Gabriel Byrne, WALKING WITH GHOSTS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Gabriel. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss your beautiful memoir, Walking with Ghosts.

Gabriel Byrne: Thank you so much, Zibby. It's lovely to talk to you. Thank you.

Zibby: Your memoir was absolutely gorgeous. I loved every word. You are a phenomenal writer. When did you even realize you could write in addition to act and everything else that you do?

Gabriel: My mother was the one who encouraged me to read. She would read out loud to us at nighttime. She would also tell us the stories about -- I knew Oliver Twist and Pip and all those Dickens characters long before I came to read the books. She read Jane Eyre to us over six months and then Rebecca. She was really reading them for herself. We just happened to be sitting there listening in on it. I was introduced to the world of gothic Victorian romance at a very early age. Then she read us Little Women, which was a really interesting experience for me because in Little Women -- there was a time when people used to say, who's your favorite Beatle? Then it was like, who's your favorite of the Little Women? Of course, I fell in love with Beth and was devastated when she died of a fever at ten years of age.

Zibby: You had said your mom read books for herself, which is hilarious, and you were an unexpected beneficiary of her just reading for herself. That's how you developed this love of literature. Tell me a little bit about how your love of reading turned into a love of writing.

Gabriel: I had always admired writers. It always seemed to me to be an inaccessible magical kind of process. The few writers that I had known, I asked them, how did they go about writing? Most of them were unable to describe how or why. It seemed to be some kind of strangle alchemy that happened between the brain and the page. I had written little bits of things here and there. I wrote a little book of love poems to my first girlfriend which would make me shiver if I looked at them now. In fact, I think I remember one small little one. There was a place where we went to. I can't believe I remember this. Secondly, I'm can't believe I'm telling you this. [laughs] Look, I was eighteen or nineteen at the time. It's a place called Delgany. "On Delgany's day with my dear one I lay. Glad to be near one who loved me well and would not tell that I loved her once with all the innocence my guilt could [indiscernible]."

Zibby: Aw, I love that.

Gabriel: Then I stopped after that. Then I went to university. I wrote academic kind of stuff. I'd always read. My taste in literature became wider after I left Ireland. In the beginning, like a lot of people, I was looking in literature for myself. I was looking for answers to who I was, looking for answers to what the world was about. That's why I began with Irish literature because it was a world I felt I could understand. Nobody was writing about the kind of place that I came from. I broadened out into British and American literature after that. When it came to the writing of this, I thought I would just experiment a little bit and see how it went. Finding a voice -- is this a goat in the background here? A goat has just jumped up on the back of the car.

Zibby: You're kidding. Oh, my gosh.

Gabriel: No, I'm not kidding. They're crazy goats. They like to get in and do whatever you're doing. Can you see?

Zibby: Oh, yes. I can see the vague outline of a goat. Now it's gone.

Gabriel: Anyway, you experiment and just see because finding a voice is difficult when you're writing memoir especially, trying to find a voice that's authentic to you. I did about ten or fifteen pages. Then I sent them to a friend. I said, "Have a look at this and see what you think." He said, "I think you should do more." Then I did about forty pages. I sent it to an agent not expecting very much. She said, "Look, I think I can do something with this." It was a total shock to me because I didn't expect this to happen at all. I had written something years ago, an experimental kind of memoir. I wrote it in three weeks, so I didn't really put much store by that. I suppose it was a combination of trying to find my writing voice and not being intimidated by all the great writers that I had read.

Zibby: The thing about your memoir is that not only do you go into the most painful areas of your life, which immediately connections the reader to you, you reveal so much and so much pain over the years in all these different ways from losing your childhood friend to your parents to your addiction, alcoholism, the abuse. It's a gift to the reader to share all of this. Also, it's the form in which you did it. Even the dashes instead of quotes marks and the lyrical quality of writing, just the format, it combines to make a very intimate, powerful memoir. For celebrity memoir, you have to overcome the fact that you're a celebrity. It's almost like people's expectations might not be for literature, but this is true literature. This is a work of art versus, this is how I got into acting. You, of course, include that. It's almost like you have to work against what people might think. Did you feel that when you started writing it? Did you feel like you had to sort of overcome what people might think, or was this just a natural thing? What do you think about that?

Gabriel: That's interesting. The first thing is that I don't think of myself as a celebrity in any shape or form. I don't. Some people might think so. I didn't want to write one of those things of, I did this movie, I did that movie. If there's a movie mentioned, it's for a reason. If there's an actor mentioned, and there are very, very few, it's for a specific reason. I didn't want to write a kiss and tell, an intimate "you'll never eat lunch in this town again." I could've done one of those because I do know where the bodies are buried, so to speak. That didn't interest me. What interested me is I think what almost everybody can do. It's an exercise to look at oneself and to say, what were the influences that formed the person I am today? Were they familial? Of course. Societal? Of course. Cultural? Of course. Geographically? Of course. Religious. All these things go to combine a huge influence that determines the kind of person you're going to be. I wanted to look at that and see how much I was the result of it. I think anybody can trace their development in that way.

The next biggest thing in terms of writing a memoir is that you can't bullshit. You're faced on every page with, is this the truth? Do I tell it? Fiction, on the other hand, if you're writing a novel, you can farm out all these characters and ideas. They're fictional characters. You can hide all your perspectives behind them. Memoir requires the truth because it's a disservice to the reader if you're bullshitting and you're not telling the truth. The point you make there is that we are all fragile creatures. We all hunger for the same things. We all fear the same things. Some of us are better equipped psychologically or emotionally to deal with them. What unites us and I think what makes us empathize with a great novel or a poem or a painting is that we feel that it's speaking to us about us. I thought two things. If I can write the truth about myself, then somebody else will read this and say, that rings true to me and I can perhaps learn something from this. Not that I was out to teach anything. I would just like you to hear this, and what you think about it is up to you.

The second thing I thought was that by telling my own story I was also telling the story of a particular time and particular place. Rather than do a book of essays or a novel, I found that this was the most potent way, to see it through the lens of my own emotion. There were many times when I thought, I don't want to put this down. I don't want to be going around have to answer questions about this. That's the very thing that keeps us trapped. Silence and shame are bedfellows. The things that we're most ashamed of or the things that we're the most silent about are the things that need to be brought out into the open. By doing that, we find freedom. There's no freedom in silence. There's certainly no freedom in shame. The liberation of the self through having the courage to reveal oneself honestly, it's not that there's a resolution where there's a big orchestra playing and everybody gives each other a big hug, and that was that problem. Life goes on. Life goes on being tough and unpredictable and joyful and beautiful, but also unexpectedly sorrowful. That is life. My biggest battle, I've found, is that I find it hard to stay in the reality of now, this. There's always a thing in me that wants to do something else, to get out of the is-ness of the moment, whether it's alcohol or drugs, I don't shop, but all those cigarettes, food, all those things that we think, this will take me out of the moment. The moment doesn't have to be particularly traumatic. It can be just the boringness, the grayness, the predictability of now that seems like a weight and we need to escape from it.

That's the biggest battle I have, is remaining in the present and not wanting or wishing to be anywhere else, to be with anybody else, to have some kind of other career. To accept the way it is now, out of that's come a contentment. I don't believe in happiness as a permanent state. I think it's a huge delusion. There's a footballer who died a few days ago, an Italian footballer called Paolo Rossi, great footballer. I was watching a little interview with him. He talked about winning the World Cup in 1982, the summit of his childhood dreams, beyond telling. He said, "It made me think as I held that cup up before the world, is this happiness? Is this what it is?" He said, "Because if it is, it was gone in two seconds." Happiness is only glimpsed. It's like something you see roaming between trees. You see it. Then it's gone. Then you see a little bit of it again. What's much more worth striving for is contentment. Contentment comes out of an acceptance of the way life is. That's why in the memoir I just said, this is the way it was. This is the way it is. People would love you to say everything's great now. It's wonderful you've got all these problems behind you. That isn't life.

I don't regard myself as being courageous. I'm lucky that I survived. I'm very lucky that people who loved me said, "Stop this. You got to take care of yourself," but I didn't listen to them for a long time. I don't drink anymore. One of the things I wanted to take on in the book was the notion of fame and success. What is success? It's actually very like the notion of happiness. I've been around enough people who have mega, mega fame. They can't even go out the door for a coffee. There's an avalanche of people saying the same things that they’ve been told for twenty years. It's really difficult for those people. People think, if I got to be that famous, everything would be cool. I'd have loads of money. I'd have loads of friends and so forth. The little bit that I've had has allowed me to see that I don't want any more of it and that it's actually not something that I want to pursue in any serious way at all. I'd like to do my work, of course, but I don't want anything more than beyond that. The things that we are led to believe -- I was talking to somebody yesterday. It was a woman who was saying to me, "God, the COVID thing, I've put on so much weight." She said, "Feel that." She offered her little wadge to be felt. I gave it a bit of a squeeze and I said, "That's nothing." She said, "No, it is. I'm bursting out of these jeans."

I said, "Listen, I've worked with some of the greatest, most beautiful actresses of the last thirty years. Every single one of them has a problem with their body. Every one of them." I thought to myself, what is that? It's because there's some ideal out there like happiness that if you get to that ideal place and you get that ideal body -- there's no such thing. It's a delusion. Men get caught up in it. Men think that's what women should look like because that's what she looks like on the cover of a magazine. Women don't look like that for the most part. Why is it that those beautiful women adored by millions and millions and millions of people still look in the mirror and say, yeah, but one of my knees is a bit knobble-y? You say, I would never even notice that. This idea that we're all culturally impelled towards of what beauty is, of what success is, of what happiness is, these are things that we really have to look at for ourselves and answer honestly what they mean to us because none of these things are the answer to contentment.

Zibby: Wow, that was amazing. You have such wisdom. That was incredibly inspiring. Although, I'm not sure if that makes me feel better about the wadge I could have you poke. I'll just leave that be. [laughter] When you said you were lucky, I feel like that's what I kept thinking reading this book. Wow, how did he turn this whole thing around? When you were washing dishes and you were getting fired from every job, I was thinking, how is this story going to turn itself around? Just because you were sitting wearing a leather jacket one day in a restaurant and someone spotted you and put you on a soap opera and all this stuff, it would've been so easy for you to have remained in this state of trying to find yourself and trying to figure out your path when your childhood dream of being a priest fell apart and you were trying to pick up the pieces and then again when you were passed out in a doorway with your tooth hanging out. When I heard you had dental work, I'm like, maybe it's because of that tooth. I don't know. How did you keep the faith inside yourself to keep going and to keep waiting for the turnaround, whether it came internally or externally?

Gabriel: That's a good question too. I would say it doesn't come externally. Everything has to come from inside. There were all the signs around saying, don't do this. Don't do that. You don't pay any attention to things like that. It has to come from inside. Eventually, you get sick and tired of being sick and tired. You say, is a better life possible for me? What does a better life mean? In my case, I traced it back to the fact that I was drinking just way too much. I never liked the taste of it. You could hand me a bottle of Budweiser or a three-thousand-dollar bottle of wine with dust on it. It wouldn't make any difference to me. That wasn't the point. The point was oblivion. The point was escape, removal from the present. The simplest thing stuck in my brain. I had read this thing once about -- I had leafed through a Buddhist book looking for some kind of hope of something. One of the things that stuck with me was every journey begins with a step. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a step. My problem was that I had been trying to go to the thousand miles and saying, how do I get there? What can I do to be in that place? What I didn't realize is that you have to take the first step and the second step. Two steps is better than no steps. Ten steps is much better than one. Bit by bit by bit, I [indiscernible].

I've used that in many ways like, for example, with children. The fact about it is that children leaving is a terribly traumatic thing, when children decide to go. The signs are there all along. I remember when my daughter was very young and she used to be in the car seat. Every morning, I would put her in the car seat. One day she said to me, "Dad, I don't need the car seat anymore. I can buckle myself in." I looked in the garage, and I saw the car seat. I said, this is one of these invisible markers. This is the end of a time in my life and in her life. Life is full of those invisible little markers. Going back to this Buddhist thing of a step at a time, one of the things -- I'm not a Buddhist, by the way, but I'll steal from any place I can get it. The Buddhists say a child's first step is a step away from you. That's a tremendously powerful notion to contemplate because they are going to leave. It's inevitable that they will leave us behind. How do we cope with that, with the sadness of that? That little piece of Buddhism helped me deal with that too, and one last one which is the idea that your lot is harder than somebody else's and this is happening to me and it's not fair and why? etc. It was the story of two monks walking along. One of them had a big bag of rocks on his back. He said, "You know what, if you had to carry these -- honest to god, I'm worn out carrying these things. Now we have to go up the mountain. Now we have to cross the bridge. How am I going to get across the river with this bag of rocks?" They get to the other side. The first monk says to him, "Why don't you just leave down the bag of rocks?"

It sounds like that it's not really a powerful thing, but it is sometimes to just say, you know what, I don't want to do that anymore. I'm tired of carrying around this baggage. I'm not going to do it. I try to do that with stuff now. I just say, do I really need to be thinking about this or dealing with this crap? I just want to put it down. To go to Seneca, the Roman philosopher, who said life is short, but the days, if you live them properly, are long, they're my little bits of wisdom that I hang onto and try to make part of life. When I came to write the memoir, I said, I'm going to be honest. I'm going to be truthful in this. If people run away from me and say, god almighty, I'm going to say, you know what, that was my choice. In the book, I talk about where people think that people act or that actors are always acting and they're not truthful. That's a stereotype. It's a false idea because the job of the actor is to tell the truth. The job of the writer is to tell the truth. The job of the artist, full stop, is to be the dog that barks before the earthquake. He's the one that says, this is happening. Here's the truth. I'm holding up the mirror. Look into it. That's what the function of an artist is. By telling the truth in performance and on the page, you're helping somebody else to look into a mirror. By me seeing where I went wrong in my life, hopefully, there'll be some guy sitting on a chair somewhere who will say, well, I'm not making that mistake.

Zibby: I'm sure there will be a lot of people on chairs nodding their head and being inspired. There are a lot of theories about trauma and the way it affects our development. I feel like you had so much trauma in especially growing up. I go back to losing your friend, Jimmy. That alone could've set somebody off on a different page, or your relationship with your sister, Marion, and what ended up happening to her and just all these things that you had to go through. The priest and when you called him back, oh, my gosh, that was insane, that moment. What do you think about the presence of trauma and how carrying that through your life affects you? Some people get tons of therapy for things like that. I didn't get the sense that that's the way you approached -- that you didn't approach it that way. What do you do with all this trauma that collectively builds up? How do you come to a point where you're sitting in a car at your age looking back and having such wisdom about everything? How do you go from there to here?

Gabriel: I don't honestly know the answer in relation to myself because I don't know if trauma ever leaves the system. The idea that you deal with the trauma and move on -- move on is a word that I -- anytime somebody says to me, and move on, I don't trust that. I think it's always there in some form or another. The thing about abuse, it's not just about sexual abuse. It's domestic violence. It's emotional abuse. It's anytime somebody abuses their power over another person. I had to work a lot to get trust back because trust is broken with abuse. I still find trust a difficult thing. I trust the people I love, of course, but I have areas where I think to myself, why do I distrust that? There's absolutely no reason to distrust that particular thing. I don't know that it ever goes away. I don't know that you ever completely resolve it. It's like the idea of forgiveness. What is forgiveness? Forgiving yourself and those things that have passed into the common culture to -- I remember meeting a Jewish couple in New York. She had survived Auschwitz with her mother. That alone is a story that -- it's hard to comprehend how somebody -- the father was the man who had met her in the transit camp in Marseille in 1945 or '46.

I said to the woman, "Do you believe in forgiveness?" She said, "I forgive the German people. I forgive the people that were the cause of the Holocaust. I forgive them because I have no choice except to forgive them. If I don't forgive them, I'll be eaten up with incredible anger nonstop. I have forgiven the German people." Her husband hit the table so hard that the crockery jumped up into the air. He said, "There is no such thing as forgiveness." Right there is the dichotomy. It's a dilemma that I still can't solve. Can you absolutely forgive? Can you absolutely rid yourself of trauma? I think the answer is no. I'm suspicious of absolutism. I believe in the relative examination of things. I can forgive, but I don't. I've dealt with the trauma, but I really don't know whether I have. I've given up alcohol. I haven't drank for twenty-three or four years, but I could start again in five minutes. I could be dead tomorrow. Have I given that up absolutely? I like to think so, but there's vestiges of all the experiences of our life in who we are. That's why I wanted to look at that. What bits are left inside me from then? How do they go to make me the man that I am today? I don't regard myself as wise or anything like that. I just felt that I had to hunt around for scraps of things that made sense to me and taking one step at a time and that I've gotten to this place where not that terribly much impresses me anymore, to be honest.

Zibby: Wow. I feel like I could listen to you talk all day. You have a way of putting things into perspective. In my own little life, knowing your theory, it makes it easier to forgive and to put down the bag of bricks knowing that you've done so before me, whatever everybody's bag of bricks on their back happens to be at this very time. Your words are inspiring to me. I loved your book. I'm so impressed with your ability to put it out there and be open and help other people. That's the most human thing you could do. That's it. It's connecting to other people. That's the most beautiful thing someone can do for somebody else. I just wanted to thank you for that. I truly loved your book. Thank you for talking to me today.

Gabriel: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to talk to you. I thought we were going to be talking about literature and Dostoevsky and Philip Roth and everything. I sounded a bit more like an Oprah than somebody who was going on to talk about -- but I think it's all connected. Literature, it's all connected. We got going on that jag. It was a good one.

Zibby: Good. I'm sure you could've talked the whole time about Dostoevsky. Maybe we'll pick that up. Next time I need a good dose of Dostoevsky, I'll try to get in touch with you. This was much more interesting to me. [laughs]

Gabriel: Thank you so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Thank you. Take care.

Gabriel: Bye-bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Shani M. King, HAVE I EVER TOLD YOU BLACK LIVES MATTER

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Shani. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm delighted to chat with you today.

Shani Mahiri King: Thank you, Zibby, so much for having me. I completely identify with the title, "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Just yesterday or the day before, my wife was like, "Shani, when's the last book you read?" I honestly couldn't remember the name of the last book I read. Don't even ask me what the last movie I saw was that is not a child's movie. I have no idea.

Zibby: As of yesterday, we're trying to go through the entire Home Alone -- it's more than a trilogy. There are like five of them. I don't even know what you call that, quinci... I don't know. We're working our way through the kids' movies as well. Yes, one byproduct, unfortunately, is sometimes less time to read. I'm bringing books like yours, which are quick to read, yours, not always, on this podcast to people who -- or maybe they wouldn't have discovered them otherwise. I only have a PDF version. Do you happen to have your actual book, or not?

Shani: I don't happen to have my actual book. Part of the reason is I'm in São Paulo right now, so it was be a heavier lift to get me an actual copy of it. Like you, I've just seen the PDF version.

Zibby: Well, it looks great. [laughs] Tell me the whole backstory of this children's book, Have I Ever Told You Black Lives Matter. Tell me about the illustrations, the people you profiled, how you came to do it, the whole story. How did this come to be?

Shani: Zibby, all of my books begin from the same place. They begin from conversations with my kids. I wrote a book before this, Have I Ever Told You?, that is really a book that is what I did say to my kids and what I wanted to say to my kids. That last book I wrote about four ago before the last election. I just felt like there was a lot of political discourse that my kids were, in different ways, exposed to. I didn't want that discourse to diminish who they thought they were. That's why I wrote Have I Ever Told You? This book, Have I Ever Told You Black Lives Matter, comes from a similar place. It involves, in part, some conversations that I have had with my kids, but also conversations that I've wanted to have with my kids. For a long time, I've wanted my kids to be aware of all of their history. I'm African American. My wife is Nicaraguan. I'm Jewish. My wife is Catholic. I was born in the United States. My wife was born in Nicaragua. We've moved around quite a bit.

My kids have a lot of history, which is part of the palate from which they can draw their own identities. For a long time, I have wanted my kids to know more about all of their histories. One of the histories is black history, is African American history. My kids are six and eight. I'm not sure, Zibby, how old your kids are. My kids don't usually like to just sit and listen to history monologues by their daddy or by their mommy. Occasionally, I'll talk to them about history when I pick up books. It was always challenging to me to try and figure out how to expose kids to their history unless we happened to go on a trip to Nicaragua, for example, or a trip to a particular African American heritage site. The Black Lives Matter movement happened. It's happening. It was just a reminder, a similar kind of thing, that I really want my kids to be proud of who they are, and so I wrote Have I Ever Told You Black Lives Matter.

There are two parts to the book. The first half is really an inspirational narrative of a speech or story that you may want to tell your kids or they want to read. The second half involves over a hundred biographies of people mentioned in the first half which gives really curious and inquisitive kids the opportunity to ask questions and get them answered about people mentioned in the first half. Another feature of the second half of the book is that there are quotations from each of the people mentioned in the back, each of the people in the biographies, which allows kids to be inspired by these people in their words. They're really people from every field and endeavor, anywhere from science to athletics to sports. It's not only historical, but it's contemporary. You have anyone from Charles Hamilton Houston, whose grandfather was a slave and led the legal fight against segregation, to Jay-Z and Beyoncé who are modern-day -- there are lots of names that you could give them, but business moguls, entrepreneurs who inspire people in their own way.

Zibby: Wow. Yes, that's all amazing. My kids, by the way, are also -- I have a six-year-old and a seven-year-old and then two thirteen-year-olds. I'm in it with you with them not particularly wanting to sit down for a history lesson. I feel like unless it's a holiday, I can't really get them to focus. Why are we celebrating this? Wait, you mentioned that you are Jewish also. I haven't met, I don't think, any African American Jewish people before. Tell me about that.

Shani: I was basically raised by my mother, by a single mother, since I was four, so my entire memory. She's Jewish. I actually don't know what religion my father was. He wasn't really involved. My mom's Jewish. My biological mother is a white Jewish woman from Revere, the Boston area. If you hear her speak, you will know that she's from Boston. The phrase that we've taught our daughter is, I park my car on Harvard Yard. My mother has a very, very strong accent. I'm not exactly sure why I don't. I'm not particularly religious, but I was raised Jewish, culturally Jewish. We celebrate the Jewish holidays. In our household now, my wife is Catholic, I'm Jewish, so we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas just because that's what I did when I was growing up. I celebrated Hanukkah. My wife celebrated Christmas. We do that for our kids to expose them to both religions.

It's interesting. We were just speaking with both our daughter and our son yesterday. The topic of religion or God or the afterlife came up. I told the kids my view. Gabby, my wife, told the kids her view. My daughter, she just had this look of sort of frustration on her face. We're like, "Suriyah, what's wrong?" She was like, "It's just confusing." I was like, yeah. [laughs] It is very, very confusing. One of the points that we wanted to make to her was that no one knows, from our perspective ultimately at the end of the day, what the real story is, what the real answer to fundamental questions -- is there God? It's a belief. What the fundamental answer is to what the religious history of the world is, no one knows. What's important is that you can believe whatever you want to believe. You shouldn't judge someone else for believing what they believe. That, I think, got across to her and to Matias as well. Whether there's anything deeper than that that got across to them, I don't know.

Zibby: I guess we'll find out what actually stuck in twenty, thirty years, something like that. We can circle back then. [laughs] Coming from a mixed-race family, do you feel that you also need to tell the story of the Nicaraguan history to your kids? Will you be getting to that book, or is it because this is so of the moment and, of course, there's so much national, not even national, just worldwide focus on making things more in common parlance and all the rest?

Shani: I have a couple of thoughts, Zibby. First of all, I've always wanted to, as I mentioned, teach our kids African American history. I always felt like I'm proud of all of my heritage and who I am. I want my kids to have an opportunity to be proud of who they are. There are some children's books that talk about different aspects of African American history. I wrote this particular book because I hadn’t really seen a book that covered it in exactly this way, this breadth of coverage in both the digestible way in terms of first half, but also a deep way in the second half that allows kids to explore and can even be a resource for educators. The Black Lives Matter movement was a reminder and helped, but it's something that I wanted to do anyway and I've wanted to do for a long time. Also, it's a time during which our kids, as you know being, among other things, a mom, our kids really need us. It's challenging. It's challenging to be the same kind of solid presence for our kids when we're dealing with this craziness and this pandemic among other things too. For a lot of reasons, it's a time where our kids need us. I wrote it not only for my kids, but because I have the opportunity to write it for other kids as well.

In terms of the Nicaraguan history, yes, we have made many stops on that train. My wife is a very proud Nicaraguan, as is her mother. Her mother, my suegra as we would say in Spanish, or sogrina in Portuguese which I'm learning now, is also a proud Nicaraguan. We eat gallo pinto. We eat queso frito. We eat nacatamales. Yes, we are exposing them to Nicaraguan culture as much as we can. One of my wife's biggest, I don't know if it's a frustration, but I think something that makes her a little sad is that we can't travel as freely as we would otherwise be able to do. So far in our lives, we've been very fortunate to be able to travel. One thing that we haven't done is we haven't taken the kids to Nicaragua. Nicaragua really is a fundamental part of who my wife -- she spent a lot of time there. She's very close with her Nicaraguan family. She's fluent in Spanish. That's something that we would like to do more of when we have the opportunity to travel more than we can now. We want to expose our kids to all of their history. Then like you were saying Zibby, ultimately at the end of the day, who knows what they're go be like? Who knows how they're going to identify? We just want to give them the opportunity to explore aspects of their identity.

Zibby: Very true. Not that this is any of my business, but I'm wondering, how did you meet your wife?

Shani: It's interesting. Whenever somebody tells us their story of meeting, they're like, I saw X from across the room, and it was love at first sight. They have these amazing stories. My wife and I don't have that kind of amazing story. We met, actually, at work. I had been working in private practice as a lawyer in New York. Then I moved to Northern California. My wife was born in Nicaragua but moved here when she was four and reared in Oakland, California. I had been in private practice. She was working at a not-for-profit organization that represented only children in different kinds of substantive proceedings and dependency proceedings and education proceedings and immigration proceedings and guardianship proceedings. I had reached a point in my legal career where I had always wanted to do this, but I reached a point where I could. I was moving to California. I just thought it was a good point to switch gears, to switch from private practice to representing kids, to child advocacy, which is something that I'd always wanted to do. I interviewed at this not-for-profit. I got very lucky and got a job there. They were fantastic people, fantastic lawyers. That's how we met. We were friends, and that's all she wrote. That's where we met. Then we moved to Florida when I got a job as a law professor at the University of Florida. We moved to Gainesville, Florida, which I had never thought of at all before moving there because I grew up in the bigger city, Boston, and then moved to New York. My wife grew up in Oakland, and so I had never really heard of Gainesville other than the Florida Gators, the football team. I didn't really know much about Gainesville. Then we moved to Miami. Now we're in São Paulo for the time being.

Zibby: Wow. That's a journey. I love it.

Shani: That's how we met. She's great. She's much smarter than I am. She is an incredibly kind person. One amazing thing about her is that she's really busy. She's a really busy lawyer doing high-stakes and complicated litigation, but she has an unbelievable ability to be emotionally available to our kids. As is the case for many parents, you work. It's impossible.

Zibby: That's how you met your wife. That was a great story. I also wanted to know, what plans do you have for more books? and how you're doing this with your regular job. You already have a lot going on. This is such a service you're doing by combing through all these biographies. If the fonts were different, this could've been a huge biography, middle-grade type of project. The bios were smaller at the end. Tell me about your upcoming stuff.

Shani: The way that I usually write -- I don't know how other people do it. I'm sure it's different for everyone. The way that I usually write my children's books is I just sit down when I happen to be thinking about something and write a draft. That's how both of these children's books worked. The second one involved, you're right, considerably more research than the first, but it was really even rewarding personally. I knew many of the people in the book, but I didn't know everything about every one of these people in the book. What's next? A couple of things that are in the conceptual drafting stage. One is more Have I Ever Told You? books from different perspectives. This happens to be a book about African American history, but there are many different kinds of Have I Ever Told You? books that could provide access to kids to different histories. You mentioned, do I plan to expose my kids to all of their different histories? Yeah, and I'd like to write more Have I Ever Told You? books.

Another project is slightly different. I mentioned to you, Zibby, that I think that my kids are, even though they complain sometimes, maybe a little bit too much, I think they're very fortunate kids in so many ways. One of the ways they're so fortunate is they have gotten to travel more than I could've ever imagined. Last summer, because of my wife's job, we spent about a month in Panama. The summer before that, we spent about seven weeks, eight weeks, in Buenos Aires. Another conceptual project is a project that is a children's book that explores the story or path of children who are from traditionally underserved populations traveling to these different locations and how they experience them. I never thought about traveling in the way that my kids travel. One thought was to provide a window and access to the experience that my kids are having to other kids through a children's book. Those are a couple of things that I'm working on. In terms of how I find time to do it, it's really so much fun for me to do. I feel like particularly during this time when there is so much going on and we really need to be there as much as we can for our kids, it's the least that I can do to try and use this platform to try and speak to kids.

Zibby: That's amazing. I can't wait to see what comes next. It's so funny, in The New York Times today, there was a whole thing -- you know that At Home section? I don't know if you read The Times. They have At Home. Today, it was like, you're at home with your kids for the holidays. What are you going to do? If you're the type of family who used to love to travel, you can do these things. I was reading it like, what? What am I going to do? [laughs] There were all these resources to pretend as if you're traveling with your kids. They all seemed pretty shoddy, but having a book like yours would fall into that great category.

Shani: I do read The Times. My wife and I had the exact same -- right now, our kids' school has -- wait for it -- a five-week break. We have five weeks. We had received recommendations from the school as to things that they should do. For one of my kids, for my older kid, it's thirty minutes of reading three days a week and this math program which probably takes her about ten minutes. Then for my son, it's about fifteen minutes of reading. Now, I'm not a mathematician and I haven't done the exact calculations yet, Zibby, but that leaves a lot of hours during the day.

Zibby: For Roblox? [laughs]

Shani: For what? I really appreciate people working hard to try and help come up with ideas. I think there are things that will take up the time. Maybe we'll do some baking. It's a challenge. My wife and I were talking about it. One of the approaches that I take is that this is really an unprecedented, at least in my lifetime, time during which some of the rules that we normally have I think are just going to have to be off the table. Ultimately at the end of the day, my wife and I will do the best that we can to give our kids some stimulation during the day. At the end of the day, they're not going to have as much as we would like. We're not going to be able to do the things that we would normally do. As long as they're relatively happy, they're going to be okay. This is one of those situations where I think my wife and I just have to continually remind ourselves that, you know what, let's just put one foot in front of other. We're going to do our jobs. Our kids will get some stimulation. If they watch their iPad a little bit more than normal, it's okay this time because they're going to be just fine. Listen Zibby, I know that I spent a lot more time in front of the screen when I was a kid.

Zibby: Me too. I'm always saying that. I'm always referencing commercials and shows from the eighties and whatever. At one point, I talked to my mom. I was like, "Did I watch TV all the time?" I do remember reading a lot, but there was not a show I appear to have missed. Honestly, all the kids are going to be fine. We're all going to be fine. Actually, it might even lead to some course correction on the overparenting front because we all see that, you know what, they're fine. They're in the other room. The world's not coming to an end.

Shani: You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of when your kids are little and -- I don't know if you did this. You read all of these parenting books and blogs. People have such strong opinions about what you should do and shouldn't do and how things will ruin your kid if you do them or don't do them. Should you let your kid cry? Should you not let your kid cry? At the end of the day, all the kids are fine. They're just fine. It's the same thing now. I really do wonder if this will result in a course correction because the kids are going to be just fine.

Zibby: I say this all the time, but the more kids I have, the more I realize that I have nothing to do with how they turn out. All I can do is mess them up, but they are who they are from day one. I'm just like, who did I get? [laughs] As long as I love them and make sure that there's some boundaries and I'm not mean and I'm a loving parent, the kids are going to be okay. All this philosophical parenting talk, I didn't see this coming. Thank you for coming on my podcast. Thank you for your book. I can't wait to get a hard copy to read to my kids who, despite all their time on screens, somehow don't like to read books on screens, of all the things. I'm jealous of you being in Brazil. I hope you survive these five weeks.

Shani: You too, Zibby. Thank you so much for having me. If it makes you feel better, yes, we are in Brazil, but just like you, I am inside. We could be anywhere right now. Good luck to you in this next five weeks. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Take care. Buh-bye.

Shani: Bye.

Liz Tichenor, THE NIGHT LAKE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Liz. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss The Night Lake.

Liz Tichenor: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Your subtitle is A Young Priest Maps the Topography of Grief. When I saw this whole cover and subtitle and everything, I was like, oh, my gosh, I have to read that. That must be really amazing. It was. Can you please tell listeners basically what it's about, the period of time, and what happened? What made you turn your experience into a book?

Liz: I had been moving towards being ordained as a priest for a long time. When it actually came to pass, when it happened, my life was a really different landscape than what I had imagined it would look like at that point. My mom had been sick for a long time. She struggled with alcoholism for many, many years. It was just a couple of months before I was ordained as a priest that she died. She died by suicide. It was just awful and unexpected that it would end that way. Then a few months later, I was ordained. It was an unusual setup in some ways. I had decided to take an extra year in graduate school. I was ordained and then was continuing the academic year studying more. I began my first call splitting my time between a parish and a summer camp and conference center. My second child, a son, was born about maybe three months after I began at that parish. I started and was just getting my feet under me in this new job and not just a new place, but my role in doing that work. You learn everything in school, but it's pretty different when you're actually out trying to do the work and discover how you're going to do that work. I went onto maternity leave.

Then forty days later, our son, Fritz, died suddenly, totally unexpectedly. He'd been this huge healthy -- everybody said, he's so big. Then all of a sudden, I was the parent of a dead baby. There are statistics, but I was young. I was healthy. I don't think I had ever really considered that that would be the shape of my life, and maybe especially because my mom had just died. One of the things that people said to me, wait, but you just went through that. How can you be going through this now? It was not even a year and a half later. When I went back to work, it was maybe a month later after he had died. I was still learning how to do this job. There are a lot of different ways to inhabit it. It hasn’t been that long, really, that women have been ordained. It's still a job, a role, that is so influenced by the many centuries of male-dominated leadership. What I came to see pretty quickly was that I actually couldn't separate my grief and what I was doing there with authentically showing up. Yet my job was to lead people towards hope and to look for how the moral arc of the universe is bending towards justice and where we might find good news together. In some ways, that felt so at odds with the really dark and desperate place where I so often found myself in those days.

As I began sticking my toes in the water a little bit, I discovered the more that I showed up authentically, the more I was honest about where I was wrestling, the more it seemed to work, what I was trying to do in my job. The book is a sort of winding road through that process of grieving these two beloved people, of trying to discover how to survive that. There were times when I wasn't sure I was going to come through on the other end or what that would look like. Then trying to both lead a community and also parent -- my daughter was two and change when our son, Fritz, died. Wrestling, do we do this again? We wanted to raise siblings. How? How do we do that? It's a story of, what is too much? and how we try to rise to that and live through it anyway. To the second part of your question, why I decided to write the book -- I looked it up the other day. I was curious. Brené Brown's book, Daring Greatly, was published about two weeks after my mom died. There was this surge as that got traction. I found that book. A lot of people found that book. There started to be more conversation about this intersection between leading and being vulnerable. It's not something that I saw a whole lot of. I was not taught to preach vulnerably. We're taught to be really careful not to use the congregation as your therapist, and I totally support that. The other adage that I heard which I, to a certain extent, agree with is to preach from your scars not from your wounds. Don't go up there and bleed all over everybody. That makes a lot of sense to me.

It breaks down when you're in the midst of life. Life is happening. All these people knew that my mom had just died by suicide. They knew that I had just lost our baby totally unexpectedly. For me to get up there and unpack our sacred texts or try to point to different ideas leading us forward and not bring myself into it, it felt dishonest. Somehow, to the concern of some more traditional folks, I started doing that. I started being just real and sometimes raw in what I shared. It wasn't for everybody. Not everybody is ready for that. The folks who needed it, the response was really stunning. I remember one day several years ago, someone who's now a friend came to me after hearing one of these and said, "Okay, so when are you going to write that book?" She had been through some really tough stuff too, just a terrifying diagnosis and life unraveling and then coming back together on the other side of that. I couldn't really get away from it. It felt like it needed to come out of me.

Zibby: Wow. This is such a powerful story. How did you maintain your faith in God after everything that happened to you?

Liz: [laughs] It was really hard, honestly. There were some pretty bleak days and seasons. I think some of what made a difference for me was that my faith is not a one-on-one kind of thing. It's not just me, Liz, and God, and we go back and forth and it all depends on that line. I believe that this happens in community. That's a way that I have tried to engage it for as long as I've been part of a faith community. I found my way into the church as a teenager when things at home had gone really sideways. We had briefly plugged in as a family when I was eleven or twelve. Then my parents divorced. Everything sort of unraveled. I went back when I got my driver's license and found this group of people who were ready to show up. I looked rather different then. I had, in various turns, a shaved head and bright green hair. They said, "Welcome. We're so glad you're here. Here, would you like to step up and lead this part? Do you want to come to this class?" It was amazing. That continued for me, especially in college. There was just an amazing crew of folks. We chose to be kin together. We could do this work of seeking, of wrestling really big questions that don't have answers, of trying to discern what to do with our lives. We could do that in community.

Both when my mom died and when Fritz died, those were the people that showed up physically and also finding really creative ways to be with us from across the miles. They showed up again and again and again not with platitudes, not with, God needed another angel and blah, blah, blah, not any of that, but just, we're with you. We're letting our hearts break with you. We're going to stay alongside. How I ultimately held onto my faith was allowing these other people to have that faith on my behalf when I couldn't. There were longs periods of time when I felt like, maybe I want to pray or connect or listen, and I have no idea how to even begin to do that. I don't know what those words would be. I knew that there were other people joining me there who could and would, who were doing that on my behalf. I think that's ultimately how we can make it forward. We take turns. We don't all have to have it figured out or steady every day all the time, but we can carry each other in that. I think that's really what carried me through.

Zibby: Wow. It speaks to the power of community more than really anything. That image you just struck up of your walking through the door and feeling welcomed, I feel like at its core, that is what we are all looking for. Whether it's online or in a church or in a recovery group, Weight Watchers, people are just longing for connection in any way. The fact that yours had the perk of having God attached is --

Liz: -- Bonus.

Zibby: Yeah, bonus group member there. I think that’s beautiful, what you just said about being close to people who can maintain the faith when yours waivered. It's just beautiful. I bet those people, now that you're not necessarily on the other side but in a different place than in the depths of despair, must feel so proud of you that they’ve helped pull you through. I bet you'll turn around and, if you haven't already, you'll be the one pulling them through whatever life throws their way.

Liz: I hope they know that. The key people who show up in this book have read it. I ran it by them. I wonder that sometimes. The ones who are especially generous and loving and just so thoughtful, they're often also the ones who end up being the most humble. I wonder sometimes if they know how critical they were, how much of a difference it made. For me, there were times when I couldn't respond. I couldn't receive it. That was about as much energy as I had. I wonder. Sometimes you send things out into the void. You hope, maybe it'll make a difference. You don't know. I hope they know that.

Zibby: First of all, you can now play them this podcast when it comes out. Second of all, you should set aside half an hour this afternoon and just send a few emails or texts. Just tell them because I bet it'll make their day. Not to give you more work.

Liz: That's good work to do.

Zibby: Good work to do. There were so many parts of this book that were just beyond beautiful. I also loved the whole tradition you had of folding up the notes and then as the book went on, pulling out the little scraps of paper. Can you just explain that a little more and talk about the power of these little thoughts that women in your life had to impart over time?

Liz: Fritz was our second child. We had everything we needed. We did not care about dressing a boy in girl's clothes. It was a baby. Whatever. At this point, we were living at the camp where we were working at Lake Tahoe. It was right on the shore of Lake Tahoe. We were living in a cabin that was, I think it was 340 square feet including the outside shed thingy that was attached. It was very cozy. We also really didn't need more stuff. We did not want a baby shower. One of our neighbors who lived at the camp there just felt like, ritual matters. We need to mark this. We need to celebrate and welcome this baby. No, we don't need to give you more things, but we need to do something. She gathered the women and girls who lived at camp. It was me and my best friend, Lori, who's the chef there, and her two daughters -- I'm not going to get their ages right; they're maybe seven and nine, pretty little still -- and my mother-in-law. We gathered in their home. The sun was setting over Lake Tahoe. Ate all kinds of wonderful food. The girls really sloppily painted my fingernails and my toenails.

What they decided they wanted to give me was not onesies and pacifiers, but their well-wishes and their intentions and their love in the form of these little notes. They were maybe three by two, not even that, two by one, very small pieces of paper. They wrote these wishes for me with the intention that I open them while I was in labor with Fritz and that that would give me strength and encouragement. I'd know they were with me and all that. They gave me them in this little bottle. Fritz was really late, really, really late. We tried, oh, my goodness, everything. I walked so many stairs with that baby trying to get him out. We were in Nevada, the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe where, at least at the time, there was not a whole lot by way of regulations. We were planning a home birth. Alice had been born at home with a midwife also. We came to the very last day that, even in Nevada, they would let us do this. He was twenty days late. As a last-ditch effort, I drank castor oil and the next morning woke up in just roaring labor. He was nine and a half pounds. It was wild. There was no stopping to read notes at that point. I don't know if they even crossed my mind. Then we were in the baby fog, newborn, chasing a toddler, all that.

I don't really remember, but I don't think I really thought about them or noticed them until he died. He died at night. Getting up the next morning, there's light everywhere, and there's no baby. I just thought, how the hell am I going to do this? How do I even do this first day? I saw this bottle, this little green glass bottle sitting on the shelf next to the plates and stuff. I took it down and pulled a note out. I read it. I'm not going to remember. It's in the book, which came when. I decided I was going to open one a day until they ran out. It got me through the first week. Then I strung a thread through them and taped them up in the window. They're totally bleached out now. You can barely read the words anymore. It was just this connective tissue between the life that these beloved women and girls had wished for us and sent towards us and then unfolding in this entirely different way, but trying to trust that the love they offered to me and this child was still there.

Zibby: It's so beautiful. By the way, I think that's a really nice thing to do even for people who have lost someone recently. Maybe this will get you through a week. When you're in that frame of mind, that's basically as far as you can even see. Even that feels insurmountable. For everybody who's like, "What can I do to help somebody who's grieving? What should I say? What should I do?" putting like seven scraps of paper in a box might just be the most helpful thing you can do.

Liz: It's a start to get you through those first days.

Zibby: It's like the jumper cables on a car. It's not going to fix the car, but it'll get you to the shop.

Liz: I love that.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about writing this book. How long did it take you to write it? When did you find the time to do this? Where did you do it? All of it, the process.

Liz: Oh, geez. It had been sort of kicking around, that nagging that doesn't go away. It was December 2017. I emailed a friend who has written many books and said, "Jane, okay, I'm ready, but how do I do this? Where do I even start?" We got together. She said, "How you start is, it's way past the deadline, but I want you to apply for this writing fellowship anyway. Just do it." It felt totally just, fell from the sky gift. I was able to join this writing fellowship. It's this bizarro artist farm thing up between Palo Alto and the sea, this old ranch converted. I went that January in 2018 for five days with maybe ten other writers. I worked through all my old journals and made lists and started writing some of it. Then the shape of the program was that month by month I was supposed to turn in pages and get feedback back, which was so incredibly helpful. Writers who are listening, if there's any way to build some kind of accountability in, month by month or whatever interval, that felt just incredibly helpful to have to put it out. I worked in whatever bits and pockets of time I could find that winter and spring. At that point, I had -- let's see, can I do math? Alice was six. By that point, we had had another child, Sam. He was turning three, so a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. I was working full time.

I remember hearing an author describe her process. Her way in was she had this amazing and elaborate ritual to get ready to write. I don't know what it involves, a particular food and a way of making tea and some exercise and setting her -- it took like two hours, she told us, to get ready. Then at that point, she had invested so much time in getting ready that she was compelled to write. That worked really well for her. Her book is incredible. It is so gorgeous. I was sitting there with a couple other moms listening to her describe this and trying so hard to be gracious and supportive because it was beautiful. It was really clever, frankly, how she worked this out. I was thinking, oh, my goodness, if I had two hours uninterrupted, I could write so much just in that time. I tried various things. I tried making recurring times on my calendar. I tried hard to write five days a week. Sometimes that would be for fifteen minutes. Sometimes I would get an hour. Sometimes I'd get nothing for weeks. It would be really hard to reset, but coming back to it again and again. Then, really, what made it possible was that summer in 2018, I had the gift of a sabbatical. I'd been in my new position for four years at that point. It was just a gift. I spent ten weeks. We traveled to spend time with various people that we love dearly and don't see enough of. My husband, Jessie, would run with the kids in the morning. I would write in the morning. Then we would adventure the rest of the day.

I think especially because I had those chunks of three or four hours each morning and was not trying to produce creative work for my job, it was just gold. It was such amazing time. When we came back at the end of the sabbatical, I had a first draft. Then after that, it was just totally catch as catch can. I took a couple of weeks of vacation to charge through edits. There were a lot of late nights. It was a little over a year ago I got the book deal. There was some more rounds of edits. I had received the tentative schedule of how things were going to be going back and forth. I took a new job around this time last year. In April, we moved just a half hour away, but to a new house. I think it was actually on our moving day that I received the copyedited manuscript back and the request to turn it around in two weeks. [laughs] I think I laughed and cried at the same time. We were just moving. Of course, in the depths of pandemic, there was no school, no childcare at all. I guess I'm not really going to sleep a lot. I wouldn't recommend that as a sustainable practice. Once in a while, that's how it happens. You find the time where you can. You get it done.

