Dr. Evan Antin, WORLD WILD VET

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Evan. Thank you so much for take two of "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" minus the technical difficulties this time, I hope. Thanks for coming back.

Dr. Evan Antin: Thanks for having us. I got Henry here too.

Zibby: I have Nya here on the floor.

Evan: Right on.

Zibby: I can pick it up. She likes to lay right there.

Evan: Hi, there.

Zibby: Good. It's a four-person podcast. [laughs]

Evan: There we go.

Zibby: Your book, World Wild Vet, which, PS, is hard to say, World Wild Vet, there we go, Encounters in the Animal Kingdom. Tell me a little more about this book. I know that you wrote it over fifteen years. Obviously, I've read it. Tell listeners what inspired you to do a travelogue of all the places you've been to and all the experiences you've had with animals. Why now in your career did you decide to write a book?

Evan: I'm so fortunate that I've been to so many places and I've worked with so many different species in different habitats and seen what it is to work with wildlife, appreciate them in their natural environment, be involved in their conservation efforts, and veterinary medicine for individual animals. I feel I've got a lot of different messages to share from around the world. It can vary quite significantly whether you're in Australia or Africa or Central America. I did think about writing a book for years, but I didn't think it'd be until later in my career. I decided to do it now because I think I have enough experiences to share. I've got a lot of messages to share as well. I felt like now actually is a good time to start writing and sharing those experiences and messages and lessons. My whole goal is to get people excited about animals, teach them a little bit about vet medicine and what that's about. Then of course, a big part of that is making an effort towards wildlife conservation awareness and sharing that whole world. I've gotten to see that in so many different places.

Zibby: Amazing. You've had some really unbelievable experiences. Actually, the part that stuck with me the most was after you went on this whole big adventure and collected this amazing footage and everything, was it your car that was broken into? You lost everything. You even lost thirty-four pounds. Tell me that story again.

Evan: Oh, man. I don't often rent cars when I travel. So many places I go, you just don't need to. It made sense for the things I wanted to do in Costa Rica. I had just gotten to this hotel. I think I was arranging the room, just getting settled in there, and away from the car for not very long. It was dusk. By the time I came back to the car, it was night. I opened the door, and everything's gone. Everything. I had a day pack with me that had my passport, which was huge. It had a memory card that had a few pictures. Ninety-nine percent of it was gone, all my travel stuff obviously. I bring my snake hook and my croc snare. My clothes and everything was in that bag. That was all gone. Oh, man, I was so pissed. I was not fun to be around for a few days. It was crazy. I'm not an angry person, but oh, my gosh, I wanted somebody to disrespect me in some way so I could take out the anger on them or something. It was a horrible mental state to be in. Things worked out. I still have those memories. Nobody can take those away from me, but I sure wish I had the footage and the pictures to back it up.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. That was all of your Galapagos experiences too, right?

Evan: Exactly.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. Then of course, you go to Costa Rica -- I think it was when you were in Costa Rica when you sort of kidnapped a crocodile and left your girlfriend sleeping in Costa Rica in some hotel. She thought god knows what happened to you. You came back with the crocodile, which I can't say has ever happened to me in any of my travels with anyone.

Evan: I've never heard of anybody doing such a thing. I wouldn't do it again today. Legally, I don't know what that would entail. It's probably not allowed. It was my first crocodile that I'd ever caught in the wild. I worked with alligators and some other crocodile species in captivity. To see one in the wild, it was so easy. I just was dying to make an educational video about it and get some pictures with it and everything. At the time, I was just making educational videos for YouTube. I have one picture from that experience that I'd emailed to somebody. I at least have that from that experience. It was so funny. I guess I didn't realize how long I was gone because she was freaked out when I came back. She really was about to call the embassy. She thought I was kidnapped. She can worry sometimes. That can escalate rather quickly. She went from being freaked out to being willing to help me film this guy within a matter of minutes. She got in the car and we went over to exactly where I caught him, got some amazing footage for a few minutes, and let him go. That was that.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Then you were bitten by a snake. Your mom had to get involved. It was a whole thing.

Evan: I've been bitten by hundreds of snakes, maybe thousands by this day, but that was a venomous snake. Again, it was the kind of thing where you learn lessons along the way. I've definitely done many things that I wouldn't do today. That was one. That was probably the biggest one. That was also a blessing in disguise because it did obviously give me an opportunity to gain an even bigger respect for dangerous animals. I'm lucky I got bit by not the most venomous snake. It was a copperhead, which is bad news. That can be pretty destructive and pretty scary. I didn't have any permanent damage that I know of. Everything worked out. If I'm working with an animal where I think the danger risk is too high, then I just say, I got to pass on this one or we have to do this a different way, or I have to sedate it. We have to just approach it a little bit differently. I still work with a lot of venomous snakes and still love it.

Zibby: How did you go from doing educational videos on YouTube to having a million followers and a TV show on the Animal Planet? How did that happen?

Evan: That was all part of the vision. That all started in that first chapter when I'm road tripping Australia and I had my mom send out my camera and my tripod. I wanted to start making that kind of content having no idea where it would go. I did a couple TV guest appearances shortly after graduating vet school. I think they found me on YouTube or something. I'm not totally sure. The Kris Jenner Show was my first show. It was a total blast. Then I did another couple shows. Then towards the end of 2014 about a year and a half after I graduated vet school, People magazine, I don't know how they found me, but they offered to include me in the Sexiest Man Alive issue they put out at the end of the year every year. That year I was the sexiest beast charmer. The other years they did it I was the sexiest veterinarian, at least. The first time, it was a men-at-work section. It was different professionals. They're the sexiest chef or teacher or whatever. Then in early 2016, and I think it was unrelated to the People thing, I had some big publications put out articles about me. One called Bored Panda did. Then when they did, Huffington Post and -- what's that other big one? Buzzfeed and a few other big ones reached out for an interview. Then they did a story on me, basically. In those days, it was easier and more possible to just go viral. I went from hitting 10,000 followers the night before that I was so excited about, and then two weeks later I was at 220,000, and then grew from there.

Zibby: Wow. Has that affected your personal life and your relationships? Do you feel like you have people glomming onto you who you don't trust now? Do you stick to your core people from growing up? How do you handle that?

Evan: Personal-wise, nothing's changed. My friends, they think it's funny when I'm the sexiest vet or whatever. They know that's not what I was striving for, necessarily, even though it's been a blessing. I'm not complaining about it. Same with going viral. There's been way more positive things than negative things. For me, I'm a pretty down-to-earth kind of guy. It's not changed a whole lot in my personal life. I've always been close to my family. I've always been close to my friends. That's all totally the same. They're super supportive. It's opened a lot of doors and created a lot of opportunity in a very good way for me. Really, those things have been absolute blessings.

Zibby: You said this whole vet empire world you're building was part of the vision. What is the next phase of your vision? What's your secret hopes and dreams? What's next? What do you want?

Evan: Honestly, I want to keep doing what I'm doing and just get on a bigger and bigger scale. I want to do even more than I can in the media space and that platform and just creating awareness for wildlife and its conservation and promoting quality veterinary medicine and even talking about how we can best care for our pets too and getting people excited and educating them about animals and just growing that and making it bigger and bigger and becoming well-known in that space, but in a very positive and constructive way for our pets and wildlife.

Zibby: How have you dealt with the pandemic, not being able -- I saw on your Instagram you were recently in -- where were you? Tanzania?

Evan: Tanzania, yeah.

Zibby: Amazing. I didn't even go to downtown. How did it affect you to not be able to do your thing and travel everywhere? Was that really hard?

Evan: This is the first year in several years I've traveled not nearly as much. The last few years, I think I've been gone probably, cumulatively, three to four months out of the entire year, probably closer to four months, and in a dozen different countries over the course of a year. Listen, I'm not complaining. I'm super lucky. I've already been to Australia and Tanzania. That's more than most people can say they get to do in a year. From my perspective and what it usually is, yeah, it's significantly less. Our hospital's been open the whole time. I work at Conejo Valley Vet Hospital in Thousand Oaks nearby. I'm still seeing patients when I can. I'm still working on other projects. We're talking about the book. The book, it's taken a lot of my time this year. I've had other projects. I did another Facebook show. Tanzania was actually, technically, a work-related thing even though I was getting to have fun and get in the bush and host this really fun series. It's definitely slowed some things down. I've absolutely managed to stay busy. I picked up a new hobby this year that I've just absolutely loved and dove into headfirst. It's woodworking. I've gotten some new power tools and having just a ton of fun doing that and building furniture and stuff.

Zibby: What's your latest creation?

Evan: I'm working on some midcentury chairs right now. It's called a Z chair. The Z chair is the standard common name for it. It's proven to be a bit of a challenge. This is a very new hobby. It was maybe a little bit ambitious for me, but so far, so good. We're moving along. I think they're going to turn out okay.

Zibby: If you're selling them, my name does start with a Z. If you run out of options, I'll invest in some Z chairs.

Evan: Z chair Zibby. I love it. [laughs]

Zibby: Tell me about writing this book. How did that process work for you? Did you sit down and write it every day? Did you dictate it? Did you work with somebody else on it?

Evan: Writing and reading were never my strong suits through my education. I'm much more of a math, science, right brain or left brain, whatever that would be. Because I'm not a professional author by any means, I did hire a ghostwriter, which I think is common unless you are a professional writer. I ended up getting a phenomenal writer. Her name's Jana. She really found my voice. We talked a lot. We had really long interviews. I had a very good idea of how I wanted the book laid out, the stories I wanted to tell. Then she would interview me. She would ask a lot of questions. I would tell a lot of stories. We had a really good back-and-forth. A lot of the work was just that, and then of course revising and editing what she would bring to me. She is so phenomenal at finding someone's voice and sharing their verbal stories and putting it on paper in a way that would come -- when you read it, that really is how I talk and how I share. She did a phenomenal job. That was a big part of it. Of course, working with the publisher. I've been very happy with Henry Holt Publications. They're a boutique company under Macmillan. They do awesome work. They’ve had some really cool books. It's been a dream to work with them too. They’ve been really helpful along the way. Of course, I have a team that's very helpful. I've got a manager and an agent that I trust. Everything's just been this perfect collaboration, cooperation with everybody. It's been great.

Zibby: What do you think the most effective part of your book marketing has been in terms of what you did or some event that was different or just anything in this whole, I'm out and about trying to tell people more about my book? What stands out to you out of all the stuff? Aside from our amazing interview right now.

Evan: Other than this amazing interview -- to half-answer a previous question about the pandemic, this changed everything. I was going to be going on a national media book tour. I was going to be going to several big cities doing in-person signings and readings. Obviously, that's not so much the case. My team, the publishers and my agents, everybody says social media is the most important, most valuable tool. Having a decent following is very helpful for that. It seems to be that way. I'm getting a ton of positive feedback from my followers. I've been sharing a lot of things from the book, whether it's animal facts or just sharing what the book's about and how the project's been going and that kind of thing. I think that's helpful. To answer that question, I think it's a combination of things. Social media's huge. Doing podcasts like this one I think is really, truly valuable too in just getting it out there. I don't know if there's one thing.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to either aspiring authors or people who want to do something to really make a difference in the animal kingdom, in the animal world, and conservation and all of that?

Evan: For someone that really wants to pursue that in a very big way, you have to be passionate about it. You have to show that passion. I think that's what's worked so well for me. I'm not working or trying to show my passion. My passion is very vibrant in me. I'm lucky that I can portray that on a media platform and on social media. I think that's a big part of it. I'm so lucky too. I get in the trenches. I get in the field. I get to work with these vets on the ground and these conservationists and get to wildlife rescues and get my hands on these animals and show what that's all about. That's a huge part of it too, the hands-on stuff. I can sit at home or in my yard and talk about conservation, and people will listen. If I'm actually out in the field, I'm in the Philippines or I'm in South Africa and I've got a binturong or a rhino or an anaconda or whatever, I think that goes a long way.

Zibby: My last question, my kids are in the stage where they want every animal under the sun. My little guy had a tantrum that we couldn't go buy a blue jay today after school.

Evan: Oh, come on, Mom. We got to get him a blue jay.

Zibby: So not fair. I want a bird. I want a bird. One day, it's a hamster and the fish. We're in that mode. We already have dogs.

Evan: How old is he?

Zibby: We're overrun. We have dead fish floating that I haven't even dealt with. We're like a menagerie. My little guy is almost six. Then I have a seven-year-old and two thirteen-year-olds. They're kind of over the --

Evan: -- Wow. That's a whole other challenge that I can't relate to, but I do a hundred percent sympathize. Most of my friends have children. It can be tough at times.

Zibby: In terms of the animal/pet management piece of life for many parents, you are the ultimate animal whisperer. What do you say to that? Should us parents get browbeaten into getting all sorts of different animals to give kids more exposure or just stay with the traditional black lab who I have over my shoulder? What do you think about bringing them into your home? Today, we were trying to explain that, no, blue jays are out in the wild. They don't want to live in a cage. How do you tow that line of wanting to give your kids a love of animals but not have your home be taken over?

Evan: Number one, there's a lot of ways to cultivate that without necessarily acquiring new lives that you have to then be responsible for. Most big cities and areas, moderate-sized cities, they have really high-quality zoos. Zoos are accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and/or American Humane. They're good places where they're doing right by the animals. They are, in a very major way, contributing to wildlife conservation in their respective parts of the world where they have some of the animals as ambassadors of these areas. That goes a long way. Even going to petting zoos and things like that, just getting them exposed and getting those interactions is really valuable and really important. Nature's such a big thing too. I grew up in Kansas. We had a creek in my backyard. My parents, they both like animals. They're not completely insane like me, but they totally cultivated it. If I brought a turtle home for a couple days, it was okay. I'd get out in the creek and appreciate the nature. I'd go catch crawdads and look for insects and look for turtles and snakes and the wildlife. Anywhere you live, there's going to be something in your backyard no matter where you live in the world. That's always an option too.

Then when it comes to the pets, there's no one answer. It really depends on the individual, the parent, the family, the children, everything. You have to ask yourself -- I say this for any new pet, whether it's an exotic pet or a dog or a cat. I have three main general tips. Number one, do your research. Know what you're getting into. What does that pet need? Diet, space, time, ambient humidity, temperature, all of these things. You need to be aware of what you're getting into. You don't provide these things, you're not giving this pet the fair life that it deserves. It's going to be disservice to you and the pet. It's going to be expensive and sad and just not what you want to do. Second question you ask yourself is, can I provide these things? Do I have the space? Do I have the budget? Do I have the time? Do I have the ability to provide all of these things? Am I going to do the upkeep? All that stuff. Then number three, find a veterinarian in your area that's comfortable working with those animals, whether it's a small animal practice that's very comfortable seeing dogs and cats. If you're looking to get, say, a cockatiel, which is a great pet bird -- they do very well in captivity and can be phenomenal pets. Find yourself an exotic animal veterinarian that's comfortable. They're going to be a big tool and resource for regular check-ups and preventative medicine like vaccines and that kind of thing. That depends on the species, obviously. That's really important too.

If you can ask yourself those questions and say, yes, we do have time for -- say we want to get pet rats. Rats make phenomenal pets. They get super strong emotional bonds. It's really like having a dog or a cat in rodent form, super intelligent, great animals. They need to be social. We need two rats. We need decent space for them. We need good enrichment. They're super smart, so we need to constantly do mazes and toys and engage and that kind of thing with them. Can we get the right diet? Can we get with a vet? It really depends on the person. For some parents that have the children, especially a six-year-old boy that wants everything as I did, you just have to pick and choose. Do what makes the most sense for you. It sounds like you guys have a lot of pets. It sounds like you guys are doing pretty good. Just putting the energy into the pets that you have is also really important. There's ways you can re-excite them about their pets. You do a little bit of research and -- what do you have again, for example?

Zibby: My mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law had a dog named Nya, this black lab. They both just passed away from COVID.

Evan: Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry to hear that.

Zibby: Thank you. They had two dogs. We took Nya. Then my husband's sister took Luna, the other dogs who's a mix of three different breeds. Nya's a black lab. Then I had a Pomeranian who is now basically my babysitter's dog. She brings the Pomeranian in every day. Anyway, I could go on and on about this, but this is not about your book. Then we had these two fish. Now my daughter wants a bunny. My son wants a bird. We had two fish that we got over the summer that lived quite a while, but not anymore.

Evan: It's the kind of thing you want to educate yourself in. Fish and some of those other pets, they can be lower maintenance in some ways. At the same time, you need to be very familiar with what a biological filter is and know how to properly care for these fish. It takes some experience. If you're considering any of these exotic kind of animals, do your research. When it comes to bunnies or rats or --

Zibby: -- We're not getting a rat. I'm drawing the line on even discussing buying a rat. Full stop on that.

Evan: Let's say bunny just hypothetically. You do want to know what you're getting into. They do need space. You do need to have at least two. They're super social animals. Don't just get one bunny. Don't just get one guinea pig. Know what you're getting into when it comes to that space. If you have time that you can do some research if you're kiddo's really excited about one species, you ask yourself -- don't tell him yet because if he knows you're thinking about it, it's over, probably.

Zibby: I know. At first, I was like, I'm going to play him this podcast. Now I'm like, I am not playing him this podcast.

Evan: No, no, no. This you do until after the fact. You get the bunny. Then you can say, if you do that. If you don't get a bunny, he can't hear this one. [laughs] You just ask yourself those things. At the same time, you have four children. You have a dog. You are a busy working woman as well. Don't do something that's unfair to the pet. There's things you can do with your dog. You can do fun training and things to get him excited about that. There's other opportunity to cultivate it. Then of course, there's great programming available. I'm sure he's into Kratts brothers and Coyote: Brave Wilderness.

Zibby: Wild Kratts? Isn't that what it's called? The Wild Kratts?

Evan: Wild Kratts, yeah, the brothers. Then there's Coyote Peterson. He's got great kid content, super educational, good guy. I met him on a show we did together, actually, about a year and a half or two ago. Super good dude, a good space. He promotes wildlife in a really good way too. There's lots of ways you can cultivate it without necessarily having to get the pets.

Zibby: See, after this conversation, maybe now my almost six-year-old will turn into you. Who knows?

Evan: Cultivating it's so important. I'm lucky that my parents would let me have pet reptiles and let me do these things. My mom is a landscape designer. She wasn't doing it professionally, but she was crazy about her landscapes. She had all these little rock gardens and different things and other plant gardens too and everything. I was flipping rocks every single day looking for roly-polies and millipedes and grubs and cicadas in the right time of year. I just loved all of that.

Zibby: It all comes down to having your parents foster the love of whatever.

Evan: I'm glad you're saying that message because I cannot stress that enough. There's so many people, they buckle down, their kid's getting a pet. They don't do the research. It's their kid's pet. It's like, listen, it comes to you guys. Then they come to see me at the veterinary hospital when I'm seeing patients, and they really don't know what they're doing. Our veterinary appointment is not just a wellness thing because their hamster has a legitimate health issue that's out of their hands. It's because they didn't know what they were doing, because they weren’t providing the proper ambient humidity or UV light or they're feeding an all-seed diet to their parrot. There's so many things that people just don't know and assume. They're wives' tales or whatever. It's just common knowledge that's totally not right for these pets. They find themselves seeing me because they just didn't do their research. That's the number-one thing. Please do your homework. Whether it's for your kids or for you, please do your homework before you get a pet and take on a life. Make sure you're doing it right.

Zibby: Excellent advice. Thank you, Evan. Thanks for doing this round two with me and sharing all these great tips. To be determined what pets I end up with next. [laughs] I'll keep you posted.

Evan: Hit me up anytime. I'm happy to answer questions and make recommendations. There's plenty of other pets besides rats that make great pets. With a bird, a cockatiel. Look into that. If you're considering a bird, look into that.

Zibby: Okay. Cockatiel, I'm on it.

Evan: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: Thanks so much. Take care.

Evan: Take care.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Evan: Bye.

Morgan Jerkins, WANDERING IN STRANGE LANDS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Morgan. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Wandering in Strange Lands. I'm so excited to talk to you.

Morgan Jerkins: Thank you. Likewise.

Zibby: Wow. This was a labor of love. This is a lot of travel and research. Oh, my gosh. First of all, tell me about when you decided to write this book and why. Then I want to hear about the journey to getting all the information.

Morgan: It's going to be weird of how I got the inspiration for this book because the book went through many different iterations of what the scope was to be. I will say that the impetus for the book began with a movie. It was Get Out. I was watching it in Magic Johnson Theater, Harlem. There's a climactic scene where Daniel Kaluuya's character, the black male protagonist, has his hand around his white girlfriend's throat. She and his family has been trying to basically steal his body for the majority of the movie. As soon as the police car pulls up, everybody gasps. Now, in a regular society, police would mean safety. Yay, he's coming to arrest the white girl. But we as black Americans know that the police often does not mean safety. I was fascinated that when we were in this theater, for example, we all had the same instinctual fear. I'm not a native Harlem. I've been living here for five years. I had a feeling that other people in this theater were not all natives to this neighborhood. That really fascinated me, this idea of fear of state violence, fear of the state, and our precarious position on any type of American soil. I wanted to first investigate that intergenerational fear and trauma. When I spoke about that to friends of mine who were actually professors who were based in the Boston area -- this is after the book was sold. They told me, "This sounds like a migratory story." That's how the book started to develop. Not into just fear; that fear is a subcomponent. These migratory patterns and how we are connected and also disconnected because of the violence of the state, that's how the scope grew.

Zibby: Wow. I actually thought what you just said was one of the most memorable parts of the book and has applications for really everything in life, was how you can really pass down trauma from generation to generation even if you haven't lived it yourself, which I didn't even realize could happen. If I had a traumatic experience, have I now doomed all my -- [laughs]. When does it have to have happen? It must have to happen before you have kids. Or is it just a societal thing? What do you think?

Morgan: I don't know. Late last year, I got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a guest professor at Leipzig University in Germany. When I was there, one of the classes I taught was a literature seminar, Black Women's Interiorities Across the Diaspora. I had one student there -- I still think about him to do this day. He was from Israel. We were talking about the intergenerational trauma of slavery. He was likening it to intergenerational trauma if those were the descendants of Holocaust survivors. As I mention in my book, this research has already been investigated by those such Dr. Rachel Yehuda where she studied epigenetics and how trauma affects gene mechanisms through Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Then there was also Dr. Joy DeGruy who coined the term posttraumatic slave disorder. It made me think about it.

If you have a whole generation of people who have undergone just unspeakable stress to their psyches and their bodies, how could they not pass that down to children? It's hard because you think, I'm my own person, and also because America's very individualistic in a way, for better or for worse, because of how we're dealing with or not dealing with the pandemic. That really got me to thinking about certain things, certain fears that I have, certain trepidations. If I just listen to a conversation happening with my mother and her siblings or even my grandparents, I'm like, now I see the echoes and the rippling effects. That's something that I really wanted to demonstrate in Wandering in Strange Lands, is just that echo that happens from coast to coast, region to region despite the fact that black Americans are distinct, but also overlapping in terms of the disenfranchisement that we face.

Zibby: Wow. I thought maybe, for instance with the Holocaust, it was more environmental, that if you're born into a family where the parents had experienced a trauma, it was the environment, all that energy that just transmits when you're around people who have gone through something awful, versus, does it actually shape your DNA? I don't know. It's so fascinating. Although then, it's also discouraging in a way. Hopefully, with all the progress that gets made, then the future generations can have that sort of lifted.

Morgan: Yeah, or just don't forget the history. That's another thing. I remember I read this -- I don't know if you saw this article. I think it was published last week where it said twenty-three percent of Americans, young adults, didn't think that the Holocaust happened or don't know about the Holocaust. I'm like, are you kidding me right now? There are people alive today whose parents were Holocaust survivors. What is going on with the public education system or just the American education system that we have forgotten?

Zibby: Don't even depress me any more. [laughs] I can't even go there. It's like people who think the pandemic is a hoax. There are some people out there who just don't respond to facts and science or reality. You can't really do much, right? I don't know.

Morgan: Just to bring it back around to the book --

Zibby: -- Yes, please. [laughs]

Morgan: I'll try to bring it back around to the book. You see, that is something that I also wanted to elucidate in Wandering in Strange Lands, is the different realities that we inhabit. A lot of times in African American communities, there can be a collision course between oral history, stuff that's passed around in communities, and what is actually documented. Sometimes for people who are from communities that are disenfranchised, communities that have been violated, they don't always take the documentation at face value because they often know who has the power of this documentation: those who are generally white, privileged, with a lot of networks. They're not. They're the complete opposite. They have this suspicion. That was something that I learned early on. Something that I always did before I traveled anywhere was that I got in touch with people from that area. I wanted them to know who I was, what publisher I had to deal with, my website, just so they knew that I was a real person, but also because -- for example, when I went down to the low country, Georgia, and I was doing research on the Gullah/Geechee communities, doing field research, one of the women there, she told me, "We've had people come down here, interview us without our consent, turn our stories into scholarship without proper acknowledgment." They’ve already been violated. Even though I was black like them, I was coming from New York City. I was already a New York Times best-selling author. I taught at an Ivy League institution. I was the institution. I had to really tread lightly. That's something I didn't lose sight of.

Zibby: Morgan, tell me more about your story. Tell me how you got started writing, how you became a best-selling -- give the CliffsNotes and all that stuff because it's so impressive, just awesome.

Morgan: Thank you. I thought that I wanted to be a doctor. My father was a doctor. Every time you ask a child what they want to be, doctor, lawyer, whatever. I thought I wanted to be a doctor.

Zibby: I never wanted to be a doctor.

Morgan: That's great.

Zibby: Just throwing that out there. Science is not my thing. I have so much respect for you and doctors and everything.

Morgan: Science wasn't even my thing either. I just loved the narrative of people's lives and their bodies. Anyway, when I was in high school, I was bullied a lot. I'm not a confrontational person. I internalized a lot of that low self-esteem. I wanted to escape. Because I didn't have a passport at the time, plus I was a minor, the only way I could escape was through fiction. Every day when I'd get home, I hurry through my homework and I'd start writing fictious stories as a way to cope. I continued to do that well into college when I matriculated at Princeton. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I had a lot of colleagues who were applying to med school, applying to law school, going into banking. It was like, oh, my god, am I going to waste my degree and I should maybe try to get a job at Goldman Sachs or something like that? When I graduated from college, I didn't get a job anywhere. I didn't get a job. I was applying for entry-level positions at publishing houses and literary agencies assuming that that would be my way in. Granted, I had already done unpaid internships like I was told. I was told you had to do unpaid internships in order to get a foothold. As you know, that puts a lot of economically disadvantaged people with the short end of the stick. I did all of that. Graduated from the number-one university in the country. Still couldn't get a job. I returned home jobless, heartbroken.

The only thing that I had as an anchor was that I was in an MFA program at Bennington, which is a low-residency program. I had some insecurities there because I was the youngest and I was the only black person in my cohort. I was like, oh, my gosh, am I the token? even though I had a wonderful experience there. When I was online, I was spending just an extraordinarily large amount of hours online, particularly on Twitter. I'd see people my age exchanging content. I was like, oh, you can exchange content and you can get paid for it? Then I'm going to do that. Because I had so much time on my hands, I was able to amass a large amount of bylines in a short amount of time. Then everything just started to take off like a rocket. In 2015, I moved to New York. I also got an agent. I also met the woman who would become the acquiring editor for my first book through Twitter as well. The week that I was graduating from my MFA program, I was fielding calls from editors interested in acquiring my first book. That was in June 2016. January 2018 is when This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America was released. It debuted on the New York Times best-seller list. Then from there, I taught at Bennington as a teaching fellow. I taught at Columbia University, Leipzig University. I've done speaking engagements. Of course, I just released my sophomore book in August of this year.

Zibby: Wow, that is exciting. Wait, can you tell me, please, what it's like to write a book and have it come out and be an instant best seller? Tell me about the call you got or when you found out.

Morgan: It was funny. I was on my book tour. I remember what it was like. I was in Atlanta. It was about an hour or so before I was going to get picked up to go to the bookstore, Charis Bookstore, or Charis. I'm pronouncing it wrong. C-H-A-R-I-S Bookstore, I think that was the one. I was interviewing people for my second book. I knew I had a deadline. I wanted to hit the ground running. I was literally on the call with a scholar from UCLA. Somebody is calling my other line. I'm like, who is calling me at this hour? Why is my editor calling me at this hour? All of a sudden, I click over. I'm like, "I'm sorry. I got to take this because somebody is frantically calling my other line." I click over. Then they tell me the news. I click back over, mental/emotional whiplash. I tried to get through the interview, but a part of me wanted to scream at this lady who didn't know me from a can of paint, as my folks would say. That's how it happened. Then on the way to the bookstore, I cried. I was in the car with my mom. Had the book event. Family members showed up that lived in Atlanta. Friends of mine from college showed up. Then when I came back to the hotel, my publisher sent me flowers. Then I ordered room service with my mom. Then I passed out. It was the best. My experience as a debut author was incredible because I could not have asked for better blowout. I knew that it was picking up steam because of the amount of anticipated lists that it was on. In terms of just the book tour, the people that came out during my book tour, and the reception, I would want that for any debut author. I was very lucky or very blessed.

Zibby: That's amazing. After that big tour with so much emotion and success and everything, now you have a book coming out into this much quieter time in life. How are you handling that transition?

Morgan: It doesn't feel quiet. I think it's been hard for everyone. I know that I am surrounded by a lot of literary citizens who, we could be a bit self-deprecating when we're promoting our work. When it's huge professional news, we often lament online about how weird we feel about promoting our stuff because we live in a society that often devalues art or devalues writing, and especially devalues it as something that should be a monetary pursuit as well as a self-motivated, passionate one. It's a tricky balance. It's definitely a tricky balance when millions of people file for unemployment. Stimulus checks that were sent months ago was only $1,200. It feels decadent to be like, I wrote this book. Here, I'd like you to read it. My book was originally slated to come out May of this year. I live in New York City. New York was the epicenter of the virus. I always tell people that it was nothing like I've ever experienced before because I couldn't hear a thing. What I mean by that is that -- I live near Central Park. I couldn't hear a dog bark. I didn't hear a bus approaching its stop. I didn't hear people arguing on the street. The only thing I heard every single day or night was the ambulance sirens and me just praying that I didn't know anybody in those vehicles. I was surrounded by death.

When the city went into lockdown mode, I'm just trying to get my head together. When my editors emailed me at the top of April and asked if we could push to August, I was happy about it. Usually, I'm an impatient person. I'm like, let's go, let's go, let's go. Because I was trying to get myself just emotionally prepared to reset for this different routine that I was going to have do, I liked the extra time. Then as we know, as time went on, then George Floyd's murder happened. Then the protests happened. All of a sudden, my book took on this different kind of urgency that none of us could've predicted, obviously. In the beginning, I was happy because I thought, August is great because I thought, silly me, that everything would be opened again. Also because there's so much traveling, August is time for vacation, I thought we could pitch it that way. Because of the protests, then things started to [indiscernible]. Then things just started to move really quickly. When you say that it takes on a quiet form, it didn't feel that way at all, at all.

Zibby: I take it back. I shouldn't have said quiet.

Morgan: I'll say this. It definitely felt quiet in the sense that -- I'm a Gemini. I pride myself for being able to work a room anywhere I go. I know that I could command attention. I project my voice in a way. Maybe it's because of the insecurity complex of being short. I'm very short, so I try to project as much as I can.

Zibby: How short? I'm very short too.

Morgan: I'm five feet tall.

Zibby: I'm 5'2".

Morgan: Every time people meet me, they're always like, I thought you were taller than what you were. Not every time they say this. A lot of times when people meet me, they're like, I thought you were taller than what you were. I take that as a compliment because I guess my personality's large, but also because I know how easy it is to be invisible, not only because of my height, but because I'm also a black woman. I guess that has something to do with it. I love going on book tours and going into bookstores because I can project. You can see people's gestures, their faces, the different comments they make as you're telling your story. You get energy from them. When you're doing a Zoom call, you don't get that same interaction even though you do feel tuned in because people do Q&A stuff. It's different because now you have to deliver twice as much energy. You're not going to get that back. As I was doing these book tours in August and even though they were only an hour long, I would be wiped out after them.

Zibby: I can relate to that. It's also the contrast of, you're sitting in one place doing your normal life and then all of a sudden, your space has to completely transition. Usually, you go somewhere. I'll go somewhere and have to perform or be on or whatever. Here, I can just be my focused self and then next thing you know, it's like -- [laughs].

Morgan: Yeah, exactly. When I was in Atlanta when it was announced that I -- I told the crowd that I just got the best-seller list. I was with them. Twenty minutes before it was go time, you meet the booksellers. They're so nice. They show you around the store. They say, "Here's where your book is. Let us know if you want any water." You could say [indiscernible]. Also, sometimes they have a pet, a resident dog or a resident cat. That bookstore had a resident wiener dog. You saw the dog move in and out of the crowds as people were enjoying themselves. It accounts for so much. Even when you're signing books, that accounts for so much. I'm not going to say I took it for granted, but man, I would've loved to have gotten my wardrobe together and picked out the finest makeup palettes, go to the bookstore, and especially in August, and go and have a nice wine spritzer with friends or family afterwards. There's so much that could've been done, but you know what, I'm lucky with podcasts like this one. Also, independent bookstores and booksellers, we've really got ourself into shape. The thing about this whole time is it's unprecedented. It's not like you can go to somebody and be like, what did you do during this time when it happened twelve years ago? None of us knows. Despite the fact that we don't know, we have been able to reorient, I'm sure with difficulty, but we're doing it. I think that that's pretty inspiring.

Zibby: I agree. I think there's some things that came out of it that will make regular life better going forward.

Morgan: I sure hope so.

Zibby: I feel like so much of life was running around, getting places.

Morgan: The pandemic has made me prioritize rest a whole lot more. Again, I live in New York. New York is very fitness heavy. I was really focusing on, I want to lose this much weight by the time my book comes out, May 12th. I had it all planned out with a personal trainer. Then of course, the lockdown happened. I was getting so upset. I was like, man, if the lockdown didn't happen, I would be able to bench press my weight by now. I would be able to do this. I realized, but you're alive, though. Your body has kept you alive. Okay, you had junk food two days in a row. So what? You're working under stress. This pandemic has really forced me to do a whole reset and to shift my thinking about my body and stuff like that.

Zibby: I've never even tried to bench press my own weight. The fact that that was a goal of yours, I applaud.

Morgan: I was getting close. It wasn’t a goal. I was just getting there. It wasn't a goal. When I started bench pressing 110 pounds, I was like, I could get here. I'm almost there.

Zibby: I am beyond impressed. That is up there with the instant New York Times best seller.

Morgan: I don't know if I could bench press that now, though. Not anymore.

Zibby: What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Morgan: Oh, man. This is going to sound really weird. If you have an idea in your mind that kind of makes you afraid, that's probably the one that you should investigate, I would say. If you have an idea in your mind, that it comes to you in flashes -- I know a story is important when I can see certain scenes visually or certain lines come to me. If you don't write it down, it's going to keep pestering you. It's going to haunt you in a sense. I would always tell writers that. Also, don't ask for permission. I say this especially for female writers or writers of color or female writers of color. Don't ask for permission. That's the way that I had to be with my career. When I didn't get those jobs that I told you about, I definitely sulked, but I also was like, listen, I may not be the best writer out there, but I'm going to work harder than the best writer out there. That involved me pitching relentlessly, getting rejected a lot, and doing it all over again and just trying every single angle I could to shoot my shot, basically. Don't ask for permission. Don't wait for somebody to say, yeah, it sounds like a good idea, go for it. Just start writing. Don't worry about it being perfect the first time. First drafts are supposed to be bad. That's why it's a first draft. You can revise in layers. I try to encourage writers to do the same.

Zibby: I love that. Morgan, thank you. I feel like we didn't talk too much even about your book which I felt like was so awesome. I learned so much about your family and your background and all your amazing research skills and all this. Readers will just have to get the book and find out the backstory, so to speak, Wandering in Strange Lands. Thank you, Morgan. This was such a nice chat.

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

Zibby: You too.

Morgan: Take care.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Morgan: Bye.

Laura Vanderkam, THE NEW CORNER OFFICE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Laura. Thanks for coming back on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" after I mistakenly deleted our episode. Thank you. [laughter] 

Laura Vanderkam: Thanks for having me back and not just leaving it in the trash can. I appreciate that.

Zibby: It's so ironic because you're a time management expert, essentially, in addition to other amazing skills. We had this great conversation about using time efficiently and managing our time and all this other stuff. Then I wasted your time completely by having the podcast not record. Anyway, here we are.

Laura: It's fine. Here I was five minutes late to this one because I was using the wrong link. [laughs] 

Zibby: I was literally about to go digging for the time zone. I'm like, really, did I mess this up again? These things happen. Nobody's perfect.

Laura: All good.

Zibby: Thank you. Let's talk about your book, The New Corner Office: How the Most Successful People Work from Home, which basically is almost everybody right now. Give listeners the low-down on what this book really helps people do and how you can empower people to work more successfully from home.

Laura: I wrote this book after I noticed in March that there were a lot of people who were working from home for the first time and suffering through a lot of really terrible Zoom happy hours and that they were probably going to be looking for advice on how to do this long term, to work from home both productively and ambitiously. I cranked this out, got tips on how you can redesign your workdays to take advantage of some of the upsides of working from home, how you can handle a self-directed schedule, how you can stay social and build your network when you're working from home, how you can think big about your career, and how you can take care of yourself at the same time.

Zibby: I want to hear all of those things. Where do we start? How do you stay social and expand your network while at home?

Laura: It is challenging. I think there's a bit of a false view of this, though. I know in the past when people were asking to work from home and negotiating to work from home, that term implying you need to give something up in order to do it, one of the arguments against it was that relationships are best built face to face. Obviously, when you're working from home, you are then not face to with many of your colleagues on those days. Very few places going forward from this are going to be a hundred percent virtual. Most places, it's just going to move the needle a little bit on how often it is acceptable to work from home. Most places will not stay five days a week remote for all of eternity once this is all over. In that sense, if you're going to be working from home two to three days a week and in the office two to three days per week, you don't have a problem with this because you'll just be very social on the days that you are in the office. That will be perfectly fine. 

In the meantime, there are a couple things you can do. You can certainly begin meetings with a little bit of social chit-chat. People are going to do it anyway, so it's good to put it on the agenda for all your meetings. Then it's accounted for, so it doesn't run over. Also, people are expecting it so you don't get that one guy who's always like, we don't have time for this, and cutting it all off before people have actually said what they meant to say. That helps. You can pick up the phone and call people. In our world where we have smartphones in our pockets, very few people use them as actual phones in the sense that you can call someone. If you've been working with somebody for six years, you don't actually have to schedule an appointment at a certain time, trading emails back and forth to be like, would it be acceptable to call you for ten minutes at this moment? You are allowed to pick up the phone and call. That is often the most efficient way. It's very good because then you hear their voice and talk and all that good stuff.

Zibby: I always find myself apologizing if I call.

Laura: How dare I use my phone, to this person who gave me your number. [laughs] 

Zibby: I should've checked with you first to see if it's okay. Also, I feel like if I call certain friends, they’ll think something's wrong.

Laura: [laughs] Oh, yeah. That's true.

Zibby: I'm like the school nurse. It's not emergency.

Laura: It's okay. That is true. Although, once you do it more regularly, people get used to it. Definitely if you're managing people and you're working from home, you do need to call your employees frequently so that they don't think they're in trouble every time you call. That's a very important managerial tip here. I'd actually say that one of the ways that working from home can be better for network building is that when you work in an office forty hours a week, a lot of your immediate need for social interaction and for professional networking feels satisfied by the people who you are working with closely. You go to lunch with your colleagues. You go to coffee with your colleagues. You chat with your colleagues. That's great except that the people you work closest with are not the only people in the universe that you probably should be getting to know. When you work from home, it's not so automatic that you would be going to lunch every day with your colleagues. Maybe you find somebody else to go to lunch with or somebody else to call, somebody else to have coffee with as that becomes more that people can do that as we come out of this. Then you could build a broader network when it's not just enforced by the social norms of your immediate office.

Zibby: How do you work from home while your kids are around?

Laura: This is complicated. Before all this happened, one of the most frequent conversations I would have with people who are looking to work from home was the "don't think you can save money on childcare" conversation. Some people would be like, wait, hey, maybe I don't have to pay for it. It's like, no, no, no, you still do. You cannot, long term, be the adult in charge of your young children during the hours you intend to work. Unfortunately, that reality has not changed just because we are in the midst of a pandemic that has thrown many people's childcare arrangements for a giant loop. What do you do? The most obvious thing, if your childcare arrangements are not available or the ones that are available are not acceptable to you, you can trade off with your partner. 

I have a schedule on my blog from a couple months ago that documents how each party can work either twenty-nine or thirty-one hours a week. Of those, twenty-five are pure focused hours. Four to six are probable hours using a combination of naptime and movie time and spouses covering for each other. If you are going to do that, it has to be strictly delineated who is in charge. The party who is in charge not only has to keep the kids safe, you have to keep them out of the other person's home office. That is the nature of the job. That's what you can do. If that's not going to work for your family, maybe there's another adult in a similar situation that you could likewise swap with, if it's a neighbor or another family member that you're willing to enter into the bubble together with. It's challenging. Hopefully, people will come to a place where if they need to, they can also find some sort of paid childcare that they feel they can trust for at least a few hours a week because the honest truth is you will get more done in two hours of focused work while somebody else is dealing with the children than you will in four hours of going back and forth between work and dealing with your kids.

Zibby: Look how focused I am. I have a babysitter in the next room. [laughs] 

Laura: There you go. That's what it's got to be, honestly.

Zibby: Otherwise, they're over my shoulders and popping in and whatever else. Although, sometimes I feel guilty. I'm home. Why do I need a babysitter?

Laura: You should get over that. [laughs] I hear this from people. I think it's just a change in mindset. When you're working from home, you're working. The operative part here is not at home. That just happens to be where you're doing it. You achieved the efficiencies of not commuting to an office. Great. Go you. That doesn't change the fact that you are working and the work still has to get done. If you were not available for intense in-person childcare when you were working at an office, that does not magically change just because you happen to be doing the same work at home.

Zibby: All right, okay. I felt a little guilt ebb, just a little. 

Laura: You see your family a lot. A lot of this is predicated on feeling guilty that you are maybe not seeing your family. I always suggest people try tracking their time if they are feeling that way. There are 168 hours in a week. Even if you are working 40 hours a week, which is a full-time job, if you subtract 40 from 168, you'll notice that there are a lot of hours still there. Even if you subtract your sleeping hours, you'll notice there are still a lot of hours still there. You can subtract housework. You can subtract whatever else you want. There are still a lot of hours. Many people do spend the majority of those with the people they live with. That tends to get rid of some of the guilt.

Zibby: I feel like my kids are experts at using the time that I have designated for sleep. [laughs] 

Laura: They want to interact with you during that time. Yes, exactly.

Zibby: Wait, tell me more. We talked about this last time that I deleted. I was in awe of your extensive time tracking system and how long you've been doing it and how meticulous and detailed. Tell me more about it.

Laura: All your listeners are going to know that I'm a bit of time management freak. I have been tracking my time on weekly spreadsheets since April of 2015.  My spreadsheets have the days of the week across the top, Monday through Sunday, half-hour blocks down the left-hand side, five AM to four thirty AM, so half-hour blocks for five and a half years at this point. I'm not going to bore everybody with a recounting of the five and a half years. The truth is, it's not terribly exact. I tend to check in three to four times a day. For instance, when I sat down at my desk this morning, I noted what I had done since about six PM last night. I will check in probably after this, so maybe one thirty, two PM will be another check-in, another in the evening, and that's it. Then it will be tomorrow morning again when I check in. Each check-in is thirty seconds to a minute. I just write down really quickly what I've done. It's not this big ordeal. It takes about the same amount of time as brushing my teeth. I like to think that a lot of your listeners have also been brushing their teeth quite regularly since April of 2015. [laughs] 

Zibby: That would be nice.

Laura: Yes. It's along that lines. It's just more data that I'm getting from it.

Zibby: What have you done with that data?

Laura: More in the beginning than I do now. In the beginning, I was quite into the analysis of it. I wound up writing an article for The New York Times in 2016 on what I had learned from tracking my time for a year. It was useful because I found some interesting stuff. In my speeches, for years, I've had some laugh lines about people overestimating how many hours they work. I joke about a guy I met at a party who told me he was working 180 hours a week, which is very impressive when you multiple 24 times 7. Everyone laughs about this, ha, ha, ha. Then it turns out when I track my time -- I used to think I worked like fifty hours a week because I had tracked my time here and there over the years. Then I realized in the past I had chosen very specific weeks to track, like those weeks where I worked fifty hours a week because that is what I wanted to see myself as doing. When I track a whole year, of course I can't do that. It turns out the long-term average is a lot closer to forty, which is a different number than fifty, turns out. [laughs] I saw that I was very consistent on sleep. I didn't get the same amount week to week, but over the long haul I tended to get 7.4 hours per day. If I tracked for two months, it would come out to 7.4. If I tracked for six months, a track comes out to 7.4. If I track for two years, it comes out to 7.4. Good to know. These days, it's serving more of a diary function. I haven't really added up the major categories in quite a while. I do love that I can look back over a previous week, any previous week from the past five and a half years, and see what I was doing. When I look at those notes, I tend to be able to reconstruct it in my brain, and so that week is not completely gone. The memory is still there. That has the effect of making time feel a lot more rich and full.

