelsea: I do, though, really have so much respect, admiration, awe for the teachers who are really able to engage especially our youngest learners and to help them still feel connected to their classmates and to their class and to the material that they're learning whether that is working on handwriting, because my daughter's in kindergarten, or learning about a historical figure or learning a song. They did yoga earlier this week. You could hear, because all the kids forget to mute their screens, all the kids stumbling and fumbling through the different poses. I'm incredibly grateful and also aware of how deeply privileged we are that our kids have reliable internet access and have their own screens to be able to have this experience and how unfortunately, that isn't true for so many kids in our country.

Zibby: Very true. I completely agree with you, especially as I watch a PE teacher emulate trying to swim as he's going across the screen. I'm like, this guy in his apartment, that's amazing. Thank you. No embarrassment, just all in. The kids love it. Yes, we should do a support group for moms with kindergarteners in Zoom school because it is not the most fun. Hopefully, we'll be near the end of this soon, god willing. Back to She Persisted in Sports even, just to talk about for a minute. In this book, as in all your She Persisted books, you have different profiles of, this time, athletes and different powerful quotes. This one was one of my favorites from Jean Driscoll. "A champion is someone who has fallen off the horse a dozen times and gotten back on the horse a dozen times. Successful people never give up." I feel like this is so fundamental to your whole message of She Persisted, and in every page, saying again, "She persisted. She persisted." What is it about reminding people how important it is to persist that is particularly meaningful to you? Why is this the message that you want to hammer home, especially for young readers?

Chelsea: I think that persistence is so central to our ability to really do anything in life that hopefully can give us meaning, whether that is learning a new skill -- I watch my daughter now. She's struggling to learn how to write her lowercase letters. She needs to have persistence to learn to do that. I think about in my own writing when I hit a writing block and I force myself to keep writing. Even if what I'm writing, Zibby, isn't great today, I know that I'm far more likely to be productive tomorrow because I didn't give up today. For me, I make myself write every day. Sometimes it's writing about my kids. Sometimes it's more academic writing. Sometimes it's the idea for my next kids' book. It truly, for me, has to be that routine. We can practice persistence. The more that we persist, the more we don't give up, the less likely we are to give up in the future. I think that is just such a fundamental life skill for all of us. It hopefully helps give us, then, the courage, the bravery to try new things because we know that we're going to have the grit and the fortitude to push through whether we're good at them or not, candidly, and also hopefully to enjoy the journey. I think persistence is one of the most important aspects of life. Certainly now as a parent, I'm trying to help model persistence for my kids, encourage them to persist. Admittedly, because I am their parent, sometimes I can force them to persist because I want them to build that muscle of persistence because I think what Jean Driscoll said is so true. I think about my grandmother, my mom's mom, who had this adage that life's not about what happens to you, it's about what you do with what happens to you, how you do just keep going, over, under, around, through whatever challenges may come.

Zibby: I love that. It's really the only choice sometimes. Let's go back to the fact that you said you write every day, which is super impressive especially given the kids and all the other things you do.

Chelsea: Sometimes it's only a couple of sentences. I'm like, oh, my god, it's the end of the day, I need to write something. For me, it's important. I know every writer has different approaches that work for them. I know some people religiously get up early and they have to write early in the day. I have a friend who only writes after his kids go to bed. I've said to him, "If someone's sick and you're up until eleven or twelve?" He's like, "No, I make myself write every night after the kids go to bed. It doesn't matter how late it is." I don't have that same kind of adherence to this time in my day, but I make myself write every day. Sometimes it really is just about my kids. Sometimes it's like, Aidan did something funny today or Jasper, who's our baby, learned a new word. He learned apple yesterday. He was excited, just kept pointing at the kitchen, our fruit bowl, being like, "Apple, apple!" He's like, I said it. Admittedly, that's what I wrote about last night.

Zibby: It sounds like maybe there's some sort of memoir you have potential notes for. Would you think of doing a memoir?

Chelsea: It's not anything I've thought about. I've been asked this before, but it's never anything I've given mental or emotional space to. Way in the future, if I thought my life story could be more than just interesting, if it could be useful to someone, to a young reader somewhere, I would think about it, but not now.

Zibby: I think almost everybody has something useful for somebody else to share from their life story. I feel like opening yourself up to making those connections, you don't have to have had anything truly outrageous happen in your life, but just the ability -- again, going back to persistence, I love reading memoirs of people who got through anything, whether it's a child's illness or an eating disorder, addiction, or a horrible tropical -- some event, tsunami. It's so inspiring.

Chelsea: That's true. Have you read Glennon Doyle's book? [Indiscernible] I thought was so beautifully written and also so powerful. Yes, I do think that is a good reminder that we certainly all do have something to share.

Zibby: Exactly. Tell me about the decision to then increase your series of the She Persisted books and to expand it to slightly older kids and the Harriet Tubman book which you wrote with Andrea Davis Pinkney who was also on this podcast. There you go.

Chelsea: Oh, my god, I love her. She wrote the book. I only had the privilege and the pleasure of helping to edit it. Really, this grew out of just continued questions from young readers, from kids themselves, from their parents, where they could go to learn more about these women. Especially the thirteen women in the first book have meant so much to me in my life. I grew up with some of these women in so far as my mother and my grandmother sharing their stories or teachers sharing their stories. I just feel like they nested into my heart. When we kept being asked, where could readers go? thankfully, my wonderful editor, Jill Santopolo, and I decided we would provide them a place to go and take the thirteen women in the first book and really flesh their stories out. I'm so thankful to the thirteen amazing women authors who really have done that. I'm excited to see my daughter now who is -- I started reading the Harriet Tubman book to her a few days ago. She just said, "Mom, I can read it." Last night, she's in bed and she's reading the Harriet Tubman book. It made my heart so proud and happy. I'm excited for her and as Aidan, my four-year-old's reading skills develop, for them to read these books and later for their little brother Jasper to do the same.

Zibby: No pressure on the early reading. It comes when it comes.

Chelsea: He's totally fine. He doesn't feel, thankfully, any pressure. He is very fundamentally his own person in a really fantastic and often hilarious way where I look at him and I'm like, how did I help create you? You're so curious in such wonderful ways. Your curiosity's taking you in so many fantastic directions. I feel this way about all of my kids. I can't wait to be along for the ride.

Zibby: I don't know if you feel the same way. I feel like the more kids I have, the more I'm like, I have nothing to do with who you are. You have appeared fully formed. I am just here to usher you along. You have these sixteen different qualities that I don't know where they came from, but they're pretty awesome. I'm just going to sit back and relax and watch you become yourself.

Chelsea: Totally. My son Jasper who's one just never stops moving. Gets up in the morning, moves. Takes a nap. Gets up from his nap, moves. Takes another nap. Gets up from his nap, moves. Goes to bed. I think now, to your recognition, Zibby, of having more kids, I'm like, your siblings didn't do that. They were active when they were toddlers, but they also would sit and stare out the window or bang on things. He just never stops moving. It's such a, I know, small thing, but just such a clear mark of, oh, you're already your own person.

Zibby: That is probably not going to stop as he gets older. I had one kid like that, and still moving all the time. It's so funny. I feel like I could just chat with you about having kids and New York and schools and Zoom and books and all this stuff. Yet you've had an overlay of this unique experience that I certainly haven't had and a lot of people have not, most people have not had, of being so in the public eye from a very young ago. I just wanted to know -- I feel like with parenthood and feeling judged, perhaps, by others, I'm on the street and I lose it with one of my kids, I'm like, oh, no, I hope nobody saw me just scream at her for doing X, Y, Z -- what it's like to feel that added layer that maybe people actually are watching you as opposed to my thinking that they are and probably could not care less.

Chelsea: Zibby, in some ways, because I've never known what it's like to not be in the public eye -- I definitely have had experiences where I have felt, in wonderful ways, more anonymous. Yet I've always known that people could be watching me. I certainly, at least before we were all walking around in masks -- although, I sometimes do get recognized even in a mask. I'm like, wow, you have really good eyesight. Especially when it's really cold in New York and I'm wearing a hat and a mask and people are like, "Chelsea?" I'm like, how do you know? Amazing. I think because I just have never really known what it's like to not be potentially scrutinized, I've never really wrestled with that. I will say, something that surprised me when I was pregnant with Charlotte, I had the experience of people coming up and offering me advice in a way that I had never really had before. I'd grown up with and I had been an adult with people coming up and offering me opinions about things one of my parents had said or done, or something I had or done, or something they thought that we may have said or done that we never did, and a range of emotions and things said and shared, generally positive, and often if negative, super negative.

I had never really experienced being on the receiving end of just a lot of advice. People would recognize me standing in line in Duane Reade or in the subway or walking in our local park or on a weekend, having coffee with a friend. People just come up and be like, "Oh, Chelsea, I hope you're considering this when you're giving birth. Here's some things you may want to think about." Most of it was lovely, but that was a new experience for me. Then I did have the experience of a few people coming up to me and saying, "Please don't vaccinate your child." I would say, "I will be vaccinating my child. They will get hep B in the hospital. They’ll stay on schedule thereafter." It was really my first personal interaction with the anti-vaccine movement, which unfortunately has gotten only stronger over COVID. That was a rambling answer and reflection to your question, Zibby. I didn't ever think, oh, my gosh, what if someone's watching? I think it's just so engrained in me to think somebody could be watching. The advice part was a new dynamic to navigate. Thankfully, most people were really offering quite positive pieces of advice from their own experiences of parenthood.

Zibby: I feel like pregnancy opens you up to anybody's advice, strangers or not, whether or not you're a public figure. People putting their hands on your belly and telling you what they should do, everybody feels like it's an open invitation. I can only imagine the compounding factor of people feeling like they know you and then actually sharing. Crazy. When you read, -- I see a trillion books behind you, as we were chatting about before, organized in a lovely, perfectly symmetrical way as opposed to the piles of mine falling behind me. What types of books do you like to read? As a mom, do you have time to read? How do you find the time?

Chelsea: It's such a timely question in some ways, Zibby. My husband and I, we are working from home like so many of us. Again, recognize that this is a privilege to be able to work from home. We took the week off between Christmas and New Years just to really be with our kids, disconnect from the world. We realized we had these truly column-high of magazines of basically The Economist, The New Yorker, and National Geographic. I was like, this is so strange. We have these big piles. Then I realized it's because we don't go anywhere. We used to read these magazines on the subway, in a car, on an airplane. We don't do any of that right now. I was like, why do we have basically a year's worth of all of these magazines? We got through just a tiny fraction of even what we wanted to read from them over that week. We just then were thinking about, wow, what and how we've read has really changed so much over this past year. Thankfully, I don't think that's true with our kids. We have always read a lot with our kids. We have always read this sacred time of reading with our kids before bed. We read a lot with our kids.

My daughter's obsessed with sharks. She's been obsessed with sharks for years. We have read so much about sharks. My son Aidan loves numbers, loves math, loves stories about mathematicians and the discovery of math and anything that -- I guess arguably, everything has math underlying it, but things that more obviously have math underlying it like the discovery of different planets or things in the solar system. It is true that so much of our free time while our kids are awake is reading time with our kids. Then for me, for pleasure, I love reading history. I also love detective books, especially in the last four years. I like books, admittedly, where the bad guy is caught and the mystery is solved and there are consequences for evil. I've always liked a good detective story, but I have read far more mysteries probably in the last four or five years because of everything else happening in the world than I would've read probably otherwise, in total candor. That's a little bit of what we like to read. Then I try to read my friends' books. My friend Sarah Lewis who's a professor at Harvard has a new book coming out on Carrie Mae Weems, the amazing American artist. That's an important third category too, not just supporting my friends, but wanting to know more about their work and how they’ve spent time over, often, the years that they’ve spent working on their books.

Zibby: That is so interesting about the mysteries and the root of -- it's like aspirational reading or something.

Chelsea: I have far too much respect for what actually happens in therapy to say that it's therapy, but it has some real therapeutic effect for me. There's a beginning, middle, and end. At least in the mysteries I read, they're not open-ended. The bad guy's caught. I really like reading books, admittedly, with women detectives. Often, it's the woman catching the bad guy or the bad gal. It's great to live in that world for the few hours that I do.

Zibby: Amazing. I almost never read detective stories. Now I'm going to think twice about that.

Chelsea: Let me know. I have so many detective stories and series. I love series, I have to say. I love the development of characters over many, many books. I will say I do like when my love of history and my love of detective converge with historical detective series. Now I've brattled on too much about this, Zibby.

Zibby: No, that's okay. [laughs] What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Chelsea: Write, truly. I've now been lucky enough to do some writing workshops with especially younger writers and kids who want to write for other kids. I know this may sound obvious. It may not sound particularly useful. At least for me though, it really is the practice of writing. I spend a lot of time editing. I spend so much time editing even my She Persisted books to try to get those two or three sentences right. Especially for the first She Persisted, I wrote a page or two for each woman. Then I would really work hard to get it down to a paragraph. Then the paragraph was still too long, and to just further condense. Some people may just spend a lot of time thinking about and spend maybe days trying to think about those perfect sentences, and the work goes on in their heads. For me, the work really goes on in a connective process of from my head to the page, back to my head, to the page, back to my head, to the page. I think the best advice that I can give is just to write.

Zibby: I feel like anytime you condense and have to go to a shorter word count, it always improves. It never gets worse cutting things down.

Chelsea: If I had had more time, I would've written a shorter letter. That's true any genre.

Zibby: That's awesome. Chelsea, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for this totally candid, fun conversation. I feel like I just had coffee with a girlfriend or something. I hope our paths cross again. This was great.

Chelsea: Me too. Thanks so much, Zibby, for having me.

Zibby: Thanks. Take care. Buh-bye.

Chelsea: Take care.

Charles Yu, THE ONLY LIVING GIRL ON EARTH

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

Charles Yu: Thanks, Zibby. I'm excited to be here.

Zibby: You sound it.

Charles: I'm sorry. I am [indiscernible/laughter].

Zibby: No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You don't have to sound it. I'm excited to talk to you because I just finished -- when was it? -- last month watching the National Book Awards on my laptop as I took it through the house as I put all my kids to bed and was watching and watching. Then I saw you on there winning and crying and being so excited. I was like, who's this guy? I've got to get to know him. Here we are. It was great. Congratulations.

Charles: Thank you.

Zibby: What was that experience like for you? Let's just jump in there.

Charles: It was really strange. I was not expecting at all to win. I literally didn't write anything down. Roxane Gay said the title of the book. My son who was sitting right next to me, he's eleven, he and I just started screaming at each other. We didn't know what to do. My wife was one chair over. She and I had been drinking champagne that my publisher had sent. "Congratulations. It's so exciting to be a finalist." I thought this was going to be a teachable moment. This is how you experience disappointment in front of your kids. Then I won. I was so excited that I forgot to thank my wife and kids and my parents. A lot of them, their stories and experiences inspired the book. I just felt gutted right away. It was this mix of one of the most exciting times in my life and then immediately, I literally blanked. It was awful.

Zibby: I'm sure they didn't hold it against you. Everybody understands, right?

Charles: I hope. I don't know. I hold it against myself.

Zibby: Maybe this speaks to your bigger character that you could go and win this big accolade and yet find the negative in it. I don't know.

Charles: Maybe, or maybe I should just write things down.

Zibby: Next time, you'll be prepared to win, setting expectations. First of all, I had not even been familiar with Scribd until I read your story. Now I am obsessed. My kids are using it. I'm using it. It is the greatest app for all sorts of books and stories including Scribd Originals which your new story, The Only Living Girl in the World, is featured on. How did you link up with Scribd? Then I want you to tell listeners, if you don't mind, a little about that story.

Charles: Definitely. I had known Amy Grace Loyd for years. She had acquired a story of mine and helped me edit it for Playboy, actually, about a decade ago. We had always stayed in touch. She came to me late -- not late -- actually, early about a year ago saying, "Do you have anything that might be longish and enough that it could stand alone? Not a short story, but something that someone might want to read for a decent amount of time." One, I thought that's a cool idea. How often do I just want half an hour or forty-five minutes' worth of reading? I can't quite get into a whole book right now. I've got kids, so I'm like, how do I find that thing? I thought that was cool. I had this story that I'd been working on for years that needed some polishing up. Amy and I worked on it together over the course of several months. Scribd is publishing it, which is really exciting to me.

Zibby: That's so neat. Tell me about this vision of yours as Earth in the year 3021 or so where the gift shop is sort of all that's left, the remnants of an amusement park that was a failure. Now all you have is the best part of the amusement park, theoretically, the gift shop, Earth's Gift Shop or whatever. There was a lot of debate of what to call it in the story. Where did this whole vision come from, this abandoned Earth because of climate change and all the rest?

Charles: It was inspired by a story of Ray Bradbury's, There Will Come Soft Rains. The story is basically told through the point of view of an automated house. When he wrote it, it was far sci-fi. Now it's almost reality, completely smart home. All that survives are the gadgets. It's just such an interesting lens through which you can look at who we are and what we leave behind. Really, to me, it was this form of archeology or anthropology. I was invited years ago to write in a tribute anthology to Bradbury. I took that story as my inspiration and thought of, what if all that survived of human civilization was our souvenirs and our tchotchkes and stuff you'd find in a gas station gift shop? That's where the seed of the story came from. I imagined Jane, this young woman whose job it is to basically sit there all day and wait for the occasional tourist in their spaceship to fly by and try to hawk the keychains. Come to Earth. It's really fun. That's her thing.

Zibby: I like that you found a way to get some mother-daughter drama right in the beginning there of pushing the limits and fighting and real-life dialogue, except of course the limits are outer space instead of going down to god knows where.

Charles: Jane's mom works off planet. You're right. It's the same mother-daughter dynamic. We've got a thirteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old son, so I'm witness every day to many mother-daughter conversations.

