Brooke Fossey, THE BIG FINISH

Zibby Owens: Brooke Fossey was once an aerospace engineer with a secret clearance before she traded it all in for motherhood and writing. She's a past president and an honorary lifetime member of DFW Writers' Workshop. Her work can be found in numerous publications including Ruminate Magazine and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut novel, The Big Finish, was published from Penguin/Berkley. When she’s not writing, you can find her in Dallas, Texas, with her husband, four kids, and their dog Rufus. She still occasionally does math.

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

Brooke Fossey: I'm so excited to be here.

Zibby: Can you please tell listeners what The Big Finish is about? Congratulations on your debut novel. It's really exciting.

Brooke: Thank you. The Big Finish is about an eighty-eight-year-old named Duffy Sinclair. He's living his last days in peace at Centennial Assisted Living except it's all disrupted when his roommate's troubled granddaughter climbs through their bedroom window. He has to reassess his legacy and his past and make some decisions as chaos ensues.

Zibby: I was so interested that you would choose to tell a story from the point of view of an eighty-eight-year-old man. Tell me about that. How did you come up with the idea for this book?

Brooke: I always say I have an eighty-eight-year-old man living inside of me somewhere. I'm like an old [indiscernible/laughter]. Truly, I came up with the idea when I was visiting my grandpa at the assisted living. I would bring all of my kids. Like you, I have four children. It was chaos. It was controlled chaos. I did a lot of just collecting them, trying to make sure they didn't run away. I was inspired because everyone there, despite their age, had such rich histories and such fantastic personalities. I decided they all deserved a book. More than that, they deserved to be the heroes of the book. That was the seed. I loosely based my main character off of my grandpa. Josie, who's troubled but also brings a lot of joy, is kind of my kids, basically, is how it happened.

Zibby: I feel like a lot of trouble and a lot of joy is a good description of basically any kid. [laughs]

Brooke: A hundred percent.

Zibby: I saw the picture of you with your four kids seeing your book in a bookstore for the first time on Instagram. That was so great. How exciting.

Brooke: I had one teenager that was underwhelmed by it all, but what are you going to do? [laughs]

Zibby: I have two almost thirteen-year-olds. I relate to that montage. Did you give your grandfather the book? Did he get a chance to read it?

Brooke: You know what? He passed before I had finished. In fact, I think I may have finished a draft, but he did not get to see it published. I know he's smiling down on me. He's probably pretty proud.

Zibby: What was the process like writing this novel? Why write a novel now? Where did that come from in your life?

Brooke: It's really funny. I was an engineer by profession. I got two degrees in it. I worked at Lockheed on the joint strike fighter which is a [indiscernible] thirty-five plane. Then I started having a bunch of kids. After four of them, I decided I was going to stay home. I really am glad that I made that decision. At the same time, I was slowly going insane because I had four kids in five years. It was a little bit of luck here. During a naptime, I opened up my computer and I started writing. I couldn't stop. I would look forward to these naptimes because I would start going into a different world. I finished a couple books. I started to practice the craft and really get serious. It took me about ten years to get here, but it's been fun. It's basically a very late-in-life passion that I discovered.

Zibby: Wow, that's amazing. I feel like such a waste of space when I talk to so many authors like you who use their kids' naptimes to write books. I emailed. Why did I waste all those naps? I tried to catch up on thank you notes or whatever else I was doing, bills. Everybody else is sitting around writing beautiful novels or practicing the craft. [laughs]

Brooke: Well, you should see my house during that. I could've been doing something else also productive. That was my outlet. It was fun for me.

Zibby: That's awesome. How has it been? I know this is such a crazy time in the world, A, and to have a book come out, B. What has this whole process been at this stage having worked for so long to get this out into the world?

Brooke: There's been an expectation gap, obviously. I'm glad that my family and I are very adaptable. We've just kind of rolled with it. I mean, what are you going to do? You just have to accept it and keep moving. It was disappointing. We canceled the parties. We canceled all sorts of event. Then I learned how to use a lot of technology. I did more online stuff than I ever imagined. I'm well-equipped now at the house. Although, you couldn't tell it by looking at me at the moment.