Zibby: When you're tracking it, how much detail are you putting into -- if I were to, say, work today, would I then put "interview Laura Vanderkam"?

Laura: You could if you wanted to. Oftentimes, I just put work. That's the basic email, writing an article, unless it's something that I'm trying to track to see how much time I am devoting to. Sometimes I will put the names of people I am speaking to, like if I'm interviewing or somebody's on my podcast or I'm on their podcast, just partly to have the names. It's the memory. I will remember it more if I say talk with Zibby versus podcast or just work. Sometimes I'll be a little bit more specific, but there's no rules. It's just for my benefit.

Zibby: I know, but if I were to try and maximize this, if I were to try to do this, I would want to go all in. If I'm going to spend a week tracking my time, I want to do it the right way.

Laura: The right way. Then you might want to be more specific. If you're only going for a week, it's a little bit easier to do that because you're not worried about the sustainability so much.

Zibby: You're trying to make time stand still, essentially. You're trying to capture the most elusive thing on the planet which cannot be captured. What's this about deep down, do you think?

Laura: [laughs] Do you want to psychoanalyze this?

Zibby: Yeah, I do.

Laura: Time passes. Once a second is gone, all the money in the world cannot buy it back. Yet our interactions with time are very different depending on what we do with it. I have found that recording it makes these years that people say pass so quickly feel a little bit more like this rich tapestry as opposed to a slick linoleum floor which is just sliding away. I do have more memories of the past five and a half years than I would have had if I had not been recording it. I'll still die anyway, but I do have this that I can look back on and recall.

Zibby: Do you take pictures?

Laura: I do, like everyone, just a cell phone. I'm taking like ten a day of my toast. [laughs] It's kind of the curse of modern life.

Zibby: I know. That's how I feel like I fill in my memory.

Laura: It's helpful too. Although, to some degree, photos are of particular moments. Then you can go long bits of time that are not particularly memorable, but there are things you could remember of them. I do both. Sometimes it's fun to look back at photos as well. I think that's something we could definitely spend more time doing too. Recently, my older kids and I were looking back through the whole iCloud thing from the past four years. It was amazing to see just how different even they looked in the past four years, let alone their younger siblings who were a baby and then one who didn't exist. Seeing that change is pretty profound to note the passage of time too.

Zibby: I don't know if you can see. I'm in my office in New York. Here, I'm going to just slide this. That bottom shelf is all photo albums. Each one has, I don't know, a thousand.

Laura: Oh, my goodness. Good for you for doing that.

Zibby: This whole shelf is also all photos.

Laura: So many people don't print them up anymore. That's the issue.

Zibby: That was pre-digital. Then starting on that shelf are all my digital albums. I am obsessive about monthly recounting in photos. Maybe I have the same complex as you in a different way. [laughs] 

Laura: That probably has a good high-level view of your time as well. I'm sure if you looked back through it you would see plenty of things that showed daily life then if you're being that good about tracking it.

Zibby: I'm trying, but I don't know. So how did you manage to get a book out this quickly?

Laura: [laughs] Well, you just write. I've written a lot of books, so it kind of flows pretty naturally. I've always been a swift writer. A lot of the material I was covering was stuff I've been writing about for years. I didn't have to entirely reinvent the wheel here. I just wrote down some of the tips I had learned. Then I went and found people who had been working from home and running their own companies or had been working as part of distributed teams for a great many years. They had tips. I could incorporate those as well. It's a short book. It's a quick read. You probably could get through it in less than an hour and a half. It's not War and Peace.

Zibby: We would have to track that, though. Now even reading the book is an hour. You're all over my time tracking then this week. No, I'm kidding. Obviously, I read this a while ago. You have lots of kids yourself. 

Laura: I do.

Zibby: Four kids? Did I make that up?

Laura: Five kids.

Zibby: Five kids, oh, my gosh. A baby is one of them, right? Didn't you just have --

Laura: -- Yes, one of them is a baby.

Zibby: That's like four and a half. 

Laura: Four and a half, sure. [laughs] 

Zibby: I'm kidding. Five kids, and you're doing all this writing. How do you do it? Not to say, how do you balance it all? because it's an annoying question. It sounds like you're strict about, this is when I'm working and this is when I'm not. Then even in the not-working time, managing five different sets of needs is a lot.

Laura: Yeah, it's challenging. Partly, babies are challenging too. This year, I'm doing it with a lot less energy because I'm not sleeping as well as I would certainly hope to be sleeping. That is what it is. Babies are tough. They're worth it, but they're tough. I try to get very clear each week on what needs to happen. I spend some time every Friday looking at the calendar for the upcoming week. I try to record anything that is time-specific or that's coming up. I put it on the calendar so I know it's going to happen. I spend some time on Friday looking at the upcoming weeks seeing what needs to happen to be on track for those things, looking at people's schedules, the kids, the different priorities they're going to have. I make myself a priority list for the next week with my top career things, my top relationship things, top personal things. The goal is to end every week with all of it crossed off, which means that I have to make it very limited. There is a strict winnowing that goes down through there. I look and say, is it possible for all this to happen in the week? 

If I'm trying to bite off more than I can chew, then I need to crunch it down a little bit more so that I can cross it all off. It definitely has been more challenging the past few months, partly because when the kids have all been home, there's just more potential for interruption. I haven't had as much open time and space to be a little bit more flexible of when things happen. To record, I have to make sure everyone's quiet and accounted for. That's been challenging. The good news is the baby's in childcare right now. The five-year-old, we put in a private school that was promising to meet in person and has been. Then the older three started school virtually, but they’ve been, past the first day, relatively self-sufficient. I did a lot of Zoom tech support the first few days. After that, they kind of go and disappear. I know roughly when they’ll come up for their breaks, but I can work around that. The past five weeks have been so much different than the five months before that. I feel sort of like, ahh. [laughs] 

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Laura: I do, which is to write a lot. We can't be too precious about writing. I find that each author who has a lot of good stuff coming up also just has a lot of stuff coming out. They discover cool ideas by trying different things and then seeing what resonates and then writing more about that or by forcing themselves to come up with hundreds of ideas of, say, blog posts per year. Out of those hundred, maybe one or two might be a good idea for a book, for instance. If you were only trying to come up with one or two ideas a year, the odds that those would be really good are minimal. Do a lot of it, as much as you possibly can. Your quality and your ideas and all that will become better through the sheer quantity of output.

Zibby: Love it, a perfectly quantitative awesome. I would expect none less. [laughter] I feel like you did really well on the math part of the SAT.

Laura: Maybe.

Zibby: I'm kidding. And English. Look at you. You're a writer too. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming back on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." You're my only double.

Laura: I'm so thrilled. I'm honored. This is great.

Zibby: I learned new things this time. It was great. Take care. Thank you so much.

Laura: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Buh-bye.

Kim Brooks, SMALL ANIMALS

Zibby Owens: Hi.

Kim Brooks: Hello.

Zibby: I listened to your book. I listened to most of it in the car on a few drives, so I feel like you're my friend. [laughs] I'm so used to your voice. It's all I've been listening to.

Kim: Thank you. It was fun to record. I'd never done anything like that before. By the time we got to the end, I was like, wow, acting is really work. Actors work. I guess I did kind of think they didn't work. It's hard to read something that long.

Zibby: I bet, but fun to listen to. Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear, this was so great. The first chapter, I was like, wow, this person gets it like nobody else. I'm sure people tell you this all the time. I have four kids myself. I hadn’t even read your book. I don't know how I had missed it. I read your fantastic New York Times article about divorce in the corona era. I was like, I have to talk to you. Then I read your book and I was like -- [laughs]. Anyway, here we are. Would you mind telling people who have not read Small Animals what this book is about and what inspired you to write it, particularly the incident?

Kim: The incident that kind of sparked the book took place quite a while ago now. It was about nine years ago now. I was home visiting my parents in Virginia. I live in Chicago. I was with my kids. My son who was about four and a half at the time -- the day that we were leaving I ran to a store about a mile from my parents' house. This is a very rural, suburban area where I grew up. When we got to the store, he asked if he could wait in the car. I was just going in to get one thing. I let him wait in the car for about five minutes, which was something that I honestly always remembered doing as a kid in this same area. I remembered waiting in the car while my parents ran into the store or went to look at furniture at Sears or whatever. I just always remember sitting in the car. It was a pleasurable memory. I thought, this is just a quick, five-minute thing. I pulled up in front. When I got back to the car, everything was fine. He was playing with my mom's iPad. We headed back to Chicago. It was only later I found out that someone who I would never meet and never see had seen me run into the store and let him wait there and had called the police.

The police had then showed up at my parents' house. They were looking for me and wanted to press charges because they viewed that I had done something dangerous. It was just this one incident that kind of snowballed into a year and a half of various types of difficulty, legal and otherwise, in my life, but that's not really what the book is about. That's the narrative backbone of the book. What the book is really about is me examining our notions of what it means to be a good parent and what it means to protect our children and thinking about why those ideas have changed so radically in the course of a generation or two. It was really the first point in my life when this happened that I started to think -- until then, I was very much going with the pack, running with the herd of anxious parents. That was the first moment when I was like, you know, this is kind of strange how obsessed everybody is with protecting and safety and fear of public spaces in a way that is so different from just thirty years ago. Why have things changed? Is the world more dangerous for kids? If not, which is what I found out, then what's happening? What's happening to the culture of parenthood?

Zibby: I agree. I think that's what your book's about too. [laughs] It was so interesting to get that lens. I don't know exactly how old you are. I'm forty-four now. I grew up in a time where I sat in the back of the station wagon all the time while my mom went in. Okay, one time I crawled in the front and smashed into a dumpster. For the most part, I was left and I was fine. That's just what happened. I watch even home videos. My brother and I are playing about to fall in the pool all the time. She's sunbathing. That is the way it was. In your scene when you visited your family and your mom was playing mahjong or something in the other room with her friends and talking about how crazy we all are as a generation of parents and how they hadn’t done it, I just so related to that. There is, even within families, a sort of culture shock in parenthood that has everybody scratching their heads. You tried to explain it. I shouldn't say tried to. You tried to unearth what the root cause of all of that was. I just so appreciated you trying to unlock the key to all of that because it affects me on a daily basis, and I'm sure so many other people.

Kim: I'm about the same age. I'm forty-two. It's interesting that you bring up your childhood. I think about it a lot. I should say that there's many strands to the mystery that I tried to tease out in the book. I do think that one of those strands is a reaction in people, our generation, against maybe some of the permissiveness of the eighties culture. Not all of us, but I think a lot of us feel like our parents were very distracted or very focused on themselves. It was a time where there was a lot of divorce. Women, on the one hand, were going back into the workforce, which was wonderful, but our country didn't really step up to provide any kind of system for support, national daycare or leave or anything like that. There was this frantic sense of nobody's watching the kids. That was a cultural anxiety. From the kids' perspective, I think there was sometimes a feeling that there was a lack of adult presence in our lives. Some of that, I think people have very nostalgic, positive memories of that kind of independence in childhood. I also think have some of us have negative memories too. I think what's happened with our generation is there's been kind of an overcorrection. It's funny, this is a slight digression. I was watching Big with my daughter a few nights ago. She's ten now. We've gotten on this eighties movie kick. One thing I noticed that I thought was so funny was -- have you seen Big?

Zibby: I saw it with my kids recently. Keep going, yes.

Kim: Obviously, there's tons of things, you're like, oh, my god. The lead woman character is smoking, a really funny thing. My daughter's like, "Why is she smoking?" I'm like, "People did it." The funny thing that I caught was that scene where Tom Hanks and the girlfriend are at the dinner party. The guy's kid comes in, the guy who's hosting the dinner party, and says, "Dad, I need help with my homework." The guy's kind of like, "Not now, son. I'm doing something adult." I just thought that would never even be in a movie. It would be so unimaginable to show that scene where a parent says, "I'm doing an adult thing. Go deal with this yourself." I thought, if they shot that movie now, everything would stop. The parent would have this very public display of, "I'm going to help my son." It just was one of those small details about how much the culture has changed.

Zibby: I was thinking when I watched that movie, I couldn't believe the kids were just wandering around the neighborhood by themselves all the time and biking and wandering. I'm like, what? They just go in and out of the house whenever they want. That was the part that I was like, wow. They were so little, too, in the movie.

Kim: Especially the friend. The whole premise is his friend keeps coming into New York City.

Zibby: Yes, that too.

Kim: He's like, "I just got to be home by ten." There were no cell phones. There were no GPS tracking devices. The two alternatives were either you kept your kid literally locked inside the house until they were eighteen or you gave them some independence and you tried to teach them skills. You gave them some freedom. I think now, maybe somewhat, it is caused by technology. There's this sense that we can be watching our kids all the time and we can be connected to our kids all the time. Then there's the question of, should we? What happens if we accept that?

Zibby: I have this confession which I haven't even thought about in a while. I was so on top of my twins from the moment they were born. Now my last two kids, I'm much, much better. I'm not so crazy. My twins, I stayed home with them. It was my job. I was going to not let them out of my sight. Then when they went to school, for their first field trip, I was like, what do you mean you're just going to take them on a two-and-a-half-hour drive? What if something happens? What if there's an accident? What if? What if? What if? I got them these little GPS things. I hid them in their backpacks. [laughs] Then all day, I was like, are they okay? It's kind of raining. I don't know. What if the road's slippery? This is obviously my own issue. As I said, I'm better now. As a first-time parent, it's crazy. I would go away with friends for entire weekends, and they'd be fine. Goodbye. Have fun in Woodstock.

Kim: Exactly. The technology has changed our notions of what is possible in a way that --

Zibby: -- Not to jump around too much, but I loved your chapter on moms competing against each other and why everyone is so quick to put down each other's choices and why, when we should all be lifting each other up and being one big community, moms are so quick to put down other people's choices, which basically stems, of course, from not feeling confident, essentially, in your own choices and that so much of the time it's not even really a choice. It's where you just had to end up. Instead of being upset or something, you have to just own it, and so you double-down on it and are like, I picked this, so shame on you for not picking the same thing. That was a summary. [laughs]

Kim: I should say, I feel like when I wrote the book, which was a number of years ago now, I was in maybe a moment of feeling a little bit disenchanted by that kind of competitive mom culture. As the years have passed and I've reflected on it more, I really wany to say that I don't blame moms at all for feeling competitive or insecure or comparing themselves to other mothers. I think that we live in this culture that undermines women and undermines mothers in so many different ways both subtle and overt. We get the message that women don't know what's best for their own children. You have to defer to some authority figure. It's things as outrageous as women being arrested for making reasonable parenting choices to small things, small condescensions that take place, or the culture that tells us the answer is in a book we need to buy, a product we need to buy, or a blog we need to subscribe to or whatever when really, most women know what's best for their children. One of the good things that will come, I hope, from the pandemic in the aftermath is that I do think there's been more and more women who are taking ownership of their choices and taking control of it and saying, maybe how my kid does on the standardized test in the context of a worldwide plague isn't the most important thing. Maybe we can have different values. Maybe sitting in front of the computer all day isn't the best way. I'm going to homeschool. I'm going to work with my neighbors or do things that a year or two ago would've seemed really radical and unconventional choices. Now we've been given an opportunity to do that.

Zibby: Very true. You also point out how there is no such thing as basically harassment of a mom. There's sexual harassment suits and all these other ways. Other groups are protected, but not really for moms. Anyone can poke their nose in your business. A policeman can feel like he has a right to interrupt somebody at Starbucks like you wrote about or any of that. The moms kind of just have to take it. Whereas if it was a dad, you'd be like, oh, he must have had something really important to do. It's no biggie. I found that very interesting.

Kim: Unfortunately, I think it's true. I think it's still very true. I think that there's kind of a sense that if we can pose something as being an issue of child safety, then mothers have no rights. Then that priority takes away any kind of rights of a mother and any kind of rights of a child. The children don't have rights to do things either if there's any risk to their safety. The problem is being alive is risky. Being a person in the world is risky. In the book, there's a point where I interview this social scientist at UC Irvine. She makes that point where she says if some politician -- I won't name any in particular. If some politician got on TV and said, "I love women so much. We just need to protect them from something terrible happening to them. Women are abducted by strangers or assaulted, so women need to not be out in public by themselves just because I want to protect them," we would say, thanks but no thanks. We'll take that risk because we want to be people who move through the world. What this woman said, this social scientist, was that people will say that that same principle doesn't apply to children. She said, "I don't think that's exactly right." Obviously, it's not the same, but children do have some rights. Children have some rights to some amount of risk.

Zibby: It's so interesting, wow. Now the most recent article you wrote for The Times, which was so good -- I am divorced. It's been five years. I'm remarried. COVID has elevated some issues under the surface, as most stressful things are want to do, and so I found myself particularly relating to your essay. You almost point out that -- why don't you say more about it? There are so many different pieces of it that I found so interesting, not the least of which is that you had to do all the court stuff and finalize everything with your lawyers on Zoom, which is crazy. I also felt like having just finished this book, I was like, oh, no, they broke up. [laughs]

Kim: That’s the thing. We did break up. As I say in the essay, he lives across the street. I live here with my partner who's hiding upstairs. He lives with his partner. I should say, we were separated for a long time before we divorced. Some people have written to me. They were like, "How did you find another partner in the middle of a pandemic?" We were separated for some time. I think that there's this idea that divorce sort of has to be a tragedy for children and for family and that if you get divorced from someone it means that you hate them and you blame them and there's all this conflict and animosity. I'm not going to say that there haven't been any moments of conflict. Obviously, there's conflict when you're dealing with a big change. Overall, I think that we both chose to take the view that this was something that was good for both of us and that the fact that we were moving from being husband and wife to be coparents and friends and next-door neighbors for the time being, that that didn't have to be a tragic thing. It might be hard. It might be a transition. We were married for sixteen years. We didn't kill each other. We brought two amazing kids into the world. We could cherish that and still say, this is the best thing for both us, and see it as a kind of growth and restructuring of our family as opposed to a destruction of our family, which is, I think, the traditional way we think about divorce.

Zibby: I love that the divorce lawyer said she was in family restructuring. That's so genius. I loved it.

Kim: Can I ask you, though -- I'm just curious.

Zibby: Yeah, sure.

Kim: You've been divorced for five years. Were your kids pretty young when that was...?

Zibby: Yes. They were very, very young. I have four kids. We separated when my youngest was about nine months old.

Kim: Oh, wow. Stressful.

Zibby: I'm not supposed to talk about it publicly. It had been brewing.

Kim: I just was curious more about, did you find in the years that followed that there was still a lot of stigma to being a divorced person with small children? That's the thing that I found interesting. I guess I thought both things. I've internalized the stigma, but then I was also conscious of it. It is funny that it's 2020, but that it's still sort of stigmatized to have kids and to say, no, I'm getting a divorce and this is for the best. There were still so many people who sort of viewed it that it has to be a horrible thing. Did you have a similar experience?

Zibby: Yes, I did. I was shocked, actually, by the responses when I started telling people about it. By the time I finished telling and everything, I realized it has all to do with their own marriages. People's responses, it's all about how they feel. It has nothing to do with me and my kids and my kids' lives or anything, but I didn't know that at the time. I've tried to tell people who I know who are newly getting divorced, take all the responses with a grain of salt. I had people bursting into tears and being like, "But your kids." I'm like, yeah, I know, but I actually believe strongly this decision is the best thing for my kids. I still believe that. It sucks. It's hard. It's not to say I don't cry still a lot when they leave or if they get sad. Now my youngest is almost six. This has been their whole lives, my two youngest. My oldest are twins. They're thirteen. They're used to it. A lot of people were, "Are you sure? The poor kids." I'm like, you don't know what it was or what it will be. You just don't know.

Kim: I think you're right that it has more to do with people's own insecurities. There's a lot of people who don't want divorce to be a reasonable choice. Obviously, people like you and I aren't going around saying everybody should get divorced.

Zibby: No, no. It's terrible. I wish I weren’t.

Kim: Of course. When people say, "But for me, for us, for our family, this was the best choice," to some people who have put up with a lot or who have accepted really unsatisfying relationships, it's like, oh, that's a choice? That's a reasonable choice you can make? It can be very destabilizing.

Zibby: Yes. So many people feel so trapped. They want to leave, but they can't or they can't afford to leave. There's so many reasons why people stay. Even yesterday, I just saw this ad for Purina Dog Chow that said there's this new initiative because forty-seven percent of domestic abuse victims don't leave because they don't want to leave their pets, which I thought was so interesting. Okay, so now there's another wrinkle. It's very hard. If you can and you need to and you're able to, that's one thing. So many people aren't able to. You're just a mirror. You're just a mirror for their failings or their feelings of failure or their sadness at what they don't have and whatever.

Kim: It circles back to the issues in the book about when -- it's true that it's very hard for a lot of people to leave. Some of that, I think, has to do with our lack of autonomy as parents and our lack of a support system, our lack of wider community of social safety nets. People feel trapped sometimes in unhealthy marriages because women literally are trapped. They're financially dependent, dependent in other ways. That's something that hopefully will start to change.

Zibby: The only times that I really feel like I'm in a community -- not to say I don't have a lot of friends and people I love and people who are great with my kids, but it's only when something absolutely terrible happens where I cannot move when I actually feel that. "Hey, can you pick up the kids today? Would you mind taking so-and-so home with you?" or something. Then people, "Of course." I would love to help other people. I hope that this is different in some other communities where people -- I feel like in your experience and mine, that's not what it has been like, which is a shame.

Kim: It is a shame. I think it's very much due to this culture of the nuclear family and this idea that it's every mom for herself. It's every nuclear family for themselves. To ask for help or to reach out is to sort of --

Zibby: -- Impose.

Kim: Impose on people instead of, no, this is what humans do. They help each other out. One of the saddest parts of writing Small Animals was when I talked to this woman, Debra Harrell, who's an African American woman. She was charged with endangerment or neglect for letting her daughter play unsupervised in a park while she went to work one day at McDonald's because she didn't have childcare. Her childcare fell through. The daughter was completely fine. It was a very busy park with tons of adults. There was a camp running there. There were a lot of kids. When I was doing that part of the book, I watched online -- they since took it down. There was a video of her being interrogated by this police officer after she was arrested. He just kept belittling her and saying, "This is your daughter. She's your responsibility, nobody else's. Nobody else is responsible for this girl." She was crying as he said this. It just was so heartbreaking. On the one hand, this woman knows that no one else is looking out for her kid. This is a single mom who's taking care of her kid on her own. Second of all, I thought, it's true, and isn't that a tragedy? Isn't that so heartbreaking that we live in a country where nobody cares about other people's kids and that the expectation is that you look out for your kid and no one else is? No one's going to do it for you. It's really sad. Again, I hope that that's something that we'll change as we reexamine everything.

Zibby: What's coming next for you? What are you up to and all that now?

Kim: I am actually working on a new book about marriage and divorce and female friendship and a bunch of other things. I think it's going to be called Nobody's Okay: On Marriage, Madness, and Rebellion. It's a memoir and general nonfiction. It kind of takes up where Small Animals leaves off. It's the last six years of my life in navigating all of these things. I'm very excited about it. My agent was going to send it out to publishers about a week ago, but we decided that everyone was too distracted by the election. Literally, I went to Starbucks, and the woman giving me my coffee wanted to talk about the debate with me. Everyone's very anxious and focused right now. We said that we're going to send it out after the election. That hopefully will be my next project.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Kim: Gosh. My advice is to just be compassionate with yourself and to see writing or whatever you're trying to do as -- to look at the long game. I write a little bit about this in Small Animals and more so in this new book. I think about the many years of feeling like I wasn't a real writer because I hadn’t published a book and feeling like even though I was writing all the time, it didn't count somehow. Of course, that just made everything worse. This is not very original. A writer is somebody who writes. Just because you haven't reached the milestone you might want to yet doesn't mean you're not going to get there eventually.

Zibby: Love it. Thank you, Kim. Thanks for talking today. Thanks for your book and your article and all the rest. I can't wait for your next book. That's awesome.

Kim: Thank you. It was great talking to you.

Zibby: You too. Take care. Buh-bye.

Kim: Bye.

Matthew John Bocchi, SWAY

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

Matthew John Bocchi: Morning, Zibby. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Zibby: Your book was so good. I loved it. I could not put it down. I read all the way to the end, every word. I was like, don't even talk to me, when I was reading it. Congratulations on writing this beautiful memoir.

Matthew: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Zibby: Can you please tell listeners what Sway is about?

Matthew: The quick synopsis and the easiest way to put it, in terms of themes and messages, I think that my story encapsulates resilience, inspiration, hope. My story is, really, it starts off as a 9/11 story, but it shifts drastically. My dad worked at [indiscernible] on the 105th floor of the north tower and passed away on 9/11. The reason why I think 9/11 is such an integral part of the story is because it's the catalyst to everything else that happened in my life. Not only that, but it's really when my life changed. All of our lives really changed. For someone who was personally affected by it, it had a really long-lasting effect on me. The early years after 9/11 I spent trying to figure out how my dad died. Hearing what I was told from family wasn't enough and didn't suffice for me. I wanted to have every single minute and second of those last moments outlined and figured out. I really wasn't going to stop until I got to that point. As the years went on, I was really, really direct and poignant with my questions. I had facts and data and research to back up all the things that I was asking. This inquisitiveness really was what was my initial downfall that led to me being sexually abused by an uncle through marriage. As that transpired, the feelings that I started to accumulate of guilt and shame -- embarrassment was a big one. All those feelings led me to start using drugs and alcohol as a way to cope with my feelings and emotions. I went down a path of drug addiction for many years and by the grace of god was able to pull myself out of it. I've maintained my sobriety since. My story, it's a continual downfall as it progresses. Of course, there's a happy ending. There's a rising at the end.

Zibby: Wow. As I was reading it, just one thing after another, I wanted to reach out and hug you and be like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this is happening. Now this is happening. Yet you kept -- I guess you just keep on keeping on. That's what you have to do. You just did it. Your resilience is amazing, I guess is all I'm trying to say.

Matthew: Thank you.

Zibby: Can we talk first about 9/11? You're one of the first people, if not the very first person, to write a memoir from the experience of a child of someone who had died that day. My best friend actually also worked in the north tower, and roommate. It's so crazy for me to think that just a few floors up your dad was there and was my friend was there. What happened that day? Like you, your obsession with or what you later called an addiction to watching the footage religiously, almost, is something I shared at the beginning just watching all of the jumpers as so many people probably did to see if they could spy their loved one. What were they wearing? That's such a unique phenomenon to this event, I feel like, that need to understand what happened. Tell me a little more about your compulsion to research and that need you had to understand the end and why it felt so important to you to know.

Matthew: If you look at 9/11 itself from a third-person, third-party point of view, especially someone who grew up in the tri-state area, people who knew the World Trade Center, to be witnessing what was going on with obviously the planes, but then watching people voluntarily jump to their deaths as a way out, as a way to not have to deal with what was going on inside, it was so baffling and perplexing to me that I was amazed by it. On some sort of philosophical level, I think I was looking for myself in also trying to figure out my dad's story. I am the oldest of four boys. Being a nine-year-old kid at the time, I think that there was just a need to figure out who I would become as a person in a sense too. Really, by watching these last moments to try to figure out my dad's story, I was trying to figure out who he was as a person. Although, you can't figure that out in someone's final moments in something so tragic and horrible as what was going on in there. I was extremely naïve, and I thought I could.

What I started to realize through time and watching certain documentaries was people, they at least claimed that they were getting some sort of closure by finding out, good chance my loved one was a jumper. This picture pretty much looks like them. They knew. They had their answers, and that was that. For me, I thought maybe I would have my closure and my peace and know, okay, my dad made a few phone calls after the plane hit and then he realized there wasn't a way out, and that was that. But I didn't have that, so I held onto that. I held onto the belief that maybe he was able to figure out something. Maybe it wasn't so bad for him in there. As I continued to watch those videos and stuff and look at the pictures, seeing the tragedy unfold, it's just a horrible thing to witness, obviously. Knowing that my dad was in there and that's where he spent his final moments, it just really overwhelmed me to a degree. I'm at a point now where I know the answers. I know what I'm going to know and what I will forever know. I also know that I will not be able to find out every little detail. That is something I'm okay with today, but it took me a long time to get to that point to really be at peace, so to speak.

Zibby: Wow. The intensity of the search and all of the ways that you wrote about it were just so moving, and even how you described the fact that he was able to call and that you do have a record. You knew that he knew, and then as all these details emerged, how you had to make sense of that yourself.

Matthew: I think too, he really did know. That's the thing that's fascinating to me too, is the fact that he called two minutes after the plane hit. I think that there was already a level of uncertainty inside the tower. I have a feeling that things got bad pretty quickly just given the fact that he faced that head on. It would only get worse, obviously, as time would progressed. Also hearing that, too, from my family -- I didn't get to witness that myself. I didn't get to go through that myself. I didn't get to speak to him. I wanted something for myself. I wanted something greater that I could hold onto, that I could cherish. There's so many positive stories. There's good Samaritan stories like the guy with the red bandana and stories like that where there's a happy ending for the family. I was so determined to find that happy ending story. Even though my dad didn't make it out, maybe he did something miraculous or heroic before he passed. That was something I was really trying to figure out and search for. All it did was bring up more anger and sadness and confusion.

Zibby: Also, for you, exposing yourself at such a young age to that graphic, awful, violent, just disturbing imagery, that is a lot for anybody to take on. That in and of itself, it's like watching a trillion R-rated movies at the wrong age over and over. The trauma of that, how do you even get over that part?

Matthew: And it's real life. That's the thing. I'm twenty-eight years old. I have a lot of friends who live in Manhattan. You go in there, and you look at the skyscrapers. Even the skyscrapers that are forty stories high, that are not big, big buildings, that don't overcome the skyline, and you realize that the World Trade Center was nearly triple that, and that's what people were watching. People on the outside were watching that. Twenty-eight years old now. I've had friends who finished my book and they told me, "Look, I'm going to be honest with you. I actually started looking at some of that stuff. After reading what you said and wrote and how you wrote it, I was curious to see for myself." I don't know to what degree they looked at it. I didn't really ask. I think for so many people it was so easy to try to forget back then, especially around my age. I was obviously relatively young. For people like myself to be doing what I was doing and searching what I was searching, it got to a point where it was completely voluntary. I wanted to try to find something.

I think that people realize how almost heartbreaking my story is, or what I went through as a child. Many of my friends who also lost their dads on 9/11 did not go through that. They didn't want to know. They didn't want to look at that. Maybe they just accepted it for what it was worth. Their dad died, and he's not coming back. That's that. For me, I wanted something more. That's just the story of my life. Nothing was ever enough for me. I always, always, always wanted something greater. Even with writing my book, I can't even tell you the amount of rewrites I've done. Now the book's in hardcover out for everyone to read. I haven't even read it back to back yet. I've read it on the PDF and stuff. If I read that book -- I opened up to the epilogue. I'm searching through it. I'm finding words that I would change. This is what I do. I over-critique myself. I'm just trying to grow as a writer, but I look for things that I wish I wrote differently or maybe had a different change on a certain way to express something. There's certain things that I wish I did differently. I guess I could for the paperback.

Zibby: There's always the paperback. I want to talk about your writing, but just one story which will probably make me sound crazy. I had always believed that my friend Stacey had died instantly because the plane hit right at her floor. Her mom said the phone rang once right at that time. Stacey always used to get to her desk and call her mom. Our belief collectively was that she had gotten to the office, sat down, started to call her mother, the plane hit, and she died instantly. That's our theory because nothing ever turned up. Then I had a session with this medium. This sounds so hokey. Until this session, I didn't really believe in mediums. She said all this stuff about other people that I just thought there was no way. Anyway, she told me that that is not what happened to Stacey and that she heard a loud explosion, so she must have been elsewhere in the building, and that she was with a nice older man. The two of them were trying to find their way out, and then it happened. I don't know if I believe that or not.

Matthew: She was trying to find her way out and then the building collapsed?

Zibby: Yeah, or something. I don't know. The thing is about these things, we'll never know, but now I have two theories in my head.

Matthew: With mediums, I've had one experience with them. Actually, I take that back. My mom has had one experience, or at least that I know of. I never have. I did a psychic. It wasn't the same. Those, I don't maybe believe to a certain degree. If I really believed in them, my book would've been a best seller three years ago. My mom had an experience with a medium that was -- she said what you just voiced, that there was no way of knowing some of these things. I've been kind of curious myself to check that out and see. It’s one of those things where it's like, do you believe it? Do you want to believe it?

Zibby: I know. I don't know. It gave me some sort of sense of peace.

Matthew: I think it should.

Zibby: Hearing it from someone else, like, I know what happened, but she's okay now. Anyway, whatever. Let's go back to your writing of this book. [laughs] The writing itself is amazing. Some memoirs, along the way they might say how much they loved writing or something. I didn't get anywhere in here that you had turned to writing as a coping technique at all. The drugs and all the other stuff you did were very spelled out. I was wondering, when did the writing start? Have you always loved to write? It just didn't come through in the text. How did you do this? The crafting of it is exceptional, all of it, the time, the way you go back and forth in time, the language, the immediacy. Tell me about that part.

Matthew: First of all, thank you for that. I, like I said, critique my writing. I'm really overly critical too. I do probably what authors and writers should not do 101, read people's reviews of your book. A lot of people -- not a lot of people. I focus on the minority. That's the way it always goes. I have a lot of good reviews. Then I have a couple reviews that have said where I either skipped out on parts on maybe fast-forwarded through parts or something. I briefly mentioned it towards the end about how I used to journal as a kid. I'm not sure if you remember that part. What it came down to was -- my mom's brother is a music journalist. He gave me my first journal when I was ten years old. He wrote a little note on Christmas morning. He said, "I've gone through hundreds of these journals in my life. Write whatever comes to your mind. Don't overthink it." In the beginning, I did that. I wrote. Whatever came to my mind, I wrote. Then I started treating it sort of like homework. I kind of strayed away from it because I didn't really like that. I would go to bed and write, "School was good." There was nothing deeper.

I was talking about this, actually, with one of my friends from Villanova. One of my biggest regrets in college is that I didn't pursue creative writing the way I should have, or writing in general. I didn't pursue my goals and dreams because, obviously, I was going through addiction. I think I was fixated on continuing the story that people wanted for me, which was go into finance or whatever. When I got sober, I started speaking at schools. As time went on in my speaking -- I started off as the basic 9/11 story, into drugs, now recovered. Then I started going a little bit deeper. Then when I got deeper and I talked about the abuse and my obsession with my dad's death and all that stuff, people were really blown away by that and said to me, "You should write a book." For me, the journaling started to continue in sobriety. I shouldn't say started to continue. It remerged in sobriety. I started writing just basic things. It was just whatever was coming to my mind, and the pain, physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain, all the things I was feeling. Then in 2016, I said, you know what, I'm going to do this. It was the tail end of 2016. I started writing. The way I did it initially was -- I didn't even have a laptop at the time. I had nothing. I borrowed my brother's laptop.

I started dating stories. I still have that original document. I started dating the stories. It was like, December 2014, then I would just write out the story. I finished about fifty thousand words in three months. Then I went to an editor. He was like, "I think you need to do this, do this." We worked on it. I wrote another thirty or forty thousand words but then cut out fifteen. Finished the first draft in 2017 and then started pitching it to agents. Nothing was happening. Then I started rewriting it. That's where I think I started to find my voice big time because I really had to get vulnerable. There was a lot of things that weren’t there in the beginning. It was very surface level. I got really deep and basically just said my whole entire story in graphic detail. I think that's what people are amazed by, is the honesty, especially as a heterosexual male, saying some of the things that I said, that I admitted to happening. Most people don't want to talk about that stuff. I think that vulnerability was important for me in order to grow as a person too. Then I continued rewriting stuff. The first ending that I had was not well-rounded. It was strictly chronological in the beginning. I didn't want that. I was viewing it almost as a movie. I wanted it to be a little creative. I wanted parts to move around. That's when I started moving segments around. I had to find the right spots for them. I finally had these clicking moments where it was like, all right, here it is.

For instance, my dad's car, that scene with my uncle going to get the car was initially way in the beginning. I changed that to move it to the end and then finished the story with us driving the car. As time went on, I found my voice. I did. Now I write every day. One of the issues that I ran into, not issues but sort of a dilemma, was I was writing the way I write now for my nine-year-old voice. I had to go back in time to not reflect. It had to be in the moment. What were you feeling in the moment? For me, to remember some of those details was really, really hard. I had to put myself back there to do that. Same thing with fourteen-year-old. I know what I look back at now and how I reflect on these moments. That can't be laid out for the reader. It has to be in the moment and as it progresses. What's a beautiful thing now is that I can write now. I'm twenty-eight years old. This is my writing now. It's a little bit slower with dragging out imagery a little bit more. I'm trying to really slow it down for a reader like describing the cardigan, things like that, whereas I felt at times I had to condense certain things, certain parts of the story where maybe I would like to have expanded a little bit more or gone into a lot more detail. It gets to a point too, as you know, with the editing process where, does it need to be there? Is it really going to move the reader one way or the other? I'll be honest with you, as a kid and as time went on, did I envision myself to be writing? Absolutely not. There's days that I don't want to do it, of course. There's days that it feels like a job in that sense. Then there's a day like today, a muggy day, where all I want to do is read and write. It has its perks and benefits sometimes.

Zibby: I literally posted a picture yesterday of me reading a book because it's so disgusting outside. I'm like, that is all I want to do. That is not what I am doing. Reading, writing, cozy, maybe under the covers, oh, my gosh, that would be a dream day. That's one of the perks of writing. Are you working on another big project? What are you up to?

Matthew: There's a couple things. I was approached by a couple screenwriters about adapting it to a movie. I would like to have some sort of say in the writing process for that. There's been discussions of that. That's sort of where I'm going. The thing is, writing a memoir versus a screenplay, it's a totally different type of writing. I'm a little hesitant in a way if I want to put both feet into that fully. The thing with my story is, I knew this going into it, I could've split it up into three books, essentially. I didn't want to do that at the end because what I felt was especially 9/11 and the sexual abuse led into everything else that I did. I don't blame them. I don't use them as reasons for doing what I did. I know I have an addictive personality. It's just who I am as a person. I felt that it would be remiss if I didn't include it all because these all played into each other. It was just a domino effect.

People were saying, "Maybe you should split it up." I didn't want just a story of me, 9/11, and all that. I wanted it to be different. I think it certainly is. Now where the book ends versus where I am today is about four years. Besides the epilogue where I fill the readers in on where I am, where it ends was four years ago. I have four years of, in sobriety, struggles and other things that I went through. I'm debating about taking an Augusten Burroughs type of spin on it and continuing. Then maybe in continuing the story, I can also really touch back on things from my childhood that are not in Sway where it's not going to be repetitive. Obviously, there has to be a creative and artistic approach to do that. I don't want it to be repetitive. I think that there's a lot of stuff that has transpired in the last four years that people who were really into my story and wanted to know more about where I am today and all that stuff will definitely -- I think they’ll find it maybe somewhat satisfying and see a little bit more growth in the last four years.

Zibby: I also really wanted the continuation of how everything that happens towards the end affected your family. You had one sentence about it, like, this destroyed my family, or whatever. I was like, wait, what? What happened?

Matthew: That's the big thing. It was really tough because I could've continued writing and writing and writing.

Zibby: You ended in a good place. I'm just saying now talking to you. I don't want you to give away the ending to other people.

Matthew: To answer your question, yes, there's a lot that I could fill in for that. There was a lot of things that -- we could take it offline -- that happened that I think I could tie it back creatively to when it happened originally and some of the feelings that came.

Zibby: So you are definitely never going back to finance? Is that it?

Matthew: Unless some place wants to pay me some great money to sit on a board and do nothing. Look, I said this about two and a half years ago. I was working at the company my dad would be working at now if he was still alive. I was there for about four months. Then I didn't pass one of my financial series exams. I was presented with the opportunity to leave or basically drive myself to insanity by staying there. I was like, all right, I'm leaving. Back then, I was like, I'm going to take my dad's death and the feelings that he had leading into his job and that day of wanting to quit and not having the chance to do it and finding his true passion in life, I'm going to do that. I didn't do it. Now after finally getting the story out there -- the publication's there. It's out. Everyone can read it. A couple of my dad's colleagues reached out to me, one of which was in the book. I changed his name, but he's in the book. Peter is his name in the book. He's very proud of me. He's like, "Your dad would be very proud of you. Your dad would be really proud of the fact that you're not trying to go down this road." He's still in finance. He was trying to get me to come work for him. This was recently. This was right before COVID. He's like, "I'm not going to even offer you a job if you beg. You're good at this. You should pursue this. This is what is your path." I think I found my path, so I'm sticking with this. I'm sticking with it.

Zibby: Good for you. That's the best ending to any story, is finding your purpose in life. I think the only perk, perhaps, of 9/11 is that it caused so many people to switch gears and say, this is important to me. Life is short. This is what I'm going to do.

Matthew: Life is short.

Zibby: It just took you a little bit longer, maybe. One question I just have to ask is -- I know we're almost out of time. I want to know how your brothers and your mom are doing and how they felt with the book coming out.

Matthew: They're all doing well. My mom, as time went on, I'd print out, old-fashioned, print out a chapter at a time. She got to chapter five or six around the time where the abuse starts. We had to put it on pause for a little bit. Then when I got my complimentary copies from the publisher, she was like -- I got them about a month or so prior to it coming out. I was like, "Here's your book." She's like, "I'm not going to read it. I'm not going to read. I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it." She didn't know what to do. Then she got to her own answer of, you lived it, I can read it. She read it. My mom is not a quick reader, but she breezed through it. She loved it. It's difficult for her to read, obviously. My brothers, they're very proud of me. They're very proud of me for getting my story out there and being diligent with it and determined and persistent to get it done and get it out. To my knowledge, I don't know if they’ve read it in full. It's hard for them. It's hard for them because they didn't have the same effect with 9/11 that I did. They didn't go through the other things that I went through. They know about it, but to read it on paper I think makes it a little bit more real. It certainly is the same for a lot of my family too. My mom and dad, both of sides of my family, for them to read it just makes it more real. This is not some random author. This is not some fiction piece. This is their nephew or their grandson, whatever. I think in some ways it makes it a lot harder to swallow too because how crazy that this all happened under everyone's eyes? No one was expecting that.

It was really cool for them seeing me on TV and stuff. I hit a couple of my brother's favorite spots, so he was really happy about that. It was important to be up front and address this and be okay with who I am. To say that on national TV -- my mom was saying to me during the release -- that was the one thing that they were asking me a lot about. How are you feeling? How are you doing? It's just so surreal as you're going through it that it almost doesn't feel real. Four years ago, I was writing this book. I was thinking at first, I'm going to write it, I'll get an agent in probably like three months, maybe a month. I'll reach out to ten agents, and one of them is going to grab it. You know the process. It's hard. To think that it actually happened is, to me, the biggest success that I could have. If it does really well, the best-seller list, obviously I'll be happy, but that wasn't my end goal from day one. The little messages I'm receiving on Instagram and stuff like that are, to me, what I did this for. Parents of sons or daughters with addiction, people who went through 9/11, that's why I did this, people to be like, thank you for telling your story, and that they can get something out of it.

Zibby: That's the true gift that you leave. It's a true gift. Last question. What is your advice to aspiring authors?

Matthew: It sounds very cliché, but just don't ever give up. Look, I think it was really easy at some points in the writing life -- not that self-publishing is a sign of failure. It's not, but I was very close to either just saying, I'm not going to get this book out there ever and I'm not going to even self-publish it, or I'm going to self-publish it and then we'll see what happens. I didn't go the traditional way either. I don't have an agent right now. I was able to get in contact with my publisher who's a little bit smaller. We worked out a great deal and everything that was okay with me and definitely has its perks for sure. It was not an easy step. The rejection is what I think adheres a lot of writers and prevents them from really continuing to pursue it. You get a couple rejections from agents and you think, my story's not good enough or my writing's not good enough. It's really hard to hear it, but you have to just keep going. You'll find your right fit finally. One day, you'll find that fit. I remember there was one time I had an agent who lost their uncle on 9/11. I'm reading her response. I'm like, oh, my god, this is it. I finally found the one. Then she's like, "But it's too close of a story for me. I can't do this." It was really hard for me as someone who has insecurity issues to begin with and self-confidence and self-esteem issues to get those rejections. Sometimes they're just so bland that it's like, my story sucks. My writing's not good. It's very easy to get in your head. You really have to stay persistent and know that your writing is good in whatever way. Someone's going to find something from your story, whether it's nonfiction or fiction. That would be my advice. Keep going. Don't give up.