Zibby: Quarantining with teens, unique challenge. Very interesting time. Another planet sometimes might sound nice. How did you get into writing to begin with? When did you know you were a writer? How did you get started?

Charles: Going way back, I started writing poems when I was a kid. We took a class trip to Yosemite. I don't know what got into me, but I just started writing these little things down. I called them poems. I don't really know what they were. My teacher wanted to encourage them, so he sent them to the local paper. The local paper printed them saying, look, this eight-year-old kid wrote some poems. I guess that got me the publication bug. That was pretty exciting. I didn't actually start writing again until college. I wrote poetry at Berkeley. It was my minor. I was a biology major. I was supposed to be a doctor, but that didn't work out. Instead, I went to law school. Sometime in law school I realized, oh, I miss fiction. I started reading again. Right after I graduated when I started practicing law, I also at the same time, I think subconsciously, wanted a creative outlet. I'm going into this law firm. It's going to crush my soul or whatever. I thought, I need to have some outlet, so I started writing these really weird, tiny, short stories in the margins of notepads. I'd scribble an email to myself and shoot it off and just say, later tonight when I have time at eleven o'clock, I'll come back to this. I started writing those short stories right at the same time I was practicing law.

Zibby: Then it just took off from there?

Charles: It was a very slow build.

Zibby: Do you still practice law on the side, or no?

Charles: I stopped a few years ago because I started writing for TV. That became the new day job. For more than a decade, I was writing stories. I started to get them published. It turned into a first short story collection for which I was paid less than I made as a lawyer in two weeks or something. It was very clear from the beginning this is not going to be a replacement for your job. This is something I love to do. In a lot of ways, that was liberating to not think of writing as my livelihood. I kept publishing books and eventually started to, I think especially because I live in Los Angeles, or I did at the time, I started to meet people in TV and film. Through one of those people, an executive at HBO, I got in the mix for this TV job on HBO. I got the job. I don't know how. That's when I switched about six years ago.

Zibby: Tell me about the TV shows you've been involved in. I know there have been many.

Charles: The first show I was on was Westworld, which is this big sci-fi -- I guess it's safe to say it's dystopian. It's based on the 1973 Michael Crichton film of the same name. It's this futuristic theme park where rich people can go and basically pretend to be in the wild west, whatever narrative suits them. The park is incredibly advanced. These really lifelike hosts that are powered by artificial intelligence, they help you live out [audio cuts outs]. On top of that, though, there's this meta element because the show is not just about the people enjoying the park, but in many ways, it's more about the people who work at the park and are creating these robots and also telling the stories. It was meta science fiction. I literally thought I created a skill set of writing meta science fiction that nobody would ever want. It turns out somebody wanted it, so I got that job. I think it also helped that one of my bosses, Lisa Joy, was a former lawyer. Maybe she had some sympathy for me. [laughter] I worked on that. I worked on a show for AMC called Lodge 49 which is no longer. It was this great, great world of characters and atmosphere created by a fiction writer named Jim Gavin. He's just an incredibly talented writer. He made this show along with Peter Ocko who's an experienced showrunner. I got to work on that for a bit and see a very different kind of vibe.

I've worked on Legion for FX which is Noah Hawley's show. I worked on a really, really fun show on Facebook Watch starring Elizabeth Olsen called Sorry for Your Loss. It's about a young widow who is basically dealing with the aftermath of losing her husband at the age of thirty. It's incredible performances and created by this writer named Kit Steinkellner who has already done many things and I know will go on to write so many more things because she's incredibly talented. I worked for Alan Ball on a show called Here and Now on HBO which lasted one season, was a really fun groups of writers. Getting to meet and work with Alan Ball was amazing because I loved Six Feet Under. That was one of the things that made me want to write for TV, actually. Then to actually meet him and then have him be my boss, it's crazy. I don't know why I gave you my whole resume. That was too much, probably.

Zibby: It wasn't. I'm interested. I had read about it. I had read about you and your work and everything, but it's always really neat to hear from the person who's been doing all this stuff and how it tracked in your own life. Don't worry about it. That was great. My understanding of TV writing is a lot of it happens in writers' rooms. You have to be very collaborative, whereas short story writing, perhaps, or novels and fiction is much more of a solitary pursuit. Do you have a preference? Do you like having the mix of both in your life?

Charles: If I had to choose only one, it would be solitary. I do enjoy the mix. I think the two things are feeding each other. I like being around people, especially in an environment where there's free food. [laughter] It's really fun. It's not something that most short story writers or novelists experience. Some people call it like a team sport. It sort of feels like soccer or hockey. You pass the ball. You don't know exactly where it's going to lead. Then sometimes you'll see the conversation develop into something that you couldn't have anticipated just a few minutes ago. Just also getting to see how other writers' minds work in a really deep way, other than reading The Art of Fiction interviews in The Paris Review or places like that where they go really deep, you're like, this helps me understand how this person thinks and works. It's really hard to get that kind of insight in someone else's method. Seeing it firsthand is pretty fun.

Zibby: What do you have coming up next? What are you working on after this?

Charles: I'm adapting Interior Chinatown for Hulu, so hopefully I can figure out how to do that. I'd like to write another book. This one took seven years. I'm not trying to rush it at all. I'll definitely be writing more short stories. Working on this with Amy and Scribd is just so fun because, one, it's nice to finish things and have them be out in the world. I love the short story. It's how I started to write. There's something about it that is, if anything, it's more demanding and it's more pure than a novel. You can actually imagine, not to say writing a flawless short story. That's not how I would gage it. It's not as if there's flawed and flawless stories, but you can actually imagine the feeling of pulling off what you're trying to do in a finite amount of time rather than a novel which is sort of like, eventually someone's just going to rip it out of your hands or you're going to send it in in an act of exhaustion. I'm hoping to write more short stories soon.

Zibby: It's great for the author to feel that sense of accomplishment, and also for the reader. Like you mentioned earlier, it's not as big an undertaking. Yet you can still get a taste and then see. When I was on Scribd, there's so many authors who have written these original works for them, even authors I've had on like Elizabeth Berg. I was like, oh, my gosh, I have to read her story. I have to read this and that. It's not such a big commitment. I think it'll be good for other people who aren't as familiar with people's work to get a little sampler, like trailers for books or something. Anyway, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Charles: I don't know if it's your website or the podcast website, but I loved what you were saying about listening. I'm botching the quote. What is it exactly so I don't...? [laughs]

Zibby: You mean when I said something like I believe in the power of listening and hearing other people's stories and all of that good stuff? I don't even remember what I said. I can look it up.

Charles: I'm sorry.

Zibby: No, I'm glad you read my website. That's so nice of you. What did I say? I know I said I believe in the power of stories. I said, "I believe in the power of stories. I believe in the healing power of a good conversation. I believe that listening is far more important than speaking. I believe that the right book can change everything." Is that what you meant?

Charles: Yeah, all of that. I can't really do better than that. I think the part that's so true is listening rather than speaking, paying attention. That means usually reading and listening rather than talking. Here I am talking and saying that, but I think it's so true. I read so many short story collections when I started to write. Just getting other people's voices in there, in my head, the feeling it gives you, reading people like Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver, or George Saunders, the way it lit me up and said, I could never do this, but I want to try to make someone else feel this way, that sense of wanting to connect with people and always using that as a kind of North Star.

Zibby: Excellent. It's always nice to have my advice quoted back to me. [laughs] That's a first. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on my podcast. Thanks for letting me enjoy, start to finish, a short story and give me a feeling of accomplishment this week in particular. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

Charles: Thanks, Zibby. It was nice to speak with you.

Zibby: Bye.

Charles: Bye. Thank you.

Brittany Barnett, A KNOCK AT MIDNIGHT

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

Brittany K. Barnett: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: I am embarrassed to say that I did not know about your book until it won the Amazon number-one book of the year. I don't know how that's possible. I must be under a rock. I try to be on top of all the great books. Until then, I hadn’t even heard about your book. I am so glad I did because it is so good. A Knock at Midnight, oh, my gosh, amazing. I have a bazillion questions for you. First, I just have to say I am so impressed by you, by not just your writing, but everything that happened in this book, your work ethic, your determination. You're just amazing. You're a total rockstar. I am delighted to talk to you today.

Brittany: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, truly.

Zibby: For listeners who might not know what your book is about, would you mind telling them a little bit about the backstory and how it's led to your becoming the advocate you are today for so many people?

Brittany: I grew up in rural East Texas, one of those doors unlocked, windows wide open pieces of rural Texas, and truly had a happy childhood. Unfortunately, during my childhood, my mom was also suffering with a drug addiction. Her addiction ultimately led to her going to prison. Having a mom in prison, it really brought me close and made me very conscious of this issue of mass incarceration that our country faces. During this time and being so close, I got really interested in the criminal legal system, began representing people who were fundamentally set to die in prison under these outdated federal drug laws. The book follows that journey. It follows my journey growing up in rural East Texas. It follows the events surrounding my mother's incarceration and that experience of having a mom in prison. The book is truly a memoir that shows how I came to understand injustice in the courts, how I discovered genius behind bars, and how this journey caused my definition of freedom to evolve.

Zibby: Wow. How did you remember all of this, first of all? This is a such minor point, but the detail in your book is so great. Did you record everything as you went along? The way you wrote it, it was like we were literally standing on your shoulder watching everything you went through from the time you were little to when you then even show us into Sharanda's family and her mother and the accident. Every detail is so vivid. In fact, when I went on your Instagram and saw a picture of your mom and then your Mama Lena, I was like, oh, yeah, totally. That's totally what they look like because that's exactly how you described them.

Brittany: It was a long journey for me to write that book. It took me over two years to write the book. I was just very intentional with every piece of it from every word to every punctuation mark. With each section, I became very intimate with it. I made sure that I went back into time in that way. That really helped. Once you're there and present and conscious about a particular moment, it's very surprising how much memory does come back.

Zibby: Did you have any -- I know you didn't, but I was going to ask if you had any idea about the injustices of all the drug laws because I definitely did not realize how unfair -- and even the hundred-to-one sentencing for the difference between crack cocaine and cocaine and when you're part of conspiracy versus if you're not and how biased it was towards black people. It's just insane. I couldn't believe all the data that you discovered. As you show the reader, you seemed really surprised by a lot of it too. Tell me about that.

Brittany: Oh, yeah, I had no idea. I am in law school and truly wanting to be a corporate lawyer. I was going to follow my path for that. I had a job lined up after law school in corporate law. During this time, I took a critical race theory course. It's a course that analyzes the intersection between race and the law. I was writing my paper about this disparity in sentencing you mentioned between powder cocaine and crack cocaine and how it was disproportionately impacting people of color, in particular, black people. I was shocked by what I learned. I was shocked at how little to no legislative history was there surrounding this law, which was the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. I was shocked at how arbitrary the disparity in sentencing was with this one hundred-to-one ratio, which means that you could have five hundred grams of powder cocaine, I could have only five grams of crack, and we would receive the same sentence in prison. It's not lost on anyone then, especially now, that in the late eighties, more affluent white people were using powder cocaine. Crack cocaine was running rampant through communities of color, in particular, black communities. This caused such a wide disparity in sentencing to the extent that even today, over eighty percent of the people in federal prison for drug offenses are black and brown people. It was shocking to me as a law student to learn that, especially learning it based on just how unfounded these assumptions were that crack cocaine was more severe than powder. What was also shocking to me was after the law passed, the sentencing commission and members of congress and courts, they all began to see just how unjust these laws were. To see how the laws were put into place, to see this change of heart, if you will, surrounding the laws but to know that people are still in prison serving these draconian sentences, it was quite eye-opening for me.

Zibby: Even as the laws started to change and you would get so excited, then you would realize that a lot of them weren’t retroactive. I feel like you were wringing your hands a lot of the time. How could you change it? Then finally, you were able to figure out your path.

Brittany: Absolutely. It was totally just the way it reads in the book, trial and error, for sure. Even learning that, I'm getting so excited because I see how minds are evolving and this country's evolving as it relates to crack cocaine. I'm seeing the laws change. Then I'm like, oh, it's not retroactive. Another law changed. Oh, it's not retroactive either. It was just unconscionable to me that we have people serving life sentences today under these outdated federal drug laws. To me, and I would think to any reasonable person, if the law is wrong today, it was wrong yesterday.

Zibby: Right. Now, of course, you've started all these different nonprofits to help people escape from these sentences and overturn what had been going on before. Your Buried Alive Project, on the website it said something like there was still three or four thousand people, 3,400 maybe -- I don't know. I can't remember. Something awful, all these people. The laws have changed. They shouldn't have been in there. They shouldn't be serving life sentences. Yet there they are. What can we do about it? Tell me about the nonprofit that you've built up around it and how those people can get out.

Brittany: I cofounded the Buried Alive Project with two of my clients, Sharanda Jones and Corey Jacobs. They were both sentenced to life for federal drug cases. Both had never had any convictions before, felony or otherwise. We were able to secure clemency for them from President Barack Obama. Once they were freed, they felt a survivor's remorse, if you will, because they knew they had left so many people behind who were just as deserving of freedom as they were. I linked arms with my clients, and we cofounded the Buried Alive Project to provide legal representation, pro bono, for people serving life for federal drug offenses. To date, we've helped free dozens of men and women who were set to die in prison who are now living their life after life, as we like to call it. Still, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more. We're doing what we can to build a super team of lawyers to help litigate cases through the courts and also working on clemencies and working through congress, quite frankly, to ensure that we have laws that are changed.

Zibby: What was that like? What's the feeling like when you've literally been able through your hard work and dedication, given someone their entire life back? Tell me about that moment.

Brittany: It never gets old. It is a feeling that words can't even begin to touch. It's such a joy and elation. People have to understand and remember that life without parole is the second-most severe penalty permitted by law in America other than the death penalty. This sentence, it screams a person is beyond hope. It screams a person is beyond redemption. It truly suffocates mass potential as it buries people alive. To know that my clients, people like Sharanda Jones and Corey Jacobs and Chris Young who you read about in the book, are set to die in prison, they're literally serving the same amount of time as the Unabomber. It's heartbreaking for me. To be able to tell them that we've given that life sentence back, as we like to say, and they are free, I get chills just thinking about it.

Zibby: You are an angel, truly, that this has become your life's work and that you're so smart and dedicated that you can do it. It's amazing. It's just amazing. It's amazing to watch from the outside and to have read about it. Even when your name was in my inbox, I was like, oh, my gosh. [laughs] You're just such a hero. It's truly amazing. I feel like it would be so great if other people would follow in your footsteps, other people who have your brains and your potential who could work towards helping people get their lives back. I know in the beginning you wanted to be like Clair Huxtable and be a big corporate lawyer, and you were and everything. Wow, the value you've added to society by having all these people come back in people's lives and even reducing the sentence for your one family friend. You were like, I got him from life to something like thirty-two years. How they were all celebrating, it's just a huge deal. This sounds so obvious. I'm just heaping praise.

Brittany: Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciated it so much. It's an honor and a true privilege for me to do this work. I am grateful to my clients for trusting me with their lives, literally trusting me with their lives. It’s a task that I don't take lightly. I always say I fight for my clients' lives as if it were my own because it is. We are all one. What impacts one directly impacts us all indirectly. There is so much untapped genius in this population of people, people who are incarcerated, who were formerly incarcerated. I've seen it firsthand. It's true ingenuity our nation needs to thrive. The human potential there keeps me going. My clients' prayers and strength and empowerment keeps me going. I agree with you. I truly hope that more people join us to help push and drive for impactful change.

Zibby: Tell me about GEM and Milena Reign and XVI Cap. How are you running four different nonprofits at the same time? This is insane. How are you sleeping? When are you doing everything?

Brittany: Only two of them are nonprofits.

Zibby: Okay, sorry. Businesses.

Brittany: I totally believe we can't nonprofit ourselves to a better and just society. I do have two nonprofits, Buried Alive Project and Girls Embracing Mothers. Girls Embracing Mothers is a nonprofit that empowers young girls with mothers in prison. We partner with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and every single month, take a group of girls to visit their moms in prison. We're truly working to break the cycle and build a bond. That organization is so near and dear to my heart. It stems solely from my own experience of having a mother in prison. We've been operating for seven years now. I have amazing teams. That's one of the reasons I'm able to carry it all. At our program, Girls Embracing Mothers, our program director, Angelica, she was formerly incarcerated. In fact, her and her daughter were in our program just a few years ago. That's so important to me that directly impacted people are centered, they're amplified, and they're leading the way on any movement and any work surrounding them. Linking arms with Sharanda and Corey with the Buried Alive Project and having Angelica lead Girls Embracing Mothers, it's truly my life's work, to ensure that they are at the table, for sure. Milena Reign is a company named after my Grandma Lena. There, I just want to cultivate talent from the South, help writers from the South showcase their talents, break through to get opportunity.

XVI Capital Partners is similar. I'm working with that company to bridge the gap, to provide resources and capital to formerly incarcerated entrepreneurs. One thing I realize doing the work -- writing the book really helped me reflect on this. We have to change the laws. We have to continue our work to get people out of prison. I realize, also, that we can't keep rescuing people from prison and restoring them to poverty. I'm holding this vision of creating sustainable liberation which includes economic liberation. It includes equity. It includes ensuring that directly impacted people have access to resources and capital not just so they can survive, but so they can thrive and flourish. That's why I'm working with XVI Capital Partners. We've invested in a couple of companies so far that are ran by formerly incarcerated people including Sharanda Jones who is recently in the process of opening a food truck. She'll hire directly impacted people to work in her food truck. It's about paying it forward and realizing, too, that systemic change doesn't always have to come from Capitol Hill. We need the laws to change for sure, but the people that we are freeing, they're pushing forward a movement of such power and dignity that they're going to create systemic change. They're going to have a positive impact on anyone that they encounter in the future. It all just keeps me so hopeful.

Zibby: That's amazing. How has your life changed, if at all, since this book came out and your story became a much more widely known phenomenon?