Zibby: I know. I'm like, if we ever do go back to real life, now I have all these skills. Throw me on a platform and let me find my way out. Oh, my gosh. After working on that book, are you working on another novel? Are you constantly thinking of new ideas? How does the writing process look for you?

Brooke: I am working on another novel. It's cooking. I'm what they call a pantser. I don't like to plot. I just like to explore and surprise myself as I write. I hope that shows up in my writing because as you read, you might be surprised a time or two. I can't say too much about it because I'm not a plotter. I can say that there are some soap operas involved. I think it's an homage to soap operas in a way because I'm Greek American, and my great-grandmother, she learned how to speak English by watching soap operas. I've just taken that and ran with it. Very little has to do my family besides that.

Zibby: How did your family end up in Texas from Greece?

Brooke: I'm third generation, so my family has been here for a while.

Zibby: Got it. Sorry, random question.

Brooke: No, you're fine.

Zibby: I was just thinking, if I was coming from Greece, how would you end up in Texas? I don't know.

Brooke: The American melting pot is an amazing thing.

Zibby: Yes. So what kind of books do you like to read? Do you like to read fiction like this? Who are some of your role model authors or books that you've read lately that you've really enjoyed?

Brooke: I love all books, basically. Every book I read, because I never took a proper writing class, I underline a lot when I see something that's interesting. Basically, every author that I'm reading at the moment is my favorite because they're teaching me. I love Peace like a River by Leif Enger. It's one of my favorite books. I'm a Dave Eggers fan, Ann Patchett. I love Tana French. I like a lot of literary-ish novels that are accessible, is how I would put it.

Zibby: That's a good way to put it. I might steal that to describe categories of books.

Brooke: Once you add ish to something, the umbrella gets bigger.

Zibby: When you write, so you're a pantser without any outlines or anything, where do you like to write? Do you like to write at home? Are you the type of person who can write anywhere? Are you very much like, I have to be in this corner of my house? What's it like? What's your process like?

Brooke: I'm like a dog that was trained. As I was writing during naptime, it was basically quiet and it didn't matter where I was. I just had to have some time by myself. That's what it's turned into for me. I will drive a kid to practice, and I will sit in my car and do it then. I will get everyone into bed, and I will sit and do it then. My only requirement is honestly that it's quiet and that nobody's bothering me because as I write, I have a tendency to talk out loud like a crazy person. I can't go to bookstores or coffee shops. Some of my friends will invite me for little writing dates. I'm like, I can't. I look like a crazy person.

Zibby: What are you saying out loud? Are you writing it and then reading it out loud to see how it sounds?

Brooke: Yes, I do a lot of audible stuff. In the writing workshop that I belong to, we do a lot of read-alouds. I think that's also trained me just to listen to what it sounds like, what it's going to sound like to the reader, basically. To be fair, I also do a little acting, I think. [laughs]

Zibby: A little acting?

Brooke: Sure. Why not? So you can get their gestures and their tone and how they're going to say something.

Zibby: Did you end up narrating the audiobook for your own book?

Brooke: No. A really excellent voice actor did it named Mark Bramhall. He did a fantastic job.

Zibby: Probably better to be a man. [laughter] I was just thinking that you could use that skill. I actually just interviewed a voiceover actor. I was like, wow, it never occurred to me. I should've tried out for that job. There's so many jobs out there that you don't even know. It's silly.

Brooke: It's fascinating. I agree. I think I explore that a lot in my writing because my career choice has kind of taken a left turn. I do, I see so many jobs out there where I'm like, that would be interesting. Now, that would be interesting. So I feel that.

Zibby: How do you think your engineering mind works well with fiction? Do you feel like any of the strengths of that apply when you're crafting narratives? Do you think this is just another skill set and you just have different parts of your brain that jump in at different times?