Zibby: That's excellent advice. Matt, thank you. It was so nice to talk to you.

Matthew: Thank you. Likewise. It was awesome.

Zibby: I had a few more questions. [laughs] Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for this beautiful book complete with this amazing cover, by the way. I didn't even really pick up on what this was until halfway through the book. I was like, oh. Well done.

Matthew: Thank you so much. We'll certainly be in touch. I'll keep you posted. By the way, thank you. I have to thank you again for nominating my book for the GMA list.

Zibby: Of course.

Matthew: It was so funny. When I found out the connection to that, I was like, oh, my god, I have to reach out to her. I have to try to get on her podcast.

Zibby: I actually had meant to reach out to you. Then things got crazy. I'm so glad that you did. It's perfect. I wanted to have you on from when I first got ahold of it.

Matthew: Thank you so much. Bye.

Zibby: Bye, Matt.

Liz Petrone, THE PRICE OF ADMISSION

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Liz. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about your amazing memoir, The Price of Admission: Embracing a Life of Grief and Joy.

Liz Petrone: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: It's such a pleasure. Your book was moving and well-written and soulful. I just was like, I love this woman. [laughs] You know when you read something and you're rooting for the person so much and you care right away? I had that feeling reading your book.

Liz: Thank you.

Zibby: Would you mind telling listeners what your memoir is about? What made you even write a memoir to begin with?

Liz: This book was seven years in the making. The book that got published was probably the fifth iteration of this book. It was a process. In the book, I talk about the loss of my mother. We lost her after a struggle with addiction and mental illness. She was bipolar. Eventually, she committed suicide. That was about seven years ago now. If you follow that timeline, as soon as she died, I sat down and said, we need to be talking about this stuff. I've said in a lot interviews since the book came out that I feel like my mom died of a disease of silence. We live in this society where we don't talk about these things. We don't do a very good job of dealing with addiction and loss and grief and mental illness as a society. We didn't do a good job as a family. When she died, the very first thing I did was sit down and start writing because I really believe that we need to be talking about this stuff. That includes my own story, which of course is woven in through the book. We talk about my mother, but I also talk about my own struggle with an eating disorder and my own suicide attempt when I was younger and my own struggles with depression and anxiety. I think these are universal themes that we need to be doing better telling the truth about.

Zibby: That's amazing. So many of the scenes here were crystal clear as if you were living them then, like the scene in the elevator and the scene with your daughter in your tummy. They were just so clear. Are you the type of person who was journaling or recording these along the way, or do you just have an amazing memory?

Liz: I think maybe it's somewhere in between those two things. I don't know if you watched The Office. When Pam and Jim are getting married, they do this little mental camera where there's these moments. You just kind of know that these moments are something bigger than they feel like when you're living them. I think especially if you're a writer, but probably if you're any sort of creator or artist at all, you look at your life as you're living it through that lens a little bit. There are these moments that seem sort of ordinary. Then you go, oh, this is going to mean something later on.

Zibby: I know those moments. I do. I know those moments. There were so many passages that I wanted to at least flag because I thought they were so beautiful. I loved this part. You said, and this is probably how you titled your book, "I've come to realize that the true lie the darkness tells is one of omission. The darkness doesn't tell you how pain is simply the price of admission. And it's a steal, really, a bargain. One I will pay a hundred times over for the simple pleasure of a beautiful sunrise or a mug of tea heavy in my hands or another mile run or a hug from a long-time friend or the smile --" I'm going to cry -- "of a child across a crowded room. For the comfort of my soon-to-be husband's arm strong across my waist while he watched me sleep. For the moments when the darkness whispers its lies in the night and I am able, still, to answer it with the only two words that matter: I'm here." Oh, my gosh. Does that make you want to cry too hearing it again? It makes me want to cry.

Liz: Hearing you read it gives me goosebumps. I think you should just read the book to me all day long.

Zibby: [laughs] I have more passages I want to read. I don't usually just sit down and read somebody's book to themselves.

Liz: That particular story, which is really the story of my own suicide attempt, for me, was the hardest story to tell. There's this idea in writing that every story that you tell will be the same story in some fashion until you tell the story you're supposed to tell. That was that for me, which is why it was important to me that the book be named The Price of Admission and that that kind of be the lynchpin. Even though I set out to write a story in my mother's honor, that story, for me, was the one that I was very, very scared to release into the world. It's also the one that was the most freeing to tell the truth about.

Zibby: In the book, you were saying how you were afraid to even tell your husband. You have the moment where you finally confess to him. He was your boyfriend then, right? I think you weren’t even married. Now you've gone from that place of, should I tell the person in the world closest to me? to, actually, now I'm going to tell anybody who can read.

Liz: I'm going to tell you in the grocery store while we wait in line. [laughter]

Zibby: Wait, tell me more about how it feels freeing.

Liz: I think we carry this stuff with us. We think that we're the only person that could possibly ever feel this way. That can be anything. For me, it was that story. It could be anything for anybody, any story of struggle or hardship or any story where you feel like you are not necessarily the hero or painted in the best light. Those are the things that, when you put them out there, I feel like they make the most immediate universal connection with people because everybody has that. It doesn't have to be the same version of that, but everybody carries that kind of stuff with them. What I really have found is the hardest stuff to put out there is the stuff that makes the most immediate and true connection with people, which is really a gift when you think about it.

Zibby: It's true. We hide so much. Like you, I'm heart on my sleeve in my writing, but not as much in my talking with people. People have said, you're brave to write about this. I'm like, it doesn't feel like bravery to me. It just feels like finally I can get it out of my own head and just get it out.

Liz: I feel like it cuts through a lot of that minutia. I have relationships with people that I've met as a result of writing or as a result of things they’ve put out on the internet. We get to skip through all these preliminary layers because it's already there. We've already laid the baseline of, okay, we're going to do this. We're going to be intimate. We're going to tell our stories. For me, someone who's introverted and not really good at that whole small talk/minutia stuff, that's also a self-serving gift. I hear you. I get that too, that whole, you're so brave to be putting this out. In many ways, I'm doing it for myself just as much as I'm doing it for the rest of the world.

Zibby: I know. It's true. I've been talking to you for maybe five minutes, and we've already talked about your suicide attempt and your mother, your eating disorder and all this stuff. If we met at a cocktail party, this would never even come up. Obviously, this is a different format and I'm interviewing you for a reason. I wanted to read just one more part. This is when your mom calls you after you were stuck in the elevator. "I didn't know it then, of course, but it was the last conversation we ever had. She died a few days later. In the first chaotic weeks of grief, I thought of that elevator and how quickly everything can change. You can be just standing still, all minding your own business, when the floor drops out from under you and you're thrown right off your feet. It's completely terrifying, and it's easy then to get stuck in unfamiliar territory where the only way out is going to be calling out Marco and trusting even while your heart tries to gallop right out of your chest that the Polo is coming. And it is. There are people who will quite literally lift you up, grab your hands and pull. It's happened before --" I'm going to cry again -- "and it will happen again. Of this I am sure, as long as I continue to have the faith to call out." It's so nice. Oh, my gosh, sorry, I'm so emotional.

Liz: I know that you are dealing with your own grief right now.

Zibby: It's just anyone who's gone through grief has found, or really anything hard, as you point out so eloquently having just literally dropped floors in an elevator and getting stuck, that your life just sort of followed the feeling. You captured it so beautifully, especially because you were thirty-six weeks pregnant in the elevator, oh, my gosh. Could you even get into another elevator after that?

Liz: I worked on the, I think it was the sixteenth floor at the time. I was hesitant to get into another elevator, but I think I was even more hesitant to walk down sixteen flights of stairs.

Zibby: What was that job? What were you doing in the office building?

Liz: I was a computer programmer. I still am a computer programmer. Although, I don't work in that building anymore. It's a very opposite of writing professional life that I have.

Zibby: Wow. Like coding and building [indiscernible] and all of that?

Liz: Yeah. I support financial systems, so I'm sort of an applications programmer. I think that the two sides, the computer programming world where there is a very clear and finite answer to a problem and I find that answer to a problem and I give it to people and it's very satisfying -- then there's the creative side of telling a story where you could tell a story eight hundred different ways. You have no idea what's the right way or the wrong way or how that story is going to be received when you give it to the world. They sound like very opposing ideas, but they do a really good job of balancing each other out.

Zibby: That's really interesting. How amazing you have both sides of your brain. I only have one. I only have one of those sides. [laughs] Amazing. Tell me a little bit more about the eating disorder piece of your story, if you don't mind. You told in the book about going to an inpatient facility with a much older woman named Tina and how that was sort of a warning flag for you. You would not let yourself become that person when you got older. Tell me about your, not getting over it, but how you found your way through that mess. What lingering effects do you still wrestle with today?

Liz: The active part of my eating disorder was, we're going on over twenty years ago now, when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I was anorexic primarily with a little bit of bulimia in there in the later stages. At the time, there really just wasn't the treatment options that there are now. Thank god that there are now. I think that's important. I've done some work with some agencies. I'm excited that that is happening, finally. At the time, we just all were shepherded into a treatment facility which was a generic place where they treated addiction, suicide attempts, eating disorders, anything where you weren’t safe being home by yourself. I had a roommate who was also an eating disorder patient. She had to be in her fifties, maybe, which to me at the time was ancient because I was a teenager. To see her struggling honestly in the same way that I was struggling, it was such, like you said, a wake-up call to me. I really had thought, okay, I'm dealing with all this crap because I'm young and I don't know what I'm doing, but by the time I'm in my fifties, I will have figured everything out. Everything will be fine. To realize that that wasn't just a given was kind of jarring and scary.

I credit that moment, really, more than any therapy session or treatment that happened as an impetus to really start pursuing getting better and getting healthy. Getting better and getting healthy was a long, convoluted process. It probably is for anybody, but especially then when we didn't really have a lot of options as far as treatment. I think anybody who's ever lived with an eating disorder would tell you, you don't ever really get away from that completely. I would never stand here and say I'm totally healed. It's still something that lingers in the background all the time. I've had to develop a much healthier relationship with my body, especially through four pregnancies and raising children and, not to generalize, but raising teenager daughters who are starting to deal with some of the same ideologies that haunted me then. It lives there. I see it when life gets stressful. I'm not sure I've had life get more stressful that it is right now. It's definitely there. That's another reason why I think it's important that we talk about this stuff. If I didn't talk about it, it would be unhealthy for me personally.

Zibby: Do you still get therapy? Do you have things in place to make sure you don't slip back?

Liz: I don't actively get eating disorder-centric treatment right now. I do keep in place for myself, a support network of things. I will fall back on that when I can see that stressors are popping up or triggers are popping up. A good example might be, when my third daughter was born, I had postpartum depression. I didn't have postpartum depression with the first or the second, so it was kind of a surprise when it happened. I didn't have any experience with it. I wasn't prepared. When I got pregnant for the fourth time and then my mom died during that pregnancy, very close to the end of that pregnancy when my son was going to be born, I said, okay, the risk is huge right now. I've had postpartum depression before. I'm dealing with grief at the same time. I'm going to mobilize this network. I'm going to reach out to my people. I'm going to reach out to my treatment providers. I'm going to knit this safety net underneath myself and have people check in and have myself check in. That's the beauty of having been through stuff before. I think the problem is that you don't know to do that if you haven't lived it before, which is, again, why we need to be talking about this stuff and why we need to be laying that groundwork for people.

Zibby: There's someone in my life who's struggling with an eating disorder now and doesn't want to get treatment. As somebody who loves her so much, what advice would you have? What can I do as a friend? I'm sure other people out there have people who maybe they suspect have eating disorders or things like that. Is there anything you can do, or does the person have to be ready? What do you think?

Liz: It's just like any other addiction, really. I think the person has to be ready to pursue treatment in order to get healthy. Having people in your life that are understanding and supportive and primarily understand that this is an illness and not a choice, which is not always how people view things like this, but if you can look at it like that, that kind of gives you permission and grace to always be there no matter what the situation is. That is so important. Especially when you're in the late stages of an eating disorder, which is both when you're getting really close to getting treatment but also when things are getting dangerous, I think they go hand in hand, the instinct is to push everybody away because people are starting to notice and be concerned and push you towards treatment. It's hard to love somebody in that situation. Anybody who can survive and stay there with grace and patience and understanding is giving that person, I think, a better chance than they would have if they were truly all alone.

Zibby: What would you say to the person? Let's say there's somebody listening who's really struggling themselves right now.

Liz: It gets better. There is hope on the other side of all of this. It is better on the other side of all of this. That leap is probably one of the scariest things I've ever taken in my life, that leap to abandon what becomes the comfort center of living in this illness and what becomes the identity of living in this illness. It sounds crazy because you're sick and you're in pain and you're not in a good place, but that becomes almost your comfort zone. To leap out of that is terrifying. To land someplace softer and safer and healthier is so worth it. It's so worth it.

Zibby: Thank you. I'm hoping that somebody who needed to hear that today heard that. Thank you.

Liz: I could just sit here and stare at your color-coded book arrangement. It's so satisfying to me.

Zibby: Thank you. I know. I love it. It goes all the way around.

Liz: Oh, my gosh.

Zibby: I have to redo it soon. Because I've gotten so lazy, now I'm throwing things everywhere. I'm overflowing with books.

Liz: How do you find time to read all these books? is what I want to know.

Zibby: Man, I don't know. I just do. I don't finish every single book. I sit down to read. I've figured out a way to -- I don't know if it's called speed reading. I don't know what it is I'm doing, but I can go through with just a second or two and get most of the important information off of every page. Every other weekend, I don't have my kids. I don't have them today. They're with my ex. I can read all day. I'm about to take a drive. I'm going to listen to a book the whole time. I don't know. I just find the time. With my kids, I always, at bedtime, have a book. It takes like four hours to put your kids to bed. They know that as soon as the first time that they go in the bed, I'm going to sit down and start reading, so I always get a good hour in.

Liz: I do that too. I've read before bed since I was five years old. I think that's where wanting to write a book comes from, honestly, is that voracious consumption of reading. It becomes the logical way that you think of to tell a story, almost.

Zibby: What types of books do you like to read?

Liz: Anything, really. I probably prefer women stories and women authors. Since the pandemic, I'm in this ridiculous cycle of only reading psychological thrillers because they're so absorbing that they can distract me from everything else that's going on. I do worry what that's doing to my mental health because I find myself going, who do I know that's a murderer?

Zibby: [laughs] That's the great thing about books, though. You can decide. It's so crazy. They all look the same. In one, you're going to be terrified. In one, you're going to be crying with emotion. In one, you're going to learn all these factual things. Yet they all just look like words. I know this is ridiculous that I'm saying this.

Liz: No, you're right. To me, it felt like a level playing field. You can be a nobody and write a book. You can be the world's most famous person and write a book. They're both books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. It's crazy.

Zibby: Right, exactly, which is great in a way because we all are just people with thoughts and feelings in our heads. Getting them out on paper is just one way to share. Famous or not, who's to say your story's any more important than yours? Anyway, sort of loosey-goosey talk. One last thing I just wanted to touch on was the suicide element of your loss because that's a particular beast in and of itself. You talked about the priest at the time asking if it was okay to even share at the service that it was a suicide. While you were saying yes, everybody was saying no. I'm wondering in your own family or your own extended circle, when did that protection and hiding, almost, go away, if it did, or this is a big coming out of her death?

Liz: Her family is not okay with me talking about this. There's a big schism there and has been since shortly after the death, which is a huge source of sadness for me, but not enough that I felt like I had to stop. I feel like putting this story out there was honoring her, which I think is kind of a funny thing to say. I tell some stories about her that probably are not totally flattering. My mother, despite all of her faults, despite the fact that she would wake up in hospital after us calling 911 and her going in an ambulance intoxicated and saying, "Did the neighbors see?" I think she would've wanted the end of her life to help save somebody else's life. I truly, truly believe that. Without getting into all sorts of froufrou stuff, our relationship didn't end when she died. I have full confidence that she supports this book and this story and the work that I've done. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe that. To specifically address what you're asking, no, we do not do a good job talking about suicide. We don't do a good job talking about death in general. Suicide is a whole nother level. Then grieving a suicide is a whole nother level because it takes you a while to get to where you would start if you just -- I don't want to say just -- if you had lost somebody in a more natural fashion. Like I was saying earlier, I started writing this book seven years ago when my mom first died.

That first iteration of this book was angry and hurt and abandoned. I was the martyr. She was the villain. Thank god that thing has not seen the light of day. Also, thank god that thing came out of me because it had to. That kind of grief is not the kind of grief that people are going to necessarily feel comfortable talking to their friends about because who wants to say, my mom died a month ago and I'm still so mad? That's not a thing that people feel comfortable saying. I think it's just the natural progression of losing somebody in that fashion. Seven years have gone by. I'm not angry anymore, but that takes time. I think it takes honest conversations. I hope that the book can help people have those honest conversations and help people understand that all of those reactions, the anger, the abandonment, the sadness, the everything, is totally normal. When you lose somebody who's been struggling like that and you've had this tumultuous relationship, there's that -- I'm going to screw this up, and I don't want to say it wrong -- almost this sense of relief, like, at least that's over. That is a thing that people really can't talk about it because it sounds so off-putting and terrible, but it's just natural. It's just part of all of it. I think we need to talk about that stuff.

Zibby: That’s amazing. I hope you're thinking of starting, if you haven't already and I just don't know about it, some sort of bigger way of spreading, like a movement about what you're talking about because you made it. You need to be the leader of this movement.

Liz: I do. Now that the book is out there and that work is done, I really do want to start doing some community work in this realm. My story of having been a suicide survivor myself and then losing my mother to suicide I think gives me the ability to see it from both sides and to speak to both sides in sort of a unique way. I want to encourage more people to be having these conversations.

Zibby: I should introduce you -- I'm on the board of the Child Mind Institute. It's for children's mental health and also to help reduce to the stigma of mental illness. It's more for childhood issues, everything from anxiety to depression, everything. Maybe you could reach parents that way or you could reach the children who are struggling and tell your story to them.

Liz: That would be great.

Zibby: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] offline about it. I'm just trying to think of good channels for you to be able to use that are already existing as opposed to having to put your own community together to get the message out. Anyway, not that this is my job. Last question. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Liz: Write. Butt in chair. Write. It's funny. I did a podcast yesterday. The host asked me, "How was the experience of writing this book?" I'm like, "It was the worst thing in my life," which doesn't sound like much of advertisement for writing, but I think that's how you know it's what you're supposed to be doing, that it is just so unbelievably hard and exhausting and consuming and all-in. I remember going to bed at night and falling asleep. Then I would wake up an hour later just with chapters flying through my brain. I think we all need to be telling our stories. It's not about being trained as a writer or even being a good writer. It's about putting pen to paper and putting the story out there. I remember going to a book lecture when I was probably in my twenties. I had always wanted to write even though that wasn't my career. The author, I can't even remember who it was, stood up and said, "People are always coming up to me and saying, I have a story inside of me." She was saying that she found that offensive, like, nobody comes up to a surgeon and says, I have a surgery inside of me, but they come to writers and say they have a story inside of them. Now that happens to me. People come up to me and say, "What would your advice be to write? I want to tell this story," or they tell me their story. I think the fact that people are constantly coming up to me and saying they have a story inside of them is the best part of all of this. There's nothing more universal than the fact that we all want to be heard. We all want to relate. We all want to have that community. It's beautiful.

Zibby: Wow. This has been really inspiring. I hope that we stay in touch. I'm just so happy to have met you.

Liz: Thank you so much.

Zibby: Thank you for your beautiful book, Price of Admission. Everybody go pick this up. Thank you. Thank you for coming on the show.

Liz: Thank you.

Zibby: Bye, Liz.

Liz: Bye. Thank you.

Clarissa Ward, ON ALL FRONTS

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

Clarissa Ward: Thank you so much for having me on.

Zibby: How great, we just made all these personal connections that we should've known each other ahead of time. We didn't, but anyway, here we are.

Clarissa: Now we're meeting.

Zibby: Now here we go. On All Fronts, your latest -- your memoir, not your latest, your memoir, it just came out. It details your incredible experiences as this award-winning, badass journalist. I cannot believe how much you've accomplished since graduating after me from Yale. It's amazing and humbling. I'm just totally impressed. Can you please tell listeners what your book is about? Then what inspired you to sit down and write the story of your life so far?

Clarissa: The book is really about my journey starting from my childhood -- it wasn't necessarily a childhood where it would've been an obvious trajectory for me to go on and become a war correspondent -- and then through 9/11 which for me was kind of an epiphany moment. I was studying comparative literature at Yale. I thought I wanted to be an actress. Suddenly, my world was turned upside down. I became consumed by this idea that I wanted to go out there and understand how this had happened and why this had happened and what was at the root of it. I really wanted to be at the tip of the spear. Then it basically goes through my career. I think the problem is when you're watching the news, you're only getting half of the story. You're only seeing what's happening in front of the camera. You're not seeing what's happening behind the camera. You're not seeing these beautiful moments of human connection, moments of laughter, acts of kindness, acts of bravery and sacrifice.

Those are moments, to be honest, that, first of all, make this the best job in the world. They're also the moments that really shape the way you see and understand the world or a culture or a conflict. I wanted to share that with a wider audience. I wanted people who are not slavishly following every development in Syria to be able to connect to people in Syria and see the conflict through their eyes and feel it, but do it in a way where it's more approachable. It's like going on a journey with me to some of these really exciting and interesting and often difficult and dangerous places. I only really decided that I wanted to write a book when I got pregnant with my first son. I was like, I really need to have some kind of a record for him because I'm probably not going to tell him a lot of these stories at the dinner table, but I want him to know about these things and to know who I am other than being Mom.

Zibby: I read your Glamour article about this. It's called "I work in some of the most dangerous places in the world. Motherhood hasn’t changed that." You talk, obviously, about having a newborn and a two-year-old and how it feels to still be the one juggling the playdates while you're at war on the battlefields, essentially, still dealing with playgroup. Your point, of course, in the article was much more complex than that, which is, a lot of people have thought you're going to give it up now that you have two kids. You must be staying home now. You're like, would a man in the same position professionally be asked the same thing? I was hoping you could talk about that because I thought it was such a powerful piece.

Clarissa: Thank you. It's a really tough one. On the one hand, yeah, I get a little bit like, come on, I know so many dads doing this job. I know they're not being asked every five minutes if they're going to keep doing this work now that they're fathers. On the other hand, I do get it. I get why people ask that. I do really take my security very seriously. I take my responsibility for midwifing these two young souls into the world really seriously as well. I think it's a fair question. I've given it a lot of thought. Really, what I come up with at the end of the day is there have to be boundaries and there have to be limits. There are certain assignments that I won't do if they're too dangerous. I will actively avoid being in a really kinetic situation on a front line. I won't be away for longer than two weeks max, but ideally one week. I do my due diligence for months to plan these trips to the best of my ability to be sure to mitigate every single risk. I feel like it's important to have mothers covering war. I think we bring a different perspective to the table. I think that I have changed a lot since becoming a mother. I know I've become more emotionally porous. I feel like my heart is sort of out there beating in the wind sensitive to every small act of suffering I see or a child or a woman who's pregnant or a mother making sacrifices for her children. I just feel acutely attuned to it and profoundly moved by it. I hope that makes its way into my reporting. Maybe if there were more mothers covering war, we wouldn't have so many wars, which is not to say that I think all moms should leave their kids and head to the front line, not at all. It's not for everyone. We need to have a diversity of voices telling these stories. I guess that's my point.

Zibby: Moms don't have time to go to war. [laughs]

Clarissa: Exactly. Definitely not.

Zibby: What do you think it was -- I know you spell out so much of this in the book. You take us all the way back to even childhood babysitters and all of it. What do you think made you able to do this job so well? This isn't something that everybody could just hop into and excel at. I know I couldn't do it. I have too much fear and anxiety to even fly to visit my grandmother right now. Seriously, is it bravery? Tell me, what do you think it is? What is it?

Clarissa: It's definitely not bravery because I don't think I'm exceptionally brave. I'm able to stay calm in incredibly stressful situations, but on the inside, I'm a wreck. I get very scared. It's not bravery. I think it's a combination of things. If I'm being generous with myself, it's -- I was an only child. My parents were very busy with their careers, always. I had to be able to perform to get attention. That meant learning to tell stories in a compelling way. It also meant learning to be really adaptable. I went to boarding school at the age of ten years old. I had come from the US. It was miserable. I hated it. It was a sink or swim situation. I needed to fit in. I needed to make friends. I needed to make it work. I did. That has allowed me, that skill in my career, to go into any culture in any place in the world and form human connections with people and just immerse myself. As long as I have a working Wi-Fi connection and maybe air conditioning at a push, I'm okay. I'll be okay. I also think there's a level of passion that you have to have because there is a lot of sacrifice that comes with a job like this both in terms of your personal life and trying to make that work and in terms of the emotional toll that obviously this kind of work inevitably takes. You really have to want it deep, deep, deep in your core. I tell that all the time to young journalists who are like, should I do this? I'm like, if you're even asking yourself that question, it's not going to happen. You have to want this with every fiber of your being. You have to feel it's a vocation.

Zibby: Interesting. Tell me more about the 9/11 experience for you and how this became your calling.

Clarissa: I don't know what your experience was like at Yale. My experience at Yale, it was tremendous. It was so thrilling in terms of the incredible education and campus life and all of it. We were making movies and starting magazines and enjoying French new wave cinema classes. I had pink hair and lots of piercings and was indulging in all sort of more superficial self-exploration, let's say. Then 9/11 happened. It was like a thunderbolt from the sky. It was like, oh, my goodness, this has been lovely, but let's face it, there is some really important stuff happening in the world. It's been happening for a while. I haven't been engaged. I haven't been paying attention. Why do these people hate us so much? What do they understand about America versus how America sees itself? How they can be engaged with? How can there be better communication? It felt to me on some level that this mutual process of dehumanization and miscommunication, that it was really fundamentally arising from this failure to understand each other. Keep in mind, I'm twenty-two. There's a lot of idealism and hubris at work, but I became impassioned by this idea that I wanted to go and act as a communicator between worlds and in the process of going to these places, take something of America with me to share with them, but also take their stories back to America. I have subsequently realized that that's a hard job because not everybody wants to hear that. Some people think that listening or humanizing the other is tantamount to weakness. It's been a humbling journey in many ways, but also one that I'm profoundly grateful for.

Zibby: Wow. You're so articulate. I love listening to people who speak in complete paragraphs. I feel like there are speechwriters who would want to grab what you just said and throw it down on the page and claim it as their own. It's awesome. I have such appreciation for your language. Anyway, so when you keep going from place to place -- I know you've worked in Moscow and Syria. You been everywhere, Bin Laden. You have traversed the planet, essentially. I know, yes, okay fine, only child and performance, but how do you literally land on your feet everywhere you go? How do you just pick up and immerse yourself in something totally new? How do you do it?

Clarissa: What drew me to television rather than print is that television is a team sport. It's collaborative. You work with a cameraman and a producer. That really, for me, is a hugely important part of what I do. I thrive on that collaboration. I really get a lot of energy from just joking around and hanging out. What people never tell you about covering war is ninety-nine percent of it is killing time and waiting for something big to happen. Then one percent of it is totally mental. Everything is going off. You're just trying to get as much done as you can. Then it's back to sitting around and waiting for a press conference, waiting for a ride to the front line. Waiting, waiting, waiting is a huge theme. You need to be with people in the field who make you laugh, who keep you grounded, who keep you sane, who look out for you, who feed you, who you feed. That comradery is a huge part of it.

Definitely, that's what's allowed me to parachute into all these crazy places and live in Beirut and Baghdad and Beijing and Moscow and all the places that I've lived because it is lonely. It is lonely. Definitely, when I've been on my own on these trips, and some of them I've had to do alone, you have moments where you witness something so beautiful or so profound or so sad or whatever it may be, and it's tinged with this real sense of loneliness that you can't share it with other people in that moment, people who you love or people who you work with. It is hard to be away from home for so long. It is hard, as successful as you can be at it, immersing yourself in other people's lives. They are other people's lives at the end of the day. One of the most challenging parts of the job is trying to carve out your own real life. What does that look like? Where is that? Who's a part of that? It's not possible, really, to do this forever, constantly being in other people's lives.

Zibby: When you come home and you have your husband, let's just say even before kids, how do navigate going through intense -- you would think you'd come back with PTSD every week. Then you come back and maybe -- like your girlfriend who we were talking about earlier who we both know, how do you confront, then, a girlfriend who's just having relationship problems when you've been watching a man be carried in a casket through the streets? How do you keep perspective and relate to everybody else?

Clarissa: I think this is one of the biggest challenges of the job, to be honest, because you are straddling different worlds and shuttling back and forth. It's polar opposites. How do you acclimatize? I think there's a lot of guilt as well that comes with leaving the front lines of Aleppo and going to the South of France and sitting with my girlfriends around the pool drinking rosé. It's like, on what planet is this okay? On what planet does that make any sense? Is there any justice in this world? It's a lot. What you come to realize as you do the job longer is that if you can't make that work, if you can't experience joy and allow yourself to have that joy and love and spiritual nourishment or physical decadence, pampering, whatever it is that you need to fill the tank when you're at home, you can't go back out and do the job again. You need to fill the tank. Once you understand that, you're able to navigate it a little bit better. There have been times, and I talk about this in the book, where I would come back and I didn't feel like I wanted to be me anymore.

I didn't feel in love with my life anymore. I would bristle when my husband would try to hug me. I would zone out when I would go out with girlfriends for dinner and catch up with them. They would ask me sincerely about Syria, and I would not be able to engage with them on it. That is not a healthy state to be in. You do need to be proactive if you're doing this kind of work and you're witnessing this kind of trauma. You need to be proactive about your mental health. You need to be seeing a therapist. You need to start to recognize the telltale signs of when you're burning out a little bit or when you are getting too detached and too numb. It's a little counterintuitive. You see movies and you think, oh, they see something bad and then you feel sad. No. Feeling sad would be great because that means I'm processing. There's catharsis in grief or sadness. There is not any catharsis in feeling numb, in feeling detached, in feeling irascible. That's when you know that you really need to do some work to get back to a place where you can feel joy, where you can feel love, and where you can feel connection.

Zibby: You have a great therapist. I need this person's number instantly. I think I have a lot of people who could benefit from this information. Or you're just super highly evolved and self-aware, which is also fantastic. It's a great combination. Tell me about the process of writing this book. When did you find the time to do this? How long did it take and all that?

Clarissa: I wrote it on my maternity leave because masochism comes naturally to me. I was like, what should I do with this time I have off as a first-time mother? I know, I'll write a book. I started out, the process for me was like, I'm going to write a thousand words a day. Then I quickly realized that didn't make sense for me. There would be days where I could write a thousand words no problem. There would be other days where I would become too obsessive about this word count thing, and it was impeding the flow. Then I shifted gears. I was like, okay, write as much as you want or as little as you want, but just sit down for two to three hours every day and write. That's manageable even when you have a baby. I was lucky. I had a maternity nurse. My parents were around, a lot of my husband. I had a lot of support. Two to three hours was manageable. What I think many people who writes memoirs find is that when you're writing about your own experiences, it's a lot easier. It does flow, and especially when it comes from a place of truth. It's an amazing experience. You're just like, wow, all I'm doing right now is typing out the words that are pouring out of me. That was the first draft. Then I went back to work. The first draft was done in three months. The second draft took almost a year because I was back at work. I was traveling a lot. It was much more difficult to find time to really immerse again in it. The second round, a lot of, flesh out a bit here, what the situation was like in Syria. It's stuff I know, but it's more the research, the "let me tell you in three paragraphs, the history of Syria" part. That requires a bit more discipline, I would say. That was harder. The first round flowed. The second round was work.

Zibby: Do you feel like now that you've had all this exposure and research and writing about it, you have intense political views? Does it shift how you feel about international relations and all of that on a bigger-picture scale?

Clarissa: It's interesting you ask that. I think not so much about political issues. I'm pretty passionate about Syria. I have pretty strong views on that. Obviously, I testified at the United Nations Security Council, which is kind of on the edge of, are you a journalist or an activist? I've definitely entered that hazy space. For the most part, I think what writing did, actually, was to give me more courage of my convictions in terms of what makes a great journalist, what makes a great story, and what these human moments of connection -- I know I keep coming back to that, but it made me understand better why I do this and what it's all about for me and the privilege that comes not just with witnessing history, which I have had the fortunate of doing on occasion, but of making profound connections with people who live a hundred thousand miles away and every metaphorical sense of that.

Zibby: Then how did you deal with COVID? When the brakes slammed on your life, how did you cope? How was it being back?

Clarissa: I was heavily pregnant. Basically, everyone was on lockdown with me. I was already on lockdown. Listen, it was really challenging because it's the first war I've covered from my living room. It's a very tough story to cover in terms of the way I like to cover stories, which is usually with more of a human angle. You have to rely a lot on technology and getting people to do video diaries. It's hard. I definitely learned a lot. Now I'm on maternity leave. It also meant that my book release was delayed by six months, which was a blessing in some ways because I don't think I realized with how much work releasing a book is. It turns out it's basically a full-time job. [laughter] We're calling this a maternity leave, but basically, it's a full-time job. It's a really fun full-time job because you're out there talking about something that you feel passionate and excited about. I'm definitely thinking now, okay, I'll be going back to work. I'll probably go back after the election. I have no idea what the world's going to look like both in terms of the election and in terms of COVID. What kinds of stories are people going to want to hear? This is one of these things, COVID, much like 9/11, it's a bolt from the sky again that's going to profoundly change the way we live and function as a society in ways that we don't really yet understand. We haven't quite got our arms around it. It's going to be tremendously interesting, but it's definitely going to be challenging as well.

Zibby: Yes, I would agree with that. Knowing how much work is involved in the whole thing, would you ever write another book, or are you like, this was great and now I'll be more prepared?

Clarissa: I haven't started therapy for that yet. [laughter] Yes, at some point I would like to write another book, but not for a while.

Zibby: Do you find time to read yourself?

Clarissa: I really wish that I had more -- I used to be a voracious reader of novels. I was a comp lit major. That's really what I loved.

Zibby: Which two languages?

Clarissa: I did French, Italian, and Russian, but my Russian wasn't good enough, so I was reading in translation. As you know, hence the name of the podcast, having kids is like, wow, when do you find time? I have this beautiful stack of books by my bedside. Then I get into bed. My husband's reading Netflix. I'm making sure that I haven't missed fifty Zoom calls or whatever. I get the book out. Then before I know it, I'm like, [snoring]. It's really hard. I'm not going to pretend it's not. One way that I get to read books is people ask me a lot to write blurbs for their books. That's great because then you really have to read the book. I do try to read, but man, I really wish I had more time and that I could read more. That's why I think it's so awesome what you're doing because we do need to carve out more time and find these little moments to read. It's such an important thing. I think social media and everything, we've gotten a little bit distracted.

Zibby: I hope by doing the show that I entice people to read. Once they hear somebody's story like yours, they're like, oh, my gosh, I have to hear more. I want to read the whole thing. That's my goal, whet the appetite like having movie trailers. This is the book trailer channel or something. [laughs]

Clarissa: Believe me, authors are so grateful to you for that. Your sincerity and your curiosity and enthusiasm is just really, really awesome.

Zibby: Thanks. I feel like a child. I really do get so excited. [laughs] I do. It's really awesome. My kids just went to school. Now they're only in school in real life for the mornings, my little guys at least. They come home after three and a half hours. My daughter was just at lunch. She was like, "Wow, I feel like I didn't even leave." I was like, "Yeah, I feel like that too except that I had three podcasts this morning and I met the most interesting women ever." I talked to somebody in Florence. I talked to somebody in Chicago. How else would I ever met all these interesting people? I feel very lucky.

Clarissa: That's kind of like my job, though. I feel the same way. I think that's how you know when you're onto a good thing. It's not about whatever the trappings of success might -- it's about that, wow, I'm really excited. I'm learning. I'm meeting interesting people. I'm seeing different ideas. That's the thrill of it. That's the excitement.

Zibby: Totally. Then once you're in it, more ideas and more things happen as opposed to when I was home when my twins who are now thirteen. When they were little and every day was like a thousand hours long, I was just like, I can't even think of a single essay to write right now. I'm so burnt out. Now, like with you, I'm sure, you just throw one more thing in the fire, and you're already going at warp speed.

Clarissa: Oh, yeah. It's long days, short years.

Zibby: Yes, exactly. It was so great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for sharing your journey with everybody. I'll look for you eventually on TV.

Clarissa: Yes, or in person hopefully if we ever find a vaccine.

Zibby: In person would be great. It would be even better. It would be awesome. I'll talk to you soon. Hopefully, I'll see you soon.

Clarissa: Take care. Thank you.

Zibby: Thanks, Clarissa. Buh-bye.

Clarissa: Bye.

Cameron Douglas, LONG WAY HOME

Zibby Owens: Hi, Cameron.

Cameron Douglas: Hi, Zibby.

Zibby: I'm looking forward to our conversation. We got a little preview beforehand. All these people stole some of my questions, but I'll come up with some more.

Cameron: Because you're a pro.

Zibby: Long Way Home: A Memoir of Fame, Family, and Redemption, you have been through so much in your life, and you're younger than me. It's unbelievable. Why did you decide to put it all into a book? Why write a book about this at all?

Cameron: I'll give you the short answer first. Then I'll elaborate a little bit. The short answer was to try to take some of these experiences that I've been through, some of them very painful, some of them lovely, and turn them into something useful for people. That's the short answer. To be a little more long-winded, at first, it was my father that was really pushing me to write this book. I was confused about that, as we talked about earlier, because our family has always been very private. It was helpful. It was out of love that he was pushing me to write this book and also out of the fact that he and the rest of my family felt that I had a story to tell and a story to share. At the expense of some of their privacy, they felt that it was worthwhile. It's been an interesting journey. It's been a long journey. I started writing the book before I came home in 2015, 2016. It took about four years to write all in all. I must say, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about myself, which is important to have insights like that when you paid such a high price for your decisions.

Zibby: You mentioned earlier that it was really your time in prison that allowed you to get in touch with your feelings. I wanted just to hear a little more about how that happened. Were you in prison one day and you asked for a notebook? How did you start writing there? How did you find the time? How in control of your time even were you?

Cameron: It started, really, when I was doing my first fairly long stretch in solitary confinement. It was around eleven months. It was fairly early on in my sojourn through prison. I had a really difficult time adjusting. My journey was very atypical. I started at a minimum security, and I worked my way up to high security. That's not the way it's supposed to work. You're supposed to go the other way. As I said, I really had a difficult time settling in. I was very angry at myself, which I think is understandable. I don't think I dealt with that very well. As a result, I just made life even more difficult for myself. I'd like to think that some of it was necessary. It's part of my journey. From where I'm sitting today, I probably wouldn't be here without a lot of those experiences. I was in solitary confinement. Obviously, you can imagine. You're in there twenty-three hours a day. You get one hour three times a week. Most days, you're in there twenty-four/seven. Then on the days that you do come out for that hour, usually they’ll come get you at around four thirty in the morning. If you're on the East Coast, they take you outside to a little cage. It's just freezing out there. I opted to sleep in most of the time anyway. I started journaling. What I tried to do is I tried to set up a curriculum for myself to keep my mind active. It made me feel like I was taking some of my freedom back. The curriculum was reading. I'd read three books. I'd have a self-help type of book. Then I'd read a literary classic, something you might read in an English lit class in college. Then I'd have a beach read like Game of Thrones or something like that. Had that. I had my exercise, meditation, and writing. I don't want to speak for too long, but that's where it started.

Zibby: I love the idea of you sitting -- I mean, not love, but the comical vision of you in solitary confinement with a beach read. [laughs] It's so against what you would think. That's great that literature could provide you with that outlet, as it does. That's some of the power of books to begin with. Where better to escape than when you literally can't?

Cameron: It really is. Then I'll fully answer your question. You have this book cart that comes around a couple times a week. I got this book off the cart by this great American classic author, Stephen Crane. This was his book of short stories called The Red Badge of Courage. They're all fantastic stories. The Red Badge of Courage in particular really spoke to me and gave me something that I think was necessary for me at the time. I was so taken by his writing that I got in touch with my -- you get one phone call every three weeks. I got on the phone and I asked, I forget who, I said, "Find me some more books by this guy Stephen Crane." I didn't realize he was a well-known poet as well. What came in the mail was all these books of poetry. I was like, what am I going to do with this? I was fairly well-educated, but I've never really connected with poetry. I started reading them, as you can imagine [indiscernible]. For the first time, I really was taken by poetry and inspired by it. I started playing around a little bit. That's kind of where it started.

Zibby: [child noises] Nice to have the little one. I was warning you that this good stage was going to end. Anyway, in your book, you talked when you were younger about developing what your mom called the curly-whirlies where you would spin your hair around. Your anxiety was clearly manifesting itself from an early age. Do you feel like some of your later behaviors were your own way of coping with maybe an anxiety disorder that wasn't really treated or underlying things? Now that you're in a totally new place emotionally, where did that all come from? What would you do to prevent this trajectory from happening to, say, your daughter?

Cameron: Especially as a child and then as a teenager, I always felt sort of uncomfortable in my own skin. I would do everything I could to not let onto that. I think I learned at a fairly early age that by getting high or getting buzzed, it would allow me to feel comfortable. Looking back on everything, one thing that I really had a chance to take advantage of but I didn't that I think would've been extremely helpful is therapy. Had I been a little more open and willing to talk to somebody as a teenager, I think maybe it would've been helpful. That's something I let anybody know. I have friends that have kids that are struggling. I tell people that I care about to give it a chance. It's a big part of my life today. It just took me so long. It wasn't until maybe six months before I was being released from prison. I remember one day saying to myself, I think I'm ready to give therapy a chance when I get home. I followed through on that. It's been very helpful for me.

Zibby: I thought it was so funny that when you got out of prison, one of the things you realized you missed the most was going to the dentist. Who knew?

Cameron: Exactly. I was pretty fortunate with my dental situation in prison. It's funny. My partner, Vivian, who I live with and we have a daughter together, I've known her for many years. She reached out to me. She wrote me a letter. I wrote her a letter back. We hadn’t seen each other in many, many years. Finally when we got on the phone together -- I had my visiting privileges suspended for a long time. Finally, I was getting them back. We'd been talking for about a year. I was on the phone with her. I said, "Look, I just want to warn you. I only have three teeth left. I feel a little self-conscious about it." There was dead silence on the line for a second. Then I started laughing. It can be a bad place for your teeth. That's for sure.

Zibby: [laughs] You wrote throughout the book about so many different losses. I don't feel like you necessarily framed them as such, but they just kept popping up in one way or another, even your manny, essentially. I thought it was so funny that your dad had a busboy and was like, "He seems like a good nanny." The next thing you know, he takes care of you intimately for years, which is one method of recruiting babysitters I have not tried yet. Now I'm going to open my mind to that. Even with him being so close to you for so many years and then gets let go of and immediately disappears, that's a big loss. Even your pet ferret getting eaten by your dog, these are heartbreaking things, particularly at that age and time of life, and then of course as life goes on and more things happen. What do you think those early losses -- do you feel like they were as significant as I'm perhaps making them or less so? I know you wrote about them a lot, so clearly you found them to have some importance.

Cameron: Joaquin is somebody that to this day I think about. Sometimes I'll even think I see him. He was a huge part of my life. That was a difficult loss. Kids are sensitive. In life, things are going to happen. When you're young, you need people to help you through it. They may not be available. I think they do leave a little scar. You try to figure out a way to deal with it yourself. You don't, maybe, have all the coping mechanisms at the time. Again, listen, life is -- that's what it is. It's full of loss and hardship. That's what builds character. We have the decision to make choices as a result of these things that we go through. Some choices are better than others. Can't really blame it on Joaquin and my ferret, although I would've liked to. [laughter] I think I told that to the judge.

Zibby: Maybe we could talk about your family in case that played more of a role in some way. You painted such a loving picture of your dad, and your mom at times. You painted her as somewhat inconsistent, I would say, in her availability and emotional availability, physical presence, all of that. You really made your dad seem like he wanted to compensate for having a famous father himself by being a great dad to you and making sure that you didn't feel the way he had felt, it's this whole full circle thing, and was really there for you and tried all these things when you did develop your drug addition to help. I wonder looking back, what do you think he could have done or your mom could have done to have prevented your addiction from spiraling in the way that it did, or was it just once it started, there was sort of no way to really reel it back in because you didn't really want it to stop?