Brittany: It's been amazing. I'm truly grateful at just the public's reception of the book. I'm so thankful to Amazon editors for choosing my book as the best book of 2020. Never in a million years did this small-town country girl think that this would be the case. It's been great. It's really helped to elevate what's important for me, and that's this issue of mass incarceration, and help raise awareness for causes I'm very passionate about. That's always a win.

Zibby: Do you find any time for yourself where you're not working? Do you have any time when you're not emailing or doing stuff or fighting? Even when you would talk about going to work and then you'd come home and then you'd have these buckets of cases and files and transcripts, I'm like, did she get dinner? What is this girl eating? [laughter]

Brittany: I would eat and work. I do. It is something that I'm working to center, this self-care practice, and self-care taking it back to its radical roots, not self-care as this form of escapism, but self-care in order to rest so that I can be fully restored to continue the work. The amazing poet Audre Lorde says self-care isn't an act of self-indulgence. It's an act of self-preservation. It's a radical act. That's what I try to practice. I'm practicing, which means I'm getting better. I'm not all the way there yet, but I definitely try to work to take that time to focus on me.

Zibby: Is this going to be a movie? Has this been optioned? It must have been.

Brittany: We're in a lot of talks. Hopefully, there's some news I can share soon.

Zibby: I bet. I can't wait to watch it. I feel like I watched it because I read it. It's so cinematic, the whole thing. You're such a visual writer. Everything is just so clear. I want to follow up on all the characters. What's up with your sister? How's she doing? Is she good?

Brittany: My sister, Jazz, she's doing amazing. She's actually in law enforcement now. She's doing really well. I'm so proud of her.

Zibby: That's amazing. Tell me a little bit about what is next. You have so many projects, so many good deeds you're doing. Do you want to write any more? Do you want to just solider on with all of your mission-driven activities? What does your next five years look like for you?

Brittany: I won't rule out writing another book. I definitely won't rule that out. I'm definitely going to keep moving forward with what I'm calling this liberation heist, getting people out of prison, making sure we're serving women and girls who are directly impacted as well. Then I'm going to continue the work to ensure that resources and capital are allocated to formerly incarcerated people and injustice-impacted people, for sure.

Zibby: Do you have any ambition to run for office?

Brittany: I don't.

Zibby: You say it in a -- it's no failure. I'm just asking.

Brittany: No, I don't. It's not my thing.

Zibby: I get it. I totally get it. Back to the writing for two seconds, you said it took two years which you said was a long time, which, PS, is not a long time for a book from all the things I've heard. [laughs] Where and when did you write this? When did you fit this into life? Then do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Brittany: I'll first start with my advice to aspiring authors. That's to do it. Share your story. The world needs your story. No one can tell your story or any fictional story you're dreaming up better than you. The world needs it. That is motivation that I received from people. I want to definitely pass that along. I found time in between the work, honestly. I had hoped to set aside a period of time to just focus solely on the book, but freedom calls. As my shirt says, there's nothing more urgent than freedom. I was still able to set aside blocks of time to write and blocks of time to work. For me, it was a process that was, in a way, therapeutic as I talked so much about my childhood experiences and having a mother who was incarcerated. I had to really be gentle with myself during the writing of that. Also, ensuring that whatever time I set aside that I was solely focused on the work, especially related to my clients' stories. I was so intentional there. I wanted to really show their heartbeats on the page in hopes that their lives and stories could impact the reader on the page the way it impacted me in real life. I knew because we were dealing with such a vulnerable population and mass incarceration still has all these stigmas and stereotypes that if I chose one wrong word, it could help perpetuate these stigmas and biases. I was really intentional with my clients' stories. I really held them close to heart. I'm so hopeful that people see their brilliance and genius and just truly how amazing, amazing they are. I say all the time, many, many people in prison, they're not bad people. They just made bad choices. We all make bad choices every day. Really having a chance at redemption is something truly powerful.

Zibby: Wow. Amazing. We didn't even get to the abuse. There's so much in this book. I see all these books behind you by all these amazing authors, so I'm guessing you love to read as well.

Brittany: I love to read.

Zibby: Behind your shoulder, I'm seeing both Obama books. There we go. You just read everything? What's your favorite kind of book to read?

Brittany: I read everything. I really am hooked on reading books by black authors from the South, as you see; Jesmyn Ward behind me; Kiese Laymon behind me with Heavy; Sarah Broom, The Yellow House. I recently read Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half. She's from the South as well.

Zibby: That was so good.

Brittany: It is so good.

Zibby: I had her on this podcast. You should listen.

Brittany: Really? I would love to meet her one day. I had been reading so many memoirs and nonfiction. To dive into her book that's fiction, oh, my god. It was so good. Then I mix it with other books. I'm reading a book on the business of venture capital right now as I'm trying to break into that space to create access for directly impacted people. It's all a mix. I've definitely been finding myself drawn more to fiction lately.

Zibby: That's a great example of amazing fiction. I feel like your book and her book were two of the best of this whole year. If you ever need a moderator, I'm happy to moderate that conversation.

Brittany: Thank you. That would be amazing to do that.

Zibby: If this were real life, I'd invite you over and have a salon.

Brittany: That would be beautiful.

Zibby: Also, I have a book club called Zibby's Virtual Book Club. If you have any interest, I would love to have my whole book club read your book. Then you come talk and do some Q&A for half an hour. I don't know if you'd be interested.

Brittany: I would love to. Let's do it.

Zibby: Let's do it. Great. I'm going to email you about times in the new year. Awesome. Brittany, thank you. Thank you so much for all that you do for people in the world and all you do to uplift others and open everybody's eyes to the injustices that are there and do it in such a classy way. It's just really awesome.

Brittany: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me today. It's been a pleasure to start my day off. You are a true gem. Thank you.

Zibby: Thank you. Stay in touch. Book club coming up. Bye.

Brittany: Bye.

Shari Medini, PARENTING WHILE WORKING FROM HOME

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

Shari Medini: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Zibby: I'm excited to be here with you, especially because both our books are coming out from Skyhorse Publishing this year. We're book siblings of a sort or something.

Shari: I love it. That's a new name for it.

Zibby: Book siblings. Parenting While Working from Home, your book, could not be better timed, seriously. Who is not trying to do this right now? Despite its title, it's applicable for people who are just working from home and will be applicable for far into the future regardless of where people work because every month of the year you have really great actionable tips and worksheets and all this other stuff. Tell me a little about how this book came to be.

Shari: Thank you for saying all of that. I appreciate that. We really tried to pack a lot into it. I'm glad that that came across and that you found that helpful. The book, like you said, is broken down by months. Each chapter, we are focusing on things for that particular month. As parents, every month can look a little bit different. In current times, things seem to be running together a little bit more. In typical family life, there's that distinction. Within each chapter as well, we break that down into sections where there's something to help the parent focus on themselves, whether that's self-care or building confidence or self-growth in some form or another. There's a section for connecting with your kids, which is more that traditional parenting content. Maybe it's activity ideas. Maybe it's how to help your kids through something or work on that child behavior piece. Then we have a section for working from home which applies to working from home, but we tried to implement a lot of things that is just kind of career advice in general. As parents trying to advance in our careers, what insight, what ideas, what has worked well for us that we're able to communicate and pass along for that aspect of our lives? I don't know if you feel this way too, but I feel like there's so many different aspects to parenting while you're also trying to advance in your career. It was even helpful in writing the book to be able to segment those different areas. Karissa and I, my coauthor and I, we live our lives that way. We do tend to segment and try to -- we are able to maintain a better balance because we recognize we can't do everything all at the same time.

Zibby: Yeah, it's impossible. You can. You can certainly try, but there will be evidence that you didn't exactly pull it off perfectly.

Shari: And a lot of frustration. Any time that I'm trying to do multiple things at once, I end up just getting annoyed. That's not helpful for anybody, so stopping or slowing down, taking one step at a time.

Zibby: Even just the acknowledgment that every month is so different for parents. I know you said, yes, of course, the days are sort of bleeding into each other. They're not as extreme. For sure, December is hugely different from January which is very different from February compared to July. May, we've got camp forms. This month, we've got Hannukah gifts, holiday cards. Every month brings a new set of universal -- maybe not universal. I'm sorry. That sounds very privileged.

Shari: Right. We can't overgeneralize.

Zibby: I am very lucky that I send my children to camp and that I can give Hannukah gifts and whatever. In general, there are a lot of commonalities between the things that parents go through on a cyclical basis based on the months. It was so nice just to see it spelled out. What I really loved is that you encourage readers to quickly mark down the highlights, the things that really matter to them in certain months because it's all well and good to be like, I should write every cute thing my kid says, but three things from the month of February? I could probably do that.

Shari: Definitely more manageable, yes, for sure. Like you said, we have the monthly intentions at the beginning of every month/chapter and the monthly reflections at the end of every month which are essentially journal prompts and space to write it in there. I know it can be tempting to skim over that or say, I'll come back to that, but I guarantee you, you wouldn't remember a couple days into the next month. How can we be purposeful in even taking that five minutes to just think about it? We have so much going on in our heads in any given moment that just taking that time and space to actually think about things is meaningful. You might come to conclusions that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Really encouraging people, step one of making positive change is just acknowledging what's working and what's not working. Then we can try to figure out a solution, but we have to start there.

Zibby: It's so true. You spelled out, also, a lot of things when you're -- you have a whole Focus on You section. Part of focusing on you, there was this one little paragraph on reading and how that was great. Of course, I'm like, ooh, a reading chapter. Tell me about that and how you fit reading in and why you think it's important.

Shari: First of all, I love the name of your podcast and all of this. I know everybody tells you that.

Zibby: Doesn't get old. [laughs]

Shari: Good. I love it. I think it's perfect because it is important. What I've realized this past year, I loved reading as a kid and I stopped devouring books at some point in my adult life. I think part of it was my tastes changed and I didn't really realize that. The other part of it was, if I'm reading, it should be for something. I stopped reading for enjoyment. I've read a lot of nonfiction. I read a lot of parenting books and self-help type stuff which absolutely has a place and is valuable. Otherwise, I wouldn't have taken the time to write one myself. This past year, I discovered that I love thrillers. I kind of shocked myself. I have read book after book after book in this genre and rediscovered that love of reading. It is important. I think it's going to depend, the season of parenthood that you're in. It is not going to be easy to sit down and read a book cover to cover in a weekend. Now that my kids are a little older, I have a little more time and space to do that. Just being purposeful about taking those small moments. Karissa always keeps a book in her car. When she's waiting in school pickup line or maybe they got to a doctor's appointment early or the baby's napping in the back, she has that. She can flip through and read that a little bit. We talk about, in the book, treating a book more like a TV series than a movie. You can just watch little pieces at a time. You can read little pieces at a time. When it comes down to it, do what's enjoyable to you and understand that you might get interrupted at any moment, unfortunately.

Zibby: Sometimes reading is more like a commercial than even a TV show, seriously. I get two minutes. Then something else shifts and I have to put it down again.

Shari: You're right, which might then mean that you're choosing different books at different stages in your life. That was something that we were aware of when we were writing this. It is an easy book to pick up and put down. You can get a little snippet and dive back into it later.

Zibby: And that you can feel accomplished because, yes, of course, you can read it all at once, but you could just have your goal be to read the December chapter in December or the March chapter in March. You've read one chapter of a book. Then when the book is over, you finished the book. You've had all these tips. You've done exercises. There are things in your book, too, that I loved. I'm always recommending stupid things to kill time. I know you had in there, keep your kid in the bath as long as possible, which is basically what you said, which is basically what's happening in the other room right now. They're not alone, but that's what's happening. Even how you said stuffed animal hide and seek, I've never done that. I was like, how could I have never done that before? That's such a good idea. I think we're definitely going to have to go do that after I get off this Zoom. That's a great idea.

Shari: Thank you. I love that. Not every single idea is going to be this big aha moment that we're sharing, but little things like that that you hadn’t done before that are just simple. Like you said, we can go do that this afternoon. That's an easy thing. There's no prep. We can just go try it out. Even while I was writing the book and going back through my own ideas and reading back through Karissa's ideas, I was like, I forgot about that. We should do that one. That was helpful. Why did we stop doing that? Because life gets busy. You forget even your own best tricks from time to time.

Zibby: It's true. Maybe that could be an addendum to your book, or at least a paragraph, things that got you through.

Shari: Tricks of the trade.

Zibby: The tricks of the trade, something like that. I used to throw in measuring cups and teaspoons and tablespoons into the shower with my twins when they were really little, like, I want to say three or four. Maybe they were younger. I don't know. Whatever age that would be developmentally appropriate, not when they were thirteen, when they were really little. They would spend hours just pouring the water on each other and filling up the cups. I was like, this is gold. I could sit there. I could read. I could do whatever I had to do.

Shari: Like we talk about too, bring it into the bathroom. I can't tell you how much work I've gotten done in the bathroom while my kids are in the tub or playing with cups in the shower. Once you can find those little nuggets, then it also inspires you to find other simple solutions in other areas where you're like, how else can I apply this? How else can I expand on this? What's another idea that we can do today? You're right. A lot of parenting is passing the hours, especially if you're stuck at home. Karissa and I were both stay-at-home parents when our kids were little. There's a lot of hours in the day. They need you for all of them for a while. What do you do? What do you do when you have to spend so much time together?

Zibby: I liked your idea of listening to a podcast while you sit next to your kids on the couch while they watch TV. That was a good one.

Shari: There's always those conversations, the most-hated cartoons. I can't stand to watch this or I'm so annoyed with their voice. I'm like, just pop in an earbud. Do your own thing. They're not noticing. They don't care. Not to say you shouldn't share in that sometimes and hear what they like to talk about or what they enjoy, but it's okay to zone out and do your own thing if everybody's safe and happy.

Zibby: Yep. It's taken me a while to learn all those things and not feel bad about it. I feel like the pandemic, I don't know about you, but has made me go much easier on myself. Do you feel like that? Especially in terms of technology and watching TV, I used to be like, thirty minutes a day, max. It's been twenty-eight minutes. In thirty seconds, it's almost time for it to be over. It's like, why? Why did I care so much? Really? An extra hour? I get stuff done. They get stuff done. They're happy. I'm happy. What's the downside? Maybe I shouldn't say that.

Shari: I'm a hundred percent on board with you. Again, I'm not doing the research, but in my own life and looking back through history, we have done this with kids. I saw a thing. They said when books started becoming more accessible and more popular, all the adults were like, can you believe that kid? They're just sitting under a tree and reading all day. They're just so lazy. They're wasting their time. Now we'd be thrilled if our kid sat under a tree and read all day. I do think that it takes us a while to catch up to current times. Our kids are always ahead of the curve because that's just what they know. Quite frankly, a lot of the video games that they're play, they are learning skills. My older son, he plays with his friends. They have to be cooperative. They're building things. They're learning. They're problem solving. I don't see a whole lot wrong with that. Everything in moderation just like anything else. Just like it's not the best for us to go watch Netflix all day every day, but we need that downtime. We need that distraction. Our kids are human too. They're littler versions of us that also need to be able to tune out and do things to pass the time.

Zibby: It's true. It used to be that I thought TV was the worst thing ever. Now if I can just get them off the iPad to watch a show together, that's a victory. A family movie is hitting gold. That's the best I could do as a parent. [laughs]

Shari: Although, even that has slowed down, which has been sad that since they're not able to be producing new family movies, we miss those, having that movie night every once in a while. There's not really family shows. I don't blame them. I also want to watch what I want to watch. We try to get together every once in a while and share that, but it doesn't happen as often as maybe it should.

Zibby: The only thing I'll say that I've realized -- I don't even know why we're talking about TV and technology so much. I'm sorry. I don't even know why we've gone off on this tangent.

Shari: [laughs] It's fine.

Zibby: The only thing I'll say is not to rely too much and say, they're fine, they're watching TV alone. I always remind myself it's so much more fun if I watch TV with my husband than if I watch it alone. Of course, I'm fine either way. If I watch Sex and the City with a girlfriend, it's much more fun than watching alone. It's the same for your kids. Every so often, just go sit and watch with them. It makes the experience completely different. You're doing something together. Not every time, but every so often.

Shari: Absolutely. You're right. Throughout all of this, and especially back to the working-from-home piece, you have to do what you have to do. That's fine. We talk a lot about making sure they're set up and ready to go before you need to jump on that call or before you need some focus time. It's okay to use those kind of things. One last technology piece, I appreciated the one day that grandma had said to me, "Oh, I think iPads are amazing. When I had my kids and they were little, we never went out to eat because it was a nightmare to sit at a restaurant with four little kids. If we had iPads, of course I would've used them." I was like, "You are amazing. You just made me feel so much better. You understand that it's a resource." It shouldn't be your only resource, why not use it from time to time?

Zibby: Since the pandemic has started, I have not been out to dinner with my kids. I do not miss that at all.

Shari: No, I don't.

Zibby: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] other things I miss, but trying to manage lots of kids in a restaurant is not one of them. Working from home, per your book, is also always a challenge. I meant to flag that. I'm glad you brought it up, that piece of when they're like, "Mom, can you just do this? Mom, can you just do this?" Instead of saying, "Five more minutes. I just need to finish this first," your advice is just stop, get them whatever they need, essentially, and then go back. You'll be less interrupted. Take the time up front. I know it sounds pretty obvious, but it's very helpful advice.

Shari: It's hard because on a day-to-day basis we experience that when your kids are home. Everybody wakes up, and they start doing something. You're like, okay, cool, I can go sit down at my computer. You might get five to ten minutes in before they're hungry or they need help with something or they just want to chat with you and check in, so trying to do that first. I notice that even when my son was really little, that if I could just give him my undivided attention, not for hours at a time, only maybe ten minutes that I made sure he had food and water and that he got to tell me all of his toddler jokes that he had been brewing up, that we got to connect and laugh together and then explain what I needed to do. There's a reason that I need to step away. There's a reason I need to focus. There's a reason that I'm not going to be paying attention to you for the next however long. I'll help get you set up first and make sure you have something fun to do, but then I have to go do this other thing that's also important.