Brooke: I think it's twofold. I think it helps me because I think a book is just a really long equation or a big puzzle that you're trying to put together. In that way, I feel like I'm solving a problem. On the flip side, I feel like my engineering does me a disservice because in math there's always a right answer. I can get to the end of a scene or the end of a book even and think, is this right? There's no way to know, really, because it's art. It just depends on which side of my brain is dominant at the moment.

Zibby: Wow. How great to be able to have them both. So many people are like, I'm only this type of thinker. How involved are your kids in your writing? Have they read your book? Are they really excited? Do they not really care?

Brooke: They haven't read it. I told them I would prefer them to wait only because I want them to appreciate it. I don't know that they will right now. It's not that it's inappropriate or anything like that. There's some themes that have to do with life and death. When you are a kid, you are invincible. I think that you need a little perspective to appreciate it. Generally speaking, I don't think they care. [laughs] Oh, well.

Zibby: I know. If only there was a way to get the kids to really -- I'm like, hey, guess what guys? They're like, yeah, do we have any more milk? All right, whatever.

Brooke: You're talking to a famous person? Who cares?

Zibby: [laughs] That's awesome. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Brooke: I think my only advice is to give yourself permission to write. This is from my own personal experience. All by itself, it feels like a very silly endeavor to sit and write made-up stuff. It does. I think that our adult brains kind of can stop us from just going there. If you want to write something and you have a story on your heart, all you have to do is give yourself permission to go ahead and start writing it. Don't worry about the critics or your inner critic saying this is silly. I have a good friend that always tell me when I'm like, "My story feels silly," or my short story, he's like, "Describe the Wizard of Oz to me." I'll say, "It's about a girl that gets sucked in a tornado and lands in a weird world." It sounds so silly if you really think about it. I think that's it. Just make your adult mind be quiet and go for it.

Zibby: You did just offhandedly mention that you wrote many novels as you were on your way to this one. You didn't even say it in a way like, it was hard, these novels didn't sell, or whatever. It sounded like you viewed them as practice. Those were just the things you had to do to get to where you were. Is that the attitude you took all the way through it?

Brooke: The writing workshop that I belong to was very informative as far as that goes. They celebrate rejection because it means you're putting yourself out there. I liken to if you pick up the violin and decide you want to play in an orchestra. You don't get to be in the pit. You have to put in the time and earn your stripes before you play. I think writing's a strange thing because everybody can write. Everybody can write a sentence. In a way, people are like, well, I could write a story, but there's a craft to it that you actually have to learn and practice before you can metaphorically play in the pit. Yeah, I wrote a bunch of books, but some of them are really terrible. They won't see the light of day, and that's okay.

Zibby: What makes a book not a terrible book in your mind? How did you fix whatever it was you felt you were doing wrong?

Brooke: I think that as you move along you start learning different parts of the craft. One book, I got really good at dialogue. Then the next book, I got really great at characterization. For me, my most difficult thing is plotting. Obviously, my pantser tendencies don't help. You just build on your skill set every time you write.

Zibby: That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your process and your book and all the rest.

Brooke: Likewise, Zibby. I'm so pleased to be here. When I saw you had four kids, I thought, we are kin. We're secret kin that we don't even know each other, but now we do.

Zibby: I know. I felt the same way when I read that about you. I was like, ah, okay. There's a lot we understand without even having to say.

Brooke: Yes. I love it.

Zibby: Have a great day. Thanks for coming on the show.

Brooke: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Aimee Agresti, THE SUMMER SET

Zibby Owens: Aimee Agresti is a novelist and entertainment journalist. A former staff writer for Us Weekly, she penned the magazine's coffee-table book, Inside Hollywood. Her work has also appeared in People, Premiere, DC magazine, Capitol File, The Washington Post, Washingtonian, the Washington City Paper, Boston magazine, Women's Health, and The New York Observer. Her latest book is called The Summer Set. Aimee has made countless TV and radio appearances dishing about celebrities on the likes of Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, E!, The Insider, Extra, VH1, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and HLN. The author of, as I mentioned, The Summer Set, also Campaign Widows and The Gilded Wings Trilogy for young adults, she graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism and lives with her husband and two sons in the Washington, DC, area.