Cameron: Quite frankly, I got to a place in my life where there was nothing that they could do. It's interesting. My father, one of his bones that he had with my mother -- my mother was so young when she had me, nineteen or twenty. My father's career was just getting going. It's a career that takes a lot of time and a lot of focus, a lot of attention. My father often felt like he had two kids to take care of, my mother and myself. My mother was so young. She didn't like the business. She's European and came to the States and met my father and didn't like the business and was angry and lonely as well. She was still extremely young herself. They had a lot of things going on. I was always loved and well-cared for, but maybe just didn't have the attention that I was needing. That kind of forced me to look elsewhere for that love and attention. Starting as younger teenager, I started finding that with a group of people that were rough around the edges. That's not to say they were bad people or anything like that. It's just people that were going down that road that would eventually lead to some issues. That's what happened. I remember at one point in my life I was wondering to myself, if I'm not in prison, who are these people in prison? I was wrapped up in all these different things. But I was. I just wasn't physically there yet. I was well on my way. That's it. If you're living that life, there's a place for you if you continue to live that way.

Zibby: There were so many moments where you just should not have survived, the car crash. There were just so many, the drugs, the seizures. It's a miracle that we're even on a Zoom call right now. It's crazy. What do you attribute that to? Do you feel like you have some sort of perspective on life having lived through all of this that perhaps others of us can't have or don't necessary have having cheated death so many times?

Cameron: I have been fortunate. I have angels watching over me. I've certainly not been careful with my life and often not valued it properly. Maybe subconsciously there was some purpose behind that. I guess that wasn't to be my story. That wasn't going to be the way that my story was going to end, whether I wanted it to or not. I like to think that there's something that I have to offer before it's all said and done.

Zibby: Obviously, one thing you have to offer is your story which is going to help so many other people who are struggling. Hopefully, they’ll all be reading it and can get back on track or get what they need out of it. It's an amazing gift when somebody shares their story so openly like that. That's awesome. You also talked about dealing with your dad's cancer diagnosis and treatment and how you felt about it. I was just wondering if you could share a little about that period of time and what it was like for you.

Cameron: For those of you that haven't read my book, I found out that he had cancer by one of the inmates that I was on the compound with. He came up to me and he said, "Hey Cam, I'm so sorry to hear about your dad." I said, "What are you talking about? I just saw him. What are you talking about?" He said, "I heard he has cancer." I said, "No, I don't think so." Then a couple more steps, and then somebody else came up to me. I went in and got on the payphone and tried to call him. He didn't answer, so I called a friend of mine. The first thing she said when she picked up the phone was, "I'm so sorry to hear about your father." I said, "What's going on? What happened?" She told me that it came out in the press that he had stage four throat cancer. I sat with that for a little while and obviously tried to get in touch with him. When I finally did, he felt bad. He said that he didn't want me to worry. I'll tell you, it really gave me a real respect for what these cancer survivors go through. I saw him about three weeks before he started his treatments, which was the radiation and the chemotherapy. He looked great. He looked healthy, how he always does. Then he came to visit me about a month and a half after his last treatment. It was maybe three months or something like that. I've never seen a body change so drastically in such a short amount of time. It's a real fight. Fortunately, he made it. One of the extremely unfortunate things about going away for so long is that life goes on, and as a result, you lose people. It happens a lot. I was hoping that I would make it home to see him. He got better long before I came home, so that was good.

Zibby: Wow. What is your relationship like now with your family? Do you feel like you've repaired any of the riffs that may have occurred over time? Do you feel this, still, enormous support? What's it like now? How has it been with the book as an entrant into the family as well?

Cameron: Ironically enough or oddly enough, everybody was really behind the book, which was nice. Obviously, that's important to me. That made it easier. My relationship with my mother and father are fantastic. It's taken some time, particularly with my father. So many years, I had been living in a certain way. Nobody knows that better than the people that are closest to you. To be living like that for so many years and then to go away to a place like prison -- as I said, I spent most of my time in higher-security prisons, which is a different reality in and of itself. It's like, who is coming home? I think everybody was kind of protecting themselves a little bit or maybe even more than a little bit. It's just consistency. I did a lot of growing up while I was away. I wish I was able to do that before having to go to that length. I feel like I made the most of it, if that can be possible in a situation like that. The consistency that I've shown since coming home is everything. We're in a great place.

Zibby: That's great. Tell me more about your current writing. You had mentioned that you are working on screenplays, that this book is being adapted. Tell me about all your exciting projects now.

Cameron: It's nice. Things are really just starting to come together. It was three years of awkwardness and trying to find my stride. Then it just takes a little bit of time. Things start to come together. The acting is something I jumped right into. I finished filming my first feature-length film in years in January of this year, so the beginning of this year. I just finally saw a cut of it. It looked good. It's been submitted to all the film festivals and stuff like that. We'll see what happens with that. Then I've been writing a lot during this quarantine. I hate to say it's been great because I know it's been so hard and difficult for so many people. As somebody that's procrastinated a lot in life and wasted a lot of time, I went into this quarantine with a mindset like, I have these projects that I really want to accomplish. I feel like I did so. I finished my first screenplay just a couple of weeks ago. Now I'm just refining it a little bit. It's too long. That's a good problem to have, at least initially. Then the book, Long Way Home, people have been interested in it. I teamed up with a production company called Fabrik and this amazing writer/showrunner named Tom Fontana. He's adapted it into an ongoing series. It's been exciting for me. It's been great to work with these guys in particular. Tom, he's a great writer. It's nice because it's a fictionalized version of my story. It's just based on my story, but all the characters will be fictionalized. Of course, to make it an ongoing series, you need some wiggle room. It's been exciting. It's been very exciting.

Zibby: You have a chapter, Orange Isn't the New Black. This is going to be the counter show to that one or a companion piece in a way. [laughs]

Cameron: It looks like it's going to be interesting. I'm excited to see what comes of that.

Zibby: This is a big question. What has it been like being a dad? How does it feel to have a daughter and to have a whole new perspective on life as a parent? What's that been like for you?

Cameron: It's been interesting. In regards to my own mother and father, it's been nice for them I think in particular because it sort of balanced the playing field a little bit. It's given me some insights into what they were dealing with and what a parent deals with. My daughter is my biggest teacher. She really is. I've learned so much about myself and really grown as a human being since she's graced us with her presence. It's pretty special, as you know.

Zibby: That's awesome. What advice would you have to aspiring authors, somebody who wants to write their story? Maybe it's not quite as dramatic as yours, but wants to get it down, wants it to help other people. What would you say?

Cameron: Nothing happens until you put the pen to paper or until you start banging away on the keyboard. That's the first thing with anything. Even with this screenplay, I've been thinking about it for so long. Screenplays is an art in and of itself. I was a little intimidated by it. It was just, write the screenplay and start figuring it out and banging away. It comes. I don't think one writes with the intention of making some big best seller. That's great if that happens, but you just write because you have something inside of you that you want to share or that needs to come out. You got to get started. I think if you get started and it's something that's for you, then you'll see that. You'll go from there. If you get started and you're like, no, this is not for me, then you can move on to the project.

Zibby: Screenwriting's not for me. Next. [laughs] I also was wondering, are you still friends -- in the book, you mentioned there was a boy named John you were friends with. You filmed a movie together. Your dad started to help and he was like, "Well, this production value's gone up a lot." Are you still friends with that guy?

Cameron: I am.

Zibby: You are. That's awesome.

Cameron: He's one of my oldest friends. He's actually a very successful producer now in his own right here in town. He's doing fantastic. He just had a little boy. He's married and lives about fifteen minutes away from me. We snuck a couple visits in during quarantine, but really just been keeping to ourselves like most people. Looking forward to seeing my friends and everything. Him and I have also been through a lot. We have a lot of funny stories together.

Zibby: That's great. I know there are going to be a lot of questions. Thank you for chatting with me, particularly the pre-chat. Now maybe I'll take some questions for you from the audience. What do you want to accomplish with the rest of your life? Good luck with this question.

Cameron: It's a good question. It's an important question. When it's all said and done, I want to feel like I've been useful. That's the short answer to a question that could possibly be endless. I want to feel useful. I wanted to be inspired. I want to have a purpose. I think that goes hand in hand with being useful.

Zibby: Good answer. If anybody else has questions, they can put them in the Q&A here on Zoom, and Cameron will answer them.

Cameron: I have a question for you, Zibby. How is your brother?

Zibby: My brother's great. He's actually a big producer in your town now too. He runs Black Bear Pictures. It's funny. I didn't actually even talk to him before this interview to get some inside scoop for you at sleepaway camp, but I'm going to have to.

Cameron: [laughs] That's probably better.

Zibby: Yeah. He may or may not have been kicked out himself. I'll just leave it at that. [laughs]

Cameron: Maybe I'll cross paths with him one of these days.

Zibby: You should.

Cameron: Tell him I said hello.

Zibby: I will. I absolutely will. Now we have a lot more questions. Although, you can keep asking me questions. We can turn this whole thing around. Okay, thank you for sharing your story. You are so positive after going through so much. How did you come to terms with accepting yourself and your faults and mistakes?

Cameron: It's a process. It starts with forgiveness. I certainly didn't come up with it, but a little slogan that's always stuck with me is, forgive, but you never forget. The forgiveness, especially forgiving yourself, allows you to begin to heal. The part of about not forgetting allows you to build from some of those choices. I've paid a high price for some of my decisions. The way I look at it is I might as well get what I paid for.

Zibby: I love that. Have you gotten involved in any prison support or work to reform?

Cameron: Yeah. One of the things that I'm involved in now is these voting rights for people that have either done their time -- for instance, supervised release is something that men and women are under once they finish their term in federal prison. In some states, they allow it. In some states, they don't. Look, I put it like this. Our judicial system and our government is not known for being particularly warm and fuzzy. If the time that you do is enough for them to call it even, then it should be enough for you to have your voting rights back at the very least. It goes on from there. It's really a struggle for men and women coming home. I'm very fortunate in that I have the support of my family. They believed in me. They never gave up on me. The reality for most men and women coming home is that they have nothing. To even get a job or a place to live being a convicted felon is really difficult. I think it's something that we need to work on. That's what you're doing. You're going there. You're paying the ultimate price for your misgivings.

Zibby: Someone is asking, what was your relationship with your grandfather?

Cameron: My relationship with my grandfather has always been amazing. My grandfather is notoriously a tough guy and was hard on my father and my uncles. With me, he was always full of love. Him and I had a lot in common. My grandfather was an athlete and a wrestler. I was as well. We're similar in a lot of ways and always had a lovely relationship. I was really blessed because I moved out to LA and got to spend the last years of his life with him. I moved about ten minutes away from him. I was over at his house two, three times a week, bringing my daughter, Vivian, and then just spending time with him myself. That was special for me, for sure, and hopefully for him as well.

Zibby: As you learn in the book, he often slipped you fifty-dollar bills whenever he said hello to you. That's always nice. [laughs]

Cameron: That's right, right on up through my twenties.

Zibby: Do you have a relationship with Judaism? Has it provided you with a way of gaining a purpose in life?

Cameron: My grandfather was bar mitzvahed in his seventies. He made a full circle. He was brought up Jewish and then wandered away from religion or spirituality in general and then made his way back. I'm not so religious. I was never raised in any particular religion. I am very spiritual. I believe in a higher power. I take little bits and pieces from all the different religions that I feel resonate with me. Having said that, my younger brother is bar mitzvahed. He's in Brown now and lives in a Jewish dorm and is doing his Shabbat dinners and things like that. My younger sister has been bat mitzvahed. They really resonate with Judaism.

Zibby: My daughter's bat mitzvah is on Saturday.

Cameron: Nice.

Zibby: It's on Zoom, so you can come if you want. We could do this again.

Cameron: Yes. They’ll be like, who is that guy?

Zibby: [laughs] Someone says, I'm Steve from Houston. Thank you for this awesome presentation. What is your favorite all-time movie not including one your father and/or grandfather starred in?

Cameron: My favorite all-time movie, that is tough. I'm going to throw out a couple just off the top of my head. True Romance keeps jumping into my mind for some reason. Apocalypse Now is great. I really love Legends of the Fall. Maybe I just had a big crush on Brad Pitt. I don't know. He's pretty good-looking. I just think of the cover. If anybody's seen it, it's him with that mane. It's a great movie. I loved it. I love period pieces, so Dances with Wolves. I love Star Wars. I love all of the Star Wars. I like sci-fi stuff.

Zibby: I'm going to vote for When Harry Met Sally if anybody's wondering.

Cameron: I was going to say that one.

Zibby: Yeah, I bet. Did the title of Mandela's book, Long Walk to Freedom, influence you in the choice of the title for your book?

Cameron: Not consciously, but may have subconscious. That was a great book. I loved it. Long Way Home, the impetus for that title is a band called Supertramp which is a seventies rock band. They have one song called "Take the Long Way Home." I've always loved that song. Then I felt like that's what I was doing, is taking the long way home. When I say home, it's not the destination. It's not the physical destination. I guess it's sort of arriving to a destination in my mind and in my heart. Family's probably a big part of that as well. That's where that came -- come here. Want to say hello? Come here.

Zibby: Are we getting a cameo?

Cameron: No, she's gone. She just came to grab her toy.

Zibby: Some stage fright. Do you do any speaking engagements or work with teens that have an addiction problem?

Cameron: I have. I've been doing a lot of these book tour things, but haven't been doing much just during this quarantine recently. Working with juveniles, particularly juveniles that are in that sort of trouble age which in my opinion is from thirteen, sixteen, seventeen, I think that's a critical age. I know just because I know myself when I was that age. It's important for these kids to be able to talk to somebody or listen to somebody that has been through some of the same stuff or else they don't want to hear about it. That's definitely something that I will get more involved in moving forward. I like to think that as my career starts gaining momentum it will allow me to reach more people. I feel like with success comes responsibility. That's certainly one of the areas that I care about and I think is important.

Zibby: Someone says, you mentioned all your reading in solitary. Are you still an avid reader?

Cameron: I am. I love to read. We were talking about it before the show. Yeah, I do. I love reading.

Zibby: What are you reading now? What's on your bedside table?

Cameron: I've been so focused on the screenplay that I haven't been doing too much reading. I have this book of prose from World War I authors that I've been reading at night before I go to sleep. I don't remember the name offhand. Want to come say hello?

Zibby: Hi, cutie. She's so cute. I like the pink hat. There's nothing like an indoors hat for a winter hat appearance. So cute.

Cameron: Do you have any good -- I know you said The Vanishing Half.

Zibby: Yes, that was very good. I'm reading this book about parenthood you might enjoy called Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear by Kim Brooks. Very interesting.

Cameron: Very cool.

Zibby: That's at the top of my stack at the moment. I have more questions for you. Sorry, a couple more. Are you close to Catherine, your dad's wife? Somebody else was asking about those siblings of yours.

Cameron: Those siblings of mine. [laughs]

Zibby: I was going to say those half-siblings. I wanted to make sure I was right before I said that. Yes, half-siblings. What is your relationship like with your stepmother and half-siblings? There it is.

Cameron: I'll answer the question about Catherine first. My relationship with her has always been fantastic. I was my father's best man at their wedding. Just always had a really good relationship. As I said, when I came home, my father in particular was protecting himself and was not really opening up to me as much as I would have liked. I think Catherine was one of my champions in sort of pushing him to open himself back up to me a little bit. I thought that was beautiful. My brother, Dylan, is amazing. He's at Brown. He's a tremendous actor. He's super involved in politics. In fact, he started his own political group called Make Room, makeroom.org. It's a really great movement. He's just an amazing young man. My sister, Carys, is gorgeous, sweet as can be. She's in boarding school in Switzerland. She's extremely smart and also an amazing actress in her own right. We'll certainly be hearing from them. We have already, actually. My sister's got a hundred-plus thousand followers or something on Instagram. She's miles ahead of her old brother.

Zibby: Wow. All right, I'll have to start following her. I think we're almost done with questions. What advice would you give employers with regard to hiring former prisoners?

Cameron: Like I said --

Child: -- Toy.

Zibby: Give them toys.

Cameron: Give them toys, exactly. If somebody has served their time and they're looking for a job -- this has been my experience anyway. Some of the smartest people that I've met, I met in prison. Sometimes life is difficult and people make some bad decisions. One thing I know for sure that is none of us are the same person now that we were ten years before that. We weren’t the same person then that we were ten years before that. People evolve. People make changes. When you've given years of your life based on some decisions that you've made and you come home and you're looking for a different kind of life, I think you might find that they’ll probably be some of the best employees that you can find.

Zibby: Last one. What was it like working with your family in It Runs in the Family?

Cameron: That was an amazing experience. Working with my father and my grandfather as well as my grandmother -- my dear grandmother, Diana Darrid, was also in the movie. It was fantastic. It was a lot fun. For me, I was young. I was twenty-two or something like that. Working with the two of them, it was just such a good feeling for me. I will treasure that.

Zibby: Excellent. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for doing this for the JCC. Thanks for letting us seriously into your home in the chaos that is having a small child which I am very familiar with.

Cameron: [laughs] I'm sorry about that. We made it. We did pretty good. I thought it was going to fall apart earlier, but we did pretty good.

Zibby: No, it was great.

Cameron: Thank you. I had a lot of fun with you, Zibby. I look forward to seeing you somewhere down the road or staying in touch. Thank you all for having me. I appreciate it. It's been really a lot of fun.

Christa Parravani, LOVED AND WANTED

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

Christa Parravani: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: I always think it's so funny to interview someone who's written such an open memoir with so much information that I'm like, I already know all about you. Let's skip to the next part. What happened after the memoir? Let's catch up. It's like we already had a conversation. For listeners who don't know much about your book, Loved and Wanted, can you please tell them a little about what it's about?

Christa: Loved and Wanted is a memoir that is about my time living in West Virginia. I was a faculty member at West Virginia University. My family had moved there from Los Angeles. It's about the years that I lived in West Virginia and had a second daughter and then was unexpectedly pregnant with a third child a year after having my daughter. I was my family's sole provider. I couldn't afford a third baby. I looked into my options for reproductive healthcare and discovered that I didn't have any. [laughs] Or very few, and not the kinds of options that, as a mother to small children, that I could take. There were waiting periods that would've caused me to have to take two weeks off of work and find someone to stay with our kids. Oftentimes if you get an abortion, you have to have somebody come with you. We didn't have family nearby. The book is about that. It's about the journey that I had afterward, after I had my son who is very much loved and wanted, which is where the title of the book comes from. I believe that you can both want to have had the choice for reproductive healthcare and love and want your children. It's about the discovery about what the implications are for curtailing reproductive healthcare for women and children through my direct experience.

Zibby: I was so surprised to learn about how difficult it was for you in this day and age in a state that allows abortion to get it. You went through in the book so clearly, if I had done this, I would've had to give up this many days of work. This would've cost this. This bus ride would've cost this. Then I tried this other option. Then this doctor said no. I couldn't believe it. You were saying that this goes on all over the country. I'm from New York City. You just don't know what it's like. You had been coming from LA at the time, so it was a culture shock.

Christa: It was unbelievable to me as a person who grew up in New York and then lived in Los Angeles. Our family lived in New York City for many years. We lived in Los Angeles for many years. It was shocking to me that there are laws that prevent women from being able to seek reproductive healthcare in states like West Virginia and many other states. It's not just West Virginia. As a matter of fact, the majority of healthcare providers are in New York City and/or around New York and Los Angeles, California. The reason why we don't understand this to be a daily situation is because those providers are near those cities. There are many states that only have one facility for reproductive healthcare. The numbers are going down and down and down as times goes on. There are fewer and fewer places to be able to get reproductive healthcare. Again, like you, until I saw that directly, I was unaware, completely surprised. Also, in that surprise, I felt crazy. [laughs] I felt like, why do I feel like this is impossible? What is wrong with me? In fact, it was because it was impossible. Part of the reason I wrote the book is for that reason. The ways in which I was told indirectly that the choice was not mine to make because it was too hard to make caused me to doubt everything about myself including who I was as a mother to my two daughters.

Zibby: The fact that you had to go through that with no support and no help and struggling financially -- your mother was -- I'm glad she came through for you at one point in the book. I was like, well, thank god for this. Finally, there she shows up. Also, your tragic history with your sister which was the topic of your previous memoir, can you talk a little about that too? Really throw you in the fire this morning. Here, let's start right off with your most painful things in life for me who you just met.

Christa: Let me tell you. [laughs] When I was in my twenties, my identical twin sister, Cara, died of a heroin overdose. She had suffered from depression as a result of having been raped by a stranger in the woods when we were in our early to mid-twenties. She had a six-year struggle after that attack and eventually succumbed to depression and addiction. The book is about identity. It's called Her: A Memoir. It's about what it means to climb your way out of unimaginable grief. I wrote it because I feel like people want to know what it's like to have a twin. They want to know what it's like to have intimate love in that way. We don't talk about losing that very often. I felt a responsibility to do that. I felt a responsibility also to talk about what it means to be trying to care for somebody who's been sexually assaulted and not really know how to do that. I didn't realize the trajectory of my writing career had to do with activism. It does. [laughs] This book does that too. I'm now experiencing myself as somebody who is not only interested in writing, but interested in justice and justice for women and sharing our stories, in a way, to liberate us.

Zibby: That's a perfect tagline for a career. That's great. It's great to have such a clear goal. A marketing firm would say this is fantastic. You've outlined your mission. I'm so sorry. I don't even mean to make light of your horrific experience and your tragic loss of your sister. It's just awful, what happened. I need to go back now. After I finished this book, I was like, oh, my gosh, how did I miss her first book? Now I have to go back and read it. It sounds like you've been through the ringer in so many ways. It's like, at least, they should give you the choice of whether or not to have another baby.

Christa: I think we all deserve that choice. We deserve to be in situations where healthcare is strong enough for us to be able to make that choice, and once you have your baby, to be taken care of.

Zibby: Yes. That was the other thing in the book about all the pitfalls and misdiagnoses, essentially, with your son. Oh, my gosh, I wanted to scoop you up and take you to my doctor. [laughs]

Christa: I wanted to go to my doctor too.

Zibby: I know. I know you did. I know, oh, my gosh.

Christa: I don't mean to make light of any of these things. I do think, though, there's a way in which if you don't approach something with humor and levity, you're never going to be able to communicate the thing that you need to communicate. All these things did happen. Miraculously, I'm okay. I want to be able to teach women and people to be able to go through these experiences and still be okay and to be able to look at them and help other people. We deserve to have good healthcare. We deserve to have good reproductive healthcare. We deserve to have good pediatric care for our children. The thing that I discovered in this -- I'm looking at my book here, which is the galley copy.

Zibby: Yay!

Christa: Yay, there it is.

Zibby: Wait, let me see the cover again. I had to read it online. There wasn't a cover yet. Oh, I love it. It's awesome.

Christa: It's a picture of Morgantown, West Virginia, that was taken by a local photographer not very far from the house where I lived.

Zibby: PS, I would not say this was exactly an advertisement for Morgantown, West Virginia. I'm not sure they're going to have the biggest book party for you there.

Christa: I can't say that many people have acknowledged that it's happening. [laughs] I can't say that's the case. I have a lot of love for the place even though I had difficult times there, for sure, I did, unexpectedly. The thing that I discovered is that states that curtail access to women's healthcare -- curtailing access to abortion is not just curtailing access to abortion. In fact, it's curtailing access to pap smears and all sort of women's healthcare that is only available to certain people in places that perform abortions. It just so happens that the money that is funneled into women's healthcare, when you take it away, you don't get adequate care for children. That's something that occurs across the United States and which I didn't realize until after I had my son. He was born with some issues that were not easily taken care of in West Virginia but would have probably been noticed in a second in some place that had more resources, less overcrowding.

Zibby: Then you think of the spread of COVID across the country and then you realize, how can small towns everywhere focus when they don't have the advantages of all the science and all the expertise, necessarily, of bigger communities? That's what most people are turning to. It's just kind of frightening, to be honest.

Christa: It is frightening. In my case, I lived in a town where West Virginia University is which is where I teach. The medical center there is vast. It runs the state. It's a historically really interesting place. Mylan Pharmaceuticals is based there. This giant medical complex is based there. There's a history of healthcare there that's really interesting. However, because West Virginia does not have a lot of medical offices, it is serving the entire state, basically. There are people who need to commute two and a half hours to be able to see a doctor for any reason. That includes women who are pregnant and having babies.

Zibby: There was that one scene where the mom came in with her child and waited for two hours and had to drive two hours. Then she couldn't miss any more work and had to turn around and leave. It's just heartbreaking. Then of course, you realize how often this must be happening all over the place.

Christa: It's happening all over the place. It happened to me, a professor, somebody who has two master's degrees and writes books and is a white woman. The number of women that this happens to who are women of color and poor women is astronomical. I feel like we don't really have enough of a voice for that yet. I feel like as women, we haven't been able to articulate this yet because there's something about saying "I thought about having an abortion" that is still a really taboo subject. It's one that I came up against when I was writing the book. I asked myself consistently, can I do this? Why am I doing this? What does it mean for my son to do this? I have the answers, but as I was working my way through it, I did not have those answers. I just had the desire to be able to say something that didn't feel like it was being said often enough.

Zibby: What were some of those answers deep down?

Christa: I'll tell you. I have two daughters. I thought about what it was that I would say to them in two decades from now, a decade from now, about what it meant to live in this time and not advocate for their healthcare. I know that I look to my mother. I say, what did you do in your time and place? I remember being really disappointed by the fact that I didn't feel like she did a lot when she was growing up in the sixties. She didn't have the opportunity to do that. She worked at Sears, Roebuck. She was a waitress after that. She didn't have the resources that I have. I look to my daughters and I think, I will not forgive myself if I don't advocate for them. If I don't do it, who will? I think that my son will grow up in a household of girls, of a strong mother. He will understand that this necessity is one that doesn't have a lot to do with having him being loved or wanted at all. It happens to be something that makes a better world for him too, for his sisters, for his children. I think he'll understand. It was a risk that I had to take in order to take care of them all.

Zibby: You have to protect the ones you have. Anyway, I won't get into it, but I get it.

Christa: [laughs] Thank you.

Zibby: This is like Sophie's Choice or something, but yes, I understand. I'm glad you came to terms with it and crystalized your point in doing it all and all of that. Can I just ask, are you and your husband good these days?

Christa: We're trying. It was a horrific experience to go through in a marriage. It was. The time after my son was born was not easy either. I don't write about it. The last couple years have been hard for everyone. We're living in a chaotic country in which we're not sure what tomorrow will look like in a whiplash news cycle. We both happen to be writers, my husband and me. There's a way in which that career breeds uncertainty. He was really worried about my writing this book. I think he was worried about our son. I'm also worried about our son, but as a man, intimately concerned with his needs in that way, where I was concerned with our daughters' needs. It's been hard. We're trying to work it out. I don't know what'll happen, to be honest. It could go either way. Right now, we're still married.

Zibby: Okay, I'll just leave that alone.

Christa: [laughs] I want to say something about this. One of the things that I'm asked a lot about is what my husband thinks about this book. That's an interesting subject. I think that when you take a subject like this and you ask about someone's husband -- this is no offense to your question because I would ask it too in a second. I would say you're making something about what should be about a woman's choice and her role as a mother and turning it around and asking her what her husband thinks is making it less about her and more about him.

Zibby: I did not ask that question for the record.

Christa: No, no, no, I'm talking about it in terms of -- I was thinking about it. I'm a writer of nonfiction. My husband is a writer of nonfiction. We tell stories that would be harrowing for other people. He's written two memoirs. There's a take-no-prisoners approach in his writing that I don't necessarily have in mine. I thought, what is my gut reaction to not wanting to address him? I'm interested in talking about the marriage, but what is it about this particular situation that makes me feel nervous about that? When I look at him, I'm taking away something that was really about me. I don't want to do that because it clouds a situation which, to me, seems so clear in terms of what he would think and feel about, say for example, me having an abortion. He immediately, when he found out that I was pregnant, said, "It is your body and your choice."

Zibby: I didn't ask what he would think about it. I was more interested in, are you two okay? Just wondering what the conclusion was. I guess I would be wondering because you didn't paint such a great picture of your relationship. Revealing that has effects on both members of the party. That would be it. It actually had nothing to do with the abortion part. That's obviously one piece of your book, but certainly not the other piece. I also think it's about, how do you get through being a mother in a marriage when life is really, really, really hard? I think that's a big piece of your book regardless of the reproductive angle. It's the day-to-day life and the struggling and the financial stress that weighs on you and the blame and his career versus yours. I just felt like so much of this was so widely applicable. Also, abortion has so many political and religious and whatever. I was kind of not dealing with that because people have such different views on it. However, I was just trying to get to --

Christa: -- I totally understand what you're saying. The thing is that any marriage has its complications. I talk to my girlfriends and we're all talking about, oh, my god, what are our financial lives going to be like this year? How does that impact our marriage? Who's getting to work right now? Is my husband getting to work? Am I getting to work? Who's taking care of the children? No matter what the mess, the tangle of your life is, I think we all in some way are adjacent to that in that kind of stress. Keeping a marriage together is so hard. It's really hard. That doesn't mean that you don't love somebody. It doesn't mean you don't want to be with them. It just means that it's hard. It's not just hard for me. It's hard for all of us. Show me the perfect marriage. I want to see it. [laughs] As a writer of nonfiction, it's my job to tell the truth.

Zibby: Even still, many writers of nonfiction don't delve this deep into their own marriages. I feel like some authors do it when they're older reflecting back. Dani Shapiro wrote a beautiful memoir called Hourglass about her whole marriage.

Christa: I love that. So good. I love it.

Zibby: I feel like it's not as often that you hear from the inside. I feel like there's this, almost, iron wall sometimes around people's inner relationships that you didn't have, which was great which is in part what made your book so interesting and un-put-down-able. You're like, what's going to happen next? How did they navigate this? How would I navigate that? You put yourself in your shoes and go through it with you.

Christa: Thank you. I do feel like if I didn't write about the marriage, the book wouldn't ring true. I had to do it in order to tell the story. There was no way around me. Trust me, I thought about it. Do I need to do this? The answer was always yes and to do it respectfully and with love realizing that the outcome was going to be something that I felt would be helpful to people. There's always the do no harm. I just wanted to look at it from all angles. There was really no way to write this book without that. Everywhere I hit in the story, the marriage was there looking at me. [laughs]

Zibby: I got divorced after being married for ten years. I am now remarried. After this, if you ever want to ask me any questions, I'm around.

Christa: I'll Zoom you.

Zibby: Yeah, Zoom me. I'm around. Anyway, so tell me a little more about the actual writing of this story. When on earth did you find time, especially given how you painted your life, to write a book on top of everything else?

Christa: I had the great fortunate of working for an employer that gave me parental leave after I had my son. I was on a paid leave for a semester. There was really not a lot of time to work after having that baby, obviously. He was not well. I was literally hooked up to a milk machine, a pump, for the first four and a half months of his life because he was never able to nurse. Then having the two girls running around me while I did that, it was so hard. Just pure drive and grit made me write it. [laughs] I needed to get this book out of my soul. I would type it on the side while my son was napping and my daughters were wrestling around the living room, but I did. My husband was working full time at that point. He had gotten a job in television in Los Angeles, which is a more than twelve-hour-a-day job that also involves frequent travel. Those first six months of Keats', my son, that's his name, Keats, his life was not full of a lot of work. I did the best I could. Then he got a little older. I found a great childcare provider. Every free minute that I had I invested in writing this book. Then I used my summer vacation to write the book. Then I had to take leave off of my teaching for a semester to finish it, unpaid. There was no way to do it.

Zibby: Are you working for the same university?

Christa: Yes, I am. I teach remotely right now like so many people. Yeah, I do still teach for the university.

Zibby: But you left West Virginia?

Christa: I left West Virginia. Yeah, I did. I left West Virginia because I didn't feel like I could live there anymore. This book is also about homesickness and sadness. It's also about asking what it means to be from a place. I felt, even though it hurt me to live there in so many ways, that there was so much of me that loved it. My daughters loved it. It was a very hard decision but one that I felt like I had to make after looking at the facts and then knowing that if I felt like I had a heart attack in the middle of the night, when I had to call an ambulance, that it might not turn out okay.

Zibby: How is Keats? Is he okay now?

Christa: He's so wonderful. He's so great. He's healthy.

Zibby: How old is now? Three or something?

Christa: Two and a half.

Zibby: Two and a half, wow.

Christa: He's two and half. He's just starting to put together complex sentences. He's my big helper. He's the neatest of all the kids. If you look at him, he's playing in the play kitchen wiping down the counters. [laughs] He's just a sweet little love. He's healthy and doing so well.

Zibby: That's so great. Are you trying to write any more books on the side, or are you content with the chaos that your regular life...? [laughs]

Christa: I have another book that I'm working on right now. I had been working on before this book. It was a book that I had been working on. Then when I realized that I needed to write Love and Wanted and my publisher wanted to have it in time for the election, I had to put that other book aside. It's a deep love of mine. It's a nonfiction book about a woman who was a CIA operative during the Bin Laden years. She worked at the top of asset conversion while also being involved in a really awful marriage that involved domestic violence and not being able to tell anybody about that because it compromised national security.

Zibby: Whoa.

Christa: I met her through a friend. That story changed my life because I realized -- probably, obviously, it influenced this book too. I thought, what does it mean to be a woman working in the world at the top of your game and still have this closet full of secrets and shame? I'll finish that book. I'm about halfway through now. Obviously, I'm taking time with the kids and teaching. Remote school is hard.

Zibby: Yeah, I get it. Wow, that books sounds awesome. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Christa: Put your rear end in the chair. Don't worry about it not being good the first draft. It's so important to be able to get your story out and not to stop yourself by telling yourself lies like, this isn't good enough. Who will care about this? That's my biggest piece of advice. Also, if you can, to find a group of readers that you trust and engage yourself with them. Writing is a solitary experience, but it's also a community experience because you have a reader. It's not just about you. It's about what it means to have a conversation with somebody who picks up your book.

Zibby: I love that. I have to tell you in terms of the reader, I read this book -- I couldn't sleep. I sometimes get all this pain in my body. Anyway, whatever. It was the middle of the night. I read the whole thing walking in circles around my apartment standing up on my iPad. I read the first hundred and fifty pages just roaming around in circles and so in it in the dark with just the light of the iPad. I felt so connected to it. Then I finished the rest the next day.

Christa: That sounds like what it was like to live it. [laughs]

Zibby: It was a very intense moment, especially because I feel like I was in your life in the middle of my night in a dream state or something. It was awesome. I loved it.

Christa: Thank you. That was the aim. The aim was, how do I write a book where I feel like I can put my arm around you and just tell you this thing that happened to me and we can just be together in the dark with an iPad? [laughs]

Zibby: Yes, exactly. Mission accomplished. Check. Thanks so much for chatting with me today and for giving the conclusion to your story. I was like, what's happening now? Thanks for that too. I'm excited for your book to be out in the world.

Christa: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me and for having this conversation. This is the first one that I've had about the book.

 Zibby: No way, oh, my gosh. It's been on my calendar. When I first heard about this book forever ago, I was like, yes, I can't wait. It's been one of my longest, and it did not disappoint me.

Christa: Thank you. Thank you so, so much.

Zibby: Good luck with everything. Buh-bye.

Christa: Bye.

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, MELANIA AND ME

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff: I've been listening to your podcast. Amazing. Thank you.

Zibby Owen: Thank you. Thanks for listening to it.

Stephanie: Really interesting. Very interesting.

Zibby: Congratulations on your book.

Stephanie: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Zibby: Let's discuss Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady. When did you decide you were going to write about your experience?

Stephanie: The first thing to say is that my experience with Melania and the White House and the presidential inauguration committee was fast and furious. I am a meticulous recordkeeper. I've always been. It's just who I am. My intent in having all the administrative things that you would do normally under any circumstance as part of your job -- mine was very much about budgets with my work that I've done. Things just didn't seem to add up. Let's just put it that way. After the presidential inauguration committee, producing the events, I then went into the White House with Melania because she had no one else. I mean, no one.

Zibby: Maybe I should back up. I was so interested. I just wanted to hear you answer that question so badly, but maybe I should provide more context, which is that you and Melania were friends. You met, in part, through your kids. You would go to lunches. You would hang out. She considered you one of her inner circle, essentially, beforehand and would always give you birthday gifts and call you if she needed favors and recommendations. You were her go-to. That's the context.

Stephanie: The orchid was yearly. That was the birthday gift, the orchid.

Zibby: Yeah, the orchid. Sorry, not flowers. Orchid.

Stephanie: I think it's really important because, for me at the time, every year I would get them and I would think to myself, oh, my god, she remembered. Your friends remember these things. She wasn't the one ordering it. It was a yearly -- those were the things that I had to pick up on and take a step back and go, yes, it was a lovely gesture and it was wonderful to be acknowledged and have your friend write -- all you want is your friends to reach out in a text and say happy birthday. At the time when was so much was going on, you think, wow, that was really nice. I considered it more care than maybe really what it was.

Zibby: You don't think that it was from a place of care at all?

Stephanie: No, not at all. I definitely think it was from a place of care, but that's just who she is. It's part of her makeup, is to make sure that things are recognized on behalf of others, a thank you note. She's very cordial. She does things very formally. That's more how I was thinking of it versus my scattered brain where I'm all over the place. I'm, last minute, writing my friends and calling them. Life, between work and kids --

Zibby: -- Wait, just teasing this out, so do you think that she had it in her calendar and that it's less care?

Stephanie: Not that it's less care, but it is in her calendar. Melania does have assistants and people that take care of those things. She had to want to do it. It's that next step where not only do you see it on your iCal, but you take the time to make sure that it gets there and you ask and you talk about it. It was a very kind gesture.

Zibby: You think it was a kind gesture, but it seemed kinder than it actually was because of how it was -- I don't want to keep dwelling on this. Anyway, let me just let it go. That ended up happening. [laughs] Then as you had gotten closer and you recorded a bunch of your emails and all this stuff --

Stephanie: -- I didn't record.

Zibby: I'm sorry. That was the wrong word. You were just saying you're a great recordkeeper, so I think that's why it was in my head that you keep meticulous records and everything. Then you have so many of the emails you exchanged in the book. Like everybody, they save.

Stephanie: Absolutely. That's the thing too. One of the most important things for me in writing this book was to clear my conscience because it was immediately after I was fed to the wolves, thrown under the bus, and accused of a financial crime and headlined all over the world as, Melania's friend gets twenty-six million dollars. Then the following week, Melania's friend gets fired. They attached it. They made it culpable. Neither headline was true. Again, that's why I felt like I had to take a big step back. I started writing because I was writing an op-ed. I was trying to put this into an op-ed thinking if I write what happened in eight hundred words -- I'm trying to fit this in so everyone can understand. That op-ed just kept going and going and going and going because I couldn't get enough out.

Zibby: Now your op-ed is this long, is basically what happened.

Stephanie: There it is. That's my op-ed based on all facts. There's not a line that's disputable. When the White House kept coming after me saying I was delusional, I made things up, those are the reasons why you hear some of those recordings now.

Zibby: For people who don't know what happened, you went into the White House. You were hired to help with the inauguration. You had a whole history running the Met Ball for many, many years and were a complete superstar event producer and a thousand trillion other amazing, reputable things in society. You go. Melania says she wants you to be part of the inauguration. You orchestrate that in your way that you are used to doing. Then what happens?

Stephanie: I was working with a lot of people during the inauguration. There were a lot of things going on around me that I wasn't accustomed to but I also wasn't familiar with. I would constantly bring up to Donald and Melania, a lot of inconsistencies and inaccuracies of things that didn't add up and also didn't make sense. After the inauguration, we planned eighteen events. I was only supposed to go in to do creative on a couple events. I ended up being the central figure. I became the face of the inauguration for some odd reason. I do know there was a meeting a couple days, a week, before that. "Steph, you need to go out front. We're going to do a New York Times article. We need you out there to show everyone that you're in support of this." I hadn’t done any press. I had no intention of doing press. I was just doing it actually out of honor because it is the United States of America. I am a producer. I felt it's an amazing thing to be asked to do. Melania's my friend. Nobody else would do it. The reality is even if other people would've done it, it's my own fault, I didn't take policy into consideration at the time at all, neither was I that familiar with it. I've had to educate myself. Quite honestly, I thought I could separate politics and ethics. The way I was able to live my life was to work on humanitarian, contribute in producing like the inauguration, but I always blocked out the noise of politics. You cannot live your life like that. That is my fault for going into this and saying yes to something that I knew nothing about.

This was no fairy-tale. This was no New York Fashion Week. This was a different world, a different beast, and I didn't know enough. That's one of the biggest lessons I learned. No matter how close you are to someone, you’ve got to ask questions. You've got to make sure you understand who the players are before you agree to jump into anything that you do in your life. I wanted to believe that good over evil -- it doesn't matter. It does not work that way in politics or in this world that I was dealing with with these people, but I always felt Melania had my back, and Donald. It was really with the support of Melania -- when I came back to New York, literally two days later I flew to DC. She had no one else. I mean, no one. I was interviewing everyone for her office during the inauguration. As I was planning the inauguration and I was working on Ralph Lauren and organizing her for the swearing in, every step of the way working on production and broadcast, I was interviewing and met and hired a few people for the East Wing. When I went back to the White House, it was empty. It was an empty, dark place. I was alone. I turned on the lights. I remember calling her and being like -- there I was standing in Michelle Obama's office. To me, I was like, oh, my god, I'm standing in Michelle Obama's office. She was like, no big deal. I'm FaceTiming her. I just remember that moment. I'm like, "My god. Look where I am. I'm in your office. This is the White House. This is the United States of America." She just moved on, laughed, and moved on to what's next, which is the redecorating and the staffing. She didn't really want to even talk about that. Again, I think I held the regard. I was obviously projecting what I felt onto her.

That's another thing that I see in retrospect. Because I was in a position to help her and the proximity to her, the power that she wielded, the platform that she had at her fingertips, obviously, it was something that I -- people say, you wanted the power. No, no. There's so much about children and social/emotional learning that's very personal to me because of my children, and the importance of not identifying children based on how they look. Are they typical? Are they not? Our family's been through a lot, the journeys that we've had to take to understand how important it is for children to be able to, first of all, understand themselves and be able to express themselves. They need the tools to know how to do that. That's all about prevention. It's not about intervention. When you go into kindergarten, you need to learn that -- "I don't feel well," what does that mean? Express your feelings. Understand what that means. Regulate yourself. These are things that my husband and I and my kids learned over ten years. I felt that every child should have this because it's not just for children with learning disabilities and differences. It's for every child. The fact that she only wanted to focus on cyber bullying -- she was open to a bigger umbrella. For me, I was working with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Aspen Institute, Tim Shriver. We had an amazing team of people that truly -- Ivanka wanted to usurp the first lady. The West Wing did not want her to continue moving on on a platform, honestly. There's so much going on at once. I apologize. I was banging my head against the wall every day about her and about the position I put myself in and also looking forward and tunnel vision to get it done.

Zibby: Basically, you took an assignment and then didn't totally process because who could know what would come with it? Then you find yourself in this new environment. Then you didn't have your one ally, you feel, enough.

Stephanie: I had her until I had her. I did, I had her until they needed to place blame. They heard there was an investigation opening up into the presidential inauguration committee. As soon as that happened, she turned her back on me when I needed her most. All I needed her to do was speak the truth. She says it to me personally. People say, I can't believe you recorded a friend. No, no. They had already accused me of getting twenty-six million dollars. They accused me of being fired and all the other accusations that came with it. I already had hired a lawyer when I was in the White House still in January. She knew about it because there was this setup to taking me down, and I was aware of it.

Zibby: Why did they want to take you down?

Stephanie: Again, in the book, but it was the importance of mitigating the negative response to any type of headline for the first lady in reference to me working for her because of the accusations of the pick. Now, I'm the one who raised all the red flags. I didn't have any signing powers. I didn't have budget powers. I was a piece of chewing gum between everyone. I was being pulled and pushed in every direction. I never even had access to a bank account. I never had a checkbook. I was kicked out of financial meetings. I could run over to their apartment at Trump Tower and show them things and say, oh, my god, I'm going to end up in the bottom of the Potomac because I'm pointing this out to you. They would pick up the phone and fire Rick Gates. At the end of the day, I had no financial responsibility, which made it even worse, so the fact that this worked -- internally, there were these sixty-two questions that went around the White House for a year. Inauguration's over in January 2017.

In February 2018, they released the 990. It's form 990 that's going to the federal election committee. When they did that, they list the top five companies. You don't list individuals ever. As [indiscernible] was created -- for full transparency, it's literally four people from Tiny Horse and myself. Again, we were only supposed to be overseeing $1.62 million. How it got to where it got to is a whole nother story. I'm working with the United States attorney general for the District of Columbia. I know I'm going all over the place. I apologize. I'm involved in three different investigations. I was subpoenaed by the grand jury of the Southern District of New York, the intelligence committee, as well as working with DC NOW. It took over my life. I pressed record after I was in the White House, after I had already hired a lawyer because they wanted me to create a narrative. I wouldn't go along with theirs, which was, this was the most peaceful transition of power and everything was done by the book. I wouldn't do it. This is when I'm sitting in the first lady's office creating her initiatives. I was a problem. I was a problem for everyone. I actually expressed that to the lawyers. I was very vocal about the fact of what had happened during the inauguration. I wouldn't keep my mouth shut. Not only did they not want the initiative to move forward, they needed me to stop talking about the improprieties.