Anything gets hard when we're caught in that middle ground where we are feeling pulled in too many different directions, so just trying to create those boundaries a little bit. As your kids get older, keep them a part of that conversation. Keep that connection with them. Also, if they're seeing you work from home and seeing all of that, I love that I can have those conversations with my ten-year-old about what I'm working on and hear his insight and hear his ideas. It's a fun thing. It's helpful. It's good for him to see what this looks like. Especially since we've been home and they had been in virtual school this past semester, I'm like, this is what I do when you're in school all day. I don't just play around and have fun. I work. Since you're not at school, you're seeing me work. I know that's hard that I'm not a hundred percent available to you. When we have that distinction, they would come home from school, I would try to make myself a hundred percent available to them for snippets of time. It changes. It changes every day, every week, every year. We troubleshoot as we go.

Zibby: Having written a whole book about this and having coauthored this book -- first of all, how was it working with somebody else to produce this? How did you do that? Then second of all, what advice would you have to other people attempting a similar feat?

Shari: Google Docs is your best friend. Karissa and I have been running adorethemparenting.com for almost four years. Our four-year anniversary is two days after book launch, which is fun. We have been writing together, collaborating together on a daily basis for the last four years. It really was a surprisingly seamless process. We understood each other's voices. We were able to divide and conquer. It would be like, which of these things do you feel really passionate about, that you feel like you could really run with? We divided up who would start with it. Then the other person would read through it and add their own piece of it. Then that other person would go back through and make sure it all meshed together. Being able to do that, one, it's really motivating. It's really nice that when I was burnt out of writing, I could go back through and read what she wrote and spark some new ideas. She lives in South Carolina. I live in Pennsylvania. To be able to work together virtually on the same document in live time, it worked well. That's not for everybody. We both have a very similar parenting style perspective kind of voice which obviously makes it easier. If I were writing a book with someone else, I'm sure it would not mesh as well. Advice for other people, I do think if you're going to go into something like this, a book that gets to live on past when you write it, making sure that you have somebody that you work well with because it's not just about getting the words on the page. As you know, there's so much that goes into this. There's so many different elements to getting a book published. Once it's out there in the world, your work is not done. Finding someone that you really trust and that you can collaborate with long term is step one. Then the rest should hopefully fall into place.

Zibby: Love it. I always wished I had somebody who I could collaborate that well with. I never want to take the risk because what if it doesn't work out? I'm glad you time tested it for years before you did the book project.

Shari: I would recommend that. What are the trial runs? How can you work together on other things before taking that leap? It's hard to find that. It took us both time to figure that out and what that looked like because we're both go-getters. We both have a lot of our own ideas and ways of doing things. It's hard to let go of control when you're used to doing things on your own. It just takes time to build that trust.

Zibby: Awesome. It's true. Shari, thank you so much. Thanks for chatting with me on the podcast. Thanks for all the tips in your book. I am going to keep flipping back through it and finding new things to do for me, for them. I'm really committing to filling in those highlights because I know I'll be glad once I've done it. Then I'll know where they are, even. It's a great incentive early in the new year to stick to a goal. Thank you for that.

Shari: You're welcome. I'm so glad you're enjoying it so far. You know how to get ahold of me if you need any extra insight or have any questions along the way.

Zibby: Thank you. Congrats. Thanks so much.

Shari: Thank you.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Shari: Bye.

Elizabeth Passarella, GOOD APPLE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Good Apple: Tales of a Southern Evangelical in New York.

Elizabeth Passarella: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Zibby: By the way, I love this cover too. I'm holding it up on our video which listeners can't see. It's particularly inviting. Elizabeth, tell me how you decided to write this book. Why did you decide to write this book? Tell listeners, also, basically what it's about.

Elizabeth: Good Apple is a collection of essays. It's stories about my life. To be completely honest with you, I didn't really set out to write this exact book. I've had a career in magazines. I've written for women's magazines and been an editor of magazines for about twenty years. I've always loved nonfiction. It's what I love to read. It's what I love to write. I always assumed that maybe I would write a book about my life experiences, but I never really anticipated bringing my faith into it. I just assumed I would write a funny, interesting, relatable book about life. I was thinking about all the magazine articles that I have edited or written over the years. There's so many that talked about how to make your marriage stronger or how to be a better parent or how to deal with a difficult friendship. There were many times where I'd get to the end of that article and I would think, this is great and I love all these tips, but what if you follow all this advice and it still doesn't work out? What if you follow all these tips and your marriage is still really hard or that friendship still falls apart? I'm a Christian, and so for me, that's what my foundation is built on. That's the viewpoint that I look through when I deal with difficult situations.

I was talking to a colleague and a former editor who now happens to be my book agent. We were talking about ideas for books. She said, "It would be great to write about your life in New York or raising kids in Manhattan or small-space living, all these things you're passionate about, but it's got to appeal to all those evangelical Christians in the middle of the country." I thought, oh, I can do that. That's who I am. She was a little bit surprised. She said, "You're not what I think of when I think of a Christian. When I think about that, you're not what I think of. You're this New Yorker. You hold a lot of the same views and political views and world views that I do." That was another big part of it. I just felt like this kind of book, in terms of how non-Christians look at Christians, doesn't really exist. I wanted to write something where I gave a different viewpoint of what people think of as a Christian.

I think it works the other way. All the people that I grew up with in the South -- that's where I grew up -- and people who are really strong Christians, I think they look at New Yorkers and they look at the way I live my life and think, I can't possibly have anything in common with her. She's raising three kids in this two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan in this crazy city. I wanted them to look at these stories and see themselves too and realize that we have a lot in common. It is stories about my life. I talk about growing up in the South. I talk about growing up in a pretty conservative, republican family and kind of switching my political views as I got older and moved to New York and lived here for a while. I tell stories about heavy stuff. I talk about miscarriages. I talk about death of a loved one. There's a lot of lighthearted, funny stories too. There's stories about a rat getting trapped in my apartment building, which was not a great day. There's some light stuff and some heavy stuff. I feel like most of all, I just want it to be entertaining. It's mostly embarrassing stories about me. I look the worst of everyone in my family. As personal as the stories are, I definitely come out looking the worst.

Zibby: [laughs] One of my favorite stories was when you got trapped in the elevator. I think it was your building super or somebody had to take the baby out of the crib and sit and play on the floor while you got extracted. That's such a New York story. That was just so perfect.

Elizabeth: Everyone hears that and they think, you left your baby in your apartment while you went downstairs to the basement? I said, yeah. If you lived in a huge house in the suburbs somewhere and you went out to your mailbox to get the mail while your baby was napping, that's how far away from him I was. That's New York living. I left him in the apartment. Then I got stuck in the elevator for almost an hour. Yes, the staff of my building -- we've lived here for twelve years, so they know us very well. This very nice man who works in our building went upstairs and got my baby out of the crib and played with him when he woke up from his nap.

Zibby: You were so funny. You were like, they call me Passa, and I'm not sure if they think that's my last name or not, but it's too late now because they’ve been doing this for a decade. [laughs]

Elizabeth: Yes. You always have those people who have your name slightly off, but you've known them too long. You've passed the point of no return where you can tell them they’ve got it wrong. There's one guy in my building that I think it's just his nickname for us.

Zibby: There was this whole religious dimension to the book, but that was only a slice of the book. You could've almost done it without it. I feel like it didn't permeate every single chapter and every single experience. It just set a framework for it. I don't feel like it in any way left anybody out. First of all, you define evangelical and what it really means, but also the fact that you grew up with a Jewish father. Then you have a whole chapter on Jews I've Known and Loved or some funny title you had. I should look up the title.

Elizabeth: To All the Jews I've Loved.

Zibby: Yes, yes, yes, To All the Jews I've Loved. So funny. And just your experience in New York and different religions. There's some where you put in your points of view and how it is to be a democrat among a lot of people who aren't in your background. Then it's also so many other things. I found that part super interesting and not talked about as much. I also thought it could've been amazing even if it wasn't for that. In other words, that made it more interesting, but that was only one piece of it. I don't want people to think, even though it's part of the title, that that's what this was all about because I don't think it was all about religion at all.

Elizabeth: I struggled at first whether I should put that word in the title. You're right. I don't want to turn anybody off. If you are someone who has a different faith background or no faith background at all, I really wrote the book originally -- primarily, when I thought about my readership, I thought about the people that I do life with in New York, people who I know through my kids' school, people I work with, people that live in my building, my neighbors. I really thought about a non-Christian audience. That's who I wrote it for. I think there are plenty of Christian women who will pick up this book and enjoy it because I don't think there's a lot of Christian books out there that have an irreverent sense of humor. I hope that this book does. Yes, I think you're right. I absolutely wrote it primarily for the audience that I do life with all the time and anyone else who doesn't come from this background.

Zibby: I found that part fascinating. I'm glad you put it in the title because I like to hear other people's experiences and points of view. I don't want to only read about my own. That would get boring after a while. You want to learn about new things and new backgrounds and what makes you tick and all the rest. I thought it was a really interesting piece about a culture and a particular sect, I guess, that I didn't know that much about ahead of time. That was great.

Elizabeth: You said I sort of addressed this in the introduction of the book. The word evangelical has become so charged. I certainly do not walk around the streets of New York using that word to describe myself very often. It's become such a politically charged word. That was something else I wanted to -- not like I'm trying to take the word back. I don't really care. It's just a word. I also feel like people do have a misconception. For me, it's a theological framework as opposed to a political one. I think that it's been sort of co-opted by politics, unfortunately, which is why most evangelical Christians, even if they are, really don't use that word anymore, nor do I. From a theological standpoint, I think it still does define me.

Zibby: I love how much you put in about your marriage because I've been feeling very snoopy lately. I don't know if that’s even the right word. [laughs] I love peeking into the cracks in the curtains and seeing what's going on in other people's marriages, people who are my age, because for a while, I feel like nobody was really talking about it. Only your closest friends, I feel like, share. That's why so many people get divorced and you're shocked by it. I know I got divorced and I never talked about my marriage while I was in it. I rarely do now anyway. I just always appreciate when people are willing to share. The fact that you shared how you yell at your husband or that you get annoyed that he plays golf all day and do this passive-aggressive thing where you pretend like you have to work [indiscernible] get better at going to the spa. There are just so many things you put in that were so relatable and awesome and just amazing. We were talking before about how we had both married tennis pros. I'm remarried. Has your tennis gotten better? He has ever taught you?

Elizabeth: No, my tennis is not great. We do not play together. When we were dating, we played occasionally. It turned into a huge fight. Yes, I clearly fight a lot with my husband. It did not go well when we were dating and we would try to play tennis together. He is a very laid-back guy. His reaction to every shot I missed or anything that I wasn't doing well was, "You just need to play more." I'm like, "No, I want you to tell me exactly what to do. I want you to tell me exactly how to hold the racket or exactly which way to move to make that shot go in." He'd say, "You just need to play more." It did not go well. I just didn't really play that much. You know because you live in New York too, it can be hard to find a tennis court in New York City.

Zibby: Very hard.

Elizabeth: Manhattan does not lend itself well to playing a lot of tennis. I don't. I don't play a lot of tennis. I don't love to exercise anyway. He does play with my kids, which is nice. He plays with the kids. He plays on his own. It's sort of like golf. He says all the time, "I wish you would take up golf. I wish you'd play golf." I said, "You say that, but I think, actually, you just want me to play the one day out of the year that you can't find anyone else to play with. I don't think you actually want me to play golf with you on a regular basis. You would really like to play with people who know what they're doing." It's the same with tennis. He wants to get a workout. He wants to play with guys that he went to college with and they played together. I don't play a lot of tennis. I'm not terrible, but I'm not good.

Zibby: If you guys were to play golf together, I don't think that would help with the fighting.

Elizabeth: No. No, it would not. I agree with you. I think I make people uncomfortable sometimes because I tell all the dirty secrets about my marriage or how much I don't like my children sometimes, but you know, we all feel it. We all feel it. Even if nobody's talking about it, they're definitely doing it. They're definitely having those arguments behind closed doors. I tend to have a temper. I'm much more of a verbal confrontational person. I probably fight more than the average person does. That's, in some sense, where the faith element comes in too because I feel like I'm very secure in who I am and what grounds me, and so I feel like I don't have to put forth any sort of image of being the perfect wife or the perfect mom because I am definitely not. I am very below average on both of those things. I feel really confident being honest because I know where my real identity comes from in a sense, if that makes sense. It's easy for me to be, I guess, shameless.

Zibby: It's refreshing. As a reader in particular, it's, A, very relatable, and B, very entertaining. It's funny. All the stuff you're saying is very entertaining and funny. That's great. What else can you want in a book?

Elizabeth: Thank you. Yes, that's the goal.

Zibby: Even when you talk about your basically growing up in the city, growing up into adulthood I should say, and even your days of -- as I read this when you were at Tortilla Flats and Automatic Slims and all this stuff, I was like, I was there. I bet you we were in the same place at the same time. We're about the same age.

Elizabeth: I know. We are.

Zibby: Everything you kept going through, I was like, me too! It was crazy because when I picked up this book, I never expected to have so much in common with the author of this book not knowing who you were or anything about you. I was just like, oh, this will be one of those experiences that I don't really relate to, but it'll be so interesting. In fact, you were probably on my block. [laughter] It was crazy. Also, funny how you included all of the stuff almost explaining yourself to people who don't live in New York as if you've never lived -- I've lived in New York my whole life, so I get it. Tell me about including all of that.

Elizabeth: Listen, I have tons of friends who still live in Memphis, Tennessee, where I grew up. I have tons of friends who live all over the South and other cities. They look at my life and they think -- most of them have known me a long time at this point. We live in an apartment that's two bedrooms. We have three kids. One of my children sleeps in a closet. It seems very normal to us. I do think that people are very intrigued. I have this whole chapter that's sort of a Q&A that talks about all the quirky things about living in an apartment and living in a building in Manhattan. I think that's fascinating to people, especially now. When I wrote this book, of course, it was finished a year ago right before the pandemic hit. I finished in January of 2020. Now I think even more so, people are curious about New York. What's going on? What's life like there?

I really think of the book as kind of a love letter to New York. Like you said, I moved here right after college. I've lived here for twenty years. I really feel like this is my home now. I feel so much like a New Yorker. I love the city so much. I think it's such a wonderful place to raise kids. It's such a beautiful community. That's just come out more even since the pandemic started because a lot of people left. You're much more confined to your neighborhood, and so you get to know your neighbors more. You're happier to see them when you go outside. It has made the city feel like a really resilient small town to me in some ways. I just love New York so much. I wanted this book to be sort of a love letter to the city too. Everyone loves New York. Even if they don't live here, they're curious about what life is like here. I hope that I give people a little bit of a glimpse, and it's a good one.

Zibby: Totally. It's nice to see a mom in New York telling how it is. Everyone's like, how can you do that with kids? I'm like, well, you do it. You just do it. I don't know. You just do.

Elizabeth: Like you, my husband grew up here. I do give people the caveat that, for him, this is his hometown. When we first started having kids and there was something that would seem sort of strange to me, it wasn't strange to him because this was how he grew up. When we started letting our daughter walk home from school just this year by herself, I thought, is this a good idea? Should we do this? He's like, "Oh, my gosh. When I was in third grade, I was walking to Johnny so-and-so's house down Park Avenue," or whatever it was. She's not in third grade, by the way. She's in fifth grade. He was doing all these things growing up. It just gives me a nice perspective. He grew up here. He's a very normal person. It made everything feel a little more palatable.

Zibby: I grew up in New York, and I believe I'm a normal person -- my husband might disagree with that -- and so are all the people I grew up with. I think there's a lot of misconceptions about what it means.

Elizabeth: My husband likes to say more people are born and raised in New York than any other city in the country. Isn't that amazing? When people say, "Oh, my gosh, you're raising kids there?" he's like, "Yes. Lots of kids grow up in New York." It's true.

Zibby: I bet I knew him. Anyway, we'll come back to that. It's also a very small town. Kids who grew up in New York, though, at least in -- well, I don't know.

Elizabeth: He was on the East Side too. I don't know if you were on the East Side.

Zibby: Yes, I was on the Upper East Side. It's just a very small world between siblings and people you know. In that way, I do also feel like it's a small town. Tell me about your decision to include the whole piece about your miscarriages, which also feels very timely with the op-ed the other day. How can I blank on her name?

Elizabeth: Meghan Markle.

Zibby: Thank you, which I thought was really great, by the way.

Elizabeth: It was.

Zibby: Tell me about that decision.

Elizabeth: That was another one where I have no problem talking about it. I had two kids who are ten and eight now. When they were probably six and four, we had thought about having another kid. I was thirty-nine. I had two miscarriages before I finally got pregnant with our two-and-a-half-year-old now. I didn't have him until I was forty-one. Obviously, the statistics would bear out that it's very possible that I would miscarry. The first miscarriage I had, as I started talking to friends -- anyone will tell you this. Once you start talking to people, you realize so many people you know went through the exact same thing. It is so common. I think that maybe the reason people don't talk about it is it's just such a personal bodily issue. It takes place usually in private or in the hospital. There's a lot of hormonal issues that you go through. Again, I will almost talk about anything. I'm the person at the dinner party that you either really love or really don't like that I'm talking about a lot of personal things.

I just wanted other people to read it and realize that, yes, of course, it's common. We know that statistically. You probably know a lot of people who have been through this. It's different for every woman. There were certain commonalities when I started talking to other friends who had miscarriages, this hormonal cliff that you fall off a couple of weeks after this happened, just the simple things of you're not pregnant anymore, but if you take a pregnancy test, it will still show that you're pregnant. That is so emotionally wrenching. I think that that's something people don't talk about. All of us have sat and peed on a thousand different sticks to try to figure out if we are pregnant. Then you've lost a baby, and you pee on these sticks and it still says you're pregnant. Even just that small detail is something that was so impossibly hard for me to get through. I want people to know, hey, this happens. This is one of these really annoying things that you're going to come up against. This happens. It's normal. It will pass.