Zibby: Two hours uninterrupted for a mom is like striking gold. It's amazing. I hear what you're saying.

Liz: Last weekend, I had two hours. I was only interrupted every seven or eight minutes. Even that, right now, it was the best.

Zibby: Amazing. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors aside from finding two hours of uninterrupted time?

Liz: Yeah, good luck with that. Even ten minutes, take what you can get. What feels most live for me to share or to encourage is to write what you can't not write. If there is something that you really feel you have to put down on paper whether or not anyone else ever reads it, write that. If you understand why it matters, it matters. Find the people who get it. This probably won't surprise you, but there are some people who really did not think this book was a very good idea. It was way too much sharing or way too sad. Who wants to read about a suicide and a dead baby? That's fine. They don't need to read it. I'm okay with that.

Zibby: I do.

Liz: [laughs] That's what I thought. I thought, well, I think most people actually are handed, at some point, loss or grief or confusion that is just beyond them. What do we do with that? Can we talk about that? I'd say try to find the people who understand that and are ready to run with you in bringing it out into the world. They're there. Just ignore the people who aren't ready for it. That's okay.

Zibby: Amazing. Liz, thank you. Thank you for sharing your painful yet inspiring story of survival through the depths of despair and keeping the faith and just all of it. Thank you for your time and for your beautiful book which I truly -- I feel bad saying I enjoyed it because it was so --

Liz: -- No, you can.

Zibby: It was so upsetting too, but it was very meaningful to me and memorable. Thank you.

Liz: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care.

Liz: Take care.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Jen Sincero, BADASS HABITS

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

Jen Sincero: Thanks so much for having me. I love the title of your show.

Zibby: Thank you. I love the title of your books. I feel like you are single-handedly responsible for getting the term badass into mainstream culture. That's quite an accomplishment.

Jen: Thank you very much.

Zibby: No problem. Your latest book tackles habits. Thank you for that. There are so many habits I feel like I want to change. I didn't even know which one to write down in all capital letters as you suggested. I know this is one of many extensions, including how to be better with your money and other things where you can apply the badassery, if you will. Why habits? Why did you pick that to tackle in this book?

Jen: I feel like the first three books, You are a Badass, Badass at Making Money, and You are a Badass Every Day, they're about taking action, but they were really about getting the mindset pieces down and to really wake up to all your screwed-up thoughts and beliefs and actions and words. I felt like habits was the awesome follow-up to those because you could really start implementing some of the stuff you were learning in those books and make them habits. We don't even realize how habitual everything is. The way you think is habitual. The things you talk about are habitual. We're riddled with habits. It was time to really get into that.

Zibby: That was one of my favorite points of the book. You're like, we don't even congratulate ourselves on the habits that we don't think about, like, hey, congratulations, I put my underwear on every day, or all these things that we just do. Your whole argument is we can do anything we want as long as we get in the right mindset, which I felt like was so freeing. It's not hard to make habits. It's just the focusing on them. Getting the right mindset to do it is all that's required, really.

Jen: There are certainly little tricks you can do to make it easier, but yeah, that's really it.

Zibby: I loved your framework. You basically outlined -- by the way, I also loved when you said how to catch yourself from wandering down Woe-is-me Lane. I am totally going to use that because I'm always like, I hate to say woe is me. Woe-is-me Lane, I can see a whole board game with Woe-is-me Lane. Here are the pitfalls. Maybe there needs to be a Badass board game or something.

Jen: Oh, my god, that's an awesome idea. It's a good pandemic project.

Zibby: Pandemic project, there you go, with Woe-is-me Lane in Badassery Village. Anyway, you work on that. In the meantime, you have all these stages like the trigger, the sequence, repetition, ease, patience, and identity which make up habit forming. Take me through this general paradigm. How did you come up with this?

Jen: I started looking at why we behave the way we do. The first thing we do is we unconsciously participate in "reality" because we believe that money is really hard to make or we think that we suck at relationships or we talk about how there's no good men or women out there. We get into these patterns. We unconsciously just take them as truth. It's once we wake up to what we've got going on and question our beliefs and our thoughts and our words and be like, why do I believe that? There's plenty of people doing A, B, C, or D that I have decided that for myself it is impossible and unavailable. The first step is always awareness and always catching yourself in whatever your stories are that are not serving you. That really is the first part. I just outlined that. Then with the triggers and the sequence and all of that, there is very concrete way that habits happen. The trigger is you want to take your dog for a walk. The sequence starts with you putting on your shoes and putting the leash on the dog. Then you go out for the walk. We're unaware of so many of these trigger sequences, things that we've got going on. For a lot of people, a negative habit is -- the trigger is, I'm having a cocktail. Now I got to have a cigarette. Becoming aware of the triggers and the sequences that follow them allow you to unhook from them. It's almost like stepping outside of yourself and watching yourself behave. Then you can be like, you know what, that's not how I want to show up. That's not who I want to be. Then that empowers you to make different choices.

Zibby: That was the other thing I thought was so great, was how to identify a habit worth breaking. You outlined a couple steps, four different parts of this, which made it even harder for me to pick my habit. You said, "Pick habits, one, would give you a sense of being the person you know you're meant to be, a sense of empowerment, an improved quality of life, and a sense of accomplishment." Some of the habits, I was thinking before I started reading this book, are not that important to who I'm meant to me. How I eat is not who I'm meant to be. I would like to stop snacking at night, but that's such a minor thing. It wouldn't make me feel accomplished or proud.

Jen: Think about that, though. Think about that. You have one body that you travel around in for your finite experience on planet Earth. Your body is the most important thing you've got going. Changing how you eat and how you treat it and giving it what it needs to thrive and feel good and stay healthy is epic. That little shift of not eating late at night means your little body that does all these amazing things for you doesn't have to work really hard when it's supposed to be in this regenerative mode of sleeping. It really is all about perspective. Give me another one. I'll knock it down. [laughter]

Zibby: I really said that so that I could continue snacking at night, so if you wouldn't mind taking what you just said and we'll pretend that never happened. Also, developing a habit of writing regularly. I'm so busy. I love to write. I feel like I squeeze my writing into posting on Instagram or little snippets. How great would it be if I could make time to do it? That, I feel like, would give me more of these things than something like working out.

Jen: Back to the body again. [Indiscernible] I'm going to go there.

Zibby: That's a lost cause. Let's go back to try to fit writing in. That's something that people might want to start doing, not changing a bad habit, but just introducing something new into the regular rotation. Tell me a little about that because they're different.

Jen: First, I would start out with busting yourself on why you haven't done it yet and your beliefs and thoughts and words around how hard writing is, about how you don't have the time, about how you've tried before and you failed. Get mighty clear on all the many, many reasons that it hasn’t happened yet and why you think you're going to suck at it because they exist if you're not doing it yet and it's something you want to do. Write them down. It really is about specifics. Write them down and be like, oh, hello. Then question them all and counter them all because they all have counters. You've created this belief system. A lot of the times, it's so subconscious. You've just taken it as truth. I'm a mom. I got a podcast. I got a job. I got a blah, blah, blah. I don't have time. It's true. It's true. It's true. Is it? Could you fit in a fifteen-minute writing session somewhere? Could you set up a boundary with your family to be like, "Listen, you're out of luck. I am writing."? I always talk about how we talk about how we don't have time to work out and treat our bodies right, but if we get sick and go to the hospital, we have time to go to the hospital. We are in the damn hospital. There's suddenly time for that. Time really is, as Einstein -- was he the one who said that it's a concept? It really is a concept. You can't wait for time. You have to make time. Make it happen for yourself because it is there if it's important. It really is.

Zibby: I try to say that about reading. I feel like I've gotten that in. When I talk to other people who say -- hence the name of the podcast -- we don't have time to read or this or that, I think about all the things we do make the time for every single day. Why? Why those things? It's not the same, necessarily, as a habit.

Jen: You're right, though. It's true. You get into the habit of surfing the internet for shoes or whatever you do. It's about the awareness. We just get stuck in these patterns of unaware -- they say that if you've got a job that you go to for eight hours a day, you actually spend about three hours of those days actually working. Then you're just screwing around the rest of the time. We spend a lot of time screwing around. Listen, I'm a big fan of screwing around and doing whatever you want to do, but if there's something you really want to do, you have time. You've just got to really make the time and consciously decide to make the time.

Zibby: Do you feel like you've put all this extra pressure on yourself now that you came out with a book about habits? Are there any habits that secretly you still haven't really nailed and now you can't admit it because the book is out?

Jen: You should do a podcast with my friends who see how I live my life. [laughter] Plus, we're in a pandemic. I am in my sweatpants right now. Totally, come on. Yes, I have absolutely succeeded at so many habits. I actually open the book in the introduction talking about, who the hell am I to write a book on habits? I still love fried food. Eat it all the time. I can coach you through. I know what to do. Whether I do it or not really doesn't matter as long as I tell you how to do it.

Zibby: I think it matters a little bit. Not that you have to hold yourself to that standard. Is this like a those who can't do, teach type of thing? [laughs]

Jen: Totally. No. My point in the beginning of the book was I am focusing on all the habits I suck at. Meanwhile, I have absolutely rocked some very hard habits for me to change. Nobody's perfect. We're all learning and changing and doing it.

Zibby: You've rocked the habit of becoming a best-selling author and writing more and more books. That's pretty cool. You're also doing these really awesome seminars, a $97 class to write a book proposal. I saw that all these people were selling books because of your coaching with them. That must make you feel amazing.

Jen: It's funny. I have a little pod here now with some people staying who fled the city. I was saying now I'm back on book tour because Habits has come out. I was like, god, and especially during the pandemic where I haven't left the house and I haven't done a damn thing. I'm just slothing around reading books, hanging out. That's right, there's this whole other world out there of the Badass people and all my readers. They're so amazing. It's been so nice to ramp that back up and be in that world and to remember that there is all this change going on and that people are just doing incredible things. It's so inspiring. It really, truly is.

Zibby: Wow, how great for you to help them, though. That's great. What is next in the Badass hopper? What are the next couple books? What's the plan?

Jen: You are a Badass at Taking Naps in Your Sweatpants. [laughter] You know, I don't know. I got to be honest. Each book is a birth. It's rather epic. I just birthed Badass Habits. I'm just going to enjoy my new little baby and celebrate it and parade her around and see what comes out of that and what I feel drawn to do next.

Zibby: The board game, that's what you're going to do. [laughs]

Jen: I will be contacting you to give you your ten percent when the board game comes out because that's such a good idea.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. One other thing that I thought was so great in the book was when you divided people about their boundary bungling, which is so great. I hated to even admit where I would fall short on this, as I'm sure most people reading the book would. You have too yes-y, too much no, and too control-y. You even have a huge section on if you're trying to launch a podcast about music and how you would have to put other things on hold. I literally was doing this, and obviously, this isn't about music, but I was like, she's talking to me. These are all the ways you have to make time in your life if you want to have a podcast. I'm looking around like, thank you. [laughs] Tell me about how important it is to maintain your boundaries when you're trying to form some habits.

Jen: I have to be honest. When we came up with this chapter for the book, I was talking to my editor and I was like -- I'm fifty-five now. When I hit fifty, man, I got so good at setting boundaries. All of a sudden, all these insecurities fell away. I was just kicking people out of my house and not inviting you to a party if I didn't want you to come. I don't care. I mean, not completely. We all have stuff to work through. It was so different. I really did. I remember my dad saying, "I don't know if you get older and wiser, or older and more tired." I was like, he's right. I don't have the energy to deal with people I don't want to deal with. I don't have the energy to say yes when I really want to say no. It's such a gift. I was like, I would love to write this so that the youngsters who don't -- you don't have to wait until you're fifty. You can actually start really becoming aware of your boundary issues and putting them into place and decriminalizing boundaries. I felt this was so important. When you set a solid boundary, you're not a mean person who's cutting off other people and not helping out other people.

You're actually informing them of what you're available for so that they know what to expect. Then you're not all caught up in this passive-aggressiveness and resentment and obligation and all those really fun things. It really serves everybody. No one's walking around on eggshells. I was super excited to write all that. Then I was talking to my editor. She was like, "Of course, for habits, if you're going to shift who you're being in the world, you're going to need totally new boundaries." You're going to have to set up boundaries around time that you need to implement these habits. You're going to be shifting who you are. If you are starting the habit of not drinking anymore, you are unavailable to go to bars with your friends. You are setting up that boundary. It's all about boundaries. It was really fun to write about this topic that I was so excited about and thrilled to be quite an expert on because I'm old and possibly very much more tired, but also to relate it to habits because I don't think that that comes into a lot of the books and discussions around habits. It's super important.

Zibby: I totally agree. It's more like complete behavior modification. It's an interpersonal coaching of finding what's important to you.

Jen: Exactly, and specifics and getting clear.

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Jen: Let's see. Writing equals ass plus chair. That's the big mysterious equation to writing a book. It is about just staying. I'll tell you the thing for me. I am a really reluctant writer. I have to drag myself kicking and screaming. It's really painful for me, actually. I've heard that from a lot of writers too. I have a friend who can't wait to sit down to write. I'm just like, I hate you. She's actually my writing partner. She's always excited. I'm always trying to get out of it. That's another story. What I do is I chunk it down. Chunking down has saved my ass when it comes to writing books because I'm so squirmy and I so just, [makes noise]. What I do is I chunk it down into twenty-minute writing sessions where I am unauthorized to pee, to answer the phone, to go on the internet. Twenty minutes, I set an alarm. Then I'm allowed to have a ten-minute break or a five-minute break or whatever. I'm really serious about it because I know myself. I know by minute ten, I'm going to be squirming and coming up with excuses. Once I've set that timer, I know that it's not just about this twenty-minute writing session. This is about my career. This is about who I show up as in the world. I've got to get this done. Making that commitment is manageable for me. It's not the whole, I'm going to spend five hours writing today, which will be really a half hour. For me, chunking stuff down is extremely helpful. I highly recommend it.

Zibby: Excellent. That always helps. Isn't it like the whole quote, a journey of thousand miles begins with a single step? Something like that. I don't know.

Jen: Well done. You'll be done before you start if you start out with overwhelm. That's why that one day at a time is such a brilliant theory. It's just one day at a time. Just relax. We're so drama oriented.

Zibby: It's so true. Awesome. Thank you so much. I have loved our conversation. Your book was fantastic. I am going to keep it close by, especially during this holiday time when everything that is a problem becomes a really big problem. [laughter]

Jen: Thank you, holidays.

Zibby: Exactly. Thank you so much, Jen. Thanks for all your time.

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

Zibby: Have a great day. Buh-bye.

Jen: You too. Bye-bye.

Sabaa Tahir, A SKY BEYOND THE STORM

Zibby Owens: I did this Instagram Live with Sabaa Tahir for the Good Morning America Book Club Instagram page, @GMABookClub. You can watch it there, I'm sure it's saved in their Instagram archives, and is also up on my IG TV as well if you want to watch it, plus, of course, YouTube and everywhere else. Here is her bio. Sabaa Tahir is the number-one New York Times best-selling author of the Ember in the Ashes series which has been translated into over thirty-five languages. She grew up in California’s Mojave Desert at her family’s eighteen-room motel. There, she spent her time devouring fantasy novels, raiding her brother’s comic book stash, and playing guitar badly. She began writing An Ember in the Ashes while working nights as a newspaper editor. She likes thunderous indie rock, garish socks, and all things nerd. Sabaa currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. I was really excited to talk to her about the number-four book in her series called A Sky Beyond the Storm. By the way, Sabaa is one of the few Pakistani America authors writing speculative fiction. She brings a unique perspective to the fantasy genre. I really loved talking to her.

Hi.

Sabaa Tahir: Hello. How are you, Zibby?

Zibby: I'm good. How are you?

Sabaa: I'm doing well. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Congratulations on book four of the series. So exciting, oh, my gosh.

Sabaa: Thank you. It's very exciting. It's crazy.

Zibby: I read many times over that you said you were not a crier, but that finishing this series made you really cry. Tell me about what that was like.

Sabaa: I think I didn't anticipate how characters start to feel like friends. Especially, I've spent thirteen years with these characters. I started writing this series in 2007. It took me seven years to have the first book published. I just didn't realize that it was going to be so emotional. I sort of compare it to when I was a little girl and I was afraid or nervous or whatever, I'd go hide in the laundry basket. I would sort through my thoughts there and everything. These books and these characters ended up kind of being my adult laundry basket. This is the world where I would hide when everything got to be too much or I just needed an escape. Now my laundry basket's gone, so I'm like, I'm so sad. [laughs]

Zibby: Sabaa, I am going to FedEx you a laundry basket from Amazon. You can have one.

Sabaa: Aw, thank you. Zibby, it's going to need to be really big so that I can fit in it. [laughs]

Zibby: Maybe we could put two over your head. Maybe you just need a laundry room. I don't know, something.

Sabaa: Something. Maybe I just need a laundry room. There you go.

Zibby: So many people depend on characters and story to get them through everything. When it's your own and you're creating it, I imagine that's just a millionfold. What does it feel like to hold the torch as one of the first women Pakistani American fantasy writers and how you got to represent a whole new cross section of people, I should say, in both the protagonist and the villains and every character in your book and the community in which you're writing and how you basically went from feeling bullied in the motel your parents had you living in with eighteen people or something growing up to being a number-one best-selling author? I know that's a big question.

Sabaa: It is a big question. One thing is I try really hard almost not to think too much about it, not to look too directly at it because it does feel so big sometimes. I think what really helps me is to focus on the art, to focus on the writing because ultimately, it's so important to me to tell these stories for every single one of those young adults from all over the world who send me messages. They're like, thank you for telling this story. I really needed to see myself. I needed to see my family. I needed to see my friends. I really try to focus on that because that allows me to put the art first. I feel like you're only as good as your last book to some degree. It's very important to me that that's my focus. Then I have two little kids. I think that they don't let me focus on anything other than them. [laughs] It's one of those situations where anytime I might be like, I'm really cool, they’ll be like, Mom, you did A, B, or C wrong, or I just dropped everything on the floor and I don't know how to clean it up, or whatever the case may be. It forces me back to down to earth.

I didn't really consider the impact that Ember would have until a couple of years after it was published. I started really seeing people reading it and saying, this is the reason why I'm a writer or this is the reason why I believe I can be a writer. As book four has come out, I have gotten hundreds of those messages. It has blown my mind because I didn't know when I wrote it that that's what it would be. I was just trying to write a story where I could see myself, where my sons would be able to see themselves one day, where my niece and nephew would be able to see themselves one day, and where the problems that people whose ethnicity is from my part of the world, which is Pakistan or South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa -- a lot of these places with the mythology that you see in An Ember in the Ashes and a lot of places that are going through some terrible things right now, I wanted to see that in a story. I hadn’t seen that in a story. I felt very erased. That's why it was important to me to write these. It really has only started sinking in recently.

Zibby: There's certainly nothing like kids to make you feel like you're two inches tall instead of -- [laughs]. In fact, you even wrote the most beautiful dedication that I had read at the beginning of your fourth book. You said, "For my own children, my falcon and my sword, of all the world wherein I dwell, yours is the most beautiful." That is so nice. It just sets such a tone for the poetic, lyrical way you write in general. It hearkens back. I know it takes place five hundred years ago, but it definitely hearkens back to another era and another time of life and is just completely escapist. I feel like particularly now, everyone needs that.

Sabaa: I hope that the book provides an escape. I really hope that it allows people to feel some measure of hope. That's what I need right now. That's the books that I'm turning to, the ones that even if something really harrowing and stressful is happening, there's hope in the book. That matters to me so much. I wanted to give that to my readers. I worked on that. Dedications are always so difficult for me because it's the first thing people read. Some people just skip them. Generally, I think people read dedications. It's the very first thing they see that I've written. This is for my kids, so I was like, this has to feel good when they're twenty-five. Hopefully when they're much older and I'm gone, I want them to be able to open this book and feel that love coming from me. It took me months to actually figure out that dedication. I wrote it. I rewrote it. I read it to my husband. I was like, "Is this good?" He was like, "No, write it again." I read it to my mom. She was like, "I don't know about that." It was a process. I'm glad I got there in the end.

Zibby: You totally got there. Check plus. Loved it. Maybe you should compile all the discarded dedications. Maybe they'd want to see that in twenty-five years too.

Sabaa: I should totally do that. I had one where I was like, "To my falcon and my sword, you're the reason I almost didn't finish this book." Then I was like, ha, ha, ha, I'm not going to put that in.

Zibby: For the people hanging from my ankles who are not letting me do this, do my job, thank you. I did it anyway. [laughter] Do you read fantasy yourself? Are you a huge fantasy fan? How did you learn how to write like this?

Sabaa: I am big, big fantasy fan. I've been reading fantasy since I was ten, eleven. The very first fantasy book I got was The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. It was written in the seventies. It's all dudes. It's a very classic, old-school fantasy. I just loved that book. It took me away from my troubles. I was in middle school at the time. Everyone knows middle school's awful. It was just a wonderful escape. That was really my gateway book into fantasy. Then after that, I started reading a lot more. I found that I really connected to these characters and these places that didn't exist. As I grew older, I got into literature, more literary works, that kind of thing. Actually, that's what I was working on. I was working on a memoir. I was twenty. I don't know what I was going to write about, the motel. My mother was talking to me on the phone. I was complaining yet again about how I was having a difficult time writing this book. I was just doing it in my spare time as I was working.

She was like, "Why don't you write a fantasy? You love fantasy. You read it all the time." As per usual, she was right. I started working on it. Then in terms of training, it was really working at The Washington Post. I was an editor there. I was a copy editor. I worked late at night. I worked on headlines and captions and did the last edit on a story. I learned so much about the building blocks of writing from reading all these incredible reporters at The Washington Post. I always recommend to young writers that if you are struggling with the form, you're struggling with making your sentences beautiful or making them something that you feel like convey what you want to convey, read a newspaper every day for a year. The economy of language and the way that stories are structured that you can learn from a newspaper is so helpful.

Zibby: That’s great advice. I thought you were going to just tell everybody to try to get a job at The Washington Post.

Sabaa: I mean, it's a great place to work. [laughs]

Zibby: That might not be the most easy thing for everybody to do. It's nice to throw it out there as a suggestion. I want to talk a little more about your relationship with your mom because you obviously are very close. You said in one of the interviews I read about you that you were going to kill off one of your characters. She said she wouldn't cook for you anymore if you did that. That's not even passive-aggressive. That's just outright, on the table, controlling. [laughs]

Sabaa: She threw down the gauntlet. We were talking about the book. She's really funny. She'll always try to get me to talk to her about it. She'll be like, "What's going to happen? Who's going to end up together?" She's very invested in these characters. I told her, "I'm thinking about killing this character. These are the reasons why." She just looked at me like I wasn't her child anymore. She was like, "Don't you dare. What are you thinking? No." Then there's this Pakistani bread called paratha which is a deep-fried bread. It's so good. She was like, "I'll never make it for you again." That's a serious threat. That's the rest of my life not having it. I had to capitulate. I was like, okay.

Zibby: Gosh. If I knew deep-fried bread was on the menu as an incentive tool for anything, I think would have to veer in that direction. Now that the book is out, what has this week been like? How are people even responding? I know it's probably too fast for people to read, but you have so many fans from the whole series. Now you have the ending of it. What is it like now that it's out there?

Sabaa: It's a relief in many ways. It feels like sort of a weight off my shoulders. It's out in the world. I can't change it at this point. It is what it is. That's really wonderful. I've had an overwhelmingly positive response. My readers are so sweet. So many of them have actually said something that I think is very selfless as a reader. A lot of them have said, no matter how it ends, no matter what you decided, I want you to know that these books have meant so much to me. That's such a sweet and beautiful thing to say to an author because it really shows faith in my skill as a writer. They're basically saying, hey, we trust you. We trust what you did. I've had a couple of people who were like, how dare you? [laughs] For the most part, it's been overwhelmingly positive.

It's been a weird week, Zibby, because usually I'm traveling. I'm going to bookstores. I'm going to schools. I'm meeting readers. It's really cool. It's something you look forward to almost as a way to acknowledge that the book is done and it's out in the world now. It doesn't belong to you anymore. It's sort of like a weird ritual, I would say. I've kind of turned it into that. That's not happening this week for obvious reasons, but I've still managed to have these events. I have a bunch this week and next week where I'm talking to a friend or a follow writer about the journey and the process and then doing these one-on-one meet and greets after that are really short but really lovely because you just get to talk to readers face to face. That's awesome. We live in time where it could be so much worse. I think that if this was ten years ago, that wouldn't be an option. We would just be like, sorry. Book is out. Find me on Facebook. Tweet at me if you want. That's kind of it. The fact that we could do something like this is really wonderful. I found it to be lifesaving as I go through this week because it's really allowed me to connect to the readers. I love that part of writing. It's one of the best parts.

Zibby: I think it's been lifesaving for so many people for the whole year. What would we have done? Every so often, I'm like, what if it disappears? What if Zoom crashes? It's great because I'm sure hearing from the fans directly is part of the reward in and of itself like you were saying earlier with people writing because of you. At least you still can access them somehow, which is great. I was watching the trailer for your first book. I was like, wait, is this is a trailer for a book, or is this a movie that I didn't know was a movie? Then I was like, why is this not a movie? What is the deal? Is this going to be a movie? What's the story there?

Sabaa: It's going to be something, but I can't say anything about it because the producers will find me and kill me. Maybe they won't kill me, but they won't be very happy. It is in development as something. It's iterated a few times, as fantasies often do in Hollywood. This iteration is one in which I'm more directly involved, which is awesome and I think makes a really big difference to everything about it, being able to make sure that the cast properly reflects the book and being able to make sure that the story properly reflects the nature of the actual book. All of that is really important to me. That's all I can say about it. I'm really hopeful and crossing my fingers. I hope everyone else does too.

Zibby: I won't ask anymore. We'll see. We'll all be just waiting and watching. I'm sure whatever form it takes will be fantastic. What are your writing plans going forward? You finally have put a capstone on this whole collection. This is a lot of pages, and this is still missing the most recent one. What's next? Are you going to start a new series? What's the plan?

Sabaa: I have something coming up. I can't say much about it again because my publishing house this time would yell at me. It is very different from anything I've written before. At the same time, it has the hallmarks of a Sabaa classic book, which is very harrowing and very stressful. [laughs] I will probably be announcing that next year. I'm really excited about it. Then after that, I'm really considering what I want to do. I think there are so many stories left in the world of Ember. I have absolutely left that door open in the hopes that I will be able to return there when I'm ready and when readers are ready for that. We will see. I don't think we've heard the last of these characters.

Zibby: I feel like you should pull that memoir back out. Maybe now with the vantage point of all of these experiences and being a mom yourself, I feel like maybe there's something there.

Sabaa: You might get your wish.

Zibby: Maybe I read your mind. Awesome. You've already given a little bit of advice, which was fantastic, that aspiring authors can read a newspaper every day for a year, which is really so important anyway. I feel like I'm one of the last people who reads paper newspapers. Do you read paper?

Sabaa: I read online mostly, but I do buy the actual physical paper occasionally, not so much anymore. Before, I would try to get it. At least once a month, I try to pick up the papers that are available to me, which is usually The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. I try to just grab a copy and read it. I really think there's something for reading it end to end. I always would find something that I wouldn't anticipate. I feel like when you read it online, unless you're very methodical and going through each section, it's a little bit more difficult to do that. It was such a beautiful ritualistic thing to have your paper with your coffee and read through it, especially on Sunday morning. That’s what I would usually try to do, is grab that Sunday New York Times and just enjoy it.

Zibby: I have to say, I get them every day. I get The Times and The Journal and the New York Post every day. I have to read it. Sometimes they stack up for a week. I'll say to my husband, "Oh, my gosh, did you know this happened?" He's like, "It happened a week ago." I'm like, "Whatever. I'm catching up." I'm with you. I love to read the papers. I think it's great to also just train yourself based on a certain type of writing. What other advice do you have up your sleeve? You don't have to. You already gave great advice, but if you happen to have more writing advice as somebody who can obviously -- how do you keep your focus and just keep churning out words? Do you have days where you sit down and you're like, I really don't feel like doing this or I can't think of anything?

Sabaa: Absolutely. I have days where I don't feel like writing. I have days where everything I write is garbage. I have days where I'm supposed to write, but like I said, I have a family and I have children. That takes precedence. With everything that's happened with COVID, I've actually found that my hours have been significantly cut because I have to educate my kids in the morning. Then my husband will usually take over for a few hours in the afternoon. That has really had a huge impact on my ability to write. Look, I started writing when I was working at The Washington Post. Then I continued writing through the infancy and toddlerhood of two children. I was a stay-at-home mom during that time. I found that I had to write very much as Toni Morrison once described it, in these slices of time. I call them elbows of time. It's not really about getting a ton done at once. It's about just taking any little snippet and finding some way to make it worthwhile in terms of writing. I would talk into my phone. I would be holding my baby. I have a nice big hand, so I'd be holding my baby with a bottle. [laughs] I'd be talking into my phone to dictate part of a story or talking into a recorder way back when to dictate part of a story. I would steal an hour whenever I could to start scribbling and working on it.

For the first couple of years, that's how I wrote. Sometimes I had help, but it wasn't really dependable, regular, and it wasn't a lot. Sometimes it was family. Sometimes it was someone I hired. I just was clawing away at this book. It added up. That's what I would love for writers to know, particularly writers who are parents or who are caretakers or who have really demanding jobs. You don't have to write all day every day to finish a book. If you can write a page a week, then over the course of a few years, you will have a book. Like I said, it took me from, when I started writing it to when I saw [distorted audio] was seven and a half [distorted audio] for An Ember in the Ashes. It's a long time. That's true. I know that a lot of people would love to just write a book in six months and then see it on the shelf. If you don't have a choice, if you really can't quit that job or you can't become a full-time writer, this is a way for you to claw away at it little by little and just get a little bit done. That's really my advice for writers. You don't have to listen to people who are like, you must write every day. You must write for four hours a day. You must have your own room to write. None of those rules apply to you if you don't want them to. Writers write. Ultimately, they can find a way, usually. If you're lucky, you can find a way to write. That's my advice for writers out there.

Zibby: I am ridiculously impressed at the visual of you dictating while dealing with the baby and the bottle. My thoughts were so incoherent at that time. Even if you weren’t holding anything, that you could dictate and it could become -- I feel like when I speak, as is evidenced right now, it doesn't always make sense. When I write, it's clear. I can go back. If it comes out, that's just super impressive.

Sabaa: It never came out well. It was always like, and then my character runs away because they're scared. Later on, I would sit down and be like, how do I turn that into something that I want to read and that doesn't make me want to run away? It's also about iteration. I think a lot of people think that the first version of a book that writers write is perfect. You know what? If you're that author, that's awesome. I am not that author, Zibby. My first drafts are so embarrassing. It's shocking. I think that if people read it, they'd be like, how did you become a writer?

Zibby: I'm sure that’s not true.

Sabaa: You just iterate. It's gets better and better with each iteration. I must have had like fifty drafts of Ember. The first one was something completely different. The last one and the one you see is the work of just little by little making it better, one paragraph, one page, one chapter until the entire book is better.

Zibby: Wow. That's very inspiring. You should also write a children's book, while we're talking about all the things you should do. I feel like you can bring it down to a kid's level, especially just how you want to represent different backgrounds and everything. I feel like you need to have a children's book in the mix at some point.

Sabaa: I would love that. I will now keep note of that and tell my agent.  

Zibby: You get on that. Thank you very much.

Sabaa: Zibby [indiscernible/crosstalk] write a children's book.

Zibby: Just put me in the acknowledgments somewhere. That's all I need. [laughs]

Sabaa: I got you.

Zibby: Sabaa, thank you so much. This was so much fun. My son is going to dive into this whole series. I'm hoping this gets him off the video games for a few hours. Thank you for taking the time to talk and coming on GMA Book Club. This will also be a podcast on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" so my listeners can hear as well. Thanks for chatting and all that great writerly advice. It was awesome.

Sabaa: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. I really appreciate your time. It was wonderful.

Zibby: Thank you. Congrats on your book.

Sabaa: Take care. Thank you. Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Cait Flanders, ADVENTURES IN OPTING OUT

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

Cait Flanders: Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: Adventures in Opting Out: A Field Guide to Leading an Intentional Life, this is so timely. I feel like we have all sort of opted out of everything not, perhaps, by choice, but here we are. Everyone's taken a new path from what they thought. Yet here comes your book. Tell listeners a little about what made you take a new path. What did you opt out of, and why? I'd particularly like to hear more about -- this is like a hundred questions in one. I really want to hear more about quitting drinking. You talked a lot about that in the book. I feel like that was a whole other book waiting to happen.

Cait: You're right that we have all unintentionally opted out this year. I think that we are forced to opt out of a lot of things that we used to do. The book is about making intentional choices, so deciding that something is no longer working for you or even just -- one of the things I like about the book or just the idea is you don't always have to make a different decision because something bad has happened. Sometimes you make a different decision actually when everything's kind of okay but you're still noticing that you just want something different. There's something that you've been curious about, and it's time to follow that path or just see where your curiosity leads you. Things that I've opted out of in the past, drinking was the first one. In terms of timeline, I stopped drinking in 2012. I was only twenty-seven years old. If I was a little older, it might not seem as big of a decision. I think quitting drinking in your twenties, it changes a lot about your life. It changes a lot about your lifestyle and who you connect with and how you spend your time and also how you, at least for me, how you deal with things.

I'll just list things that I've opted out of, drinking, I would say shopping. There was a year, actually two years, where I didn't buy anything except for a few things if I absolutely needed them, shopping, that consumerist lifestyle. I've changed career paths multiple times, so originally being someone who -- I'm from a government town. The story is truly, once you get in, you're in for life. You're set. My parents both worked for the government. To say one day, actually, I'm going to go to the private sector, that's actually a big deal. Then eventually leaving that to work for myself. Then even within that, within working for myself, switching from being a full-time freelancer to now being a full-time author. There's a whole bunch of changes in there. Then I've also moved multiple times, decided to live in different cities. The last or biggest move that I made was at the end of 2018. I gave up my apartment so that I could travel full time, which looks a little bit different this year. [laughs] That was the last one.

Fundamentally, deciding to stop drinking taught me everything that I would need to do the other things, being that it teaches me still, but taught me how to be comfortable being the only sober person in the room, so essentially being comfortable being the odd one out and choosing that, choosing to be different from most of the people that you're around. It meant that I had to change my coping mechanisms because drinking was something that got me through, whether it was awkward situations, social life, certainly my dating life, and got me through tougher moments. I don't think that I had identified that, really, until I stopped, but I really was someone -- I didn't and still don't identify as an alcoholic because I wasn't chemically dependent on alcoholic, but I used it to get through everything. Any bad, negative feeling that came up, I used drinking as a coping mechanism. To wipe all of those things out has been a lot over the years. Not drinking anymore has taught me everything that I need.

Zibby: Were there any moments -- I know you reference some of them, especially as you tried to stop drinking where you would go a little bit and then you'd kind of regress and have a bender of a weekend and things like that. I know you're not identifying as an alcoholic, and that's cool. Just as getting rid of any coping strategy, was there a moment that was like, you're hitting bottom where you're like, I better stop the drinking? It could've been, I better stop the X, Y, Z at that moment. Tell me your deepest, darkest, worst moment that made you change your life.

Cait: [laughs] There's two things. I don't identify as an alcoholic, and I actually think that there's something interesting about that. Things don't need to be the worst in order for you to want to change it.

Zibby: That's true. You're right. Sorry.

Cait: No, I'm more saying from the intentional side of things. I think that what I've done with drinking and all kinds of thing is, I'm looking at, what are the results of my actions? Which ones don't actually feel good? Drinking was one, though, where I did think about not drinking multiple times. I think the first time I very seriously considered it I was probably twenty or twenty-one. I will say this. Basically every time I drank, I got blackout drunk. That could look different every time. Maybe I just lost an hour of the night. Maybe I lost everything after the first hour of the night. I was twenty, twenty-one. I remember going to this party, and then I don't really remember anything. Then I woke up in my bed. I was very confused. It took me four days to piece together what happened, contacting multiple friends and trying to figure out how I had gotten home, and figured out that what had happened was I had called a cab. I had left the party. I guess I was tired. I sat down on the sidewalk waiting for the cab. I must have fallen asleep there. My friends' parents found me. Then they put me in their van and literally carried me into my house. I have no memory of any of it. That was probably extreme, but in terms of the blackout it wasn't. It was extreme in that someone saw me in it and had to help me through it.

Zibby: Just curious here, were you drinking that much, or do you maybe have some sort of reaction to alcohol?

Cait: I was definitely drinking that much.

Zibby: Wow. I was like, maybe there's an allergy. I'll just solve your problem right here. [laughs]

Cait: Oh, my gosh, if only it was that easy, but no. There was this thing about drinking, too, for me where it truly made up a portion of my identity that I was someone who could drink. I could keep up with the guys. I never got sick. I rarely got hungover. It was almost like those were points of pride. Because I wasn't really good at anything else in my teens and early twenties, that is what formed, truly, a huge piece of my identity. Then to give it up in my mid to late twenties was a massive shock.

Zibby: Wow. Also, it's hard when everybody around you is drunk and they all find themselves hilarious, and they're mostly not funny.

Cait: No. [laughs]

Zibby: When you're the only sober person in a crowd of drunk people, it is not that amusing.

Cait: My dad, he got sober when I was ten and a half, eleven years old. I do believe that that is one of the reasons that the topic of sobriety even seemed like something that would be possible because then I grew up in a house where my parents didn't drink. That was my role model growing up. I remember having conversations with him in the early days that I couldn't get on board with. He would say things like, it's kind of funny now to watch other people. I'm like, no, it's not. It's really annoying.

Zibby: It's really annoying. I've been there too. It's annoying. I back you up. [laughter] Luckily, now there are no parties, so it's not even an issue. I didn't mean to focus too much on the drinking. There's so much in your book, obviously, aside from that, and your whole analogy of the two-pronged mountain and coming down and all the different ways from packing to everything where you traverse this path. One thing I thought was interesting, and I guess it's sort of related to this being an outsider now in your friend group with the drinking, is how to deal with the aftermath of making a decision that might be right for you but that sets you outside the comfort zone of your entire life. I was looking at some of the things that you had pointed out. This is sort of like the warning bullet point list. "You might feel as though you don't have anything in common with anyone anymore. You might feel like you have nothing to contribute to conversations. You might feel like you can't relate to experiences." You go on and on. I mean, not on and on in a bad way. You elaborate. This could be applied to so many things. I felt like I could've written that bullet point list when I got divorced as a mom with little kids. Suddenly, everybody else is married. You're like, well, that's not my experience right now. I don't have a husband at home who I'm annoyed with or whatever it is they're complaining about. I think it's interesting because people don't really talk about what it's like in life as adults to suddenly -- I'm envisioning a Jell-O mold and you squish out just enough that you're not really in the mold anymore, but you're still attached to the Jell-O. [laughs]

Cait: It makes me think, one of the pieces around why it can be applied to so many different things is, that was a piece of your identity, which means it was how people connected with you and/or how you connected with other people. Then it's gone. That can be so many different things that we're going through. It can also be bigger things like if you are grieving or just healing from something and you're deep in process. That can be a very isolating period of time. That is certainly something that I think that we've probably all collectively, but at different times, been dealing with this year. It is hard. It is hard to feel like no one sees you or hears you anymore. No one really gets you anymore. It's especially hard when you chose that, when you chose to enter that space. It's not even that I wrote the book being like, here, I have all the answers. One of the main reasons I wrote it was because I just thought, we have to acknowledge this.

There are so many self-help books that just sort of give you ten steps to follow, or here's the goal in making these changes, but I don't often read a lot about just people describing the actual human experience that you are going to have when you decide to change your life. It's not just that you change. A whole bunch of other things change because you have changed. It's not as simple as saying, just let go and it'll get better. Trust me, I'm a firm believer in nonattachment and how that can help us in certain ways. Doesn't mean that hard things don't come up or that you're not going to have to navigate difficult feelings and difficult situations. I thought, we just need to at least be addressing this. If this book is even just a conversation-starter, maybe someone else will write all the tangible ways of how to navigate all of it. I just thought, we have to start acknowledging this. We can't keep writing self-help books that are promising simple solutions and don't talk about the actual emotional ups and downs that come with it.

Zibby: Maybe it could've been called Adventures in Opting Out: What Comes Next or After the Self-Help Book Ends or something. It's almost like a continuation. Okay, you decided you're going to have a big January and stop doing X, Y, Z. Now what? You also have obviously moved so much in your life. I know you talk about as a child how you moved so much with your family and then as a grown-up and now, of course, traveling or whatever. I'm curious what you're doing now in place of being a nomad. I wonder if there's a correlation between kids who moved a lot or military families or just people who have had to have change and the ability to pick up and change again. I would think yes. I would think, well, you've learned to adapt. You know it's possible, and so you're going to try it, versus people who maybe their parents are married and they’ve lived in the same home until they go to college. They go to college, and they come back to their hometown or something. Then they're forced to make a decision like, maybe I'm drinking too much. Maybe then they don't have the mental roadmap, if you will, to put that into place. What do you think?

Cait: I think that makes perfect sense. I think that an extra piece of that would also be around probably relating to people and/or building relationships and also maintaining relationships. I get a lot of questions or just comments from people saying, you seem to have friends all over or friends from all these different periods of your life. I don't think I had ever really actively thought about if that was true or how that was possible. I have reflected on it a bit more this year, obviously, as we're all communicating at a distance more and people are really learning how to check in with each other more. I actually think that also came from moving around all the time and also having a dad who -- he worked for the coast guard his whole career, so he was home for twenty-eight days and then gone for twenty-eight days. I've also learned a lot about how to maintain long-distance relationships, essentially. I do think that you're right. I think that if you have really been raised where things are constantly changing, you do learn just how adaptable we are. I would say that that, the word adaptable, is something that has really resonated for me this year and also has been nice to see other people recognizing in themselves, that they are more adaptable than they thought.

Even I, at the very beginning, had really intense anxiety about what this year was going to look like. Reminding myself, if I can settle into whatever this looks like, let's say, for a year and a half -- we were all promised two weeks, two weeks, and things get better. I just thought, that is not going to work for my anxiety. If I can settle into whatever this life is, this is my life for a year and a half, I will be able to at least get through it. I have to find whatever my base is for this. To answer your other question, I've been at my dad's house this whole year. Literally, what else could I do? We had finished everything for the book. I had a flight booked to go back to Europe where I would've probably spent most of the rest of this year. I would've come home for the holidays. Those were the original plans. It was like, well, what now? We just had conversations. My dad's still gone half the year. It was just like, I'll pay rent. I'm a grown-up. I'm not going to live at home rent-free or anything. I'll pay rent. We'll be roommates for up to eighteen months and see what happens after that. It has worked and also been challenging. It's challenging to live with your parents as an adult. The silver lining of it is I think we'll have a much different relationship as adults now than we would have if I had just left home at twenty and never come back.

Zibby: I see another book in formation here. What do you think?

Cait: [laughs] A Year with Dad.

Zibby: A Year with Dad, yeah. Living at Home: Adventures in Living Back in the Nest or something. A lot of people can relate to that. I actually wonder what it's going to be like when everybody tries to leave again. This whole two weeks, and now it's been -- you said you kind of got used to this eighteen months or longer. I am not allowing myself to look forward anymore. In my head, I'm like, this is life now. It will never change. Then I'll be pleasantly surprised. In actuality, of course, things will probably, I hope, God willing, get back to normal at some point. How are people going to cope with that? Maybe you become so close with your dad and everybody feels a sense of loss. The closeness that we're all having with our immediate quarantine-ers is going to lift. Then we'll all be inexplicably sad while we're out in the world again expecting to be jumping up and down for joy. Who knows?

Cait: Who knows? If people don't stick with it, I think there will be a longing for how slow and present people were this year if that part goes away. We've been forced to look at a much smaller perspective than usual, which is immediate family, closest friends, our home, our hometown, wherever we're staying. We're so localized right now. I do think that when it expands, my assumption is there will be a bit of longing for that.

Zibby: You're probably right. Then we'll all need to opt into that. Aside from my book idea, are you working on any other writing projects right now?

Cait: Kind of. I don't know that either of them are going to become anything. I do have, I don't want to say that it's a novel, but I'm playing around with fiction for the first time since I was probably eighteen. I don't actually know that anyone will ever read it. Even for now, it's nice to be trying something different and something that's a little bit challenging, or a lot challenging. I don't know that I would call this maybe an opt-out, but thanks to COVID and the fact that everything is online, at least here still, I actually decided to go back to school just part time. I'm taking two classes at my local university in January. It may just be two classes and I'll never take any more again. I thought, I have a curiosity. I'll follow it a little bit. We'll see what happens.

Zibby: That's so cool. I love that.

Cait: We'll see. [laughs]

Zibby: In the meantime, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Cait: Oh, my gosh. I almost feel like this year has shown to not be afraid of whatever your idea is because we do only one chance at it. Even if no one ever reads it, just following it. I didn't actually know that anyone would understand what Adventures in Opting Out was going to be. It does only take one person, whether it's another writer or it's an agent or one publisher. It only takes one person to say that they get it, that they can see it, so just to try it.

Zibby: It's true, and perhaps take a few classes. See what you can drum up.

Cait: Take a few classes.