Aimee Agresti: Hi!

Zibby: Hi. [laughs]

Aimee: I'm so excited to meet you. I'm such a fan, as I told you. I just love what you're doing. I'm so grateful as a reader even. I love the interviews that you do so much. It's just so exciting to get to meet you and be on, so thank you.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, it's my pleasure. By the way, when I was reading some of the blurbs, I feel like I know everyone who blurbed your book.

Aimee: I think you do. I know. I got so lucky. I have the world's best blurbers. Oh, my gosh, I know. You've talked to all of them.

Zibby: Yeah, I think so.

Aimee: They're all amazing. I got so lucky that they took the time to do that because they're some busy women, those amazing writers who were kind enough to read. I'm always so grateful. I always feel bad asking for blurbs because I know everyone's in the middle of their own work. To switch gears and read somebody else's and then have to write something about it is hard to do, so I'm always grateful. You've got great people on all the time. I was like, oh, my gosh. I was lucky to get those ladies.

Zibby: Oh, stop. [laughs] The Summer Set, congratulations on the launch and everything. It's so exciting. Tell listeners what The Summer Set is about.

Aimee: The Summer Set is about an actress named Charlie Savoy. She was a Hollywood "it girl" and an ingénue in her early twenties. Then she flamed out and disappeared from Hollywood. When we meet her at the beginning of the book, she is almost forty years old. She's been in sort of a legal scrape and she's forced to go back to the summer Shakespeare theater where she got her start as a teen and where her ex, Nick, is the artistic director. Drama and hilarity ensue as they spend this summer together. It's about a Hollywood actress, but I really think it's a universal book because it's about old friends, old flames, old rivals, and second acts. I think that's something that a lot of us can relate to, especially the age that I am, early forties. A lot of us are sort of reinventing ourselves, whether we become moms or when we get to this stage in our lives. I think it is sort of a universal story.

Zibby: Totally. I'm all about reinvention in your forties.

Aimee: Right? [laughs]

Zibby: What inspired you to write this book?

Aimee: That's a great question. I got my start in magazines and entertainment journalism. I was at Premiere Magazine right out of college. That was a great movie magazine. It was just such a great place to be. David Foster Wallace wrote for them back in the day. Then most recently, I was a writer at Us Weekly. I've always really loved the entertainment world. It's funny, I think the seeds were really sown early for this book because back in high school -- I grew up in this very small town, Olney, Maryland, outside of DC. We were really lucky to have this great theater there. It was a professional theater. They cast all the actors from New York. They came in. The really cool thing about this theater was that the actors stayed on the grounds in their own residence together. I've always had an overactive imagination, as novelists tend to have. Even back then in high school, I was volunteering there, always off stage, way off stage. I would volunteer and I was always thinking -- the actors, a lot of times they were young and beautiful and living together. I was like, who's friends? Who's enemies? Who's getting together? What's going on? I always wanted to know. I think that has always been in my head a little bit. I really love being around that world. I think it's really inspiring. My mom, back then, was in charge of the welcoming committee for the actors, which was so much fun. She would enlist me to help her throw parties when they arrived. We would bake them cookies and have lunch for them and make little baskets for their rooms and stuff. I was always watching everybody wondering what was going on, how they were getting along.

Zibby: What was it like writing for Us Weekly? I always read those articles with so much interest and intrigue, but almost feeling guilty about it because there I am just trying to pry into people's private lives. Tell me about that. That's so interesting.

Aimee: It was so much fun. It was a great place. I always said, at least back in the day when I was there, the stories really were true. We had a very solid fact-checking department. It was a lot of fun. I really got my start at Premiere. Back then when it was all really new to me was extra exciting. I was twenty-two, had just come out of school. Because I was that age, I was often interviewing the up-and-comers, which was really cool. Sometimes they would be my age and in their first thing. You were talking to them before they're famous, before they know they're famous, and they're really real and genuine. You know you're never going to get them that way again. That was always really fun for me because then I feel like you spend a little time with someone and even if you don't talk to them again after that, you kind of always want to follow their career and see where it goes. With that, some of them went straight to the top. Some of them took more winding paths to success. Then some of them hit road bumps that were really rough.