Zibby: Why keep peeing on the sticks?

Elizabeth: I don't know. You're waiting for your hormone levels to drop to the point that you don't appear pregnant so that you can try again. That's the big thing. The minute you miscarry, you think, when can I try again? It's just a lot of waiting. It’s a lot of time.

Zibby: Got it. Understood. When did you find the time and how did you find the space and all of that to write this book with three kids?

Elizabeth: That's a good question. I will say, I said this earlier, but the book was finished before the pandemic. If the book had not been finished before the pandemic, I'm not sure we would be talking right now. That has made work so much more difficult. I work from home. I've been a freelance writer for a long time. I work from home. When we did have this third kid and he's home with a sitter or someone, I couldn't work at home anymore. I pay a lot of money to babysitters. The summer of 2019, I paid a lot of money to summer camps and day camps to keep my kids occupied. I actually go to a library. It's probably near you. It's the New York Society Library.

Zibby: I know you were going to say that.

Elizabeth: It's a private library. A lot of writers go there. It is not expensive. It's a bargain in Manhattan for a yearly membership. They have really sort of sad, depressing desks in the stacks. They have really nice private rooms, but I never use those. I just go to the stacks. I sit at a little desk. I'm completely isolated. You can't even talk on the phone. You can't bring food. That's where I wrote this book. I wrote it in the stacks of the New York Society Library on 79th and Madison.

Zibby: I feel like with enough time, I will interview everybody who's ever tried to write a book in the New York Society Library.

Elizabeth: Yes. I already know a couple of them. I see them sometimes.

Zibby: So funny.

Elizabeth: It's a beautiful old library. It's a beautiful building. It's quiet. There's just nobody bothering you. That's what I did. I paid as many babysitters as I could afford.

Zibby: That's awesome. I love that. What are you hoping to do next? Do you have more essay books, or are you good with getting all of this out?

Elizabeth: Yes, I am under contract to write another one, so I've got to come up with some more stories. I've got to have some more things to happen. We'll see. It's interesting as this book makes its way out in the world, what resonates with people and which chapters people really love and which ones seem to attract the most attention. Listen, I'm a one-trick pony. I do not have a lot of talents. This is about it. I'm not a fiction writer. There's going to be no romance novel for me. This is what I enjoy and what I like writing. Hopefully, yes, I will write another book of essays. I would love to do that down the road.

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

Elizabeth: Oh, gosh. I came up through the magazine world to the journalism world. I came to book publishing that way. I would say, from my perspective, you probably will write a lot of things that you don't like to write about before you get to write about something you do like to write about. I think about all the years as a young editorial assistant or assistant editor, how I wrote so many captions for fashion spreads that I did not care about at all, but it taught me so many lessons. It taught me about word choice and how to say something in the most economical way possible. I spent a lot of time looking over proofs and seeing what editors changed and why it sounded better that way. I studied those. It made me a better writer. Don't shy away from those kinds of assignments even if it's not what you want to do. Just be humble and use everything as learning experience. I would also say, this is something that my friend Catherine Newman who I used to work with at Real Simple -- I think she's been on your podcast. She's a wonderful human and writer. She said be nice, turn things in on time, be easy to work with, do your job well, and be nice to everybody. I cannot tell you how many people I worked with as assistants who are now the editors-in-chief of magazines or who are content directors at really big platforms. You just never know where someone's going to end up. Be a hard worker. Be nice. Be pleasant to work with. Do a great job because the people that you're working with now, even though it might be at a really small publication or someone who's even younger than you, you never know, they could go on to have a really big job that could be really helpful to you down the road.

Zibby: I love that. That's great advice. Awesome. Thank you, Elizabeth. That was fantastic. One day, we can meet in Central Park.

Elizabeth: Yes. We can go on a walk around the reservoir. Thank you for everything that you do for authors. It's just so uplifting and wonderful, especially for people like me who are first timers. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: I'm really excited for your book to come out. I'll be cheering for you.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Elizabeth: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Ashly Perez, READ THIS FOR INSPIRATION

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Ashly. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about Read This for Inspiration. Today, we'll talk about this for inspiration. [laughter]

Ashly Perez: It's so weird. I haven't seen very many people holding the book. You just popping into frame was like, oh, my goodness, there it is.

Zibby: There it is. It's so beautiful. I know this is a podcast and also on YouTube. For the people listening, I am a sucker, as you can see from my bookshelves behind me, of the different rainbow colors. It says Read This for Inspiration in all different colors on the spine with yellow in the back. All the illustrations are just so happy and awesome. In addition to the actual content of the book, the container is so happy and something that we all really could use right now. Bravo on that.

Ashly: Sorry, guys, if you hear background noise. I'm outside, and there an airport near me. That's what you're hearing.

Zibby: You know what? There's always something. Usually, it's sirens in my background. Trade-offs. Ashly, tell me about your journey from Buzzfeed to publication, how this book came to be, and how you exploded onto the scene yourself.

Ashly: My background is Buzzfeed. I worked there for five and half years before Buzzfeed was really what it was. I was a video producer making all types of different content. Now I'm a TV writer and then have now written this nonfiction book that in some ways is a culmination of most of my life experiences. I went to college to study international studies. I love languages. At one point, I lived in South Korea as an English teacher and thought I was going to be a diplomat. This book is very much a dumping of my brain. I have ADHD. It's a function of how my brain works that these are in short little chapters about lots and lots of different subjects. It was actually really relieving to write the book and to see it because even now to this day, I can open it, and it still looks like the inside of my brain.

Zibby: I love how you set out all these rules at the beginning. You were like, you can read it like this, or you can just open it anytime you want, or you can do it like that, and it doesn't matter. It was the most forgiving entrance. It's like you're holding someone's hand and being like, let me teach you how to use this book and how it can be a little different.

Ashly: Really, the rule is just, however you want to use the book, you can use it.

Zibby: Let's go back to your ADHD, which you talked about. You said in the book, "I'm not good at resting. In fact, I have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, emphasis on the hyperactivity. Stillness does not exist in my bones, literally. And because of this, I am also not very patient." Then you talk about how you rush through everything and all the rest. Tell me about, when did you know you had ADHD? How did that affect even your education and growing up and things like that?

Ashly: Most women don't get diagnosed with ADHD until they're older. I was the same. I was in my late twenties. When I found out and finally got the diagnosis, almost everything clicked backwards in my life. I was like, oh, my god. One of the things that made me realize that I had it is that constant interrupting is a sign of ADHD. My whole life, I just thought that my brain felt fast and I was rude or something. Then I realized, oh, this is just one of the symptoms of ADHD. When I went back and started actually talking to my therapist and to a psychiatrist, I had almost all of the markers for both deficit and hyperactivity. Because of the way women are socialized, we often can socially get around what most little boys can't, which is just hyperactivity and an inability to concentrate in schoolwork. For me, ADHD, it was very much a cycle of feeling relieved and then feeling upset and then feeling confused about what that meant, and ashamed. Now I really feel like I've embraced what that does to my brain. This book wouldn't exist if my brain didn't have ADHD. ADHD has an ability to grasp different concepts from all over the place and put them together in kind of a weird and interesting mash-up. That's what I tried to do with this book, is just let my brain be free and bring together concepts that might not normally make sense.

Zibby: It's so funny. I've talked to other big-deal editors of memoir or narrative fiction or whatever. They're always saying things like, try to play with time. Try to bring in this and mix it up. Don't make it too straightforward. Make it more interesting. That's exactly what you're saying is how your brain is, de facto state of operation, right?

Ashly: Yes. It's nonlinear and just hops around. That's so interesting that editors are looking for that.

Zibby: Because the rest of us, even if you don't have ADHD -- I feel like I have situational ADHD. I am constantly interrupted, and so I can't actually think in a normal way anymore. No, I know it's much more -- I know a lot about it. I don't actually have it. I do feel like sleep deprivation and other things can really affect your ability to focus, not in terms of an underlying condition, but a situational condition.

Ashly: I also think that, in some ways, the way that we use social media now has affected all of our attention spans whether or not you have a diagnosis of ADHD. We all have so much less attention because of the way we're constantly consuming content in little bites.

Zibby: Yes. I think that has its translation into fiction where it's, keep people on their toes. Don't just sit and tell them a story and expect them to -- and not all. Maybe it was just a handful of -- I don't want to totally say -- now people are going to be like, wait, I have to change my novel and mix it up a little bit. No, no, no, but just in some instances, it can help keep the pacing or whatever. Anyway, all to say you do that naturally. I love how you interweave, as you said, all your personal stories. Tell me a little bit about your abuelo and his love of books and your special relationship with him and then how you ended up dedicating the book to him and his great saying that you put -- of course, I'm not going to find it at the right time. Was this one it? "There's always more to learn."

Ashly: Yes.

Zibby: You have it here, which I'm showing on YouTube, but nobody can see. I won't even try to massacre the Spanish. Tell me more about him.

Ashly: The book is dedicated to my abuelo. He is the entire reason that I love books. He died in 2019. He was known as kind of a walking encyclopedia, anything that he read. He read in all sorts of languages. He read in French. He read in English. He read in Spanish. Anything that he read was committed to memory even all the way up until he died when he was eighty-nine. He always used to write me letters in Spanish. I would write back to him. The entry that you're talking about is from a letter that he wrote to me. At the end of it, it's, "Nunca creas saberlo todo. Siempre necesitamos aprender más. Never think that you know everything. There's always more to learn." I really think that that's how he lived his life, always in the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of new facts. He enjoyed discovering new things that would change his perspective. I always very much appreciated that about him.

My sense of curiosity and appreciation specifically for words -- you'll notice that a lot of the book has to do with etymology and the origin of language and what words really mean. I think that came solely from grandfather because he was so precise with all of the words that he chose. He often corrected my Spanish and often made sure that I was using the correct words, the correct interpretations. I would go over to his house in order to learn Spanish. He would pull out old letters that my dad had written him. We would correct my dad's letters in Spanish, which is very fun. We would correct my dad's letters in Spanish with a Spanish-English dictionary next to us to be learning, and always learning. I wanted to dedicate the book to him because it's very much an expression of love of learning and of always being curious and always discovering new things and not being precious about where you discover new things because you can find things everywhere. You can find inspiration everywhere.

Zibby: That is such a genius idea, by the way. I have this giant bag of camp letters from summer camp which is stuffed underneath a bunch of clothes in the corner of my closet. How great, as my kids get better at grammar and learning to spell -- hopefully, they’ll get better -- to take those letters out, even in English, and have them correct them. Then they can learn more about me. We can have a bonding moment. That's brilliant.

Ashly: It was such a fun way for me to learn about my dad with my grandfather there and learn about their relationship and then also learn Spanish. It was just so fun and so personal. I'm sure your kids would love that. I think anytime, as children, we get a glimpse into who our parents really are and who they were when they were our age, it's mind-blowing and it humanizes them.

Zibby: Totally, and the people, even, who wrote me letters because I saved a lot of those. Now with the emails, I'm always like, I'm sure I'll be able to find this later. I'm just going to stuff it in this folder on the side here. I'm never going to see that email again, but my own letters, I have. I know where they are.

Ashly: I think a lot of writers are very attached to words, obviously. The only thing that I will ever keep -- I always think, if there was a fire, what would I grab? I keep everything anyone has ever written to me. If I was at a bar with a friend and we wrote something on a coaster, I have that coaster. I have Post-its that my roommate used to write me in college. I have anything that has words on it. When my grandfather died, or right before he died, he showed me in his office, his whole desk was filed with every single letter anyone has ever written him. The ones marked from his family were marked tesoros, which means treasures. I was like, oh, at the end, all we have are these treasures from each other and what we said to each other and how we made each other feel.

Zibby: It's so true. I'll tell you, the first thing that I always do -- I've lost a lot of people, as I know so many people have. I don't do this consciously, but I have found that one of the first things I do is an inventory of, what letters? Where is their handwriting? What can I hold in my hand? What pictures do I have? What videos do I have? I assemble it all together. Those become talismans, the note from my friend in college that I still have, the birthday card from my grandmother, all of it. It ends up having so much more importance.

Ashly: I've memorized every voicemail my grandpa ever sent me. It's so funny because voicemails are always so casual. It just feels like, how did I not know this was so important? Now my mailbox is always full because I refuse to delete any voicemails from anyone. [laughs]

Zibby: The only voicemail I refuse to delete is from Andre Agassi who was the second guest on this podcast. I just thought it was the coolest thing that he ever called me. I keep deleting all the annoying school emails or my parents or whatever, but Andre Agassi, all caps, is in my voicemail inbox. [laughter] Tell me now about your TV writing and what you're doing aside from writing great inspirational books like this one.

Ashly: My TV writing, I work on a show called Good Trouble which is on Freeform. It's a spin-off of a show called The Fosters. It's been such a fun exercise. I started in digital writing and writing short-form content for the internet and then moved into TV writing, which is group writing, essentially. I didn't know even as a writer what, really, the function of a writers' room is. It's just a bunch of writers sitting with each other discussing their lives and stories and seeing how it translates to other characters. Really, all writing is the same, I think. It's humans sharing stories with each other and then figuring out the best form for it to take. Ironically, being in a writers' room, you do very little solo writing. When you get an episode, you go off and write. Sometimes you'll write scenes for different episodes. It was more of a function of just being in community with each other.

Zibby: I feel like I usually preferred solo projects to group projects in school. Yet I kept getting thrown together, particularly in business school because they were like, you have to learn how to work as group. Then the more I talk to people who work in writers' rooms, it's the same thing. I'm like, I guess I should've [indiscernible] I have that opportunity. A girlfriend of mine is going to be in a writers' room in January. She's like, "Do you want to come in on our Zoom?" I was like, "Yes, I can't wait. I want to see what that's like."

Ashly: It's definitely a very cool experience. It's fun to be able to write in lots of different forms. The book was very much written exactly where I'm sitting every day at the same time. I would write during the dawn and during dusk, I found were the best parts for me, so in the very early morning or at night in the magic hour, essentially, of the day and the dawn. The hardest part about writing this book was that I had to be inspired in order to write it. I was constantly practicing, how do I find inspiration and in what ways? Part of it is the discipline of looking for inspiration. Then oftentimes, it would be at the time where I was completely exhausted, couldn't think of anything, and would go on a walk that something would surprise me and give me a true burst of inspiration that was unlike just pining and looking for it.

Zibby: It's hard to say, okay, now I'm going to be inspired. Although, I guess now that we have your book, now I have a time and a place that I anytime I want, I can just go in. Another thing I noticed is how often you referenced Oprah. I feel like she must be some sort of cult hero of yours because you talk about not only how she used to hand out free donuts on the street to get people into her taping studio, but also how few iconic moments are relative to how much time the show took in general, how many hours. Tell me about you and Oprah.

Ashly: Me and Oprah, I wish that that was a real thing of, here's my friendship with Oprah. Like most of America, Oprah has just been an icon in my house and a purveyor of wisdom and somebody I've looked to for perspective. My and me editor had a lot of back-and-forth about how much Oprah could be in the book. [laughs] I won a lot of Oprah. I was just flipping through the book the other day. I'm like, oh, the first couple of entries are very Oprah-heavy, or people that Oprah has talked to and the wisdom that she learned there. I really respond to Oprah's What I Know for Sure and Little Truths. She has a book called The Book of Happiness. Oprah is also someone who has been scouring the world in her lifetime for new perspectives and new learnings. Oprah's person is Maya Angelou. If you know anything about Oprah, all she ever talks about is Maya Angelou and what Maya Angelou taught her. For me, Oprah and Brené Brown are the two people that I constantly and incessantly talk about who I feel like are women who have taught me a lot. One of my favorite things that you're referencing is, there's an entry about Oprah how she had, I believe it's 4,561 or 4,651 episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Zibby: 4,561.

Ashly: 561. I was trying to memorize it because this has actually come up a few times. She has 4,561 episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Maybe ten of those episodes, but truly, three of those moments are iconic in American history and feel like part of our pop culture zeitgeist. I think about the fact that she had a quote that said, "Do the work as an offering. Then whatever happens, happens." I think often as artists or creatives or people who are looking just for inspiration, we put a lot into whatever the next thing is and feel like it has to be perfect and it has to be the thing. In actuality with life, even what you were talking about with camp, think about how many hours you've spent at camp, how many days, how many nights. How many of those memories really stay exactly with you? How many of those are pertinent to you? It kind of taught me that you can't hold everything so preciously. You just do the work because you want to do it, because you love it. You live your life because you have to live your life. We're not really sure what's going to resonate. It's not our job to figure that out. It's just our job to put out there what is important to us.

Zibby: I love that. That sounded like great advice. I always like to ask what advice you have for aspiring authors. That is fabulous. Would you have anything else aside from, basically, keep putting things out there and letting the right people find it when they need it?

Ashly: That pretty much sums up my advice. You don't need permission to be a writer and that the validation of -- oftentimes for me, I was always looking for, what is going to make me a real writer? What job am I going to get? Who's going to see it? Do I have to have a published book in order to feel real and authentic? It's actually so much more about, I feel like a real writer when I'm writing stuff that I like and no one can see it. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who's this amazing writer -- she did Fleabag and Killing Eve. She's a television writer. She always says that she writes for her one best friend. She just wants to make her one best friend laugh, and that's it. She ended up making everybody laugh and is this incredible writer. I think the pressure of thinking of an audience and people who are going to deem your work important can actually be the killer of creativity. Either write for your best friend or write for yourself. Take that pressure off. Then whatever happens, happens. If it goes out into the world and people like it, great. If it doesn't, I often think that the time of anonymity is the best time to be a writer because you can fail in the dark by yourself with no one watching. Enjoy the time before the time where people are looking.