Zibby: I think another, just to give lessons on your behalf from your book, is that any big life change is also great copy for a memoir. [laughter] You can go a year and stop shopping, and there's your book right there.

Cait: Apparently. That one was really interesting. I wrote about the shopping ban on my blog with no intention ever of writing anything about it after that. I just thought it would be over. I was done. Then other people said, hey, that could be a book. I went, okay. That is true. Also, too, you do not know who is reading your content and who might think that you have more to say.

Zibby: Very interesting. It's a good encouragement for just writing something and putting it somewhere because you never know. If it stays inside you, no one's responding to it. That's for sure.

Cait: Yep, that's definitely true.

Zibby: Basically, I'm just giving my own advice. [laughter] Thank you for coming on my show where I just don't even interview you. I'm kidding. Thank you, Cait. Thank you for your advice, and mine. Thank you for sharing all of your adventures. I can't wait to see your next book about your time with your dad.

Cait: He's going to laugh so much. I can't wait to tell him about it.

Zibby: At least an essay.

Cait: An essay, I could probably do that.

Zibby: There you go.

Cait: Awesome. Thank you.

Zibby: Bye, Cait. Thanks.

Cait: Bye.

Sophie Cousens, THIS TIME NEXT YEAR

Zibby Owens: Hi, everybody. I'm half a minute early, so I won't be too official. I am so excited. Here we go, one o'clock. Hi, everybody. It's Zibby Owens. I'm here from the podcast "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to have a great discussion on GMA Book Club's Instagram account with Sophie Cousens, This Time Next Year: How Many Chances to Meet Your Perfect Match, a novel, which is the GMA Book Club pick for December. I am so excited to be welcoming her in. I can't wait to talk to her about this fantastic book, especially as New Year is quickly approaching. A lot of her chapters begin with that. Hi.

Sophie Cousens: Hello. Hi, Zibby. How are you?

Zibby: Good. How are you?

Sophie: I'm good, though I've got a bit of a phobia of Instagram Live because the last couple I've done the connection's gone halfway through. Fingers crossed the internet gods are with us tonight.

Zibby: So far so good. I was sure this would be cancelled. There's a snowstorm here in the Northeast.

Sophie: Oh, no.

Zibby: I know. We'll just hold our breath and see. At least you came on and spared me from just talking to myself, which I hate. It's always my least favorite part. I'm like, here I am. [laughs] It's a delight to meet you. Thank you for doing this conversation with me.

Sophie: Not at all. Thanks for having me on. It's been really exciting. The whole Good Morning America thing has been incredible.

Zibby: Let's start with that. Tell me about finding out that you became the GMA Book Club pick for December and your reaction and where you were. Give me the whole thing.

Sophie: I got a text from my editor in the UK saying, "Oh, my god, have you seen your email? Have you seen your email?" I hadn’t seen my email. She didn't say what it was. Then I quickly looked at my email and saw that I'd been selected by Good Morning America. It was just such a game changer moment. When you're writing your first novel, you just hope if even my parents and five other people read it, then that would be great. It's opened the book up to such a wide readership. I've just been blown away by the support from people. It's been a dream come true, completely.

Zibby: Does it hold any less weight not being American yourself, or is it just as exciting? What do you think?

Sophie: I think more exciting. I lived in America when I was a teenager, actually. My parents lived in Virginia for three years. I felt like I absorbed a bit of American culture and got into all the morning TV. I miss my potato skins and bacon bits. Those were the [indiscernible/laughter] in America in Virginia at the time.

Zibby: Next time I see them at the grocery, I'll put aside a pack. In case you get a craving again, you can just text me or something. That's funny. Tell me about writing this book. It's your first book. Tell me about the whole process, how you came up with the idea for the story. What inspired you to write a novel to begin with?

Sophie: I've always wanted to be a writer. That's always been ticking away in the back of my head. Since I was a child, I was always telling stories and writing silly little ideas down. I've been a TV producer for twelve years. In that time, I had the odd lull where I thought, I really should write something now, but those kind of jobs, they're so all-consuming. They just don't really leave much space for anything else. I had tried a few things. I actually wrote a YA sci-fi novel as well in my twenties, but that didn't get picked up for some reason. Who knows why? [laughter] Then I had children. Then I thought, you know what, there's never going to be spare time. There's always something. There's always work. Of course, having children, there is no spare time. I thought, if I want to do this, you just have to make the time. I had a job at the time. I had two children under four.

I was like, I'm going to really commit to finishing a book and giving it a go properly. I love rom-coms and humor, so I thought this is the area I should be focusing on. Then the idea for the story, I've just always loved the idea of first impressions not being what they seem. I think that especially in this story, Quinn, you look at him from the outside, and he's got everything. He's very good looking. He's had an amazing job. He's very successful. I really liked the idea of exploring that that just isn't usually the case with most people. Nothing is as perfect as the veneer the exterior might convey. That was the seed of the idea. Then the structure of basing it around New Year's Eves, that's a really good way of dipping into these characters' pasts to see, what were the building blocks that made them the people that they are in the present? That's how it all started.

Zibby: Wait, going back to what you just said about being so busy as a mom and all that stuff, literally when did you do it during the day with the two kids and all the rest? Did you wake up early? Did you do it on a computer? Where and when did you do it? I just want a visual.

Sophie: I basically was working in the day. Then I'd come back and do bedtime, put the children to bed. Then I'd pretty much write between eight and ten at night. I had a deadline because I had a book deal when I was halfway through. I knew I had to write five thousand words a week in order to get it finished. I worked that out as five sessions a week. I had to do a thousand words in each session. Between eight and ten or eleven, I basically had to write a thousand words before I could go to sleep. Strangely, I've almost found that easier than what I've got now where I've quit the day job now. I've got the day to write, which is an enormous privilege. I feel incredibly lucky, but there was actually something quite focusing about that very small window of time after a day with work and children where it just had to get done or it wasn't going to get finished, you know? I'm sure you know. [laughs]

Zibby: I do know. I have heard that from many other authors, that when you squeeze it in -- it's like, give a busy person something to do. You just throw it on the heap, put it on the pile. Then boom, boom, boom, it's done. When you're like, I'll spend all day, then you get two things done.

Sophie: Completely. Also, I think that there's not enough time for procrastination. When you know you have to hit a certain amount of words before you can go to bed, you're much more focused on just getting it done. Whereas now, there's a lot of distraction of just, ooh, let me look on Amazon and see what number my book is or read this article, someone being nice about my book. Actually, it's kind of better to be a writer maybe in a cave and just not look.

Zibby: I think maybe you should keep doing the thousand word a day, five days a week thing. Breaking it down into tiny -- not tiny. A thousand words is not tiny, but into achievable goals and spread it out over time. Even to me, I'm like, I can do a thousand words five times a week. All of a sudden, you have a book.

Sophie: When people ask me, if they want to be writers, what advice I would give, I do think that a weekly word aim is a really good way to go because you just know if you hit Friday and you haven't done enough words, you have to cancel your plans and not go out. You have to write. In the world of COVID, no one really has any plans anyway. In the old days, you would have to cancel your plans to go out to write.

Zibby: Excellent, so this is an even better time to focus on writing since you're not really missing anything anyway.

Sophie: Exactly.

Zibby: How did you come up with the idea of getting stuck in the bathroom at a party overnight? You must have gotten locked into a bathroom at some point. Of course, this is one of the first scenes in the book.

Sophie: I think I have momentarily been stuck. You know when you try the handle and it doesn't click? You're like, hang on a minute. You have that sudden panic in your chest of, I'm going to be stuck in here. I think it was based on that, but it was also just this idea of Minnie has so much bad luck. It was just thinking anything that could go wrong at a party was going to go wrong, so tripping over someone, getting vomited on. Then it's almost like fate really has a sense of humor with Minnie. As soon as she's in bathroom thinking -- she has a little pep talk with herself. She's like, right, I've got this. Stop being paranoid. There's no jinx. Then, of course, she almost looks at the heavens and thinks, okay, you're playing with me now, because it's just another thing in the catalog of problems.

Zibby: I feel like her jinx became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Each year would come around, and then she’d be so worried. She ends up sleeping the whole day. [laughs]

Sophie: Again, this is a theme that I feel like I only scratched the surface of in this book, in a way, of this idea of luck and almost it being self-fulfilling. It kind of feeds into the superstition thing as well. All of us, whatever beliefs you have, everyone spills salt and they're like, [gasp], over their shoulder. There's various superstitions and beliefs that has just crept into all our culture. I always knock on wood. If you say nothing bad has happened so far, I always knock on wood. Where does that come from? For Minnie, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy because for so long her mother has said, "You were born unlucky. Nothing's ever going to right for you on this day." If you have that mentality, maybe it doesn't, or maybe the jinx is real and everyone's giving her a hard time.

Zibby: Or maybe it's having a mother who is telling you that you deserve that bad luck. Really, the time you're born, there are so many factors. Whether or not you win the first baby of the year award doesn't usually have a traumatic effect because you don't know if you've won or not. Maybe it's just the proximity of losing -- I don't know. I think the family lore, the family perpetuating that myth.

Sophie: Completely. I also think that what was interesting to explore with Minnie is this idea of, she has low self-esteem. The book slightly unpacks why she has that low self-esteem. A part of that is definitely her relationship with her mother. It’s the relationship with her mother, but it's also her name, which led her to be teased. I think that if you're teased at a very impressionable time in your life, it can really affect your self-esteem. It’s one of those names that, on the surface, you imagine everyone meeting her and saying, oh, Minnie Cooper like the car. Then you actually think, imagine having that all the time with everyone you meet, and especially how cruel teenagers can be. It just was interesting to me to imagine all these little external factors that had made her have low self-esteem. Then actually, Leila is the friend that comes in that actually helps turn that around for her. The importance of friendship is another big theme in the story.

Zibby: I have to tell you, I almost named my second daughter Minnie. In fact, that was the name that I had picked. She was born. I told my closest friends and family, "Welcome, Minnie." My family staged an intervention. They were like, "You cannot name her Minnie." I was devasted. I haven't even gotten to the room yet. I'm still on the gurney or whatever you want to call it with my newborn girl who I was all fawning over. They're like, "She's going to get teased. What if she's really big?" [laughs]

Sophie: I love the name Minnie.

Zibby: I love it too.

Sophie: My agent's daughter is called Minnie. Then when I was having this joke about Minnie, I was like, "No, no, no, it's a really lovely name." It's just the combination of being Minnie Cooper or, as you say, if you're called Minnie and you end up being really tall. Someone's just asking on the chat if it's available on audio or Audible. It is available on Audible, but it's not me reading it, luckily. I would be like, blah, blah, blah. It's Hannah Arterton, who's brilliant. It is available on Audible.

Zibby: I feel like Minnie was always getting herself into these situations almost in a Bridget Jones type of way. She reminded me a lot of her at various points, particularly the moment -- I don't want to spoil because it's so genius -- when she's traveling in the airport in India and the gift from her friend gets discovered, Leila's gift. She has to confront the security guards and explain this very personal, unexpected item. I was cringing reading it. Then answering the phone and thinking it was Greg, but really, it was Quinn, about the dental stuff. [laughs]

Sophie: That's my favorite bit. You know what's funny? Maybe I'm wrong here, but I think it's quite a British sense of humor thing to kind of enjoy the cringe of a situation. That's definitely what I loved about Bridget Jones. When I read those books for the first time as a teenager, I was just like, this is so my sense of humor. This is so funny. Because maybe the British have a bit of a reputation of being a bit more uptight and a bit more, everything's fine, so that then when stuff is really embarrassing or cringey it's even more just so embarrassing. I really enjoyed trying to put her in situations that you just want the world to swallow you up because it's so embarrassing.

Zibby: What do you think about fate intervening? I know fate is sort of different from luck. This is maybe too broad a question, but just how people's lives can intersect in all these different ways and how this probably happens all the time.

Sophie: I think I read an article that said -- I can't quote it because I can't remember the statistics. It was something about the likelihood of you having met the man or woman that you end up with a number of times in your past. You probably wouldn't have known it. I've actually got friends here in Jersey, they were looking through old photo albums and they found a beach holiday. In the background was his wife.

Zibby: No!

Sophie: As a child, yeah. It was just they happened to be on the same holiday at the same time. I think statistically, it is quite likely. What I quite liked about this story was exploring some of those near misses. Is it just a coincidence, or is it fate that's drawing people together? One thing people have asked me about the book is they said, I would've loved for them to realize at the end and to piece together all of the jigsaw puzzles. I very consciously didn't do that because I think life is not -- there's so many things none of us will ever know about when you might not have crossed paths with your partner. I think with Minnie and Quinn, they would work it out because they'd get talking about [indiscernible] and they'd say, I was there that year. There's enough little clues. They both like Star Wars. That's going to come out. I didn't want to do it completely overtly because I like that touch of the universe will know, but we won't kind of thing.

Zibby: I know. I always wish I could rewind, I could just rewind and get a wide-angle view of all these situations. What would you see? What wouldn't you? But no, not meant to be. [laughs]

Sophie: I know. I love the movie Sliding Doors. You know Sliding Doors?

Zibby: It's one of my all-time favorite movies.

Sophie: I just love that that expression has become like, oh, it's a sliding doors moment. How amazing to come up with a story that then it becomes an expression. It's brilliant. I do love stories that explore the alternate universe of how something might have played out differently. Then actually what's interesting about this time next year is that they missed each other all those times, if that was their one chance to meet their soulmate and they missed it. Maybe the universe works in its way that it'll just find another opportunity and another opportunity. That's actually quite a nice thought that it's not all totally down to being on the right beach at the right time looking in the right direction.

Zibby: You have to sometimes be clobbered over the head by fate. It takes time and time and time again. Then finally, you see the person. Tell me also about the role of baking and the pie business, which was hilarious, and putting recipes in the book and even in your book club guide and everything. Tell me about that and your own personal relationship to cooking and baking.

Sophie: I love baking. I'm more of a cake baker. I'm not very good at cooking, actually, but I do love baking cakes. I always make very elaborate designs for my kids' birthday and stuff. Every birthday, I'll say, "You can choose whatever you want to have." Then I'll try and make it. My daughter said she wanted an armadillo cake this year, which was challenging, but I tried. I do love baking. In this story, it came up because I wanted Minnie to have a job that she was very much helping others. That's the thing about Minnie. When you first meet her, she's a bit bristly and a bit prickly. She's definitely got a chip on her shoulder. You might not completely love her when you first meet her. I wanted to have this contrast that she was a bit spikey, but you could see she was really kind, and the way that she interacts with her friends. Also, she set up a business to basically bring food to people who can't cook for themselves or who can't leave the house. That really came out of a genuine affection for the community. For me, baking for others was a really good way to illustrate her kindheartedness and her love of community. It's also a really communal job. I love that idea of when she's with the friends and her colleagues in the kitchen, it's a very sociable job, sitting around the kitchen kneading dough. It just gave a lot of opportunities for interaction that maybe other jobs would've been harder to find, I suppose.

Zibby: And the disappointment with the burnt pies and all of that and have to restart and all the meaning, the themes of starting over.

Sophie: Exactly. Also, it's the kind of job we can all sympathize. You all kind of sympathize with, okay, it seems quite simple. Bake a pie. Take it to someone. Get paid. Actually, it was quite fun to explore all the problems they have on the way and things that can go wrong. When they're in India as well and her and Leila are talking about this ideal company they'd love to run where they employ people who need a second chance, who maybe have had some issues in their life, then you flash to them working in the pie shop and actually realizing some of these people are making life harder for them. [laughs] At what point does your public spiritedness have to compromise for commercial interest?

Zibby: I loved their relationship. It was such a great example of female friendship, female work partnership, sort of like a work wife trope, if you will, and how they even get annoyed at each other sometimes. I feel like there aren't so many best friend examples in fiction all the time. This is a particularly vivid one. I know you've talked in the past about your own close girlfriends. Tell me about how your own friendships made this one so rich and lifelike.

Sophie: I love rom-coms, but equally, there's so many good ones that have been written that you can find yourself falling into the trope of the kooky best friend and then the inaccessible man. For me, I wanted to write something warm and engaging but that also had a little bit of edge of something a bit different and also slightly playing with undercutting those kind of expectations. Even though Leila is kind of the kooky best friend, I wanted her to have so much more heart and importance in this story than just being a sounding board to Minnie for her romantic life. That's what was important for me as well. The slightly more old-fashioned fairy tales of Cinderella being rescued by her prince charming feel very outdated now to modern readers and modern viewers. I think that love and relationship should be something that is the cherry on the cake of your life, but you've got to have -- look at me, I'm doing cake analogies. This is how embedded in baking -- the sponge needs to be your own self-belief and self-worth, which is, again, about community and friendship and family. Then romantic relationships, in my view, should be the icing on the cake that make your life that extra bit special, but they can't be the thing that you're wanting to fix you or make you happy. That's got to come from something a little bit deeper down. For me, her friendship with Leila, she's known her since she was fifteen. It's really important to her. It's also really affected her life and her journey and her career and her self-image. I wanted Leila to be more than the kooky best friend who just talked her dating, basically.

Zibby: How have your friendships been impacted by both the success of your book and also having kids? I feel like no matter how committed I am to my friends, there's just not enough time to see them, essentially.

Sophie: What's been interesting, actually -- I used to live in London around about where this book is set and then six years ago moved to Jersey, which is a channel island between England and France. That was quite a challenge because most of best friends were my school friends and they all lived in London or the UK. I moved away and then had children and so felt very removed from them physically because it's not that easy to just jump on a plane or jump on a boat and go and visit your friends when you've got a six-month-old in tow. I just got quite good at having people that I call regularly and would do Skype and WhatsApp to. Almost pre-this year where everyone's had to have their friendships like that, some of my best friends, I very much had that going on already. Also, I think your oldest friends, you can not see each other for years, and nothing -- I've actually got a really good friend called Jen who lives in Canada. I went to university in Canada for a year. She was my best friend when we were at Ottawa together. I haven't spoken to her probably in six years. She texted me and said, "Oh, my god, I heard your book was a New York Times best seller. I have to talk to you." I had a Skype call with her last night. We chatted for about three hours, and it was as if it was yesterday, and just caught up. Isn't that what's amazing about life and friendship? You can just pick it up. If you really love someone and know them and know that you like them, then the time and distance can be overcome, hopefully.

Zibby: Yes, I totally agree. I have friends like that too. I'm like, thank god that we can just -- the ones where you don't have that ease of relationship, it's easy to separate the wheat from the chaff, or whatever that expression is, when you have kids or you have a book or something big is coming on and you don't have time. Then to be able to reconnect easily is a hallmark of a really strong friendship.

Sophie: Completely. To be honest, it also sifts out -- when you live away from where most of your friends live, the ones who don't regularly call or WhatsApp you or message you, they are much harder to keep up, these friendships. Again, when you've got little children, sadly, life just gets whittled down, doesn't it? I've made loads of new friends in Jersey as well, mom friends. Life evolves. Someone's just saying on the questions, is this a fictional story or based on true events? It's very much a fictional story. I'll just remind them that is the...

Zibby: Sorry, here's the cover.

Sophie: It's definitely a fictional book.

Zibby: Does female friendship play a role in your next book that you're working on? What's that about? Are you allowed to say?

Sophie: The next book is called The Way We Met. It's all set in Jersey where I live. It's basically about a girl, Laura, who travels to Jersey for work. She picks up the wrong suitcase at the airport. Inside, she sees the contents, and she's convinced that this is the man of her dreams. Lots of the stuff in the case points to the fact that this is her soulmate. She sets off to try and find him. It's very much about someone who, again, believes slightly in fate and destiny and has very strong ideas about romance and [indiscernible]. She really wants to have this amazing [indiscernible]. There's definitely friendship and family that I explore in the book, but slightly different themes and slightly different ideas. It's been really fun to write, actually. I hope people are going to enjoy it when it comes out.

Zibby: Can you share how you met your spouse? I don't know if you're even married.

Sophie: I am married. This is so funny. Someone came over the other day who’d read the book. She met my husband. She said, "My god, you must be so romantic." She basically thought he must be kind of Quinn. I was like, no, he's not. [laughs] We met through, my best friend is married to his best friend. It was kind of a setup in our early thirties. We had lots of friends the same. It's not a particularly exciting story. It’s lovely to start dating someone when you know so many of the same people. We've been on lots of double dates with our best friends together. It's been really nice.

Zibby: That's nice. Awesome. Do you have any advice? I know you already gave some, but more advice for aspiring authors?

Sophie: I would say that sticking to a word count would be good. Then the other thing that really helped me is just applying for lots of competitions. The idea of finishing a whole manuscript can be so daunting, especially if you've just got no idea whether what you're writing is any good. There's lots of competitions for short stories or first chapters or extracts of writing. If you can apply for that kind of thing, it really bolsters your morale and your confidence. I first got published when I entered a competition called Love at First Write, which was for the first three chapters of a romance. Winning something like that can just really boost your self-esteem and make you think, actually, maybe there is something in this. It can also help you get seen by agents and stuff. That would be definitely a tip. Also, get friends to read your work who you trust to be brutally honest. I've got some friends who will read my draft and be like, "It's great. Excellent," which is not really that helpful. Two of my friends, [indiscernible] and Tracey who read my drafts, they're like, "Okay, this is where it's boring. This is where it's slow. I don't like this character." You might not take it all on board, but it just really helps to have someone who will be incredibly frank with you because that's what you need. Someone's saying, when will the new book be out? I think in the US it'll probably be out in the autumn next year. That's the plan. Hopefully, people will still remember who I am by then.

Zibby: Of course, they’ll remember who you are. You're just getting started. Are you kidding? Sophie, thank you. Thanks for doing this GMA Book Club live. Also, this will be a podcast on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," little double-header situation. Thank you so much. It was so great to talk to you.

Sophie: Thank you so much. It was really fun. This is the first Instagram Live I've done that hasn’t been plagued by technical errors, so yay! Thank you so much for talking to me. That was wicked. Thank you.

Zibby: Good. Thank you. Have a great day.

Sophie: Thank you. Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Lauren Martin, THE BOOK OF MOODS

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

Lauren Martin: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Zibby: I literally cannot wait. I have been counting down for this interview because your book, which is called The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions Into My Best Life, has been the most helpful book I've read. It's not self-help. It's not memoir. It's this perfect hybrid of, here's what happened to you. Here's how I can help you. Here's what you need to know. It's shifted my whole mindset on everything. Maybe you should jump in and just tell listeners what the book is really about, what inspired you to write this book. Then we'll go from there. So much to talk about.

Lauren: I'm just so happy that you thought that because I was worried with the book being published during this crazy pandemic, oh, wait, is this going to seem trivial? Now I'm realizing more than ever, people are kind of locked in their emotions and locked in these places. I feel like we're dealing with such monotony, but also, life has expanded. We need something to ground us. I'm hoping this book is that. Basically, the book started obviously before COVID hit, five years ago. I was living in New York. I was in my twenties. I had everything I wanted. I had a good job at a magazine. I had just moved in with my boyfriend. I was living in New York City. I kept, I don't want to say breaking down, but just ruining my days. I would get in these bad moods. One day, I came home from a really bad day at work. I remember I was in a bad mood. It was a bad commute. I was irritable. My husband was there. He's just always in a good mood. He was making dinner. He was excited to see me. I was just a bitch. I was cranky. I was mean. I was moody. I couldn't get out of it. He poured me a glass of wine. He was trying to talk. Eventually, he just snapped. This was after probably six months of living together. He was like, "I can't do this anymore. I really can't live with someone who cannot control -- it's exhausting, these ups and these downs."

I think when you live with someone, you're forced to look at yourself in a different way. I realized my moods didn't just affect me. They affected him. It's one thing for me to have a bad day or a bad week, but that affects those who you live with. I talk about in the book, mood is energy. Energy's transferable. It just is this snowball effect. That happened. We broke up for a little. I also met this amazing girl, which I talk about in the book, in this bar. She was like, "What's wrong? Why are you drinking on a Monday night?" She said it so simply. She was like, "Oh, you just have moods. Me too." She was one of those women who, I could tell, had a handle on them. I realized, maybe this is something for me to figure out for women. Maybe there's so many more women like me who feel this way who can't seem to get through a day without obsessing over a remark or looking in the mirror and not liking what they see and then just not being themselves and feeling bad. I was like, you know what, I want to explore this. I spent five years studying all my moods, anytime something put me in a bad mood, a comment from my mom, a subway delay. I tried to organize them and evaluate them. Then I started working on things to try and fix them, like things I would read from psychology or spirituality or science. The book is a whole distillation of the best things I learned and the things that worked for me.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. First of all, I am so with you on having moods. I wish that when I was your age -- I'm in my forties now. I wish that back then when I was having so many moods, I had taken five years to sort them all out. [laughs] I pursued different tactics for trying to regulate myself. I think so many people have what you're talking about, which is moods that feel like they take over you. They almost feel out of your control. They can run your life and hurt your relationships. You always feel bad afterwards. I didn't mean to say that. I didn't mean to do that. I didn't even feel like myself. I feel like things like lack of sleep, all these things are triggering factors. Then what do you do? What do you do with this whole composition of characteristics? Your book answered the question in a way.

Lauren: Moods are very individualistic. I'm not going to be triggered by the same things that you are. It's funny. When we hear our friends complaining about their bad moods, it seems so trivial. That's because that's their trigger. The book is broken up by my triggers: family, friendship, beauty. At the core of those is the underlying emotion, which is universal. It's anxiety, depletion. Even though you're seeing my triggers and my stories, I think most people will understand that feeling. What I hope they do is start looking out for their own triggers, which can be kind of fun in a way, and kind of like the love language, find your specific triggers.

Zibby: It's so true. The chapter that I think stayed with me the most -- I shouldn't say I think. One of the most compelling chapters was your chapter on beauty and when you got a zit on your face and you didn't want to go to a party. To be honest, when I read it, I didn't know what you looked like. I didn't even know at first how old you were until you gave it away in the book, essentially how old you are. After I read that whole chapter -- basically, it was you saying you felt so awful about how you looked and that you've always been comparing yourself to other people. You have to come to terms with the fact that you're not a pretty person, and that's okay. Everyone feels ugly from time to time and lets it get them down, but it's okay. You can power through. You come to some state of, really, resolution on it and how to carry those feelings in the world and not let them get you down and whatever. Not to be totally superficial, but then I saw your picture. I'm like, oh, my gosh, what is she talking about? You are so pretty. Then my heart hurt for you even more. Not that it would've been okay for anybody to be beating themselves up over it, but you happen to be very pretty at the same time. For you to be feeling this ugly -- you even talk about being with somebody else who made you feel that way, somebody you idolized. You were like, I can't believe she felt that way. It's almost like everyone's feeling that way. Just tell me more about that whole section.

Lauren: First off, I so appreciate that. Since the book has come out -- I never did Instagram Lives before because I don't like to look at myself. I don't. I talk about in the book, I don't think women see themselves. I think we just look in the mirror and see this compilation of all the things we think are wrong with us. I look in the mirror and, to my husband, he sees something completely different. I've grown up being like, my cheekbones could be better. My lips could be plumper. My eyebrows could be better. I don't see myself. That mood, it's the second chapter because it was a big one for me. Especially living with a man who -- he's confident. He didn't understand. I would have a zit and didn't want to go out. He was like, "Who cares?" To me, it was like, but my beauty is my worth. I think it was coming to terms with my beauty is not my worth and also coming to terms with the fact that I am beautiful, but in my own way. I need to start appreciating that way.

There's this mantra that I talk about in the book. It changed everything for me. It was the whole, you're not pretty like her, you're pretty like you. I found that a few years ago. I made a little sticker out of it. I put it on my phone. Every time I was walking somewhere and I saw a beautiful girl on the street or just was comparing myself, I would look at it. It started to change something in my brain a little bit and really rewire it. Now it's like, I don't know if it's because I'm older or I've just practiced it so much, but I really do feel more confident. I feel like I have these amazing gifts to give. I have these unique things that make me beautiful. I'm going to stop comparing myself to women. Also, when that happens, I think you start appreciating women more. Rather than comparing yourself against them, you can start to be like, wow, this girl's amazing, and I'm amazing. I swear, this book was like -- I was writing through it as I was experiencing it. I let a few friends read it. She was like, "This is a love letter to yourself. This is really beautiful because you can tell you're reckoning with something in each chapter." I really did go through the chapters in real time and have to experience it, which is why I'm glad it resonated with you.

Zibby: Totally. Even when you challenge us, go back and look through photos from three or four years ago. Were you really as bad as you thought? Also, being around older people and having them see the beauty in you as the youth itself, that's something just so intangible. Until you lose it, you didn't even know you had it. You didn't value it. It had no value to you at the time. It was only once you lost it that it takes on its own value.

Lauren: Exactly. There's this amazing Nora Ephron quote that I put in the book. It's like, if I could go back, I would put a bikini on until age thirty-five and never take it off. We just don't appreciate ourselves in the moment. Then I always look back, I'm like, wow, I was so cute back then, but right now, I'm cute. Why can't we just ever appreciate ourselves? I talk about in this chapter, a little bit of the spiritual aspects of washing dishes while washing dishes and appreciating the moment.

Zibby: Yes, I loved that.

Lauren: I'm glad it resonated.

Zibby: That was so great. I'm sorry I'm cutting you off. I'm so excited. I'm not even going to let you talk. I used that the next day. Last night or the night before last, I had this going on. There were so many dishes. Even when my husband was cooking, I was like, "Are you sure you want to make eight things and heat up four things in other pots? That's going to be a lot of dishes after." He's like, "It's great. Everybody's going to want this. It's going to go bad if we don't use it." I'm like, "Okay, fine." Then of course, there were a thousand dishes. Everybody left to go watch TV. That's not true. I had some helpers. Anyway, there I am with my hands in the wet, soapy water. I was like, wait, this is what Lauren was talking about in her book. My kids were around me. Everybody was sort of happy. I was like, you know what, this might be the best moment even though I would normally be annoyed and in a bad mood that I had all these dishes. Is it worth it? Instead, that was like, wow, this is a moment in time. There are actually a lot of great things going on. I was thanking you for that as I got that mindfulness boost from the book.

Lauren: That is the most amazing thing to hear because that's really all I think any author wants from a book, is just someone -- especially with a book like this that's more self-help, even if just one thing sticks with you and that changes the way that you perceive something or live your life, that's a huge feat. That's amazing to hear. I do the same thing when I wash the dishes now. I'm like, Lauren, appreciate this right now. This is a great moment. Stop thinking about the future. Stop thinking about what you'd rather be doing. This is a good thing to be doing right now. Your husband's in the other room. You're washing dishes for the food that you just had. Life is good.

Zibby: You even said something like maybe you're washing dishes and eventually you won't be washing dishes for two. You'll be washing dishes for one. That made me want to cry. The whole thing is such a great reminder of making the best of life, is really what it is.

Lauren: I just felt like my bad moods, I was wasting my life. I was wasting my life in these bad moods. Why can't I be in a good mood more often? I know when I'm in a good mood, I'm my best self. I'm happy and cheerful. My husband said something to me the other day. He's like, "Oh, my god, you're so cute today." I was like, "Why? I'm wearing sweatpants." He's like, "You're just happier. You're happy." Most women, we get so in our heads. We just get so distracted. Then we're not ourselves.

Zibby: It's so true. What is your stand on medication? A lot of people might come back from this conversation and say, maybe she just needs a higher dose of Zoloft or something like that. [laughs]

Lauren: I think everyone kind of wonders once in a while, do I have depression? My grandmother was bipolar. I think everyone wonders a little bit. I have been prescribed Xanax when I couldn't sleep. I talk about that in the book. I think there's a fine line when you know this is a bigger issue than something I can handle myself. In high school, a doctor did put me on Zoloft. I didn't stay on it. I think I was on it a week. I was like, you know what, this is ridiculous. I want to see if I can work this out. I've always had that. I think some people are just born with a little bit more sadness than others, especially artists. I find myself more introspective. I think a lot of women have this amazing quality for empathy and this amazing quality for emotions. We have so many emotions within us. I didn't want to lose that. This book has been my source of help and medication. I do think you know when there is a time and place for you to seek actual help. There's a fine line. I think you'll know when you should speak to your doctor if you are feeling those ways. I hope this helps those who aren't sure, really. Then maybe this could be the last try.

Zibby: Totally. How did you find the actual writing of the book? You loved it?

Lauren: No. [laughs]

Zibby: No?

Lauren: It's not that I don't love it. I talk about it in the book. I think it's the first chapter.

Zibby: How you did not want to do it at all and looked at it like hell. [laughs]

Lauren: I had a breakdown. I was freaking out. I do come from a writing background, but when you're doing it for -- you probably know this. When you're doing it for a publication, you have a deadline. You just get it done. I was writing an article a day. It's just like, whatever. You care, but it wasn't this, wow, this has been my whole life leading up to this book. This is a publishing company looking -- you also understand because I know you're working on a book, not to be creepy. [laughs]

Zibby: It's not creepy. Buy my book, everybody. [laughs] I'm kidding.

Lauren: Just throw that in there. It was so anxiety-inducing because I started worrying so much about, is it going to sell? Is it well-written? I started going to what I always did, which was Words of Women, looking at how other women approached it, and especially writers. I love writing advice. I just love it. I was finding a lot of solace in how other women faced the blank page. I took the best ones and I put them in the book. I feel like writing advice is really life advice. Focus on one word at a time. Just pay attention to what you're working on. Stop getting ahead of yourself. The process started as very chaotic. Then as I was getting into and finding this writing advice, it got much calmer. Then I loved it. I loved every bit of it.

Zibby: People think my podcast is about books, but really, it's about life because that's all writing is. It's all stories and moments. That's what a good book is. It's a way into somebody else's life and into their heads and into their advice and all the rest.

Lauren: Writers are these vessels. We're just trying to explain our life experience and the things that we see in life and interpret out of life. I feel like the two coincide really well.

Zibby: Tell me more, also, about Words of Women. You had all the quotes. That's grown into this huge thing now. Tell me about that.

Lauren: Five years ago, I was obviously in this dark place. My boyfriend and I had kind of broken up. I met this girl. I was really lonely too. I talk about friendship in the book. I was in New York, but I didn't have the college friends anymore, and the high school friends. I had some coworkers, but I felt really lonely. I was seeking, at the time, women with moods and trying to understand it better. I started finding all these amazing quotes that these women were saying. They really made me feel better. I think a lot of pain has to do with the loneliness as pain and how we feel so alienated by it. We must be the only one feeling this way. When I found these other women saying, "I feel this way. I feel anxious. I feel insecure," it would be, like, Isabella Rossellini. I was like, oh, my god, these amazing, successful, powerful women feel the same way I do. I feel not only less alone, I feel really empowered by this. I started putting the quotes onto an Instagram account. At the same time, I was like, I'm going to -- I couldn't get a publisher at this point. I was an unknown writer. It's really hard to get a publishing deal. It's hard to get an agent. I was like, you know what, I'll self-publish one day. I was like, I'll build this account. I'll bleed in what I'm learning from the book and my own words and these amazing quotes. In five years, I'll self-publish. Five years goes by.

I also have a newsletter. This woman reached out to me on the newsletter who worked in publishing. She was like, "I love your newsletter. I love your account. Do you have an agent?" It kind of went full circle. I really believe if you invest in yourself and really -- these quotes that I was putting were things that were driving me to keep going and keep following my dreams. It just grew organically. I think a lot of women like knowing that they're not alone and also like hearing these amazing stories of women. I talk about it in the book. I also wanted to kind of disrupt the feed. I think a lot of our moods and our insecurities come from just scrolling through perfected lives of others, these fake lives. We see, oh, it looks like a beautiful girl on a yacht, beautiful girl, friends hanging out without me. In between that, I really wanted there to be an amazing quote that wasn't cheesy or inspirational, but a really profound quote about life or friendship or just the female condition that made you really stop and forget about the rest and think about something different.

Zibby: Would you do, or maybe you already have this in the works or something, just a quote book, like a beautiful coffee table book with all your quotes?

Lauren: I would love to do that. I had one publisher -- I think my agent's mad at me -- reach out to me about doing it. I'm so particular because I've been doing it for five years. I basically did a pitch to her with all of these quotes I would use and this idea. She was like, "No, I just would rather have it be --" She wanted a Beyoncé lyric for the name of it. I was just like, that's not the vibe of Words of Women. If I'm going to do it, I want it to be done right. I passed on it. I'm waiting for the right opportunity to really do it and do it right, but I would love to do that.

Zibby: Don't wait. You should just send it out now.

Lauren: Yeah, I know. Now it's like, stop waiting.

Zibby: Now's a really good time.

Lauren: You're right. Okay, I'm going to definitely work on that.

Zibby: If you just maybe get your agent on that this afternoon, I bet you could. Call me in two weeks and let me know if you haven't sold it. [laughter]

Lauren: I love that idea. It definitely is on my radar.

Zibby: I was just saying on another podcast, I have this secret, maybe I should have a publishing house myself or something like that because every time -- not every time. A lot of times I talk to authors like you, I'm like, I want Lauren Martin's coffee table book on my coffee table now. Who's going to do it? If I could just make it happen, that would be so cool. I'm not at that point. If I were, I would be doing it myself.

Lauren: Maybe I will wait for that. That's what I mean. I'm happy to just wait for the right opportunity. I'll keep an eye out.

Zibby: Okay, great. I have four books slated ahead of you. No, I'm kidding. [laughter] I'm totally kidding.

Lauren: Fine with me. It'll give me time.

Zibby: No, I'm kidding. What are you doing now? You must have all this press coming up for the book and all of that. Are you still writing? Are you doing it just on the side to keep yourself sane, or what?

Lauren: It's so hard because I'm kind of superstitious. I'm like, I don't want to start working on another book until I feel like I've sold enough of this one and I'm out of the woods. I'm very overly cautious. I do still work full time. I work in marketing. I so want to be a full-time writer. That's my dream. This is my first book. I don't want to jinx it. God forbid I quit my job and -- I know how life works. I know that it can take time. You look at someone like Elizabeth Gilbert and you're like, I'm going to be a best seller like her. Eat Pray Love was her fourth book. It takes time. I'm working. I'm writing on the side. I still write my newsletter. I still run the account, which I love doing. It's an obsession. I have a few ideas for -- I would really love to do a book on female friendship. I think it's not really talked about enough. I think women have a little bit of a warped view of these friendships we should have in our thirties and forties that's not realistic. I feel like it would be helpful to have someone say, look, I struggle with sometimes feeling lonely or maintaining a friendship that I wish I could maintain. That might be something I'm working on next.

Zibby: That would be great. I'm sure you could put some of the quotes in there too.

Lauren: Of course, I'll put the quotes. I'm a quote queen.

Zibby: You could do The Book of Friends. You could have a whole series of The Book of...

Lauren: I love that. My husband and I are currently working on getting pregnant. We had a previous little thing, but it didn't work out. I was thinking when I was pregnant for a little, the emotions --

Zibby: -- I'm sorry.

Lauren: It's okay. I'm so happy more people are talking about it, like Chrissy Teigen and all these amazing women. In the few months I was pregnant, I was like, this is so extreme, these emotions and being a woman and having to just keep going through life but also being pregnant and being tired and being nauseous and having your hormones change. Then I was so excited because I was like, when motherhood comes, that's going to be a whole range of moods that I'm sure I haven't experienced yet, and triggers.

Zibby: Yeah. Hold onto your seat for that one. [laughs]

Lauren: Exactly. That's kind of also in the works, as in getting pregnant hopefully one day. Motherhood would definitely be an interesting subject.

Zibby: You could even call it The Book of Trying.

Lauren: I feel like there's definitely not enough literature out there for women who experience miscarriages or lost babies. You do feel very isolated when it happens.

Zibby: Especially because people say don't talk about it until after twelve weeks. People are much more open. I have thirteen-year-old twins and also a seven-year-old and almost six-year-old. When I was trying to have my twins, nobody was talking about anything. All of a sudden, it's like, don't tell anybody even if you are pregnant for twelve -- I'm like, how could I not tell anybody for three months when I'm vomiting on the street? This is the time that I would want to tell everybody every little detail because it's the wildest ride ever.

Lauren: It's so true. You're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. I didn't tell anyone except my parents. I was twelve weeks. Then when I experienced the miscarriage, I had to go out with my friends. I'd been avoiding them for three months because I didn't want to tell them. Then I went out for drinks with them. I had just experienced this intense traumatic experience. I didn't want to tell them because I hadn’t told them I was pregnant. I wasn't going to be like, guys, I'm really sad today. [Indiscernible] so much that's internalized. You're going on with normal life. You're just like, this incredible thing happened to me. This also terrible thing happened to me. I just have to act normal. I'm happy to see more women are speaking about it. I do think we definitely could talk about it more.

Zibby: Especially as you're going through it, even if you're not ready to write a whole book about it, you should be journaling and taking notes on all the feelings and moods. I think that a book like this on that would be really interesting too.

Lauren: Definitely. I've been trying to write about it. I will say, it's been harder. I'll write about it. Then I'll have a drink and start crying later. I'll be like, clearly, that was a very -- I need some time. When I was pregnant, first of all, I just can't get over how tired you are all the time. I was way too tired to even write. I was like, I'll write when I start feeling better and normal. It's an intense experience.

Zibby: I didn't mean to put pressure on you to do it. Not that you need more ideas. You already had a fantastic book. I want to keep reading what you're writing, so that's why I'm throwing out all these --

Lauren: -- I love it. Trust me, multiple people have been like, you should be journaling. You should be writing about this. I know as well. I'm just excited. My first book, it's definitely anxiety-inducing. I'm trying to, as I speak about in the book, change that verbiage from, I'm so nervous and anxious, to, I'm excited. Otherwise, I'll have a heart attack.

Zibby: Even what you said about -- what did you say? It's not stressful, it's a challenge, or something. It's not hard, it's just a challenge.

Lauren: It's been five years, and [indiscernible].

Zibby: I know. I'm sorry. I should've had the quote at the ready. I'm like, can you please quote this back to me?

Lauren: I was actually talking about this the other day with someone.

Zibby: And accepting the inevitability of pain and then keeping going, all of that too, so you don't have to worry so much.

Lauren: Stoicism, yeah. I'm trying to find it as well. Of course, you can never find things when you need to.

Zibby: No. Sorry, this is my job, and I'm not doing it. Anyway, you said something great as if -- it's basically just reframing. You just have to reframe the hard times and see them all as --

Lauren: -- Exactly. Oh, here it is. It's to replace "Calm down" with "I'm excited;" "I don't want to" with "I get to;" "I'm scared," "I'm pumped." It's switching that. That's called anxiety reappraisal, which is obviously a cognitive trick. It really does work because the feeling of nervousness and anxiety is the same as excitement, but the way we label it is the way that we then experience it.

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

Lauren: Yes. One, I just wrote about this in my newsletter, there's always a back door. I think the hardest part about writing, especially if you're kind of unknown and you don't have a large following of anything, you're like, what's the point? I'll never get published. If there's a will, there's a way. This is coming from me. I literally moved to New York when I was twenty-two. I didn't even major in English. My parents wanted me to major in marketing. They're like, "You'll make more money." I just decided, I'm going to go to New York. I'm going to just walk door to door until someone gives me a job. If I'm an intern, that's fine, which I was, worked my way up. Then I couldn't get an agent the traditional way, so I built a social platform. It took five years. If you love to do something, it will come. Have faith in yourself. Have faith in the process. Even if you need to self-publish, I think there's no shame in that. Fifty Shades of Grey was self-published. Even if you go towards your goal that way, don't be daunted by it. Once you start writing, I think the biggest thing is to just have faith in what you're doing.

I literally have a Google Doc which I also might one day publish. I think it's two hundred pages of quotes from writers giving advice. So much of the advice is just get it all out. Get it all down. That's what the first draft is for. Then the second draft, just rework it. I think it's so daunting when you see the blank page. You need to just get it out even if it's not good. Then you can rework it later. The other is Dani Shapiro. I love her. I know you've met her and interviewed her. Her book, Still Writing, is my bible. She has so many good quotes. I just love her "build a corner." That's what people good at puzzles do. They do one piece at a time. They focus on the corner. I think it's just staying calm and staying passionate and not getting discouraged by the process and not getting discouraged by when your friends are getting published and you're not and feeling like it's impossible. Anything worth doing is hard. If you have that burning desire, that's enough proof that you deserve to be a writer.

Zibby: I love it. Lauren, thank you so much. Thanks for this chat. Thanks for your book. Thanks for indulging all my random ideas for you which you don't even need. I'm sorry.

Lauren: No, I loved -- they were all the ideas I've ever had, and someone was just validating them. Thank you.

Zibby: [laughs] Okay, great. Stay in touch. Congratulations.

Lauren: Thank you for having me. Talk soon.

Zibby: My pleasure. Bye.

Lauren: Bye.

Kara Goldin, UNDAUNTED

Kara Goldin: Thank you for connecting. I'm really excited to do this, very, very, very excited.

Zibby Owens: I'm excited too.

Kara: Did you get a copy of my book, by any chance?

Zibby: I did.

Kara: Yay! Awesome. I just wanted to make sure that you got it.

Zibby: Oh, yeah, I devoured it. I read every word. I loved it. I love a good business story memoir. So many of them are by men. This was so great. I just loved it. It was awesome. I can't wait to talk about it.