Zibby: I get everything. I did read your book. I followed you on the news.

Stephanie: I'm sorry.

Zibby: No, no, I just want you to know I do have some background. Part of this is teasing out what happened. I am sorry for what's happened to you. I can sense your fear, really. There's a lot going on. A lot of it is out of your control. All you've done is work hard. Yet all this stuff is happening to you. I can tell how unfair you feel that is, and justifiably.

Stephanie: It took over my life, financially, socially, emotionally, physically. I was in the hospital for over a month. I almost died. I gave up all my businesses. I literally gave up all my partnerships to go do this for her. That's why that betrayal was so hard. It still affects me. It wasn't like your friend just didn't call you back. I gave up twenty-five years of my life's work, my career, my livelihood. My three children had to watch this.

Zibby: Do you think she had the free will, almost, enough to do -- from just how it looks on the outside -- I shouldn't say that. Do you think that she was an independent actor enough to have, if she wanted to, have had your back? Do you think she could have?

Stephanie: That's when I have the recordings. That's where she couldn't have, and she told me. These are her words.

Zibby: It's almost like, is it really her fault? Not to say that there's not a huge amount of wrongdoing here. It seems like with the book at least, the point of view of the book is the friend who does you wrong. I'm not saying she didn't. I'm just wondering, is all the rage and the frustration and justifiable sentiment you feel, is it really because of her, or is it because of this whole situation?

Stephanie: Had it not been for her, I wouldn't have put myself in that situation. The first story that said I got twenty-six million dollars, which to begin with wasn't true, whatever. It was the second story where all she had to do was say I wasn't fired. That made me culpable to the money. It made it look as if I was on a contract that was terminated due to Jared and Rob Porter's security clearances. It had nothing to do with the pick. She asked me to keep it quiet about my contract because there was only one other person who had the same contract. Had I actually said that and told the world that, then they could have made me culpable to the first article. Again, the persuasiveness to keep my mouth quiet -- talk to a lawyer, but keep your mouth quiet. I had the NDA, so I was gagged. I couldn't say a word. When your friend tells you to get over it and don't be so dramatic after that happens to you, that's not a friend. There was no empathy. There was no understanding. This came to that because of politics. Those were her words. Again, I didn't need for her to do anything with the presidential inauguration committee misdeeds. She wanted to stay out of that. I just needed her to say I wasn't fired because I wasn't.

Zibby: Do you think she feels remorse? Do you think she feels anything? In the book, you paint her as somebody who doesn't have that many emotions. Sometimes we're like, how can she stand by? How can this not bother her? That's the common thing. She seems so, you describe it as calm, but it's also, can she feel the feelings? Is she capable of remorse? What do you think? That's sort of different. That's like a kid at school who doesn't have the ability, necessarily. We're all very up to date, Child Mind, different socioemotional stuff. Is it that she lacks the ability, or is it that it was intentional?

Stephanie: There are many different angles to Melania. There are many different Melanias. What's consistent is that, I say that she's unapologetically skin deep. If she cannot control how you think about her, she will not even consider how you're feeling or what you're thinking. That's a fact. She must be able to control the narrative. She says it over and over, I don't care. Somebody hurts her, somebody does something mean to terrible to her, they expose her nudies on the cover of a magazine; politics. The RNC speech; politics, liberal media. She literally says about those type of things, it'll pass in a day. We had a lot of conversations, she and I, where I said, I wish I could live my life somewhat like that. I can't. I wear my heart on my sleeve. She does and did express how she is able to move on and people need to just stand up, hold your head up high, and move on and get on with it because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, the next week, the next month. These are her words. She did say I love you and I'm sorry. That's not enough.

Zibby: You have the letter in here where she's apologetic-ish and saying "Love, Melania" and all this stuff to the end. Did you ever think of yourself as a person who would write a book about a friendship gone wrong type of thing, your other friendships and all the rest?

Stephanie: Never. I literally looked at my husband one night. I was like, "I'm an author?" I never ever, ever, ever -- this was me to be able to understand what happened to me and the world around me because I could make sense of, who is Melania, then? How is it possible that she could be so callous yet at the same time I was drawn to her because she had such great common advice, because she was so strong and independent? What that is, there's a barrier. She feels it, but she's not going to internalize it ever.

Zibby: I totally get that you need to figure her out and process it. You must have just a trillion feelings about this whole thing, but that's one bucket. Another bucket is taking it and sharing it with the entire world.

Stephanie: The entire world needs to know she supports him. She's his biggest cheerleader. She thinks that he should be very strong and assertive about everything that he's doing. She is not at all concerned about what you think, nor does she want to tell you what's really going in the incident with the meme Free Melania. As you know, Barron accidently kicked her in the foot. She will never reveal to anyone the source of what's happening because she doesn't want you to know her emotions. She doesn't want the reader to know who she is. She doesn't want anyone in the world to have any inkling. The truth is, she does not care. She really doesn't. If it's good for Melania, it's good for Melania. Forget about me. I'm talking about everyone else from anyone else's situation to the way I watched her deal with certain people that were very close friends. She will ask, "How's that person doing?" She really doesn't care.

Zibby: Do you think that anyone doesn't believe that she supports her husband?

Stephanie: I do. That's one of the reasons why I did release the tape in addition to the fact that they were calling me a paranoid liar. People need to hear it from her so they understand that Melania, in order for her to do something, she needs to be recognized for doing it. That's where she and Donald are very similar, but he'll cry about it if someone's beating him up. She doesn't care. You could say anything you want about her. That's the difference between the two of them. They both want the attention. They both internalize it. But Melania, that's where it ends.

Zibby: Based on your friendship before, do you feel like you had any loyalty to her to not share her inner stuff?

Stephanie: Honestly, the whole thing that happened with the recording yesterday, I, in my mind, never even went there. To think that that's what it would turn into, a battle between Twitter, I honestly was sick to my stomach. Not my intent. Honestly, I wanted to write the book and move on. I really thought, I'm going to write this. I'm going to make sure that the world knows what really happened. I'm involved in these investigations, so I was leaving some breadcrumbs as well. Because of my NDA, I am still gagged. I worked with first amendment lawyers to be able to write as much as I could. There is a lot of bad going on in our administration. I mean, a lot. The people that are leading it are connected in so many different ways that people don't even realize, the intricacies of what's going on and how it's affecting us and how it will affect our children and our children's children. I felt like I'm still protecting them if I don't release the tape as well. After the presidential debate, the way he acted to Joe Biden and then when she went on stage and admiringly looked at him and smiled, regardless of how they held each other because that's a whole different -- that's not what they do anyway. All of a sudden, I felt my blood boil. I felt like it just wasn't right. If it was my husband, I would've gone on stage regardless on cameras or not, I would've looked at him like, what was that? I understand he's the president, but don't treat people that way. It's not okay. The disrespect, the lack of character and integrity, she stands behind that because that is who she is too. There is no Free Melania. There is no, oh, poor Melania.

Zibby: You don't want us to feel sorry for her at all.

Stephanie: Neither does she. She doesn't want anyone to feel sorry for her. She knows exactly what she's doing. She's says, consequences or no consequences, I do what I do because I want to. She doesn't feel it the way that everyone thinks she feels it. She just doesn't at all. We're a month away from this election. Having spent the time, these couple of years, learning about politics and learning about the fact that you've got to educate yourself and you have to know the differences not only between right and wrong -- for me, it was never left versus right. It was always right versus wrong. You have to know the differences because, as I said earlier, your ethics, your values, have to be in line with your politics. I have a responsibility to myself, my children, my family. They watched me suffer and give up. I had a responsibility to learn what I didn't know. Now I'm vocalizing it and verbalizing it so people understand that they need to know more.

Zibby: Is this helping you? I feel like you're still really upset.

Stephanie: Can I tell you? There's something that happened. Things got a little -- again, I wanted to write the book and go like this. The fact is that I have so much information that people are still using because of the investigations. I'm a witness in all of them. The weight on me in not being able to talk about the things I know and the expectations from all of these prosecutors and people -- again, I spent millions of dollars. Why? For what? So I can give the government the information that I kept calling out over and over and over? What's happening? These people are still walking around -- for me, the emotion is not so much, it's not Melania. It's not the betrayal because I really got it. I understand the fact that it's inhumane. It is. Yet we have a humanitarian crisis in our back yard. That's all anyone should be talking about. That's all she should be doing. Yet what she did to the Rose Garden is just -- I tie those things together and I say to myself, that's what makes me angry, is that she's in a position to make a difference, and she doesn't. What still upsets me is that I am a voice that knows her and knows this family in a very different way. I know Melania to her core. I have sat with that family at dinner tables. Now, do I know Donald and the boys and Ivanka? Not anywhere near how I know Melanie at all. I know Melania. I can say to everyone, do not worry about her. Do not think that she has, remotely, any sad feelings or she's locked up. I do have to vocalize. I must verbalize the fact that, I can't say it enough, people really need to understand the politics of this all and how it's going to affect our next generation. We're not going to be here to protect them.

Zibby: Wow. This is intense.

Stephanie: I'm sorry.

Zibby: No, don't be sorry. You have a lot going on. This is a lot to carry for anyone. It sounds like you're using the book to sort out your feelings. You're trying hard not to succumb to the things that have happened. You're trying to look for why they happened. You're angry and frustrated.

Stephanie: Here's the thing. The truth is that what happened to me is happening to everyone else. Writing the book and expressing those sixty-nine days, I was able to tell it from my friendship with Melania because of the NDA. Through my friendship with Melania, I didn't have an NDA. I wasn't being paid for my work for Melania. Everything I did was on my own dime.

Zibby: I understand. I get it.

Stephanie: It was a journey.

Zibby: It's a journey. We're out of time already. I didn't even ask you about the writing of the book.

Stephanie: I'm so sorry that I went off topic.

Zibby: No, I just feel like there's so much to unpack in your experience. I feel like I am watching someone who is really struggling. That is really hard. Maybe I'm not. I'm blind saying that.

Stephanie: When I say I almost died, I've had two pulmonary embolisms. I had two spinal fusions. I wear a neck brace around my house. I can't do the things I used to do. I am not the same person.

Zibby: Oh, god, I have to get my daughter. [laughs]

Stephanie: Oh, my god, go. Go, go, go.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I'm like, let's just ask a few more questions. Meanwhile, she's waiting.

Stephanie: Well, you're not wrong. Let me just say that. You're not wrong.

Zibby: I hope that this book plays into your being able to find some sort of inner peace and make sense of what's happened and move on because ultimately, you can't save the world. You have to focus, maybe, on you.

Stephanie: A hundred percent. That's why, again, writing the book and closing the door would've been perfect. It didn't allow me to because of everything else that's going on. It's out of my control.

Zibby: I'm happy to continue this in another forum, but... [laughs]

Stephanie: Thank you so much. Again, I'm so sorry that I over-spoke about other things.

Zibby: No, it's very interesting.

Stephanie: If you want to speak some more even off the podcast, I'm happy to. I do apologize.

Zibby: No, please don't apologize.

Stephanie: Thank you so much. This has been great.

Zibby: Thanks for coming on the show. Buh-bye.

Stephanie: Thanks. Bye.

Sara Seager, THE SMALLEST LIGHT IN THE UNIVERSE

Zibby Owens: Sara Seager is a Canadian American astronomer and planetary scientist. She's a professor at MIT known for her work on extrasolar planets and their atmosphere. She's the author of two textbooks on these topics and has been recognized for her research by Popular Science, Discover magazine, Nature, and Time magazine. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 citing her theoretical work on detecting chemical signatures on exoplanet atmospheres and developing low-cost space observatories to observe planetary transits. I really don't know what any of that means, but obviously she's super impressive. A graduate of the University of Toronto with a PhD from Harvard, she is also the author of memoir The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, called a luminous memoir about how she had to reinvent herself in the wake of tragedy and discovered the power of connection on this planet as she searches our galaxy for another Earth.

Welcome. I'm so honored to be interviewing you today for "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks so much for coming on.

Sara Seager: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. The Smallest Lights in the Universe is perhaps one of my favorite books I've read recently. It is so good. The parallel lines of the space race with your own grief, it's just amazing. I just wanted to let you know how powerful I thought it was.

Sara: Thank you. I really appreciate that.

Zibby: For listeners who don't know what The Smallest Lights in the Universe is about, would you mind telling them what it's about? Then what inspired you to write this memoir?

Sara: The Smallest Lights in the Universe is about the journey of exploring outer space, but also the journey of exploring inner space. By outer space, I mean the stars. I hope you have a chance to look up at the dark night sky filled with stars because each one of those stars is a sun. We have evidence that each of them have planets. We're looking for another planet like Earth, one that might have life on it. By the way, I just wanted to capture in the book that science is truly a journey of exploration. Just like the people who first went to the North Pole or to Antarctica in the South Pole, we are trying to push the frontiers of exploration. All of us in our everyday life often eventually get to some kind of crisis. In my case, this was a death in my nuclear family of my first husband. It was like hiking in the outdoors and imagining falling off a cliff where at the bottom you're just broken and isolated. It feels like an incredible journey to have to make it back out of that lonely canyon. In my book, I interweave both of those stories. My goal is to just show people what science is like and how we can try to inspire ourselves to do big things.

Zibby: You're one of the most preeminent astrophysicists and have just really blown the records off of so many things, discovered new things, achieved things throughout the course of your career. Why a memoir too? Having read your story so I know how busy your life is, when did you find time to do this?

Sara: The whole thing started, actually, when my first husband died, which I can talk about now without being really upset about it because it was almost a decade ago. When I was going through this incredible journey of inner exploration, I just was like, wow, I haven't read about this or seen about it. I was so lucky to meet another group of moms, widows. I asked them, "Aren't you writing a book about this?" It seemed like something the world should know about. That was partly my motivation. It's funny because they say busy people can get more done. In my field, people are allowed to take a sabbatical. Every six years or so, you take some time off your everyday busyness. Repeatedly, those folks get less done on their own personal private work. I did have to squeeze things in on evenings and weekends. It was definitely tough.

Zibby: Wow, I'm very, very impressed. Your writing on grief, would you mind if I just read you this excerpt? Maybe you could comment on it. It has stayed with me so much. You write, "Everybody dies instantly. It's the dying that happens either quickly or over a long period of time." Then you go on and you say, "I understand intellectually the need for the distinction between dying and the instancy. A car accident and cancer are two different strains of death. It's the difference between dying as a whole all at once and dying piece by lost piece." Then you say -- I'm jumping around two pages because it's all so good. "Either way, the buildings end up gone, but the way it vanishes isn't the same, and we need a word to make clear the difference in process. It still felt to me as though Mike died instantly. Yes, we knew his death was coming. We could get his affairs in order, whatever hallow comfort that is supposed to bring, as though the most important thing when you die is that you die with a tidy desk." Then you say, "The dying time that Mike and I shared didn't make his death any less of a horror, and it didn't make my loss feel any less sudden. Mike took a breath, and then he died. He was alive, and then he wasn't. In one moment, I was a wife. In the next, I was a widow." That is so powerful. That's amazing. Tell me a little more about that difference and how it felt in that moment and this distinction that people tend to make as if the dying slowly will somehow blunt the trauma of having someone you love suddenly die.

Sara: I know. Now I do feel like crying.

Zibby: I'm sorry.

Sara: It's okay. What happened was he was diagnosed with cancer. He became terminally ill pretty quickly because the chemo didn't work. He definitely went on this downward slide where eventually he was bedridden. We both wanted him to die at home, so we had set up a hospital bed. We had home hospice. It was all very helpful. He was just hanging on like you wouldn't believe it. His home hospice nurse, Jerry, had explained to me what would happen and what to look for. Jerry would come back day after day, week after week, and go, "Wow, we haven't seen a forty-year-old man do this before. It's only the twenty-year-olds who have a brain tumor whose body is so strong they’ll hang on." I took care of Mike. I was just waiting for him to die because he was basically dead. He couldn't communicate. I was just taking care of him, helping him on that final journey. I honestly expected that I had come to terms with his death already because of those extended days and few weeks when he should've already been dead. He was just hanging on somehow. Then after he died, except for a short period of relief, my life just fell apart.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for your loss. It's such a gift for you to be sharing it in this way.

Sara: One thing that I tried to convey in the book, I'm not wanting people to have a loss at this level, but sometimes a catastrophe can lead to new, beautiful things. Think about this. In the spirit of mixing science with personal, when the dinosaurs became extinct, we think a giant meteorite hit Earth and destroyed not only the dinosaurs' life, but lots of other species by creating just pure chaos in our atmosphere and enabling volcanoes to spew out ash. Everything became darker and probably a lot colder. Because of the dinosaurs dying out, new life could flourish, including what led to us humans being able to rise on our planet. Although as sad as my loss was with Mike, it definitely gave me new opportunities.

Zibby: That's a very healthy way of looking at it. There's the difference between what you know intellectually and then the feelings that you have when you're going through it. You know it might lead to something good. In the moment, as you described so well, it's hard to internalize. I'll just read one more quote on the grief. You wrote, "The tears ran down my face in steady streams. I knew intellectually that the widows were right. I needed to make forward progress. I couldn't spend the rest of my life drowning in grief. I had to kick my way back to shore. But when you lose someone, you don't lose them all at once, and their dying doesn't stop with their death. You lose them a thousand times in a thousand ways. You say a thousand goodbyes. You hold a thousand funerals." Now I'm crying, oh, my gosh. Oh, this book. Tell me a little more about that passage.

Sara: As you go through grief and life starts to rebuild, there are, sometimes constantly, other time occasionally, striking reminders that you've lost your loved one. You're going along. I was taking my kids somewhere to stay overnight. I was still really depressed back then. Just seeing the happy families or going to take my two boys to soccer where it's all coached by mostly soccer dads and seeing all these healthy dads supporting the boys, you just feel the loss all over again, again, and again.

Zibby: I wish there was some way to make sure that didn't happen. I think that's part of why grief is so unpredictable. It comes and clocks you on the head when you are least expecting it even if you're having a good day, and then something happens.

Sara: It's so true.

Zibby: The widows of Concord, I felt like that could've been a name for a book as well, the widows of Concord. That's such a perfect thing. I loved how your sons got so into it that at one point when you started dating, one of your sons said, "No, you can't get married again because then we'll be out of the widows group." [laughs] I know you touched on this earlier, but tell me just a little more about the power of getting involved in a group like this. I know you were so initially resistant thinking everybody was in much better shape and all the rest. The power of being with people in a similar spot, tell me how that worked for you.

Sara: It was just an incredible experience, honestly. When I talked about how death could give rise to beautiful things, this small group of women in my town -- my town only has about twenty thousand people. There were six, and then we had one woman from a neighboring town. What was amazing is that at least for the first couple years, our mindsets were all so similar. Admittedly, we're of the same kind of demographic. We all had kids ranging in age from about four years old to thirteen at the time. It was amazing with these women because they didn't judge. No matter what our differences were, our widowhood, our fresh grief was so common that it brought us together. The widows were so funny. You don't really associate humor with grief, but you kind of have to counterbalance the huge depths of despair. These women had a shocking sense of dark humor. The stuff we joke about -- sometimes we were in situations where there'd be other people who weren’t widows, and you should've seen the way they looked at us. We got together really regularly on the so-called "important" holidays like Father's Day, Halloween, Valentine's Day. Then we'd meet for coffee where our first topic would be how to stay afloat financially. I was the only working widow at the time, but it's still tough, actually. Then the second topic, equally treacherous, was on dating because you've got a lot of baggage. Any single person at that age usually has some baggage, but I feel like we had more heavy baggage.

Zibby: Wow. I love the continuous proof that there are beautiful things that come out of this, and your friendships. I know you wrote a lot in the book about your difficulty finding your crew, basically, in the past and how you were almost relationship-averse, that is was a fluke that you fell in love with your husband and that you could connect in that way. Do you feel like now this has opened you up to all new kinds of friendships, or are you just committed to your widows' group and that's kind of it?

Sara: Oddly enough, the widows' group kind of dispersed. We had a lot in common for the first couple of years, but we all went back to our new normal. The moms whose kids are in college now, they're doing different things than those of us who still have kids in high school. People seem to get busy with their own hobbies. Ironically, we started meeting again. They had a socially distanced outdoor book party for me. I gave each widow a copy of the book. We're at least planning to start meeting regularly again, but we'll see how those go. I try to be open to new experiences.

Zibby: That's amazing. Let's talk a little bit about your really unbelievable and inspiring career. I had never really read anything about what it's like in this industry, and especially as a woman in this industry, and all the discoveries and how people doubted your research at first. Yet you kept at it. Your HuffPost article when you were pointing out to people who didn't realize it that the demands of having to meet, say, quarterly in person is really tough for a working mom who lives across the country. Tell me a little more about how you keep finding the resilience and the confidence to just keep plunging forward into literally the biggest unknown there could possibly be in the universe and not letting the naysayers and the setbacks throw you off course.

Sara: There's a few different things. One is, I've always loved exploring. I grew up in Canada where canoeing is a thing. We don't have mountains in Eastern Canada. If you're going to take up an outdoor sport, it's going to be something other than mountain climbing. We would go canoeing and do big, adventurous trips in the north of Canada. I feel like science has that same spirit of, wow, wanting to do something new. Don't you hate it when you want to do something new, whether it's small or big, and someone says, you're never going to be able to do that? Has that happened to you?

Zibby: Yes.

Sara: How does that make you feel?

Zibby: Actually, it happened with this podcast.

Sara: There you go. Doesn't it make you feel angry, like, I'm going to do it, I don't care what you say?

Zibby: Yeah, to spite them. It's like, well, watch me go. [laughs]

Sara: This fuels the fire if someone says, no, I don't think that's a good idea. I think a lot of people share that feeling. Finally, I do have a specific visualization tool to do this. I do share this with younger women I work with. It's very common in my field to have the imposter syndrome where you think you don't belong and you don't have belief in yourself. What I tell them I also do myself. I try to focus viscerally on my past accomplishments to give myself that inner confidence that I can succeed at anything. How many times as women or moms or whatever are we always kicking ourself or berating or just saying, I could've done that better? How many times do you say -- this is what I tell my kids -- I did the best job I could with the skills I have? Then how many times do we say, wow, I did a great job? Never, right?

Zibby: Yeah. [laughs]

Sara: We should be spending as much time or more being proud or being complimentary to ourselves as being hard on ourself. I feel like doing those things consciously really helps me reach my goals.

Zibby: It's funny. Someone who had helped me do something asked afterwards how it had gone. I typed in a text, "I did a really good job." Then I sat there with the phone in hand and the cursor blinking being like, should I delete that? That sounds terrible. Then I was like, well, I feel like I did do a good job. I want to thank this person and let them know that I didn't let them down. There's all this inner critic not allowing ourselves to say that things went well. You're right. How much better off would we be if our inner voices were constantly encouraging rather than discouraging us?

Sara: Yes, I really, really think that's important. As a mom, I know my kids wanted -- I don't know if this is going to sound good or bad, but my kids wanted me to be more nurturing. One of them would always say, "Mom, moms make chocolate chip cookies. Moms do this. Moms do that." Instead of feeling bad, I would just say, "You know, I don't do that. But you know what? Even though I don't make cookies, we do all these other things." It is praising ourselves, but it's also not beating ourselves up for something that isn't who we are.

Zibby: That's true. That's such a good idea to show that to the kids. Otherwise, they’ll think they can do everything. It's impossible, so why set them up for failure?

Sara: One time, this big tree branch had fallen on our garage. I had to get rid of it. I remember my kids expressing doubt that I could do it. One of the widows had come over very fashionably dressed in leather pants and the high-heeled boots with a chainsaw and instructions on how to use it. I decided not to use the chainsaw because I wasn't totally sure I could do that safely. That's the widows empowering each other. I did have a handsaw. I sawed it, sawed it, sawed it. Finally, it came down. It was so heavy. Honestly, I could've really got hurt. You know how heavy even a tree branch is? So heavy. I jumped out of the way just in time. That helped the kids because they were skeptical I could actually take care of that.

Zibby: Wow. I feel like a chainsaw is one of those things you should not be reading instructions for. [laughs] It should come with some required training instead of a YouTube video. Oh, my goodness. So how long did it take you to write this book? I know you said you did it in found time, basically. What was it like going back and reliving all those emotions again?

Sara: It took a few years to write. It was definitely cathartic. It was incredibly emotional at times. Wow, I would just cry my eyes out sometimes, but it was a good feeling, really good.

Zibby: Would you want to write another book on any topic?

Sara: Maybe someday, yeah. It was one of those things that brought -- there was a creative process and narrative process, a storytelling process. It was definitely a lot work, though. I had a fantastic team set up by the publishers. Once the first draft is done, the book is only half done, actually, because they come back and reorganize it or say, do this, do that, do that, do that, total reorg. That happens two or three times, actually. Then the editor will go through it with a finer tooth comb. Finally, we had this absolutely outstanding copy editor. That's the person who's just checking for grammar. That person went so far above and beyond and would say, "This sentence makes no sense because a few paragraphs before you said this." It's not just the writing itself. As you know, the publishing process took way longer than I ever expected.

Zibby: Your publisher is Crown, right?

Sara: Crown. Right.

Zibby: That's great. Not everybody has such a great experience with their editors and publishers and everything, so I'm glad that that worked so well. A lot of people do, but not everybody.

Sara: I think I was of the mindset that they know more, so I should just do whatever they say. I did push on a few -- there's a few specific sentences they really didn't like because they weren’t literal. They were just figurative. There's one where we're describing this incident at one of our widows' get-togethers. One of them is telling us this crushing story that her husband who had died of cancer, the day before he started chemo, she had found in his pile of stuff, he had bought tickets to go to Paris.

Zibby: That was such a sad part.

Sara: Airplane tickets and hotel. He never told anyone because it was a bet against cancer. People do these defiant things. My own husband, he never cared about good clothes. His one and only suit was given to him by his father who happened to be the same size and who had worn it for a few decades. For some reason when my husband was terminally ill, he went out and bought a brand-new suit. Does that make any sense? It's defying against that prediction of death. She found all of this, literally, I think it was just a few days -- she found all of this stuff. The date on the ticket was a few days after he had died. When I wrote this part in the book, it's one of my favorite sentences in the book because the kids were just playing and they didn't notice that we widows were telling this story and crying. It ends the paragraph saying, it's something like, Paris was in full flood. That means we were crying so much about this trip to Paris. The editing team didn't want that sentence because it doesn't make sense, really. We were crying, but we're not in Paris and there's no flood. It's just so poetic. Rarely did I really push back. I think my experience was good because I mostly just did whatever they requested. By the way, the widow in question, later on in her life she actually did manage to take her two kids to Paris and had a great time.

Zibby: Aw, that's such a great coda -- is that the right word? -- to the story. That's amazing. I know your kids must be older by now. I know how old they were in the book. Seventeen or something?

Sara: That's right. The older boy is seventeen. The younger one is fifteen.

Zibby: Have they read your story? Have you shared it with them? How do you feel? No?

Sara: I actually asked them not to read the book until they are adults, like twenty-one, because it's pretty upsetting. Kids, actually, are resilient. People have died, parents have died for millennia. Kids get over it. I really believe having gone through this with not only my own kids, but watching my widows friends' kids as well, that in order to be resilient kids brains are designed to forget. A lot of the details in the book, they won't remember. It might be upsetting for them. A couple other things, before I submitted the book or at some stage, I told them everything that was in the book about them. In one case, I toned something down because the kid requested it. It's the opening where he has the meltdown on the sledding hill. He thought it sounded worse than it actually was. I went through just as a courtesy because I didn't want them being embarrassed by anything that was in the book. Then another thing was that one of them, after I said, "Look, I think you shouldn't read this until you're twenty-one --" You know how kids push back. If you say you should read it, they’ll never read it. If you say don't read it, they’ll want to read it. He just said, "Mom, if everyone else in the world gets to read it, isn't that kind of weird that your own kids who are in the book aren't supposed to read it?" I said, "Sure. Okay, fine." We go by logic. If my kids have a logical argument, I don't say, no, you can't do it because I said. I always respond to logic. I'm like, "You could, sure. I'm not going to prevent you from reading it, but I just want you to know that sometimes things aren't as upsetting to people if it's not about them personally."

Zibby: That's true. What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Sara: Let me think for a second. I do have a piece of advice that someone gave me early on. For your story, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, there has to be an arc to the story. This might sound obvious, but it's really harder to implement than it sounds. There has to be a start and an end, but also a rise and a fall and then a rise. In a mystery novel, there's a plot. Something happens. The characters are trying to solve the mystery. They can't solve the mystery at the beginning or there's no book. They have to solve it towards the end, but not right at the end. It's the same thing. Whatever the story is, and the narrative, there has to be an arc to it.

Zibby: Interesting. One of the things I loved about your book is the way you used time and how you went back and forth in time and how you structured each chapter. However it is you did it, it really worked well in propelling the narrative arc forward. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time.

Sara: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on your call.

Zibby: I absolutely loved your book.

Sara: I wanted to just say, I know your mother-in-law died. It must have been a really crazy few weeks. I'm sure it's tough.

Zibby: Thank you. Honestly, your book really helped. It's one of the things that helped the most, so thank you.

Sara: You're welcome.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Sara: Bye.

Elizabeth Lesser, CASSANDRA SPEAKS

Zibby Owens: Elizabeth Lesser is the cofounder of Omega Institute and the author of Marrow, The Seeker's Guide, and the New York Times best seller, Broken Open. She has given two popular TED talks and is a member of Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul100, a collection of one hundred leaders who are using their voices and talents to elevate humanity. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her family. This is her book, Cassandra Speaks. Basically, she talks in this book -- I'll let her explain it more. It's a collection of her own thoughts and feelings and responses to how history has shown women to not have the most advantageous position in the narrative, but it's not an angry book at all. It's thoughtful and considered. Cassandra, the myth that she's referencing in the title of the book, is because -- I can't remember all the details, but something like Zeus gave Cassandra the power to see the future but not be able to enact any change or really have anyone believe her. In a way, that's similar to how some women feel that they know everything, and they say it and people don't listen. Here we go.

I'm live with Elizabeth now. Hi, Sam. Thank you guys for watching ahead of time. Hopefully, this will work. There are so many quotes and so many sections that I wanted to talk to Elizabeth about today, and the fact that at the beginning of most chapters she has these little quotes, which I always love.

Hi.

Elizabeth Lesser: Hi. Oh, boy, here I am.

Zibby: The problem with Instagram Live is that everybody who eventually gets on is completely flummoxed and frazzled because it never works right at first. I'm sorry.

Elizabeth: I'm on my iPad sitting in my living room. Thank you for having me on.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Thank you for coming on. Your book was so good. I was showing the people here, I dogeared like every other page. Usually if I find something interesting, I just turn it. Maybe there'll be two or three things where I'm like, I have to talk to this author about this. In this book, this page and that page. Now of course, you're here, I'm not going to be able to remember what I wanted to ask. Anyway, thrilled to talk to you about it. If you wouldn't mind, for everybody watching, I read your bio already, but if you could explain better than I did what Cassandra Speaks is about and what inspired you to write this book, that would be great. You can bring in any family members, anyone in the background. Totally fine. [laughs]

Elizabeth: My husband just walked through the room. Ask me the question again.

Zibby: Here, we'll start again. I'll pretend that this is a podcast only. There's a dog barking in my house too. My sister-in-law is here with my mother-in-law's dog. Welcome, Elizabeth. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Zibby: [laughs] You're welcome. You're the author of Cassandra Speaks, which I told you is amazing. Subtitle, When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes. Could you please tell listeners what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Elizabeth: In a way, I've been preparing to write the book my whole life. It's my fourth book. People often say, how long did a book take you to write? I'd say my whole life. This one, not the other ones. I'm the daughter of a feminist mother and a domineering father. I have three sisters, so four girls. From my earliest age, I was like, what's going on here? How come men told the story and women's values and who we are don't also get expressed in our myths, in our movies, in our literature? I studied literature in college. I love books like you do. It's not just that so many books that we consider the canon of Western literature are written by men. So many of them are about what men care about. It's not that women also don't care about the hero's journey and adventure and war and sports and things like that, but we also care about things like family and relationships and talking. These get put into women's literature as if that's a genre, as if women are a genre of writing. I always wanted to explore, what would've happened if women's storytelling had also been valued as much as men’s? How would history have changed? How would culture have changed? I go back into the old stories of Eve, Cassandra, Pandora, Hester Prynne, a lot of the old literature, and newer movies. I also explore the canon of power, books about, what is power? like Machiavelli, The Prince, and Sun Tzu. How did we come to define power as what we do? I also tell a lot of stories about my own life as a mother and a wife and a daughter because I'm primarily a memoirist, so I can't help but do that too.

Zibby: I loved those parts. All of it was super interesting, but I found myself wanting to fast-forward to, when's the next little snippet she's going to share about herself?

Elizabeth: I know. Isn't that so? My first book many years ago was about how America was changing the way people did their spiritual searches, the democratization and diversifying of spirituality. It was primarily research, but I told a few of my own stories. People would always say, that was interesting, but I really liked your stories. My next book was almost completely memoir because I think people -- see, that's the point. People learn through stories. We've learned everything about humankind through stories written primarily by men. Not that there's anything wrong with male stories at all, but we'd left a huge part about what it means to be human out of the human story.

Zibby: You show how all the statues are of men, how everything is about war, how even our vocabulary, the way that we talk, like no-holds-barred, and all these things refer to things that have the meaning of power that isn't necessarily the best meaning of power.

Elizabeth: An imbalanced meaning of power.

Zibby: And how we can change it even with little things like the way we use our vocabulary. I love how you started it off tiptoeing down to procrastinate and you're going through your son's boxes and finding his whole canon of literature downstairs where you start going through some of these books. It was so clear in the book, but just tell people watching how when you were down there and going through the books, you were like, can you even believe that it says this in The Prince, or all these other books that you had been opening? Tell me about that moment a little more.

Elizabeth: My youngest son went to a college called St. John's College. It's the Great Books school. It's an amazing school where every student reads the same one hundred books over four years. That's all they do. They read the Greeks in ancient Greek. They study math through reading Pythagoras, no interpretation. They just read the original texts. The students lovingly call it the dead white man's curriculum. Whenever I'm trying to do something, especially writing -- maybe you can relate to this. All you writers out there can. The way I procrastinate -- because writing is hard. Even if you've written a lot, writing is hard. I procrastinate best by cleaning. I love to clean things, closets, my car. The basement is particularly, according to me, not my husband, disgusting in our house, just tons of old boxes and everything. I was about to start this new book. I thought, oh, my god, I got to clean something big. I went into the basement and I started going through boxes. One was a box of my younger son's college books. That was the first box I opened and, PS, the last box. I just got completely caught up in the books.

Here I was about to start writing a book about women and power and stories, and I start reading through these hundred books. I felt so naïve. I opened the first book. It was The Prince by Machiavelli. Now, I doubt any of you have read The Prince. Maybe you have. I never had. I knew his name. I knew he said something like the ends justify the means, but that's about all I knew. I start reading this book. It was shocking, some of these quotes about how you do power by making sure people are either enemies or followers. He said something like a leader should be feared more than loved. I was just like, really? Why wasn't I informed of this? Then I opened Sun Tzu's The Art of War, same stuff about fear and love being for wimps. There I am in the basement. I'm actually sitting in an old rocking chair that I nursed my kids in in a dark basement reading these books about men and power thinking, wow, there actually is a primer for the abuse of power. Why wasn't I informed of this? I took all those books upstairs. I made a deep study of the history and the pathetic way that we've reduced power down to either dominating or aggressing. All the newer forms were [distorted audio] women come into more power of vulnerability and inclusion. None of that's in the old doctrines of power.

Zibby: It's so true. Then of course, you led a big retreat, which started off small and, as you say in the book, grew and grew and grew, called Women in Power. You have all these high-powered women come in and strut their stuff and do everything from getting people away from their phones to regroup to having great speakers. Tell us a little more about your Women in Power conference and how that came to be and what the goal of it is, especially vis-à-vis men in power and the imbalance that exists today.

Elizabeth: I'm the cofounder of an organization called Omega Institute which is a conference and retreat center in Rhinebeck, New York. I helped start it in my early twenties. I've been at the same place for forty years running this conference center. Even as I say it, I can't believe it. What? I'm not telling the truth. Forty years? Actually, it is. As such, I have organized hundreds of conferences over the years in everything from holistic health to poetry and sports, because it's a holistic learning center, all sorts of ways that humans can learn and grow. As a woman in power, I had been aware yet confused and scared about how I was learning the language of how to be a leader with all these men. I was grateful for what I was learning, strategy and some form of holding my own and ways of being powerful that I was eager to learn. My way of expressing -- let's say I was a leader in a meeting and I was emotional and it was making me want to cry, I would stuff that and try to be a guy among the guys, like locker room putdown or stoicism or whatever. I felt, I am losing a whole part of myself to be powerful. In many ways, I'm losing the best parts of myself: my empathy, my ability to listen and include, my desire to empower people as opposed to dominate people. I'm losing that part of myself. I don't want to lose that part of myself. What do I do? Help.

I looked around. There was no one to help me. I thought, I'm going to start one conference. The first conference I organized, I had Anita Hill and Eve Ensler who wrote The Vagina Monologues. I just picked anybody I could who would be like, who are women doing power differently? I don't want just women who are out manning the men. I want women who are actually trying to bring some of their best qualities into leadership, changing leadership from the inside out. Not that men, bad; women, good. Look, the world's a mess. We need something new. Could women do it differently? I brought this first conference in. Usually, I do one conference on a subject, and that's it, but people were starving for it. Women were so hungry just to be a room and to say things that we can't usually say. One thing we can't usually say is, I want power. We're not supposed to want power, but I don't want that kind of power. I want a different kind. Twenty years later, the conference is still a vital, amazing gathering where we've brought women leaders from all over the world and every discipline, an astronaut and artists and actors. Also, the women in the audience are so fantastic. A lot of that informed the book. A lot of the keynotes addresses I've given informed my Cassandra book.

Zibby: I love when you were backstage at the TED talk. Who were with? Madeleine Albright or something. You were all nervous about going out and giving your big talk. Tell me more about that experience and how you've found your way to lead in the way that you wish other people could lead.

Elizabeth: That was funny. I was giving a TED talk. If you'd ever like to actually almost have a heart attack, you should give a TED talk. They figured out a way to make every speaker incredibly nervous. The person who's about to go on and the next person and the next person all go in the greenroom at the same time. The person before me was this amazing speaker who actually founded an amazing organization called A Call to Men which is helping men actually become more vulnerable; and then me, I was going to give my talk; and Madeleine Albright who, of course, had been the secretary of state and brokered peace in Serbia. She was so nervous. The reason I told that story is because as the founder of Omega, I've had a chance to meet so many powerful people, men and women. People often ask me, what's the best thing you've learned from being around all these people? I would say that they're all scared children inside just like you and me. It doesn't matter what's on your resume. It's doesn't matter. Everyone has that core, super strong dudes, women athletes. It doesn't matter. We all have that part. We just all hide it from each other in different degrees of success. That is a very helpful thing to remember as anyone wanting to do power differently. Part of the skill, to me, of being a new kind of leader is finding that place in another person. The best way to find it is to admit our own, to be our vulnerable selves with each other. I do believe that is something women have a little more skill at than men do. It's what the world needs now.

Zibby: This is validating my personal confessions on Instagram all the time. You're making me feel better about that. [laughs] Another part of why I think you told the story from the TED talk was that the man who had gone before you talked about how one of the young people he had coached or mentored had said that should somebody tell him he threw like a girl, he would have been more than upset. He would have been destroyed by that comment. You were saying, what kind of gender roles do we have if being compared to a girl would make a boy feel destroyed inside when girls want to, perhaps, throw like boys or whatever else? What does that say about what our genders are defined as these days?

Elizabeth: It's very interesting. I'm a grandmother now. Right before I signed on here to Instagram with you, I had picked up my eight-year-old grandson at school. With COVID now, he goes to school just two hours every morning. It's crazy hard for parents. You just start working, and suddenly you have to go pick up your kid again, so I've been helping them. I picked him up. He's eight. He likes every now and then to wear dresses to school. I'm thinking, this is so cool. This is so amazing. Often, it's just like, is this okay? Is this okay that my little grandson wants to wear a dress? It's so amazing what's going on now. I'm not saying it's easy for any of us as all of this merges and melds and changes. The fact that if a girl is called a tomboy and she feels good, it's kind of cool to be called a tomboy, but a boy is called a sissy or a mama's boy, and that's an insult. What does that say about what men think about girls and women? I'm insulted if you compare me to a girl, but if a woman is compared to a dude, we feel cool. Unpack that. Just think about it. It goes all the way back to the ancient stories. The fact that there's some fluidity now [distorted audio] strong kid boy and still like beautiful things, I'm so fascinated with this.

Zibby: My son likes to wear all my daughter's stuff a lot of the time, all her nightgowns and whatever. He wants to be her. She's so cool. He doesn't have the type of school that would allow anything but uniform, but whatever. Just the fact that he can paint his nails and we can have the greatest time and that's just the way it is, it's fantastic. I love it.

Elizabeth: That's new. That's also not universal. In other cultures and in houses down the street, we are still under the influence of a double standard of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman and what kind of values are seen as primary.

Zibby: You illustrated that so well with your support group of the 9/11 survivors and how even though you were like, it's okay, you can all share, I'm here, everyone's like, we're not doing that. [laughs] No matter what you did, no matter how skilled you were at eliciting feelings and confessions and all the rest, the men were too set in their trained ways to break through all that to be able to share the trauma that they had been through. Tell me a little more about that.

Elizabeth: I've been a teacher of mindfulness meditation for many years. After 9/11, people who had that skill, many were asked to come and help first responders who were having trouble integrating what they had seen and experienced. They were forced, if you can enforce mindfulness on someone, it's doesn't really work, but they had to take these courses so they could learn better how to deal with their reactivity. When you're traumatized, your reactivity, you can get triggered very quickly. Somebody gave money for first responders in New York City to take mindfulness classes to learn how to take that pause before you react, which is what meditation is so good at teaching. I was trying to teach mindfulness to wounded warriors, all guys, who were firemen who had rushed into the buildings on 9/11. I loved these guys. We had a wonderful, fun repertoire. As you say, every time I would have them -- often when I teach meditation, I have people start just by, put your hand here right now on your heart. There's something very powerful just about that. Just stop, pause, and breathe. What's in there? There's varying degrees of -- some people put their hand on their heart. I ask, what's in there? They just start to weep because there's grief in there.

We're not trained in grief. We've got this bizarre idea that you get one day off when your mother dies, from work. Whereas in the old cultures, the women wore black for a year. They'd walk through town and they'd get great respect. Oh, she lost someone. Now you get over it, closure, my least favorite word. Some people are afraid to go in because if you go in there, uh, oh, what else is in there? I maybe would cry for a year and never stop. Some people are like, feelings? Wimp. Get over it. They're just going to slow you down and confuse the matter. That's for the girls. Those guys were like that. I'm not going in there. I'm not talking about it. I'm supposed to get over it. That's what Tony Porter, the guy who gave the TED talk before me, he calls that the man box. Not only men are in the man box. To some extent, we all suffer from patriarchy, for lack of a better word. We've all been trained. That's Cassandra's story. Cassandra tried to tell the truth of what was going on, but no one believed her because she was a hysteric. We have this mixed up idea that if you feel deeply, you're a hysteric. Men don't want to be hysterics, so they lose out on so much, such depth of feeling and intimacy and all the juicy, good things that are in here. They're the strong and silent types. I tried to help them feel that you could be soft and communicative, and that is also powerful and good and helpful. It'll heal you. You'll actually get over what's bothering you quicker. We made some progress. We made a little progress, but it's deep. It's deep inside of men and many women.

Zibby: Do you think it's too late? What about this new breed of female empathetic world-changing leaders that nobody might be ready for? In your Omega Institute, how do you walk into a room full of men who aren't of the new mindset? How do you affect change when you're still a minority in that sense?

Elizabeth: Hard, but it's being done. I'm super hopeful even though it looks alarming at the top right now. It looks like we have backslid back into the neanderthal caves, without naming names. Look at the leaders who have handled COVID best in the world. They're women. They're Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand. They're Angela Merkel in Germany. They're in Taiwan and Finland. I think the top seven countries who've dealt the best, the least deaths, the least new infections, are women. They're in power. They're obviously doing something different because their countries are handling it different. In neuroscience, they talk about, for years, you've heard the way humans deal with trauma and stress is flight or fight. Those are the only two ways. There's been a lot of new studies done on women. Now they're calling it tend and befriend. There's fight and flight, but there's other ways to deal with stress too. Women have millennia of dealing with it through tending. There's a trauma. You tend to the old. You tend to the children and befriend. Instead of making someone an enemy, hey, can we do this together? Can we all create a goal we want to solve? We may have different opinions, but can we move together toward something? This is how the COVID women leaders have been dealing with it, by tending to the most vulnerable and befriending the different ideas of how you deal with it and trying to create a community as opposed to dividing people. Those studies, both the medical studies and the studies done sociologically in organizations about tend and befriend versus fight and flight, are so fascinating. I really recommend people reading them.