Zibby: Love it, failures in the dark. [laughter]

Ashly: Yes, the next book after Read This for Inspiration, failures in the dark.

Zibby: Read this for inspiration in your closest with the lights off. Ashly, thank you. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for this beautiful book which just makes me smile whenever I see it and which I'm going to leave out on my coffee table even though it's tiny and adorable because it's really happy.

Ashly: That's exactly what it's for. That's what it's for. I made it specifically, when I was designing it -- I carry my books with me all around in backpacks and stuff. I wanted it to be hard enough that it didn't get bent and that you could fit it into your purse, into your locker, or right next to you by a coffee table. Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. It was great talking with you.

Zibby: Great talking to you too.

Ashly: Bye.

Zibby: Bye, Ashly.

Priya Parker, THE ART OF GATHERING

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

Priya Parker: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: The Art of Gathering, you might think this is a bad time for this book to come out, but it's actually the most important time ever for this book to come out when every gathering is imbued with extra meaning and navigating how to gather becomes the most important thing when you can't actually see anyone. What do you think about the timing of this release?

Priya: It's ironic. It's a fascinating moment to have The Art of Gathering, particularly -- the paperback came out in the midst of the pandemic and at a moment where the word gathering was in every headline perhaps in a way that it's never been before. The CDC bans gatherings. Washington State bans gatherings of ten or more people. Andrew Cuomo bans gatherings. In a sense, the word gathering -- I chose it very intentionally -- before COVID hit, was a source of meaning and inspiration and beauty. Within three weeks, the context of the entire word flipped. It was a source of danger and a source of death. Part of what has been beautiful and powerful and complicated and painful in this moment is that we still are grappling with and struggling with how to be together when we can't in the same old way. How do we create meaning together despite significant obstacles? I'm a conflict resolution facilitator. My core day job craft is not an events planner or a florist or a lighting expert or somebody whose profession is reliant on the things, the accoutrements of a gathering. A facilitator is trained on, how do you create meaningful connection despite significant obstacles? A huge part of The Art of Gathering, well before COVID when I was writing it over the last many years, is about, how do we actually stop our obsession on form and on things and on the fish knives and the flowers and the AV equipment? How do we actually think about creating meaning not through things, but through people? Right now, we can't make meaning through things. It's become actually this turned-up volume on, how do we actually create psychological togetherness and not over-rely on the physical togetherness?

Zibby: How do you do it? [laughs] Like you, like everybody, I'm completely reliant on Zooms and FaceTimes and trying to make time for that in life, but it's not the same. There's something very much missing.

Priya: Absolutely. I hope and pray as much as everyone else that this period passes as fast as possible. I think the way you do it is actually, in some ways, the same way you do it whether you're physical or virtual, which is, you start with the need in front of you. You start with the purpose. The same way if you're thinking about a birthday party, I would say you don't start with the cake and the candles, in a Zoom meeting or in a Zoom staff meeting or in a Zoom birthday party, you don't start with Zoom. Zoom is a tool. It's not the host. I'll give a specific example. I have a friend who was turning fifty. He thought about not, what kind of party do I want? but, what is my need right now? He was feeling tender about turning fifty. He'd never really cared about birthdays. He wasn't one to worry about getting older, but he felt a niggle. I don't even know if that's the right word. He felt this thing about turning fifty.

He got clear on it and he said, "In my life, I have always been attracted to and I've always sought out adventure and risk." He was a foreign correspondent. He realized that in his life there were many people who, once they turned fifty, they began to contract. They took less risks. They started taking less of the scary jobs. He was really worried that would happen to him. He decided for his fiftieth he would invite the people in his life that most continued to take risks. He brought them together. It was around a table, but you could do this on Zoom. In the first five minutes, he raised his glass and he told the story. He said, "What I most want is to continue to take risks and to expand. I don't want to be somebody who contracts slowly and incrementally over the next twenty years. I want to keep expanding. You are people who have always kept expanding despite obstacles. I want to thank you for that. I want you to blow that energy to me when I begin to contract. Remind me of tonight."

Zibby: I love that. Even in your book when you talked about the dinner party, it's something as simple as having a few couples for dinner. I'm having this couple, so I guess I should have this couple. What do you want to get out of a dinner party? Why are you going to do this? What do you want to talk about? Maybe you should talk about something really interesting. Maybe invite this other couple you hadn’t even thought about and give it a whole new purpose. Everything just shifts. I think one of the biggest things is we so often have meetings or events or whatever, and because we have them, they just are what they are. Your book and your whole message, really, is, no, no, no, we all have to stop. Yes, gathering's a part of life, but it doesn't have to be so route, almost.

Priya: Monotonous. Totally. I think at first, people are like, oh, god, that's just so exhausting. I'm like, no, you know what's exhausting? Going through life on autopilot and focusing on all the logistics and having everything to be perfect because you're trying to replicate somebody else's form. That's exhausting. You know what's life-giving? Having a real need and looking at yourself and saying, what is it that I need right now? Who might be able to help me with this? What is it that this community needs right now? How might we actually design for that? I'll give an example. One of the characters in the book, Ida Benedetto, I called her up recently. She's the one -- I don't know if you remember. She creates these extreme experiences to help people navigate risk with care. She does these fake conventions at the Waldorf Astoria where people show up in black tie and have to do things like -- there's a wedding on the third floor. Crash it, and give a toast to the bride. Things that just make your palms sweat. I called her up. I said, "How are you thinking about the holidays?" When I just need a different way of thinking, I call her.

She said, "You know, if I could give any advice, I would say don't think about a holiday party. How can you shift from a party to an adventure? The difference between a party and an adventure is two things: motion and mission." I was like, "Okay. What does that mean?" She said, "I threw my thirtieth birthday party years ago. Many friends often say to me it's one of the best nights of their life. I'm like, why? It was so simple." She had a friend who was a photographer who was taking pictures of beautiful keyholes on doors in the city. She brought together twelve friends. They all had to bring their camera. She explained their mission. The mission was to find the most beautiful keyholes in the city in two hours. Then they just went. She said, "What if during the holidays, rather than trying to all clamor into Zoom --" There's way to make Zoom, also, meaningful. "What if instead, with your team or with your family, you created an adventure?" You can be outside. It's cold, but when you're in motion, it's not so cold. When you have a mission, it allows for you to move. How do we actually think about being together in ways that are new experiences and don't have to look like what we think a party looks like?

Zibby: It's like my kids going on field trips. You have to get out of the classroom every so often. You have to go into the world. You kind of roll your eyes. You're like, really? I have to schlep to the Queens Museum? or something like that. Then you end up realizing that that's when you have the most memorable thing from the whole class. You just have to push yourself to get out there because learning often doesn't happen the way you expect. Neither does any of the rest.

Priya: And the dynamics within the classroom, all of us, for good reasons, play specific roles to have some amount of order, whether it's assigned seats or whether Sally always sits by Sanjay, and Sanjay always sits by Leia. Then on that sleepover, everyone could pull their sleeping bags in the museum on different parts of the floor. All of a sudden, these new friendships were born. When we shift our spaces, psychologically or virtually, we're also shifting our norms of who is labeled as what. They're always the introvert. They don't usually sing. Each of us have many parts. I define a gathering as anytime three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle, or end. We're gathering all the time, but we're often gathering in ways that we're on autopilot. It's not serving anybody.

Zibby: I think about this all the time, so I was particularly receptive to your message and your mission because I'm always analyzing time and how we're spending time. Is this worth it? Even my own time, is this group Zoom worth it? What is my purpose? Should I be doing my emails at the same time during this one or that one? How do you maximize everything? Why are we even doing it? What is the point? Why are we doing it? Before, I used to do it with meetings. What are we all just sitting around -- why do I go to board meetings? What are we doing here? [laughs]

Priya: When it becomes performative, like, I'd like to be on that board or I like that company's mission or whatever reason we each join boards or you join a board, then at some level, no one really wants to be this performative sitting duck. I'll give an example. A woman came up to me, pre-COVID, at a book event. She said, "I'm an executive director. I read The Art of Gathering. It helped me figure out why my board meetings suck. I realized that they are rubber stamps. We all as a staff work to make sure we make our most beautiful presentations. We go like a dog and pony show. We show all the wonderful things that are happening. Everyone politely claps and leaves." She said, "But these people on my board are brilliant. I want to use them. I flipped my board purpose from being a dog and pony show to be bringing them our scariest problems."

Zibby: I love that.

Priya: Everything changed. It was specific and disputable. Some of her staff were like, "I don't know if this is such a good idea. You really want to tell them what the problems are?" All of a sudden, you could see the blood come back into the board member's face. They were actually needed. We should be gathering because we need each other, not out of obligation, and shifting it -- every community has needs that benefit by people coming together. We're just not often gathering around what those needs are. We shouldn’t judge what those needs are. The needs can be hilarious. They can be release. They can be, I need to have a night where I can talk with other mothers and we don't talk about our kids. I need to remember that I can be many things.

Zibby: Yes. I feel like I need to try to put in motion -- I'm on the board of a major medical institution. I don't know how receptive they'd be if I'm like, okay -- but then you think, gosh, look at the people sitting around this table. If we were all just talking to each other, how interesting would that be versus listening? I also feel like that's some ways that we've all saved time. I do feel like one perk of this pandemic -- not that there are any and not that I wouldn't trade it, obviously. For times when you just need to listen and process, why go anywhere? Why run around town and go from here to there to there just to sit and listen if you can do it from your computer? If you want to be with people and bring yourself and your feelings -- I'm sorry, I'm preaching to the choir here. [laughs] I totally agree.

Priya: Absolutely. I often say to my clients, people I work with, in all types of institutions, there's a sense, we should have a retreat. We should have a three-day gathering. I always say, why are you doing this? Why do you want to have a conference? What is your purpose? Then I say, if you want to invite all of these people, I want you to figure out what the agenda is so that they would cancel other stuff to attend this. That's the bar.

Zibby: Usually, there has to be something they're getting out of it. You have to look at it like marketing. I have this anthology coming out. We're trying to plan a tour. I'm like, I've been on so many calls about books. There has to be something that you're offering. Otherwise, why would anybody just sit and listen? What can I give? I don't know if I even have an answer to that. What can I give that people might leave and be like, I'm so glad because now in my life I can do X, Y, or Z better, or something where it's not just...

Priya: Yes, and not just receiving. One practical way to think about -- I think about time as real estate. If you're sixty minutes on a Zoom call, fifty-nine minutes of those shouldn't be a presentation unless it's literally the most fascinating presentation in the world that people are tearing walls down to get this data. That's not most people. Maybe it's the presidential daily briefing. [laughs] If it's not that, how do you begin to shrink the presentation time to thirty minutes, meaning over an hour, or ten minutes and create time for people to interact meaningfully? On Zoom, that might be breakout groups. It might mean putting people in groups of three. It's not rocket science. It's having the courage to not fill time. You know what else? The presentation also is de-risked. I know schools that are navigating enormous conflict, whether on COVID or teachers. It's such a fraught time. When administrators finally come and do a Zoom call and you log in and it's a fifty-nine-and-a-half-minute presentation, they're not doing anything. They're perpetuating a problem because they're not actually shifting the relationship and listening to what people have to say. How do you actually not just give people something, but how do you create a contract where the gathering has changed because of who the participants are and how they actually engage there? You can't create something new if it's just a stagnant webinar.

Zibby: Totally. You should just send the presentation ahead of time. Let me skim through it. I will digest the whole thing. I will come back to you in the meeting, and then I will have my questions already thought through. So will everyone else. That's the beauty of the brainstorm. You really do get lots more ideas when you all come together, but if you're going to waste time just listening...

Priya: There's a facilitator named Misha Glouberman. He wrote a book called The Chairs are Where the People Go with Sheila Heti a few years ago. I think it was in April, he wrote this nerdy little Medium piece that I loved. It's nerdy because it shows you how to host a cocktail party on Zoom, but through all of the technicalities. I have a newsletter community that every two or three weeks we send out a story of what somebody's -- how they're creating togetherness virtually. Every now and then, we do an experience. We brought Misha in. He showed us on Zoom how you can create basically an unconference with a hundred other people. When he wrote this piece in April, it was kind of complicated. Now the latest version of Zoom has a feature where you can make everybody the host. Everybody, a hundred people, can be a cohost. This is an example of, if you have a hundred people or thirty people or twenty people, people are interesting. They know what their problems are. They know what their needs are.

He created a Google Doc where he said, "Do you have a conversation you would like to host in this group? Do you have a burning question you're trying to figure out?" Some people were like, how do you fight online? How do you have conflict safely virtually with your team? Other people were like, how do you create intimacy? All these different questions. Then everybody becomes a cohost on Zoom. You see all the rooms. You see who's hosting the conversation. You see what the topic is on Google Docs. You can literally portal yourself. Like Exit West, you can go through the portal and find yourself in another room. It’s a way of actually decentralizing power. It's putting the agenda into everybody's hands and letting people choose where they want to go. It's not rocket science. It's actually helping people determine what the needs are and choose where they want to go. People are now doing this virtually.

Zibby: Wow. That's really neat. All right, so there's hope. There's hope for the Zoom world. Thank you for that. How did you know you wanted to be a conflict resolution expert? How did that happen?

Priya: I assume, like your podcast, you are trying to sort out your own life through this podcast. [laughter]

Zibby: What makes you say that?

Priya: Something tells me.

Zibby: I can't believe you would jump to that conclusion. I'm offended. [laughs]

Priya: Same, girl. I'm biracial. I'm bicultural. I grew up in a family that two parents were married and then divorced. My mother is Indian. My father is white American. Each remarried people who were, in a lot of ways, polar opposite of the family that they had created together. They had joint custody. I was part of both homes. Every two weeks, I'd go back and forth between these two homes. It was like split screen or split reality. One home was this Indian, British, Buddhist-mediating, incense-filled, dream-interpreting, [indiscernible] for me home. Then I would travel 1.4 miles to my father and stepmother's home. It was, and still is, a white American, evangelical Christian, conservative, republican, meat-eating, softball-playing, dogs -- just culturally a different place. That was also my home. Every two weeks, I'd go back and forth between these two split screens. In many ways, the things that each of those family cultures began to think of as the other was actually my other two weeks. I've always been interested in when and why and how we come together and how we create our realities and how we create group identity.

How can you create a group and an experience and a community where people feel something in common, feel connected to each other, but don't have to all be the same, where you're stamping out people's differences in order to belong? In part because there's communities that I feel like I could belong and be complicated in and there's communities where I don't feel like I can belong and be complicated in, I'm really interested in the communities where you can belong and still have many paradoxes within you. I also don't think every community is for everybody. A big idea in The Art of Gathering is exclusion. You shouldn't invite everybody to everything. One, it makes everything the same. Also, it doesn't make sense for the purpose. I'm a huge advocate in excluding people with care and not because of the personality or because of the politics, but because of the purpose. I often talk about this gathering that a journalist hosted called the worn-out mom's hootenanny. She was trying to create this dinner party. She felt obligated to do it. It was actually an assignment she had. Then she shifted and she said, you know what, a need I have is I'm worn out. I'm a mom. What if I host a dinner party for my other worn-out moms? She called it a worn-out mom's hootenanny. If they talked about their kids, they had to take a shot. The six women who were invited and went were so excited to be seen as worn-out, to be seen as a real need. Some of the partners were like, why can't dads come? Part of it is because that's not the need tonight. It begins to shift. If you want a worn-out dad's hootenanny, you better be a little bit more worn out. It just starts to create specificity that actually has an opportunity to shift norms.

Zibby: Very true. I know. When I was reading about your childhood and the whiplash you must have had going back and forth -- I'm a child of divorce too. My parents lived very close together. They're not as different as yours. Still, any child of divorce who has to navigate constantly having themselves in these two different environments and having to adapt and also having to deal with parents in that situation, I feel like the conflict resolution schools or whatever, however you get trained, should pair up with the divorce lawyers. You could just have a feeder organization.

Priya: Completely. It's like a boot camp.

Zibby: Yeah, boot camp. There you go. [laughs] For you personally, now you have this book. You're talking all the time on all these shows and podcasts. You just talked to Brené Brown, oh, my gosh. I started listening, but now I have to finish after this. I was like, oh, my gosh, you guys are amazing. What is it you still want to do? What are you super fired up to do next? What now?

Priya: I look at the people who I think have had some amount of success, whatever you want to define that as, who are in their sixties and seventies and eighties and who are still happy and vibrant and seem grounded and not like jerks, what I see them doing and having in common, whether they're a comedian or whether they're a therapist, is that they all are still connected to their source work. It's the therapist who still sees clients three days a week. Jerry Seinfeld still writes jokes every day. He still goes to Podunk -- pre-COVID and hopefully post-COVID -- stand up halls to try out new material even though he's the most famous comedian in the world because he's pursuing mastery. He's close to his source work. For me, for the rest of my life, I think, I'm a facilitator. My craft and my source, it's to be close to the work. In a sense, I see writing as this outcome of the questions I'm pursuing through groups. Then I think the second thing that has really helped me is -- years ago, David Brooks made a speech that resonated with me. He said something like, no question worthy of pursuit is answerable in a lifetime. How do we come together in ways that are meaningful and have a common, agreed purpose and not have to all be exactly the same? That's a thousand-year question.

Zibby: That's true. All right, so you got your work cut out for you.

Priya: I think for each of us, rather than thinking about the form -- again, it's how do you stay close to your source work, whatever that is? How do you continue to pursue mastery, whatever that may be in? Brené Brown, she has one of the best and most whatever, number-one podcast. She's relatively new at it. She tweeted the other day, "Enjoyed so much listening to Dax Shepard and Tim Ferris geek out on how to podcast." She's a student. She's not sitting on her laurels. When she interviewed me, I was so moved. I was intimidated by the interview. Going in, oh, gosh, what am I going to say? She, more than anybody else -- the entire interview is text based. She had her book, The Art of Gathering. It was dogeared and Post-its all around and like a student with a capital S. She was studying. It just reminded me, we all may have a mastery in one specific thing, but to continue to pursue a question is life-giving, not just to everyone else, but for yourself.