It always made me wish that we actually were friends, that I could call them and be like, are you doing okay? What's going on? I saw what happened. But you can't. You feel this connection from the moments that you spent interviewing them about their life, but then this huge disconnect because then they're gone and you can't get back in touch with them. To watch these different paths that they took I thought was really eye-opening for me. It was fun because I got to be, back then, a party reporter, which I didn't even know was a job back then. I felt like I should be paying them. I would go to the premieres and stand on the red carpet and ask the questions and then go to the movie afterwards and then go to the party and drink champagne and talk to the stars again and go home and write a story, and it was a job. It was great. It was a lot of fun. I tried to get all of that excitement and passion about Hollywood and that industry into the book because I think we all love it, right?

Zibby: For sure, guilty pleasure. I know you've written three YA books and two novels. How did you switch from that into writing books?

Aimee: I always wanted to write books. I've always loved books. My mom's a librarian, so I grew up reading everything in sight and just living at the library. You know how it is? It's one of those things that you feel like -- I didn't know anyone who was a novelist. It felt very unattainable. I'm a practical girl. I love writing, so I went into journalism and went into magazines and things. I was always writing on the side. Then when we left New York at one point -- my husband's in politics, and we came back here when Obama came to town. I was freelance writing and I thought -- I had written a novel before that. You know how these paths of a novelist -- everyone has that one that's tucked in a drawer that will never see the light of day but you learned how to write a book from it. I have that book that is the book that I wrote that got me my agent who I'm so grateful to have found so long ago. It just wasn't the book that was going to be published. It just didn't work out, but I kept going.

When we moved back here to Washington from New York, I was like, I'm going to try this again and write something very different than the book I had written before. Everything is timing. It happened to be that time when grown-ups were reading Twilight and Hunger Games and all of that. I always tend to write the book that I most want to read at any given time. Everyone was reading that. I was having this real feeling of, I'd like to try writing the kind of book that I would've loved as a kid. I read so much. I always loved mystery and romance and adventure and strong girls. I cobbled together all those elements. That became that trilogy. I got lucky. It was the right time for that. It's funny. When I wrote that book, the first in the trilogy, Illuminate, I had the idea for Campaign Widows, which was my first adult book, at the same time. I was debating which one to go with first. I had just gotten back to Washington even though I'm from here. The city changes with each administration. I felt like I wanted to live in the city more with the Obama years and really see how that was going to change the city before writing it, so I went the trilogy instead. I'm glad that I did that. It was funny. I had them both. I was like, which one do you go with first? It's hard to decide. I got lucky. I'm very grateful. Anytime a book gets published, you feel very lucky. It's a crazy business, as you know.

Zibby: I know. It's amazing. I want to do a whole nother show, I'm just making this up, of all the people out there who wrote books and they can't be on the show because they never got published. Maybe they're just not quite here yet. They’ve written their first book or their second book. I just feel this obligation to tell people, you have to write at least a novel or two before you can even contemplate having success. It seems like everybody has to write them. You have to have the ones in the drawer.

Aimee: It's true. I feel like they're the ones that get you to the one that actually works out. It's all worthwhile. I always like writing because I feel like it's something that you get better at as you go. It's not like at some point you have to stop doing it. If we had decided to be gymnasts or something, you'd have to probably stop that at some point. Writing, you can keep going, get better and better.

Zibby: Totally. You can just keep getting better, get better and better. So what are you working on now?

Aimee: Now I'm supposed to be writing the next book. [laughter] I've not been the best multitasker in quarantine here. I know what the next book is. I'm mapping it out. I'm a big outliner. I always feel like I need to have the whole thing mapped out before I actually start writing because then the writing process actually goes pretty fast. I'm sorting out the pieces right now. I've got the major stuff, but I have to actually just sit down now and start the writing. Again, not the best multitasker. I think you need to write a book about time management and multitasking because I would be the first in line to get that. I don't know how you juggle all the things that you do. I'm always very impressed and inspired by you.