Kara: It's funny because I didn't know when I wrote this book that there really aren't women's books like this. It's typically women who are no longer CEOs anymore or something horrible happened with their company. There's a horrible story versus saying, yeah, I had some crap that went on in the midst of it, but at the end of the day, if you want to succeed and you want to move forward and you want to learn some lessons -- also, it's funny. So many people who have known me didn't even know I was going through some of those things. It's interesting. It's not like when you bet your company on your life. You've now just made this deal. I think it's more likely that people sort of go into hibernation. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want to have a lot of these conversations. Then they're like, okay, I've just got to resurface and deal with some of this stuff. Even John Legend, who's one of our investors, said, "There were so many things in here that I just have more respect for you saying you were trying and you were busy. We all knew that you were busy, but we just had no idea some of the stuff that you were really dealing with along the way." That is really my hope for this book too, not just to explain myself, but also to share with people that if I can do it, you can do it too. It just got The Wall Street Journal best-sellers list too.

Zibby: Yay!

Kara: I know. Everybody was saying to me, don't count on any of those because during this time, you're not doing big book talks. It's an election. There's a million reasons why it wasn't going to be able to get it. Then it got number seven. I was like, oh, my god. It's crazy. I'm really, really excited.

Zibby: You deserve it. It's a great book, seriously. It's a narrative. It feels like you're watching a movie about it. You're telling it as it comes, but then you have these little tips called out. It's not so much about balancing your life and your work. It's literally the story of building a business, which I find fascinating. I went to business school. I just love entrepreneurial stuff in general, personally. When I hear about some of the things and some of the times you had to regroup like when you started out and there was the mold in the water and you had to figure out what to do about it and when you were having your c-section and how you had to load up the Jeep and you refused to stay home -- you were sneaking out of the house to work. It's awesome. [laughs]

Kara: I still laugh about that. We live in Marin County now, but when we lived in San Francisco, we had this private school right across the street from us. It's called Town School. It was all boys. I knew a bunch of those mothers who were dropping their kids off. I knew that their drop-off was at 8:15. Literally, in the beginning, I would go over there with bottles. I'd be like, oh, my god, I have to get across the street to get to the drop-off because I'm going to give them a bottle and see what they think of this flavor. People were like, uh, okay. I said, because they won't expect it. You'll hand it to them. I'll be like, give me your honest opinion. Oh, my god, this is amazing. The more that I got of, this is amazing, then I would be like, okay, let's move forward with it. Entrepreneurs laugh at that because they're like, oh, my god. The mold story too, like I said, don't get me wrong -- we had this lab in South San Francisco called Anresco. I used to drive down there. It's not in a great neighborhood. It's in the Bayview neighborhood. My husband would never let me go by myself. I'd lock my doors. I'd never bring my kids in the car. I'd drive really fast, little scared. Then I'd drop off these samples just to make sure that there wasn't botulism. We never wanted to kill anybody.

Zibby: Which is nice. [laughs]

Kara: I always say to entrepreneurs, especially in food and beverages, it's amazing how people do not take those steps. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I knew -- there was definitely mold, but we were testing it. There's mold in cheese and kombucha. There's lots of stuff, but you have to make sure that it's not the bad stuff that's going to kill you.

Zibby: And how your husband would drink it in front of your buyers to be like, no, no, no, I'm good. Look at me drink it. The dedication of the two of you and the fact that you could do it together, all of it.

Kara: I know. We're still laughing. We still laugh. Over the years when I've been out public speaking on this too, people are like -- he's from Scarsdale. He's like a Seinfeld episode. He talks, but he's typically not the one speaking on the brand. A couple of times, the two of us have been together and talking. They're like, "What's it like to work for your wife?" I remember when Inc. asked me the first time on this panel. I was like, oh, my god, where is this going to go? He was like, "Don't we all work for women? I have two daughters. If they're not happy, I'm not happy." He'll say these things somewhat tongue in cheek, but he's pretty serious about it. He was like, "Look, we have sixty percent women in our company right now. Like Kara always says, it's because the guys don't want to work for women. She might be right." The people don't show up for the interviews because they're like, I don't want to work for a female-founded company. I'm like, good, don't apply for the job. I'd rather you not show up and apply for this stuff.

He's always like, "But then it leaves the cool guys here that actually want to work with women. They enjoy the thought process." He's hysterical. He just makes me laugh every single day. That was the other thing. He did a lot of the editing on the book too. He was this awesome and still is an awesome intellectual property lawyer in Silicon Valley. All of his friends were like, "What are you doing?" He was like, "Kara is writing $50,000, $100,000 checks off our bank account like it's water. It is water. She can spend money like I've never seen in my life. She made money." Still, he's like, "I don't want to go bankrupt over this whole project. I got to stay close to this and really understand where she's going with this." He's so funny. He was the general council. He's the chief operating officer. He always says, "I can always go back to being a lawyer if I really want to." He realized that he didn't like law. He loves the operations side. He loves the science side of things.

He's automated our whole supply chain. We don't have any people in the room when the bottles are being filled. That was a four-year project for him. He said when we don't have any preservatives in our product, that's where stuff actually happens. That's where bacteria happens. He was working on this project. As of December of 2019, he got all the people out of the room. Again, I would look at that saying, that sounds good, but I'm not going to work on it. You can go work on it. He went and did it. Now with the pandemic, when the FDA was running around the plants trying to figure out, where was COVID in the food supply and the drink supply? we were so happy that we had done so much work around automation. That's the way his brain thinks about things. While he's excited to be working for a beverage company, he does so much other stuff that is so important but so way beyond what a Coke or a Pepsi -- he loves what he does. You can't discount that at all.

Zibby: I think that's something that comes through for both of you and how you keep innovating. One of the parts of the book that stayed with me the most is when you approached somebody who was high up in your company at the time and you were like, "You're doing a good job. You must be bored. Time to change it up. Let's go." He was like, "What?" You were like, "Aren't you bored? You've mastered your job. If you've mastered your job, it means it's time to step up and do something else." That's just so anathema. People don't view it that way. I got good at this; I'm going to stay good at this. You're like, no, no, what else can you do? Even you saying that you don't want to be bored and you want to keep innovating, that's how all the great stuff happens.

Kara: That's the thing. We just developed a hand sanitizer. I don't know if we sent you any.

Zibby: You didn't send me any of this. I went online and bought out your website after reading this book. I was like, I have to try everything that they make. Yes, I have all the hand sanitizers. I have the deodorant. I have the sun lotion. I got everything to try it all.

Kara: It was so funny because I just kept smelling all this hand sanitizer in the beginning. First of all, it was really hard to get in the beginning of the pandemic. Then I started smelling stuff that just smelled rancid. It ended up that a lot of it was. There was a lot of stuff that was recalled. I just started thinking, god, there has to be some better ones out there. Finally one day, I guess this was the beginning of May, a girlfriend and I were hiking. She lives up in Sonoma. She knew this whiskey brand that was really struggling. They were doing hand sanitizers. She was like, "Maybe you guys want to do a hand sanitizer. Can you just talk to them and talk to them about maybe some ideas around direct to consumer and whatever?" I got talking. I kind of did it as just a favor to them to help them. Then all of a sudden, now we're almost sold out of the product. We're trying to figure out how to make more of it.

People were so surprised that the CEO was jumping in on it. I was like, really, I don't want to bog the rest of my team down on this stuff. Then selfishly, that's the stuff that I love to do. I love getting scrappy and roll up my sleeves and try and figure out, could this actually be a big business? It's a lot of what I speak at on that topic, even on college campuses. I used to think that becoming a manager, the important thing was really getting a bigger title. Now the more that I talk to CEOs, they're like, oh, yeah, I got this little project here. It's super fun. Don't tell anybody. It's the secret, but it's the best thing I do in the company. Sometimes it's been philanthropy. Sometimes it's other stuff. I think the more you can do these little things where you are learning -- that's the other thing that I've realized about really smart people. The mecca is not being this boring CEO that is just sitting here looking at a spreadsheet and watching the numbers. Instead, it's, how do we innovate? How do we do other things? That goes at every single level of the company that I've really tried to push on. What else can you be doing that really gets your head thinking about stuff?

Zibby: I feel like I share that. I'm obviously on a much tinier, tinier scale here. Even with this podcast, I've been doing it now for almost three years, so I know how to do it. I love it. I love everything about it. Recently, I started another thing called "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight." I'm like, I'm cheating on my company. I'm cheating on my number-one priority by doing this thing on the side. Here's my other Instagram account. [laughs] It's so silly. I'm like, let's try this. Let's try that. I love trying new stuff because I'm like, well, I don't know. Okay, looks like that's not working. Let's go with something else. I love that. It's the tinkering and experimenting and finding out what people respond to. It's so fun.

Kara: I think that's so true. It's funny. I've spoken on so many college campuses and business school classes about this. I think I sort of disrupt the learning a little bit. I was speaking to a whole group of engineers at Berkeley. I'm like, look, if you want to be like Mark Zuckerberg, it's not going to happen if you don't actually go and take classes outside or try and figure out what other people do. Always be learning. It's not a linear thing. The goal isn't to get to the top of the heap and then manage a bunch of people. Yes, you'll do that, but then can you go horizontally? Can you actually come back with creative ideas? Can you actually understand a basic business plan? Can you understand these different things along the way horizontally? That, to me, is the key to the kingdom because it keeps you energized. It keeps you learning. That guy is still at Hint. I point to him all the time as one of our best managers. He's gunning for my husband's job. He is, which is great. He keeps taking more and more off of his plate.

Eventually, if it's not at Hint, he'll go somewhere else and go be an amazing operating officer because he's done exactly that. He knows enough to get him in trouble in all these different -- you get it. People talk about this at business school. A lot of these learnings are there, but it's clearly not how we're teaching people in regular college campuses today. It's not what we're teaching people. If you're a manager, you're great with people, you know your stuff, and then you can teach people. I'm like, okay, but what about that person? There's so many people who just get angry at their company or they get depressed or whatever. I really think it has a lot to do with the fact that they're no longer learning. It's the spice of life too, with marriage too and your personal life. It's part of the reason why I think COVID is so hard for people. You got to switch it up. You got to go find new hiking trails. You got to get out of town every once in a while. You got to do things that are going to allow your brain to create and have new.

Zibby: I think that's sort of an under-discussed contributing factor to depression. People don't talk about how much we crave learning. I used to always say, I miss school. I really loved school. I'm such a nerd. I really loved it. I loved all the stuff I was learning. When I got out into the real world, I felt very rootless. Where is the structure? What am I building if I'm just showing up at work? Anyway, I totally agree with you.

Kara: It really is. Should we just continue on this? Do you want to ask me specifically about stuff?

Zibby: Yeah, let me just ask you a little bit more about your book. What made you decide to take all your experience and turn it into a book, first of all? Why a book? Why now? Why did you do it now?

Kara: It's crazy. I was out speaking about founding Hint over the years at lots and lots of events. Then about four years ago, I started journaling. I was primarily doing it because I felt like I would tell these stories when I was out speaking and then I kind of wanted to hone them in and also think about, if somebody talks about, how do you get started? then I would have, what are the three stories that come to mind that are good examples of that? Then I just kept going. Every time somebody would ask me something kind of hard, I would think about, here's my examples that I can go back to, or whatever. Then I started really hearing more and more from people not just in audiences. Also, they would write to me on LinkedIn and say, things are really hard. I can't raise money. I have so many doubts. This is so much not like you. I'm sure you've never had any fears or failure. You're relentless. You're this. You're this. I'm like, no, I totally had lots of examples of -- I move forward, but I also have doubts, etc. The journal was like six hundred pages about a year and a half ago.

I have friends that are authors. I was like, maybe I should put this in a book because I could actually help a lot more people who are feeling this way that maybe aren't going to reach out to me or who aren't in an audience hearing me talk about this. I got an agent. Then the agent was like, "This is going to take a long time. These publishers are going to want you to write a certain book." There was definitely that, but it got sold in like two weeks. It was really unusual, and I think primarily because I didn't know how to write a book. I wasn't this person saying, one day I'm going to be an author. I'm not going to lie. It feels pretty great to have a published book and be an author and a Wall Street Journal best seller and all that stuff, but I did it differently than most people. Today, so many people are journaling too and trying to feel like, how do I find happiness? How do I be a better leader? or whatever it is. They're writing, but they don't know where this goes. That's another thing that I like to share with people.

This book, my hope is that people will read it and be inspired and put it into their own storyline to figure out where it fits. Even Jamie Dimon, who's kind of been a mentor to me over the years, it's funny, he read the book and he said, "Your story in the Grand Canyon really got me thinking about, what are those really hard things in business that I faced where when I was facing something in my personal life that was super hard, what did I think about? How did I have the relentlessness to just keep going on?" He had throat cancer. He talked about all of these challenging times that he had in business and how he loves what he does. He loves his work, but he was really feeling like that was a challenging time for him. He was able to automatically set his mindset to think, I got this. I can do this stuff. Yes, of course, he remembered his family and all of those things. In addition, he remembered all of the hard stuff that he had been through as lessons to be able to tackle other hard stuff. I think it's fascinating that that's what he picked up on in the book.

Incredibly smart people are picking up things and placing it in their own life, which is helping them to figure out, what did that mean? I'm excited because I wanted to get it out there. Like I said, it got picked up by a publisher pretty quickly. I didn't really know what that meant. I also realize women don't really talk about this. This clearly is not a book about how I was shunned in some way. There's moments in there. I also, hopefully, give people hope to say that there's people like them. I clearly had some tough, tough times. Also, my kids are older now. They look at me and they're like, my mom's a badass. She just goes. She's crazy. Right in the middle of my launch and Sheryl Sandberg's interviewing me, my son's texting me saying, "Can I get those shoes?" Crazy town, right? I'm like, "Stop it," yelling. That's real. It never stops. That's okay that that stuff goes on. I think people think, is this just my life, or is this everyone's life? Anyway, that was really why I decided to ultimately get it out there.

Zibby: That's great. It's a book I want to give to my daughters, when they're older I mean. One of my daughters is seven. It's an example. Look, you can do all this. You don't have to write a book about things you're complaining about, essentially. I think a lot of books right now are what has worked against us as opposed to, yeah, these things were hard, but I got through them. Here's how you innovate. I thought that was really awesome. Once you sold the book, tell me about the writing process. When did you ever find time to do this?

Kara: Because I had really written so much of it, it was a lot easier for a publisher to actually say, let's do this part of the book and these sections. Then I got this editor who's on the inside cover of the book, John Butman. Then my husband, actually, he would remember other parts of the stories and stuff, and so he became sort of like the co-editor. What was so sad is that my publisher -- we turned in everything at the end of January. It was pretty fast. It was from the end of June until the end of January. We talked four days a week, blocked three hours four days a week. We were on it. We just went back and forth on emails. I was doing weekends and nights. I'm still the CEO of the company. I'm still trying to do both of the things. Then actually on March 13th -- do you know who Platon is? He's a photographer in New York. He shot the cover of the book. He had shot me for this Verizon commercial. Just loved him. He's shot Kobe Bryant, that picture that was so powerful. He's done every president. He's just this amazing guy.

Of course, the city was shutting down when all this was going on. I said, "Are you going to cancel on me, on the photoshoot?" He was like, "No, no, no. Let's just do it. Then let's both get out of here." That's what happened. Then I got the pictures back that weekend while we were out of stock on shelves everywhere. There was a lot going on at this time. I remember talking to John on that Monday saying, "What do you think about the cover?" In the meantime, we're trying to figure out, do we close down our San Francisco office? We already closed down our New York office. He was like, "Oh, my god, I love the cover." We put a period on the end of Undaunted. He was like, "I love it. It's exactly how you talk," all of the stuff. Then I get a phone call from my agent a few days later. She's like, "I have something critical to tell you." I thought, oh, god. What else is critical going on in the world? She's like, "John died."

Zibby: What?

Kara: I know. I was like, what? This is somebody that I talked to more than my husband for the last six months. He had a massive heart attack.

Zibby: No!

Kara: I know. It was so sad. He had just bought a house in Portland, Maine. He was super healthy. He was sixty-five years old. I'm convinced that COVID is -- we'll find out years later that -- he didn't have it that he knew of. It was really, really sad. I hadn’t gotten my manuscript back from the publisher. In many ways, because I had time sitting at home and was able to dig through it, and John did such an amazing job to really get it where it needed to be, there wasn't that much editing even that was needed. John, in many ways, I felt like for the process of getting it out there, I could just feel his presence, as crazy as that was, like, you got this. It's going to get out there. It was very, very sad, though, along the way.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry that that happened. It's terrible.

Kara: I know. Really sad.

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and aspiring authors? Now you're both. You can show that off. [laughs]

Kara: The main thing that I've signed up for over the years that wasn't as clear to me maybe earlier on in life is that if you don't try, then you actually won't succeed. I always share with people that no idea is crazy, especially if you just keep thinking about it. If you keep thinking, oh, gosh, I should go write a book or I want to launch this company, you can just take baby steps to actually go and do these things. People are like, I don't know how to write a business plan. I'm like, you just google business plan. You can start to figure this stuff out. It might not be the best business plan in the whole world, but stop putting these walls up in front of yourself that actually prevent you from moving forward. I think that that's the biggest thing. Frankly, that's the biggest thing that I find for entrepreneurs. They think, I haven't worked in a couple of years. I've never worked in that industry. I didn't go to the right school or business school or whatever it is. I'm like, just go. Just go try. If nothing else, you can actually say, I thought about it. I looked at the industry. I wrote a business plan. I talked to some people. That's actually succeeding. That's doing something. You got a little bit further than you were six months ago or whatever it is. That's my biggest advice to people.

When you look at successful people today, they didn't have all the answers. They actually had a lot of failures. They had a lot of doubts. You have to go and just take these little steps and figure out, what are those steps that I can go even figure out whether or not this is worth doing? Really, just live your life undaunted. If you do that, I do believe too that, while it can be stressful at times, it's also really rewarding. Today, we're the largest nonalcoholic private beverage company in the world that doesn't have a relationship with Coke, Pepsi, or Dr Pepper Snapple. That was never supposed to happen. I didn't have the experience. I was just this mom with four kids under the age of six walking into Whole Foods. I was just driving in my Jeep Grand Cherokee. None of this was supposed to happen, but I just kept trying. I was getting educated. I was really intrigued by the fact that originally, I thought these little things were caps, and they're actually called closures. I was like, that's so cool. There's this whole secret, hidden vocabulary out there for these things. I don't know why I geeked out on the fact that those were the things. You have to get confident in yourself that you can go and accomplish a lot. Most people actually can do a lot more than they allow themselves to do. Again, if you don't want to do something, that's a whole other topic. It's really, do you want to get up and actually move forward? That's the biggest question that I think people need to answer.

Zibby: Wow. I feel less daunted, maybe not un. [laughs]

Kara: You are definitely. You're doing lots of amazing stuff too.

Zibby: Thank you. I feel like your book is so inspiring. It's just so important. I think that entrepreneurship right now is sort of the greatest thing we have left in this country. During this pandemic, watching people innovate has been the most encouraging thing that's happened, with your hand sanitizer. There's this company that sent me all these things. What were they called? Something like Scenties, scented masks. You should actually talk to this company. Maybe you should talk to this girl. It's this random entrepreneur. She's making scented masks.

Kara: So fun.

Zibby: All these little things, that's what it's all about. That's how our country can really get better. Anyway, I feel like I could talk to you all day and ask you a million other questions. I'm so glad to have met you, to have read your book. Now I'm drinking all this extra water, which is amazing.

Kara: And getting super healthy. I love it.

Zibby: And getting super healthy. Thank you so much for our very informal chat today. I hope to stay in touch.

Kara: Definitely. I love it. If anybody wants to reach out to me too, I'm on social, @KaraGoldin. Again, the book is Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters. It'd make a great holiday gift too. I've been talking to a lot of people who are reaching out to me saying, how do I buy fifty of these? I know a lot of girlfriends or high school kids or college kids that need this book. It's very applicable.

Zibby: Perfect holiday gift. I'm holding it up now. Thank you. Stay in touch. Have a great day.

Kara: Have a great rest of the week.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Kara: Buh-bye.

Isabel Wilkerson, CASTE

Zibby Owens: Welcome to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," Isabel Wilkerson. I'm so excited that you're here to talk about Caste.

Isabel Wilkerson: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: You must be exhausted. You must be doing a thousand interviews every day. You're on every list of recommended books everywhere. How are you holding up?

Isabel: You just power through because this is what you have to do. No one could've expected how this year would turn out. You just simply could not have imagined. The idea of working on something for so long and so hard and then to introduce it to the world in the midst of a global pandemic, you just never could've imagined. I want to always say, of course, that compared to people who are really experiencing challenges in this world at this time, this is so low on the totem pole in terms of what I'm going through here at all. It's not in the same category of true suffering, but it does create challenges. It can be exhausting, but it's necessary. I'm just glad that we have ways to be able to speak to people and to be able to communicate, as I am here with you. What would we do without it?

Zibby: I don't know. We'd be back in another century. We can dive back into some of your research. We can imagine what it would be like. [laughs] I'm glad you're holding up enough to at least chit-chat a little today. Your book, before I read it, my mother was like, "This is the most amazing book you'll ever read." When I know that, I'm like, all right, I better sit down and button up. Then we have to have a whole talk about it. Obviously, everybody's mother and sibling and everyone has now read this book, which is amazing. Tell me about all the research it took to do this, about the thousands of interviews for both this and The Warmth of Other Suns. Also, what do you think makes a great interview? How do you extract the information you need from other people?

Isabel: Those are really great questions. For one thing, the work that I do is called narrative nonfiction. It combines what ideally would be the best of both worlds, meaning that you have to do a tremendous amount of research in order to find and to be able to determine and excavate truths that are verifiable fact that help explain some phenomenon. Then you translate that into a narrative using many of the tools that novelists would use so that the best of both worlds would be, you're learning something, you exposed a phenomenon you otherwise would not know about, but it's told in such a way that, hopefully, it builds suspense. It's a page-turner. It tells a story. You get involved in the people. To do that takes a long time. I say that I have sort of have a gestational lifespan of an elephant. [laughter] It takes a lot time. The Warmth of Other Suns took fifteen years. I'd say that if it were a human being, it would be in high school and dating. That's how long it took me to work on that book. Then this one, I got a little bit better. It took about eight years of germinating and distilling it and thinking about it. In the course of that, it means that one project leads into the other. This grew out The Warmth of Other Suns, which is where I started first using the word caste to describe the hierarchies built into our country going back to colonial times. I used that word because it was the most comprehensive, accurate way to describe the world that a lot of us don't even know about.

It's a world in which the hierarchy of the American South, for much of our country's history, was so tightly delineated. It was this graded ranking of human value that went on until, essentially, the 1970s, legally, formally, until basically the 1960s legislation, but then didn't take effect until the 1970s. This was a world where it was against the law for black people and white people to merely play checkers together in Birmingham. There was a white Bible and an altogether separate black Bible to swear to tell the truth on it in court. The very word of God was segregated in that era. It could mean your very life if you breached any of the protocols and laws of that system. That's what I was describing in The Warmth of Other Suns. That was the term I started to use, caste. It was more evocative. It was more comprehensive. It was language that anthropologists who had studied the Jim Crow South actually used as well. The second book grew out of the first. What started it was really what happened with Trevon Martin. He was a teenager walking home from a convenience store in a suburban subdivision in Florida where his very image, what he looked like, was viewed as suspicious by someone who stopped and ultimately killed him. That actually occurred in an area, a part of Florida, that -- one of the protagonists from The Warmth of Other Suns was from that same area, so it sparked my interest and attention from the very start. I wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times connecting caste to what had happened to him. That was really the beginning of my thinking that led to this book.

Zibby: Tell me a little bit about when you interview people, what you do to get them to open up. What are some of the things you look for when you're talking to somebody new? What is that about for you? What are some of the things that you've really taken away from people you've met all over the world?

Isabel: That's such a great question because I don't consider myself to do interviews, really. The kind of work that I'm doing takes a lot of time. I both don't have enough time -- there's never enough time, apropos of the title of your podcast. [laughs]

Zibby: Nobody has any time for anything. Yes.

Isabel: There's this Cuban saying. I believe it's Cuban. It says something along the lines of, slow down, I'm in a hurry. I think that's an interesting way of thinking about life itself. Because there's never enough time and yet the work that I do takes time, I end up allowing myself the time to spend with people as opposed to a Q&A because I'm not going to be able to learn what I need to learn if I have a set of questions for the work that I do. The work that I do is attempting to get deep into the heart and the minds of people, into their motivations, into their thoughts, their dreams, their triumphs and their tribulations, what they’ve actually been through. It's hard to even formulate a single question that will elicit from someone, your deepest dreams, thoughts, and motivation. I have to spend time with people. I generally do more closely what we would identify with anthropologists, which is participant observation, ethnography, spending time with them, getting to know them in a more relaxed and hopefully more holistic way. It just takes a tremendous amount of time. It does.

For The Warmth of Other Suns, for example, in order to find the protagonists for that book, I had to go to the places where they would be. I went to -- there were actually Baptist churches in Brooklyn where everyone was from South Carolina. There were Catholic churches in California where everyone was from Louisiana. Obviously, I was writing about the Great Migration of people who went from the South and then spread out to the rest of the country following beautifully predictable streams. That's what I found in the process of that. I interviewed over twelve hundred people for that, basically a casting call. It was like auditioning people for the role of the being a protagonist in this book. That's where I had a chance to meet many, many people. For the most part, I, in some ways, throw out prompts just to get people talking and to see where that leads and to allow them to talk. Whatever it is that can get them to feel comfortable and to talk is what I would do. Generally, it means asking fewer questions than you might think.

A lot of it is responding to what they’ve said to keep the conversation going, to make it conversational, to sort of sit at their knee and to hear their experiences, to make it comfortable for them, essentially, to till the soil to make it receptive to whatever is pouring forth from them. That's what this is all about. It just takes a lot of time. It really does. Some of those people end up telling me things that they hadn’t told their own children because they had been through so much pain and trauma that they didn't want to burden their children with that. They didn't want to revisit it. That was post-traumatic stress for a lot of the people who endured and suffered and survived Jim Crow. They were telling me things that were very, very painful. The most that I can do is be the very best listener that I can be, be encouraging, empathetic, understanding, and to validate their experiences and their feelings. That's what my job is.

Zibby: Once you have to absorb all of that stress and trauma and history and narrative that's very disturbing, how do you then walk away and have a normal night? How do you extract yourself from that intensity and deal with those emotions, aside from obviously turning it into a best-selling narrative nonfiction book? Emotionally, how do you toggle back and forth from that intimacy, really?

Isabel: It's probably one's individual constitution that makes the person more likely to be able to think long term about something. That's how I am. These are huge projects that take a long time. I go into it knowing that it's going to take a long time. I'm going to have to sit with it, live with it for a long time. There's several answers to that question. One of them is that I often focus in on people with whom I already have developed or feel there is some kind of connection. There is some chemistry that makes me feel that I want to spend time with them and they want to spend time with me because this is a long-haul journey here. This is really years in the making. You have to feel that there is connection that can power you through. That's one of them. In the case for the things I do, I end up absorbing myself into what their lives has been. I am, by definition, kind of an empath. I just am, so I absorb it. That's just who I am. Knowing that it's going to be for the long haul, it means that I have absorbed who they are into my being. They become part of me. I just live with it. They become part of me. All of the people that I write about on some level become part of me. I don't view that as draining as much as enriching because I get to know these amazing, incredible people. If I didn't have a chemistry and love for them, then it would be harder for the reader to experience that as well. If I feel this love and connection to them, then reader will as well.

I think that the way particularly The Warmth of Other Suns has been received -- the book has been out for ten years. It was on the best-seller list when it first came out. It's back on the best-seller list again ten years later. It's incredible. I think that that's because people can feel the connection, the love, the empathy. They can see themselves in the people. I say that narrative nonfiction is the closest that you get to be another person. We know that empathy can be elicited when we read novels. Narrative nonfiction allows you to feel that same empathy for people who were real, who actually existed. What allows me to get through it is my sense of connection, compassion, and in fact, love and admiration for the people that I'm writing about. That does not mean that I'm writing about them as if they're perfect. You get to see them in their full humanity. It actually is a disservice to people to overly romanticize a person. I think that a full humanity means the range of emotions and experiences, and so that's what comes through. That's one of the things that powers me through, that gets me through the really difficult aspects.

The other thing is ultimately the reader. I embark upon these projects, these massive research immersions, because I ultimately want to share this with readers. I'm thinking about the reader the whole time. Thinking about the reader and knowing that ultimately whatever it is that I'm having to experience, suffer, go through will reach someone else, that's what inspires me. I love the definition that Tolstoy gives for art. He says that art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another. That's a beautiful, concise description of art, the most beautiful that I've heard. That is what this is. This is literally being the person in between the sender of emotion and experience, and the receiver of that emotion and experience. The sender is the person whose story is being told. The receiver is the reader who is now getting to learn and immerse him or herself in someone else's story. I am the intercessor. I am the interpreter of that experience. That's what I'm thinking about too. It's not complete until it gets out of me and out to the reader. That's what also inspires me and motivates me even for some of the really difficult parts of the work that I have to do.

Zibby: How did this all get started? You referred to your constitution earlier. Were you always this empathic? Give me a picture of you in seventh grade or preschool. Were you always the one connecting everybody? When did you know you wanted to embark on these deep dives into other people's lives?

Isabel: Actually, like a lot of writers, I'm an introvert, probably an extreme introvert. I think a lot of writers are observers. They're people who were always the quiet one with a book in hand, that child in bed with the flashlight under the covers reading a book. That was who I was and am. I was feeling that connection through the stories that I was reading growing up. I was also the person who was usually the quiet one on the sidelines observing all the action that other people might have been in the midst of. That doesn't mean that there weren’t times where I might have been involved. Generally speaking, I'm very content to be the one who's watching, observing, interpreting, examining, and thinking about what is going on around me. The way that it comes out is through the writing. That's how it comes out.

Zibby: I think you can maybe put aside your flashlight. I think you've graduated to perhaps a lamp on your bedside table at this point. What do you think? Are you still hiding? [laughs]

Isabel: No, symbolically, of course. I'm long past that. It's the idea of being able to lose yourself in a story.

Zibby: No, I'm kidding. I feel the same way. I also had a flashlight. Literally, I would hide in my bathroom and read Charlotte's Web. Now my husband sleeps next to me, and the light is on. I'm the same way. I was also very quiet and observing as a kid. I relate to everything you're saying. It's awesome. In your book, you set out, obviously, all these different paradigms for analyzing societies, especially how we've gotten to where we are now through the lens of both cultures in India and the Holocaust and Jim Crow South and everything as to why we are the way we are, and perhaps we should look at it differently. I was just wondering, having gone through this complete analysis of our society as it stands today, how hopeful are you? What would you tell kids who are growing up now in this environment knowing what you know and all you've researched and everything? What would your advice to them be? Do you feel optimistic about where we can go, or not?

Isabel: I wouldn't have written these books if I were not optimistic. It takes a lot of faith and optimism to embark on something that will take years to complete with no guarantee of how it's going to turn out, no guarantee of what the world will be like by the time it comes out. Will people even be interested by the time you finally finish this thing you started? It takes a lot of faith and optimism to even start down the path that each of these books began with. I wouldn't have written them if I weren’t optimistic. Of course, one of the missions and purpose of these books is to help illuminate aspects of our country's history that we otherwise would not know so that we can together find ways to transcend these artificial barriers and boundaries that have been created long before even our ancestors were thought of. This is going back to the seventeenth century colonial America before there were the United States of America. The goal of this is to shine a light on these aspects of this old house that we call America.

I use this analogy, this metaphor, about our country being like an old house that we've all inherited. None of us alive are the ones who built it, but it's our responsibility now that we are in this house. That's the purpose of all of this. The purpose is to somehow find a way to recognize what we have inherited, to really look closely at what we've inherited in hopes that we can make the improvements, make the repairs, the massive repairs that are necessary in order for to be as strong as it needs to be. That's where my hopefulness comes, and also people's response to what happened over the summer after George Floyd. There was a sense of alarm and outrage that was absolutely warranted and that many, many people, not just in our country, but around the world felt and responded to, and a sense that this should not be happening in this country or any country, but especially not in our country given our creed and what we stand for. It should not be happening now. I think that that's where I get a lot of hopefulness, the fact that people did respond, the fact that people did recognize how woeful and how tragic that this is happening in our current era.

Zibby: This is probably none of my business, but when you are not being a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and researcher and of the amazing things that you're doing to help the country, what do you do in your spare time? What do you enjoy doing? How do you use time when you're not at your desk or at your computer? What are some of your things that make you tick?

Isabel: Sadly, for a lot of the last year or so, and especially with what's going on now in COVID, that takes up a vast majority of my waking time because that's what the circumstances require. The question you're asking is almost pre-COVID. So much of my time is spent just absolutely loving being able to travel and to see new and amazing cultures, connecting in that way. That's massively central to who I am, obviously. I love to spend time out in nature in any way that I can, and especially digging in the soil and the art of what can happen when you plant something and have it to grow. I'm such a tremendous, tremendous animal lover, animal rights advocate. I just absolutely can't imagine life without having some kind of animal in one's life. I'm a big dog lover. I love all kinds of animals. What I'm saying is there are many, many sources of joy in addition, of course, to family and friends and what's really important in life. The circumstance in which that we find ourselves now means that the world is the way that it is. That's what's necessary right now. For writers, it's not as difficult to transition to the world that we're in now in terms of being interior, being still engaged with words and engaged with talking about words. That's very, very natural because that's what we do.

Zibby: I was literally just saying yesterday that I couldn't -- I have a black lab that I recently inherited from my mother-in-law who passed away. I have fallen in love. I was like, I can't believe that I have the capacity for this much love for an animal. Every time I'm with her thinking about how much I love her, I'm already thinking, what am I going to do when she's not around? which is stupid. With people, you can fool yourself that they’ll be around forever. With animals, you can't. At least, I've found you can't have that.

Isabel: COVID has been such a devastation to everyone and more particularly, people who have suffered from it directly, clearly. It's been going on for long enough that many things, both good and bad, in life also happened because it's been going on for so long. One of the things that happened is that I lost my beloved westie who was seventeen. He'd made it to seventeen. In the early months of COVID, he passed away. You realize how they work their way into your heart in ways that you don't expect, in ways that humans don't. It's a different kind of love. They're by your side, essentially living for you, waiting for every gesture coming from you. They literally exist for you. They become so much a part of your life that you don't even think about it until they're no longer there. There were two. We had two. Now there's one. He made it to seventeen, and so I can't complain.

Zibby: I'm so sorry to hear that. On the street yesterday, I was walking the dog. This older man came over and was just like, "Can I stop and pet the dog?" Of course, I'm with my mask, like, why is he coming so close to me? He's like, "I lost my German shepherd after fourteen years. It's only been three weeks. I just have to hug your dog." My heart broke. Yeah, animal love. Anyway, last question because I know you have to go soon, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Isabel: I don't have anything that you haven't probably heard before, so I apologize in advance for not being any more insightful about this. We're often told, read, read, read. Read good things, things that you admire, and things that you could learn from because they're not as good as they could be. There are people who say write every single day. That is true. It's probably a great idea. I, however, believe that there are some of us who -- I actually do better when I am writing because I feel as if I am bursting with something that has to be on the page, where I cannot stop myself from having to write. That, I find to be more productive. When you have to write and you're on deadline, of course you write. I find that, to me, the most inspiring and inspired and effective writing comes from when I feel as if, oh, my god, where's a piece of paper? I need to write this down right this second. I just have to write this down before I lose it.

One suggestion I would have is to always have pen and paper or whatever it is. If you write in your device, have it available. If something hits you, write it down then. Do not assume that it will be there tomorrow or next week or next month. If something hits you, some revelation or some way of thinking about something, some idea, some turn of phrase, write it down right then and there because it may not be there again. The mind works in mysterious ways. You need to capture it while you can. I always have something nearby that I can write on, envelopes. It doesn't matter. Whatever it is, always have something nearby. I would say to be kind to one's self when things aren't coming as you wish them to be. Know that if you've done it before, you can do it again. It will come. Be patient with yourself. I personally, as I said, don't believe in suffering and torturing yourself when it's not coming, when it's not working. I just don't feel that you should suffer. Of course, if you're on deadline, that's a different thing. You've got to get it done. The most beautiful things that are more naturally, holistically emerging from your subconscious will come when you least expect. Be there to capture it.

Also, in terms of being kind to one's self and patient with one's self is to realize that all times when you're working on something, your subconscious is working all the time. It is constantly trying to make sense of what it knows has to come out of you. To know that even when you're not in front of a screen, or for people who -- there are many people who still do write in longhand. I like combining both. Whatever I write in longhand is usually going to be, often, the most powerful, meaningful, oddly enough, well-constructed observation or passage, generally. I don't know why that happens. Maybe there's some direct connection from the brain going through the neck and then through the arms and into hands. I don't know. Maybe somebody has studied that. That's what I find. To know that we are working even when we're not in front of the screen, the subconscious is constantly trying to make sense of it because it knows it has a job to do. It knows that it needs to get this thing written. It absolutely knows it. It's working on it whether we realize it or not. Then when it reveals itself to us and when we sit down to write, then it can all pour forth. That's how I work. That's what works for me.

Zibby: Maybe this can be your next book, how the brain and the hand interact. You can go around the country and talk to every writer. I think that would be really cool. I'm sure you have other ideas. [laughs] Thank you so much for your time and for the fantastic contributions to literature and for the conversation.

Isabel: Thank you. I so enjoyed it. Thank you.

Zibby: Have a great day. Buh-bye.

Isabel: You as well. Bye.

Paige Peterson, GROWING UP BELVEDERE-TIBURON

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

Paige Peterson: Thank you. How are you?

Zibby: This is so nice for me because you were my first boss ever. How old I was? Eleven or something. I babysat your kids. How old was I?

Paige: I think you were ten. Alexandra was just born.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. How old is she now?

Paige: She's almost thirty-four.

Zibby: Yeah, I was ten. Oh, my gosh, that's crazy. It was so great. I got to spend all those summers and watch Alexandra grow up and then go to school with her.

Paige: We picked Trinity because you went there.

Zibby: I hope she liked it.

Paige: We followed you through your education.

Zibby: This is such a coming-full-circle moment. I'm so excited I can have you on the podcast. Your book is so beautiful and so beautifully written. I have to say -- let me back up. Why don't you start by telling listeners what your book is about and what inspired you to write it? Then I will continue my raves about it.

Paige: [laughs] Thank you. I actually was at dinner in New York with a friend of mine, David Patrick Columbia who has a blog called New York Social Diary. We were sitting together. I was just telling him what my childhood was like. He said, "Oh, my god, you must write about this. This is incredible." The way I wrote this book was to get very, very quiet and to kind of channel that inner child of mine and remember what it was like to be a little girl. I started writing vignettes. I just started writing paragraphs, nothing connected. In the end, nothing sort of connects in the book either because it's childhood memories. They're just capsules of moments. I was extraordinarily blessed. I'm sixty-five years old. In 1955, I was born in Northern California. Belvedere and Tiburon was still a railroad town. It was a rural, wild place. It was great.

Zibby: Your book is such a great combination of your own memories about growing up there and the place itself, but also your childhood and then so many amazing photographs that you have dug up from the past hundred-plus years, which is amazing.

Paige: We took those photographs from the Miwok Indians up. There's an amazing history here, one that America should not be proud of. What the Spaniards and the Mexicans and then the white men did to the American Indians is appalling. This whole peninsula that I live in where I'm talking to you from was just beautiful, peaceful land with Indians. Of course, in a very short amount of time, we decimated them. The missionaries put them in Western clothing and turned them into slaves. It's really an appalling history here. Then we moved forward. I did write about a hundred years of history in Northern California. It's amazing. This railroad town was an amazing place.

Zibby: Your childhood, literally, I was reading it and I was like, this is the backdrop for any movie about America. I felt like I was reading a set for a novel or something. I couldn't believe that's the way you grew up with riding your bikes all day and no playdates and just so many things that you think of as so traditional America, small town, whatever. Yet there was San Francisco right over the bridge too. Crazy.

Paige: It was crazy. You know Zibby, I raised my kids on Central Park West just the way you were raised and you're now raising your children. My childhood was so vastly different. Of course, our parents just sort of said, make your own lunch and leave the house. It didn't matter if it was raining. It didn't matter. We would go to the library. We were told to go. We wouldn't come back until the four-thirty whistle blew. Nobody paid any attention to us. We used to take swings and swing off over the cliff. Nobody cared. More importantly, kids didn't get hurt. I think sometimes the hovering things, kids aren't as mindful as they should be because everybody's always hovering around them. I feel so very blessed to have been raised here.

Zibby: Tell me about this. You put water in the freezer, and that was your water for the day. You would take it out and wait for it to melt.

Paige: Yeah, in a glass jar. We all did it. Collectively, all the kids always had a glass jar in the basket of their bikes. We all used to drink out of garden hoses, which of course now we know is completely toxic and horrible to do. I would never let my child, but we did it. We did it. We weren’t dependent on anyone. By the way, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was all one needed for nine hours. There were no such things as snacks. It was so simple.

Zibby: There was part of me reading your book sighing with longing as I think about the effort it takes just for me to get my kids to school, and the fifty-seven snacks and water bottles. That's just to literally cross the park. That's a ten-minute --

Paige: -- I did it. I was you.

Zibby: Yeah, I know.

Paige: Just preparing to get out of my apartment, I used to think, oh, my god, I cannot even believe this. My mother never did this. It was a much simpler time. It was really beautiful. One of the things, Zibby, I live on the water. The Tiburon Peninsula has water on three sides of it. There were no life jackets. Kids swam in the bay. Kid swam in the lagoon. We were competent on boats and kayaking. There was no safety of any kind. There were no helmets when you rode your bike. There was nothing. It's amazing. By the way, I don't know any kid that got hurt. There were things that happened later on as teenagers, but it wasn't about playing and being free.

Zibby: You had this great passage. It just stayed with me, one of your many descriptive scenes that takes the reader back. You wrote, "For years, the snack bar at the club only offered bags of potato chips. After some remodeling, the menu upgraded to include grilled cheese, hot dogs, and hamburgers with chips and pickles, mayonnaise and yellow mustard on the side, paper cups for ice water. The thin plywood changing rooms stayed the same for years, lockers and hooks for hanging wet towels, the smell of never-ending dampness. Don't we all have such memory rooms composed of tastes, smells, and textures? They stay with us always." Aw, that is so nice. Then later on, and maybe this goes to what you were saying about the teenage years, you write, "Like any town, we had our share of tragedy. What happened inside the homes of our friends was none of anyone's business. People didn't talk about their problems outside of home. Ours was a culture of silence and secrets. In the 1960s and '70s, at least eight of my friends died before the age of twenty, some from drugs, some by suicide. All these decades later when I see the parents of those children, their eyes still carry sadness. As my grandmother would wisely nod to us, there but for the grace of God go I." Beautiful. You're a beautiful writer. That is haunting, the culture of silence and secrets in this idyllic waterside town. What's really going on inside the homes? This is a novel. It's like a thriller. I don't know what it is.

Paige: [laughs] It's interesting. I haven't heard somebody read that before. I was raised as an Episcopalian, but I went to a Catholic girls' school. It's interesting, this gang of girls. One of them ended up being schizophrenic and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Another one died of an overdose of LSD. It was in the sixties and seventies. Drugs were just being introduced to California, free love, and everything else. I think I was saved because I had a very strict mother. I was scared of her, and so I didn't do any of that stuff. I didn't follow. I wasn't allowed to. One of the things I write about, I wasn't allowed to go to Main Street. There were definite boundaries for me. I feel so very lucky and, as my grandmother did used to say, there but for the grace of God go I. It was so sad. Belvedere and Tiburon are two towns. It's divided by a road. It's not unlike East Hampton, one side of the tracks to the other. There was a lot of alcoholism here because of cocktail parties. This is a yachting community. This involves a lot of drinking. I still don't know what went on behind closed doors, but a lot of it wasn't very nice.

Zibby: Interesting.

Paige: And sad. Kids didn't go to psychiatrists. There wasn't much divorce. I was the product of a divorce. My parents were divorced when I was eighteen months old, very, very early on in my life. Most of the people I knew in this community were married and settled. Nobody took vacations because nobody had any money. We just played outside. We were together. Those years were complicated. I bet all over the world people could talk about the sixties and seventies being a hard time for kids in some respects.

Zibby: It seems like the trade-offs -- your childhood sounded just so perfect. Obviously, nothing is perfect. Maybe the secrets in your house do not want to come out either. Maybe you're keeping those locked inside.

Paige: I certainly didn't write about what happened inside the house. That's another book.

Zibby: I want to read that book.

Paige: [laughs] Outside the house, I think I was absolutely -- I look back on my childhood with such delight. I was so lucky. I just was so fortunate. Also, I was open to it and took advantage of it and didn't fight any of it. We were big tennis players. My mother was a professional tennis player. She is ninety-four and in the other room. We were on the courts all the time playing. There was amazing structure in that, being an athlete. Then the freedom that we had was just amazing. I don't see kids here having that freedom at all.

Zibby: Even there? Now I'm feeling all guilty that I have kids in New York City. What is it like for the kids growing up there now?

Paige: I have to tell you, Zibby, I loved raising my kids in New York City. They just had a completely different, wonderful experience. There are nannies holding their hands. There are hovering mothers. You don't see kids off on their own at all. It's just different everywhere. This idyllic time that we had I think was a capsule in time. It doesn't exist anymore. It'll never go back. First of all, the population exploded. We still had lots of empty lots on the island where we did box sliding and made forts and kept all our sleeping bags up there and put them under branches. That can't happen now. We're overpopulated. There's still a sweetness to this small town, but it's different. It's definitely different.