Zibby: Interesting. I love that, tend and befriend. That, I can do. Those come easy. On the writing side, can you tell me a little more about your process of writing the book and then also if you have advice for aspiring authors?

Elizabeth: I'm the kind of writer -- when I wrote my first book, I kept trying to be a different kind of writer. I kept trying to write what, I think it was Anne Lamott calls shitty first drafts. I write sentence by sentence, word by word. I can't leave a sentence until I love it. I can't write big, huge things and then go back. It makes for an extremely slow and tedious writing process. I'm not a very fast writer. I just work those sentences. I love words. I love language. The construction of a sentence tells me a lot of what the next sentence needs to be. There's a poetic sense to my nonfiction. It's the way I do it. I've tried not to do it that way because it's slow and torturous, but that's just the way I do it. I keep telling myself, well, you wrote a book, so I guess you can do it this way. When I'm writing a book, I'm very, very disciplined. Other parts of my life really suffer. My friends don't understand me. I disappear. At the end of every book, I'm like, I am never doing that again. Why would I do that again? Just last night, I'm laying in bed thinking, when this virtual book tour is over, what will I do? I have a book in my mind. I'm like, no, don't do it. [laughter]

Zibby: You clearly know what you're doing. Now I can't wait to go back and read your memoir now that I was just trying to pull out all the bits of you from this. You really are a beautiful writer. I underlined so many things. I don't, for sure, always say that, so I mean it.

Elizabeth: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Zibby: Any parting advice for aspiring authors?

Elizabeth: I'm a nonfiction writer. I did try to write a novel once. I think probably all nonfiction writers try to write a novel. My agent, when I showed him the first couple hundred pages, he said to me, "Well, your dialogue kind of sounds like a stilted civics lesson." I was like, ouch, run away. I put it in a drawer. I've never looked at it again. This is advice for nonfiction writers because I'm not a fiction writer. I just think people learn through stories. The stories people mostly learn from are not the sweet and happy and "isn't my life so perfect" stories. They're the stories of mistakes and really poor behavior and learning through just everyday crap. I end up telling those stories. I always say the book made me do it. People are like, you're so brave. I'm like, no, the book made me do it. I would just say be brave about telling your own story because that's what we want. We want you.

Zibby: I love that. That's great advice. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me a part of your publication journey. I know you have so many notables interviewing you. You had Dani Shapiro and Maria Shriver and all these great people on your tour.

Elizabeth: You're a great people. [laughter] Thank you for teaching me how to do Instagram Live. I learned I can't do it on my computer.

Zibby: I should've put that in the email. It's my fault.

Elizabeth: No, no, no.

Zibby: Now you've got the hang of it. You'll know how to do it from now on.

Elizabeth: I do. I know now. Thank you.

Zibby: You're welcome. Take care.

Elizabeth: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Megan Harlan, MOBILE HOME

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

Megan Harlan: Hi, Zibby. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Zibby: Yay. Your work, Mobile Home, can you please tell listeners what this is about and what inspired you to write it?

Megan: Mobile Home is a memoir in essays about how I moved seventeen different times across four continents when I was growing up. It really explores how our homes and our places shape who we are. The types of homes that I lived in really spanned the gamut. At one point, I was living in a very posh flat in London, in Kensington. I also lived in several different really normal suburban houses in California and Texas, so your McMansions and your ranch houses, that sort of thing. I also lived in three trailers. One was located in Saudi Arabia. One was in a jungle in Columbia. The first one was in Alaska not too far from the Artic Circle. Moving all the time, it gave me a different relationship with place than probably most kids tend to have.

Zibby: I would say so. How could it not? That's a perspective that, child or adult, most people have not been able to have. That is a huge geographic and structural variety that you have there. Wow. There are so many things to tease out. One is the effect of frequent moving. One is the actual environment into which you moved. Break it down for me a little bit. When you were moving so much, what do you think that did to you as a personality and all the rest of it? Then we can go to what those places were like.

Megan: On the positive side, I think it gave me a sense of ease with cultures across the world, a real curiosity, and just a desire to learn more about the world. Socially as a kid, I think it was actually really difficult. It's funny, I didn't really see it until I became a mother myself. I had always sort of believed that my childhood was this great adventure. It was in a lot of ways. I don't think I ever really had the perspective of what a child who's growing up actually needs from their home, which is a sense of rootedness and, really, structure. If you've ever taken a child on vacation somewhere, if you're in Paris, you want to see the Eiffel Tower, and they want to get ice cream. Their perspective on a place is just completely different from what any adult would have.

Zibby: That is why I haven't taken my kids to Paris.

Megan: Exactly. It's a little bit wasted until they're at a certain point, maybe.

Zibby: Yes, wasted on the youth. [laughter]

Megan: Totally. That was something that, again, when I had my son, I started to see this huge difference. I would think about when I was in kindergarten and I was living a motel for a while. Then I was living in a hotel in London. Then I was living in Saudi Arabia. It was always about a year. Meanwhile, he was going to a very normal public school in our city and just had a completely different life than I did. The chasm between these two experiences really started to fascinate me. I started writing these essays. I would say he was about seven or eight. I started exploring the differences that we were having.

Zibby: How old is he now?

Megan: He's thirteen.

Zibby: I bet he's glad you're not up and moving all the time.

Megan: I think so. He loves his home. He does. It's worked out. We do travel as much as we can. I think being in one place, for our family at least, has really been the right thing.

Zibby: Do you feel itching to travel all the time? I know you discussed your nomadic childhood, but do you feel like a piece of that snuck into you? I think you said you did.

Megan: I do. Partially, I just think it's my family history. Everyone in my family is like this. I do think there's almost a genetic part, possibly, that some people like to keep moving and some people really want to stay in one place. If I hadn’t become a parent, I don't know that I would've settled down the way that I have. We'll never know at this point.

Zibby: Tell me about writing the essays. How did you decide how to structure each one? Then when did you decide that they would be great together as a complete work?

Megan: I love writing essays. I find the form to be incredibly freeing. When I start a piece, I usually have some kind of question in mind. As I'm writing, I'm really trying to find, not so much an answer, but maybe more interesting questions. For example, I wrote a piece about my arachnophobia. I still am afraid of spiders. I have kind of a superstition around them. I never kill them. As I was writing the piece, I started seeing there were actually some more interesting questions that were buried underneath the surface. I really come to each essay trying to look for more discoveries as much as I can find them. As far as the book itself, I don't know that when I first started writing the essays I conceived it as a collection. At a certain point, it was hard not to notice that there was a certain theme that kept coming up. Then I was able to write a few pieces to pull them together and give the whole thing a shape so that they would cohere, hopefully.

Zibby: What do you think the characteristics of being able to adapt like that -- what makes someone better or worse? Like you said, you feel it's genetic. I kind of like things the way they are. I would like to be more, today I'm in Saudi Arabia, tomorrow I'm in a posh flat in London. To be perfectly honest, I'd rather just stay in the posh flat in London if I was going to go anywhere. [laughter]

Megan: Were you always that way? I know you have kids. I do think when you have a family, it really does change.

Zibby: I like to travel, but I'm not like you. I like to travel recreationally a few times a year. I wish I had that wanderlust. I know people like you. I have someone in my life who loves to travel and is always off somewhere. You have to have a baseline adaptability, a baseline, you can drop me anywhere and I'm going to pick up. It's like my dog. We just inherited this dog from my mother-in-law. Anywhere we drop her, she's fine. She just figures out what's on that block. I don't know how to get that or how to give that to my kids, but you have it. I want it.

Megan: [laughs] I think there is a lot of nature and nurture. It's hard to suss that one out, I have to say. Are there places that intrigue you from afar that you've never been? I feel like there are cultures that I'm just like, I have to go there. I have to feel what it's like to be there. That, more than anything, is what drives me to keep exploring and keep things fresh. Honestly, it's a nature/nurture question. I'm not sure I can figure that one out.

Zibby: These days at least, travel is sort of on hold anyway. I can table this for my self-improvement next year. [laughs] I love your writing style. You have a really beautiful writing style that's different than others that I've read lately and that really was arresting from even the first page, the way you see the world and your vocabulary and the way you piece it all together. It's a really nice style.

Megan: Thank you. That's so kind.

Zibby: Tell me about your writing background and what classes you may have taken or when you decided that -- I know you realized that essays are your preferred medium, but when did that all happen? Take me back.

Megan: Such a good question. I studied poetry early. I got my MFA in poetry from NYU many years ago. Then I went into freelance journalism. I really made a living doing that. I did some travel writing. I did a lot of book reviewing, some arts journalism. I did author interviews, that kind of thing. I think that what happened for me is -- poetry, obviously, is so creative. Then the journalism I also really enjoyed, though, because I actually enjoyed the fact-checking. I liked just learning about a subject and almost having a humility when you come to it. You think you know something. Then you research. You discover new elements to it. For me, writing essays really smashes these two things together where I can be creative and bring kind of a lyrical voice sometimes to the subject, but then also keep everything tethered in reality to some degree. That's really my background. I have another book, which is a book of poems. This book, it really does bring together what I love to do in writing the most.

Zibby: Tell me a little about your publishing journey.

Megan: My publishing journey for this book, I submitted it to some creative writing contests, academic presses, that kind of thing. I sort of felt that because it was a book of essays that are very literary, I probably should go the university press route. I picked out some of the contests that looked really interesting to me and the presses that I know are class acts. I really focused on those. I was so fortunate with this. The contest I ended up winning that resulted in my book being published was the first one I submitted to. I didn't know it, of course, for many months, so I was still submitting to other contests. I was very fortunate. It's worked out beautifully.

Zibby: I love that. I had somebody else on the podcast recently who won a book prize in Connecticut that she had entered. It just makes me think people should be entering more contests. I don't know if people are doing that or what the hurdles are. I don't know about the cost or whatever. I don't know much about them. It just seems like a good way to at least motivate you to have something finished enough to send out to that as a start.

Megan: Absolutely. I know. There's nothing like a deadline. In fact, I actually finished the collection the day of the deadline of this contest, believe it or not. I was sending it that day. It was really my goal. I'm like, I'm going to get it in for this one. Having the deadline is key to finishing. I feel like I can pick at these things for years, as I sometimes have. It's really helpful for me to have a deadline at some point.

Zibby: Since the contest and then it sold and all the rest, what have you been working on? Are you someone who has five different essays going at once?

Megan: I do. I actually started a new project last year. It's another creative nonfiction type of thing. It's funny to me because there are themes that really overlap with what's happening this year. It's really changed the way I see the whole thing. I'm not sure quite what to do with it. I've got some new stuff in the works, not that I've been writing recently.

Zibby: That's all right. I was going to say I'm eager to see the output from this time, see how it's affected literature and what comes out.

Megan: I know. It's such an intense year. One thing with the pandemic and then the election and just so much to pay attention to with home schooling with my kid, it's just been a lot having everybody at home all the time when I'm not always used to that, to have my own writing time. I'm really impressed by the writers who have been getting work done because it's been a thin time for me.

Zibby: Do you have any go-to sanity-reclaiming measures in your day-to-day life to sort of regroup?

Megan: Yeah, I do. I do a lot of walking. I have to get out. I do yoga. The physical stuff is really what helps me the most, I'd say. We've had wildfires here in California. That's been another layer of pressure on the whole system. Right now, things have cleared up, so I'm able to get out again and do hikes and socially distance with friends and that kind of thing. It's really a lifesaver at this point.

Zibby: We inherited this dog recently. I didn't used to walk in Central Park that much. I'm in New York City. I'm just not somebody who takes a walk with no destination. I'm not like, I'm going to go for a walk. It's like, I'm going to go pick up my kid and I'm going to take the long way, maybe. Now that I have this dog, I'm constantly out and in the park. It's a totally different perspective on the city and city life and life in general, getting out into nature. I know this is the most obvious thing.

Megan: No, it's funny how we forget the obvious things all the time. I do, at least. It makes a huge difference. Are you enjoying it?

Zibby: Yes. Sometimes I'm so busy that I'm like, oh, my gosh, the dog hasn’t gone out in five hours. Yes, I enjoy it. The other day, it was pouring. I was like, oh, no, I'll just go in the rain. I have to go. Now I need it. That happened very quickly. It's only been three weeks, but now I'm very into it. All goes to show how quickly we develop habits and all the rest. I see a zillion books behind you. What kind of books do you like to read?

Megan: These days, mostly nonfiction. I read a lot of travel. I've been doing a lot of armchair travel just to remind myself that there is a world beyond my little town here. Actually, this is my fiction collection. These are all novels. I have a ton of books. Like I said, I used to review books for a living, and I just collect books. I adore them. I love the objects. I don't read a lot on Kindle. Although, I do when I travel. I'm very old-fashioned. I just love having it in my hand. I'm also a margin person. I write in the margins all the time, so I'm kind of hard on my books. I love having them around.

Zibby: Me too. I always like to turn the pages and [indiscernible/crosstalk] back and forth. Plus, I find the ones I read online, if I don't have them, I kind of forget them. Whereas if I'm always reacquainting myself with the spines, they stay in my consciousness.

Megan: It's true.

Zibby: What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Megan: For creative writers, I would say the best advice I wish I had had a long time ago is to write the pieces as if you're never going to show them to anyone. This is also one of those obvious pieces of advice that I feel like I did hear many years ago. Write for yourself. Write not even because you're afraid to spill the skeletons from the closet, but just because you want to write the piece. There's some subject you're fascinated with, you suspect maybe other people may not be, but go for it anyway. See what happens. I just think having that freedom is the key to really doing creative work.

Zibby: Very true. Amazing. Thank you, Megan. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Mobile Home. Congratulations on winning the contest. Sorry for how many times we rescheduled to get here.

Megan: [laughs] That's okay.

Zibby: I feel great that we can finally say we did this.

Megan: Yay! Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Thanks for the conversation.

Megan: Excellent. Thank you so much, Zibby. Bye.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Megan: You too. Bye.

Sydney Sadick, AIM HIGH

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

Sydney Sadick: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited, the queen of books.

Zibby: [laughs] The queen of fashion.

Sydney: Thank you.

Zibby: Aim High, your new book, please tell listeners what this book is about and what inspired you to write this book.

Sydney: I host a lot of fashion segments for shows like the Today Show, E!, Inside Edition. Once my segments ended, I would get hundreds of DMs on Instagram from women of all ages ranging from teenagers to women in their sixties saying that they needed more. They wanted more fashion advice. They wanted to know about confidence. They had all these questions that they couldn't get answered in my six-minute segment. That was where the idea came from. How can I expand on what people already know of me in a place that you can constantly go back to and learn more? Aim High is really that place. It's a go-to read for motivational advice on fashion tips, but also how to bring out your confidence from within. I always say that confidence is an accessory that never goes out of style. It's just as difficult of something to bring out as much as developing your own personal style. Those two things really come together. It's also to explain how the way that you dress can affect your mood. It helps you achieve the goals that you want out of life. I know for myself throughout quarantine, I was living in sweatpants at the beginning. I was very unmotivated. I was very depressed by everything going on in the world. Then I realized, wait a minute, if I want to shift my view and my mindset, I need to start dressing like the girl I used to be. Now I put on my makeup. I put on structured pants. I wear a fitted top. I am like the original me. This whole notion of aiming high is something I think that's even more relevant today because of the pandemic. We all need that positivity and that emphasis on self-care. That goes right down to what we wear.

Zibby: I am totally impressed that you're dressing up in your home every day. That's amazing. I love it. It's inspirational. I need to take a piece of that. I have these three sweatpants that, actually, I learned about from Real Simple magazine. They did an inventory of the best joggers. I was like, ooh, I'm kind of tired of my sweatpants, so I ordered those sweatpants. Every day, I'm like, light grey, dark grey, black, light grey. [laughs]

Sydney: They're comfortable. I get it. If you could see on the side of our Zoom screen right now, I have six pairs of sweatpants that are just sitting on the side. I say those are for after hours. That's what I can change into once I'm done with the work that needs to be done. That's just my own way.

Zibby: That's great. I do dress up sometimes because it does make me feel good. It's absolutely true. When you feel better, you even eat better. It's this whole ripple effect. Yes, I totally understand. I loved how in the book you gave a whole example at the beginning when you were trying to help a woman dress for three weddings in a week. You ended up finding this magic item I'd never heard of before that morphs into fifty-seven different things. You could see her confidence really coming out. She really owned that outfit and the accessories that you found. You are the best shopper ever. You don't spend that much money. You get a hundred different things. You make all these different outfits. Then the end result, of course, is this super confident person who can waltz into the wedding feeling really great. I thought that was such a great opening story that you included.

Sydney: Thank you. That was definitely one of the memorable moments of the last few years. It was my first real creative segment on Hoda & Jenna where I got to really create a concept and have someone, a viewer, be changing on live television as we went. We had a little mini-dressing room for her with a curtain. She ran back and forth. The dress, which was called the convertible wrap dress, was being wrapped around a million different ways. It was a whole situation. This woman, Eileen, was just so excited. That was the moment I realized, too, it doesn't matter where you live in the country. We live in New York, so we're surrounded by fashion constantly. This was a woman who lived in a very suburban town outside of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania where it just wasn't part of her life. She didn't even care. This is a moment where she realized, wait a minute, there is something to be said here. I actually do like fashion. It just took me a moment to figure it out. I think it happens for every woman at a different point in life.

Zibby: Tell me again the story, and you included it in your book, of your complete go-getter-ness from your Harvard summer program to launching a blog to becoming you, working all through college. This is insane. Just give us a little more color into all of that.

Sydney: I think a lot of moms will relate to this when you have a child who maybe is super shy, is maybe afraid of going to summer camp or doing the traditional things that all of the kids on the Upper East Side or even other states are doing. I was just never that girl to leave my family and go away even on a sleepover. I was just very attached to my mom and probably still am a little bit. My parents were like, "Sydney, if you want to go to a college that's outside of New York, how are they going to think that you're ready for that, these schools? They know that you haven't done anything that's outside of your box." I said, "You're right." My mom brought up the idea of Harvard summer school. My aunts had gone. This is years ago. We have a big age gap between us. She told me that she had this amazing experience. I was like, if she did it and she's a homebody, then maybe I could get into it. I applied and got in. When I went to go and select the courses that were available to me, the two that really sounded the most appealing, and for no other reason than the descriptions, were in journalism. I signed up for these two classes with all Harvard professors. I was the youngest person in my classes because for some reason it was more targeted towards grad students, but they let me in. I was just sixteen.

For the first assignment for one of the classes, they said, "You need to come back in the next day and start your own blog. Write about whatever you want." This is in 2010. Instagram in nonexistent. The word WordPress is this new term that people are just trying to figure out what that even means and what you can do with it. My dorm room was coincidentally the dorm room that Mark Zuckerberg was in, Lowell House, years ago. I create this blog. I'm like, you know what, if I'm going to write about something, it needs to be what I know. I had a very stylish mom. I had a very stylish grandmother. I can write about fashion. I come up with the name Style Solutions. I start posting my outfits like you see of traditional fashion bloggers today. It was becoming wildly read across this summer program for whatever reason. When I got back to New York, I was like, I don't want to give this up. I could totally see this becoming a brand. I said, but it needs to be different. I can't just be posting my outfits. It doesn't have enough depth for me. In addition to the digital skills I learned at this program, I said I wanted to really take the reporting skills that I learned in the other class that I was taking that summer, and I said I want to start interviewing celebrities. At sixteen years old, you don't really know how you're going to make that happen.

Conveniently, the New York Post has, always, these great little stories and advertisements. There was an ad for Rhianna who was going to be launching her debut book at Barnes & Noble, which is ironic. Life is so funny like that. It all comes around. I got my school to let me to leave class early. I changed in the middle of Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street out of my little uniform, put on whatever clothes I had. I wait in this line for three hours. I was the last person. I swore Rhianna was going to leave. I was just begging the team I saw around. I'm like, "Is she going to stay? Is she going to stay?" She stayed. I got up to her. I said, "Instead of just signing my book with your name, can you please write down your favorite fashion accessory?" I didn't know if she was going to do it. I couldn't see. There was so much room between me and her at the table. I have the book here. I look at it sometimes. She wrote it down. She said it was scarves. I was able to turn that quote into an article and say "Rhianna reveals her favorite fashion accessory" and recapped her best moments in scarves. The article blows up. It gets ten thousand unique people in that first hour.

Zibby: I thought it was hair accessories. I could've sworn you said something else. Wasn't it hair accessories? It had two words. There were definitely two words in it.

Sydney: It could've been changed to hair accessories because she used the scarves as turbans across her hair. It was a combination, but she really meant scarves, is what she meant. We wrote that in the book, but I think it was more leaning towards scarves because she always wore them across her head.

Zibby: Got it. Okay, sorry. [laughs]

Sydney: Good catch of detail. She wrote this down. The article blew up. That was the moment where I was like, if I can get Rhianna to talk about something, then I should be able to ask many more celebrities. From there, I got an internship at the Daily Front Row, went to GW for college in school of media and public affairs, freelanced for them throughout college, and interned for Rachel Zoe, Oprah Magazine, all of which kept my feet wet. I became an editor as soon as I graduated for the Daily until I left two years later to pursue being on air. It's been a ten-year journey. People are like, you're so young, you're so young. I feel old because it's been going on for so many years.

Zibby: Is that your dream, the on-air component of your life? Do you want to have your own show? It sounds like that's where this is going, that one day you're going to have your own fashion show on Bravo or something. Is that where you're headed?

Sydney: Definitely. You know what? Fashion has been my core. It's been the base of what I've done. Because of it and then what I've also been doing, other things throughout quarantine, it's opened the conversation to talk so much more about fashion. I love fashion as a way to get into someone and to just talk about fun things, but I'm really interested in expanding that and really having conversations beyond fashion too, but how to mold these different categories together.

Zibby: Very cool.

Sydney: But a show, yes.

Zibby: [laughs] Now it's so great, though, because you can just turn on your camera, and you have a show. It's so disintermediated, if that's even the right word.

Sydney: And that's all you.

Zibby: You don't even need the network. It's better because you get a bigger audience right away, but you can test it out.

Sydney: That's what I've been actually doing throughout quarantine. I started a daily Instagram Live show. We bring on different celebrities and designers every day. Sometimes I think the views are so crazy that it might be just as much as what people are watching on television. Media is changing so much. I think people really want that accessibility. You do your Instagram Lives too. Your fans and audience can ask questions as they go. They feel engaged and involved. I think we all want to feel less alone right now. That whole notion of community is so important.

Zibby: Totally. You're right. Of course, you have your Instagram Live show. I'm sorry, I should've thought to say that.

Sydney: No, that's okay.

Zibby: Let's go back to the fashion specifics for two seconds to the aforementioned moms who are in their sweatpants, perhaps me, most of the time. What changes are within our grasp that are not so hard to implement that can make us feel better?

Sydney: By the way, if you're good in your sweatpants, don't change out of it. If that's what makes you feel comfortable and good right now, leave the sweatpants as your base and go for it a little more in the other elements of your wardrobe. When you're doing all these Zoom talks, and I'm sure a lot of moms are doing school conferences or they will be soon, it's really about focusing on the upper portions of our bodies and how we can make a statement from the waist up. An easy way to do that is to throw on a statement pair of earrings like a hoop, a chain necklace, something that just adds a little bit of glamor and boldness without trying too hard. It doesn't take that much effort. Layering is also something that is really easy to do. You have a T-shirt. Then you could throw on a little blazer. I think blazers are a little stiff when we're at home. It's a little hard for me to even do that. A really crisp cardigan always works really well. Going for some color or even a pattern, just a way so when people are looking at you, it brightens things up a bit. That's also really easy. I think it's totally fine to stick with your comfortable silhouettes. It's just about going for them in a little bit more of a fashion-forward way.

Zibby: Mind you, I know this will be on YouTube and on the podcast. For the people who are not watching this on YouTube, to see our outfits right now, Sydney is wearing this little white T-shirt, very cute, with a gold -- oh, there's a little heart on it. Her gorgeous, long, looks-like-it-must-be-fake-because-it's-so-gorgeous hair is covering it with a chain gold necklace and giant hoop really thick earrings and full-on makeup and whatever. I am wearing a black T-shirt under a black long sleeve T-shirt with my kid's school lanyard around my neck and my hair in a ponytail. I actually put makeup on, so this is better than it could've been. I'm not in my pajamas, which is also great. I'm not even in sweatpants today. I'm in new leggings. [laughs]

Sydney: [Indiscernible] are different. I'm single. I don't have a family. I don't have the responsibility other than myself. Like I said before, it depends on where you are in life. Your priorities shift. I don't know what I'm going to be like, but this is me right now in my twenties who doesn't have anyone to worry about but me. That's the truth. It's different for you and for a lot of moms.

Zibby: Thank you for letting me off the hook in that gentle way. [laughs] What about your sourcing of inexpensive, really cute, make a big pop items that you seem to find for all the people on TV?

Sydney: For me, I do better in Zaras and Forever 21s than I would ever do in luxurious label brands like a Gucci or [indiscernible]. I don't really feel comfortable with those brands. It's fun to have a splurge handbag or a shoe. In terms of clothing, I don't think that's where women should be spending thousands and thousands of dollars. I just personally don't see the value. You can find great quality clothing in stores like Zara. One of my favorite websites is called the Verge Girl. It's kind of the new Nasty Gal.

Zibby: Wait, I'm writing this down. Say it again.

Sydney: Verge Girl. Some of it looks, I'm just warning you, a little juvenile when you go to the homepage, but the quality is so strong. You need to sift through it and find those pieces like their oversized sweaters. It's such good quality. Everything is around a hundred dollars. It works. I don't believe in spending a lot of money, also, on trends.

Zibby: A hundred dollars is a lot for a sweater. Keep taking me lower and lower. [laughs]

Sydney: You can go lower too, but in terms of a high-quality cashmere [indiscernible] sweater, between eighty and a hundred dollars. Compared to going to Bloomingdale's, they're never going to be under a hundred ever. Forever 21, sites like that, you can find pieces under fifty dollars that are amazing. I never put anything over fifty dollars on my segments ever. It's always under fifty. Places like Old Navy; I love the jeans and jeggings from American Eagle. I think they're so flattering. They fit on all women.

Zibby: Yes, my daughter just told me about American Eagle. We got her some clothes. They're amazing. I was like, I think I have to order from here. I was unexpectedly wowed by American Eagle. That read like an ad. It was not an ad. This actually happened.

Sydney: None of these are ads. They're just opinions. Lulus is another great site, tons of pieces under fifty dollars that are so fun.

Zibby: Lulus?

Sydney: Lulus is [indiscernible] only.

Zibby: To be honest, I do not like to spend money on clothes at all and don't very often. I like to spend money on books. I do also feel like it's important to look put together. I always hear my mother's voice in my head. Come on, pull yourself together. Wear a cute outfit.

Sydney: It really is not about spending money. That's what I try to explain to people. Style don't equal a price tag. It's just a mindset. The first place that I always suggest shopping first is your own closet. People always say to me on Instagram, you have so many clothes. Yes, brands send me clothes every single week. I'm very, very lucky. But half the time, I'm re-wearing the same pieces every week. You can't even tell because I'm just styling it in a way that tricks everyone from not realizing. They think it’s a new outfit, but it's not. It's just developing that craft and knowing what looks good on you and what you like and then mixing and matching. That way you don't feel like you have to go shopping. I never really feel like I have to shopping, nor do I really want to at this point. That's not what's as important to me right now.

Zibby: What do you think is going to happen to all the designers and everybody if nobody ever goes to events anymore? I opened my closet. I have a few really fancy dresses. I was like, oh, I wonder if I'll ever wear these again. Then I was thinking, what about all the people who make all these fancy dresses? Their whole business model, they must have been doing great. I sound like a moron. Obviously, I know that the economy has been hit in basically every possible sector, but I just happened to be thinking about high-end formal wear companies and what's going on with them.

Sydney: It's so true. I've been in the Hamptons since March. I've gone back to the city twice. When I went back most recently -- I had my rack of clothing which is where I would usually keep the clothes I would wear that week. I was going to tons of events, and I just had to stay organized. That rack is full of the clothes that I was supposed to wear the week that the city shut down. I saw this gorgeous periwinkle sequin blue gown I was supposed to wear to the [indiscernible] museum for their young adults' party that I was on the committee of. I'm like, am I ever wearing that again? A lot of designers have had to shift their focus. Jonathan Simkhai is now doing total ready-to-wear very cool just leggings and T-shirts, the most causal I've ever seen him. Michael Costello, when the pandemic first hit, he stopped making his gowns and just transitioned to making masks with his million-mask initiative to give masks to frontline workers in LA and in other cities. He was one of my first guests on my Lunchtime with Sydney show. He actually brought us into the back where we could see these masks being made, which was super cool. Christian Siriano, he's definitely doing a little bit more licensing deals, I can see, with different companies. I think they're all trying to just figure it out. I really hope that we will be able to go to events. I think it's just going to take time. Especially for my generation, millennials, they don't like that notion of waiting. I read like crazy, these articles. Time magazine just did an article comparing the pandemic to the Spanish flu. It literally did a side-by-side. To me, it says another year's going to be washed. When things do hopefully normalize in some capacity, we're all going to have to have a really big coming-out party. Everyone's going to have to just be decked out in their best outfits ever and make up for the last two years.

Zibby: Exactly. What's coming next for you? Do you have any idea? Where are things going? You're doing your own show, basically. You have this amazing book that just came out. Now what? What's in the next year? What's your planning?

Sydney: Planning is the one thing, as such a controlling person, that I can't really do right now. I think a lot of women, and men, are struggling with that. We're not really in control of our futures. I've kind of taken a step back and realized that I can't plan. My goal before the pandemic was to work for a specific network. I thought I was moving to LA and this was all happening. Then I was like, that can't even be my goal now because that's not the focus of viewers. Media and fashion, they're both changing so much right now that it has to be a very fluid situation. The one thing I can control is myself. This Lunchtime with Sydney show is something I fully have control of. I do everything. I host. I book. I produce. I'm loving that hands-on-ness that I'm able to have right now because it makes me fulfilled. I am continuing to build that out. I host Instagram Lives on Fridays for the Today Show's new millennial platform called Tomorrow by Today, which is a very similar concept to what I started on Lunchtime with Sydney. Continuing to focus on the book and just doing fun events and trying to do virtual things with my followers because I really want people to take COVID seriously and to stay home as much as they can and wear their masks. My generation is just so out of touch in a lot of ways with how to deal with this. I'm trying to set a good example. It's easier said than done, but I'm really trying. And hopefully more products. I launched an Aim High hoodie with my book. It was a collaboration with [indiscernible] brand, [indiscernible]. It sold out within twenty-four hours. I want to continue to release products to make people feel good and that's accessible to everyone.

Zibby: That's a great idea. Awesome. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors having just written a book?

Sydney: Listen, I've never given birth, but I feel like it must sort of be like the equivalent mentally of giving birth to a baby because you're putting something out into the world. I went to school for journalism, so I wrote. I've written my whole life. For me, that wasn't really hard. It's just about coming up with an idea and how it can be different. We're in such a world where there are so many people who are so good at the same kind of skills. It's about our perspectives that make us different. It's about finding that niche and what makes your voice a little different from the rest. I think it's just figuring that out, writing a lot of lists. You would give way better advice than I would. I'm sure you have a great method.

Zibby: You know what? Everybody I ask has something a little bit different to say. It's just so neat. It reflects their personality. I just like hearing. Make lots of lists, I don't anyone has said that before. There you go.

Sydney: Post-it notes everywhere. I tried to clean up for you today.

Zibby: [laughs] Thank you. Sydney, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Congratulations on your book. I can't wait to see where you end up going in life. You're like a little shooting star. We'll see what happens.

Sydney: Thank you so much. I so appreciate that.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Sydney: Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Ann Shen, NEVERTHELESS, SHE WORE IT

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Ann, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for talking about your book, Nevertheless, She Wore It: 50 Iconic Fashion Moments.

Ann Shen: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. I'm so excited to be here.

Zibby: This book was so awesome. I couldn't even decide which I found most interesting, some of the current-day fashion trends or all the ones from back in the day, the invention of the bikini or when pants were a big deal and all of that stuff. How did you come up with all of these different fashion moments? What is the bigger story behind assembling them all together?

Ann: Oh, my gosh, that's such a good question. I love fashion and style. I love it as a way that we can express ourselves. I was thinking about all the ways that people who are very much in the public eye are aware of that, and especially women who historically have been a group that haven't always had a voice, are aware that people are always looking at what they're wearing. Then there have been people who use that as a way to deliver a message. That's kind of the theme that I started with. A lot of the time, the message was a way to give women more of a voice, a place, power, more liberation. I looked for examples in history that started evolving styles, but in ways that were for women to feel more empowered. Narrowing it down to fifty moments was really difficult because there's so many fun styles, interesting styles to talk about and the history behind everything. I really tried to either trace the lineage of styles, because they evolve through time, to, where did this come from? What did it mean at the time? And then moments that were very politically or news-groundbreaking that we still remember even now that are tied to a message like Lady Gaga's meat dress or Hillary Clinton's white suits.

Zibby: You mentioned in the beginning of the book how things really changed after the Industrial Revolution. What happened? What happened then?

Ann: Before then, all clothes are handmade, literally by hand. Most people didn't own a lot of clothes. The Industrial Revolution created factories that then were able to create garment mills and sewing factories and make clothing more accessible, meaning more affordable, to everyone besides the upper class. The only people who had real costumes or changes were people who were royalty or who were very, very famous or well-off. Once the Industrial Revolution happened and everybody was able to get clothing, they were able to have a bigger wardrobe to express themselves, to have more of a say in how they wanted to present in the world versus, here are the few dresses that my mom made and have handed down, or that I made. That made style a more accessible choice to everyone as a way of personal expression.

Zibby: It's funny because I don't really think about what I wear that much. I'm not very stylish. I'm not really into fashion so much. My clothes don't make a statement. If they fit, it’s a good day. I know what I like. My main criterion is, does this hide the places that need to be hidden right now? That's how I dress. I realize for all the women in here, everybody, not everybody, but most people were trying to say something or do something, or maybe inadvertently, like Michelle Obama with the sleeveless shift dress or Serena Williams with her tennis catsuit. Were they all trying to make such a message? Even Elizabeth Hurley, how you point out how she created an influencer at all, really. How intentional do you think most of these current-day moments were? Did they mean to create such a stir? Maybe it just varies.

Ann: That's such a good question. I want to go back to you not thinking you're a stylish person. The thing is, we all get dressed every day. We all make choices of how we want to dress. What you expressed was just, you dress to feel good about your body because you're emphasizing the things you like and directing the attention. [laughter] You're in control of the attention. That's part of the power of getting dressed. Even if you're not a celebrity on the red carpet or a politician, you're still making those choices of how you want to present in the world. That is your personal power you have every day. Every single person has that. Even little kids have that. They definitely want to express themselves through their clothes. Some of the choices in there, some of it incidentally turned out to be controversial, like Michelle Obama's sleeveless shift. It was just a shift dress from J.Crew.

Zibby: I'm pretty sure I had that dress.

Ann: Every woman owns a dress like that. It looks like a professional dress. It's a high collar. It's black. It's very simple and silhouette. People were so scandalized because she was the first First Lady to wear a dress without sleeves in her official portrait. Also, she had amazing arms. [laughs] That helped. It also was just so silly that that was something that became newsworthy, but at the same time speaks to how conservative and how different we view everyday women versus someone in political power, perhaps. Then there are also intentional ones. Even with the Liz Hurley dress, she wasn't famous at the time. She became famous overnight because of that dress. She was just Hugh Grant's girlfriend, was going to one of his premieres. He had connections to, I think it was Versace. They only had one dress available for her, which was the safety pin dress. She was confident enough to be like, yeah, I'm going to wear that dress. I didn't really think anything of it. It looks like a little black dress. Photographs of her at the premiere were all over the world. It was really interesting that a woman confident in her body making a choice that really wasn't a choice because that was the only dress she had been offered also became a statement.

Zibby: If that was the only dress I was offered, I would not go. You have to be able to pull that off.

Ann: She was also probably twenty-four.

Zibby: Okay, fine. Yes.

Ann: She's dating Hugh Grant who's super hot at the time. She was really feeling herself. Absolutely, I don't think I would either. The fact that a woman was feeling comfortable enough to wear that was already headline news, which is also kind of crazy.

Zibby: Even how you point out in the book, J Lo's famous Versace dress -- I think it was Versace.

Ann: Yeah.

Zibby: Two other people had already worn it. Nobody had really cared or noticed or taken note of it. It was just the fact that it was so right for her and brought out all of her glowing-ness, if you will.

Ann: Yeah, and at that moment. You know what's funny? Looking back at that dress when I was painting it, I was like, wow, it doesn't look that scandalous compared to what people wear now. I remember at that time we were all so scandalized, like, oh, my god.

Zibby: Now people are basically naked all the time. People don't even get dressed. What is that? Let's go back. How did you get here? How did you end up writing this book? How did you get your start with writing and illustrating and all the rest?

Ann: I went to college for a degree in writing. Then I worked for a few years in nonprofits. Then after that, I decided I wanted to go back to school and be a professional illustrator and designer. I did that. Then I was working for a few years in-house as a professional designer and then freelancing on the side and working on little passion projects. One of them was Bad Girls Throughout History, which ended up being my first book. It came out in 2016, but I started it in about probably 2010. It was a book about female trailblazers like the first woman to do X, Y, Z. I try to cover a lot of broad fields. At the time, I was finding myself struggling with finding any female role models who had broken the rules, who had been the first to do something that they were told not to do, which was something that I felt like I was running up against a lot as a young professional. Since I couldn't find it, I started collecting them and telling their stories. The more I did that, the more people would share with me, "Have you heard of so-and-so and so-and-so?" Before I knew it, I had a whole book. My agent had seen it. It was a little zine at the time. My agent had seen it. Posted it on a blog.

She reached out to me and asked me if I was interested in turning it into a book. I was like, only my hope and dream in life. I played it cool. I was like, "Yeah, that'd be cool." We made a proposal, pitched it. Chronicle Books gave us a great offer. They were a great fit for it. They’ve been a publisher of my books ever since because they really get what I'm doing, which is something kind of unusual. It's not a children's book, but it's not a usual adult book. It's a coffee table book. I want it to feel like learning history, but from your best friend where you're just like, have you heard of this cool person? That's the thread of all my books, which is all about feminine power, women in history which have been largely marginalized. My second book was about goddesses in all different cultures because I wanted to explore archetypes and the way women were treated or how females were thought of in cultures, the important roles they played prior to even pre-Christian colonialism, basically. My third book now, I wanted to explore a different angle of feminism and something that I felt like is kind of coming up again, especially with how much we pay attention to -- I think it came up a lot after the 2016 election where everybody was wearing a pink pussy hat to the Women's March. It was the first time that we had a collective style moment where we could feel together even though we were very despondent. That's something that people have done throughout history, like the Black Panthers with black berets, suffragettes with their tricolor stripe. That was really interesting to me.

Then we always get articles about -- there was a while, people were saying "Ask her more" for women on red carpets. They were saying women are just asked about who they're wearing. Then women kind of co-opted that for the Time's Up movement when they all wore black on the Golden Globes red carpet. That was really interesting. These women know that they're in visible positions and what they say has a lot of power because we all see them. Their images are all around the world within the hour. That visual representation is just as important as what you're saying. You could use that as a means of style. Then of course, we see it in politics all the time. We see it right now, especially with Kamala Harris wearing Chuck Taylors and boots. Everyone's writing about it. It sends a message about the kind of leader she is. It's a really interesting time since we are such a visual society with social media. We're getting news refreshed every second. We're so visual that we take those visuals even more as a means of power and expression. Anyway, that was my longwinded story of how I got here and how I ended up writing this book.

Zibby: I totally understood those Golden Globes. It was the Golden Globes, right? Or was it the Academy Awards when they all wore black? Selfishly, I was very disappointed not to have all that eye candy of dresses and necklaces and all the glittery things that we don't get in our normal life.

Ann: I know. I definitely had a moment where I was like, wait, are they doing this at every award show this year? [laughs]

Zibby: How long is this going on?

Ann: I totally support the visibility of it. I love the red carpet because it's such a way for people to appreciate artists too, like a lot of young American designers. Michelle Obama only chose to wear American designers. Their choices in celebrating these designers, it gives them a platform unlike anything else.

Zibby: What's your fashion motif? What do you like to wear?

Ann: Oh, my gosh. I always love a Peter Pan collar.

Zibby: Very cute.

Ann: It kind of reminds me Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of course. I feel professional but also feminine. It's our version of our white collar. I love a red lipstick. I definitely do feel more put together even if I'm just wearing red lipstick, which has been a thing even through quarantine. I'm like, if I just put on lipstick for this Zoom, I will feel like my life's together and everything is not falling apart around me.

Zibby: Lip gloss is my thing. I continue to put it on. I don't even have it. It stays on for like three seconds. In those three seconds, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm all put together. Now with the pandemic, I put it on, and then I put my mask on. It's so stupid. Why do I do this? But I know. I know it's under there. [laughs]

Ann: It makes you feel good. It makes you feel like, my life is together.

Zibby: So silly. The red lipstick, it's nice to have a signature thing like that. It makes it sort of easier to get out the door when you know that's what you do, the red lipstick, not the lip gloss.

Ann: The lip gloss too. What's your favorite lip gloss?

Zibby: No, only I can ever tell that it's on. Yours is a statement that I can see now. So are you working on a new project after this? What's coming next for you?

Ann: I'm actually working on a fourth book which I'm really excited about. We haven't announced it yet, but it's inspired by a lot of the events of this year.

Zibby: I will translate that in my head. [laughter] I happen to love both your illustration style and your writing style. Both, I find, it's a little bit of flirty fun and sense of humor mixed with actual great depiction of things. I didn't say that very well. Even the title, it's like you don't take yourself too seriously and yet you're also teaching, which is the best kind of teacher there is, really, versus, I am going to make you realize this about feminism or whatever. I unfortunately feel that some more feminist-leaning things -- now this is going to sound bad. I don't know. I just don't like anybody being too didactic in what they're trying to teach or to share. There's gentler ways to communicate. Anyway, I just love it. You should do commissions. Do you do that, like somebody commissioning for my mom's birthday or something, you would do [indiscernible/crosstalk]? I could send you her favorite coat and then frame it.

Ann: I get asked all the time for that, but I really don't have time since I'm always working on a new book.

Zibby: You're like, I'm way too famous and accomplished for a picture [indiscernible/laughter] mom. Thank you for the thought. On my last dime, maybe I'll call you.

Ann: [laughs] I am too busy hustling to make more things that are accessible to everyone. It's way easier to buy a twenty-dollar book than to afford a commission.

Zibby: I'll just say I really appreciate your work. The book is great. It's also a great giftable book. If you even do the necklace and black dress and this book, what a perfect gift is that.

Ann: That would be so sweet.

Zibby: Holidays are coming sort of soon. I'm going to have to remember this around the holiday time, to match it with any of these things, and especially with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the cover given her recent loss and everything. Do you have any advice to aspiring author/illustrators such as yourself?

Ann: Just follow your curiosity. Those things are things that are unique to you, your voice, your point of view. Create the things that you wish existed in the world. That's what I continue to keep trying to do with my books. Like you said, I like to make cheeky, fun books. I had a hard time memorizing history or being really interested in history when I was in school. My approach to it now is, I rediscovered it as, these are all people just like we were, just human, messy, complicated, funny, accomplished. They could still do all these amazing things. When I talk about it like that and when I'm sharing it with a girlfriend, I'm like, this is fascinating, or when I'm hearing stories from a friend. I want it to be cheeky and fun and interesting and also make you feel smarter and more connected to the world and our collective ancestors. That's what I'm interested in. Think about the things that you're interested in and you're curious about and love and want to share with the world. Someone else will need the thing that you want to make.

Zibby: Hopefully. [laughs]

Ann: They will. There's so many people. You look on the internet, there are groups for everything. You will find your people. You'll find your tribe.

Zibby: That's true.

Ann: How big it'll be... Someone needs what you make.

Zibby: Someone will need it. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for Nevertheless, She Wore It. I just loved it. It's adorable and awesome. Thank you.

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

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Ann: Bye.

Elizabeth Berg, I'LL BE SEEING YOU

Zibby Owens: Hi.

Elizabeth Berg: Hi. How are you?

Zibby: I'm good. How are you?

Elizabeth: I'm fine. Thank you. I want to tell you thank you for what you do. [Indiscernible] about you. Especially now, it's so important. It's so impressive. Thank you for including me.