Zibby: Thank you. I don't know how I do it either. Every day is different. I feel like I don't do a lot of things very well. I'm cutting a lot of corners these days. As we were talking about before, I've had to email my kids' teachers a couple times, more times than I could admit, being like, we missed this, or I'm sorry about that. I do the best I can. I do things really quickly. I don't know how I do it. [laughs]

Aimee: Well, I'm impressed. I'm also glad to not be the only one who's emailed the teachers a bunch of times and been like, we're doing the work. I promise. We'll be on the call, I think.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. You've already given such amazing advice to everybody. Is there anything else you would want to say to aspiring authors aside from everything else?

Aimee: I always say just keep writing because it's true. When you're writing and you're not having the success and the luck and having people pick it up and publish it and stuff, you feel like, how do I keep going? You just never know when it's going to work out. You're getting better all the time, so just keep writing. That's the one thing I feel like we have control over in the publishing world, is just to keep writing and keep making new work. Then you just never know what's going to be the one that strikes a chord with somebody. Keep going.

Zibby: We talked at the beginning about reinvention in your forties. How do you feel that you have reinvented yourself in the last couple years?

Aimee: I love that. I feel like the biggest thing is when you become a mom. It changes everything about how you live your life and do your work and everything. That has made me a more efficient person, for sure. It's also forced me to sort of figure out how to do my work the best that I can when I can do it. Everything has changed about the way that I work. On the first book that I wrote, I thought, I'm kind of a fast writer. I wrote this pretty fast, but no, no, I just spent every possible minute and didn't need to sleep much. I used to have really useful nighttime hours writing. I found it very peaceful. I don't know how you are with your kids, but I have all this adrenaline right before their bedtime. Then as soon as they go to bed, I'm like, I'm going to write all these pages. Then I fall asleep, often with my laptop. Sometimes I fall asleep with my laptop on my lap. I'm sitting in bed. You know you're not going to get work done, but I'm like, I can work in bed. The laptop falls on the floor. I've had everything happen. Now I try to sit down to write when I know that my head is really there and I can crank some things out. For me, it's always most important to end your writing time excited to go back to it rather than hitting a word count every day. I've learned a little bit how to change my writing habits and my work habits to be more efficient. I think we're learning every day as moms and as writers.

Zibby: I totally agree. Thank you. I'm so glad to have spoken to you, Aimee. I hope I get to meet you in person sometime. I feel like I need a picture of -- maybe I'll take a picture with my phone -- of your amazing backdrop here. It's insane. I think you did a great job with the technology. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Aimee: Thank you so much for having me. This is so exciting for me. Thank you. Keep doing all the amazing stuff that you're doing. We're so grateful as authors.

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

Aimee: Thanks, bye.

Sonali Dev, RECIPE FOR PERSUASIAN

Zibby Owens: Sonali Dev is the author of Recipe for Persuasion as well as several other books. She is a USA Today best-selling author who writes Bollywood-style love stories that let her explore issues faced by women around the world while still indulging her faith in a happily ever after. Her novels have been on Library Journal, NPR, Washington Post, Kirkus Best Book of the Year list, and she's won the American Library Association's Award for Best Romance, the RT Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Contemporary Romance, multiple RT Seals of Excellence, and is a RITA Finalist. She's been listed for the Dublin Literary Award. Shelf Awareness calls her “not only one of the best, but one of the bravest romance novelists working today.” She lives in Chicagoland with her very patient and often-amused husband and two teens who demand both patience and humor, plus the world’s most perfect dog.

Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about your latest book.

Sonali Dev: Yay, thank you for having me. This is very exciting.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. You are a Bollywood, passionate -- you're just obsessed with the Bollywood theme. Tell me about how you started writing about all of it. Just tell me everything. Tell me about Recipe for Persuasion and everything.