Zibby: Do you think that yields different kids and different grown-ups? What do you think the impact of that is on a societal level when you have a whole generation of people who grew up with all this independence? Now obviously we have these kids who we have to buckle up six ways and sideways just to get around the block in the car seats and everything. What do you think? What type of society does that lead to?

Paige: It's a really good question, Zibby. I'm glad I'm not raising kids. I'm sorry. I just think it's so hard. It's so hard now. I don't know. What do you think?

Zibby: I just think that it dovetails with the increased anxiety everybody has. Kids feel that we're so weary of everything that goes on around them. I think that it creates a population of kids who are not as inherently brave and bold to go forth. They're always looking behind them. Maybe that has some benefits as well. We like to believe in the sense of control and everything. I don't know. I look at you. I remember when I used to babysit. You were always painting these amazing things. You were just so cool. Not that you aren't anymore, but I just thought you were the most amazing woman, and so creative. Now you've written your book about Blackie. You've already written a children's book and now this beautiful book. You beat to your drummer much more so than most people that I grew up with knowing.

Paige: Thank you. You know something, Zibby? I didn't have any information when I was a kid. There was no information.

Zibby: Did you go to school?

Paige: [laughs] Yeah, I most definitely went to school.

Zibby: Okay, good. All right.

Paige: We're stating the obvious. There were no computers. There were no phones. I mean that kind of information. Our lives were so simple and small. Parents didn't talk to kids. In those days, it was completely -- I remember being told once -- I was horrified by it. Not by my mother, but I was told, "Children are to be seen and not heard." We didn't have the kind of information that our kids have now. I think that creates more anxiety for children. I wasn't anxious at all when I was a kid.

Zibby: Are you close to your mother now? What's your relationship like?

Paige: I have a wonderful relationship with her. She's at the end of her life, ninety-four. She's still full of pep. She was a two-term mayor here in Belvedere, so she's very political. My mother was a working person. She didn't have that much time to fool around with us. She played sports with us. She was a wonderful mother. When I look at how interactive the parents are with the kids, I just think, oh, my gosh, give them some space. I don't think children need to have as much information as they're getting. One of things I did is that I just had endless hours of daydreaming. I liked to paint when I was a little girl. I didn't have a scheduled time. Even after school, there was freedom to do nothing. Out of that nothingness came, for me, creativity. I started painting when I was very young. I didn't think anything was impossible. Then when I started reading, I thought, I want to be Gertrude Stein. I don't want Alice B. Toklas, but I want Gertrude Stein's life. I want to be surrounded with writers and painters and creative people. I was very attracted to that kind of world. That's where my creative brain was. I was always painting and writing, not necessarily reading. I was an action person. I was raised in Belvedere-Tiburon with Anne Lamott who was a childhood friend. Annie always had a book in her hand. I never did. I was finding things and making things. I was much more into being more creative.

Zibby: I saw her quote at the end. I read your book online in the PDF that you sent me, so I'm hoping that the final copy has this on the cover or something.

Paige: Yes, it does.

Zibby: All right, great. It says, "I love this new book by Paige Peterson and the Belvedere-Tiburon Landmark Society. Always amazing and meticulous in its discovery and preservation of historical photographs, the Landmark Society has found the perfect narrator for this new collection. Paige is both precise and charming in capturing the wild and natural beauty of our shared childhoods and habitats in Belvedere and Tiburon in the fifties and sixties. She extols the days of getting on our bikes after breakfast and not coming home until dinner, covered in blackberry juice and dirt, scratches and bliss. This combined effort brought me nostalgia and cheer. Anne Lamott."

Paige: Aw, Annie. I was very touched by that. We had the same childhood. She was a great tennis player. We all played tennis all the time together. She was so much smarter than I was. She always had a book in her hand. When you started this blog, I used to think about Annie. Also, Zibby, you were always reading. I remember you as a teenager always reading. As a little girl, you always brought a book with you. This is innately within you. I was not a reader. I was a painter. The other thing I used to do is that I used to make forts. Then I would make houses and play houses. I was much more out there creating things than I was reading. I am trying to catch up with that now. I read more now. Annie was great. You were reading all the time. I was trying to think about something. On your twelfth birthday, I gave you a book by -- he was a Lebanese poet.

Zibby: Kahlil Gibran?

Paige: Yes.

Zibby: Yes, I loved that book, The Prophet. I ended up quoting from it in my bat mitzvah speech the next year. In fact, if you gave me enough time, I would get up and start looking for it because I know that I still have it. I'm going to go search. If it's not in this room, it might still be at my mom's. I will find it. I loved that. I loved it.

Paige: In thinking about you and loving you, I remember thinking, what can I do for Zibby? I thought, oh, god, she loves to read. This is sort of out of the wheelhouse. It was just something different that I had been impacted with. It's wonderful.

Zibby: There you go. It's the power of a book. That book has stayed with me ever since. That's the best gift you could've given me. Plus, you gave me a painting of yours. I had it hanging in my room for years. Those are the gifts that have true meaning. Imagine if you had given me an LOL doll or whatever kids are getting now. [laughs] Thank you. This conversation has made me feel better too because I've been doing a lot more work lately. I'm on my computer more. I'm around the kids. I usually have my laptop upstairs. The kids just play. They play. They draw. They just do whatever. I'm not on the floor with them anymore. That's in part because they're older. I'm talking about my little guys, not my teenagers. I put them to bed last night. I was thinking to myself, oh, god, I worked so much today. I was next to them all day. They would jump on my lap. I'd kiss them. They'd run. Then they'd go do their own thing again. I was like, I didn't really spend that much time on the floor with them, except for the three hours in the morning when they got up at the crack of dawn. We were baking together and whatever. Once the workday started, I was focused. I felt so guilty when I went to kiss them at night. I was like, ugh, I was such a bad mom today.

Paige: You were a great mom today. To just be present and let them be, I think that's the best. That's what my mother was like too because she worked. She had a retail store. She also was in politics. She was available, but she wasn't on us. I think that's a gift. What you did today was great. It lets them figure it out themselves. I see these parents and I want to say, leave that kid alone. Let them figure it out.

Zibby: My mom would always say to me, "Zibby, benign neglect." I was on top of my twins when they were little, literally just like a hawk watching them as they scampered every single second. She's like, "It's okay." Then I watch home movies where my mother is lying on a lounge chair by the pool smoking with her long, red fingernails smoking Vantage Lights with a little plastic eye protector so she didn't get a tan around her eyes. You see my brother and me almost falling in the pool. Then fortunately a babysitter might sweep in and save us or something. Now she's like, "I don't understand what you're doing, the way you parent." [laughs]

Paige: That's really funny. That's really good.

Zibby: Different times. Different times.

Paige: Different times. I'm glad you're giving your kids space to just be themselves. One of the things that I did with my kids, I painted with my kids a lot. I was always doing their homework. They were Trinity kids. God only knows, we were always doing homework. We worked side by side, not necessarily integrated, but side by side. Good for you. I applaud you.

Zibby: Thank you. Paige, this has been so nice, just so meaningful, and so warm and loving. I'm just so happy we got to do this. I'm so proud of for your latest book. It's great. Enjoying this Blackie on my shelf. Congratulations on the book.

Paige: Thank you so much, honey. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Of course. My pleasure. Enjoy now that I know where you are. I'm jealous. Bye, Paige.

Paige: Love you, honey.

Zibby: Love you.

Clint Edwards, FATHER-ISH

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

Clint Edwards: Oh, hey. Happy to be here.

Zibby: That's when you say, "Thanks for having me."

Clint: That was my que. I missed my que. [laughter] I'm not very professional. People are always like, why don't you go live? I'm like, because I'm so awkward.

Zibby: No, you're not awkward. You're so funny. I started reading this book not in the best mood. You know those moods when you're like, I just don't feel like laughing? I don't want to get out of my bad mood. I just want to marinate in it for a while. I was reading your book. You made me laugh a few times out loud. I'm like, gosh, okay, fine, I'm not in a bad mood anymore. [laughs]

Clint: That's good. That's the goal. I think I'm funny, and that's the most important part. My family, I think they're tired of me. They’ve known me for so long, my siblings and my mother in particular. I love to bring up at family dinners that I'm a recognized humorist. I'll be like, "You guys know I'm a recognized humorist. I'm a funny guy." Everybody at the table just groans. [laughter]

Zibby: You can always trust your family to put you in your place.

Clint: You can really. Yep, your family and your children. Definitely.

Zibby: Father-ish is your latest book, Laugh-Out-Loud Tales from a Dad Trying Not to Ruin His Kids' Lives. You have an amazing blog. You've written other books. You just have this way of making all these everyday moments in parenting life really funny and relatable. You end up really rooting for you. You compare yourself often, in this book at least, to Clark Griswold who was, as a child of the eighties, my dad hero of sorts or something. You're much less awkward, it seems, than Clark.

Clint: It's funny. My blog, it's No Idea What I’m Doing. Across platforms, I'm getting close to a half a million followers, which seems really cool. I still have a day job, so it can't be that cool. What is funny is I often have people say, oh, man, I wish we were neighbors. I wish we could have dinner or hang out. I'm like, you would be shocked how boring I am in real life. I think what I'm good at is just finding the humor in boring things. For the most part, I'm just this thirty-something-year-old dude wandering around in sweatpants. I'm not that interesting. I've just been lucky enough to be able to find some of that humor. I've been lucky my wife is willing to let me do it. She's allowed me to be able to write freely about our kids and her. They're the most interesting people I got, easily. I've been lucky enough to be able to just sit down and be able to find the humor in it.

Zibby: When did you start writing? Did this proceed your kids? Did you write as a kid yourself? Is it something that came up when you just had all this material in your head suddenly?

Clint: I don't know how far back I want to go on this.

Zibby: Go all the way back.

Clint: I was not one of those kids. I graduated high school, and I didn't know how to type. I'd never read a novel. I was a failure of the education system. When I met my wife, I was twenty-one. I told her I wanted to go to college, but I didn't know how to type. She was like, "I'll help you." She actually typed my papers when I first started college. I would handwrite them. My spelling would be so bad and my handwriting was so bad, she couldn't actually read it. I would sit next to her. She was living in this apartment across the street from the liquor store, just this run-down, crappy apartment. I would read the paper to her, and she would type them. That was when we first started dating. I couldn't help but fall in love with her. I was really scared to take English composition and all that sort of stuff when I got into college. Then I finally did. I had a really great professor. I got really lucky. One of the first assignments was to write a humorous essay. I wrote a story about when I crapped my pants my freshman year in PE. Everybody just thought it was so funny. I had so much fun writing it. The professor was like, "This is really unfortunate, what happened to you, but this was really, really funny and well-done."

That was when I got the writing bug. I changed my major from powerline technology to English. My mother was like, "What are you going to do with that?" I just told her, "Homeless." It's what she wanted to hear. It was the easier answer. My blog is titled No Idea What I'm Doing. It's because my dad had a drug addiction and I didn't know him very well. He was in and out of my life. That was kind of how I felt going into dad stuff. Anyway, I started writing a lot of essays that were funny. Then I started writing a lot of serious stuff. Then I eventually went and got an MFA in creative writing. I thought I was going to write this heartbreaking tragedy memoir like Liars' Club type of thing. I finished my MFA. I spent a summer as a stay-at-home dad trying to sell the book. I was rejected by -- I have a whole spreadsheet. It's a spreadsheet of shame. I have two hundred-plus agents and small publishers in there that rejected me. I was so depressed and so frustrated. I thought, you know, I got to do something different. I took the dust off this blog that I created as an undergrad and just started writing about my kids. It was something else. I didn't think anyone would be very interested in my kids, but maybe they would. The first thing I published on there was about being a stay-at-home dad. I think it was read by a thousand people. My head just exploded. I thought, what? A thousand people read this? The last literary journal I was published in was North Dakota Quarterly. How often do you read that?

Zibby: [laughs] Anytime I'm in North Dakota.

Clint: Always.

Zibby: I'll always pick it up.

Clint: Every quarter, it comes in my mailbox. I think the circulation was three hundred. It's a very respected journal and blah, blah, blah, but I'm pretty sure I read the essay, and the managing editor. I think those are the two people that actually read that edition. I was like, wow, a thousand people read it, so I just started posting on my blog every day for five days a week. I was like, let's see what happens. I did it for a year. By the end of the year, I had gotten the attention of the Huffington Post, so I wrote for them. Then I wrote for The Washington Post and The New York Times. I had this one post just explode on The Washington Post. Good Morning America came to my house. It was the worst experience. If Good Morning America wants to come to your house, you tell them no. It's so awkward. They were following me around, and my kids. It was eight hours or something. It was some obscene amount of time. I think I was on the show for maybe five minutes. I thought, okay, I should be able to publish a book. Then I sent it out. I started trying to publish a book about parenting. I got rejected like two hundred times again. [laughs] I have two spreadsheets of shame. I actually self-published my first book. Then eventually, I ended up getting the attention of Page Street which is distributed by Macmillan. That's who published my last three books. Sorry, you said go all the way back. It was a long story.

Zibby: That's what I wanted. That whole thing was really interesting.

Clint: It was a long journey. I'm here now. I just kept at it. I kept blogging, kept writing. Fingers crossed, hopefully, I'll make all sorts of money. I'll be able to be a full-time writer. That's my goal now.

Zibby: You said you have another day job. What's your day job?

Clint: I work in an athletics program. I tell the student athletes to do their homework, so I'm really popular, as you can imagine. I've been there six years now, something like that. It's a good university job. It's fine. I love helping students. I love education. I never really got out of the university once I got into it. At some point, I would love to just flip my desk and peace out and be a writer full time, but that's a lot hard than you think.

Zibby: At least, you have to put it out there. You have to get that goal out there. If you don't have it as a goal, it's definitely not going to happen.

Clint: I'm surprised how many people think I just write full time. They think that is what I do. I'm like, no, that'd be cool, though. It'd be great. Maybe someday.

Zibby: Maybe someday. It is a hard profession in that regard, unfortunately, because the talent is not commensurate with the compensation in the slightest in this industry, I will say. It's funny you talk about how you couldn't sell your book about parenting because I actually had the same experience. I was doing all this essay writing about parenting and all these everyday moments and whatever. I was like, this is great. I'll do a whole book about it. Everyone in the industry keeps saying, no, books on parenting don't sell. It's so hard. Meanwhile, I read books on parenting all the time. I love essays books like this. So do other people. I don't know. I think it depends on the book, like with everything else. I think blanket statements like, books of essays don't work or parenting stories don't work, it's not that. You just have to have the right storyteller.

Clint: I think a lot of people get caught up in the rejection. I'm telling you right now, I was rejected hundreds of times. It's got to be in the thousands by now across periodicals and essays and books and different things. It used to really emotionally cripple me. Now I just wrap my arms around it. I give it a hug. I pull it in. It is what it is. Rejection is a huge part of it. If I had given up after that first rejection or whatever, I wouldn't be selling books and having people message me and say that I helped them with X, Y, and Z. There's really cool stuff that happens with it. We're in a really cool time where, yeah, they say no; okay, cool, self-publish. Put it up on a blog. Put it out there. Keep trying. There are so many avenues to publish right now. It's a really cool time to be a writer. Think about this. I am living in the middle of nowhere, Oregon. I've started a blog, most of the time writing at the McDonald's PlayPlace at five o'clock in morning because there were no kids around and they had diet soda. I could just get jacked up on Diet Coke and write for two or three hours. I don't go there now, but I've been doing stuff like that for years. In the middle of nowhere, Oregon, I've been able to put together half a million followers and have three books out. What other time could you do that? I don't know. It's a cool time to be able to do it.

Zibby: That's true. I like that. It's very optimistic. Yet you also have this same sad side to you as well. I think a lot of humor comes from pain to begin with. You write openly on your blog about having anxiety and depression and even when you tinkered with your meds and even stories in this book about how your dad was there more for your older brothers and taught them to do more of the handy things. You missed out on that, and so you tried to teach your son, which ended up being another hilarious story. There's sadness in all of this. This is your way of challenging it. Yet you also share it, which is very unique for most -- not to make sweeping generalizations, but a lot of men aren't as comfortable sharing all of that. Tell me a little bit about that piece of you and coping with what happened with your own dad and coping with your own mental stuff.

Clint: I was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder. I was probably nineteen, I think is when that started to really hit home. Now I think I live a pretty normal life. I was never Jack Nicholson bad in -- what is that movie? As Good as It Gets. I was definitely never Bill Murray in What About Bob? I never got that bad. I definitely had a lot of, and I still struggle a lot with anxiety. A lot of it has to do with having kind of a difficult childhood. My dad was a drug addict. My mom has a lot of emotional problems that she hasn’t dealt with. I ran away when I was fourteen. I was just like, peace out. I left and eventually was raised by my grandmother. It took me a while to be open about my anxiety and my depression and stuff. Some of that's cliché masculinity stuff. It takes a while for you to even understand it yourself. I don't even know if I fully understand it. I will say that I've found a lot of humor in the tragedy. Some of the best medicine you can do is to just laugh at it and laugh at what you're doing, laugh at the anxiety. It definitely takes the power away.

I've been writing a lot more about my mental health and depression and trying to make sense of it. I was worried that people would give me crap or call me crazy or whatever. I already call myself that, so it's easy for them to do too. I've actually had way more people reach out and just say, thanks, I went on medication because of you. I reached out to my therapist because of you. You helped me figure out how to better manage my own anxiety. It's not like I think I'm saying anything really profound. I'm just writing about it and being open about it and being a presence. That really helped. I think that helps a lot of other people. That's cool for me as a writer. It helps me not feel so alone. Of course, this all is about me. I feel less crazy by talking more about my crazy, I guess.

Zibby: Wow. Why do you not have a podcast?

Clint: Why do I not have a podcast?

Zibby: Yeah.

Clint: Oh, man. Listen, I have no desire to hear my voice any more than I already hear it. [laughs] I have no desire to do a podcast. I have no desire to be a vlogger. I went live a few times. I just found it really awkward. I didn't like it. I just want to write. That's what I want to do. I want to write. I like to write. Writing is great for me to help me process the world. Parents listening to this, particularly dads, you want to be a better dad, write about being a dad. Sit down and just reflect on it. Think about it. Take some time to really understand, why is that moment sticking out in your head? Why did you feel like a jerk then? Write it down. You will be shocked how much -- it's been the best thing that I could've done for my marriage and my family, is for me to just sit down and be reflective about it. I can't count how many times I've been writing a blog post and I'll think to myself, man, I don't know why I can't stop thinking about that. Then I'll be like, oh, it's because I was being a dick. Then I'll go and apologize to my kid or I'll apologize to my wife. I was like, "I just realized that I was being a total jerk back then. I'm sorry." I apologize, and I can finish the blog post. Being reflective and thoughtful is one of the best things you can do.

Zibby: That's great advice. Your essay on when the dog was choking on the gingerbread might have been the funniest. It's a David Sedaris-level humor thing. It's true. It's what you just said. At the end, you're like, can you believe I made the dog say you're welcome? or whatever it is you did. Just so funny. The other great thing about this introduction, even, in your book is you say there are no parenting experts. No one is a parenting expert even if you call yourself one, parents who view themselves as one. It doesn't matter how much TV exposure, what you put on the label underneath your title on a book. No one knows what they're doing. That is just the most universal feeling because it's true. Your whole thing about control, we have no real control over these constantly changing animals. I have four kids. It's just impossible. It's always impossible. You have to just buckle your seatbelt.

Clint: We were talking about my son going by the name Flip. Whatever you think your kids are going to do or whatever you hope or if you even think they're going to be interested in anything you've ever done, throw that all out the window. They are definitely their own little people. They are interested in their own little things. Parenting has been the hardest thing I've ever done. It's the most rewarding. I love the heck out of my kids, but they're definitely confusing. I can't figure them out.

Zibby: I also feel that the more kids I have, the more I realize I have not that much to do with even how they're turning out to begin with. They're kind of born the way they are. I didn't know that at the beginning. I thought whether or not I had the kid on my lap or next to me in the music class would actually make a difference in their development overall, and what music class, the fact that I even had them in music classes. Whereas these guys, I'm like, whatever. [laughs] It makes no difference. They're born basically who they are just like you and I were. All we can do as parents, I think, or what I've come to realize, is just not mess them up. Protect who they are. Just try hard not to mess it up.

Clint: One of the things that I've struggled with is for a long time, I would compare myself -- we were talking about keeping the expectations low for this interview. I did the same thing as a father. I thought to myself, I'm doing better than my dad. Well, my dad was a drug addict. He was in and out of jail. The best relationship I had with my dad was when I would visit him in jail because I knew where he was. I knew where to find him. For the most part, he was sober. That's a pretty low bar. It was a while there before I got into it. I was like, why am I still comparing myself to this guy? I should be raising my bar even higher. The thing with this book, too, is so much of it -- the original pitch was a Christmas book. I wanted to do a book all about Christmas. That's why the first several essays are about Christmas. The publisher was like, "I don't know if that's going to work." We eventually settled on a book of fails. Ultimately, this book, it's a collection of all my mistakes. So many of these mistakes, I went into it thinking I was screwing it up and then found out that it actually wasn't that bad. I actually didn't do that bad of a job. I think that's ninety percent of parenting. You think you're screwing up your kids in every avenue. Then you start to realize that you were there and you were trying, and that was enough. That's cool.

Zibby: It doesn't even have to be such a verb, like to parent. Growing up, my mom -- this is back when there weren’t a lot of parenting books. She was definitely more interested in romance, best-selling salacious reads, and all this other stuff. She had this one little parenting book. It was How to be a Better Parent or something. I remember seeing it and being like, what do you mean? You're reading about how to be a parent? Don't you know? Doesn't that just come with the territory? What do you mean you're reading about it? It blew my mind. Then I think about the eight trillion books that I have, which mostly go unread. I like to read the funny things about actual parenting. There's no real roadmap, but here we are.

Clint: We're all lost. It's fine. I like to think that my kids think that I know everything, but I'm just really good at googling. That's really the fact. They’ll ask me questions, and I google them. [laughs]

Zibby: That's true. Now they don't even ask me. They're just like, "Siri..."

Clint: Yeah, that's true. My kids are pretty good at asking Alexa how to help with math now because they know Dad's of no use.

Zibby: Redundant. I might as well not even be around. Anyway, so what are you going to do next? What's coming next? You're going to keep doing your blog. Do you have another book in you that you're thinking about?

Clint: Yeah. My thought right now is I might do more parenting books, but I'd love to write a really funny mental health book. I would love to write something that's a really funny look, just dark funny look at my own mental health and trying to understand. The goal would be to help others know how to overcome this sort of stuff. I'm not saying I'm the best at it. I'm still living with it. I will say that one of the best things I ever did was to try and -- so much of what my father did with his drug addiction -- whenever I discuss him with my therapist, they're always like, "Was he bipolar?" I'm like, "I don't know. He would've never gone to a therapist." There's so many parts, these crazy parts of my life, when I'll talk to a therapist about it, he was probably having a manic episode. Then you get jacked up on pain killers and just make it worse. Understanding how to take those lessons of bad mental health management that I learned from my parents and unpacking it, undoing it, and learning how to have healthier habits. I'm hoping to write something in that vein, but funny. We'll see. We'll see if it works out.

Zibby: That sounds great. Awesome. Normally, I end by asking people for advice for aspiring authors, but you've given so much advice along the way. Give me your last final shreds of wisdom.

Clint: This is the best advice I can give to any writer, and they hate it. They hate this advice. You need to write every day. There are authors that will disagree with you. I can tell you, when I was in grad school, this John Reimringer -- I'm probably messing up his name. He wrote a book called Vestments. It won a Minnesota Book Award. He came and talked to us. He pulled out these calendars. Each day had a couple stars on it. Each star represented an hour that he wrote. He would give himself a star. There were weeks where he didn't have anything. For the most part, he had years of these calendars where he gave himself a star. He said, "I recommend to people to write two hours every day." I remember thinking to myself, that's not even a part-time job. I just dragged my family halfway across the United States to get a creative writing degree, and I wasn't writing part time. It was right then that I said, I'm going to write at least two hours a day. Geez, that's been ten, twelve years ago. I write way more than that now. If you write every day, you'll get somewhere. You're going to write to no one for a very long time. That's just the facts. That's when things started getting better for me. I always would say, if you're married, sit down with your spouse and establish that schedule. I write in the mornings. The whole family knows I write in the mornings. If you bother Dad during writing time, he's a jerk about it. I am territorial. This is my time. I have claimed it. That's when you're going to get the most writing done. Write, write. Figure out a time. Establish it with your family. Then be a jerk about it. You'll get more done.

Zibby: Awesome. I love it. Clint, thank you so much. Thanks for talking to me about your views of parenting and your books and all of it. This was really fun. I can't wait to read your next book and follow along. It's been really awesome.

Clint: Thank you. It was awesome being on here. I appreciate your time.

Zibby: No problem. Take care. Happy Thanksgiving.

Clint: Bye. You too.

Zibby: Bye.

Rachel Bloom, I WANT TO BE WHERE THE NORMAL PEOPLE ARE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Rachel. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about your book, I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are, which I feel like I should sing in The Little Mermaid-esque.

Rachel Bloom: Feel free to.

Zibby: [laughs] I won't subject you to that. Thanks for coming on.

Rachel: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Rachel, can you tell listeners what I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are is about, what inspired you to write this memoir about your life, and why you did it? Why now?

Rachel: It's really a collection of stories and essays and comedic pieces about my relationship with normalcy. Personal stories are the jumping-off point of each part. Then I extrapolate based on the emotions of those stories to do comedic pieces, comedic essays. For instance, there's the story of the night I won a Golden Globe, but as described by my dog. Even winning a Golden Globe, which is such a societal marker of, you fit in, I want to have some perspective and remember that a dog doesn't care. It goes through my relationship with normalcy through childhood up until now, basically.

Zibby: I appreciated the picture of the dog with the Golden Globe that you included. That was also a nice touch to really ground us in the normalcy, question mark, of that. [laughs] I have to say, your middle school experience gave me PTSD from my own middle school experience. I'm sure everybody has had something happen in middle school where they have felt like they didn't fit in. Everybody has had a moment in middle school where they feel like they don't fit in or they're not part of the group. The boyfriend that you had, or not even really a boyfriend, but the guy you followed around all the time -- this is going to sound terrible. I think his name was Ethan.

Rachel: Yeah.

Zibby: Maybe just tell me the story again from the horse's mouth, as it were, and how experiences like that where you're wanting so much just to have a normal relationship and it backfires -- tell me a little bit more about that.

Rachel: It was the first crush I ever had. I remember my feelings for Ethan being just as real and passionate as any feelings of love or infatuation I had as an adult. I was a dork. He didn't really fit in either. The more I tried to be around him, the lower it made his social standing. He started insulting me to try to just get me to go away and also fit in with the other kids who also thought I wasn't cool. That made me love him more. I can't tell if it made me love him more or if I loved him regardless and I loved him despite the insulting. Either way, it set a pattern for later relationships. [laughs] He was quite mean because I was clearly in love with him at an age when no one was having these intense feelings of infatuation.

Zibby: Where is Ethan now? Do we know? Have you looked him up?

Rachel: Yeah. I had a conversation with Ethan for using his real name for this Vulture Fest. Vulture has this festival of arts and entertainment. We had a conversation. He actually became one of my really good friends in high school. There just wasn't time to write about that in the book.

Zibby: I feel like the dramatic stories are better, sometimes, to read than, and now we're good friends. To fast-forward from your middle school antics to let's just say a section like An Apologetic Ode to my Former Roommates and all of the unresolved issues, which, by the way, I love -- it's like a poem to yourself. You're so funny. I really love how you use lists and different formats and scripts. You're using the book in a whole new way. It is a book, but it's an art project at the same time.

Rachel: I try to vary it up. I don't really love reading. It has to be a really, really famous person or someone I really admire to read just a straightforward memoir. I like reading personal stories or especially books that are very personal where the format is varied up. I wrote the book that I would want to read. Also, I wrote in a way that I would still enjoy writing it. I didn't want to sit down and just write a bunch of personal essays. One of the chapters is a full musical that you'll actually be able to listen along to on my website when the books comes out if you want to listen along and read. That was my way of keeping myself entertained. Then the ode to my roommates, which is this apology, I wanted to elevate my apology. I wanted to make it feel almost mythic because I really was a terrible roommate. I feel like most people come from the vantage point of, I had this terrible roommate, but no, that was me. I feel terrible about it.

Zibby: You are one of the most, I want to say self-critical, but it's beyond that. It's like self-flagellating. You're always so hard on yourself in a funny way, but there's always a little truth to every joke.

Rachel: It's a glass houses thing because I definitely bitch about other people in the book. I don't want to get off scot-free. I, perhaps, at times in the book, overcompensate by being pretty self-flagellating just to make sure. I know that I'm making fun of other people, but I'm not perfect. I always want to play that other side to cover my bases.

Zibby: Is the book reflective of how you think? Is this the way you think? You're always onto this and then another thing, and this is the creative interpretation of that? It's not as linear, like what you were saying, I don't want to just sit down and write a bunch of essays.

Rachel: That is how I think.

Zibby: That's how you think.

Rachel: Yes. There is a smidgeon of ADHD in there, as my psychiatrist has told me. Although, he's like, "Don't get excited. I know you'll get off on a diagnosis tangent." Yes, that is just how my mind works. I think it also comes from writing sketch comedy for so long and coming from that sketch brain of, okay, what's a sketch I could do based on this? is the feeling that I'm having.

Zibby: Speaking of your therapist, would you mind if we talked a little about the OCD and the [indiscernible/crosstalk]?

Rachel: Please.

Zibby: I feel like that OCD has been branded all wrong. People think it has to do only with washing your hands and turning things on and off. Actually, the intrusive thoughts are a huge element of OCD. It would be very easy to misdiagnose someone who's having that symptom as something completely different or not to worry about or even annoying. I want parents out there who might be listening also to know that sometimes the intrusive thoughts that your child is having could be this. Tell me a little more about your experience with it.

Rachel: Especially now as a parent, I'm thinking about it a lot. What happened was basically, in fourth grade, I started getting these intrusive guilty thoughts. I started fixating on things I thought I did that were bad, that I should feel guilty about. It was this gnawing darkness that I'd never felt before. This is around nine and a half, ten. I thought that the only way I could relieve myself of this guilt was to tell my parents everything. It was this series of obsessions, obsessive thoughts, and compulsions to tell my parents everything. At the time, my parents, they just thought it was some sort of quirk of adolescence because OCD was, yeah, you wash your hands or you check the burners to make sure the stove isn't on. It was this very specific thing that we thought OCD was. It's only now as an adult and now consciously that we are starting to realize -- when I say consciously, I think non-therapists are starting to understand, oh, no, no, obsessive thoughts and compulsions come in many, many forms. No one around me understood or could see that I was suffering because it just seemed like I was quirky. I'll hear stories like this in other kids. My kid's having trouble sleeping. They keep bringing this up. It's not just a quirk of childhood or of adolescence. They're suffering. Writing this book when I was pregnant right before I was becoming a parent was a nice reminder that my child's feelings are valid. I can't just brush them away with, they're just a kid, or even, they're just a baby. No, these feelings are real. Just because the person feeling them is little doesn't make them less valid.

Zibby: It might not necessitate the decibel level of screaming that accompanies it as a child, I might say.

Rachel: That's fair. It applies more to the future of when my child is -- my child's seven and a half months old.

Zibby: That's what I mean, the loud, bloodcurdling screams.

Rachel: Look, at a certain point, I have to put a sweatshirt on her. I have to put sleeves on. The bloodcurdling screams are, yes, going to happen. I can't not ever put clothes on her. Yes, true.

Zibby: I think anybody who has had any sort of mental health anything and struggled for a diagnosis and then felt a sense of relief once it had been like, oh, wait, this constellation of behaviors or thoughts or feelings actually falls into this rubric and there's a treatment for it, that's a very great feeling, not to keep harping on this. I'm on the board the Child Mind Institute. I don't know if you've heard of that.

Rachel: I have.

Zibby: Which is great, if you have any interest in getting involved or whatever. It's all about reversing the stigma on childhood mental illness and raising awareness for things like this, like OCD and selective mutism and just all these things that maybe people don't know as much about, and also finding treatments and biomarkers and all the rest. Anyway, not to bring that into it. I just wanted you to know I'm so on the same page in terms of wanting to raise awareness and helping families get through something that can be challenging both for the child and the parents.

Rachel: That's so cool that you're on the board of that. I would actually love to learn more information about that. I wish that had been around or I'd been aware of that when I was a kid.

Zibby: It wasn't around, so don't worry. [laughter] I know that having a child often brings up old stuff in your brain, in your mind, and issues and all of that. How have you adjusted to being a parent? Has it raised any unexpected reactions in you in that way?

Rachel: First of all, there's something freeing about putting her needs and her happiness above my own. It's actually quite freeing. It actually really helps with things like cognitive behavioral therapy when you're trying to just focus on the present and not engaging in anxious thoughts as much. It really helps with that. Around the time I'd finished the first draft of the book, I gave birth. Around the time I was getting induced and giving birth, among everything else that was happening, I was having some intrusive thoughts again. They were kind of unspecific. The thought and the gut feeling at this point are one in the same. My anxiety was amped up, and so it latches onto these little thoughts. It was weird to be writing about that while going through that again during a big life event. Coming out the other side of this one, because I had to be present for a baby but because I was also writing about it, it helped me realize, oh, yep, this is just a part of how my mind works sometimes. I have to be there for her. That’s what matters. I'll just ride this wave. Being a mom is more important.

Zibby: Wow. That's amazing. In terms of writing this book, how long did it take to do? When did you do it? How did you fit it in with all of your other stuff? What other big projects do you have in the hopper? This is like fifteen questions in one question.

Rachel: No, it's fine. I had had a book deal since, it was like 2017. I got it when I was filming Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I started brainstorming and slowly writing the book for the next year or so, but I didn't really get started earnestly until August, September of last year right when I was pregnant because that's when I had time. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was done. We'd performed at Radio City Music Hall. I'd toured in London. Finally, I was back and ready to write the book. Then I got pregnant. Definitely, the first part of writing the book was also a good distraction from nausea. I wrote it from about September of 2019 until March 2020 with then some significant changes done April, May.

Zibby: Would you do it again? Did you enjoy any of it?

Rachel: Yeah, I did. It was hard. It's hard. It's scary because it's just you. I can't hide behind a character. At least, I chose not to. It's nonfiction. My only cowriter was my editor. Editors are really the unofficial cowriters of every book. Still, it's putting so much of yourself out there. I chose to be so vulnerable. It's putting myself out there in a way no one asked me to do or expected me to do. Plus, it's a lot of words. There were pieces that were cut. When a song was cut from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, that was still a lot of work, but that was maybe fifty words, a hundred words. I don't know. I can't think of how many words were in a song. When you're talking about cutting five hundred to a thousand words, there's a lot of stuff that I worked on that's not in the book. It's hard. Writing a book is really hard. Then as far as other things, working on movies and TV. No more books coming in the near future. Honestly, doing press for a book, especially when I'm not doing a book tour, takes a lot of time. That's what's in the hopper, is doing press for the book. I'm working on a musical using songs from the late nineties, early two thousands to explore nostalgia of that time. I'm pitching a sketch show. Still figuring out this new normal that is both COVID and having a new baby.

Zibby: It's actually, probably -- not that there's ever anything good about the COVID era, but I feel like anytime I had -- I have four kids.

Rachel: Whoa.

Zibby: Yeah, and I'm still standing, sort of. I'm sitting now, but you know what I mean.

Rachel: You look great. Your house looks immaculate.

Zibby: Thank you. Yes, I try not to let them in here. [laughs] No, I'm kidding. You're only seeing this little sliver. Normally, they're walking on top of the couch around there. The shelves don't get touched that much. Why was I saying that? Something about after every kid.

Rachel: Oh, the silver lining. I completely agree.

Zibby: I was completely isolated from the world. My schedule was so different. Everyone else was zoom, zoom, zooming around. I shouldn't have used that word. Everybody else was running around super busy. I was at home. Your being at home, obviously, everybody's at home, so I guess there's some synergies in everybody else's lifestyle.

Rachel: I gave birth in late March, which is when quarantine started. As we went into having a newborn, it felt like the rest of the world also had a newborn. People were talking about how time made no sense anymore. Everything was upside down. That's what having a newborn is. As far as timing, yes, very stressful to have a child during a pandemic, but the aftermath as far as just the schedule of having a newborn worked out very well.

Zibby: I'm sure everybody asks you about this, and so I hate to ask. Just because I don't know a ton of people who have won Golden Globes, I'm just curious.

Rachel: Ooh, ask.

Zibby: I know you wrote about it, thanks to your dog and everything like that. I'm really curious, what happened the next day? What happens the day after you win a Golden Globe? Do you get a thousand emails? Do you feel like life is exploding? Was there any point when you were like, I kind of miss not having all this attention? I know you already had attention because of your career. Do you ever just wish you didn't, or not?

Rachel: The day after is so cool. I've gone through that day after a couple times now with the Golden Globe and then the day after my Emmy win last September. I got a big brunch because I'd been up late the night before. You're hungover. There's always a big brunch, a ton of emails. The good thing is I don't feel like I have to get back to every one of those emails the day of. The day after the Golden Globes specifically, I wasn't filming, but work was still happening. Me getting the Golden Globe essentially saved the show. I needed to at least get nominated, if not win, to save Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I went to work and I let everyone hold the Golden Globe and take pictures with the Golden Globe and celebrated with everyone at work because it was, in a way, job security for 250 people as well as myself. A lot of gifts, a lot of flowers. It's great. It's overwhelming. I was really psyched. I had two major awards bookending the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend experience.

The Golden Globe happened the middle of season one. It was in the middle of filming. I had filmed not the day before, but two days before. I had to go back to filming two days after. Then I had to fly to New York. There was all this stuff happening. It was all so soon because the show -- I talk about this in the book. The show, I thought it was a dead pilot with Showtime. Then it suddenly got ordered to series. The whole thing was just whiplash in a way for which no one could've been fully prepared and didn't fully sink in. It took like a year for all of it to sink in. Then the Emmy win last September, it was the opposite. I was done with the show. I was pregnant, so I was at home just being nauseous, sleeping a lot. I really had the time to fully soak it in. That was, as opposed to getting the Golden Globe for after the Hollywood Foreign Press seeing eight episodes of the show, the Golden Globe for songwriting was after writing 157 songs. They were actually two very different experiences. The day after is awesome.

Zibby: Wow. By the way, thank you for the layman's interpretation of how to sell a show and the timeline of that. To show people why your timeline was so different, you're like, here's how it was supposed to happen, and here's how it happened for me. It was like two days.

Rachel: My pleasure. I'm still confused by the whole process, so it was good to lay it out for myself.

Zibby: Do you have any advice both for authors and also for anyone who wants to get into your field of songwriting, creating, acting, all of it? People are dying to do that.

Rachel: The only real advice I have involves other people. Find likeminded people. You want to be around people who are doing what you're doing. Try to find people who are better at it than you so that you can watch them do what they do and then also get feedback on your work. I think that's where a writing circle helps. You're around other people doing what you're doing, so you're not writing in a vacuum. You're getting feedback. It gives you a deadline. If you're in some sort of writer's group or writing circle and you say, we're all going to read aloud what we wrote on this date or, hey, I'm going to have a table read of this screenplay I wrote, it gives you a deadline. I cannot finish anything if I don't have something holding me accountable even if it's a little thing like, I promised so-and-so I'd get them the script by this day. Anything you can do where you are forced to write, that is my number-one tip.

Zibby: We'll have to think of ways to bind people to their chairs and not let them up until --

Rachel: -- At least, it works for me because it's the fear of letting people down.

Zibby: Accountability. That's one of those Gretchen Rubin -- you know The Four Tendencies? Have you heard of this book?

Rachel: No.

Zibby: There's the obligers. You're probably an obliger. Anyway, this is ridiculous I'm talking about this.

Rachel: No, I'm going to look this up.

Zibby: There are all these different personality types. I am the same way. I try to finish everything so I would never let anybody down. The thought of missing a deadline for me is like, are you kidding? Of course not. That's one of the personality types. You should check it out. It's fun. Just google it or something.

Rachel: I will.

Zibby: What about getting into being a performer and a songwriter and all the rest?

Rachel: God, there are so many ways to do it. It depends what you want to do. There are so many hubs of entertainment now. Five years ago, I would've said New York, LA, or Chicago. Now there's Atlanta. There's Vancouver. I think first finding a place where you have the freedom to experiment and fail is really important. That's not starting out online because there's no freedom to fail. Once you put something online, it's there forever. I had a college sketch comedy group where we would do shows once a month. A sketch would bomb, and then no one would ever talk about it again. Finding a safe place to stumble and realizing that you're supposed to stumble and you're supposed to fail at first and you're supposed to make a lot of mistakes and you'll always make mistakes, that's really important. Then as far as turning it into a career, everyone's trajectory is so different. That's why I think the community of it all is important on multiple levels. Then you start to see people get agents or sell scripts and you start to figure out how that happens depending on what avenue you want to go down.

Zibby: Just to circle back here to middle school as my last question, do you ever -- I know Ethan and you hung out in high school and everything. The people that you felt sort of alienated from or who were stuffing you in a locker or whatever else crazy stories, whatever happened to your relationship with them? Do you ever want to be like, look, I'm not -- you know. [laughs]

Rachel: Middle school was really, really rough. That was after Ethan. I talk about, in the book, one of the girls who was my main tormentor in middle school. She came to one of my live shows about nine years ago. She took me out for coffee after. We had a really, really vulnerable conversation about how she was just as miserable in middle school. She was afraid of losing her popularity. That's the one really vulnerable, probing conversation I've had with a bully other than Ethan. Ethan became my friend, so it almost doesn't count even though it does, obviously. That's the one other conversation I've had. Then short of that, I posted on my Facebook around the time of this Vulture Fest. I said, hey, did you bully me in middle school or were you popular? I'd love to talk to you. Ethan was the only one who got back to me because we were friends in high school. No actual middle school bully got back to me. I like to think it's because they were afraid. Bullies are scared, yes, but I also think a huge percentage of people who were bullies aren't terribly introspective people. They don't think a lot about the past. A bad part of this country is sometimes we forget history. I think they are those types of people a lot of times, people who just, they don't really think about stuff in context. They're just kind of living their lives, not even in a bad way. They’ve matured since middle school. They’ve grown up, but they don't think about their past a lot.

Zibby: That's probably very true. They probably had their own stuff going on, which is why they were bullies in the first place.

Rachel: Yeah. They should be in therapy to talk about that and process it, but they probably haven't.

Zibby: Not that it excuses it. I'm just saying they probably --

Rachel: -- No, no. I think it's introspective people and not. This woman had been through a lot, that I talked to. She was really introspective and had really looked within. I think that's rarer for bullies.

Zibby: Yeah, you're right. I'm sure you're right. Rachel, thank you. Thanks for taking the time. I know you have so many press obligations, so thanks for stopping in here. I wish you all the best of luck in getting a sweater on your baby and all the things to come. If you do want to follow up about Child Mind, I'm happy to send you information or hook you up with the head of it there. No pressure, just if you happen to be interested.

Rachel: Awesome. That is so great to know. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care.

Rachel: You too.

Zibby: Bye.

Rachel: Bye.

Suzanne Nossel, DARE TO SPEAK

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

Suzanne Nossel: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Zibby: Let's discuss your book, Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. Amazing that you wrote this. There is so much information in here. It must have taken you a really long time to write and research and get it all perfect with all the bullet points. I feel like it's almost like a -- a textbook sounds pejorative in some way, but it's the resource on free speech. That's what it is. Every lawyer should have it. Everybody should have it on their shelf in terms of any questions related to this whole topic. That wasn't really a question, just a rave.

Suzanne: Thank you so much. Moms don't have time to write books is more like it. [laughs] It was a bit of a high-wire act.

Zibby: Tell me about it. You're also a CEO of PEN America. When did you decide to write this book? How did you decide what form it should take? Then how did you get it done?

Suzanne: The ideas, I would say, were germinating for some time. In the daily work of PEN America, we confront so many free speech controversies. We began work on free speech on college campuses several years ago. Whether it was professors being disciplined for something that they said in class or controversies over messages chalked on walkways on campuses, demands for trigger warnings, arguments that the campus should become a safe space, all of that really came to the foreground. What I saw was a real generational and cultural divide in how people thought about these issues. A lot of older people are really pretty horrified that young people seem so unfamiliar with and even alienated from the concept of free speech and are ready to ask to be protected from uncomfortable ideas by their institutions even if that meant letting the institution, the university administration, have more power over them. Young people ready to do that, and older people saying, have you lost your mind? This is freedom of speech. You ought to be more resilient. If you hear ideas you don't like, you just push back. The answer to offensive speech is more speech.

I felt like the two sides were really sort of talking past each other. That was something that has guided our work on campus free speech where we really make the argument time and again through trainings and workshops and engagements on individual campuses that the drive for a more equal, inclusive, and just society, which is what a lot of young people are striving for and working towards, is compatible with robust protections for free speech. In fact, free speech can be an enabler of those social justice causes. That basic idea which undergirds the book was something that I came to feel very passionate about and feel like it needed to make its way out more widely into the world. I really conceived the book in the beginning part of 2019. It was an editor, honestly -- I had a morass of ideas. She, when I met with her, said, "Why don't you make it into a set of principles?" The moment she said that, suddenly something clicked. I felt like, okay, I could imagine doing that. I could see how that seems like a manageable task, whereas wrestling to the ground all these complex issues without a clear structure felt a bit overwhelming. That's how I started.