Zibby: By the way, that does not make subsequent interviewers feel any good about what they are doing. I was reading this before I talked to you. I was like, oh, gosh, I've already failed this interview. I already can't measure up. [laughs]

Priya: Not at all. I think part of the reason why even interviews for me are fun is because each one is an opportunity to have your brain collide with somebody else's brain. Part of what's beautiful about your podcast is that it's your specific questions. It's your curiosity. It's not just for your audience, but for each author that comes on that's unique and makes it "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books"-ian or Zibby-ian. It's a very specific DNA.

Zibby: This is just literally my opportunity to ask people what I want to know. I'm delighted anybody else wants to listen, but this is completely self-serving. Yes. [laughs]

Priya: Which is why it's relevant. You have a real need. You found a way to spend time despite obstacles, I imagine being a mom and the things that may come along with that. There's a lot of other people who have the same problem, and so they get to ride alongside you.

Zibby: Sure. Why not? [laughs] Do you have any parting advice to aspiring authors?

Priya: To authors, one is, think about a question that you don't know the answer to when you're a writing book. You may have an instinct around -- you may think you have something to say, but you're really desperately curious to find out the answer to. That's one. Number two, don't write a book. Write twelve chapters. When I was thinking about a book, I was like, oh, my god, this is so overwhelming. My husband told me this. He's like, "Write down the twelve things you know are true that are counterintuitive that you believe might be -- and then go test them." My original yellow [indiscernible] sheet of twelve ideas, I think six of them became chapter titles. Six of them didn't. New things came in. Write chapters. Don't write a book. Make sure the chapters have an arc, but think about chapters. Then I think the third is, different authors and writers have different parts of the process that they love and that they hate. I love the research. I love the conversations. I love the meaning-making. I hate the writing. I find it very difficult. I'm a much better speaker than I am writer. I would often take voice memos of myself talking out loud and then transcribe myself onto the page. Find ways to lean into what you love and then to hack through what you don't.

Zibby: Excellent. It sounds like your husband could maybe be a writing coach on the side, if you guys need a little side-hustle situation.

Priya: Exactly. He's very good.

Zibby: I would say let's meet up sometime, but of course, I can't. If we ever have a common goal that we need to sort out, we should maybe intentionally try to do that face to face at some point in the next ten years or something. [laughter]

Priya: I look forward to that. I get so many of my examples, as you can hear from this conversation, from other people doing real stuff in the world. Send me your examples. On Instagram, we're often having lively conversations about what people's holiday plans are, what Thanksgiving plans, what a virtual party looks like. You can follow me, @PriyaParker. Sign up for our newsletter. The Art of Gathering is a call to look at your own life and ask what the need is and then gather around it. It's a courageous thing to do, but it's also a contagious thing to do. A big part of The Art of Gathering is it's a norm-spreading, permission-giving book.

Zibby: Love it. Well done. [laughter]

Priya: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and for a project that you're pursuing that other people get to benefit from.

Zibby: No problem. Thanks for sharing.

Priya: Thanks so much, Zibby. Be well.

Zibby: Have a great day. Buh-bye.

Priya: Bye.

Katherine May, WINTERING

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

Katherine May: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. I cannot wait to discuss Wintering, your beautiful new orange-covered book. We've been just discussing where it's going to go on my color-coded bookshelf. I had to flag that it was orange and beautiful. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which could not be coming out at a better time. This winter, difficult times, you nailed the timing on the publication here.

Katherine: I would really like to put it out there that I neither planned nor caused this moment in history, but I'm very glad to be landing in it. [laughter]

Zibby: Noted. Understood. Katherine, can you tell listeners, please, what your book is about and then what inspired you to write this book?

Katherine: Wintering, it's part memoir and part something entirely different. It's really about the times in life when we fall through the cracks. That's familiar to all of us. I'm trying to draw a line between those experiences of all the awful things that happen to us as human beings. That might be illness. It might be mental illness. It might be things like divorce. It might be bereavement. It might be the loss of a job. It could just be one of those times in life when everything seems to fall apart. You're ready for a change, but you don't know how to make it. I explain that by drawing on winter, the season. I'm a big winter lover. I have to come straight out with it. I'm one of those people that's very uncomfortable in the summer. I love the winter. I also see winter as a real time of rest and renewal and restoration. I wanted to show how if we think about winter as a dead time, we completely miss the point. Actually, when we're wintering, we're amassing our energies for the next stage.

Zibby: I love how you applied that to everything from how the popular advice is misguided, that you should cope. You have to buck up. It's going to be okay. Instead, by shifting your mindset and expecting winter to come and not hoping that every day of winter is going to be a summer's day, same thing with any of the trauma, loss, job, any issue, if you have the right framework, it can make you feel so much better in a difficult time. That's really the secret sauce to this book. It's reframing, almost. It's reframing how to fit a difficult time into the chaos of everyday life, especially when other people are not having a difficult time.

Katherine: Actually, this year, everyone's having a difficult time, aren't they? That's the big change. Everyone's wintering at once at the moment and in so many different ways. I suppose I'm thinking about, there's a problem that we've got with positivity nowadays. We're all busy sharing memes on Facebook and Instagram. We want to be seen to be positive. We want to be those people who are always on it and always impressive. Obviously, that hides a lot of stuff. The message that we receive from that is that we're not allowed to fall. We're not allowed to mourn. We're not allowed to be ill. We're not allowed to suffer. We've got to put a brave face on it pretty quickly. I think that's harming us. I think we've got to the point where we can no longer keep pretending to be perfect. Actually, by living through those really painful parts of life, we get a lot from that. That's part of being human.

Zibby: Your book is so great because you make yourself instantly relatable and likable when you talk about your vacation when you're playing on the beach with your son, Bert, and your husband who you call H. Your husband starts complaining of feeling sick. You're kind of annoyed by it. I have to find this quote because it made me laugh so much. You were talking about your husband, who you call H in the book, and your son, Bert, playing on this idyllic seaside around the time of your fortieth birthday with your friends. He starts feeling very sick and comes back and he tells you that he's vomited. You say, "Oh, no, I remember saying, trying to sound sympathetic while privately thinking what a nuisance it was we have to cut the day short and head back home. Then he probably needs to sleep it off." It's so funny. Our loved ones are sick in front of us, and you're like, oh, gosh, now what's Bert going to do the rest of the day when the rest of his friends are at the beach? How am I going to entertain him? I just loved that you put such a relatable moment right in the beginning, especially because this became a horrific situation. You started with such humor. Tell me more about Bert and what ended up happening in the hospital and everything.

Katherine: I was absolutely the last person to realize that he was really, really sick. He had very severe appendicitis, very bad infection from it, and eventually ended up being taken into hospital and then had to wait a very long time for surgery because the hospital was so busy. It was really terrifying. It was really life or death. It meant that after he'd had the surgery, he was in hospital for over a week just failing to recover in the way they expected him to. It was just an absolutely terrifying time. We couldn't work out what was wrong with him. He was so sick for a long time. It was just a real mortality reminder that comes every now and again. We really felt like we could've easily lost him. I felt like I had to personally be there advocating for him all the time to make sure he absolutely got the care he needed. It was a wake-up call for us.

Zibby: Even how you described being back and forth from home to drop-offs to having your son stay somewhere else. Then when you would get to a place, suddenly feeling like there was nothing that you even could do there, rushing back to the hospital to sit and wait and have nothing happen and twiddling your thumbs and trying to be like, what can I do in this time to help anything? and that feeling of helplessness amidst the chaos.

Katherine: I think we all come to that time in our lives at some point. It's that feeling of being completely exhausted but also totally wired at the same time. You're hyper-alert. You're just trying to do the best for the people that you love and trying to balance the responses of your kids against needing to tend to your husband. That's such a hard thing to do. Bert was absolutely terrified. He didn't want to see his father. He didn't want to look at him because he was covered in wires and pipes and just didn't look like himself and kept dozing off mid-sentence and that kind of thing. That's without my own fears. That's without all the stuff that's going on in my head, like, what happens now? It's a terrible time. We had a week of it, and it was awful. For some people, that goes on for months and years. I'm very mindful of that.

Zibby: It's so true. Then you move from there to talking about your own physical response. You tied it to your stress of your job but compared it to symptoms of bowel cancer, really. Tell me about what happened then.

Katherine: I'd been doing the stupid thing that you always hear about other people doing and you think you'll never be the one that does it, which is carefully ignoring all the major symptoms of bowel cancer for about six months. It's amazing how easy that stuff is to push away when you're incredibly busy, and I did. I had a busy, stressful job. I was leading a creative writing degree at university. There was a lot going on. I was a mother, obviously. I was writing books in my spare time. I'd been coping for so long that I couldn't hear the messages my body was sending me. I knew I was massively stressed. I knew I was becoming unwell. It was only when I was sitting in the hospital by my husband that I began to realize how much pain I was in. I assume it's because it's the first time I'd slowed down for a long time. Even that didn't feel very slow, but I was sitting still.

I thought that it was probably sympathetic, almost. My pain was in exactly the same place that his appendicitis was. I left it again, of course. Then within a couple of weeks, I ended up doubled up over my desk at work on the phone to my doctor saying, "I don't know what's going on, but I feel like I'm in labor." [laughs] It took a little while, but it turned out that I had multiple bowel problems, luckily not cancer. I did go away with a very thorough ticking off and warning that I had the intestines of a particularly self-negligent seventy-five-year-old. I was sitting there going, but you know what? I eat my vegetables. I'm a vegetable fan. I'm really careful about my diet. I take exercise. Then I had to just sit down and think, yeah, but you have lived with enormous stress for years and years and years. That’ll do it. It doesn't matter how many portions of cabbage you eat. The stress will get you in the end. It did.

Zibby: That's a very sobering message.

Katherine: Sorry, everyone.

Zibby: No, it's good to hear. It is so important and good to hear. It makes me want to take a deep sigh. It's so easy to ignore the stresses or say, this is what we have. We have to do this. There's no choice. Yet there's only so much mind over matter can help with your body.

Katherine: So much pushing through, yeah. You can't keep pushing through. You have to listen to those signals that we know we should listen to. Wow, I was so good at ignoring them. I was impressive there.

Zibby: If we could give medals for ignoring your body and being self-care negligent, congratulations.

Katherine: Woohoo! That's not the medal I ever wanted to win, but there we go.

Zibby: [laughs] Tell me about the decision to write this book. I know you were a creative writing professor. You are a brilliant, beautiful writer from the first sentence on through. The way you use metaphor all the time and the way you can cut through and use language sparsely and yet so beautifully, it's very captivating, I have to say. I mean it. It's really amazing. Perhaps this is what you teach your students, in which case I want to take your class. Tell me about the writing of this book and even your writing style, how it all evolved and developed.

Katherine: When I first started writing, I did start writing poetry. I think that's such a great school for economy and finding that exact image and just that image that's necessary. Also, I think the writing style comes from my really deep engagement with winter. I just wanted to write about all the lovely things about winter. One of the first lines I wrote was about the pavement sparkling in winter. There were so many things I wanted to say. I'd been pursuing it all my life, going on holiday in Iceland and Norway instead of Spain and Greece. That's what my family has to put up with from me. The idea for Wintering, the book, came before that whole crisis, weirdly, when I realized that I was a kind of expert in living through those times of life. I recognized them really well. I actually had a technique for them. Not that I enjoyed them, but I could see the value of them. I'd learned to burrow into them.

I realized I had something to share. I wanted to write a book that told other people how to do it. I thought I was going to be writing it from the sunny uplands when everything was fine. I thought I could look back over wintering periods of my life and wisely give advice to people. That's how the book was pitched. Then everything happened at once during it. First of all, I really resisted writing about them because it's like, this is not my book. This is not fair. This was not supposed to happen. Then I realized I had to crack it open and let people into the process that I was going through at the time. I think that changed the book for the better because I think that brings that kind of immediacy to walking alongside me, going through the process with me. That then became my mission. I wanted to take people through day by day, those feelings. I think I wouldn't have thought of loads of them if I hadn’t been living them at the time.

Zibby: What was your writing process like when you wrote it? Were you at this desk with these beautiful curtains behind you? Where did you like to do your writing? How long did the whole book take?

Katherine: I'm quite random in my approach to writing at the best of times. I've always been someone that will do a little bit on the kitchen table, a little bit on the sofa, a bit in a café. Actually, towards the end of the period when I knew I was going to have to deliver the book, and as I document in the story, I had to pull my son out of school because he had stopped coping. That meant that most of the book actually got written in the cafés of play centers and on benches in playgrounds. I have a favorite playground in my hometown of Whitstable that actually has a table and a bench which means that I can put my laptop on it if it's not raining. It was really, really pieced together in tiny snatches and getting up very early, like four thirty in the morning, to get a couple of good hours in before Bert woke up. It felt very against the wire. I didn't get the time on it that I wanted. I really did submit it in total terror that my editor would say, what is this? Go back and rewrite it. I said, at least that buys me some time if she says that. That's the best I can do. But no, she loved it, luckily. I think I got away with it. [laughs]

Zibby: You got away with it. It's beautiful. It's also something that's nice to return to because you have something for each month. I read it all in one sitting because we were talking. Now that I have this, it's like, it's November, I can go back and read the November chapter. Maybe that’ll put me in the right mindset. Usually, you always talk about going north. You're always venturing into new lands. That's not my go-to thing. Even just getting to relive your moments in each month and not letting the depressing darkness, feel that, but feel uplifting, in a way, can be useful as someone who's a summer lover.

Katherine: [laughs] Maybe I can convert you. There are some people who are reading it month by month. They're going very slowly through it, which I love. I wanted it to track the year because winter isn't just one monotonous space. It's actually full of really distinct moments. They are the going into winter, that mid-winter period where everything feels quite heavy and bleak. That's actually the moment when we've arranged loads of celebrations, so maybe mid-winter passes quite easily. It's then the time after winter, that January, February time when everything feels very heavy and you think the sun's never going to come back again and all hope is lost. Everything's very dreary. I wanted to track right through to that and then into the first signals of hope in the new spring that are coming when the wildflowers come out and things like that. I really enjoyed that part of it. I learned a lot about how winter progresses. It made me engage more with that season and really notice the changes that take place that had been invisible to me before, as they are to so many of us.

Zibby: Do you have any advice on periods of wintering that don't have to happen during the winter season, so what you started out by talking about, all these different things that you can be going through? If somebody is going through a wintering season in their own life, season agnostic, what advice do you have? The advice that you reference on Instagram, you say, this is not good advice. This is not friendship. This is not how you cope. Give me the goods.

Katherine: The first thing I'd say is that you can't avoid winter. It's coming. Obviously, Game of Thrones was more insightful than we even realized. Winter is coming. If you know that downtime is coming in your life, then there comes a point when you have to stop pushing it back. You can defer it for a while, but actually, it gets worse. My advice, always, is to engage with it, to walk alongside it, to make some space for it, to be in that sadness or that grief or that fear, whatever those emotions are, to actually spend some time with them and to be with them because they're always asking us something. It's usually a change. I often think that a wintering is the process of accepting a change that's coming anyway. That is the painful bit. If change wasn't painful, then we would adapt to all sorts of things that happen to us in our lives instantly and it wouldn't be a problem. We can't. We have to, very, very slowly, adapt. I don't think I'm alone in this experience.

When a major thing has happened to me, it takes a few months for it to enter my dreamscape at night. I don't know if that's true for you. I think there's a sign there that that's the moment when we've begun to integrate whatever it is that's come into our life. It takes that length of time. Those of us that have lost a loved one know that there's that year cycle in which everything is so hard that first year. You're still grieving after the first year, but it takes that full year to really absorb the change that's happened. I think at the other end of the scale, it takes a full year to absorb having your first child, perhaps, that massive, massive change. We've lost the ability to talk about change as slow and that that slowness is necessary and useful. We want to rush everything. We want to short-circuit everything. We want to find the book that gives us ten easy steps to get through it in a month instead of a year. I think we have to radically abandon the idea that that's even possible and learn to know that we've almost evolved to accept things slowly. That's how it works for us. It's not an easily packageable idea.

Zibby: That's okay. [laughs]

Katherine: It's not. It's the hard, hard truth of being a human, that actually, we can live through those moments at a very slow pace, but that great work is being done.

Zibby: Back to that first year of having a child, you wrote about actually losing your voice, which, as I hear now, is absolutely beautiful, but that you literally lost your voice when you had your child and had to reteach yourself to sing and all this stuff and how you were a walking metaphor for losing your voice in parenthood. Tell me a little bit about that.

Katherine: I was teaching at the time as well. When I was a teenager, I'd always been a chorister, so I'd always really valued my singing voice. I love singing. I might not sing professionally, but it's something that I do to release energy and tension. First of all, my voice just began to crackle. Then I experienced it cutting out fully mid-sentence. It would just go. I had various investigations. I didn't have polyps or anything like that. I ended up going to a singing teacher after months and months of really struggling. It became very uncomfortable too. It was really tickly. I'd start talking, and then I'd cough, cough, cough. I felt like I was being silenced. I was in this point in my life when I suddenly felt really invisible and really irrelevant to the outside world and really overtaken with mother work and like I was just clinging on by my fingertips onto the career that I wanted to have. I didn't know what to do until a friend who's a professional singer said, "Look, I know this really brilliant singing teacher. Professional singers have trouble with their voices all the time. I bet he can help."