Zibby: I'm delighted to include you. Thank you for thanking me. I love what I do. Every day is so amazing. I get to talk to women like you, but women from all over the world with so many interesting stories, novelists, nonfiction. It is so intellectually and emotionally engaging. I just love it. It's like a dream come true.

Elizabeth: You give back to so many others. It's such a good thing. Especially now, again, those good things mean a lot.

Zibby: Thank you for saying all that. I'll Be Seeing You is so beautiful, your memoir. I was crying at times. It made me so sentimental, the way you write about your parents. It was absolutely beautiful, as I'm sure you know. Maybe it doesn't hurt to hear again. It was just a sensational memoir about aging and caregiving and all the rest. Bravo. I loved it.

Elizabeth: I appreciate that on lots of levels, not least of which is the fact that writing something this honest is scary. You wonder if you're betraying people in presenting them this way. Of course, there's a section in the book about that. In the end, I thought it was probably worth it. From what I've been able to see so far, it really has helped people. I think there's something about making yourself vulnerable about a complex issue that opens up a lot of things for people. I'm very much gratified by that.

Zibby: I'm grateful to your writing group who I know you discussed this with early to see what they thought about it. I'm glad they encouraged you to get over the line and actually put it out into the world because it's true, sometimes you need a guide from other people. We all are going through this for the first time. We don't know what to do. Having a guidebook like yours or just knowing someone else's experience is so encouraging. It's, of course, an issue for so many people, having aging parents. I was wondering, though, because you wrote it in a diary style -- of course, it started in 2010. Did you write it at that time and then just leave it and wait until now? What happened? Tell me about the writing of this.

Elizabeth: It was a mix. For me as a writer, the way that I process things, the way I come to understand them is by writing about it. I wasn't sure that I would publish it, but I wanted to remember. I wanted to just get it out. It can feel like an incredible emotional load that you're carrying around going through these things. It struck me oddly that it's a kind of parallel for what we're going through right now in that you're stuck in the middle. You don't know when it's going to end. You don't know how it's going to turn out. There are so many sad and fearful things about it. The pandemic's a little bigger than this, of course, because aging is a natural part of life. In the same way that what helped me go through this experience was to, as I say, get small and take it day by day, that kind of philosophy is also helping me get through what we're all enduring now.

Zibby: Are you writing about it? I know you have a big Facebook blog and everything. Are you writing every day to record how you feel in the moment now so you don't forget?

Elizabeth: No. With regard to the pandemic, no. I do post occasionally. Whoa, I've really been struck by how people need that too, not just from me of course, but from all kinds of sources where people are talking about it, getting it out there, expressing their fears, expressing their anxieties and their sorrows, but also expressing what is still joyful, the things that remain that can really nourish and sustain us and support us. People need that too. For example, the last post I did was about trying to formalize some of the things that I do that bring me joy like reading, like listening to music. I'm a person, like so many others, that says, I'm going to do that, and then I don't do it. It helps if I formalize it. I say every Tuesday, you're going to concert in your own house. I had on Benny Goodman the other day. I'm telling you, I am telling you, it is joyful music. I could just see those women standing at the big square microphone in their formals and swaying and singing these songs. It was a moment. It can be hard at a time of such crisis to take it in and have it. For me, it's a matter of compartmentalization and saying, look, it's okay if you have this moment of joy. You're not taking away anything from anyone else. In fact, you're building yourself up so that you can help yourself and others better, like a mom. If the mom doesn't care of herself, forget about it.

Zibby: Yes. I know that all too well. [laughs] Going back to what you were saying about music, you had such a beautiful scene in your book about going to the concert by yourself and sitting there and seeing an older couple in front of you, the man, I think his name was Walter, and the wife trying to help him down the aisle and how when everybody applauded for the beautiful symphony, you felt like you were taking that as applause for Walter and the wife and the little steps nudging up the aisle to get out and on their way. It was just such a precious moment. Of course, in your imagination, as you did throughout the book, you're wondering what it's like for them at home as you did for one of the nurses who gave a weary glance. Then you imagined her putting an afghan on her husband. I can just see your mind working. Tell me about that, first of all, music, and second of all, how your brain just seems to wonder. It seems like you're always wondering about what comes after what you've seen.

Elizabeth: That evening was one of those times when you never know where inspiration or comfort is going to come. I admired that couple so much. I don't know their ages exactly, of course, but I think they were approaching ninety. They were quite frail, but by god, they went out to the symphony. Not only did they go out to it, but they heard it. They felt it. It was so difficult for the husband especially. The wife was in a little bit better shape. He had his walker. He moved so slowly, but he came. To the second part of your question, I guess if you're a writer, if you're a novelist in particular, that is the way that your mind works. You're incredibly curious and always wondering things and making stuff up. I've done that since I was a child. It could be a ladybug. Well, where's she going home to? What's her little house look like? That's something that's been with me all my life. Honestly, I hope it always will be because it makes life very rich.

Zibby: I do that too. I wonder if I see a family, what has just happened. What must people think of my family? Do they have it right? Do they know that this is my sister-in-law? It keeps it interesting, I guess.

Elizabeth: The gears are always turning for certain kinds of people. It sounds like you're one of us. [laughter]

Zibby: I noticed on your website -- I could've read a book in the amount of time just to read the descriptions of all your books and motivation. You've written so many amazing books and so many best-sellers. They all seem to have a little piece of your own experience, even just a smidge, or the inspiration came from something inside you. I just wanted to hear a little more about that and how you embark on book projects.

Elizabeth: I think it's inevitable that pieces of writers show up in their work. I'll keep it to myself. I'll talk about me because I don't want to speak for other writers who might say, no, that's not true for me at all. For me, I have to draw on my own life predilections and experiences in order to enrich the material I'm writing. What becomes the fiction part is the overarching theme of what it is that I'm trying to get at in this particular book or in this particular case. I do think, though, that writers write about the same thing over and over in different ways. For me, it's love, loss, longing, and the search for home over and over and over again. Maybe everybody has those themes a little bit in their work. That's because of the way I am, the way I turned out to be. It's manifested in everything I write. Even though the stories are different, those themes are always there in all those books. Oh, my goodness, you had to do so much research. [laughs]

Zibby: I loved it because I haven't read most of your books. I've read some, of course. I was like, this one looks good. The one that looked really great that I was like, I have to order this right away, I think it's called The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted.

Elizabeth: That's a good one. That's a fun one. That will be a good antidote to a sad one. That's short stories. They all have to do in some way or another with food. It was so much fun writing them. I will tell you that there's a couple in there that are sad. I think there's two that are sad, but the others are pretty funny.

Zibby: I like reading about sad stuff too. I like all of that. Actually, I just started a new group and a new podcast called "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Elizabeth: [laughs] Moms don't have time for that.

Zibby: I feel like maybe that we should have a book club for that podcast or something. That seems like a good place to start.

Elizabeth: Who doesn't like to talk about food?

Zibby: I know. I know. We could talk about it all day. When you think about your longing for home -- I know you grew up an army brat and all the rest. A lot of your writing in this book was about growing up and your dad and how your relationship with him changed over time. Tell me about how your constant relocation has affected that search for you and that need for belonging.

Elizabeth: It really does have an impact, particularly on sensitive children. I went to one high school reunion in my life. I went two years of high school in Germany and two years in St. Louis, Missouri. In Germany, it was a bunch of army kids all going to this actually quite good school there. It was they who wanted to have the reunion only because we're so small. They said, if you went to Ludwigsburg American High School between the years of this and this, come to a reunion. It wasn't the typical 1966 reunion. One of the things that happened at that reunion is that a large group of us got together and talked about that notion of what it feels like to be uprooted all the time. How does that impact your personality? We all agreed that, here's what it does. You become a fake. You seem gregarious. You seem like you're wide open and ready for friendship, but you're always holding back because you know you're going to have to leave. I think that that can bleed into relationships in general. You have that kind of reserve against -- you can't invest fully in everything around you because you're going to be pulled away from it. It's just too devastating, so you invest a little bit. I was really struck with how every single person in that rather large group agreed with that.

Zibby: That's very interesting. Is that why you mentioned in the book how you feel like you fail at your relationships, like with your partner now even and that he's very patient with you but that you failed in your first marriage? I was wondering because you didn't elaborate on that. I found myself thinking, what does she mean? How did she fail? How is she failing now? Can you give us a little more?

Elizabeth: Okay, we're just going to deliver the goods here. Because I'm always one step away from saying, fine, the end, we're done. It's very easy for me. I'm sorry to say. It's a real character flaw. It's very easy for me to get to that place of saying, forget it, we're done. I've been there so many times with a place. We're done with this place. We're leaving. Then the other part is it really is true that my parents had what my agent calls a Reagan marriage. They really laid the gauntlet down. I don't expect in my lifetime to see that kind of love and loyalty again. Boy, as you know having read the book, it was tough for a while. Holy moly, it was really tough for a while. I think the redeeming part of reading this book is to see how it got worked out, that it ended, and it ended as well as it could have.

Zibby: Wow. That was part of the power of it, watching the changes that go on with somebody else and how that love still manifests itself even in the smallest of gestures. That's one of those things that made my cry, the little lunches, just these little moments at the table.

Elizabeth: You know what got me the most out of all of those moments? The flyswatter. My dad who was this mighty army guy who scared the hell out of everybody mellowed in his older years. Then at the end when he went to what was essentially a daycare center, although we called it the VA center, he made a flyswatter decorated with a daisy. Now flyswatters have a whole other meaning, but never mind. We won't talk about that. Here she has this essentially useless flyswatter all decorated with flowers. Who would want to keep that? She said, "Your father made that for me." She set it aside. Oh, man, I had to stand really still for a moment after that one. There were lots of those.

Zibby: When he was trying to change the battery in the hearing aid and you and your sister, you were rooting for him to do it. It's not just these moments. It's somehow the way that you're writing about them, how you're so in the moment. The fact that you and your sister -- that moment from the outside might not have been so noticeable that he's in the kitchen and you guys are waiting, but there's actually all that unspoken stuff, is what you write about. You capture it. It's so powerful.

Elizabeth: We were both watching him so intently. Please let him have at least this. Let him be able to change his own hearing aid battery, but nope.

Zibby: Are you working on another book now? How can you follow that up with something? It's so personal.

Elizabeth: I think in part because of the situation in which we find ourselves, I'm uncharacteristically scattered. I wrote another Mason book. I wrote these books that take place in a fictional town. There are now three of them. The first one is The Story of Arthur Truluv. I wrote two more. I wrote another one of those. I'm very taken with nonfiction suddenly. After having written ten thousand novels, I'm very taken with nonfiction. I thought about doing a collection about old boyfriends. If there were a party and if there were a group of women talking about old boyfriends, I would so be there. I think that whenever we reveal things about the relationships we had with old boyfriends, there's a commonality, but there are also delicious differences. I've written three. I wanted to do, in essence, a life in boyfriends, how I was at the time, how they were at the time, how these relationships shaped me. In at least two instances, I went back after many, many years and had conversations with these guys. One was a musician. The other, the one who took my heart, ran over it with a tank, and then stepped on it, that guy -- we all have one of those. Many of us do anyway. Boy, that was an interesting conversation. [laughs] That's another thought. Then I have a lot of ideas that I haven't fleshed out. I guess I'm happy at this age that I still have ideas.

I am interested, too, in paying it forward in a way. I do writing workshops, not lately of course. What I want to do, my legacy in a way -- here's a big secret, not that secret, but kind of secret. What I would like to do is provide a writing retreat house where a group of women could come and know that all they were going to hear is support and all they were going to do is have time for themselves. Each woman gets a room. I want to put fresh flowers in there. I want to have books everywhere and a big dining room table that they can gather around and share the day's work with. I did share some of this. In large, to become not just a writing retreat, but a gathering place for women who could disconnect for a few days and come back to themselves and be offered cooking classes, painting classes, just a place to enrich themselves. I kind of want to do this. I like to rescue houses because you know, search for home, search for home. I find these wrecks and transform them into what they used to be. There's a little one I got that's, oh, my god. My partner, who's the guy who does construction, said, "Don't go in there. Do not go inside there." It's really bad, but it's a cute little house. I want to turn that into a cottage. I'm really taken with cottages. That's a place where I want to provide this. I guess it would be my legacy, this place for women. No men allowed, only women. [laughs]

Zibby: I think that's amazing. I would love to stay there in a peaceful room with fresh flowers and nothing but connection and dialogue and time for self. That's a dream. I don't think I could extricate myself from my life, but boy, that sounds heavenly. By the way, on your last book idea, there's a memoir called Five Men Who Broke My Heart by an author named Susan Shapiro who actually taught me a class at The New School was I was twenty-something. It's sort of the same way. She goes back and talks to her five loves of her life and sees what happened to them.

Elizabeth: Is this an older book or a newer?

Zibby: It's older.

Elizabeth: I'm so [indiscernible], Five Men Who Broke My Heart.

Zibby: I think I have it behind me. I can find it in a minute. You should check that out. It's good. Also then, Laura Munson is an author, I don't know if you know her, but she just had a book come out called Willa's Grove. In it, the women go to a retreat similar to what you're talking about, but it's fictionalized. She actually runs retreats. They're not in a cottage. They're in Montana, I think. It's the same kind of idea where she has women come and connect, but not only a couple. She has bigger groups, I think. Anyway, you might want to just, in your comp, research.

Elizabeth: That is so interesting. See, there's no new ideas. It's just the execution.

Zibby: That's not true. It's not true.

Elizabeth: In a way, it is. It's all in the execution. One of the most interesting things I ever did as a writer was to be given a sentence that someone else came up with. The sentence was, "It wasn't until she got outside that she realized her socks didn't match, but somehow that didn't surprise her." When I was given this sentence, I thought, I don't like that sentence. I don't want to write using that. Three different authors got that sentence and were told, write a story using that as the first sentence. They were so remarkably different, so remarkably different, all incredibly different directions that we went. In the same respect, for a woman to write about five men who broke my heart, if you wrote that book, if I wrote that book, she writes that book, they would all be so different.

Zibby: Very true. I would probably want to read all of them.

Elizabeth: Me too.

Zibby: What advice would you have to aspiring authors? You've done every genre. You've been a successful, prolific author for years. What is the secretly, truly? How do you do it? What advice can you give?

Elizabeth: In a way, I had an advantage in that I never took a writing class. I didn't do the literary journals, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, or any of that. I didn't know anything about that stuff. I read a lot. I read a lot. I had always written from the time I was a little kid. I entered into this whole publishing world with a great deal of naïveté which I think, in the end, helped me. As to your point about it, a succinct piece of advice -- this really is straight. It's absolute truth. Don't try to imitate anyone else. Your voice is so valuable. Your point of view has its merit. Your way of expressing that point of view should come from you. That's what's interesting, is to really know a person. I can't abide small talk because to me, it's a lot of noise. I don't want to engage in it. I don't want to hear it. The same thing in writing. I don't want to see somebody being manipulative or calculating. I want to see inside them, truly, even if they're talking about other characters.

I'm standing here at my desk. I have these little quotes around. One thing that I put on here is truth, love, and risk. Those elements are something I always want to be in whatever work I do. If you want to write and you're a little nervous about it, remember that nobody has to see it at first. It can be just for you. The truth is that when most of us write, we get to the point pretty early on when we think, oh, boy, this is great, I want to show everybody this. If you're afraid of that, don't worry about that. It's okay. You can be afraid. In fact, if you're nervous about it, it's probably a good sign. If you're taking a risk in whatever form that takes and you're a little nervous about it because you're thinking, I don't know if this is any good, it's kind of strange, it's probably pretty good. Be yourself first and foremost. Understand, too, that the Nobel committee is not going to come and knock at your door and say, have you finished your book yet? You have to get it out there if you want to be published. You have to take that chance of submitting and being rejected. If you're rejected, you have to remember that reading other people's work is subjective.

If you get rejected, it might have nothing to do with how good your work is. It might have to do with -- let's say you submitted a novel. It could be that they just bought a novel on this theme and yours is even better, but they can't buy it now because they just bought that. You have to keep it church and state. You have to concentrate on your writing and what it is that you're trying to do. When you're all done and if you want to be publishing, you want to submit, at that point, think about marketing and all that other stuff. Frankly, I think it's better to let other people think about that entirely. I can't tell you how many people have told me, "I have this great idea," and they're already thinking about marketing and how much money they're going to make and that they ride in the beautiful car to go to the signings, and they haven't written it yet. The joy is always in the writing. That's always the best part, is getting from what's in here out there. The other stuff, it's nice. It's wonderful to be on the best-seller list. Who wouldn't want to do that? But it doesn't top that feeling of having gotten something out that you needed to get out. Blah, blah, blah, that was a long answer.

Zibby: I loved it. I'm hanging on your every word. Thank you. That was great advice. I'm sure that there's somebody out there who just heard that who really needed to hear it today, so thank you.

Elizabeth: I'm glad. The other thing, of course, as you know, is read. Read, read, read.

Zibby: Yes, I do. [laughs]

Elizabeth: Not only do you read, do you know how many interviews are done -- can I just say this? -- how many interviews are done where the interviewer obviously has not read the book? You understand that right away as an interviewee. You glean that information pretty quickly. Then you know how you're going to have to structure everything. You actually read the book. Not only did you read the book, but you remember everything about it. I know you do that with all your books. That's an incredible talent.

Zibby: I try. I can't get through every book I have on the show. Sometimes I haven't read more than fifty pages. When I love a book, as I did yours, I love it. I can't remember anything about my life. College, forget it. If you want to ask me something about your book in five years, I'm going to remember it. It's the weird twist of memory. At least I can use it now. [laughs] Anyway, thank you. This has been so nice. Thank you again for your book. I'm going to give it to so many people and recommend it and whatever. Thanks for spending your time with me today.

Elizabeth: I truly appreciate it. Thank you. Again, thank you generally for all you're doing.

Zibby: Keep me posted on the cottage. Maybe by the time you have it rolled out into the world I'll have older kids and can get there.

Elizabeth: Vintage quilts in every room, I'm just saying.

Zibby: All right. [laughs] Thanks so much. Buh-bye.

Elizabeth: Bye.

Christie Tate, GROUP

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

Christie Tate: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

Zibby: I am so excited to finally be talking to you. I got this book in the middle or towards the end of the summer. I opened it up. I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover or anything, but I opened this book up this summer, and these are my favorite colors. This is my favorite design. This wins my favorite-cover-ever award just in case you were wondering. [laughs]

Christie: Thank you. I feel super lucky. That was one of the first designs. I thought, this has exceeded all expectation. I love that blue.

Zibby: Amazing, my favorite color. I know your subtitle is How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life, but could you explain a little more in-depth to listeners what Group is about?

Christie: The book opens, and I had just completed my first year of law school. I had gone to the Bursar's office. I got a little index card that told me my class rank was first. I didn't feel any joy. I felt really, really depressed. I started having suicidal thoughts because my life looked really great on paper and obviously my professional future was going to be fine, better than fine, but inside I just was so lonely. I didn't even have that word yet. I had to go to therapy to learn that word. I was isolated. I had no close friends. I'd watch people from college go on girls' trip. I'd be like, how do they do that? People would reach out to me. I didn't know how to reach back. I thought, this is great, I'm just going to die alone. A friend recommended her therapist. I was on a student budget, so I was like, "I can't do therapy." She was like, "It's group, and so it's cheap." I was like, "Okay." I could see something different in her eyes. The memoir is the story of how I went to group and my life was cracked open by the people I met there and the therapist who was the ringleader of all of it.

Zibby: Wow. I loved your descriptions of not only the other people in the group, but Dr. Rosen and how, actually, you had met him. You have been at twelve-step programs for eating disorders for quite some time. In one of your meetings, you had actually had him come, but he was Jonathan R in the group. What did that feel like?

Christie: It was terrifying. When you open the door, I was like, is that the same guy? Between the time I'd made the appointment and then sat in the waiting room and then he opened the door, I decided, this is it, this is the one thing that will save my life. I had my heart set on it. Then he opened the door and I'm like, I know him from twelve-step world. I thought that would be an automatic disqualification. I'm like, well, I won't tell him. Why would he recognize me? There's tons of women and people in these meetings. He didn't recognize me after the first session. Then I started to feel like someday it might trigger him. Then he'd have to kick me out. That would be so embarrassing. It became one of the first tests of, can I tell the truth? Can I risk rejection by saying what I know, which is, I know you from meetings? It seems like you're not supposed to know that about your therapist.

Zibby: I know. This goes back to Lori Gottlieb's book. Do you know that?

Christie: Yeah.

Zibby: She talked in the beginning of that book, as a therapist, of running into a patient at the Starbucks. She was a mess, and that forever altered her relationship with her patient. Now we go to your book where it's sort of similar. You have this view into your therapist that most people do not have, should not perhaps have. I don't know.

Christie: Obviously, I only know what transpired for me. The idea of the blank slate is not quite as blank in my case as it is, I suppose, traditionally.

Zibby: I could so relate to the times in your book where in therapy you were asked to do or say something and you were just so uncomfortable that I could feel you cringing off these pages. You were like, no, no, no, I'm not doing that. I actually can't even say it on this podcast, what they were suggesting that you do. You were like, I could never. Part of the work was opening you up to love and men and not just totally bad-for-you guys.

Christie: Part of what drove me in was I was bereft of all relationships, but it was particularly salient in my relationships with men. I tended to fall for guys who were alcoholic or had very serious depression and didn't have the ability to be in a relationship. Sidenote, I didn't either, but I could just focus on them and say, why don't you love me? I bought you pineapple.

Zibby: [laughs] The reliable pineapple love trick that we all rely on so much.

Christie: It's standard. It's very standard.

Zibby: Very standard. My question about group therapy -- by the way, I've never actually been in group therapy, but I have been in regular therapy. Do you ever get a diagnosis? I know you had three sessions at the beginning. Does everybody get a pull-aside, let's go in the corner, PS, you have OCD, or something like that?

Christie: That is such a great question. How I've seen this play out for me in my groups is people have brought in insurance forms, and you have to put in a code in order to get reimbursed. Everything that is negotiated happens in group. I saw many people come in and say, "I need your signature, Dr. Rosen, on my insurance form," but they want a code. They say to him, "What do I have? What am I?" We would have long discussions, anxiety and depression is a certain code or whatever. I remember I always paid out of pocket because I was -- this is terrible. This is not a part of the book. I'm very, very afraid of forms. I just felt like it was easier. I always knew I had to earn enough money to go to group because I'm so afraid of forms. I remember one time I said -- this was probably year two. I said, "What do I have? Do I have PTSD? Do I have anxiety or depression?" Dr. Rosen said, "Why do you want to know?" I was like, "Well, what's wrong with me? What's my thing? What's my label?" I knew I had an eating disorder, but that was before I even got there. He really discouraged me. I didn't press it super hard because as soon as he said, "Why do you want to know?" I realized my motives weren’t good for me. I wanted to know so then I could be in that box. Then I could go off and do a checklist in a magazine. I have not pressed it. I've not asked for my notes. I can imagine a scenario where if somebody needed to know or wanted to know, it would be discussed in group and they could get that information. It's hard to get information in group without a full discussion, which is something you have to weigh if you really want to go there.

Zibby: Wow. I just could not believe all the stuff that came out in your group and even your unexpected moments with individual members of the group. You were like, wow, I'm not alone anymore, like Marty. It was just so sweet and heartwarming in a way. That's probably mischaracterizing this book which is very emotional, but it's so funny too.

Christie: It's funny. Sessions themselves can be very brutal. That would be my lived experience. Someone confronting me on things I don't want to talk about or that are painful or I start to talk about it and then I misunderstood, that experience is so painful. That's some of the work of intimacy that I have just never done. I was really immature in that way. That's why I was so alone. When I look back, some of the quieter moments with individual group members, in group and outside, they were so filled with love and care. I had just been running from people for so long that I didn't know that people might just rub your back if you're crying or hand you the tissues or offer to come get you. I had kept myself so isolated that those acts of kindness couldn't even penetrate my defenses, essentially.

Zibby: When I met my current husband, by the way, we were walking down to the tennis court and I was upset about something that had happened with my daughter that day. I didn't know him that well. I wasn't looking for a relationship. He put his hand on my back and was like, "Are you okay?" I married him. [laughs]

Christie: Yes, Reader, I Married Him. [laughs]

Zibby: I get the power of those little connections when you feel like you haven't had them in so long and you so need them. He's probably like, what am I even doing here? This is all a big mistake. [laughs] The part of your book during the accident on the beach in Hawaii was, first of all, so well-written and just edge-of-my-seat type of reading, which is always wonderful as a reader, but I'm so sorry for what happened. Are you able to share now? Do you want to keep it quiet?

Christie: I think sharing is probably helpful. I was so young. It was right before my fourteenth birthday. I was from a very modest family in Texas. We weren’t going to be going to Hawaii. There was a friend of mine, and her family had been so welcoming and so loving to me. We went to Hawaii. While we were there, her father drowned in the water of the ocean. For years, I just didn't talk about it, but I thought about it. It's not like I thought about it all the time. Right around the anniversary time, I'd get really emotional and kind of a panicky feeling. I felt like I was never allowed to talk about it because it was a long time ago. I remember saying that was a long time, and it had been eight years. Each year, I had an excuse not to -- it wasn't my dad. I think I had the overriding feeling that I got to go home to my family in Texas. My dad and mom were alive. We were all well. It's almost like that didn't happen to me because it wasn't my father. That's some of the early work I had to do in group to see what the cost was of disavowing the trauma for me and how that might have impacted my ability to attach. I was so out there, like, I'm a recovering bulimic. I had stories I was willing to tell about myself. Then there were these quiet ones that I felt buttoned down about. I think they were, obviously, tripping me up in relationships.

Zibby: Before the accident on the beach, or the drowning, were you able to be more open with people? I know it's such an important age where things would have developed and then didn't. As a child, were you very withdrawn in terms of how you were talking to people? Did anyone notice a shift in you? Did your family or anybody?

Christie: That's a great question. I'm pretty outgoing and extraverted. I did always have friends. From a very young age, I had a lot of shame, shame about my body. I remember that by age five. I wasn't actively bulimic until right before Hawaii, actually. I think timing really matters. The woman that I went -- she was a girl at the time. The family that I went with, she and I tried out for cheerleader together. The winter before, we'd gone skiing. She's lively and hilarious. I was there. Even if I can't quite remember who I was, I know who she was. She wouldn't have picked some morose bump on a log. I remember us laughing. I have snapshot memories of us laughing. I was a good student, but I was also kind of a wisecracker, as you can imagine from the book. I had an irreverent sense of humor that seemed maybe a little more male than female at the time, the way that Texas is coded. I think that it was the beginning of adolescence and the trauma. Probably even without that, I was gearing up for just regular adolescence strife. You add in that, I think it bumped me off the road for quite a while.

Zibby: You say it wasn't your dad, but it's not like you were in the hotel and you found out he drowned. You were on the beach and saw him and had to pull him on the beach and get help. You yourself had almost drowned a second ago. That is hardcore. Everybody's had stuff in their life, but most people have not had to pull a drowning grown man out of the water. That's a lot to hold onto and not talk about. To not feel like you have permission to cope with it is a lot.

Christie: It's funny. I'm sure a lot of people have this experience. Now that I have a daughter who is -- she's not that old yet. As I imagine packing her off to go on a trip with another family and imagine getting the phone call that my parents got, I have much more compassion for myself and carrying that burden. I had the insane idea that I could've prevented it or I should have. That is a lot for a kid to carry. I can see that now that I have kids approaching that age. I'm like, wow, I'm glad I got the help I needed. Let's say that.

Zibby: By the way, do people still go on vacations with other families? Nobody I know does that anymore. Maybe families go together. The idea of sending my kid off on someone else's vacation -- it used to happen all the time. I brought kids all the time. I went on other...

Christie: That's a really funny question. The only instances where I know that in our community is we know some kids who were only children, and they so they may double up for obvious reasons. It's not nearly as prevalent as it was when I was growing up in the eighties.

Zibby: Me too. It was like, who's coming on vacation with us? Each of you take a friend.

Christie: Yeah, the bring-a-friend thing. I would take friends to the exotic location of Forreston, Texas, where my grandparents had a farm. It was super fun. I would take all kinds of friends there. Now it's funny, that's an interesting marker of change in generations.

Zibby: And the idea that I would just not spend my vacation with my child. I am fighting my ex-husband about, how days of the vacation could we each have? To be like, let's just send her with the Jones' over there, I don't know. [laughter]

Christie: I know. It's so funny.

Zibby: Not that there's anything bad. It used to happen all the time. Oh, well. So tell me about the act of writing this book. You sort of alternate between being private and not private. Some of these things, you held close to home. Some, you feel okay with. Now you've let it all out.

Christie: [laughs] When I started the book, I did a first draft. I started the book on November the 9th of 2015. I remember the date because I just did some research about it. I was like, how long have I been living with this book? First drafts are terrible. It was just anecdote. Then my therapist said this. Then I dated this guy. It didn't have any arc or some of the heart and no specificity. There was no scene of me binging on apples. I was very light about the Hawaii situation. It was pretty superficial. I got feedback that it was superficial and I needed to dig deeper. I didn't know how. I didn't know how to revise a novel. I mean, it's not a novel. I didn't know how to revise a whole book length. I ended up in a situation where -- the writer Lidia Yuknavitch, she does a class called Body of the Book. You can workshop in a small group, the first 130 pages of your work. I thought, I'll do that, and then they can tell me what's missing or what am I doing. It was incredibly transformative because they were able to, both Lidia and my workshop mates who were incredible, they would circle something. I vaguely made a comment, like, I binge on apples at night, and then I move on very quickly. Everybody circled it in red pen, like, show us. I was like, show you? Every apple? It felt to me like that would be tedious. Once I went in there, all the places where they said, give us a scene, I started building scenes. I think that's where a new energy came to life. Instead of telling, I was showing what I was like, what happened, and what I'm like now because of this process.

Zibby: In terms of the law career and where you are today -- now, of course, you're an author, which is amazing. What is your daily life like? Tell me about your daughter. I mean it. Now I feel so invested in you with the book.

Christie: I feel really lucky. The great thing about talking about the book now or having it out in the world is every day, I feel grateful. Every day I talk about the book, I touch back to that woman who was first in her class. I clung to that because it's all I had. Now it's so obnoxious to be like, I'm the valedictorian, but literally, it was the only tentpole I had. When I look back, I get to think about who's in my life today. I have two children. I have a husband. It's corona time, so we're all home doing our things in our little corners of the world. I still go to group. I still work full time, so that's that. I am really committed. I get up really early, in the fives. I do writing. I also do meditation just because I don't know how to survive things that are happening in the wider world without a little bit of meditation. Do the writing until the people wake up around me. I get them going. I do my day job. During lunch, I do more writing. That's when I would meet with a writing group.

Then twice a week, I Zoom into my therapy group. What readers will see is the memories of my group and I are very close, and so I'll go on a walk with someone from group or we'll meet for a socially distant coffee. It's a really full experience. The other day, I was complaining to one of the characters in the book, Max, this is a super obnoxious thing, "I'm so busy. I have so much going on." First thing he said was, "Everyone does, so get over yourself." Also, he'll say to me, whenever I complain, he'll say, "This is the life you wanted, remember?" I'm like, oh, yeah. Driving my son to the baseball field or getting my daughter to her outdoor dance class, this is exactly what I wanted. In my minivan and my family and all these people and phone calls to return to people who love me and who want to fill me in, that is exactly what I wanted. Like anybody who has a full life, it's kind of like, what plate am I going to drop today? But it's a privilege to have plates.

Zibby: It's a privilege to have plates. I love it. It's so true. In terms of advice to other people who might want to write a memoir, what would you say?

Christie: I would say read, read, read. Read the memoirs you love. Read them again. This is super advice I'm taking myself right now. I've reread my memoirs that I really love, particularly Claire Dederer's Love and Trouble and Kiese Laymon's Heavy. Every year, I read Lidia Yuknavitch's Chronology of Water. I love those books. They're artists. I want to get inside of what they're doing. I think that the idea that the only part of writing a book is sitting down and writing has not been my experience. I would say reading widely. Also, join a writing group. We're all long distance, my writing group. We've been together almost three or four years. We all live across the country. We're telephonic because this was before everything went Zoom. Now we've got on Zoom. It's free. You have to make the time for it. I learn so much from the women and the way that they push themselves. Some of them are novelists. Some of them are essayists. Some of them are memoirists. Having the community is invaluable, learning from them, getting that every-two-week feedback on my writing. We're going to talk about one of my pieces this afternoon. I still get nervous. Even though it's a first draft and it doesn't need to be great, but just the exercise of putting myself out there, I think that's really invaluable. For years, I wanted a writing group. I didn't know how to get one. What worked for me was I took a couple classes. Then I would ask people in the classes. It doesn't have to be giant. It could be one other person. I just think having company and feedback is really invaluable. I don't know how people do it without it.

Zibby: That's great advice. What are you working on now? What's your piece for today?

Christie: I was trying to a write a piece about -- one of the things that I'm interested in is what's happening to my body right now. There's middle age, of course. There's anxiety. There's upcoming elections and book publications. I've been having this totally random trapezius pain. I didn't even know what the trapezius was until I got the pain. I'm writing about the sensation and what the trapezius means. In woo-woo Eastern medicine, the trapezius, it's the heart of the back or whatever. I'm just exploring what that pain means. I think when it started was when I went to record the audiobook. I was sitting there and I was reading a scene. It was painful when it happened, painful when I wrote it. It was one of these groups that was very intense. I'm alone in the booth. There's this old engineer. I'm talking about my problematic sex life. I'm sweating. I'm alone with this man. I'm reading it into the world. My trapezius just instantly crimped. I've had enough therapy to know that those are all related. I'm interested in thinking about what part of me is still afraid to have my story out there, my truth, my experiences, to get bigger in the world. I think my body is registering my anxiety. It's right now showing up in my trapezius. We'll see if they got any of that in two thousand words I gave them.

Zibby: I think that's so interesting.

Christie: We'll see.

Zibby: I love it. I feel like new aches and pains come every day. I'm like, really? I'm only in my forties. I thought that was a sixties, seventies situation.

Christie: Totally. It's so humbling.

Zibby: Oh, well. [laughs] Thank you. Thanks, Christie. I loved this book. I'm so excited you came on the show. I can't wait to see it come out into the world. I'm just so rooting for you, in your corner, and all that.

Christie: Thank you so much. Thanks for all you do for writers and readers and listeners. It's incredible. It's such a bright light. You are a bright light. I am so happy to be here.

Zibby: Thank you so much. I want to read that essay, by the way. I'm serious. Send it over.

Christie: I definitely will.

Zibby: Okay. Workshop it, and then I want to see it.

Christie: Perfect. All right, see ya.

Zibby: Bye.

Alisson Wood, BEING LOLITA

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

Alisson Wood: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you.

Zibby: I am just sorry this took us so long. Especially as soon as I started reading your book, I was like, what has the holdup been? I'm so sorry. Anyway, delighted to be talking to you. Being Lolita, can you please tell listeners what this is about?

Alisson: At its core, this is a book very much about power and sex and gender. In a much more simple plot way, it's about how when I was seventeen, I became ensnared in this incredibly abusive relationship with an English teacher in high school. He gave me the book Lolita. He told me it was a beautiful story about love. I was seventeen. I didn't know any better. The book follows the story of how I was groomed and how things escalated very quickly and became very abusive and how I was able to leave the relationship and then what my life has been like since and how this experience has impacted me both for good and bad.

Zibby: How would you say the experience has impacted you?

Alisson: On the not-so-good hand, trauma never goes away. This experience was incredibly bad. It was very traumatic. In a lot of ways, it set me up for a lot of bad relationships. This is why it's so important to talk to teenagers about healthy relationships and consent and boundaries and red flags of abuse. There's all this research that shows that your first relationship very much creates this mold for future relationships. My first relationship was a secret. It was incredibly abusive. It was full of manipulation and lying. That was what I thought love was. That was tough to figure out that that's not love. I'm thirty-six now. I spent a lot of time in therapy and just figuring things out and making a lot of mistakes. There is the other side. You can get through it. On the good side, though, I think that because of what happened to me I am incredibly, incredibly aware and supportive of my students. I teach now at NYU. I teach undergraduate students. I'm so aware and careful. I want to be a teacher that I wish that I had had as opposed to the teacher I had.

Zibby: It's so funny. I feel like so many of the authors I interview mention the influence of one teacher along the way as setting them on their path to becoming a published author. Someone has to notice your gift or your potential or whatever. That can just change everything. The power that you have as a teacher on all these aspiring authors -- you teach creative writing, right?

Alisson: Yeah.

Zibby: It's pretty, I would think, almost a daunting responsibility in a way.

Alisson: It is. A funny thing is that I got angry about what happened to me in a brand-new way once I started teaching. Undergraduates, they're eighteen, nineteen. I teach an intro class, so it's a lot of freshman. As I'm sure any parent knows, they're still kids. They’ve never rented an apartment on their own. They’ve probably never paid a bill. They’ve probably never worked full time. They might not even know how to cook. In so many ways, they're still kids. When we send them off to college, it's this wonderful opportunity for a safety net for them to figure out how to be an adult. There's a dorm, so they’ll never be homeless. There's a dining hall, so they’ll never go hungry. There's all these safety nets in place, which is wonderful. When I began teaching, the first time I went into a classroom with my own students I was just struck by how young they are. For someone to go into a classroom thinking anything except, how can I support and encourage and keep these students safe -- for someone to go into a classroom and be thinking about their own sexual or emotional or ego gratification is just monstrous. It made me angry about what happened to me in a whole new way because I think teaching is sacred. I think young people should be nothing but supported. To do anything else is just horrible.

Zibby: What do you think your teacher originally thought when he went into teaching? Do you think that this just happened? Do you think he went in with lofty goals? I know he was so young at the time as well.

Alisson: He was somewhere between twenty-six and twenty-eight. I don't remember. There's sort of two options for how that went. On one side, he really did misread Lolita. [laughter] He really did think this was this utterly romantic story. He really did think that he and I were in love and this was this thing that was fine. That means he was kind of stupid, to be frank. I'm sorry, really? I was seventeen. I was a high school student. How on earth could you do the backflips in your head to make that seem fine? The other option is that he was a predator from the start and he knew exactly what he was doing and he was doing it on purpose. That's also incredibly, incredibly difficult because I want to believe that people are good and that people aren't evil or anything. I don't know. I never will. Either he was stupid or he's a terrible person, and probably a little bit of both.

Zibby: These are the choices today. Not so great.

Alisson: No, not so great. One of the toughest things -- this is something I've had to face and acknowledge over time. This is what I lean to, I think he was predatory from the get-go. I think he knew what he was doing. I just don't understand how you can go into a high school and not think, huh, maybe I should not try to fuck my students, and how you can make that seem okay. That then means that I was a victim, clean-cut a victim. Something that's interesting about victim blaming, even especially when you do it yourself, which I did, of course, for a long time -- I was like, well, I flirted with him. I wanted this. I thought he was so cute. To start with, that's completely developmentally appropriate. It's completely okay for a teenager to have a crush on their teacher. No big deal. That's fine. It's part of what's going on when you're a teenager. Hormones are flying. It's so exciting. Then there's this teacher who maybe pays attention to you. That's totally fine. What's wrong is when the adult, the teacher, crosses that line. That's morally and ethically and, at times, legally wrong. My experience was normal and completely okay. The victim blaming part came in when I wanted to believe that I had some level of control over what had happened, so I blamed myself which is then blaming my choices, my actions. In actuality, I think I was just a victim. I don't think there was really any blame on my part. That's also really hard to face because that's really sad. You want to believe that you're a powerful, strong person who has some control. It's tough to face that that's not always the truth. It's been a process.

Zibby: Everyone's got their stuff. Do you think you became a teacher in a way to kind of right the wrongs of what happened?

Alisson: The funny thing is it was in no way conscious. I've always wanted to teach. I've always loved that. I've always loved writing. It felt very natural and organic. Then of course as I'm writing the book, I'm like, huh, interesting. I end up a teacher. It's one of those things where it's like, I don't know if it's quite that simple. Clearly, part of what I do is to try and right the wrong that happened to me and be the kind of teacher that I wish that I had had. That's really important to me.

Zibby: It's almost a way of making amends in a way.

Alisson: Definitely. Reparations, but I'm not the one who should be making the reparations.

Zibby: I know you're not. I know. I didn't say it made sense. I'm just saying from one of those weird subconscious things that we all do to cope with something.

Alisson: Isn't that such the work of women to do this kind of work for others? That's such a woman thing that we are trained to do. We're trained to care and fix things. That's a whole other conversation. [laughs]

Zibby: Yes. Let's save that for a cup of coffee or something.

Alisson: Maybe a glass of wine.

Zibby: A glass of wine, that would be great. I was so interested in how you came into this book and how you came into, not the book itself, but how you as a character came into the relationship of the book and your backstory and how you started it feeling so other than other people in your school and that you had gone through a lot yourself. There were all these rumors about your hospitalization. Had she tried to kill herself? Had she been doing this with other guys? All that swirling around you and your previous diagnoses and also the whole insomnia part which I thought was really fascinating. You got in so much trouble for that all the time, missing classes and everything. Even though it was documented, it put you on a totally different trajectory from an academic standpoint. Tell me a little more about all of that.

Alisson: Like so many teenagers, I struggled when I was a teenager. Starting probably when I was fourteen or fifteen, I began having really serious depression. There was no specific reason. It just happened like it does oftentimes with teenagers. When you start hormones and puberty, that can often be a time when depressive episodes or any sort of mental illness will sort of kick in. I just became incredibly depressed. At one point, I was cutting myself. I never tried to kill myself, but I was in a very dark place for a very long time. Like you mentioned, I became an insomniac. I switched my nights and days for a while. I was not a happy, stable camper. I was very, very depressed for a long time, and so I stopped going to school. If you're up all night and you're sleeping during the day, you're not making class. My depression was so serious that it was at the point where I had ECT. I had electroconvulsive therapy when I was in high school to try and snap me out of it. ECT is incredibly safe. We have this real stigma about it in our culture because of the way that it's portrayed in movies and in TV, but it's actually really safe. It's only a couple seconds. You're under anesthesia. You're not awake. They give you muscle relaxers. There's no shaking. It's an incredibly effective treatment for depression. This is very much an aside in my book, but it is something that I think is important that I wish we didn't stigmatize treatments for depression. I think we've gotten better about talking about mental illness and medication. We're better at that, but I think ECT is still something that's sort of, that's only if you're psychotic or something. It's really dangerous. It's really not. It's actually one of the safest treatments for pregnant women because anesthesia doesn't pass through the placenta, so there's no danger to the baby as there are in many medications. I'm sorry, this is an aside.

Zibby: No, I find it really interesting. I'm like, gosh, I could've used a little ECT when I was pregnant. [laughs]

Alisson: It saved my life. I really believe that. It's this dark corner of mental health that people don't talk about because there's this horrible stigma. When this was happening, this was the late nineties, early two thousands. This was almost twenty years ago or more than twenty years ago. There was a lot of stigma about mental illness at that point still. It's interesting thinking about that because part of the reason that medication has come so far in being normalized is because prescription companies were able to start advertising their drugs. I remember the first time I saw the ad for Prozac in a magazine. It was the stormy and then the sun. Prozac, it'll fix it. That's part of why. There's been all this money in advertising to make medication seem okay and thus to make people buy it, whereas there's no big ECT. There's big pharma. There's no big ECT. It's machines. There's no money to be made, so there's not this public service trying to break down the stigma.

Anyway, when I came back to school -- I had gone to a therapeutic day school my junior year. Also, that was a normal school, smaller population. The only real difference was that we had group therapy in the afternoons where it's just teenagers in a circle talking about what's bugging them. [laughs] I came back my senior year, and people thought I had died. People were like, she ended up at a hospital because she tried to kill herself. She's this slut, blah, blah, blah. Teenagers can be cruel. I think that hasn’t changed. I was very much an outsider when I first came back to school. I didn't really have any friends. I felt very alone, which also made me really easy prey. One of the first steps in an abusive relationship or in an abuser's plan of action is to isolate their victim. I was already pretty isolated. It just made it easier.

Zibby: Wow. To your point about stigma, by the way, I'm on the board of the Child Mind Institute. It's all about helping childhood mental illness up through teenagers, so it would include high school and all that. There's research and there's treatment, but a huge component is trying to get rid of the stigma of mental illness because that's a whole added layer of everything.

Alisson: I really struggled with -- that was something that I wasn't sure if I should include. On one hand, I felt like it was really important context to who I was and how this happened. I was very lonely. I was very sad. I was depressed. I was very vulnerable. It was part of why I think I was such an easy target. I really believe that. At the same time, I was afraid that because of the stigma it'd be used against me.

Zibby: No.

Alisson: It has been.

Zibby: Really?