Zibby: Wow. Then what happened? How long did it take to write it? How did you structure it and fit it into the rest of your life?

Suzanne: It was hard. One really important thing was I hired two really smart research assistants. It was a process to find them. I had to test out a lot of people. I knew, sort of, what I wanted the twenty chapters to be. I had ideas for each one, but I needed them to pull examples of different kinds of phenomena and to look through the secondary literature. I put them to work. They helped by creating memos. Then I took five weeks off last summer. My job is really busy and demanding. There's a lot of evening work and weekend work. I knew I needed a concentrated block of time. My kids were at camp, which also really helped. I was pretty free and clear. I worked in the Performing Arts Library on the Upper West Side. I would just force myself to be there when it opened. I basically had to rough out a chapter each day. It was really pretty grueling. By the end of that five weeks I kind of had a skeleton of the whole thing. Then it was months of revisions and back and forth and engaging with different experts who I wanted to review different parts of the manuscript. The psychological hurdle of climbing the mountain was really last summer.

Zibby: Tell me also a little more about your amazing background. You worked within the White House for the UN. You have done everything, Harvard -- two Harvards, right? You went to undergrad and the law school. This is an amazing career trajectory that you've had. Now it's ended -- not ended. Now we're at the steppingstone of your career where there's a book and you're leading this great company helping enhance speech and thought throughout the world, really. Tell me a little about, when you were a kid, did you think this is what you wanted to do? When did you know this is sort of the path you wanted to be on? How did you start out? How did you end up here?

Suzanne: I was always sort of interested in human rights issues, international affairs. As a young child, I was involved in the movement to free Soviet Jews who were stuck under that authoritarian government, couldn't practice their religion, weren’t allowed to emigrate. There was big movement here in the US to support them. My family, at one point, traveled over to meet with some of those, they were called refuseniks. I think that made a big impression on me. My parents were also from South Africa. They grew up in apartheid South Africa. I had a lot of relatives in South Africa who we would visit growing up. My parents were not terribly political. For me, it was jarring growing up in the liberal suburbs of New York and then going to visit what was still apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and seeing segregated buses and beaches and water fountains and trying to make sense of that. Actually, after college, it was in the beginning of the opening up in South Africa, and I spent two years working in Johannesburg. Most of the time, it was as part of an effort to combat political violence in the townships during the transition. It was working with all the different political parties, the police, the churches, the businesses, civics unions. That was amazing and really inspired the rest of my career in human rights and international affairs. Being part of that momentous transition and how it teetered on the precipice of erupting into explosive violence but managed to push it through relatively peaceful and just being very close to the action with that, which was the luck of being in the right place at the right time, I would say kindled a fire that sort of kept me going my whole career.

Zibby: Wow. That's a very unique way. I remember in fifth grade we all had these political prisoner bracelets. Do you know what I mean? They were copper. Everybody had a name. My guy's name was David something or other. I wore it around my wrist for like a year because it was such a big thing. It was just the issue of the time. It was captivating everybody's consciousness then, for people who might not have lived through that.

Suzanne: It was a great movement. Those bracelets, I remember as well. They really did find ways to engage kids and people from all walks of life and make -- I don't know if you ever did the marches that they would do down Fifth Avenue to [indiscernible] Plaza at the UN. Those were really inspiring. It was the same feeling you have if you go out on the streets to protest today as part of the Women's March or the Black Lives Matter protests, that energy. You're all together. You're chanting. It's a huge release. Getting a little flavor of that for a kid, for some people, and I think I'm one of them, ends up being something very powerful that you are drawn to try to come back to at different points in your life.

Zibby: As you navigated through your career decisions, was there any one point that you feel like looking back led you to where you are? Is there any job you took or anything where there were two forks in the road and you went this way and that's how you ended up here and how you ended up at a nonprofit at this stage?

Suzanne: I had a corporate career. I was at McKinsey and then Bertelsmann Media and The Wall Street Journal and learned a lot. I really enjoyed it. I still have friends and colleagues from each of those stages who I've remained close with. Then there was a certain point where, in my head, I was doing that to gain skills that I thought I ultimately wanted to use in another arena, in something that was more human rights or public service oriented. There was kind of a turning point where I left The Wall Street Journal and went to Human Rights Watch to become the COO which was really using my management skills. It was kind of a breaking point to decide, if I'm saying this is why I've taken the time to be in the private sector and it's for another purpose, I need to make good on that. If I stay here too long, that might really fall away. I might end up with a very different career than what I thought I was embarking on.

Zibby: How did your having kids fit into any of this?

Suzanne: I have two kids who are teenagers. It's been amazing but also challenging. When I had my son, I was actually fired when I was on maternity leave. It was a complete shock and really unsettling. I was very career oriented. Then suddenly, there I was back at home. I thought my maternity leave was going to end after three months. It went on for a while. I had to find a new job. I experienced firsthand these very real conflicts. My boss was sort of forthright. He was like, "You weren’t here, and so we reconfigured this and that." I said, "Would this have happened if I hadn’t gone on maternity leave?" He's like, "Oh, no, definitely not. You were doing a great job." That was quite eye-opening. Then I would say the other piece that was a little unusual was during the first term of the Obama administration. My kids were very young. My son was in kindergarten. My daughter had just started nursery school. I was offered a position. I wanted to join the administration. I was hoping to be placed at the UN in New York.

Instead, I was offered a position in Washington, and so I commuted for a year when the kids were very little. That was very tough. I was constantly coming and going. It was a lot for my husband to deal with. We were very lucky that we had a great nanny. We also had a neighbor downstairs who conveniently was willing to be a helper in the early mornings to get the kids off to school at seven AM. That was kind of miraculous. Then I did work a day or two from New York at the end of the week. It was a real high-wire act that I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone do. It was something that was very important to me. Then after that year, my husband got a fellowship in Washington, so the family moved to Washington. We spent a wonderful year there. It's tough because the years when you're career-building coincide very often with the years when your kids are young. There can be some real challenges and dilemmas. I think a lot of women would not have ever contemplated commuting with kids so young. We made it work, but it wasn't easy.

Zibby: Wow. Your ending up at PEN, did any of it have to do with your love of books? Do you love books? If so, what do you love to read?

Suzanne: I do. I'm a huge reader. I actually read mostly nonfiction. I like historical biography. I like to read about US foreign policy. I love diplomatic memoirs. My husband is a historian. He reviews a lot of books. We have a constant flow of new books into the house. In that sense, it was very natural for me. I knew a lot of writers. I felt like I had some connection to their concerns and the debates that take place within the literary and intellectual community. What I hadn’t really done is worked with writers. In my job, especially with our board, I work very closely with writers. It's been a great pleasure because they're just such interesting people. I've been really fortunate with all of our board leadership that they’ve been wonderful to work with and so insightful and fun. Every lunch and meeting and encounter is a little bit richer and more unpredictable than what you might have with somebody who is a human rights expert or a policy expert.

Zibby: What are you going to read tonight? Do you read before bed? When do you read?

Suzanne: We're talking the day before the election, so it may be a little hard to peel myself away from the -- I'm actually trying to get through Nick Lemann's article in the New Yorker about what's next for the republican party because I'm very curious about that. That's what's on my nightstand right now.

Zibby: Nice. Yes, this will come out later, but as we're recording, it's the day before the election. I almost can't even believe that we're finally here. I felt like it would almost never come. It was like, we're only eighty-three days away or something. I'm like, what? Now here we are.

Suzanne: By the time this comes out, we will know a lot more about the future of this country.

Zibby: Perhaps, or perhaps not. Who knows? These things sometimes drag on. We'll see what happens. We'll see. So what's coming next for you? What are you looking forward to in this crazy time of life that we're all living through without planning being immediately accessible to us all?

Suzanne: For us, organizationally, it will be a significant pivot no matter how the election comes out. Having worked on free expression for many years and then over the last four years, an intensification of our work here in the US because of these divisions over campus free speech, attacks on press freedom, this challenge to the truth -- we've been doing a lot of work over the last few months on the rise in disinformation and how to inoculate people through disinformation-defense training and really spreading the word about what to anticipate with this election so that people are less vulnerable to conspiracy theories. That's been a huge focus. All of that work will continue in different ways. It's figuring out what the new paradigm is going to be like. I feel very certain that the challenges that have led up to the last four years and that we've lived through over the last four years do not evaporate no matter what happens tomorrow. I think some of the ways in which we need to engage must evolve.

We've done a lot of work at PEN America across the country really mobilizing over the last four years recognizing it's just not enough to do this work in New York or Washington or Los Angeles. We have chapters in Detroit; Dallas; Austin; Birmingham; Greensboro, North Carolina. Talking with those people about how we mend this fractured society, how we can use the power of the written word, of great literature, the stature of writers to commence a process of coming together, I'm hoping a lot of people feel that's necessary. That's going to be a big focus for us over the next few months. Then there's just also the human level of getting through the pandemic. I live in New York City. We lived through this in a very tough way in the spring. I know you've been very hard hit personally. I think we're tired of it, but we're also extremely leery and really thinking through how we sustain ourselves, and the human connections in particular. I've realized I'm an extrovert and I really miss seeing people. This has been hard for me. I need to probably come up with a plan for how to get through the winter. The summer was a lot better with ways of being together out of doors.

Zibby: I'm a little nervous about the winter coming. These first cold days that we've had are really worrying me. No kid playdates. How do you take a walk? and all these things that are the keys to my sanity. I guess we'll just have to see, particularly here. Who knows? Lots of question marks. I have to say, I was so lucky to have been invited to the PEN gala last year back when galas were a thing. I felt like a kid in a candy store because everywhere you turned you were bumping into amazing authors. I didn't even recognize, I'm sure, three quarters of them, which is the crazy thing about authors. You can sit and read for days or weeks, somebody's work, and then pass them crossing the street and not even realize. It was so amazing to just be in that environment. To have so many authors support an organization is really unique and amazing. Then you were so nice to let me cohost the Brit Bennett PEN America Virtual Authors' Night. I'm excited to do more of those. PEN's just been this nice bright light in all the darkness that we have these days.

Suzanne: It's nice to hear you say that. We obviously can't do the huge gala with all the finery of the Natural History Museum this year. It's sad because it's a great party. It's a lot of people's favorite party of the year. We really miss it. We're doing a virtual version that will be at the beginning of December. We've got Patti Smith. Actually, Bono is coming. Not entirely public, but I'll let your audience in on the secret in the hope that that news will be out by the time this podcast is released. We just announced last week we're giving an award to Darnella Frazier who is the seventeen-year-old girl who picked up her cell phone camera and recorded the murder of George Floyd and then posted it on her Facebook. The rest really is history. She performed that catalytic act. We have an award that every year goes to recognize somebody's courage in the exercise of free expression. She just felt to us like a perfect recipient. We're also giving that award -- we have two recipients this year. The other is Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch who was the US Ambassador to Ukraine who faced this withering scorn from the White House when she spoke up about interference with US policy on Ukraine.

Two very powerful women, totally different. We're extremely excited to recognize them. Darnella in particular has not really spoken publicly about this. It's going to be, nonetheless, a special event. I also invite your listeners to check out -- you did that wonderful event with Brit Bennett. We have many other Authors' Evenings that are these intimate, small-scale, really interactive give and takes. It's not like your typical webinar when, as an audience member, you're just in receive mode. Maybe you're lucky enough to put a question in the chat. You can actually, with our events, have a bit of a dialogue with a famous author, whoever it may be. We had Bob Woodward. We've got Susan Glasser and Peter Baker. We're going to do one with Isabel Wilkerson. I encourage people to check out our website and join us for these events. They're really a ball for book lovers at this time when so many of the book parties and readings and things that we normally enjoy are off-limits.

Zibby: If you need a moderator for Isabel Wilkerson, if that's available, let me know. [laughs] I'm kidding. Anyway, congratulations on your book, Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. This is really fantastic. I am wearing red to match your cover today.

Suzanne: Thank you so much. I appreciate the color coordination. It's great to see you.

Zibby: Great to see you too.

Suzanne: Happy election day. Happy winter arriving. I feel for you. I share the same feelings about the walks and the ways that we've stayed sane, but we'll find some new ones. It's going to work out. We'll be okay.

Zibby: Lots of hot chocolate.

Suzanne: Yes. We're attracted to the same creature comforts, it sounds like.

Zibby: Exactly, yes. Bye, Suzanne. Thanks so much.

Suzanne: Thanks a lot. Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Jennifer Risher, WE NEED TO TALK

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Jennifer and David, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm so excited to have both of you here with me today. Thanks for joining.

David Risher: Thanks, Zibby.

Jennifer Risher: Thanks for having us.

Zibby: This is a dual-purpose interview. The two of you, this power couple who now I know the most intimate details of your life because of Jennifer's book -- I'm almost embarrassed. The book is called We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth, but it's really also a memoir about you. It's about your success in life and how things have developed and your relationship and family and struggling with everything from, am I spoiling my daughter by going to Hawaii when she's eight months old? to all these big and small questions in life. Then David is here, A, as your husband and the central character in this book aside from you, and also because he's doing such amazing things, as you both are, for reading worldwide. Lots to discuss. Why don't we start with the book? Jennifer, would you mind just telling listeners who aren't aware and who might not have gotten the full scoop from my brief summary there what your book is about? Also, what made you write this book? What made you write it? Why now?

Jennifer: Zibby, I'm really lucky because when I was twenty-five, I joined Microsoft and I met David. I also got stock that ended up being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Six years later, Dave and I were married, expecting our first child. Dave had started this job at an unknown startup that was selling books on the internet. He loves books. He wanted to try this thing out. It was Amazon. We were in our early thirties. We had more money than we could wrap our heads around. Wealth surprised me. I didn't find myself in a big, sparkly, private club hanging out and sharing financial secrets. I found myself kind of alone in a strange, silent space where no one talks much about money at all. I felt the resentment of friends. I was worried about raising spoiled, entitled children. I wasn't sure how to give to family members or how to approach philanthropy. No one discusses these things even though most people are new to these challenges. Eight out of ten people with wealth grew up middle class or poor. I was surprised that wealth felt so isolating. Normally, if I have a problem or a question, I turn to friends. If I want to figure out, should my sixteen-year-old have a curfew? I ask everyone I know. I get their ideas. I hear about their experiences. I get advice. Just talking about something like that is helpful because it lets me know my question is normal, that it's shared. The same doesn't happen with money. I couldn't talk to people about having a lot of it. I thought, I'll turn to books. I wanted to find a book, but there were no books.

Zibby: Where is the bookshelf for people who have won the lottery? [laughter] I can't find the book about this.

Jennifer: I needed that book. Actually, I wrote my book because my story is one I'd want to know about if hadn’t happened to me. I also wrote my book for the millions of Americans like me who have more money than they had growing up or they have more money than many of their friends or they have more money than others in their extended family. I'm sharing my story as a way to help other people understand their own. We have this fairy tale idea about wealth in our heads. The reality feels strange and lonely. I'm not trying to show people how to do rich right. I don't have the answer for that. I am offering up this story that hasn’t been told.

Zibby: I feel like you came in, also -- sorry, I hope I didn't interrupt you. You came in with this bias. I feel like your family was particularly, not anti-wealthy, but there was such a judgement attached to spending anything. I feel like you had such a chip on your shoulder. Maybe not everyone coming into wealth is that almost disdainful of it or, I can't enjoy this house or I can't get a connecting flight or whatever it was. I feel like you had a particularly strong background against it. Then when you found yourself in it, you had to do a lot of mental work. It was like cognitive dissonance in a way.

Jennifer: Absolutely. To become something that you're biased against is tricky. I had to really work through that. I do think that we have a very narrow and incomplete view of wealth in our country. We see the stereotypes. We know the Kardashians and the Real Housewives and the men of Wolf of Wall Street. Of course, we've heard of Jeffery Epstein or the parents who illegally try to get their kids into schools that they're not qualified for. We see these stereotypes. I don't think I'm the only one who has this view of what wealth is all about. It doesn't look or feel like what Hollywood sells us. Eight out of ten, like I said, people with wealth grew up middle class or poor, so they are you.

Zibby: I feel like so many people would be like, really, so it's hard for you to be suddenly wealthy? I'm really sorry about that. [laughs] That's why you can't get a normal conversation going about it. It's something that people would really like to have even if there's a bias. It's a woe-is-me problem. Woe is me. Should I go to Aspen or not? These are the tough questions. I think people are very quick to mock it and not understand it. Then there left a big hole for your book, so there you go.

Jennifer: I think there's a reason this book hasn’t been written. It's because of that. I think it's important to start conversations. No matter how much you have in your bank account, if you have parents, if you have a partner or siblings or friends, you probably know that money is uncomfortable to talk about. You probably have faced that awkward money moment or you have some money issues hanging over your head. It's emotional. These emotions are universal. No matter how much you have, we have a lot of fear. It's fear of being rejected, fear of hurting other people's feelings, fear of not measuring up or of sounding unknowledgeable. We all have money shame and money guilt. We all have that money story that starts in childhood.

Zibby: David, I don't want to leave you out here. I have all of Jen's views of her family and her wealth and all this stuff and some of yours. What was this whole experience like for you? Do you share the, let's talk about it, let's let other people in, mission of Jennifer's right now? How do you feel?

David: [laughs] For sure, the answer is yes to that question. I do. My growing up was different. I didn't grow up with a lot of money myself. In fact, I was raised by a single mother. Our big event for the week was going to the library and coming out with a big stack of books. That’s how we explored the world. It obviously has something to do with what I'm doing now. For me, there's probably less emotion, in a sense, tied up. What my mother would say is, we're not poor, we just don't have any money, just a neutral statement. I didn't have this kind of bias coming in. At the same time, I had no preparation for what we've gone through at all. As Jen said, this is the book I would've looked for in the bookstore if it existed. Instead, she had to write it.

Zibby: Wow. By the way, I used to work a company called Idealab. I don't know if you knew it. It was a big deal in 2001 for a hot minute. I had a moment with stock options because I was the twenty-fifth employee. All of a sudden, I was like, oh, my gosh, this is going to be amazing. I'm going to have this huge pile fall into my lap. It didn't happen. When you were saying how people had the stock price in the office, checking all the time, that sort of became the culture of some of the operating companies. Anyway, I don't even know why I bothered sharing that. I want to hear about the new nonprofit and #HalfMyDAF and all these things that you guys are doing to change the world, Worldreader and everything. When did the nonprofit element, giving back, start bubbling up in your lives? How did it come to this?

David: It's something we can probably both talk about. We have maybe a little bit different perspective. Neither one of us really grew up in a family that gave a lot of money away. We didn't have any money to give away. Jen's parents weren’t really wired that way. For us, Jen talks about this, our first philanthropy was our children's school asking us for donations and these sorts of things, which, looking back on it, are fine on-ramps, but it's kind of incremental. It's not really going to get you over the hump. About ten years ago, we decided to spend the year traveling around the world with our children, with our two daughters. We have two daughters. At the time, they were very young. We were their teachers, which is a whole separate experience, just infuriating and fantastic and everything you can imagine. We also spent every afternoon and often entire days or longer working with them doing service work. We taught at a school in China for a couple weeks, taught English there. We helped paint a house and actually helped someone buy a house in Vietnam and so forth. Along the way, we were reading. That's a separate story about Worldreader. I think both of us at that point were looking for a little bit of the next thing. I, in particular, was very much looking for the next thing. I'd been at Amazon for many years. Again, I can tell you the story of the beginning of Amazon separately if you're interested.

Zibby: I would take that. [laughs]

David: You got it.

Zibby: Finish this one.

David: Maybe I'll tell you just the beginning of Worldreader which will help tie a couple threads together. We actually ended the trip in Ecuador. We were at an orphanage. It was a girls' orphanage. Our daughters had volunteered. We had the spent the day working with the young women there. As we were walking towards the exit of the orphanage, the woman who ran the orphanage was looking around. I was too. I saw a building with a big padlock on it. I asked the woman, "What's going on with that?" She said, "That's our library." Here, my ears are perking up because I'm the library kid. I wasn't good at a lot as a kid, but I knew something about the library. I said, "Why is it locked?" She said, "Look, the books take forever to get here. They come by boat. Often, by the time they get here, they're not very interesting because they're out of date or maybe they started out as being someone else's almost trash books type of thing. The girls just aren't very interested in that anymore." I said, "Gosh, that doesn't sound good at all. Can we take a look inside?"

She said, "I think I've lost the key to that place." When she said that, now we're looking at our two daughters. Each of our daughters has a Kindle because of my Amazon background. We use that to read around the world. Every place we went, we would read books that were local books. I just said, this is crazy. One thing led to another, and we started Worldreader with this notion that everyone can be a reader. Readers build a better future. They're healthier. They're more prosperous, more empathy. If we can get a billion people reading someday, this world will be a better place. That's been what I've been focused on these last ten years just as Jen has been focused on for fourteen years, writing this book about money and philanthropy and doing more in the world. It's been a really interesting both parallel path, but then paths which keep crossing in all sorts of fun ways.

Zibby: You must have really great, inspiring conversations at the dinner table about what you guys have been doing during the day. That's pretty awesome. Insider look at the formation of Amazon, I'll take a snippet of that if you're offering it.

David: For sure. All I can say there is -- you were the fiftieth employee at Idealab.

Zibby: Twenty-fifth.

David: Twenty-fifth, so you know what it's like to be part of a company that's still figuring out what it's all about. I was number thirty-seven at Amazon. At the time, it was, as Jen said, a tiny little internet bookstore. We had sold $15.6 million of books in 1996. In 1997, after some conversations with this crazy guy named Jeff Bezos who actually literally called me one day checking the reference of someone who used to work with me when I was at Microsoft -- anyway, joining this company, he had this huge vision of, I want to be the place where you can find and discover anything you want to buy on the internet. That was his early vision. Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll get to a billion dollars by 2000. I just said, look, how could I not do this? It's technology, which I'd grown to love at Microsoft. It's books. There was a bookstore. We could become earth's biggest bookstore. That was our tagline at the time. We could maybe do something that really did change the world.

It was exhausting and crazy. Frankly, we didn't know what we were doing half the time. We almost ran out of money a couple times. Again, it's probably a whole separate podcast. All I can say is that from the outside today, Amazon looks like this incredible machine. I will tell you, when you're employee number thirty-seven and you're literally putting down the train tracks as the train is just barreling down the tracks, it's pretty frightening. Last thing I'll say, my mother, she would call me and she would say, "David, what have you done? Why have you left Microsoft to go to this crazy thing?" The papers would be calling us Amazon.bomb. That was the thing. Anyway, no one knew why I'd made this crazy decision. I just said, "It was kind of about books, kind of about reading, and almost a passion [indiscernible] for me to see if this was going to work." Luckily, it did.

Jennifer: At that time, people weren’t going to their computers to buy things. I was like, oh, my gosh, who's going to go to the computer to buy a book? Then he was going to add music. He was going to add toys. I'm like, no one is going to go to their computer. [laughs] Luckily, someone else had a better vision than I did.

David: Actually, Jen was a huge advocate of my going. We were just about to have our first daughter. It was kind of crazy. People would say, maybe you should just have one child at once, not have a child and a [indiscernible]. It worked out.

Zibby: Wow. That's nuts. What a story. I feel like, though, the startup life and the parenting life, you're probably up at all hours in both cases. It must have been a nice symbiotic relationship.

David: Right. Neither one of us slept for about seven years. It was fine.

Zibby: Who needs sleep? Nobody needs sleep. Jen, in your book, I found it really interesting that interspersed with all of the personal stories and the thought-provoking issues you brought up, you had little pages with discussion questions as if you wanted us to stop and literally -- little conversation starters. All right, I better stop and talk to my husband about what about the parents about Emily's new independent school, what are they doing with each other? and all the rest. Tell me about putting in the questions at each chapter, and not even bullet points which I feel like other books do, but almost like reading book club questions as you go. Tell me about that.

Jennifer: I do want it to be a conversation starter and get people talking about money. I talk about private school auctions and private jets. I talk about the luxuries money can buy. I also really take a look at the human aspects and the emotions that arise. Even though the specifics might be different for people, I think people can relate to my stories. I'm hoping that they can understand their own in a new way. Those questions really are prompts to get people to -- like you reading it with your husband or giving it to your parents or giving it to your sibling or giving it to a good friend. Then it becomes the catalyst for conversation. It makes it easier to start those conversations. I'd love for people to use those questions not only to think about for themselves, but to share and start these many conversations that are so needed, start them happening. I think my book is the ideal book club book. It's not easy. I always tell people, this is really, really uncomfortable. I'm sort of inviting people to get uncomfortable. In a book club, for example, it could be like, let's acknowledge, let's give each other permission to fumble around, to get it wrong, to get messy. That's what we're going to be doing together. If you can create that safe space, it really can bring people closer. I think on the other side of those fears is a real connection, a sense of relief, and then a chance to really learn from each other and collaborate.

Zibby: I have to put you in touch with -- have you heard of Emmanuel Acho? He started something called Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. He's doing all of that about race. Now he has a book coming out, I think this week, that Oprah is helping publish. He's a big deal. He's only twenty-nine.

Jennifer: Wow.

Zibby: I know. I know. I know. Let's put that annoying fact aside. He literally was saying the same thing. You need to feel a little uncomfortable. You have to have a conversation that gets you out of your comfort zone. That's how we make change. You're doing it about wealth. He's doing it about race. Now we need somebody about uncomfortable gender conversations. I can do a whole panel. [laughs]

David: That's a great idea. There's not a lot of examples of people growing without a little discomfort at some point. There just aren't. That's what Jen's really trying to do, is push you into that zone. Then hopefully on the other side, there's a better connection.

Zibby: It's like working out. It doesn't feel good, necessarily, but afterwards, you feel -- I mean, sometimes, as I hobble around today. Sometimes you feel better. What do the two of you think about how much anti-wealth sentiment there is in the United States right now? I feel like being wealthy is the worst thing you could possibly be. So many, even, politicians and everybody want to take wealth away and redistribute it. What is your view on all that?

Jennifer: I do think it's a huge problem. I think maybe it's the biggest problem our country is facing, this disparity. There's a lot of resentment. I don't think the resentment helps anyone. It doesn't help those who feel it or the people on the other side. When there's a huge and influential segment of the population that isn't talking to each other and who feels attacked by this and isolated, it's not making them empathetic or generous. We need to start closing this gap. Our silence, it has a lot of power. It helps keeps the status quo in place. I'm hoping to get conversations going that can shake things up, help us recognize our own privilege in a new way, help us feel more accountable through conversation, help us collaborate. We have the power to do amazing things and help bring this country together. It's what we need right now, to be united. To shy away from the resentment and the huge disparity I think is not a service to anyone. People are going without housing, without healthcare, without food. There's an education crisis. This is the moment that we need to face this. If we're just going to turn our back or pretend it doesn't exist or accept it, that's not okay with me.

David: Just to add super quickly, just like growth doesn't come without some vulnerability and awkwardness, I don't think change comes through shame. It doesn't work. That's not helpful as a country. It just doesn't work.

Zibby: What do you think about the fact that so many of the people -- I shouldn't say so many. See, I'm having an uncomfortable conversation in my own head. What do you think about the fact that -- if given the choice and you said, do you want a million dollars? most people would be like, sure, hand it over. They're talking on one side about how it shouldn't be that way, but if they were to have that happen to them, they would gratefully accept it, perhaps. Not to get too political, but obviously, there are societal issues. Whose job is it to redistribute that wealth? Is it the individual, or is it from the government? I don't know. What do you think?

Jennifer: I think philanthropy's wonderful. I think we should all be filling that responsibility, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to happen. It needs to happen at a governmental level, policy level. We need healthcare for all. We need to ensure that there's a strong social safety net for people. I don't want to live in a society where people are living on the street. That’s a disaster to me. We need a huge structural change. I'm very thankful for our new leaders.

Zibby: Me too. I'm very excited. I'll air this later, but we're talking now right after this historic, exciting weekend. I feel like I've been bouncing around my house or something. Just so much optimism right now, so much excitement. I'm so ready for it, which is great. Wait, there was something I wanted to ask about wealth. Oh, I wanted to know how you're handling your daughters at this point. In order to not spoil them, today, what is your approach to parenting without spoiling? What are the rules?

Jennifer: The groundwork's already been laid. I think it happens early. I don't think it's a conversation. It's living your values day to day, week to week. They're watching you. Kids see how you interact with other people. They see how you make decisions, what you prioritize. Even just thinking about going into the grocery store with your kids, what do you do when someone cuts you off and takes the parking spot? How do you react? Are you deserving of that parking spot? Do you accept, maybe they're in a rush, let's find another one, it's okay? Going into the grocery store, it's an opportunity to show your values. Are you choosing things because of the value they have or the price? How do you make decisions? How do you make choices? That's an opportunity for teaching your kids too. When you go to the meat counter, how do you interact with the man on the other side? Are you gracious? Are you thankful? Same with checking out. All these small details add up. I think that's what kids really -- how they learn is through watching us. It's about not only values, but our attitude. A sense of gratitude is really important. Even if you're traveling to amazing places, if you don't take things for granted, if you show appreciation, all these things are important. You need to walk the walk, and your kids will learn from that.

Zibby: How about entrepreneurial ways versus not? Are you trying to imbue that as something that's -- maybe just by modeling your kids absorb this. Being a Silicon Valley family, perhaps it just goes without saying. What do you think about entrepreneurship in the family?

Jennifer: I want both of our daughters to find themselves and follow their own path and figure out what's right for them. We're modeling what's right for each of us and as a couple. Now they're in their early twenties. This is their moment to find their own path and find their own passions and find out where they can make their impact and difference in the world. I want to support them to be their best selves.

Zibby: Just putting my own two cents into your parenting, I think that even though they're in their twenties, there's still a lot of parenting left in terms of --

Jennifer: -- Oh, yeah.

David: There is.

Zibby: Especially in terms of the financial side of life. I think back to my twenties. I feel like my parents were like, okay, she's good. She knows. We can't spoil her. She's off on her own. Now that I'm in my forties, I'm ready to go. [laughs] I don't think I was in my twenties, necessarily.

Jennifer: No. I realize this more and more. Especially, this is where the wealth gets layered on. I'm reading a really wonderful book by James Grubman called Strangers in Paradise. It really talks about the stereotypes of wealth and the attitudes that we both brought to wealth, which is middle-class attitudes. Those served us well, but now we have to think about how to use our wealth in society and with our kids. It's more inclusive. It's more interdependent. It's starting those conversations. We have started to have family conversations and talk about our values and our mission as a family who has this incredible resource. How do we make sure we harness that for good in the world and that our children buy into the philosophy that we're doing this as a family? That is a piece that, it's in process right now. It's a big question, and a big question for anyone who's come into more money than they had growing up. The big worry, of course, is initially, am I going to spoil my kids? Are they going to be entitled? Are they going to be ambitious and motivated? I feel like we've checked that box, but then there's this whole new, how are they going to be as people, as stewards of wealth in the world?

David: Sometimes it's just better to be lucky than smart. The fact that we started Worldreader ten years ago -- at that point, they were in fourth and sixth grade or fifth and seventh grade. They were young at the time. I think that's right. They’ve had ten years to watch how to steward not just the wealth side, but how you spend your life side of things. Sometimes people ask me about philanthropy and rolling up your sleeves and starting a nonprofit. My basic advice is, do it, and do it earlier than you think you should. Just get into it. First of all, it takes some time to get halfway good at it. Here we are ten years later, and it still feels like a work-in-process, for me at least. Also, it gives your kids and your whole family a way to experience it over a long period of time. As Jen was saying, it's not just about that. People want to diminish these sorts of things as a one -- what does the talk look like with your kids about money? It's not like that. It's years of experience and watching and absorbing. I agree. Our older daughter, actually, was just up here for dinner a couple days ago. She actually brought up wealth herself and the relationship that she has with her boyfriend and so forth. She's twenty-three, so it's still happening.

Zibby: That's a whole nother thing. That's another podcast. [laughs] What advice would you both have both to aspiring authors having written this book -- I'm sorry we didn't talk a lot about your process. I'm interested in all that. Next podcast. Advice to aspiring authors and then advice to people who really want to use their wealth for good, both.

Jennifer: Aspiring authors, have a lot of tenacity. Keep going. I really enjoyed the process of writing. I found it fascinating as a puzzle. How was I going to piece all these pieces together? How was I going to talk about money in a way that wasn't off-putting or offensive? I had those pieces to wrestle with. I have been rejected so many times. Believing in yourself, believing in the process, and just keep going. You can do it.

David: That's good advice. [laughs]

Jennifer: It took me many, many years, so I'm very happy to have it out in the world.

David: On the putting money to work for good, I would say it really starts with looking in the mirror and thinking to yourself, what do I really care about? It's so easy to get confused. People ask you, if you have money -- even if you don't have money, people ask you for things all the time. You have to remember that's a difference sometimes between what they want and what you want. If it comes to doing this sort of work -- Worldreader now, as I say, we're ten years old. We've reached fifteen million kids. We're using technology and local books all around the world. Actually, today -- this is fun. I know the podcast will air in the future. Today, Monday, November 9th, is the day we're announcing that after ten years, we're finally bringing our program to the United States to help vulnerable communities here in the United States. That's going to have huge ripple effects on the organization. It's hard work. It's hard. Running a nonprofit is not easy, and doing good in the world, whatever that looks like for you. These are big problems, the problem of literacy, the problem with the environment, the problem with, pick your favorite. You better care about it a lot. If you don't care about it a lot, you'll give up too fast. If you give up too fast, you'll get nothing done.

Zibby: That is true. Nobody ever won the race they didn't go on, or whatever that expression is. Thank you both so much. I really appreciated hearing your story from the proposal at dinner to now. Thanks for letting the rest of the world in on your lives and trying to help others in the many ways you do. If people want to support Worldreader, David, how would they do that?

David: They go to worldreader.O-R-G, worldreader.org, on your phone or on your computer. Come on in and take a look at what we're doing. We'd love to have all the support we can get. It's the only way we're able to do our work.

Zibby: Amazing. Great. Thank you so much.

Jennifer: Thank you, Zibby. Really enjoyed it.

David: Thank you, Zibby. Super fun.

Zibby: I'll send all the lottery winners your way. You should just put it in the convenience stores. If you win, here's the book.

David: It's the ticket. [laughs]

Zibby: Just a thought, marketing opportunity. Bye.

David: Thanks, Zibby. That was a lot of fun.

Michelle Buteau, SURVIVAL OF THE THICKEST

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Michelle. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Survival of the Thickest. I'm so excited to be talking to you.

Michelle Buteau: I'm excited to be talked to.

Zibby: [laughs] Oh, my gosh. For people who aren't familiar with your work, could you give us a little background on why you wrote this book and what it's essentially about?

Michelle: What a loaded question. I've been doing stand-up damn near twenty years. I know I age really well. I've sort of made the jump into acting and hosting and TV and film and all this really fun stuff, but my true love is stand-up. I've been doing a lot of podcasts and storytelling shows. I realized, wow, there's other things I could share with people besides these funny, ha-ha, sassy-girl moments. Especially after going through a five-year battle of IVF to try and have children, it was really hard being the happy clown with big titties and freckles. As I quietly was going through these really painful experiences, I was also out and about probably working the most I've ever worked. Now that I feel like I am healed and on the other side of the mountain, I can look back at my experiences and my pain and my grief and properly write about it and share it because I'm realizing it's not about me. It's not about, how long can I talk about myself? I'm not some reality show. No shade to reality show hoes, lol.

I feel like the more I share, the more people feel less alone or just simply educated. There's a lot of, that would never happen to me, and then it does. I was like, wow, what would happen if I actually wrote a book? And so I did. It was wild. I never want to read or write a book again. It is so much work. I just remember taking care of teething twins who were about ten months old, still had them in the same room, didn't separate them yet, didn't even realize that was a thing I could do. Then I would go to set to work on a movie called Marry Me with J Lo and just be in awe of Owen Wilson and Sarah Silverman and be like, this is crazy, and then go to my trailer and try to get an essay done. I'm just like, what is this life? Then go home and go to the store to pick up baby Tylenol and just keep it moving and write this book until I would fall asleep. Then I remember one night, I even realized I had shit stuck in my nail. I'm like, god, why does it smell? Checking under my shoes. It was so dumb. Anyway, I don't even remember the question, but thank you so much for having me. [laughs]

Zibby: It was great. I have twins, by the way, who are now thirteen. Yes, it's true.

Michelle: I can't wait.

Zibby: Well, pros and cons of every age. [laughs] I also did not realize that I should separate my twins. I kept them in the same room for a really long time. Once they were napping in beds, essentially, I was like, oh, okay, maybe I should split them up. One of these million things you learn as you go.

Michelle: Are they boy/girl? Who are they?

Zibby: They're boy/girl. They're thirteen. The boy was first by a couple minutes and lords that over her head constantly. In reading and seeing your Instagram, it's taking me back to the very beginning. It does get easier in some ways, a lot less physically demanding at least.

Michelle: I do feel like that I Love Lucy episode where I'm trying to keep all the chocolate on the conveyer belt. I'm just like, get the diapers! I want to say I'm looking forward to them talking, but from what I hear... [laughs]

Zibby: Talking is good. Walking is good. There's a lot of great things coming up. I feel like by the time you're here, it's more like psychological warfare that we have going on. Being a twin mom, people would be like, but my kids are really close in age, so I get it. I'm like, no, you don't. Sorry, it's different. [laughs] Just a little different.

Michelle: Puerto Rican twins, Irish twins, yes, yes, yes.

Zibby: Different.

Michelle: It's not the same.

Zibby: Anyway, go back to the IVF part and the pain and having to sort of mask the pain and keep on keeping on. This is something I find so fascinating. How do you keep all of that emotion inside and just come out of the trailer, as you were saying, or head to work when all of that stuff is brewing inside? Did you always talk to your colleagues about it? How did you process it? Did you write personal journals? How did you get through that period of time?

Michelle: That's a good question. Now that you are talking about it, maybe I should've journaled. Maybe I should've talked to more people. I felt I couldn't, though, because no one really knew what I was going through. They're like, what do you mean hormones? What do you mean shots? What do you mean? That doesn't sound right. They would get defensive. Why are you doing that? You know what you should do is just eat clean. Maybe lose weight. Maybe don't work as much. I felt sort of attacked and shamed from people that I love who just simply didn't know or understand. It felt like I was in a marathon of an emotional cardio wind tunnel where I'm just like, get the fuck through. Get the fuck through. You will be a mom. This will happen. Get through. After the first miscarriage, I was heartbroken. I'm like, let's go again. I realize that was normal for my other friends who are talking to me about their miscarriages. Then by the third one, you're like, okay, let's just wait a second. Let's take a beat and really figure out what's going on because it's something other than a nature takes care of itself type situation. I think because I was so busy and had such a huge to-do list workwise, I was able to compartmentalize all that was going on. I'm like, okay, I'm going to LA to pitch the show I just wrote. They're interested in it. Fly yourself out. Get a doctor's note. Get the needles. Get the this. Get the progesterone suppositories. It became my life and my to-do list.

Then I would cry over the weirdest things. Somebody would cut me off on the road or my Uber driver didn't feel comfortable with me putting my window down, and I would just cry. My husband would leave crumbs from his sandwich on the countertop. I'd be like, I want a divorce. I'm like, oh, or maybe it's the hormones. It was crazy. Then as I started working more, I started giving zero fucks. That's when I really started to book, when people are like, wow, she's so edgy. I'm just like, no, I'm broken, but I will definitely wear the statement lip. When I would improve a scene, it would be ridiculous. Then I would just start crying. I'd be saying the most dumb things but crying because I didn't know how to manage all that was going on. It really resonated with people. Even my First Wives Club audition which was over Skype because Tracy Oliver, the creator and producer, was in LA and I was in New York, she was like, "Look, your husband who you've known since college has cheated on you, finally. You are coming to terms with it now. You guys are going to therapy. You feel broken. You're trying to put yourself together every day for your two kids." I'm just like, oh, my god, that's all she needs to say. Then waterworks. She's like, "Phenomenal acting." I'm just like, I got to go to the bathroom. And so on and so forth. To be honest, I don't know how I managed. In life anyway, I'm day by day. Now with toddling twins during quarantine and still working, I'm hour by hour.

Zibby: Yes, that's all you can do. Go back to what you said about being edgy versus being broken. Tell me more about that. How do you know which one you are? What causes what? Tell me about them.

Michelle: Again, it's a case-by-case basis. Everyone has their opinion of you. You could walk in a room and feel ugly, but people see a confident person. You never know what you're giving off or what people see. People are like, whoa, I can't believe you said that. I'm like, yeah, because I don't care if you like me or not. I just don't care if you like me or not. I know that I'm actually better than this and this project and this material. It did help me in a way where I'm like, I just want to go home and cry right now, so let's get this shit over with. I was also so happy to have things to go to because that gave me a sense of normalcy. Life is still going on. If I didn't have anywhere to go, I don't even know what I would be like. It also gave me a sense of, damn, bitch, you can get stuff done, which is probably why I decided to write a book. So stupid, so stupid.

Zibby: A lot of the book, though, goes all the way back. You take us all through your life and being raised by your parents and all the little things that happened to make you, you. You go into that in a lot of depth. I don't want to mislead that the book is all about IVF or anything like that. You have a lot, also, about your body in this book and your relationship to your body and your family's relationship. There was this one passage I wanted to read with your dad. You said, "There was this one time when I was about fifteen and my father said to me, 'Stop eating pasta in front of your boyfriend. You should lose twenty pounds because then you'd be so beautiful.' I stopped right there. I told him off. I said, 'I'm beautiful no matter what, twenty pounds or not. If someone is going to love me, they are going to love me for me.' His look changed immediately, and he said, 'That's my girl.'" [laughs]

Michelle: Ugh. Isn't there a better way? Do we have to be GI Jane right now at the dinner table, Dad? It's too much.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. You're very open about your relationship with your body. Tell me how you feel about it now, especially after having twins.

Michelle: I didn't have twins. I had a surrogate. For me, I was like, how am I going to feel taking care of these babies if I didn't carry them? That lasted for like five minutes because I'm like, oh, no, they are mine. I am theirs. She is a part of our village and extended family, chosen family, which is amazing.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. I totally knew that. I remember reading all that. I don't know why I said that. I apologize, but I did know that. Keep going.

Michelle: No, that's okay. I still feel like a warrior princess because I went through five years of fucking crazy rigid hormone taking, spreading your legs three times a week to get tested, blood three times -- I feel like I've done it all. To get back to what you were saying, I did gain weight during IVF. I was so used to it by then, fluctuating, because I have been since I was eleven that I'm like, it is what it is. I'll do what I can. I didn't get that overnight. I developed quite quickly. I talk about wanting a banana seat bike for my twelfth birthday, and I ended up with woman-size tits. To get unwanted attention from older men is gross. To be shamed by older women is also really disgusting. I feel like we have to help kids shape who they are in a positive way. Our bodies are all different. There isn't one way to look or be. That's okay. Also, how to speak up for themselves. Yes, definitely respect your elders. Say please and thank you, but you don't have to take people's criticism. That's wild. I think that was the hardest part, actually, writing the book, was trying not to make it sound like I was mad at my parents because there was a lot of shame from them to not stick out my chest. I'm like, I'm standing up straight. You told me to stand up straight my whole life. Why are you wearing that? I'm still wearing the same thing I've always worn. It's just, this is how my body is. By the way, everyone in my family looks like this. Why all of a sudden is it a thing? For me, it definitely is survival of the thickest in terms of having a thick body, but also not shaming people for who they are or what they want in life. That is, I hope, a takeaway, whether it's wanting to be with multiple partners to figure out -- like they're Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride, how they like their eggs.

Zibby: I refer to that scene all the time.

Michelle: Thank you!

Zibby: All the time. I'm so glad you said that. I think about that all the time. I mention it to people. Yes, so true.

Michelle: Thank you. Nobody ever understands.

Zibby: What? No. It's one of my favorite scenes.

Michelle: Thank you. Where are they now, her and -- is it Richard? What's his name again, with the gray hair?

Zibby: Yeah. Richard Gere? No.

Michelle: Oh, my god, I was going to say Richard Marx. That's where my brain is at. It is Richard Gere. They should get together and do something else. They're going to be cool grandparents.

Zibby: Yeah, the grandparents. They’ll be the new Diane Keaton and [indiscernible/laughter].

Michelle: Exactly, without the white, ripped turtlenecks, but yes.

Zibby: I do think, though, that girls developing early is something that not enough is said about. Not that I should be revealing this, but I was definitely wearing a bra by the time I was ten. I've never felt comfortable in that regard ever since. My mom took me to buy a bra. I hid between all the robes in the store. I was like, I don't want anyone to see me. With you too, age twelve, you're not necessarily ready for that. How do you then deal with your body the rest of your life when something -- it's almost as if there's this something that's out of your control from the minute you get going, and you're struggling to catch up after ever since.

Michelle: Yeah. Not only are you struggling to catch up, but you also want to fit in because you're at that age where you don't want to be different. Then you become a teenager, young adult. Everyone has a different relationship with sexuality. Because we were religious, it was just shame on shame on shame. I knew deep down inside that I wanted to be this happy, vivacious, sassy, let's see what it looks like naked person, but those people sounded like mean and bad people. Then when I finally moved away and had sex, I was like, no, this is great. This is amazing. There's nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, it was a great lesson in speaking up for what I wanted, whether it was dating somebody casual or we were serious or whatever it was. There's no classes in school that will tell you how to speak up for yourself, at least when I was going to school. I don't know about now. There's a class for everything. I think it's a wonderful lesson. In comedy, they always tell you to learn from the good and the bad. Learn from when someone's killing on stage and when someone's just dying, which is very violent now that I'm saying that out loud. I feel like the same could be said from your childhood experiences.