I thought, you know what, if nothing else, I might quite enjoy it. I might quite enjoy spending some time singing. I didn't think I could possibly hit a note. There was one particular note I couldn't hit, which ironically is middle C. I don't know if you've even done singing training, but you always start at middle C and sing upwards in your scales. The first note, I just didn't have it. It wasn't there in my voice. We retrained my middle C back in, but we had to do that by bouncing onto it from other notes. That retrained my whole voice. They can remap your vocal cords so that you're using different parts of it. The process was remarkably quick. It took a few weeks, and I was talking again. He also taught me how to read from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas as a way of learning how to retrain my speaking voice as well so that I was almost singing. I think my voice is probably different now to what it was then, but I've got used to talking that way. It's much easier.

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

Katherine: Just write. I hear so many people giving so much advice. I don't think there's any one system you can follow. I don't think there is any practice that's better than another. If you can sit down and write as much as you can on whatever subject you want to, whatever really moves you and makes you want to talk, then that's the best start you can possibly have. It's beguilingly simple, isn't it?

Zibby: Katherine, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing Wintering, for your beautiful book again.

Katherine: I'm going to wave my coffee back at you. Look.

Zibby: Look at that. [laughter]

Katherine: Thank you so much for having me. It's been really lovely to talk.

Zibby: You too. Have a great day. Take care. Buh-bye.

Katherine: Thank you. Bye.

Rabbi Steve Leder, THE BEAUTY OF WHAT REMAINS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Rabbi Leder. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss The Beauty of What Remains, your brand-new book.

Rabbi Steve Leder: Thank you. I'm really happy to be with you today.

Zibby: First of all, whenever my friend Karen Frankel tells me to do anything, I do it because she has the best taste and recommendations for everything. When she recommended your book, I was like, of course. Then I read it, and it was unbelievably amazing. I'm delighted to be connected with you.

Steve: Thank you. As am I. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me about it.

Zibby: My pleasure. Now I have to go back and read all your other books. Could you please tell listeners what this book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Steve: I think the best way I can frame this book is as an apology. Let me explain. I had been a rabbi for about thirty years before I started writing this book. Obviously, I helped many, many hundreds, thousands. I calculated that I had officiated roughly a thousand funerals over those thirty years. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of helping people and guiding them through this process and of helping them discover what an extraordinary teacher death is when it comes to helping us lead meaningful lives. I thought I would've given myself maybe an A-, maybe even an A, in the rabbi/pastoral department. Then my father died. In the run-up to, during, and the aftermath of his death, I realized that despite my best efforts in the past, I was really, as I say in the book, one degree shy of the deepest truth when it comes to guiding people through the many ways death teaches us about life. I wrote this book really as a kind of apology, an attempt to undo what I had gotten wrong and to get it right and to put the reader on my shoulder as I walked through my own trajectory with my father's ten-year decline due to Alzheimer's and his death and to put the reader on my shoulder as I walk into the homes and hospital rooms of so many others to help them through what is inevitable for all of us. To succinctly answer your question, the book is an attempt to get it right.

Zibby: Wow. There was so much helpful information in the book. I don't think you need to apologize. I think A- would've been perfectly fine, by the way. You still have graduated with honors in my book.

Steve: You didn't grow up in my family. [laughs]

Zibby: Okay. In my family, they were happy with A-, at least for me. I think that even without that layer, you had so many tidbits and anecdotes and stories from the many people you've helped, including really gut-wrenching decisions like to what to say with your rabbi hat on versus your Steve hat on to the woman who wanted to know if her family could assist in her death at the last minute and you didn't know what to do, to all these other moments where you've helped families say goodbye, moments you've come in with jokes. I appreciate you putting in a few jokes in case the rest of us are really at a loss and need a good one to buffer our conversation skills. I'm going to have to photocopy those and hang them up. There's this whole piece of you which is, this is me as the rabbi, and this is me as me. Then this book, I feel like, is where the two come together.

Steve: I did want to explore in this book, the tension and the dance that goes on within me when I am both rabbi and friend, rabbi and son, rabbi and husband, rabbi and father. Often, those are aligned, but sometimes they're in conflict. What I really, really tried to do in this book is to weave that conflict and that tension and that resolution throughout the entire book. It's another component of putting the reader on my shoulder because so few people see behind the curtain when it comes to what clergy really do and how they do it. So few understand, so few clergy honestly, understand the dynamic within themselves that has to be resolved, the cognitive dissonance between, in my case, the rabbi and the man, the rabbi and the son. Addressing that conflict has made me a better rabbi and a better son. That's the end result. That's part of the reason I called the book The Beauty of What Remains. There are other reasons, but that's a big part of it. Once you engage in that internal conversation, what remains is really, for me, something quite beautiful.

Zibby: One of the most helpful pieces of advice in this book, and there is just so much, is for anybody who's feeling anxious about death, it means they're not dying and that you can just go back to living and wait. At the time when you die, then you can start worrying about it. For somebody with immense amounts of anxiety about everything like me, that was very helpful. Here, I'm just going to read this one quote. You said, "Most people are ready for death the way we are all ready for sleep after a long and exhausting day. We just want to pull the covers up around our aching heads and settle in for the peace of it all. We are not anxious about sleeping. We are not depressed about it. We are not afraid of it. Disease, age, and life itself prepare us for death. There is time for everything, and when it is our time to die, death is as natural a thing as life itself. Consider this very good news. For those of us who fear death, dying people are not afraid of dying. If you are afraid of dying, it is not your day. Anxiety is for the living." I'm actually going to post this on my bulletin board right now. That's going to stay.

Steve: It's really true. It's really helpful for people. It's sort of counterintuitive, but it's really helpful when I can look someone in the eye after they tell me, "I'm really afraid to die." I say, "That's because you're not dying, certainly not today." When you are really actively dying, you will not be afraid. Zibby, in thirty-three years now at the bedside of more than a thousand dying people, when that person is really ready to die, not once, not one single person has expressed fear to me. I ask, "Are you afraid?" The answer has, every time, been no. I know that's anecdotal evidence, but it's pretty persuasive. It is why I can say with a very high degree of confidence that if you fear death, you're not dying. Take a breath.

Zibby: It's interesting. My grandmother just passed away. She was ninety-seven and had been very healthy until the very end. Because of COVID, we could only say goodbye over FaceTime, which was just horrific and so sad. She was there with an aid. As she was unconscious at the end, I was like, "Is she afraid? Did she say she was afraid?" When she was alive, she was always taking about how afraid she was to die. "Does she know she's dying? Is she afraid?" She was like, "No, no." Maybe she was just saying that to make me feel better. She said, "No, no, not at all. I told her I was right here. She said, okay." Then when I would say over FaceTime, "Gadgi, don't be afraid. Everything's okay," her eyes kind of flickered, and that was it. I didn't see any fear. I just felt a sense of peace.

Steve: There is a point in life when death makes sense, but you have to be at that point in order to understand that.

Zibby: So I guess it's good I don't understand it.

Steve: It's a sign.

Zibby: It's a sign that I'm alive. [laughs]

Steve: That you're alive and not actively dying, correct.

Zibby: The rest of your book, though, talks about -- not the rest, but a lot of your book talks about the effect of death on the living and the loss of other people and the effect of illness like all the things you had to go through with your dad. Oh, my gosh, the scene with you tossing the balloon at your dad, all these moments, when you go and cry in the hallway, you can just put yourself in your shoes time and time again and feel that pain and suffering. The rest of it is about how you deal with the loss. You had great advice on that too. You say, "It won't always hurt so much. I used to think that what they meant was that eventually grief abates, the ache diminishes. Now what I think they meant was not that it won't always hurt so much, but that it won't always hurt so often." Tell me about that.

Steve: That's right. One of the most difficult things that I have to manage is the death of a child. There are very few things in life more difficult than that. Of course, as the rabbi, I take that on my shoulders with the family. I carry it with them. I even carry the casket. I always volunteer to carry the casket because it's too painful for the parents. Just imagine a casket the size of a shoebox.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, stop.

Steve: As a way of learning more about the feeling of losing a child, I read a book many years ago edited by two women, both of whom had children who died. It's an anthology of writers writing about writers who had children die writing about the experience. For example, Robert Frost had four children die. Mark Twain had a child die. They wrote about it. In the introduction, these women say that the thing that helped them the most and was the most honest was when someone said to them, it won't always hurt so much. I said that for years. This is part of the apology component of the book. I said that, Zibby, so many years, decades, to parents. I would say, look, the most honest and helpful thing I can tell you right now is it won't always hurt so much. Then my father died, obviously a more normative circumstance than the death of a child. I stopped saying that to people because it's not true. The truth is, it won't always hurt so often, but when it hurts, it hurts every bit as much.

That is the truth. That has to be said. I find by enlightening people in this way, it enables them to go with these waves that come at them. One of the things I say in the book is that anyone who thinks the shortest distance between two points is a straight line doesn't understand grief because grief is nonlinear. This business about there being stages of grief, my opinion, it's nonsense. Grief is much more like waves. It ebbs and it flows. It ebbs and it flows. The waves get further apart. Every once in a while when your back is turned, you can just get slammed by a rogue wave that you didn't see coming. It can be a song. It can be a taste. It can be a place. It can be something you desperately wish you could share with your loved one who's gone. These waves hit us. When you're really looking at a wave, you have two choices. You can try to stand up against it -- what normally happens then is it crashes in on you and throws you upside down and you're gasping for air and lost and confused -- or you can submit and lie down and float with it until you're able to stand up again. That's grief. It’s the floating. It's the learning to float with it until you can stand again. That is the honest truth about grief.

Zibby: I have been, then, on the beach watching this ocean ravage my husband and his sister as their mother and grandmother just passed away from COVID. I have watched firsthand exactly what you're talking about, especially the first week. In the first week, every few hours somebody would fall. It was one and then the other and the other. I was running back and forth. Now it's been a couple months. It's still, well, it knocked me over this morning. I was okay, but then two days ago, this. It's exactly it. It's not predictable. You can't plan for it.

Steve: No. I think it's always okay when it comes. I don't think there's a wrong way to grieve. Obviously, I'm not talking about a person who doesn't eat and can't sleep for months and becomes clinically ill. There's really no wrong way, just as there's no wrong moment or time to feel love because actually, that's really what you're feeling. That's another way of seeing grief that makes it more beautiful to embrace. Grief is really a reflection of love. One of the things I talk about in the book -- the book is for everyone. Obviously, I'm a rabbi and I wrote it, but it's really not a Jewish book. It may be a book for Jews like everyone else, but it's not a Jewish book. I do, in the book, talk about that verse from the twenty-third psalm that everyone knows. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil." There are two very nuanced and very beautiful and important, profound ideas in that verse. The first, we walk through this valley of darkness. We don't stay there forever.

Even more nuanced and more profound is this metaphor of a valley of shadows for grief. If you think really deeply about a shadow, no matter how long, no matter how dark, it's proof that the light is still shining. You cannot have a shadow without light. Without light, you have total darkness, not a shadow. The light is obstructed in this metaphor by mountains on each side of the valley, of course, but in the real world, by our grief. What is grief really if not a reflection of the love that we had and continue to have with the person who has died? In that way, we can start to rethink grief and see it as something quite beautiful and really exquisite despite its pain. There's a duality, of course, to grief. I also say in the book, there's a duality to memory. We always say, may his memory be a blessing. Wolf Blitzer's made a living off of that on CNN. The truth about memory is that it's beautiful and it hurts. It's both. In the book, I say it's like being caressed and spat on at the same time. That's memory.

The more we understand the fullness of the experience, the more we're able to find the beauty within in it. Maybe there's a little bit of hyperbole in this statement to the ears of others, but as a guy who's been on the inside of this for a long time, I will tell you, I think death is the great teacher in life. Imagine a deathless life. Think about that for a moment. Imagine a life that was endless. What value would that life have? What would happen to ambition? What would happen to love? What would happen to having children? It would all be gone. Death is the great teacher when it comes to really embracing and enjoying and getting the most out of and giving the most to life and love themselves.

Zibby: Now I'm getting worried that maybe you're sick because it sounds like you're not scared at all to die either.

Steve: I don't think about it. Look, I don't want to die. I'm sixty years old. I want to have grandchildren. I want to have fun and all of these things. When I do feel any fear of death, I remind myself of my own words, which is, you're clearly not dying if you're worried about dying. When the day comes, you're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be better than fine because it's as natural, as I said, as birth itself. My kids worry about me. Especially now during COVID, I'm officiating at three, four, five funerals a week now. Very large congregation, obviously. My kids get wind of this. They’ve been at the dinner table for their lives listening to Daddy's day. My kids worry about me dying. I say, look, rare accidents occur, but the truth is, I am not likely to die until you are ready to handle it.

Zibby: Aw, that's really nice. I'm going to steal that and tell my kids.

Steve: And it's true. We can get to what to say to kids about when they ask you, are you going to die? There's a whole conversation that you can have with them that I think will really calm them down quite a bit and maybe calm you down too, Zibby. I don't know.

Zibby: [laughs] I know you wrote about that in the book as well. You had advice on everything that anyone could ever want.

Steve: I wanted it to be a field guide and a journey. That's really what I was hoping to do, put you, the reader, on my shoulder and journey through the resolution of the rabbi versus the son, the son versus the rabbi, the resolution that memory brings to my relationship with a very complicated and difficult father and also a very amazing father. As most high achievers are, they're complicated and they're amazing. Also, to put you on my shoulder on this journey with other families and other situations. I hope that it's a field guide for this journey. I ultimately hope that it really helps people -- well, you read it. You tell me. Be honest. I hope that it ultimately helps people take their own lives more seriously and appreciate those lives more deeply. That's really the hope. That's why it's called The Beauty of What Remains.

Zibby: What you said, one of my favorite lines that I think reflects this, you said, "The profound and simple truth is that we are each writing our own eulogy every day with the pen of our lives." That's also going up on the bulletin board. These are profound statements that you make. It's so true. The way we live each day, the culmination of that, that's all that we're left with. That's what people will say when we're gone. That's all you can do, is live the way you want to be remembered. It sounds obvious, but it's so important.

Steve: That’s right. There's this notion that I often share with people about living as a good ancestor. We don't think of ourselves as ancestors. We are, just not yet. Can you live as a good ancestor? That's a really good question to ask one's self. Am I being a good ancestor for generations yet to be born? You know this line of cleaning products called Seventh Generation?

Zibby: Mm-hmm.

Steve: That comes from the great law of the Iroquois tribe which says that when the elders make a decision, they have to consider the impact of that decision on the seventh generation to follow. What a way to live. What a world we would have if we lived that way.

Zibby: Wow. It's certainly something to aspire to. That's a lot of cleaning. Tell me a little bit about the writing of this book. You wrote in the book that you took a sabbatical and spent a month in Palm Springs just writing about death in the midst of COVID. Tell me what that experience was like.

Steve: Off and on, I set aside time. I need a long runway to write. I'm not a guy who, oh, I have an hour and a half, I'm going to sit down and knock out ten pages. I need a really long runway. There's a lot of pacing. There's a lot of straightening up. There's a lot of snacking on sunflower seeds and potato chips. I need a lot of runway. I also need to be intensely alone when I write. Most of this book was written in an empty house in Palm Springs and in an empty cabin in Joshua Tree, which is an extraordinary desert about three hours from Los Angeles. I locked myself in a cabin with no TV, no internet, nothing. This book just poured out. I don't know if that's a process as much as it's an environment. Putting myself in the right environment with absolutely no distractions is the only way that I could do it. This book forced me into the duality of memory because I had to go back and revisit the pain of my father's Alzheimer's, the pain of his death, the pain of his life, the pain of his mistakes, and to find a way for myself, and therefore I hope the reader, to see how we can round the sharp edges of our loved ones through memory and through our own lives and our own behaviors in their honor and memory.

Zibby: Beautiful. Last question, what advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Steve: There are a few things. First, I would say be aware that there is not one fun thing about writing a book, not one single enjoyable, fun thing. [laughter] You have to know that going in. There's nothing sexy about it. It the hardest kind of work. It's really work. I think it was Hemmingway who said writing's easy, you just sit down and open a vein. You really have to want to say what you're planning on saying. That's the first thing. The second thing I would say to aspiring writers is write what you know. Write what you know. The best books, I believe, are not research based, they're people writing about what they intuitively know and have lived. Thirdly, I would say get published everywhere every chance you get. Say yes to everything. My writing career started because I said yes to writing a weekly column for a little Jewish newspaper in Los Angeles. A publisher started reading the columns, and I got my first book deal. Someone read that book, and I got my second. Someone read that book, and the third, etc., etc. It's because I say yes to every opportunity to be published because it makes you better and because you learn.

It's a combination of these things. Have no illusions about the pain of it all. Write what you know. Say yes to every opportunity. Since I began the answer on such a carping note to that question that there's not one fun thing about it, I will say, and this happened to me two days ago -- it's emotional for me, writing a book, especially one as intimate as this. Other than holding my children in my arms when they were born, there is no feeling like holding your book when the publisher sends it to you and you're the first. You open that carton and you hold that book, there's no feeling like it on earth. I dreamed about it. I was in the writing program at Northwestern as an undergrad. This feeling of "I am a writer" is a very deep and beautiful and powerful feeling. It is not the same as, I am a parent, I am a mother, I am a father, but it's in the same universe. It's a pretty amazing feeling. To know that you've helped people, what else could one ask for than that?

Zibby: That's amazing. You're such a good speaker. You're such a great writer. I wish I could just join your congregation.

Steve: You're in. Plenty of room on the [indiscernible], Zibby.

Zibby: Maybe I'll do a virtual -- I'll join my third temple. [laughs]

Steve: You're in.

Zibby: Thank you so much for all of your time. Thank you for this amazing and so-helpful book. Even, by the way, the article you wrote recently about surviving the holidays with grief in your life, that was also super useful. Thank you for all of it. I hope to stay in touch.

Steve: Thank you, Zibby. I deeply appreciate what you're doing. Thank you.

Zibby: My pleasure. Buh-bye. Thanks.

Steve: Bye.