Alisson: Yes. One of the first critical reviews of the book, the opening line was, "Alisson Wood had shock therapy, was a cutter, was on twenty different medications, and then this happened." It set me up to be like, oh, she's this crazy unreliable narrator. Who's going to listen to this book? Honestly, that first review was sort of all of my fears. It was everything I was afraid of that would happen. I really felt like it was important to be honest and to be fully honest and fully vulnerable with my reader. I feel like that makes a good memoir. That's part of the point, to share.

Zibby: A hundred percent. It would've been a different story without that context. It's not like because you're depressed you deserved to be sexually abused. Who would think that? The behaviors come from the underlying stuff. I'm sorry that that happened to you. That's really beside the point and someone who just missed the plot of your book entirely.

Alisson: It's so common. It's so common for teenagers and for any age group, but I think it's especially common for teenagers because oftentimes that's when it'll first start popping up. I just think we're so bad at supporting teenagers with this. We're just so bad at it. I think we've come a long way, but there's still a long way to go. Especially queer teenagers or trans teenagers or women, it's tough.

Zibby: I know you worried about the beginning, but even just having the whole story out there when you decided to make this a memoir and publish it and then actually as you were writing it and it was coming out, did you have fears about that for all the personal stuff? The whole thing is very personal.

Alisson: The book is really personal.

Zibby: [laughs] I know. That's what I'm saying.

Alisson: It is a very personal book. You know, I actually am not and didn't worry that much about that. Really, what I worried about was the being honest about the depression part. I worried about how I would be judged for that. For some reason, I was like, this is what it is. I feel like when you write a memoir you make a contract with the reader. It's like, okay, the whole truth, nothing but the truth even when it's really ugly, when it's not flattering. It's funny. I didn't struggle with, someone's going to read this, people are going to know this about me. I struggled at times with the actual writing because it was going back to something really traumatic. It was going back to something really awful and painful and embarrassing and just like, oh, my god, I cannot believe I need to write this scene when this happened. I knew it was important. This bothered me to no end, early readers were like, oh, my god, the scene where he made you pee in front of him, that's the best scene. I'm like, that one? One of the most embarrassing things and shameful and awful things, sexual humiliation things, that ever happened, that's your favorite scene? Okay, great. [laughs] To me, that speaks to how universal in some ways, maybe not that exact situation, but I think for so many women we've been put in situations where we had to do things that we didn't want to. Abuse is so common. Also, the power imbalance abusive relationships like with the teacher, it's incredibly common. I hear from readers every single day still. I hear from readers, emails and DMs and things like that of women thanking me for writing the book, which is just so amazing, but then talking about how, I feel understood. I feel seen. I feel acknowledged because this happened to me or something very similar happened to me. That's honestly the best part about this book and has been the best part about publishing it.

Zibby: Having made it through the trauma of reliving the moment and going through the actual writing and being a creative writing teacher, I have to get your advice for aspiring authors. You must have hours' worth. What are some of the things that were most helpful to you and that you think are the most key in trying to write a memoir?

Alisson: I was really lucky in that I had an awful lot of primary source documents. I had a stack of journals from my senior year. I had all these photographs of me from that time. I had a whole bunch of letters and notes and hall passes and hotel receipts and all these things that were really helpful in creating the timeline because memory is faulty. Memory can make mistakes. An example of something I write about in the book is how I distinctly remembered this moment or this scene where the teacher, in the shop room, in his study hall, the teacher wanted to trade me my bra size for the size of his penis. I distinctly remembered that happening, but I thought it had happened in May. In May, I would've been eighteen. We would've been almost "together." That's still awful, but it sort of mitigated it a bit in my mind.

Then when I was going through my journals and trying to track things, I realized that it had happened on November 21st. That meant I was seventeen. He had only known me for, at most, two months. That also showed how quickly it escalated from after-school help because I was a really good writer to sexual coercion stuff. That today, of course, would've been over text message or a Snapchat or whatever, trying to coerce me to send him a topless photo for a dick pic. That was a moment when I really snapped through the victim blaming and was like, nope, there is no way, no how that anyone can make an excuse for this. There are no jumping jacks that you can do to say this was fine and this was my fault. Nope, nope, nope. That was really upsetting, again, to just face that. I think that was one of the hardest parts about the book. At some points, it felt like I was opening up this onion of trauma. The more I looked, the more I reread, the more I dove into it, the worse it was. Writing the book was really hard.

Zibby: I bet. Also, tell me two seconds about Pigeon Pages.

Alisson: Pigeon Pages is a writing community that I founded about four years ago. I founded it because I really wanted to create my own writing community. I wanted it to be full of women and queer people and non-binary folks and trans folks. Basically, I didn't want any straight white guys in it. [laughs] I wanted to create my own community. We hold monthly readings. We are a literary journal. We publish every week, poetry and prose. It's really wonderful. We're opening tomorrow, an essay contest with Morgan Jerkins, who's the wonderful author, as our judge. We're so excited.

Zibby: I just had her on my podcast.

Alisson: She's the best. She's so wonderful. She's judging our essay contest. It opens October 1st and runs through November 15th. You can find out all sorts of information at --

Zibby: -- Maybe I'll enter. [laughs]

Alisson: We're @PigeonPagesNYC on all the socials, and that's our website.

Zibby: I couldn't believe how many authors who I've had on my podcast have been contributors in some way to Pigeon Pages. I was going down and down and down. Oh, my gosh, so many. I'm all about it. I followed it. I'm very interested. It's awesome.

Alisson: We're a lovely nest.

Zibby: That's so nice.

Alisson: Also, a lot of bird puns.

Zibby: Yes. Why not?

Alisson: We believe writing is joy. Let's be a little silly. We can all get a little pretentious. Pigeon Pages is a place for, all right, let's knock that down a bit. Let's talk about writing, which is what it's supposed to be.

Zibby: I love it. Alisson, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on, for discussing Being Lolita, for going through the pain that you had to go through to get it on the page so that other people could benefit. I hope to continue our conversation offline sometime.

Alisson: Yes. Thank you so much. I'm so honored to be here. I truly appreciate it.

Zibby: It was my pleasure. Bye.

Alisson: Bye.

Jenna Bush Hager, EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IN ITS TIME

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

Jenna Bush Hager: I love your podcast. Sometimes moms do have time to read. I'm so happy to be here.

Zibby: I feel like you and I are united in our desire to help other people read more. I love shouting out to good books. You pick all your books for all of America to enjoy, so I feel like we're on the same page.

Jenna: Definitely.

Zibby: Tell listeners more about Everything Beautiful in Its Time, which, by the way, I listened to on all my walks with the dogs back and forth across the park and was so great. I was crying in Central Park. It was just amazing. You've been coming with me on all my walks lately.

Jenna: First of all, I have to tell you, recording that audiobook, it was in the middle of the pandemic. The book is about the thirteen months I lost my three remaining grandparents, so it was a really difficult time for me. Recording the audiobook, Henry, my husband, was like -- I came home with just the puppy-est eyes. I said, "The poor recording technician who got this assignment had no idea he would be passing me Kleenexes." He kept saying, "Do you need a minute?" He was so kind and thoughtful. It was reliving these moments that were difficult. I wrote this book, I started writing, really, for myself. The night that my grandmother, Barbara, died, I was alone in my apartment in New York City. My husband was in Texas. My sister, who at the time lived in the city, was in Texas. I was watching the news. One of the things that's really hard and interesting that she taught us was that losing somebody publicly is difficult. I turned on the news. There were all these in memoriams and news reports about her. At first, I just couldn't stop watching. Then I was overcome by the fact that, obviously, they were just talking about her as Barbara Bush, the politician's wife. There was so much about our Ganny and that wouldn't be said that night. It just wouldn't. There was no reason for it to be except for that’s how I knew her. Nobody knew her as intimately as we did. I turned off the news, and I wrote her a letter. That was really the beginning of this book. I use a writing a lot in my own life as a way to heal, as a way to process. Then I just decided to publish it, but it started off for me.

Zibby: Amazing. That's how the best stuff comes out. It's truthful, from the heart, what you need. Turns out, other people need it too. Isn't it true that you weren’t there because you had strep throat which you caught from your daughter? which is such a typical mom thing to have had happen.

Jenna: Yes. I went to the doctor. My dad was like, "If you have strep throat, you can't go." Obviously, my grandmother was dying, but also, my grandpa was there. I just knew I had it. My daughter, Mila, had had it the week before. Of course, moms are so close with our kids. I remember when Mila got the stomach flu. I called my parents to tell her, when she was a brand-new baby, that Henry and I were up all night cleaning up her mess. My parents just laughed knowingly. They were like, "Now you will be getting things like the stomach bug that you just haven't had since you were in third grade yourself." I couldn't go to see her, but I did get to have a conversation with her before she passed away, which was profound and meaningful to me.

Zibby: What you said about it being a public occurrence at the same time, you had a scene in your book where you're pushing Mila and holding Poppy. You're walking down the street. You got like a hundred text messages all at the same time. You're like, oh, no, what happened? You had to backtrack and figure it out. I could so see you just like any other mom, but here it is, a huge public figure. How do you even reconcile something like that when you have it coming at you in every direction?

Jenna: I don't know. It's so funny. Probably just like any other mom. We live in a place where we're walking everywhere around, New York City. There's just been so many moments where -- I really do try to put my phone away and be -- especially when they were really little and they didn't get the fact why I was holding this thing and looking here instead of at them. That day, I put my phone away. I played with them at the park. I watched them play. I hadn’t been looking at anything. Then when we got up to leave, I checked the phone to see the time. I had so many text messages from, I was telling Hoda the other day, one from our old boss who was like, "Let me know if you need me." That was the first text. I was like, why would I need anybody? My parents had tried to call, but my phone was away. My grandmother had said she was going to seek comfort care. I had never really even heard those words. I didn't have context for them. I didn't know what that meant. The five blocks home was very distracted. I tried not to be that way, but I just was trying to figure out what was happening while I had one scooting child and one toddler in her stroller.

I feel like moms, dads, parents, but maybe particularly moms, we just have to make it work. I remember when I had little kids and I got sick for the first time. I was like, wait, what's going to happen? It's like, you're not going to be sick. A parent, no matter what, you have to parent through it all. It's sometimes an exhausting part of it all, when you're grieving, when you are hurting. I know so many people right now feel exhausted by everything. Also, kids can be the most beautiful distraction. The things that they say, my girls healed me, what they said. Now I have a baby boy, but I didn't have him at the time. What they said about their great-grandparents, all three of them, who they lost, who I lost, little things that they said which I wrote down in this book -- I'm so happy because otherwise, I would never remember. The little things they said and did brought me this beautiful peace. They're so wise, our children are. If you want to feel good, put your phone away. Try to not think about the news of the day. Listen to what your kids say. Write it down. They say the most hilarious, beautiful things. I knew they’ve been a major comfort to me. I hope I don't put that on them. I'm not like, how should I feel better? Just by listening to the funny, quirky, beautiful way they see the world, I feel like it can be a wonderful comfort.

Zibby: I completely agree. I went through a loss recently. I have four kids. They were so amazing. They can be supportive. They’ll come over and hug. Then they just say the crazy things that they say because they're kids. I wasn't smart enough to write all of them down.

Jenna: Write them down when we get off. Write them down when we're done today because you'll want to remember them I later.

Zibby: I know. It's so true. Grief is so unpredictable. You had so much so quickly, such a huge part of your family. It's nice to have had that outlet, at least. Of course, you're not using them for it, but you just have to. You don't have the choice to stay in bed and dwell in it. You can't as a parent. You just have to figure out how to make it all work at the same time. Even you, you wrote in the book about having a meeting at work and then almost missing the bus pickup for your daughter. I feel like I've been in that same situation so many times, like, [gasp], pickup! [laughs] It's so relatable.

Jenna: I know. Why is pickup the most stressful of all things? This particular day -- actually, it's so funny because the people that I was at this lunch meeting with -- I remember, I felt like I was on fire. It was the beginning of the year. I had a to-do list. I was wearing heels. I wear heels every day at work. Then I take them off and I put on, they're thrown right here on the ground, these clog mom boots. I can run in these things.

Zibby: Those are cute, though.

Jenna: Thank you. I can run in those. I cannot run in high-heel knee-high boots. It was the beginning of January. I was wearing them to prove to myself that this year was going to be new, was going to be a different year. Of course, I forgot Mila at the bus stop. The amount of times even in the short months -- weeks. It feels like months. It's been a couple weeks since my kids have been in school. The amount of times I've been racing to the bus stop, I can't even tell you, almost every day.

Zibby: I once ran through the Central Park transverse where the cars are to try to get to curriculum night on time all dressed up and all this stuff. It's just so funny when you think about the city and all these moms running, not just moms, but all the running to get to places on time and what we do to make it work here.

Jenna: I know. By the way, that was a moment where I really, and I have them often, but really loved New York City because I was running and the UPS guy was like, "You got it, girl!" Another mom was like, "I've been there." To feel supported by your community in a moment of complete panic and shame is [distorted audio].

Zibby: Yes, as opposed to driving like a maniac and all that risk. Another part of your book that I really responded to is when you were talking about your Aunt Dory and how she bought the dress for the funeral. Your grandmother was more of a spendthrift. She didn't want people to waste money on clothes. She bought this special dress and then went to the mirror. The mirror fell on the ground. She took it as a sign that her mom was upset, and she went and returned the dress. You had a beautiful message to her of what your interpretation of that was. Can you just share a little of that?

Jenna: Sure. My grandmother was a force. She took on things, private pain, things we didn't know. She took it on. She was an enforcer. We didn't necessarily know why she was the way she was. She was private and also very transparent at the same time. I'm not sure if that makes sense. Towards the end of her life, we were in Maine one summer. I came down the stairs early. I still picture her when I think about her in this screened-in porch. Early in the morning, she would write in her journal and write letters to her friends and do a little bit of work, read the newspaper. When I think of her now, that's where I imagine her. I came downstairs. It was early. It was before the sun came up. She was in a particularly sharing way, sharing mood. She told me a lot about her growing up. She grew up with a mother that would say things like, "Martha," who was her sister, "is the beauty. You are the funny one." Then her mother passed away in car accident. She had a stepmother that reinforced that. Luckily, she had a dad who thought she was brilliant and hilarious and told her she could do anything she ever wanted to. I do think -- and I don't know. This is just my opinion. When I heard these stories, I felt her pain. I just couldn't imagine, as a mother myself and as somebody that's been raised by a woman who was gracious and loving and loved Barbara and I unconditionally and equally even though we were so different -- we were never compared, thank goodness for me. I just couldn't imagine being that little girl that heard over and over, "Don't eat that, Barbara," and felt less than in her appearance.

My grandmother definitely had a way about her where she would sometimes make comments. I could tell afterwards she would feel like, why did I do that? She would comment on our clothes. Maybe after freshman year in college when everybody gains a little bit, there would be a comment about how we would look. What I understood about her in that moment sitting having that conversation about her childhood was that any of that part of who she was, was really a reflection of how she raised and that she was, in some ways, talking to that little girl. She was saying to herself, why do you look like that? She didn't mean it to us. When my Aunt Doro bought this dress and thought, god, Mom would think this is too expensive, I should take it back, and the mirror fell -- and that was Doro's interpretation. I said, "Maybe she was thinking, stop worrying about the way you look." The interesting thing about her is that she was a complicated woman. She didn't, in some ways, worry about the way she looked. She famously said talking about your hair is boring. She let her hair go gray probably before she was even my age, in her thirties. I do think deep down there was some pain that was never really resolved. I think she was telling my aunt, who is beautiful and incredible, don't waste your time on earth worrying about things like that, which is so hard because so many of us as women have that little voice in us that berates us for certain things. I think what she was saying is, don't waste your time looking in the mirror criticizing yourself.

Zibby: I love that. It's giving permission to stop self-flagellating in a way, being so self-critical. I recently started, in addition to this podcast, "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight" because I feel like so many moms, with COVID in particular, have been at home and gaining weight and in their closets all upset and all the rest. Then as I was focusing on that and listening to your book, I sat at my computer and then I saw that now you're doing Move with Jenna at eleven o'clock on the Today Show. I'm like, this is amazing.

Jenna: I'm doing Move with Jenna. I'm not the one that's actually working out, but yes, we are doing it. I always like to move for mental health. I like to go for long walks. Hoda and I have been doing outdoor classes here in the city right after work. Otherwise, it's hard to go. Once you get home and you're with the kids, and I have a new baby who's always home, forget it. Once I see his little face, it's hard to motivate to go away from him. I always think it's important to move. Granted, I will tell you that I did the show from home on Zoom for two months, three months. When you're at home on Zoom, you're wearing sweatpants on the bottom. You don't have to zip up a dress. All of a sudden, the world comes back and you're like, whoa, wow, that cacio e pepe I've been cooking from Joanna Gaines’ cookbook has really caught up with me. [laughter] You're right. It's best to not dwell. Just do things that make you feel good. If you do that, then hopefully the COVID fifteen, the COVID nineteen as I like to say, will come off.

Zibby: Yes. Tell me a little bit more about writing. When do you like to write? Where do you do it? Is it in your bed at night? Give me a visual here.

Jenna: I'm a morning writer, for sure. I work in morning television, so I'm already waking up early. I always write in a journal. One thing that my husband and I do which we brought back today -- although, he hasn’t texted me back. We didn't need to do it for a while because we were never away from each other, never apart. Now that I've started coming back to work, we text each other three really specific things that we're grateful for. I like waking up that way. I like having my mind focused on the really good instead of the bad. I also like sharing those little insights with him and having him share his with me. They're not about each other, necessarily. Although, sometimes they are. I always write in a journal in the morning. For this book, when I was "writing" writing, I would set the alarm for about four in the morning. I would write in our little office/guest room/playroom. It's the New York, where you have nowhere to write except for this one little den where I wouldn't wake up the kids and Henry. I did that at least three days a week. Then right after the show at eleven, I would go over to my office at 30 Rock and I would try to continue for an hour or two before my mind had nothing left to give. I read at night. I read for pleasure and for fun every night before I go to bed. I want it to be fun. I don't want it to be work. I cannot write at night. I can't really do much at night. I have this much left to give because my mornings are so big. Then by the time the kids go to bed, I just have an hour or two with Henry to try to decompress, and then that's it.

Zibby: I have so much respect when people are like, let's go meet up at this time. Why don't you do all your emails late at night? I'm like, I am fried. That's it.

Jenna: I agree. I also think even any sort of arguments, any sort of anything that's not great happens in those hours where your rope is done. It's shortened to just a tiny fuse.

Zibby: It's so true, oh, my gosh. Tell me about the reading for Read with Jenna. How do you pick your books?

Jenna: It's been such a really fun part of my job because I just love to read. I'm reading now for January and February. I read about six months in advance, which is so fun. I love that I get to get some of these books in galley forms and read them and be one of the first, maybe besides the editors and other people that have book clubs and obviously the indie bookstore owners, who get to read this work. It feels really like a privilege. We look for books that are debut authors in many cases. We want new voices, voices that may not always get the attention. We like diverse voices, voices from all over the world or country, people that look different and have different experiences, and then just books that move us, books that move me, books that I stay up late into the night reading, books that I know will inspire. I've been in a book club throughout my life in different iterations in different towns. I know what will inspire really cool, wonderful conversations. That's really what goes into it. It's just so much fun.

Zibby: You have to come to my book club. I started a virtual book club. I have like a thousand members. Anyway, you should come. It's really fun.

Jenna: I'm in. Why don't you choose -- I'm looking around my office. I don't know if you've read Leave the World Behind.

Zibby: Yes. I just had Rumaan on my podcast yesterday. I haven't released it yet.

Jenna: I love Rumaan. I hope you told him I said hi. You probably didn't. He is brilliant. He is so awesome. Did you read this with your book club?

Zibby: We haven't yet, but you know what? We should do it. We hardly have any male --

Jenna: -- Have you read it?

Zibby: I read it myself, but I haven't assigned it to my book club yet. I think that's a really great idea.

Jenna: It's so, so good, isn't it?

Zibby: Yeah. Maybe we will do that. That's a great idea.

Jenna: Okay, good. If you ever need help, call me up. I'm happy to be part of a book club one month. Let me know.

Zibby: Do it. Maybe the two of you can do it together or something. That'd be neat. I'm sure you've interviewed him. That would be awesome. So you have so much going on. What's coming next for you? You are churning out books and kids and TV shows.

Jenna: [laughs] Churning out books and kids. With each book, there's a new kid. No, nothing is next for me. I'm just going to slow down a little bit. Obviously, the show is on every single day, which is so much fun. It's been a really wonderful distraction in this world that we live in to sit next to somebody that I admire as much as Hoda and have conversations that feel light and, I hope, filled with goodness and positivity. That's so awesome. Before the pandemic, we were in a studio with lights and people and music and a DJ and Oprah. It was the pinnacle of where we wanted the show to go. Then all of a sudden, I was at home on a ring light with my phone and Hoda on FaceTime, and it didn't matter. I missed being close to her. I missed our team. I missed the audience and the studio. Regardless, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed our conversations. What this has shown me is that it stripped down to what's really important. Thanks goodness she and I really like each other and have fun talking to each other. Otherwise, it would've been really difficult. I think it's proven to all of us that it's stripped things down and only the most important things matter. I feel so lucky that even with the ring light and a phone and us separated by distance it was still such a pleasure to do the show every single day.

Zibby: So funny that you didn't even think you wanted this job to begin with. Wasn't it your grandfather who was like, "Maybe we should watch the show"? which is so funny.

Jenna: The most obvious. Also, it's a humiliation that that wasn't something that would've come into play, but I was teacher. He was like, "Do you ever see this thing they call the Today Show?" I was like, "Nope, I'm at school by seven in the morning." We watched it together. They gave me great advice. My grandmother was like, "You just always take the meeting." Even though I just want to be home, as we said, in my pajamas by 8:08 PM, I think that advice of always taking the meeting, being ready for whatever life's going to throw at you next is really good advice.

Zibby: So it's always take the meeting, but try to schedule it in the morning.

Jenna: [laughs] Exactly.

Zibby: What other advice might you have for aspiring authors?

Jenna: I just think, write. Write all the time. This was the advice of my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Cunningham, in Dallas, Texas. She said, "You are a good writer." Nobody had really told me -- I have a sister who is an academic who got into every Ivy League school she applied to. She missed one question on the SAT. She's brilliant. I struggled in math. My dad would sit around the kitchen table and be like, "Let's get to multiplication." To have somebody put that faith in me, like, this is where you're going to go, this is what you're interested in, and you have talent in this, I will never forget it. What she said to me, the advice is read, read, read. Good writers, brilliant writers -- it's so true. Now I get to and you get to, I'm sure, talk to all of these brilliant authors who I have crushes on.

Zibby: Me too. I'm the same way. Sometimes I even get nervous. I'm like, oh, my god, Nicholas Sparks!

Jenna: I know. By the way, a friend asked me, they were like, "Who has been the best?" I'm like, "Oh, this person. Kevin Wilson's so good. Ann Patchett's my good friend. I love Emma Straub." All of them are kind and generous of time and of talent, and brilliant. All of them share the same quality which is that they love books. They read incessantly. They read everything. That's my advice, is to read constantly. It makes sense. If you want to be a great artist, you study art. You study the great artists. If you want to be a great writer, you study the beautiful pieces of writing that we get to read. I just feel like I'm happiest in my bed with a book, possibly a sleeping child. The child needs to be asleep, though. Otherwise, as you know, moms don't have time to read. If there's a cat thrown in there, that's it. That's my very perfect day. If you believe in the afterlife, that's where I'll be, in a bed with a cat, a sleeping child, and a book.

Zibby: I might be there with a dog. Maybe with some chocolate on my bedside table.

Jenna: Yes. I was going to say a cheese plate. Add some cheese plate and a glass of wine. There we go.

Zibby: That pretty much is it. That's all we really need in life. [laughter] Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for all your great books and entertainment and all the great work you do and for highlighting all the authors, so many of whom I've had on my podcast and who I love. It's amazing.

Jenna: I loved talking with you. I love your podcast. I love that you're trying to get moms reading.

Zibby: I'm trying. Thank you.

Jenna: Thank you so much. It was so nice to meet you. Thank you.

Zibby: So nice to meet you too.

Jenna: Bye, everybody. See you.

Zibby: Bye.

Shannon Lee, BE WATER, MY FRIEND

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

Shannon Lee: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Zibby: It's a pleasure to have you. Be Water, My Friend, by the way, this book cover is my favorite colors, image. This is the most soothing, beautiful -- I love it. Don't you just love it?

Shannon: I do. I love it. Soothing is such a great word. Also, the feel of the book is really nice.

Zibby: I don't know how you make things happen like this. Anyway, I won't belabor the point.

Shannon: I don't either.

Zibby: It just feels so good, especially because the inside so matches it. It's so perfect for the content and all of the amazing tips and advice and all the rest. Now that I've started off on this train, it's called Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee, who was your father. What made you decide to write this book? Why take all of his learnings? Why make it a book? Why dedicate your life to running a whole foundation and business around him? Tell me the whole story.

Shannon: Give you the whole story.

Zibby: The whole thing.

Shannon: All these things are interconnected. To start at the beginning, the reason that I do what I do is because I am healed by it and because I am inspired by it, because I am motived by it. By it I mean my father's words, his practices, the way he lived his life. All of that has helped me in my life. Even though I run all the different aspects of the business, I'm not in this for the cool T-shirts and posters. Although, they're super cool. For me, when my mom approached me and said, "Do you have an interest in helping to oversee this?" The immediate answer was yes because I just feel like there's so much value for everyone to encounter him and his message. I want him to be known more as the deep thinker and personal growth seeker and philosopher that he truly was. I think you will say after reading the book that he wasn't just an armchair philosopher. He was really invested in these thoughts and these practices and trying to live them. That's why I do all of this in the first place.

Then why I wrote this book, I have a deep love of reading. I have a deep love of writing. I always had this desire to write a book. I just didn't know what book to write. I had been doing the "Bruce Lee Podcast" for a couple of years discussing his philosophy and how to apply it and all of that. It caught the eye of a literary agent who was listening and reached out and said, "Oh, my god, I love this. Have you ever thought about writing a book?" I said, "Actually, yes. I have thought about it." He said, "I feel like putting these teachings in another format, an additional format that can then reach a whole nother swath of people is a really great idea." The "be water" philosophy of my father's is really one of his best known. A lot of people have heard him say the quote. It's made its way into popular culture in that regard. It's such an expansive quote. It encapsulates so much of him and his perspective and his practices. I just thought this is a great entry point and a way to keep it focused. It's such a vast amount of information. To not have a focal point would be really hard. I feel like the book would be all over the place.

Zibby: It was great because you broke it down into all this different advice, but in highly structured formats. Each chapter gave a little different take on different advice. I know these concepts are so timeless and they date back to the beginning of rational thought, but I feel like he was ahead of time for where we are now with a whole society focused on mindfulness and breath. I feel like thirty years ago it wasn't quite so mainstream as it is today.

Shannon: Totally. That's what I would say one of the hallmarks of my father's life is, that he was an innovator. He was ahead of his time. Look, he's taking timeless information, for sure. This goes all the way back to Daoism. It goes all the way back to the beginning of, as you say, conscious thought. He interpreted it and represented it for himself and his place and set and setting, and his place and moment in time. Now many years have gone by. Society continues to change. I feel like I've taken it now and placed it more in this moment in time.

Zibby: You have, yes. Some of the tips are just so actionable that you could do right away like journaling or getting physical or owning your own stuff in your head. Stop judging people so much. It's all great advice. It's all things you want to work towards.

Shannon: It's all things that you, in some regard, already know or already have a sense of. Sometimes you just need to have it laid out in a particular way for you so that it really grabs you and speaks to you directly. Then you go, oh, you know what, actually, I'm going to try that or I'm going to do that.

Zibby: One of the best ways to really, not convince people, but to get your message across is through storytelling. I feel like that's what you did well, especially by starting the book off and talking about the history. Even though you were only three or four when your dad passed away --

Shannon: -- Four.

Zibby: Four. The legacy he left and your reaction to it and all of that because then you're immediately invested in the person telling the story, giving the tips.

Shannon: Thank you.

Zibby: How did your dad end up becoming a movie star? He was this cerebral, mindful -- then his life took off in a whole different direction, martial arts and everything.

Shannon: It's so interesting. My father was a child actor, actually. He was in about twenty films as a child in Hong Kong, so a very different time and place, a very different industry than Hollywood. He was already, from birth -- the first cameo that he ever had in a film, he was an infant in the arms of his father. Then it just called to him. Creative outlets really called to him. As I say in the book, his nickname as a child was Mo Si Ting, which means never sit still. He had a ton of energy. As a child in Hong Kong, he grew up under challenging circumstances. Even though he was born in the United States, he went back to Hong Kong as an infant, was raised in Hong Kong, lived through Japanese-occupied Hong Kong in World War II, then lived under British rule of Hong Kong. He himself was of mixed-race descent. He started to get bullied a lot, and so he wanted to take martial arts. The gangs were very prevalent in Hong Kong. There was always a tug on kids to get into gangs. He was certainly no exception. As a kid, he had quite a temper, quite honestly. He was feisty. He wanted to get in fights. He wanted to do that kind of thing. At the same time, he had this creative side. He was an actor. He was a cha-cha dancer. [laughs]

He was interested in the teachings of his shifu, his teacher, in Wing Chun which he started training in at the age of thirteen. There were a lot of Daoist principles passed onto him at that time. He had this really active, interested, curious mind. He had a drive to understand things and to pursue things. All of that came very naturally to him, but he was getting in a ton of trouble. He was getting in fights. Someone was injured quite seriously. He was ultimately shipped off to the United States with a hundred dollars in his pocket by his parents who were like, "You got to get out of Hong Kong. You should go to the United States because technically you're a citizen. You should go there. We know some people. We'll put you in touch. Good luck." Then when he landed in the United States, he very much was like, well, I'm a martial artist, I love martial arts, I guess I need to get my GED. He worked as a busboy and a prep cook in a Chinese restaurant. He enrolled in University of Washington. He started really delving into philosophy. Then he was just training and started teaching some people very casually in the US with no desire to be a movie star, no desire to do any of that. It was through these passionate pursuits of his and his desire to pursue everything with a certain amount of quality and a certain amount of thoughtfulness, and he had an extremely diligent work ethic, that he caught the eye of a Hollywood producer. Then all of a sudden, his whole life took a turn.

Zibby: It's so crazy.

Shannon: Quite interestingly, as I talk about in the book, he suddenly realized, this is an avenue, actually, for me to reach even more people with the same thing I want to reach them with right now but in a bigger format and in a bigger way.

Zibby: In the book, you talked about how when you were younger, you weren’t always so quick to say, guess what, Bruce Lee's my dad.

Shannon: Oh, no. [laughs]

Zibby: Now it's your whole life. You're owning it to the fullest. Tell me about what happened in between or how you used to feel.

Shannon: It's hard. When you say now you're owning it, I'm like, am I owning it? I guess I am. [laughs]

Zibby: Do you still not feel like that? Oh, my gosh, that's funny.

Shannon: I do, but it's this thing where I have to own it. It is true. It is my life. As you say in the beginning, my mom would tell us when we were kids, "Don't tell people that Bruce Lee is your father. Just let them get to know you without that information. Then at some point, they’ll find out. Then they’ll already either like you or not like you. You'll kind of know where you stand and all of that." It was great advice. As I came into adulthood, I started to feel like I was guarding a secret and that there was some part of me that was not okay to share. I proceeded along like that for a long time. Then when I was older, I started to go, why can't I share that? as we do. What's wrong with that? Why can't I? Then I started to experiment with sharing that. Then I realized, oh, this isn't an all-or-nothing thing, just like with everything, by the way. Nothing is an all-or-nothing proposition. You actually have to show up to each moment with all your sensors on, your intuition in play, feeling into the other people, feeling into the situation to say, is this an instance where it's safe to share this information? Or I feel empowered to share this information or not.

I've experimented with it my whole life. I would say that it got even harder when I decided to start looking after his legacy because now this is also what I do for work. All those conversations, "So what do you do for work?" Well... [laughs] I'm not instantly recognizable as a person out in the world. I've questioned my own identity my whole life, which I think, quite frankly, we all do anyway. It's just I have a little bit different lens on mine. That's what I mean. I do feel like I am finally coming into ownership of myself. Bruce Lee as my father is definitely a part of who I am. Yet it's not all that I am. I think that writing this book was a way for me to say even though I'm going to focus on what his teachings have in them that are so great for everyone and for me, I'm also going to put some of myself out there. I'm going to write this book. There have been a lot of books written about Bruce Lee and about his writings, but never by me. It is a way for me to start stepping more and more into my own identity.

Zibby: I wonder how you're going to feel with this book out in the world. I hope it goes okay for you. I hope you're ready.

Shannon: Thank you. [laughs] I hope so too. I guess we'll find out.

Zibby: That's such a natural thing to do when you're younger. I know yours was inspired by your mom. I feel like there was a point at which everyone's a little embarrassed by their parents. Then you grow up and you're like, wait, there's actually some cool stuff about my parents, or there's not.

Shannon: And at different times, I have to abandon my parents. Then at other times you're like, no, I need to own my parents. It's your strive for your individuation. You strive to be different. You strive to learn from the mistakes that you feel like have been made. Then ultimately, you come into this understanding of everybody's just trying to do their best. Nobody knows the secret formula here. Then you're like, so I have to try to do my best also.

Zibby: Totally. Sometimes my dad can be pretty vocal politically or make statements. People might assume that I have the same ones. Then I'm like, why? Do most people share the same views as their parents these days? Maybe, but maybe not. We all have so many differences from who our parents are, I think. Sorry, there's sirens here.

Shannon: Welcome to modern times. [laughs]

Zibby: I know. There's this lingering thing. You're Bruce Lee's daughter. You must have all the same beliefs. You must feel the same way. You might totally not. That's why it's so great that you could include your thoughts and feelings alongside it and share things that shaped you. I'm so sorry, I didn't know about your brother. That part was so sad. That could've been the trajectory your life takes a different turn because of. I didn't say that very well, but you know what I mean. That part was heart-wrenching. After that, you said -- this is the aftermath. You said, "I knew how to go through each day, but I no longer knew how to live." That is the best quote on grief I've heard in a long time. That's just it. Your world is different.

Shannon: Totally. That's it exactly. When I think back to the aftermath of those times, I was like, oh, my god. I had moved to LA. I started pursuing an acting career of all things. I was on autopilot. I got married in the middle of all that. [laughs] I was just like, this is life. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. Inside, I was just like, help me. I don't feel okay.

Zibby: Can you back up? Do you mind sharing what happened? You were kind of vague about something happened in accident.

Shannon: My brother was killed on the filming of the set The Crow for the film The Crow. They were almost done shooting. They just had a couple weeks left of shooting. My brother was going to finish up. Then he was going to take off to go and get married. His wedding was three weeks away. They were extremely negligent on the set of the film. They let the firearms expert go because they were like, we're almost done. We don't need the firearms expert around more. We don't have to pay for that, great. Then they ran out of certain props. They ran out of these things called dummy bullets. Whenever they need to make a shot of a bullet in a film, they don't use real bullets. They use fake bullets. They look just like bullets, but they don't have gunpowder in them. They had to do a shot where a character was loading a gun, so they needed some dummy bullets. They didn't have any, so they bought real bullets.

Zibby: No.

Shannon: Yeah. They bought real bullets. In an attempt to be safe, they pried them open and dumped the gunpowder out, but there was still gunpowder residue in the chambers of these bullets. It's a crazy sequence of events that took place, any of one of which, if somebody had been paying attention and doing their job, would have stopped it. They had these real bullets that they'd dumped the gunpowder out of. Then they did the shots they were doing. In that, somebody was dry firing the gun. Because there was a little residue of gunpowder -- this is things that I never thought I would know about bullets, by the way. A bullet has a flat side with a little circle in it. That's the firing pin. When the hammer of the gun comes up, it hits that firing pin which ignites the gunpowder inside which is what projects the bullet out of the gun. When they dumped the gunpowder out, they didn't also fire off the pins. When somebody was playing around with the gun and firing it, they hit the pin which ignited the residue of the gunpowder inside the bullet which separated the casing and lodged it in the barrel of the gun. Now, we have no firearms expert on set. They go to shoot a scene with my brother a week later or something. Because no one is looking at the gun, no one's checking the gun, they don't know that this piece of metal is lodged in the barrel. Then they put a blank in a gun. A blank is gunpowder, but it just is encased in paper. It's not encased in metal. They stick this blank in the gun which, in essence, makes a bullet because there is a metal projectile lodged in the barrel. Nobody checks it. They shoot the scene. The actor pulls the triggers and shoots my brother.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh.

Shannon: It's pretty horrifying.

Zibby: Actually, as you're telling this, now I'm starting to remember this happening in popular culture. This is twenty years ago or something, right?

Shannon: It's twenty-seven years ago now.

Zibby: I hadn’t put two and two together until you mentioned the movie name. Oh, my gosh, I am so sorry. I know how you came back because I read the book, but how did you go through? You got married. Your life was sort of on autopilot. Then what?

Shannon: Like I said, I was going through life, but I was in excruciating internal pain. I was in full depression. At times, I couldn't leave my house. I would drive around in my car, which in LA we do a lot. I would cry while I was driving. Then I'd get to a place. I'd wipe the tears away and be like, okay, here I go. Just terrible. I remember thinking in my head, I need help. I can't live like this. I had this consistent mantra just going through my head, going through my head. What showed up without me actually -- I was too depressed to even try to pursue something logically to do like go to therapy. [laughs] I had never been in therapy before. I've been in therapy now, by the way. Like many people who have never been in therapy, there's a little bit of a stigma of, you should just be able to handle your own problems and all that kind of stuff and not really understanding the process and the value of it. I was in this place of pain. What came to me was my father's writings, completely delivered to me from the universe, quite frankly. Yes, they were always there, but at the time, my mom was working with someone to organize them into a book. They had gathered them all and made photocopies of them. Just as a, "Hey, this is interesting. Would you like to see? We happened to have them all photocopied, so would you like to see them?" they were given to me, a stack like three phonebooks high of writings.

I started flipping through them. I came across this quote which I mention in the book. For whatever reason in that moment, it was just what I needed to hear. It said, "The medicine for my suffering, I had within me from the very beginning, but I did not take it. My ailment came from within myself, but I didn't observe it until this moment. Now I see that I will never find the light unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel." I was like, I have the medicine for my own -- my suffering isn't just going to magically disappear. I think that that's what we all want. We just want to be like, something good will happen in my life and I'll get so happy that all my suffering will disappear. It was like, no, actually, you have to be your own fuel. You have to figure it out. That's when I started trying to figure it out and sought the things like healers and therapists and friends and books to read and all these things. This book that I wrote is my way of hopefully there being some little tiny something that pops out at the reader who is also struggling with something and they go, oh. That was my experience.

Zibby: That's just beautiful. I'm sorry you went through all this. I'm so glad that you found the ticket to getting to the next level of processing your grief. People always say, go get help, go get help, but as you mentioned, if you're in that state, it's hard to motivate to do anything. It can feel really overwhelming. What are you going to do, google ineedatherapist.com? It's just overwhelming sometimes. Where do you turn? Who's good? Who's going to click with you? Who takes insurance? There's all these things that prevent people. It's so much easier to do nothing and just wallow.

Shannon: And just hope.

Zibby: And just hope and wait for time to pass. Eventually, things change over time. You're so right. How great that your own dad's words are the ones that got you through. It's amazing, really. Most people's dads don't have writing like this just sitting around.

Shannon: They could use my dad's. There you go.

Zibby: They could use your dad's. That's amazing.

Shannon: I would say books are a place to go. They're easy. They're cheap. You can listen to a book. You don't have to take the time to read a book. Podcasts like we're having a discussion right now, all these things, they're an easy onramp into maybe at some point feeling like you're ready to get a therapist or whatever the next thing is.

Zibby: I totally agree. I've had some recent losses due to COVID, my husband's mother and grandmother within six weeks of each other. It was this excruciating six-week medical journey. I won't go into it. I keep posting and saying books are getting me through this. Books are it. Not books, the idea of the books, but getting lost in somebody else's story and knowing that other people have suffered and that you're going to get through it eventually in some way. It can be a horrible accident, something. It doesn't have to be loss. It's just that hitting bottom. I totally agree with you. People who don't read books, read books. [laughter] It's cheaper than therapy.

Shannon: Or listen to books. How about that?

Zibby: Listen to books, yeah. We listened to a book this morning on our long drive. Going back for two seconds to the writing of this book, what was that process like for you? Did it become very emotional? Did it take you a long time? What was that process like?

Shannon: I wrote the first draft of the book over the course of a year. I'm busy, so I had to fit that time into my schedule, which is why it took a year. I think I probably could've done it faster if I'd had nothing to do but that. I had lots of other things to do.

Zibby: You don't know. People who have nothing but time also struggle. There's no good way.

Shannon: [laughs] This is true. There were a lot of things going on at the time as well. The writing of the book was a journey. I have to say, I approached the first draft as, I just have to get this out. I just have to get it out. I just have to create deadlines. I just have to find a time to write. I would work from home two days a week and try to take hours out of those days to write, and on weekends and things like that. By the way, I'm a single mom, so I also had those duties as well. Catch-as-catch-can, I got a draft out. I felt good about the draft. Then I sent it off to my publisher, editor, and waited a while for their comments. With the timing and everything, and they had some things -- they were moving offices and all that. It took them a few months to get back to me. It was good. I was like, good, I got a draft out of it. I was feeling good about it. Then the notes came back. They were like, "This is great. Here are our comments." In that time -- look, as humans, especially for me -- I'm a person who's dedicated to continue to work on myself, to continue to grow, to continue to shift my perspective over time on all sorts of things and life and all of that.

I was so grateful for those months because I continued to learn and grow in those months and go through a lot of things that I was struggling with and learning from. Then I got the notes back. When I started to read the notes and they were like, "We're not sure we understand this. We could use a little more explanation here," I was reading it, I'm like, oh, my god, yes. This needs some work, for sure. [laughs] I was so grateful because I felt so much more clear. I'd had that space. I'd had some time to continue on my journey. In the edits, I feel like the book really bloomed. I was so grateful for the ability to revisit those thoughts and those chapters and reorganize them. Chapters seven, eight, and nine really got a lot of work done to them, which are the weightier material in the book. I was grateful for that. By the time I was finally like, okay, this is the last time I'm going to get to ever change anything in it, I felt at peace with it. This is my understanding of this material as best as I can get it for right now for where I am. I believe there are some good-enough pieces in here that it can be of help to some other people.

Zibby: What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Shannon: We all face this idea, whether you're an author or whether you're anything, of there's not enough time, with procrastination. I'm a huge procrastinator. If I don't have a deadline, it's really hard for me to get something done. Sometimes when I would sit down in front of the computer to write, I would find myself typing three sentences and then being like, I'm going to get a snack. I'd come back and type three more sentences and be like, you know what, I have to go to the bathroom. I would watch myself squirm. Then there were times when it just flowed. What I would say is it's great to fight through those moments when you're squirming because they do ultimate lead to times when it starts to flow. For me, deadlines are key. Trying to have, these are the days that I write. It's on my calendar. I'm protecting this time. I'm protecting this practice. Yes, a big meeting is coming up. They're requesting this time from me. Okay, fine, I'll take the meeting, but then I'm going to schedule this time and protect it. You've got to protect the time. There really is enough time. There's so many things that I am trying to do. I'm running these businesses. I'm parenting my child, all of this. It would be easy for me to say that there's not enough time. A lot of times, I use the excuse, I'm very busy. If this is something that is important to you, then there is enough time. You'll find the time. It doesn't matter if it's an hour once a week. Find the time. Protect that time. Just keep going. I use this example in the book. If you just keep dreaming about writing a book and never actually take any steps toward writing it -- even if it takes you ten years, in ten years you'll have a book, versus in ten years you'll still just have a dream about having a book.

Zibby: Such great advice.

Shannon: The other thing, too, is I would get off of the need for the book to be perfect or the need for the book to be immediately publishable. Just get the book out. Then you can always work on it from there. Until you get that draft out, that first idea, rough idea, then there's nothing to work with, and work with it you will. We all had the dream. My first draft, I was like, check, done. [laughter] Perfect book in the first draft. Then it was like, no, no. It's not perfect. It needs work. Great, let's do the work.

Zibby: Shannon, it was so nice talking to you and learning more about your story and your beautiful mission for why you even want the book out there. From where I sit, I feel like you're doing an amazing job of upholding the legacy of your entire family. I give you a check for that.

Shannon: Thank you so much. Thank you for your beautiful questions, for the work that you're doing as well. I hold so much love for you and your process and what you're going through with those losses and just as a human. Being a human, it's challenging. I don't want to put the thing on it that it's hard because it's not always. There's a lot of joy. It's challenging. It's challenging to be with ourselves. When we're in quarantine, we are with ourselves. That is challenging.

Zibby: That's nice. [laughter] I hope I get to meet you at some point.

Shannon: Me too. I would love that. Please, let's keep in touch.

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

Shannon: You take care. Buh-bye.