Zibby: Do you feel like, when you were writing the book, that it always had to be funny? As a comedian, do you feel like, I better make this section funny, or how do I turn this piece -- a lot of it was very funny, but there was pain beneath some of the humor. How did you [indiscernible/crosstalk] in terms of tone?

Michelle: I couldn't answer that. I was just truly, these are the stories I want to share, get it done on paper. It's easier to do a show or host a dinner party or a storytelling show and just talk it out. To put it in print, I'm all over the place, as I am on stage. I'm just like, what's the beginning, middle, and end? I never thought about being funny because I feel like that's there no matter what. Even the way I describe something, everyone's like, who the fuck? I was like, me. That's how I describe it. Emotional cardio's the only cardio I'll be doing. Everyone's like, who says that? Me, bitch. I already knew it'd be funny, but I also knew that I want to share these more painful, more sincere moments. I was just like, get it done. That's been a big thing for me. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it's just got to get done.

Zibby: Why did you say that this is the worst thing you've ever done and that you would never want to write [indiscernible/crosstalk]?

Michelle: The hours, the sheer hours, that it takes to write something is crazy. For me at least, I have every hour booked in my life, in my day. I even have an hour to relax, if I do. I will say, I'm going to go in this dark room. It's usually my closet. Let me do my thing. It was just an added thing that I had to put in the schedule of already crazy. Then also, be vulnerable in a way that I never had before. What if I just made an album, a singing album, and I'm like, okay, Christina Aguilera, listen to this? I'm not a writer. I've written. TV and punch-ups is so much different than an author. I can't even say author. Then the edits where you have to go back and read it. Then the notes where someone had read it, it's so crazy. It does feel like you are fully frontally naked and getting a pap smear in Times Square.

Zibby: Wow, that would not be on my list of things to do. I can see why you wouldn't want to do it again. I know how busy you must be because we scheduled this at ten fifteen. I'm like, that is a really busy person who's scheduling things on the quarter hour. [laughs]

Michelle: I'm in England right now.

Zibby: Oh, my goodness.

Michelle: I'm in Manchester. Off the record -- is that how you say it?

Zibby: Sure.

Michelle: Filming The Circle, which is the show I host on Netflix. It films in England. I managed to bring the kids and our nanny with us because I'm here for six weeks. Well, two more weeks. Four weeks down. Can't wait to go home.

Zibby: At least you got to travel. I feel like there's been no travel allowed for so long. Anyway, what is coming next? You're always doing a million things. Now you've got this book launch on top of everything. What is your next year? Do you have any idea? What's it looking like for you?

Michelle: What's next? I feel like something is next, but I don't remember. I'm also, for once in a long time, not living in the, what's next? What's next? I'm just like, this is dope. Let's just enjoy this. I'm not hooked up to a ventilator. I've just dropped some really important black joy content that I've worked really hard to put together. Sucks that there's a quarantine, but also amazing that people are enjoying it within a pandemic and a race revolution. Fuckin' bananas. For me, I really enjoy acting and hosting and all of the above. I really also enjoying being the bridesmaid, but I can't wait to be the bride.

Zibby: Amazing. What advice would you have to aspiring authors? Don't say, don't write the book. It has to be a little more positive than that.

Michelle: Oh, my goodness. I said it already. Don't worry about it being perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be done. You can always go back and edit. That, and also, don't do whatever you think people want to hear. That's whack. Do what you are passionate about. That could be anything. It could be knitting or snails or beaches or whatever time in your life or just a collection of essays and short stories. No one is Stephen King out the damn gate.

Zibby: Very true.

Michelle: Start somewhere. That was more than one piece of advice, but here we are.

Zibby: People need all the advice they can get. I think that's awesome. Thank you. Thank you for talking about your book. It was so good and so funny and a really refreshing style. You just tell it like it is.

Michelle: I know. I'm trying to go through the essays and figure out what I want to do as a promo video. If your relationship stinks like fish, it's probably extra pussy; that's something I wrote. I'm someone's mom. I'm a good person. Nice to meet you.

Zibby: [laughs] Nice to meet you. Best of luck with the launch and everything else. It was so nice to share some time with you today.

Michelle: Likewise. Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Tod Jacobs and Peter Lynn, NOT A PARTNERSHIP

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Tod and Peter, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for coming on my show.

Tod Jacobs: Thank you so much for having us.

Peter Lynn: Thank you so much.

Zibby: Thank you also for your contribution to married couples everywhere with your book, Not A Partnership: Why We Keep Getting Marriage Wrong & How We Can Get It Right. Tell me about how the two of you teamed up to write this book to help everyone else.

Tod: Maybe I'll jump in here. Peter and I had been working together, teaching, counseling at an institute in Jerusalem that I cofounded back in 2005. It was not our intention when we opened up this institute to primarily deal with issues of marriage and relationships. What the institute really is based in is best and brightest young men in their, let's call it the twenties and thirties primarily, average age around there, close to thirty -- these are guys who want to take about a year off minimum, two years maximum. They want to come and they want to delve into classical Jewish text, philosophy, Jewish law, Hebrew language, character building, leadership training, ethics, things like that. One of the things we found over the years was that these guys were amazingly well-prepared for pretty much everything in life. They had, many times, Ivy League backgrounds. They had incredible academic backgrounds, incredible professional backgrounds in a whole host of professions. Yet there was kind of a common theme. Everybody seemed woefully unprepared for something that they all claimed was the most important thing that they were looking forward to. That was their married life someday. Yet they didn't really have a clue how to do that successfully. I think that's a common theme that we see in our society almost no matter how well-educated you are and what kind of professional background you have.

Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Then of the other fifty percent that remain married, how many of them are really sparkling, perfect role modeled kind of marriages for people to grow up and say, aha, that's what a great marriage looks like? People are marrying later. It's a bit of a mess for many, many people. We just started delving into a combination of things. One was, Peter has an incredible background in positive psychology. I started delving into a lot of the classic mystical works and later what's called works of character building that are classic Jewish ways of preparing people for marriage, young men, young women. We found that pulling those two things together, we started doing marriage education. After doing that for a decade and a half, we looked back and we saw, wow, the couples that were formed out of the training that we were involved with have a divorce rate that is one tenth of the national average, which means some people get divorced. Still, it's a five percent divorce rate instead of a fifty percent rate. We thought, this is maybe something that we should be sharing more broadly. That was really the decision to think about doing a book, which we subsequently did.

Zibby: Did the people who came to the counseling opt in? Is it a representative sample, or is it people who are particularly already invested in making their marriage work?

Tod: This is mostly an opt-in group. In other words, ninety-five percent of the students who come to us are unmarried when they come, again, whether they're in their twenties or in their thirties. Very few of them are already married or have been married. It's almost like a clean piece of paper, a clean piece of parchment to start writing some of the foundational ideas of marriage on. Obviously, they have to unlearn lots and lots and lots of bad paradigms we all grow up with and got used to, whether it's from Hollywood movies or social media or all the kind of influences that have an influence on the way we think about relationships. We just found that, A, they got more interested in having a real relationship as they became less fearful of it. B, we found that by having some level of preparation for what a great relationship looks like and what the role of a spouse is, we found that people were way more ready for it and then when issues came up, much more prepared to deal with the issues as well. By the way, we've been kind of holding the hands of those who invited us to remain part of the counseling in their relationships as time went on. We've seen the ideas not only play out in terms of preparing for marriage, we've also seen them play out in fixing problems that have come up and dealing with problems that have been difficult in the early years or even, in some cases, the middle years of marriage by this point.

Zibby: About how many people do you think you've counseled in person at this point?

Tod: Probably upwards of a hundred and fifty, something like that, different couples.

Zibby: That's great. Amazing. The part that spoke to me right away that I just loved -- you give so much advice, obviously, in the book. You were talking about how in order to invest in a marriage, you have to give more and how people have the wrong framework to think about marriage and how the way you love a dog, the more you take care of something, the more you love it, or him or her or whatever. You said, "There was a great rabbi who pointed out that people have the concept of love exactly backwards. We go through with the assumption that if someone will do for me, will care for me, will give to me properly, then of course, I will love them in response. But the truth of the matter is that it's exactly the opposite. We love where we give. Why do parents love kids more than kids love parents? Because they give more." You keep going. You say, this is the rabbi, "You have to flip the whole paradigm and start giving and giving and giving to her, and then you'll love her. Then you'll have a real marriage." Actually, you had said this to a group. Someone responds by saying, "Whoa." [laughter] This is a highly educated group. You were on a roadshow, right? You were in finance before.

Tod: Yeah, we were on a roadshow. It was three or four of us from JP Morgan -- my background was as a Wall Street analyst -- and a few senior consultants from McKinsey & Company. Again, high-powered, highly educated group of people. I think everybody on the plane was married at some stage. The oldest person on the plane was probably in his late fifties. It went down to this young guy who I was talking to in that story. The beginning of the story was, we're thirty thousand feet in this private jet and this young analyst starts complaining about his wife. She's just not doing it for him anymore like she used to. She doesn't take care of him. She's not as kind to him. She's not as sweet to him. He's falling out of love with her. He's just kind of tired of it. That's when I told him, "You got to flip your paradigm. This rabbi taught us that you love where you give. If you want to start loving your wife, instead of waiting for her to give to you so that you'll love her in return, try giving to her. See what happens." The beautiful ending of the story was that two months later, he comes up to me in the office. He says, "You won't believe it. I'm madly in love with my wife again. I've fallen in love with her again because I decided I had nothing to lose by taking your advice. I started giving and giving and doing things for her and buying her things and taking care of her and taking her out," and whatever it was. He said, "Suddenly, I find that I'm totally in love with her again." We've seen this play out just countless times. You want to love, start giving.

Zibby: Wow. It seems so simple and so obvious. Yet it's just not how any of us think about it. How crazy that you can literally turn love back on in a snap just by shifting something? I feel like love is so elusive. I had it, but now it's gone. I fell out of love. It seems like it's such a whimsical thing. In fact, it can be very intentional.

Peter: That's one of the things to add to that. We speak about it so often in the book. Great marriages are built. When people make proactive efforts to build their marriage, and especially via this -- we always say the book speaks about the ultimate PDF manual of how to make your marriage function at full capacity. That's basically one word, which is giving. When people proactively engage in their marriage by giving, it's unbelievable to see. What's fascinating is that the person who benefits the most is the person who's doing the giving, just all of the great feelings that it brings. You see this. In my background in the field of positive psychology, there's a whole world called positive interventions. Meaning, what can you do in order to bring more positivity to your life? Tell me some practical things. According to the research, the fastest and quickest intervention for you to get out of your bad state of being, whatever that is, you're having a bad day, a rough week, the fastest thing you can do is start giving to someone. You'll see the quickest result as far as the change in your mood. It's really quite amazing to see. You see it across the board.

Zibby: Although, I would say, I'm thinking of moms in particular who might argue with this and who give so much that they almost have nothing left. You can overdo it, right? I feel like if you're always caring for other people and never even so much as taking care of yourself, that's also not good.

Peter: Listen, when people don't take care of themselves, then a lot of times the giving comes from an unhealthy place. Of course, there's a healthy degree of, this is giving in a normal capacity. This is giving in a healthy manner. We've all seen it manifest in unhealthy ways. You're right. When it happens in an unhealthy way, when people don't take care of themselves, then the whole system falls apart very fast.

Zibby: What else do I need to know? Now I've decided I want to quickly change my mood. I'm going to start giving immediately, perhaps in a new way or to people I don't normally give to or to find fulfillment in my own happiness. I'm just pretending, theoretical me. Obviously, I already do everything perfectly. [laughter] Now I can turn around and give back to my husband. What else do I need to know a hundred percent that you have found is the undiscovered gold of marital happiness?

Tod: The way we constructed the book, the book has big-picture paradigms, conceptual frameworks that we feel are critical to having a healthy marriage and to thinking about it properly. Then the second half of the book is all practical implementation of, how do you get there? We think that if you really boiled down the big picture of concepts, they boil down to three paradigms. One of them we just spoke about, which is that you love where you give. A second is to, and maybe it's really the first, is to get a definition that's a little deeper than we normally think of in terms of what marriage is. When we started looking at the book, we said, how should we define marriage? You can define it legally. You can define it the way Webster's defines it. You can go on HuffPost and see what they call marriage. Really, what we found was that there's a much, much deeper picture you can start out with. Then you begin in accordance with it. The picture as we've defined it is that marriage is two people coming together completely committed to acting in the capacity as a spouse that my beloved needs me to act in and committing that through thick and thin I will help try to give that person the life that they want and deserve. Obviously, an unhealthy version of that would be a little bit what you were describing a moment ago which is that if somebody is the one-way giver and the other side is dysfunctional, doesn't notice it, has no gratitude, it can be very, very problematic.

If two people walk into a marriage not with the idea of, what can I get out of this? but, what can I put into this to build that person? then what happens is that two people can really build something much, much bigger than the two of them, not lose themselves in that process, but really find themselves in that process and become bigger in that process by building the other. It's almost a cosmically unbelievable dynamic that two people can build something so special. It is focused on the other. As Peter pointed out, the biggest beneficiary, ironically, winds up being you yourself. It's not that you kind of manipulate and it's a calculated thing. I really want a great life, so I'm going to try and give to this person so I really become -- no, it really is focused on the other, but it turns out that the consequence of that is that you yourself wind up becoming bigger. The bigger you become and the bigger you see yourself and the more you're able to give and the less selfish you are, a person can really have an incredibly happy experience. Paradigm one is, define marriage as a vehicle for giving and for building the other person and for building something much bigger than the two of us.

Zibby: Sorry, just to jump in. That implies you're both able to do that and that you both want to give to the other person and that you possess those traits and skills. I know you mentioned this. Obviously, it can become very problematic. You have abusive spouses. You have people who cheat on their spouses or narcissists or all sorts of people who are not upholding their end. Then it doesn't matter how much the other person wants to put in. You can't do anything about it. Then it's almost a lost cause. It's almost like it starts before all of this. You have to choose someone who is on the same page with you about the giving itself. It almost starts before the practice. It starts in the choice, essentially, right?

Peter: That's what we speak about so much. Like Tod was describing, we find that especially the students we were dealing with and many places we've lectured at is that we find that people spend so much time preparing for so many things in their life, especially their professional lives, getting ready for it, and this degree and that degree and you name it. Then we saw as people are walking into the most important thing in their life -- you ask them, what's their number-one priority? They're going to say their marriage. They were totally unprepared. What we feel is so important is if people have these ideas clear before they go into a marriage, they're going to make a much healthier choice. Now, let's be very clear. Things do come up. People have psychological issues that come up. These things need to be dealt with, a hundred percent. Imagine if you have two people who get married and they're on the same page as far as what they're getting themselves into. That's already so far ahead of the game, which can really be a game changer especially as things could become rocky later on.

Zibby: What if people really change? That's another thing. You can feel like that and say that at the beginning. Yet as life progresses and things happen, someone kind of deviates from the emotional contract, if you will.

Tod: You're a hundred percent right. Look, there's many stages at which we think this information, this education can be helpful. Obviously, in a perfect world, we educate our children, our students to be ready for marriage. By the way, most people that stand and face each other to take those vows or whatever marital ceremony that they're going to have, whatever that looks like, generally speaking, if you asked those two people, what's on your mind right now? they will tell you, I just want to make the other one happy. When people enter into that relationship, what we're talking about is top of mind. The problem is they don't realize that a lot of things are going to happen in the early stage of the marriage. First of all, the freshness is going to wear off. There's a natural explosive energy in the beginning of a relationship which people think, mistakenly, is what's called love. As soon as that begins to fade -- by the way, that's not called love. That's a free gift called inspiration getting me involved with this person, helping me see the greatness of this person and downplay some of the -- nobody's perfect. We need some way of seeing something in a person that just really draws us to who that person is.

When that fades, what you're left with is a choice. Am I going to now decide that I am committed to rebuilding and getting back through a process of work and toil and sweat and energy? By the way, which is pleasurable if you do it correctly. That shouldn't sound so negative. I know it does, but it shouldn't. That thing that you got for free in the beginning, you can actually earn through the process of building your marriage over a period of time. Really, the ultimate goal is that the two of you are as in love but in a much more meaningful way that you've earned as you were in that beginning stage. Part one is, let's hope that you think about this before you get married so that you can face this. Probably, lots of your listeners, and certainly lots of our readers, are people who are now in a marriage. As you're describing, financial problems came up. A health problem came up. This issue came up. Things like infidelity, by the way, that's very, very hard to put back trust into a relationship. That's a little bit outside of -- that often needs professional help. Many times, that's going to wind up being in a broken marriage. There are also dysfunctional people, no question about it. There are people who absolutely cannot function in a marriage because of their narcissism, selfishness, dysfunctionality, etc., but that's not the vast majority of people. It doesn't need to be.

What we found is, somebody may be married, and the marriage is not so fresh. It's not going so well. They're getting a little tired of each other. This one's kind of ignoring and in their own space. This one's kind of ignoring and in their own space. The old habits begin to resurface about being kind of a selfish person like they were before they got married. What we have found is by refocusing on the idea of giving and making it fresh and beginning to build respect again -- I'll give you a classic example. When two people meet and they're going out, they do everything possible to impress each other. When I was dating my wife-to-be, when you were dating your spouse-to-be, how did we dress? How did we speak? How did we smell? How did we look? How did our hair look? How courteous were we? You say to somebody, now try to build that snapshot in your mind of what you were like when you were dating. Now take a little snapshot of yourself on the average evening at home.

Zibby: Ugh. [laughs]

Tod: That's a cringeworthy moment for most of us. That's an embarrassment because if you think about it, why am I not still doing that for the most important person in my world? By the way, when I go to work, I don't look like that. When I go to work, I don't sound like that. When I go to work, I'm wearing nice clothing. I'm made up. I look good. I smell good.

Zibby: Now you're making me feel bad. [laughs] When am I supposed to wear my sweatpants? No, I'm kidding.

Tod: But you can wear your sweatpants. That's fine. You're not meant to be formal at home. I say you. We. We are meant to remember that the person across the table, across the room, in the other room is the person that is the most important person in my entire universe. That's the person who deserves the best I've got. That's the person who deserves the most respect from me. Unfortunately, what we do is we let our guard down because we want someplace we can be ourselves, so to speak. We've talked to couples about this. The pushback is usually, hey, come on, I was acting when I was going out. I got to be myself when I'm at home. The response to that is, no, sometimes you need to act at home as well. The classic example there is when you come home and you're in a rotten mood and your three-year-old runs up to you and says, Mommy, Daddy, come sit with me on the floor. I want to show you my fingerpaintings. I have four hundred fingerpaintings. I want you to see every single one of them. You're tired. You're in a horrible mood. Your boss yelled at you. You lost a deal and whatever it is. Aren't you going to act? Aren't you going to put on a huge smile and say, nothing I'd love to do more than sit down with you on the floor right now for the next hour and look at bad fingerpaintings? It's all that. Now, it's acting, but it's not acting in a negative way. It's becoming really what I want to become if I have control over myself. I want to be a good father. You want to be a good mother. We want to be good spouses. It's just really rising to the occasion and not letting our lower self drag us down in ways that affect others in very, very negative ways which they don't deserve.

Zibby: Wow. This is amazing. First of all, you need to give this to every rabbi. I don't know if you already do this. I don't know what your marketing plan is or was or whatever. Any rabbi who's marrying people should be giving this to their congregants, at least. I have a bunch of cousins who are about to get married. Now I'm like, oh, perfect. Obviously, I can give this to married friends, but that's a little bit insulting. [laughter] You guys need some help. Here's a book. As a gift, this should be the go-to gift, and not just for Jewish people at all. I happen to be Jewish. This is just lessons culled from Judaism that apply to any relationship. It should really be for anybody.

Tod: We tried to make it universal. You don't have to be religious. You don't have to be spiritual. You just have to want a real relationship for this material to speak to you. That's certainly what we believe.

Zibby: It's common sense. You're not hawking anything totally out there. This all makes perfect sense, as you laid out so nicely and neatly in the book interspersed with lots of personal stories and work. It's something that everybody really needs to hear. Do you do personal sessions? I feel like I want to have the two of you talk to all these people I love before they get married. You should take couples. You should charge a fortune and have a bunch of people come and get the download. Marital insurance, you could call it.

Peter: [laughs] Right. You should know also -- I just wanted to push back a little bit. What we do find is that people who are married -- you're married ten years. You're married fifteen years, even more than that. I find that if you take a couple, we tend to think, this is the way it's going to be. This is what it is. What we have found is that when you take couples who have been married for a period of time and they make the switch to, hey, let's put some work into this, let's try and change the patterns a bit, you can take an okay marriage or even a good marriage and with a little bit of effort and some marriage education, it's awesome what can happen. You can now take a couple that's been married who are in their forties and their fifties and their sixties, and they find that spark again. It's funny. For me, I'm almost more excited about reaching out to those couples than I am about the ones before they get married. I agree with you. Before they get married is crucial. So many couples out there, in some way, give up when they’ve gotten to a certain place in their marriage. They have a certain amount of kids. They say, okay, this is what it is. The answer is, it doesn't have to be that way. With a little bit of effort and some tools out there -- we do not lack access to tools. There are ten trillion social media platforms that are discussing marriage and relationships. There's so much out there. With just making a small amount of effort to say, let's change things up a little bit, let's learn some new things, it can take a marriage which could really use a bit of freshness, it can take it to that next level. It's really amazing what can happen.

Zibby: Wait, I think I cut you off before. You said that there were three things that divided up the book. The second one was where we had started. Then you introduced the first one. You have to finish off now with the third before we keep everybody hanging here.

Tod: Absolutely. The third paradigm is that marriages don't happen, they are made. As much as that sounds sort of obvious, if you actually take a look and think about how we grow up thinking about love, it's all passive. I fell in love. I was swept off my feet. Especially now where we're in a world where things don't last very long and we crave newness, you combine the social media experience where I'm always seeing that everything in everybody else's lives looks always fantastic and fresh and wonderful, and then I've got this vision that love is passive and I just fall in love and if I could just meet the right soulmate -- by the way, they say in corona, you don't need a soulmate, you need a cellmate, a C-E-L-Lmate. At any rate, this idea that it's kind of passive and I find my soulmate and then everything's just supposed to be fine as long as I find the right person, we think that that's almost completely wrong.

Obviously, you need to try to find the right person. You need to find a person whose values you share, who you're attracted to, who you respect, who respects you. You get that person. They get you. That's the fundamental gating factor for committing to somebody. The point is that once that commitment happens, you have to realize that it will require giving, work, thinking about it, prioritizing it. Without that big picture that paints everything I do in marriage, I will fall naturally back into the Hollywood romance vision. They meet. They sweep each other off their feet. Usually, something bad happens that separates them. At the end of the movie, they fall into each other's arms again. The curtain goes down. That's the end of the movie. Of course, we all know that the next day the curtain comes back up. That is now act two, scene one, where the choice is going to be made. Oh, wow, that person is not quite as exciting as I thought they were, not quite as funny, not quite as attractive. I've been duped again by life.

Or I can say, wait a minute, I got into this and now I'm going to start actually prioritizing it, working on it, building it. A is get your marriage vision right. B is realize that you love where you give. The more you give, the more you will love. C, realize that this will be a process of making this work and investing in it. My background is investments. I will tell you, I never found a higher return investment than marriage because the well-being and the intimacy and the trust, almost everything a person wants and needs to have a meaningful, happy life can lie in a powerfully good relationship. We believe that it's not something that just happens to that lucky few. We really believe that anybody almost at any stage as long as it's not totally been destroyed by dysfunctionality and abuse and things like that can really restart their marriage and get it moving again.

Zibby: Wow. Thank you, guys, so much. See, you gave. I'm just taking, but it still improved my mood. Now I'm going to go give this back to the people in my life who I think could really use it including everybody listening. Fantastic book. Fantastic advice. Loved the whole framework. I am sad to not be on Zoom with you guys for the rest of the day so you can help me through all my inevitable stumbles. It's just such a good reminder to step up for your marriage. Just step it up. Do little nice things. Maybe leave a little note somewhere. It doesn't have to be such a big thing. Little things make such a big difference. Thank you for this reminder. Thank you for all your time.

Peter: Thank you so much for having us. We really, really appreciate it. Keep up all the great work.

Zibby: Thank you. You too.

Tod: Thank you very much.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Tod: Bye.

Peter: Thank you.

Emmanuel Acho, UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS WITH A BLACK MAN

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

Emmanuel Acho: Of course. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: I feel like I should rename it for the night. I should call it Very Comfortable Conversations with a Mom. How about that? [laughter]

Emmanuel: That's a little more welcoming, you could say, than Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.

Zibby: My whole thing is making people feel like they can talk to me and whatever. Although, I have to say, that is your thing too. The uncomfortable is sort of a misnomer because you make people comfortable immediately.

Emmanuel: That's the trick. People are like, Emmanuel, where's the discomfort? I'm like, it's not always for you. Sometimes I'm the uncomfortable person. Sometimes the listener's the uncomfortable person. Sometimes my guest is. More than anything, I try to make people comfortable because that's when you really get the truth out of people.

Zibby: It's so true. I was thinking to myself ahead of time, I was like, ooh, what could I ask him to make him really uncomfortable? [laughs] I decided not to do that. We can just chat. It's fine. Take me back to May when you decided to start Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, the videos, and when your friend came and you were going to going to record together and then she bailed on you that morning and the whole thing of how you started it as the video series and then how it transitioned to a book.

Emmanuel: After the murder of George Floyd, Zibby, I was like, what do I do? I have to do something. I'm a sports analyst, but I'm a black man before I'm a sports analyst. Before the world acknowledged me as a black man, I'm a human being. It's my responsibility to positively contribute to society in some way, shape, or form, leave the earth better than it was when I found it, when it found me. I said, okay, what am I skilled at? I'm a, to a degree, gifted orator. I can speak. I'm going to do something called Questions White People Have. I grew up with so many white people. I know they have questions. I grew up in an affluent neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, went to this affluent, white, private school, wore a uniform, all boys' school called St. Mark's School of Texas. I said, I know my white brothers and sisters have questions and they don't have answers because they’ve never actually asked the questions. I've just heard the murmurs and the whispers. Great. I'll get three white people together, three black people together. We'll sit around the roundtable, clear fishbowl in the middle of it. My white brothers and sisters will pull out a question. They’ll ask it to the black people at the table. We'll have a conversation.

Problem, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Nobody can travel. Now what do I do? I'll call one of my white friends who can come down from Dallas to Austin, Texas; three-hour drive, straight shot, Interstate 35. She said, "Emmanuel, if I'm going to be there for you, I have to show up." I said, "Thank you. I greatly appreciate it." She shows up on Saturday. We're going to record on Sunday. She spends a night in my guestroom. We rehearse in front of her mom, in front of her sister, in front of my best friend. We're good to go. An hour and six minutes before call time on Sunday for the first episode of Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, I come downstairs. She's in my kitchen with tears in her eyes. "I can't do it. It's not right. You should it by yourself. They don't want to see me. They want to see you." Long story short, she had a change of heart. Now I'm like, what do I do? I got to do it myself. I still didn't want to do it myself. Transparency moment, I don't think I've said this. If I have, I haven't said it often. I called another white friend last minute. I said, "Hey, can you just stand in and ask me these questions? I'll answer them." Remember, Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, not Uncomfortable Monologue with a Black Man.

Zibby: [laughs] I was going to say that. I was just thinking monologue.

Emmanuel: The first episode was not supposed to be me talking for nine minutes, twenty-seven seconds. The first episode was also very likely only going to be one episode. If you listen closely, episode one, "Welcome to the first of hopefully many episodes." I didn't know what the heck I was going to do. That is how this all came to be, the ups, the downs, the highs, the lows. It was kind of ordained, a moment meant for me. I wasn't searching for it or seeking it out. The man met the moment.

Zibby: Wow. That's impressive. So you started doing all the videos. By the way, the quality of the videos, this isn't like you were just propping up an iPhone. They're highly produced. When Oprah shows up on episode three or four, whenever she came, I was like, of course she's going to show up because it already looks like an Apple TV set that you're doing this on.

Emmanuel: Let me interrupt you. First episode, the producer was my best friend who's an Olympic gold medalist in Rio Olympics 2016, a sprinter, anchored the 4x100 meter relay. The videographer was a wedding videographer, not some Emmy-award winning videographer. It was just my friend who's a wedding videographer and his wife. The first episode was shot in an area that I shot my 2018 birthday video. I wanted a white psych wall. I said, wait a second, if we're going to do this, we got to do it well. It looks very highly produced, but the reason it looks like that is because it was so simple because I paid for it. I paid for the first three episodes out of pocket all myself. I said this, people's eyes need to be satiated, if that's the right word. They need to be stimulated. Content is digested better if it's higher quality. I said, let me take the $1,500, let me do this with friends. These aren't pros. It's a track Olympic gold medalist and a wedding videographer and myself. We were the four people in the room for episode one. That was it. Episode two, I got my friend who's an interior designer. She was our stage manager. It was not a family affair, but it was a friendly affair of just me gathering a group of people who wanted to see the world be better and wanted to see the world change. We all garnered those first forty million views just kind of doing it.

Zibby: Unbelievable. There's something almost metaphoric in the fact that it was you against the white background. The black man, the white background, you've probably thought of this before. Thought that was genius of me. Let's go to the content of what you talk about and what you put in the book and all the rest, which by the way, was so much more than just a continuation of the videos. This is a history book. I was reading it before bed. I was just like, oh, I'm learning. I feel like I'm in school again. Also, memoir, highly engaging, but just so many facts. You must have had to go research. Do you just know all this off the top of your head? Tell me about what went into making the book.

Emmanuel: The book, I didn't want it to just be regurgitation of the episodes because that, to me, is, to a degree, lazy. It's also not enough. It's accurate, but it's incomplete. I wanted the book to be both accurate and fully complete. I wanted to give people a ton of information. Let me submit this to you because this is something I've had a challenge with. We learn our history too young in America. We learn our history too young. Why do I say this? I was taught about the Civil War before I cared about the Civil War. Don't teach me about the Civil War when I'm eleven years old and I can't even spell. Don't teach me about that stuff then. Don't teach me about the judicial system. Don't teach me about the three-fifths compromise. Don't teach me about things that have to do with my identity before I know my identity. I've never said that before, but I'm really having that moment of, we learn so much stuff so young that we didn't digest it.

Now when I was writing this book and researching more information, I was having those moments of -- I forgot the grandfather's clause. Prime example. Everybody knows the term the grandfather's clause, but we don't really know what it means. We don't remember what it means. For those listening, when black people were disenfranchised, they would put those Jim Crow laws together that would try to limit black people from voting. They would make you take literacy tests in order to vote after slaves became free. You had a literacy test. The problem is, black people couldn't read because they were slaves and you weren’t allowed to read. The problem was you were disenfranchising white people because some lower-class white people couldn't read. Rather than adjusting and removing literacy tests because that might have helped black people, we said, let's create the grandfather's clause. If your parents could vote, if your grandparents could vote, you can vote. Black people's grandparents couldn't vote because of slavery. I don't care about that in fifth grade. I care about that as a twenty-nine-year-old. That's when I care.

When I was rereading all the information as I was writing this book, I was like, we have this notion in our head that history is boring, outside of the few history majors that are walking the earth that we all are like, oh, those super nerds. We have this notion that history is boring when all you got to do is go watch the Hamilton musical and you'll be like, yo, history's kind of interesting. We just learn it too early. I kind of [indiscernible] and went all over the place. I do think those listening will really feel that. When I was writing this, so much of the stuff, it's so interesting. The fact that black and white people couldn't be married sixty years ago, that's so interesting. I think it's Loving v. Virginia. So much stuff is so interesting. I'll end like this, you have to know your past to know your future. You have to know where you came from to know where you're going. I think we have to do a better job of knowing where we came from.

Zibby: You're absolutely right. By the way, I was just helping my thirteen-year-old daughter study for an American history test. I had to go through all the things that happened around the 1760s, 1750s. I was like, huh, is that really what happened? When you get to be this age -- I'm forty-four, so this is even more embarrassing. I learned it in school, but it hasn’t really come up that much more since, and so all the details get a little foggy. Yes, I think knowing your history and also positioning -- history needs a rebrand. I think we should call history class amazing stories or something. I totally agree with you. You need the context. I'm also curious about -- I know so many people are watching you and listening to you. You're engaging people, everyone from police to just so many people about things that they're unwilling, perhaps, to look at or haven't thought about before. I'm wondering what you, deep down, believe is the potential for change. Do you think that the right people are listening? Do you think people can change? You asked that amazing question with the police when you said, "Do you think we'll ever get to a place where a young black child could look to a policeman as someone who's a safe haven?" The answer was sort of up in the air. What do you think?

Emmanuel: We have to make incremental leaps, steps, and then eventually bounds. Here's what we have to understand. The people that are on extreme sides -- my black brothers and sisters on extreme sides that are just, I hate white people because of what they’ve done and the history and I just will never forgive white people, we got to move off that fence. The white people on the extreme side of, racism doesn't exist, systemic racism doesn't exist, black people just need to get over it, things have been equal for fifty years now, there's not a problem, got to move off that fence. We all got to get away from our sides and get towards the middle because the truth of anything lies in the middle. The truth of most arguments, it lies in the middle. It doesn't hover on extremes. How can we move forward as a country, as a world, as a nation? We have to have real dialogue. The biggest thing for me, Zibby, and it's the simplest, conversations. I was talking to the group of police officers -- my latest episode, for those that are listening but haven't yet watched it, it's a group of twenty-five Petaluma police officers in Northern California, and predominately white. This a population of sixty thousand but that's less than one percent black. My first question I asked the officers was, "When's the last time you had a dinner, a conversation, with a group of black people?" Two officers that I asked said, "Honestly, Emmanuel, we never have."

Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing right with that either. Inherently, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't think it's malicious. You have to understand, if you're not going to expose yourself to a group of people that don't look like you, don't sound like you, aren't cultured like you are, then how do you expect to interact with them? However you think you're interacting with them, how can you think you're interacting with them properly if you don't even know the them that you're interacting with? I went to an all-boys' preparatory school. I told you this, high school. I didn't have girls in my school from fifth grade to twelfth grade. Didn't go to school with girls. Some perks to that. You don't have to worry about wearing cologne and looking good and all that other stuff, but there's some negatives. When I got to college, I was like, there are girls here. There's some women here. What do I do? I had to learn and relearn how to navigate, how to act, how to be. Don't be so aggressive. Don't be so hostile. Don't be so curt. I had to learn some things because I hadn’t been exposed on a daily basis to a large people group. It's the same thing. I don't even remember the question you asked anymore.

Zibby: That's okay. Whatever. It doesn't matter.

Emmanuel: Nonetheless, I think that's what we have to do to become better as a nation. We have to just have real conversations.

Zibby: So we'll get rid of all-boys' schools. That's the answer.

Emmanuel: [laughs] Basically.

Zibby: I worry. My son is at an all-boys' school right now. I'm like, what is he going to do when he gets face to face with women? Do you feel like you were behind the other guys when you got to college, or what?

Emmanuel: Yeah, but it's a quick learning curve. It also depends on -- I was still going to church on Wednesdays and Sundays. Then I have two older sisters. It's not like it was a completely foreign species, like, oh, my god, brain malfunctioning. I see someone with longer hair. I don't know what to do. That didn't happen. It was just different being in class. Now you got to figure out how to navigate differently. It's just different. I submit that it truly is the same thing with black and white people. Just because we're all people, no; Emmanuel Acho navigates differently around white people than he does around black people. He just does. We just have to understand that and move and navigate life accordingly.

Zibby: Wow. You must have written this book really quickly. How did you fit this in? You already have a busy schedule. You're hosting a show. You're all over the place. When did you do this?

Emmanuel: Well, I don't have a ton of fun right now. I have a ton of work. I did it from the last two weeks of June to first two weeks of August. That was like, hey, let's knock this out in six, seven weeks. That was before I was doing a lot of talking and public speaking. In my free time, I would just start notating the stories, notating the concepts. Where do I want to go? Here's the thing, though. I realize the end of something before I ever start it. What do I mean? 2015, I'm playing for the Philadelphia Eagles. I get a direct message on Instagram from a fan, Zibby. "Hey Emmanuel, if I get two thousand retweets, will you go to prom with me?"

Zibby: I saw that.

Emmanuel: I say, "If you get ten thousand, you got yourself a deal." I never thought it would happen. Here's what I also said. I said, "May the odds ever be in your favor," a quote from the famous movie Hunger Games. That's how it was ended. I said, in the event that she gets these ten thousand retweets, I want there to be a cool story, a cool response, so I ended with that. Long story short, Elizabeth Banks, the lead star of Hunger Games, ends up retweeting the story. I had gone to the end before I ever got to the beginning. When I was getting thousands of emails after my episodes, I was favoriting the ones that were really good questions. I said, in the event this ever becomes a book, I want to use these questions in the book because I want to be able to talk to real people and answer real questions. It was easier to write because as I was always thinking about it, I always thought, I don't want this to just be a moment of sizzle. I want it to be a moment of substance. Books are more substance. Spoken word is sizzle. I was always preparing for the potential.

Zibby: Interesting. Were there any questions you considered putting in the book or making an episode of your show and you felt like they were just too uncomfortable or you just didn't want to go there?

Emmanuel: The biggest place I don't want to go is politically. Some people are like, hey Emmanuel, why don't you bring on somebody on the hard-extreme end who doesn't even think racism exists? Then I submit this, Zibby. I say, I want to have an uncomfortable conversation, not an uncomfortable argument. If your mind was already closed, what am I going to do? I'm not here to bang on a door that's deadbolt locked. I'm there to knock on a door that's cracked open. If you're already closed-minded, it's not going to do me any good. I'm not sitting here trying to get into a yelling match. Racism is real! Zibby, if you were like, hey Emmanuel, the Earth is flat, I'd be like, okay, you're wrong, but you're entitled to your wrong opinion. People that are like, systemic racism doesn't exist, okay, you're wrong, but you're entitled to your own wrong opinion. We're not debating opinions. We're talking about facts. I'm not going to get into an opinion-based debate over factual matters. That's, to answer the question, what I've been asked most to do that I just don't bother with.

Zibby: Where is this whole thing going? I know it started, you didn't plan it. You just responded emotionally. Then you put this enormously brilliant whole thing together. It's already been expanding. Oprah's been on your show and put you on her list. The book's going to just blow up. This is probably releasing right after the book. I'm sure by then it will have already blown up. Where do you see this going? Do you have a vision? Are you going to be the president one day? How big? What do you see? What's your secret hopes and dreams?

Emmanuel: Great question. I think any answer would be too small. If you would've asked me on May 30th or May 31st, I never would've told you that I would've got a call from Matthew McConaughey, Oprah Winfrey, and Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, all within a month and a half. My mind can't fathom the reach in which this could have, nor do I want to. I've said this before. When I was a kid, you would lay a hundred dominoes, the black and white dominoes, and you'd push the first one in hopes that you would see a train of a hundred dominoes fall. It was just the coolest thing ever. The first domino, Zibby, didn't care about the hundredth. It just cared about knocking over the second one. I'm not worried about the two hundredth or hundredth domino. I'm just worried about the next episode. I'm worried about the episode with the police officers. Then I'm worried about the next one. Then I'm worried about the next one because I just want to keep making pockets of change, keep making pocket of change. Then I'll look up and be like, oh, this is pretty cool. So many people have been like, Emmanuel, have you not stopped to celebrate? Are you not super excited? I'm like, I don't have time. I got work to do. I'm going to stop and look back one day and reflect. I've had one waterworks, tear-jerking, god, thank you so much moment, but I don't have time. I don't have time to celebrate. I'll look back at the end, and I'll be grateful that I was used as a vessel in the moment. I don't have visions of where I want it to go. I just want to keep staying focused and true to the moment because I think our society will benefit.

Zibby: Did you feel like you had room for a calling before this happened? I was looking at your before-Instagram. I'm like, what was he up to before? It's not like you were doing nothing. You already had a whole -- singing and this and that. This came in and clearly has just ignited every sense of you. You're in it, you said earlier. Did you know there was room? Can it just happen? Did you long for something?

Emmanuel: Can it just happen for other people?

Zibby: I guess. Did you know that there was something that you wanted to do to make meaning and then this fell in your lap? Were you waiting for something? in other words.

Emmanuel: I wasn't waiting for this. I was trying to create content around love shows and create a crazy type of entertaining content. It was never this. Let me answer your question. There's a difference between your career and your calling. I think your career is what you're paid for. Your calling is what you're made for. Many people have heard that being said before. Your career is what you're paid for. Your calling is what you're made for. My career is sports. I was focused on my career, but I was still attentive to my calling. I got three calls from no-caller ID numbers during the course of these Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. The first one, Oscar award-winner Matthew McConaughey. He calls me. "Acho, McConaughey here. I want to be a part of your second episode." Matthew McConaughey. The second call, Oprah Winfrey. "Emmanuel, I love what you're doing. Would love to have a conversation," etc. The third one, commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell. "Hey Emmanuel, I just saw one of your episodes. I want to be a part of this conversation." I say that to say this. Your calling will call you. Pick it up. Your calling will call you. Make sure you pick up. My calling called me. I didn't dial any numbers. My calling just said, okay, Emmanuel, now is the time. Remember, I wasn't trying to do this alone. That's what people don't understand. I was trying to do this with anybody else, but I couldn't. I just still knew I had to do it.

Zibby: Last quick question, do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Emmanuel: Man, that's a really, really, really good question. I have tons of advice. To aspiring authors, I would say stay true to yourself. Stay true to your intention. When I first talked to Oprah, the very first question she asked me -- she made is sound way more elegant than I will. She said, "Emmanuel, what is your intention? Your intention will drive you." I said, "Oprah, number one, I want to change the world, and I actually believe I can. Number two, I want to be a catalyst for racial reconciliation through dialogue and conversations." My intention's not to get a lot of Instagram followers. My intention's not to get a lot of clicks. My intention's not to get a lot of fame. My intention is to change the heart of at least one person or at least change and open their aperture of understanding. To my potential authors, stay true to your intention. Don't be focused on selling the most books, selling the best book. Sell the book that is truest to you. That is the best book. Whatever it is that your intention said, this is what I want to do, that is what you do. Everything else will come. Lastly, there's a different between success and significance. Pursue significance, and success will come. Pursue success, and you may miss both. If you pursue significance, success will follow.

Zibby: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. This has been such a treat. I can't wait to watch your star continue to rise. I'm so glad we got to spend some time together.

Emmanuel: The pleasure was mine, my friend. Thank you.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Emmanuel: Bye.

Rachel Hollis, DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING

Zibby Owens: Hi, Rachel.

Rachel Hollis: Hi. How you doing?

Zibby: I'm good. How are you doing?

Rachel: Good. Thank you.

Zibby: Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." This is such a treat to get to talk to you. Your latest book, Didn't See That Coming, I feel like that is the story of my life and obviously for so many people, especially during this time. Oh, my gosh, best title ever pretty much.

Rachel: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Zibby: Obviously, there's so much in life that none of us can see coming. You've had a lot of twists and turns from a very, very young age starting with your brother's suicide, which you write about so poignantly, all the way up until now. When you decided to write this book, which part did you want to focus on the most? What did you say was, this is the book that I have to talk about X, Y, Z? What was it?

Rachel: It's interesting. I read something years ago that said that all authors are essentially writing the same back over and over. There's a central theme for every author that they just keep exploring from a bunch of different directions. I thought that can't be true for me because I've written fiction, I have cookbooks, and I have nonfiction, personal development, self-help stuff. I thought about it. I was like, oh, yeah, all my books have the exact same theme no matter what it is I'm talking about, which is, you can do this. You can do this thing. In this book, what I wanted to explore most was encouraging people who are going through a hard season or who are in the midst of something difficult that you can get through this. Not only can you get through this, but you can come out the other side of it as a better person than you went into it. In order for that to be true, you have to make a conscious decision that you are going to pursue the learnings in this, the wisdom in this, the information that you can glean out of it. Otherwise, you feel bitter or you get stuck or you don't know how to move forward because you become paralyzed by the pain that you're inside of.

Zibby: Wow. It's all so true. You wrote so beautifully to your point about how people can get through grief especially. So many people are grieving right now given the pandemic and obviously just for regular life as well. You had this whole section. I just wanted to read a tiny portion of it because it was so encouraging. I have recently been through a lot of grief myself, so this was particularly resonant for me. You said, "The grief over death is making them miss the life that's still there. I can't tell you how to grieve. That's an incredibly personal process that nobody's in charge of but you, but I can tell you something with absolute certainty. The person you lost would not want this for you. The person you lost would never ever want you to suffer over their absence." Then you say, "It's okay to be sad. It's okay to miss them. It's not okay for you to lie down and die too. You are still here, and there's a reason for that." Tell me more about that and how to really channel what you might know intellectually but then put it into practice emotionally.

Rachel: This, for me, shows up in two ways. One is, you know if you've read the book, there's a chapter in it where I talk about my parents. I have children. I cannot imagine what it felt like for my parents to lose their only son to suicide. I can't even fathom that, but I do know what it feels like to be the little sister who -- as a little girl, I felt like I'm not enough of a reason for them to keep living because they both, in different ways, just checked out. They weren’t present. Ryan died when I was fourteen. From the time I was fourteen years old, I truly raised myself. Nobody cared if there was dinner. Nobody cared if my homework was done. Everything that I figured out how to do, I figured out on my own. I really truly live my life in a way that asks how situations, even if they're bad, can be for me. I look back and I'm like, oh, that's why I'm a self-starter. That's why I'm an achiever. That's how I built my company or wrote these books.

It was because of having gone through that experience, but there's still a part of that that's deeply painful that feels like I was abandoned by these people who are supposed to take care of me. That effectively, I don't want to say destroyed, but really hurt the relationship I have with both my parents for the rest of my life. On the one hand, I am speaking about grief from that perspective. Then the other place that I come from is having done so much therapy for so many years about coming to terms with the loss of my brother and finding the bittersweet in missing him. When he first passed away -- grief, if you've experienced this, then you know this is true. Grief is an evolution. The grief that you feel when you first lose someone or when you first lose something that really matters to you is very different than the grief that you experience five or ten years later. I don't think that it ever goes away, but it does evolve. To have gotten to a place in my life where I can miss my brother but also really see that there's beauty in that missing, it's celebratory of his life.

I was very close to my grandparents. Those are two other people that I, all the time, am missing. In my house, there's pictures of my brother. There's pictures of grandma and grandpa everywhere. I talk to my kids about them. Last year, we lost my brother-in-law very unexpectedly. That was devastating for our whole family. I was cooking dinner the other day. My niece, she's a grown-up, she's walking through the kitchen. It was her dad that we lost. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, I got to tell you, every time I make this, I think of your dad." She stopped. Her eyes are really big. She's like, "Why?" She just was so starving for that story. I'm like, "Let me tell you this story about when I was a little girl. You dad made me this thing." Even though there's pain in that memory, there's so much beauty in those people that we've lost still being very present in our lives. If there's a way for people to get to that place, it is just such a better state to exist in than only feeling the painful emotions.

Zibby: It's true. I feel like people are sometimes hesitant to tell stories or bring up the person who's recently died for fear of upsetting the griever, which I feel like couldn't be further from the truth. You're already thinking about the person. It's not like, oh, I forgot about this horrible thing that happened, but because you brought up my brother-in-law, now I'm upset. I think that's a big misconception. By the way, going back to your parents sort of abandoning you, when you wrote about it in the book, about your Christmas holidays and watching the movie over and over again with your sister, oh, my gosh. Then how your husband thought that that was just something you enjoyed doing, but it came from this deep place. Anyway, my heart was going out to you.

Rachel: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Zibby: I actually recently interviewed an author named Hope Edelman who wrote a book called The AfterGrief. I don't know if you're familiar with it or not. It's about how grief that stays with you for your whole life ends up, as you just mentioned, sort of morphs in some particular ways. She followed a group of people for thirty-odd years and did a lot of research into what the lasting effects of grief are. One of the points is exactly as you had said. There is a silver lining to it even though it's horrific and you wouldn't want that lining if you could return it, but that you do have a different type of appreciation of life. Anyway, in case you're in the market for a new book to read.

Rachel: Yeah, thank you.

Zibby: Another thing that I was really struck by in this book is that you have built up such a reputation for yourself as sort of the healer to everyone. You've sort of taken on everybody's pain. You were so honest in this book about how that makes you feel, like the scene where you're out with your son. Somebody comes over to you and starts spilling out their most traumatic memories and you're like, um, hold on. [laughs] Tell me a little bit about that. You don't often hear people who have become big-deal leaders on the emotional front having to confront how that makes them feel. I was hoping you could just tell me a little more about that.

Rachel: It's so interesting. This is the thing that people have to understand. This was never my aim. I never in my whole life thought that this would be what I was known for, truly. In fact, if you look at my career as an author, I started writing fiction. I just loved to write. I wrote fiction. Then I wrote cookbooks. I never thought, oh, I'm going to be this self-help whatever. Then I had another author friend who prompted me who was like, "What would you say to women? If you were going to write nonfiction, what would you say to women?" My answer was Girl, Wash Your Face. It was my first nonfiction book. I put it out there. Just like every other book I've ever put out in the world, it had a slow start. I was like, oh, my gosh, five people read it. This is great. Then it exploded, millions. I want to say it sold five million copies. It's insane what happened. I was describing it to someone the other day. I said the past three years have felt like I'm riding a runaway horse and I'm trying so desperately to rein it in and get control of the journey. It's not always graceful. I don't always do it well. It's just felt like a really crazy experience.

Back before COVID, my company would throw a big women's conference. We'd have five thousand women come from all over the world for three days, an amazing event. In those settings, I'm very prepared to hold space for your pain. I'm very prepared to be in that with you and talk about the hard things and do the work. There is a way that you can mentally and emotionally prepare yourself for that kind of experience. What happened when the books exploded was that there were no boundaries anymore. People would truly come up to -- the thing I talk about in the book is a real experience, being at the grocery store with my son and a woman walks up with no "Hello. How are you?" Just immediately starts bawling and telling a very traumatic and upsetting experience as my little boy is standing next to me holding my hand. He's afraid. It's funny, but it's one thing when it's me. When it's me and I'm walking through an airport or whatever, let's go. I'm here for you. I'll do all the things. I will be present with you in that space. The times that it has felt out of control, and it's happened many times, is when I'm with my kids. That feels, to me, so inappropriate, especially because women are often telling stories that little kids shouldn't hear.

I didn't know how to handle that, truthfully. I had no idea how to process that. What I did was, I just didn't want to leave my house. I traveled quite a bit at that time. I would travel and be on the road. People would stop me all the time. Then I would go home and I wouldn't leave home because I was afraid that I wouldn't know how to handle it. It just felt so overwhelming. It took a lot of time to come to terms with that and to accept the responsibility of that. I do think it's a responsibility. I handle it now by believing if I am in public, then I am prepared to hold space for people. I worked really hard to get here, but I also believe that God and the universe gave me this opportunity. I want to take that responsibility with the measure of how big it is, I want to take that and do it well. If I'm in public, I'm like, all right, I'm here for you. When I'm with my kids now, I have learned to steer the conversation. I have learned to hold boundaries up. I make it really clear that it's not an appropriate time to talk to me about that thing right now.

Zibby: Wow. That's a lot to have to put on your shoulders just to walk out the door if you want to go run to the store or pick up some milk. That's just a lot that you have to be -- it's almost like some sort of an ambassador, like a ruler almost, like you're the president. Being a public figure I guess is what I'm trying to say. Maybe you're not in the mood that day. What if you're having a terrible day yourself?

Rachel: Honestly, there's an interesting thing. I have some friends who are high-profile figures. The unique situation that I'm in is that I think because I talk about so many personal things in my life, my readers feel like they're my friends. They don't think that there's anything weird about walking up and being like, oh, my gosh, Rach! Then they’ll tell me some story. It's almost like they feel like they're in the middle of a conversation with me already. There are definitely other friends I have who, they don't experience that. I try and look at that as a gift. This is the biggest, lamest namedrop that I could possibly do, but my best example of this experience is, I had the opportunity at the end of this year to speak for Oprah on her tour. It was a lifelong dream. She's my hero. It was just such a huge moment. I love this story because I've met so many people that I admired and have been really disappointed. I can tell you that Oprah exceeds every expectation you could possibly hope for. I did my keynote. I was backstage. She had welcomed me onto stage and hugged me when I was done. I'm like, okay, that's it. She's freaking Oprah. I've had my moment. I went back to my dressing room. I was there with my best friends. We're just like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing.

Someone knocks on the door and says, "Miss Winfrey would like to come see you. Would that be okay?" All of us in the room pee our pants. We're like, what? I'm in this teeny tiny dressing room. Oprah wants to come to me in this trashy room? She's the queen. Shouldn't I go to her? It was so wild. I'm like, "Yes, that would be just fine." I close the door. We start cleaning. When you were little, if your company was ever coming and the whole family just starts cleaning feverishly, we're shoving things under cushions. Get it clean! She comes into the dressing room and hung out with us for about fifteen minutes, which still blows my mind. There was this moment where she said -- I know this sound cheesy, but she looks into your soul. She's not human, first of all. She's a goddess. It's something so much bigger than a regular human being. She looks into my soul through my eyes. She's like, "How has this felt for you?" I said, "It's been really hard. I have had to ask myself a lot in the last year if this is something I really want." She touched my hand. I wish you could see me right now because I'm acting out this entire thing. Truly, I cannot explain. My best friends were all there. It was a divine moment in my life. There is no other way to put it.

She touched my hand. She looked me in the eye. She said, "Do you want this?" Nobody spoke for like ninety seconds. I felt like it was the universe asking me, are you willing to carry this responsibility? I said, "I do." She said, "Okay, but you have to understand what you're taking on because very few people will understand what it means to hold this for so many women. I understand what it means. Just know what you are signing on for." I was like, okay. [laughs] It was truly just one of the most amazing moments in my whole life, understanding that you really do have to look at it as, it's not about me. None of this is about me. It's about her. It's about the reader. It's about who might be helped. I'll tell you truthfully that I approach my work, always, if I'm going out to give a keynote, if I'm writing a book, always, my prayer is, God, let this help one person. One person. If one single person is helped by this thing that I am about to do, then it was worth the effort and the energy and the pain and all of it. It doesn't matter. I'm talking about me. We could be talking you or your listeners. Whether you're a teacher, if you're a stay-at-home mama, if you're a podcast host, whatever it is that you're bringing to the world, if your work can positively affect the life of another human, then what a blessing. What a gift. I'm willing to carry the hardship and stress of that if it means that I can be helpful to someone.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, that was amazing. I want to stop recording and just replay this five times for myself. That was amazing. Thank you.

Rachel: Good. You're so welcome.

Zibby: First of all, I can't believe you started that by saying it was a pathetic namedrop. That was the most inspiring -- [laughs].

Rachel: I always feel like, "Oh, this time I met Oprah," shut up, dude. Don't be that person. I met a lot of people that I've been like, oh, man, I wish they weren’t so lame. She was so wonderful. Not only that, but she talked to my friends and hung out with my friends and took pictures. She had no reason to do that, no reason whatsoever. I like to tell that story because I think it's good to hear that people are good.

Zibby: I agree, especially somebody like Oprah who's so iconic. For you to have this personal experience and to know -- sometimes you hear things about people. You're like, she seems great, but privately she's really awful or she's so rude to other women. Then you're so disappointed. I'm not surprised to hear that she's as authentic as she seems, but it's still nice to hear.

Rachel: Absolutely.

Zibby: Wow, that was a fantastic answer. Let's talk about time and how you deal with all of the things that you do being of service to basically anybody who has an issue in the entire country or world or whatever, dealing with all of your kids, writing books, running a business. How are you doing all of this? I don't want to talk about juggling. Just literally, how do you get through this?

Rachel: I actually just posted something about this last night on Instagram. I will tell you, I'm saying this and maybe it's not true, but I am one of the most intentional people you will ever meet. I am wildly intentional with my time. I want to say this to your listeners. This is a learned behavior. This is not something that I grew up having. I would say about ten years ago when I really started to grow my business and I really started to focus on pursuing the goals that were in my heart, I started to understand that I needed to be so effective with the hours that I had inside of every single day. You do that by, number one, knowing what your personal values are. Especially for women and especially for moms, we are often told by the world, by our family, by society what we are meant to value. I absolutely fell into that trap when I was a new mom and was first trying to figure it all out. I was trying to be this picture-perfect, Pinterest mom and throw these elaborate birthday parties and volunteer as room mom and do all this stuff. I felt so frustrated. I felt so bitter. I did not feel closer to my kids. I felt like I was sort of making other moms think that I was doing a good job, but that I wasn't really doing what I wanted to do with my own family.

The first piece is knowing what your personal values are. I tend to think that we should choose four to five things that we're really going to focus on. The key, once you know what your values are, is to say, anything that is not these values does not have a place in my day. For instance, one of my biggest personal values is growth. I want to learn. I want to grow. I am a voracious reader. I am constantly challenging myself. I'm trying to learn Spanish. I'm taking horseback riding lessons. I want knowledge. It lights my heart on fire. I don't even care what the knowledge is about. I just love to learn. That is really important to me. Someone else might say, my greatest personal value is showing up in my community and volunteering. They might then spend their time doing that. If you know what it is that you care about, then you can lay out your day to make sure that you have time to do the things you say you care about. Know what your personal values are. Be willing to say no to anything that doesn't fall into that list. If you saw my schedule right now, it might stress you out. It might stress lots of people out. Yes, I am very busy. Beyond the stuff that's inside of my work schedule is just -- I'm looking at my calendar right now as I'm talking to you. My calendar starts at five AM. I put things into my calendar like, this is your reading time. This is when you do your gratitude work. This is when your workout happens. This is when you're going to meal prep for your day to make sure that you're eating foods that are going to bless your body today. This is when you're going to go on your run.

It's all in there because in order to accomplish and make traction against your goals, both personally and professionally, you have to have a plan for when they're going to show up. I'm super intentional. I'm very focused on where I'm going. The other piece of this is that if you're going to take the time to figure all of this out and you say that you care about something and you say that you're putting it in your calendar, you have to show up for yourself. I have a personal rule that I do not break a promise that I make to myself. As women, we often will keep our promise to everybody else, but break the promise that we made to ourselves. Meaning, you said, man, I'm for sure going to get a walk in today because I know it makes my spirit feel so good and I love to get outside, but then someone needs you to do a favor. You're like, you know what, I'll not the do the thing that matters to me so that I can do the thing that you need me to do, which is how we get to the place where we're burnt out and stressed out. If you say that you are going to do something, you got to do it. You've got to hold yourself accountable to the things that you said you were going to do. Those are some really practical things that I do to make sure that I can accomplish all the things that I set out to do.

Zibby: This is amazing. You have bullet points for everything I ask. This is perfect advice. It's amazing.

Rachel: The thing is, I get a lot of the same questions on social or on Live or whatever.

Zibby: Oh, I'm sorry.

Rachel: No, no, no, don't hear me like that. What I mean is, I get a lot of the same questions from people in my community, not that I get the same ten questions, but I get the same one hundred questions. I try really hard to come up with answers that are helpful. Even for you, you're doing this podcast and you're helping people find information in the world. Oftentimes, someone will ask us how to do something. We think that the knowledge that we have -- you're like, oh, that's so simple. Anything I tell you would be dumb. Nobody wants to know how -- no, people want to know exactly how. I try really hard to pay attention to how I get the result so that when somebody prompts me, I'm like, great, I've got three things you can do right now.

Zibby: Wow. I'm going to put that on my list of things to do, having a million answers ready for when anyone asks me anything, not that anyone cares.

Rachel: Girl, don't say that. If you have listeners, they care.

Zibby: I'm joking. My one question about your really effective, intentional time management system is that you have lots of kids. So do I. They don't really care what's on my schedule sometimes. When they fall and need a Band-Aid or when they want to show me their art project, I stop everything. How do you interweave the complete unpredictability of having children with the need to be totally self-directed?

Rachel: Great question. I'll tell you that as I look at my schedule right now, I've got this chunk of time that starts at five AM and ends at six thirty, which is when the kids get up for school. Then there's a chunk of time that's just, breakfast, lunches. Get everything prepped. Get everything ready. Get the day going. Once they're settled, then I'm going to start my workday. I will tell you, because I'm the queen of ask for help, I have a nanny. I'm really blessed in that I have a nanny of four kids. I could not do the work that I'm doing if I didn't have her help. The kids' dad is as present as a father as I am as a mother, so definitely coparenting inside of the family. Then the other thing I would say is the schedule ends every day at five PM. Past five PM is clear. I know the things that I want to do because I'm really big on routine and ritual. Each one of my kids, there's a different bedtime routine that I go through with them. That's really important to me. I talked about, how do I want to show up as a mom? I freaking love teachers. I'm so grateful for teachers. If someone wants me to donate money or get cupcakes for the class bake sale, I am there. If you want me to volunteer my time, that is not a value. That's not a personal value that I have as a mom. My value with my kids is intentional time with them at home, so what happens in the morning, what happens at night, what happens on weekends. After five PM, it's clear again because that's just family time. That's kid time. By compartmentalizing my day like that, I am so much more productive with work. At five o'clock, I do not look at work. I'm not picking up my phone. I am not checking email. I am not on Slack because that time is for me and my kids.

Zibby: Wow. That's impressive and inspiring. Thank you.

Rachel: Just know, please know this took me years to get to this place. I would just make a little bit of progress over here. Then on that progress, I'd add another great little thing and another great little thing to get to the place that I am today. I don't think we go from zero to sixty overnight. I think that you just slowly try and weave in things that will be helpful to you. Then you build the foundation for the life that you want to have.

Zibby: That's great. If I could figure out how to cut out hours of emails after five PM, that would be very nice. [laughs] I'm working on it. I'm going to use the Rachel Hollis tools now. I feel empowered and all the rest.

Rachel: There you go. I know you're a reader. I just want to ask, have you read The One Thing by Gary Keller?

Zibby: I have not.

Rachel: Please put that on your list, especially as you're working on the show and you're trying to grow your platform, whatever that looks like, for people who are listening who are businessowners. Heck, you could look at it through the lens of having a better family. The idea in that book is Gary Keller, who is Keller Williams Real Estate, he talks about this idea that we all have this stuff. We have fifty million things that we want to do in our business, in our life. It helps you identify, what's the one thing that I could do that would make the rest of the list obsolete? If I pursue this one thing and I make traction against this one goal, everything else, it's like the tide coming into the harbor. All the boats rise. That's a really powerful tool, a really incredible read for anybody who feels like, oh, my gosh, there's so much going on. How do I even focus? The One Thing by Gary Keller.

Zibby: I'm buying it right this second. I'm on my phone as we're talking.

Rachel: Please do. You'll love it.

Zibby: It's in my cart. I'm checking out. Done. See, multitasking, there you go. [laughter]

Rachel: Perfect.

Zibby: This whole thing has been advice, but in terms of writing itself because we haven't talked too much about the actual writing, do you have advice to aspiring authors on how to get everything done or just any inspiring advice on that front?

Rachel: Yes. Honestly, I will give you a little tidbit. I got this request so often that I just did a podcast about this I want to say three weeks ago, four weeks ago. It is my most successful podcast of all time, which is wild. "The Rachel Hollis Podcast," it's called How to Write a Book. If you go look, it's just a few weeks old. It won't be hard to find. I share all of my wisdom. What it boils down to is, writing -- I don't care how much support you have from family and friends. I don't care if you don't have support. Writing is a really interesting thing because it is a solo endeavor. It doesn't matter what is going on in the world around you. You have to find the will to write down the words. I was at an author conference years ago. I was listening to a workshop given by Nora Roberts who has written ten million books. Someone raised their hand. They were like, "What's the trick? Tell me, how are you so productive?" Everyone's looking for the magic bullet or the thing that's going to -- can I buy something that's going to make this easier? or whatever. Nora said, "Yeah, I'll tell you how to finish. Sit your butt in the chair," except she didn't say butt. She said, "Sit your butt in the chair. Write the freaking words." She also didn't say freaking. This sweet, petite, polished older woman fully dropping F bombs was like, write the words. That's the trick. If you want this thing, there's a reason that not everybody does it. It's hard. You have to give yourself the permission to get to a first draft that's awful. You have to let yourself create. This is not just for writers. This is anybody who wants to create. You're going to have let your creation suck. If you don't let it suck so that you can get to the end of the first draft, you're never going to get to the polished book which comes in the eighth edit. Just let yourself have that freedom. Push yourself to finish. If you want all the other advice, go listen to the podcast.

Zibby: This is great. I wish I could interview you every day. [laughs]

Rachel: There you go. Here I am.

Zibby: Thank you. Wow. I hate to even end this, but I don't want to take too much of your time. I know I'm already over. Thank you so, so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and sharing all of your tips and tricks. I know there are a bazillion more in the book, Didn't See That Coming. Your story with Oprah is going to stay with me the rest of the day. It was just awesome. The work you're doing is amazing. It was great to be able to chat with you.

Rachel: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Zibby: No problem. Have a great day.

Rachel: You too.

Zibby: Thanks. Buh-bye.

Rachel: Buh-bye.

Hope Edelman, THE AFTERGRIEF

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Hope. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss The AfterGrief, which I'm trying to show here, Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss. It's such a pleasure to be with you today.

Hope Edelman: Thank you so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Would you mind please telling listeners what your latest book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Hope: My first book and several of my books were about early mother loss. I wrote a book about the long-term effects of losing a mom when you're a child, teenager, or young adult because that was my story. I was seventeen years old when my mother died of breast cancer. There were no books for girls like me or adults like me who had lost a mom when she was younger. Then over the years, I started living more into my own experience. I discovered that even decades later this early loss was still coming up for me in new and different ways, some that I could anticipate or expect and others that just blindsided me. At that point, I knew lots of women in the Motherless Daughters community. I'd met a number of their brothers. I had a lot of friends who had lost fathers or siblings. They were telling the same story that the experience of grief was much more protracted and, in fact, extended over a lifetime in some ways.

That's how The AfterGrief came out. That's what I'm calling the period that comes after that acute phase of grief when we're really wondering how we're going to make it through every day without this person in our life. Then slowly, slowly, the intense pain starts to recede. We enter this next phase where we're adjusting and adapting to the loss constantly over time. That's what I call the aftergrief. I interviewed eighty-one people who had lost parents, siblings, close friends, or romantic partners, most of them before the age of thirty, and then asked them how that kept showing up for them ten, twenty, thirty years later. In my case, thirty-nine years since my mother and sixteen years since my father died. They're still a big part of my life. I think of them all the time. I miss them from time to time, sometimes very painfully still.

Zibby: It doesn't matter how much time has gone by. If you're missing something that you perceive to be so central to you, it never really goes away. Does it? It doesn't really ever disappear.

Hope: I don't think so. That's why I think that expecting things to last a certain amount of time or using measurements of time often backfires on us. I'm frequently asked, how long before I move from the acute phase of grief into the aftergrief? People want to have an idea on what calendar date they're going to cross the threshold. I can't answer that question for anybody. It's so individual. For some people, three months. For some people, six. For some people, two years. It depends on so many factors. I think once we release ourself from this idea that there's going to be an end point on the calendar and learn how to just move with the ebbs and the flows and think in terms of intensity and duration rather than an end point, it's a much kinder and gentler way to move forward without someone important in our life.

Zibby: You point out so aptly that most employers give people maybe no time, maybe two weeks. You think you're supposed to be back on your feet. Of course, that's impossible. Two weeks is nothing. You can barely put your shoes on two weeks later.

Hope: Oh, Zibby, the average is three days of paid leave.

Zibby: Three days, oh, my gosh.

Hope: That's the average for the American worker, three days of bereavement leave. Then you need to take personal days, sick days, or if you have mental health days, maybe, at your company, or you have to start going into unpaid time off in order to sufficiently mourn the person who died. In many cultures, three days isn't even enough time to have the funeral because there are preparations and there are rituals that you need to go through. People are going into unpaid time off just in order to mourn their dead, which I think actually is a tragedy in this culture.

Zibby: Not to mention the fact that you're so cognitively impaired when you are in the intense beginnings of grief, for the most part. The idea that you have to go through all that sludge and then perform at work as if you were at the top of your game is close to impossible. It's not even good practice for the companies to have employees who are a fraction of themselves. If you just gave them a little bit more time, it might help. Anyway, I don't know why I've even gotten into this.

Hope: For some people, work is a really welcome distraction because they can compartmentalize really well. Then they feel like, okay, I can just leave the intense distress over here. I can go to work and get some relief and then come back. Not everybody can do that. Those who can't, I think, shouldn't be expected to.

Zibby: You're right. You're absolutely right. Work can be a total refuge. You had so many passages that I found so interesting. You wrote, "A terrible disconnect exists between what the average person thinks grief should look and feel like -- typically, a series of progressive, time-limited stages that end in a state of closure -- and how grief, that artful dodger, actually behaves. This means a whole lot of people getting stuck in the gap between what they’ve been told to expect after someone dies and what they actually encounter when it happens." I loved your expression the artful dodger so much that I wrote it here in blue Sharpie because it's such a good description. It's something that comes in and out and creeps. It's that creeping feeling. You don't know where it's going. It's so sneaky, almost.

Hope: Right. I'm also a child of the seventies. I grew up on Oliver. Remember the Artful Dodger?

Zibby: Yeah, me too. I knew where it came from. [laughs]

Hope: That little boy with the black hair dancing in the streets of [indiscernible] London.

Zibby: I'm pretty sure my brother was the Artful Dodger in that play. Now I might be wrong, so forget it. You also wrote that "Mourners who are able to make meaning of their experiences exhibit lower levels of complicated grief and better mental and physical health later on. In fact, making meaning after a trauma is the most powerful predictor of good long-term outcome among adults." I wanted you to discuss this notion of complicated grief versus whatever the opposite is, regular grief.

Hope: Complicated grief is a term that's used to describe about fifteen percent of mourners who can't seem to get out of that acute phase of grief. It's like the grief channel gets stuck on high or it gets stuck twenty-four/seven. They're not able to compartmentalize and go to work and come back. They're at a high level of distress and can't turn the nob down. It's now believed that those are typically people who have preexisting susceptibility to anxiety or depression. That gets really amped up when somebody they love dies. It is about fifteen percent of the population. The rest of us, over time, figure out how to adapt on our own. I think there are still mourners' needs. I would even create the mourners' bill of rights, things that we really need and deserve in order to adapt well on our own. Not everybody needs therapy. Not everybody is a talker and needs to talk it out. I think we all need some form of self-expression. We all need some sense of safety and security in order to grieve, which is why some people experience postponed or delayed grief. Complicated grief is a known category within the bereavement field. It affects about fifteen percent of people. They really do need some professional assistance in order to work through whatever trauma they may have that's lingering or feelings of remorse or guilt or anxiety or depression that needs to be addressed concurrently with their bereavement needs.

Zibby: I'm actually surprised. I felt like the statistics on what percent of the population has anxiety or depression would make me think that far more than fifteen percent would have complicated grief. I don't know what the rates are off the top of my head.

Hope: They say complicated grief. That's a term in the bereavement world to explain the people who are really at the highest level of distress and can't get out of it on their own, but I think everyone's grief is complicated. You had a difficult relationship with that person. It can be complicated because you have children to take of and you need to attend to their needs over losing a grandparent, for example, or a mom or a dad, and don't have time to attend to your own. Those are complications that can arise with grief. A number of people who have anxiety and depression can manage it on their own or are already managing it when grief comes. This fifteen percent, typically, it's like the volume knob gets turned all the way up, like I said, and they're not able to turn it down on their own or with the assistance of the people they already have on their team.

Zibby: You mentioned how much therapy and talking can help, but that obviously some people are not talkers. What if you have someone who ends up in the fifteen percent who doesn’t find talking helpful? How do you help that person if therapy doesn't help?

Hope: I recommend that anyone in the fifteen percent work with a bereavement professional or especially a trauma-informed bereavement professional if the loss was due to a traumatic form of death like a suicide or a homicide or an accident that was disfiguring. Sometimes really watching someone suffer for a long period of time is traumatic for us. There's something called shock trauma which is when something happens very suddenly and unexpectedly. There's also a category called strain trauma which is taking care of someone or watching someone who's ill deteriorate over a long period of time. I would recommend almost anyone in the fifteen percent who feels like they might not be able to -- they can decide, is that for six weeks they're too sad to get out of bed? That's serious. Is it six months later they still can't concentrate at work because they're still having images or flashbacks about how the loved one died? Those might be examples of complicated grief. I think that everyone needs a form of self-expression. It doesn't have to be talking. Some of us are talkers and we don't have anyone who will listen. People shut us down. They don't want to hear. Especially months later, they feel like we should be over it, which is why the introduction to the book is called Getting Over Getting Over It. I think we just have to get past this idea as a culture that grief is something we get over. Forms of artistic expression or physical activities are also terrific ways to externalize our feelings, whether we're doing it through cardio or we're doing it through dance or writing. Writing and journaling is known to be a really excellent way of helping people release and process the emotions that come with grief.

Zibby: I think reading too. I know it's more of a receptive type of act versus productive. I think taking in other people's stories and having that in your head make sense with your own can help.

Hope: I think so. I think that's why certain book clubs can be really helpful if people are really responding to the material or reading book like The AfterGrief and then talking about it with somebody. That's bibliotherapy and a form of talk therapy. You just need a compassionate other that you can confide in. It's really important, really, really important. All the research shows that -- this was one of the most fascinating things I learned when I wrote this book. It was a subset of social psychology. It's also a form of psychology called constructivist psychology. It's about how we make sense of the world around us. This is how we make meaning. We do it by creating a story that tells what happened and that makes sense to us. Sometimes that's hard when someone dies if we don't know all the facts or we don't really understand what happened or why or we weren’t there to witness it and we have to piece it together from other people's accounts. That can take a while.

We need to create a story that makes sense to us emotionally and cognitively. There's something called the story development phase after a death where the survivors piece together the story to make sense of it. Oftentimes we find that even within a family, members don't have the same story to explain what happened. They may make a different meaning out of the loss as a result. We see that a lot when a parent dies. Siblings have different stories about what happened and what it meant to them and what it means to the family as a whole. After you create that story, you really need to be able to tell it in some way, whether it's writing it out as a memoir or putting it in your journal or talking to a friend or talking about it in therapy. The confiding part of story development is extremely important, psychologists have found, for people's adjustment over time. You have to be able to share that story in some way, whether it's with one person or the public at large.

Zibby: Maybe this is why I post on Instagram all the time when I'm going through grief. I'm so mortified by it now. That's how I process everything. I know I'm not alone in that.

Hope: Social media gives us an opportunity to confide. Even if we're doing it with a long list of strangers, we are still putting it out there in the world in some way and getting some feedback.

Zibby: I was also so interested in your book that you went back to the women who you had interviewed years and years ago for your Motherless Daughters first book. I loved the image of you rooting through files and being like, who can I google and find information about at this point? You reunited with, I think you said something like twenty or fourteen or something like that of the original crew and then interviewed them along with other people. What were your main findings?

Hope: That was something else. I felt like the Edleman PI firm for a while trying to track down these women. It had been twenty-seven years since I had first interviewed them for Motherless Daughters. A lot of their last names had changed. They had gotten married or they'd gotten divorced. A few of them had passed away. Some of them, I just couldn't locate. It wasn't really that sophisticated, to be honest. My private investigating firm was not really that high level. It was mostly Google and Whitepages and Facebook and LinkedIn. A couple of the women I had kept in touch with over the years. I was really young. I was twenty-eight years old living in New York. This was before the internet. I had found these people by putting an ad in the back of The Village Voice or word of mouth. I traveled to a couple other cities. These women had now dispersed all over the world twenty-seven years later. I had sat down with them one on one and taped the interviews. Some of the interviews went on for two, three, four hours, really extensive, in-depth interviews. Then I had to use portions of it in the book and kept in touch with some of them after the book came out. They were all pseudonyms in the book.

I couldn't not find, when I was writing The AfterGrief, any studies that had tracked people over decades also to see how their stories had changed and evolved. When I say we make a story of the loss to make sense of it, that story, it's always in motion. It's always in a state of evolution. We're going to reach a point in our development later when we're going to look back at those same set of facts and we really see them differently. New information might come in. We might meet someone that tells us something about our loved one that we didn't know that maybe changes our perspective a bit. I was really interested. How do stories change over time, stories of loss? There weren’t any studies. No studies tracked people longer than about seven years at the most. That's because it's expensive to have a study that lasts that long. It's hard to keep participants in it for that long. There are all kinds of scientific reasons why those studies would be difficult to maintain. I couldn't find anything that tracked people over decades. Then I remembered, oh, I have all these transcripts of interviews and tapes from these interviews that I did with the original Motherless Daughters. There were ninety-four of them. I managed to find about eighteen without doing too much work, a couple days up to weeks of searching for them. I located eighteen of them and was able to reach them through emails or through LinkedIn or through Facebook. I think seventeen of them agreed to be reinterviewed.

I reconnected with a number of them in person because they still lived in New York. I flew out to New York. I sat down with them again twenty-seven, twenty-eight years later, and the rest of them by Skype or FaceTime, always seeing each other. It was extraordinary. It was extraordinary to see each other again after all this time. I learned that their stories were very dynamic. Obviously, they changed a lot. Most of these women had been in their twenties and thirties when I first spoke with them. Now they had had very rich and full lives. They'd been married. Some of them had been divorced. Some of them had children or they were single moms. A number of them had lost their fathers as well by that point or had other major losses in their lives. I said, just as I had the first time, "I'm just going to ask you to tell me your story of mother loss. Start wherever you'd like. Tell me the story." The second time, I said, "As if we've never talked before. I want to see what your story looks like now or sounds like now." I asked the same kinds of questions I had the first time, but not leading questions. I was just asking them to fill in some part of it that I thought could be flushed out more. Then we sat down together or separately but together and looked at the original transcript and looked at the one that came several decades later.

It was really fascinating to see which parts of the story that had been so important to them when they were younger didn't even show up on the later version and which parts did show up almost verbatim because it had been important parts that they'd been telling over the years, so they were telling it exactly the same way. What really struck me, Zibby, was how many of them talked about that first interview as a watershed moment in their story. I think it was, for many of them, the first time they had been able to confide in someone. They had been carrying a story for all these years. People had told them, you should be over it by now. It's in the past. Don't wallow. Don't dwell. Family members maybe didn't want them to talk about it or had silenced them, in some cases very deliberately. It was the first time that someone said, I want to hear your story, and I want to hear all of it. I'm going to give you hours to tell it. Quite a few of them said, that interview was a real turning point for me. It was when I feel like my healing really advanced or, in some cases, really began because somebody wanted to hear it. I didn't have to carry it alone anymore.

Zibby: Wow. That must have made you feel really good.

Hope: It did, but all those interviews helped me as much as they helped them because I was on the same journey that they were. I was as thankful to all of them as they were to me. Those original interviews were really more of a conversation than a Q&A.

Zibby: If there is somebody who has recently lost a mother, or say in the last five years, knowing what you have researched about the aftergrief, what can they expect in twenty-some-odd years?

Hope: You can expect that there will be certain moments when that loss feels almost fresh and new and painful again. That's because they might be experiencing it in a new way. There's a category of grief that I identified in this book that I call new old grief. That's when we experience an old loss in a new way. We can't grieve the loss of the person in this capacity until we get there. For example, I was seventeen when my mom died. I was thirty-three when my first daughter was born. There was absolutely no way I could grieve my mother's absence as a grandmother or as a resource to me as a new mom when I was seventeen. I couldn't even have those emotions when I was pregnant with my daughter. Although, I felt them coming. I really could only miss her that way and understand what she had lost when my daughter was there in my arms, healthy. It was sixteen years after my mom had died. Even after all the work I'd done, you'd think that I, more than anyone, wrote this book, have been traveling the world talking about mother loss, that I would have a handle on this. It turned out that, no, I was no different from anybody else. I was still mourning the loss of my mom as a new mom in a way that I couldn't before.

Then another big one, and this is a big transition for women too, is when you reach and pass the age your mother was when she was died. If your mom died young, most of us are going to do that. I've worked with women. I'm also a grief and loss coach. I've worked with clients whose moms died when they were twenty-nine, thirty-five. My mom was forty-two. This is young. Forty-two was a really wonky year for me. I was like, wow, I'm as old as my mom was. When I was seventeen, she seemed so old. Forty-two is not very old. Then I turned forty-three. That was like, whoa, I'm older than my mom got to be. My inner relationship with her and my inner representation of her really needed to shift, especially as I got even older and then I'm looking back at her. I think women who have lost their moms just a few years ago can be aware that that's ahead. I'm creating resources, and there are resources that exist. I'm actually working with people now who help create rituals to offer free templates for a way to honor reaching your mom's age and passing it and also for acknowledging death anniversaries every year, particularly significant ones like the first, the tenth, the twentieth, almost like wedding anniversaries.

We have ways to acknowledge wedding anniversaries, like a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, but we don't have any way to acknowledge, wow, my dad or my mom has been gone for twenty years. That's a long time. I want to do something. I don't know what. There's nothing in the culture that we can do. If you have a culture within American culture, there may be some kind of ritual that your family might perform like a Day of the Dead celebration or ceremony. If you're Jewish, you can light a candle. Once we're done with a funeral in American culture, there really isn't a whole lot of ritual for us to connect with, to maintain those connections, and to bind the past, the present, and the future for a sense of continuity and allow that person to walk forward with us in a meaningful way. I know there are a number of initiatives happening now, especially in the COVID era, to help people through these transitions. My hope is that they will extend to the larger culture over time.

Zibby: I hope so. I feel like there's such a lack. You're so right. Everybody at some point or another -- I guess maybe not every single person. Almost every single person goes through losing somebody at some point in their lives. Yet there's not that much. There are experts like you. There are obviously books on grieving and things like that, but that's not enough. Your message, your ability to scale it, is so important, and having things be a part of life as opposed to -- we all know, okay, we go to a memorial service. Then what? There should be a hundred percent more goalposts and ways that the community can help you too. I'm not sure if I mentioned in an email, but we lost my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law both within six weeks this summer. I have my husband, who's thirty-eight, and my sister-in-law, who's thirty-three, they’ve been living with the kids and me this whole time. We've been going through this process together. Especially in COVID times, there's no community that you can be a part of. It's all virtual. Maybe a cousin will check in on text, but it's not like what you had before. There are so many, many, many people who are going through this right now, not just for COVID, but in so many ways. What would you say to that, not my story itself, but the probably millions of people who can't be with somebody who's grieving or feels they're doing it more or less alone?

Hope: I know. This is so important right now. It's really important. A hundred and twenty years ago, grieving was a social phenomenon. People came together. The village gathered to mourn the passing of one of their own. Our facsimile of that now that has survived 120 years of Western culture is the funeral and the eulogy and the memorial service and, in some cases, the celebration of life. It doesn't extend much beyond the event itself, but it's something because it brings people together. They sit and they listen to stories. They share stories. They even laugh about warm and funny memories that they can share. It's much harder to do that now. I think the Zoom funerals and Zoom memorials don't really fulfill the need that especially the mourners have for human companionship and human touch. That said, they do offer an opportunity for people who can't physically get to a funeral to still be part of the village, people who can't afford to fly on short notice or can't leave children or can't leave work and otherwise would not be able to take part in the ritual. My hope is that we get back to in-person gatherings and memorials as soon as we can, as soon as it's safe, but that we also livestream them so that the people who can't make it can still be part of that village, and the village is more expansive. Our villages now are dispersed. They're not all in the same geographic perimeter. Our villages are spread out all over the world in some cases. We want to find a way to bring them together.

People have asked me or said, we've had to postpone the funeral or memorial for our loved one who died, and not just to COVID. People are dying of all other causes as well in the past nine months. They’ve said to me, what do you think? It may be another year before we can do it. I said, doesn't matter. Where's the law that says the celebration of life has to occur within the first week or two after a death, or the first month? There really is no written guideline or mandate that says we have to do it within a certain period of time. Again, I think we have let go of our idea of the calendar structure and say, we'll do it when we can. It's really important. I say, if you can't do it for another two years, people are still going to remember your loved one. They're still going to have stories of the person who died. We're going to find out what it means to us to come together a year or two later instead of doing it right after. We might find, in some ways, that it's actually richer and more meaningful. I don't know because we haven't tried it yet. I think it's really important that we do it no matter how long we have to wait.

Zibby: It would be nice if each year on the anniversary or the birthday or the death or something that there was an event or something that marked it, not just for you. I think it's great, all you're advocating for and all the rest. Tell me a little more about your work as an author on top of a researcher and coach and grief counselor. Now you're doing all these live seminars. I saw on Instagram you have a new six-week course or something coming up. Tell me a little bit about that and then also when it is you managed to fit all of this into your life.

Hope: I do offer online courses and online support groups now. This is kind of an offshoot of the retreats that I was leading in person. Claire Bidwell Smith, author, therapist, friend of yours, and I in 2016 started offering live retreats for motherless daughters who really wanted to meet other women who could understand their experiences as adults. We started in Ojai, California, with twenty-three women. That grew into a whole company that I'm now moving forward. Thirteen retreats have been done, one of them virtually, twelve of them in person. We do ones for women who were children and teenagers when their moms died. I've done one for women who were just in their twenties, a couple for women who were adults when their moms died. The needs of those groups are very different. When COVID came, I started moving into more online offerings. Yes, I do offer some online courses. I also do individual and group coaching.

How do I fit it in? My kids are older now. It would've been almost impossible to do it when they were younger at this level because not having had a mom after the age of seventeen, I was really committed to being a mom who was present and gave my kids as much of me as possible. They're now twenty-three and almost nineteen. My youngest one just started college in September. I'm able to dive more fully into these kinds of offerings. It just happened to coincide with COVID and this incredible need for grief awareness and grief education and grief advocacy. It is a little bit of being at the right place at the right time. Maybe I should say the right place at the wrong time because nobody would've wanted to think of COVID as the right time, of course. There's an expanded need for this work. I'm just trying to fill those gaps.

Zibby: Excellent. Do you have any advice -- I'm going to ask two questions -- any advice to aspiring authors, particularly of your type of work that involves a lot of research and more analytical thinking mixed with memoir, and also to those who have a relationship with grief that they continue to wrestle with?

Hope: In terms of writing, I write straight memoir too, short pieces and long form as well. This book is a hybrid. This book integrates my own story with research. I became, in a way, someone who tried to decode my own experience and understand it. It combines research, interview, and personal writing. I find it difficult to maintain a really solid writing schedule, and so I binge-write. I'll go away for four or five days. I'll take everything else off my calendar. That's how I've written most of my books. I've just had to binge-write them. Same thing for this book. The majority of this book was written between February and June of this year because COVID took everything else off my schedule. I just sat down at my dining room table day after day after day and worked on the book. I can multitask like a ninja, but I can't always focus on writing to the extent that I need to if I've got three or four other things going on. I tell people, whatever works for you. If you read that Stephen King gets up every morning at five AM and writes for four hours and you feel somehow less than because you can't do that, don't worry. My circadian rhythm is to write late at night. I do my best writing between five and ten PM. I can do all my administrative tasks during the day and then write between five and ten or, like I said, I just go away and binge-write. Again, it's a matter of finding what works for you.

When my kids were young, I couldn't always go away for four or five days. Occasionally, I was able to negotiate with my husband at the time that he could take the kids from -- he'd pick them up from school on Friday. I would drop them at school Friday morning. I'd take off. There was a hotel in Ventura, California, an hour and fifteen minutes away, which was just far enough away that I could get home easily in case of emergency, but they would not be dropping by for dinner if the kids were crying that they missed me. It was the perfect distance. They knew me there. She's back. The writer's back. I went one weekend every six weeks, maybe, from a Friday morning until a Sunday at three o'clock. I got a late check-out. I would bring food into the room and eat all my meals there and just sit at the desk and write. That's how I wrote Motherless Daughters. That came out in 2006. My kids were five and nine when that book came out, so they were probably four and eight when I was doing those weekends there. That's what worked for me. Now I have more time to write, but other, more responsibilities. Your other question was about people who were having trouble with their grief. Was that it?

Zibby: Yeah, or just still trying to get a handle on it.

Hope: There's no right or wrong way to grieve. There's only your way to grieve. If someone says, I'm having trouble with grief, I first ask them, what are your expectations of what grief should look like and what it should be? Let's deconstruct those at first and see if you're holding yourself to a standard that maybe isn't one that you can meet for various reasons. A lot of people, especially men, think they haven't grieved because they haven't had these outward displays of emotion that we normally associate with grief. Some women, too, have said to me, I don't feel like I cried enough. I don't think I grieved my person. Someone says to me, I never grieved the death of my mom or dad when I was young. I said, what do you mean by you never grieved it? They say, I didn't cry enough. We want to look at that. I say, I firmly believe that we grieve to the best of our ability at any point in time. Maybe at that point in time your ability was very limited because you didn't feel safe or, if you were a child, you didn't have adults around you to help support you in your grief. Maybe you had other survival needs that were more pressing at that moment and you couldn't focus on your own emotions because you were taking care of other people or you had a demanding job that had to support your family. Men often say to me that they feel they didn't grieve because they didn't cry.

In fact, there's so much more research now about the difference between how men and women grieve. I see this among spouses. I see it among partners and siblings. They don't really understand each other because men don't typically have these -- or the masculine way of grieving, I should say. About fifteen to twenty percent of women grieve in a more masculine style. Fifteen to twenty percent of men grieve in a more feminine style. The feminine style is reaching out and talking, emoting, showing your emotions. The male grief patterns are more about working through your feelings by doing, which is why some cultures have the women sit in a room with other women and cry for days in a row and have the men plan the funeral. Working through the details, for the men, is a way that they are processing their emotions around grief. Men tend to want to fix things or solve problems and work through their grief that way. Women don't always recognize that that's what the men are doing. Men often don't understand why the women can't pull things together and be more instrumental and need to talk about it all the time. It's just different patterns of grieving, but they're both working through their feelings of loss.

Zibby: Wow. Hope, thank you so much for chatting today. I'm going to share your episode far and wide for those many people out there who need it. Thank you for all the research and the personal stories and everything that went into The AfterGrief and for creating this concept so that people who are continuing to be sad for the rest of their lives know that there's a reason why and they're not doing anything wrong.

Hope: I just want to also emphasize this doesn't mean you're going to be grieving for the rest of your life. It just means you're going to be remembering and thinking about it occasionally, missing that person because they were really important to you. They will continue to be important to you.

Zibby: Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time.

Hope: Thank you so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Buh-bye.