Sonali: Great, my favorite thing to talk about. I grew up in India. I moved here many, many, many years ago, but I grew up in India and basically was raised watching Bollywood and Hollywood both. There's this concept that we have in India about being film-y, which means basically treating your real life like it's a film or a movie. [laughs] It fits the Indian state of mind very well because it essentially means being very dramatic and, as my kids say, extra. Bollywood films definitely are very much woven into who I am as a person, but not only in terms of being dramatic. I think that it's really a way of looking at the world or dealing with relationships. It's where the emotional lens is just a little bit more aware and dialed up. I say a little bit, by which I mean very. Of course, I'm being facetious here. Bollywood films, over time, have been such a great way to trap the Indian psyche. They're always community set. The families are always huge influences. No human stands alone in terms of being part of a community.

Stylistically, I think in terms of storytelling. I very much consider my style of storytelling a Bollywood style. By that, I don't mean ridiculous. There is one kind of melodramatic, ridiculous component to it. What I mean is just seeing story through a lens of emotion and seeing story always through a lens of community and every character being individual, but their individuality being entirely wrapped up in family and community. That's the impact it's had on me, and then of course seeing your world as ridiculous, wanting to really feel things. I think a lot of people who watch Bollywood films, the most fun part of it is that you actually feel things. I don't mean even that you're forced to feel things, but you're just in there. Even the musicality is just these songs bursting in your head when something terrible or something fabulous happens. It's almost a way of processing stories and a way of processing life. For sure, my books are very much that.

As for Recipe for Persuasion, it is my homage to Jane Austen's Persuasion. Of course, it stands completely alone. I use the term homage because it's not a retelling, really. You won't be able to find scenes that directly translate. It's not Jane Austen's Persuasion set in the Indian community. It's its own story that pays homage to what I learned from that story as a young girl. That was that you can make mistakes and there's always a second chance, that mistakes are not absolute, that hope is a real thing, which I don't think until I read Austen I was seeing a whole lot of in classic literature. It's my homage to what I learned as a little girl from her. As a story, it's the story of this chef in Palo Alto who is trying to save her father's fine dining Indian restaurant. For twelve years since her father died, she's been trying to rescue this restaurant. As a last-ditch effort, she goes on a Food Network show called Cooking with the Stars. Of course, since it is Persuasion, the celebrity she gets stuck with is the man whose heart she broke back in high school. He believed it was under familial pressure. He's back for closure. She needs her own closure with her issues with her family. All of that gets tangled up.

While it's a love story between her and this man who's gone on to become a World Cup-winning soccer player, it's also a love story between her and her mother. It's these two parallel stories of second chances that are entangled because who Ashna is and what she allows into her life has to do with these two relationships which have been almost the stone around her neck, so to speak. It's a fun story, but it really also is a story that explores familial relationships and especially mother-daughter relationships when a mother is a woman who refuses to do what society expected of her. We are, as women, continuously taught that if we slip up, if we're not good mothers, if we're not good wives, then we destroy the family structure. We destroy our children's lives. It actually happens because that's the situation we're put in by society. When a woman stands up and says, no, I'm going to put my own desires before everything else, then there's collateral damage. Ashna, who's the chef and our protagonist, is the collateral damage. It's these two women navigating that distance.

Zibby: Wow. There's a lot in there to discuss. [laughs] You keep coming back to this idea of second chances. Is there a time in your life that you really wanted or needed a second chance? Does that come from something personal, or not?

Sonali: Growing up in India at that time, there was this sense of absolutes. One mistake could throw -- at least, this is what we were told. I think it was a completely nonsense narrative. What we were told is that if you slip up, then your entire life is going to go off the rails. Say you get involved with the wrong man, your honor is gone forever. If you don't get the right grades and get into the right college, then your career is gone forever. You do the right thing at the right time was this overarching motto that we were raised with. It was all around us. Somewhere in my heart, I knew that was not true. Books and stories which focused on reinforcing that, I gravitated towards. Yes, absolutely, I feel like the one truth in life is that there is always a second chance no matter how much it feels like there isn't. That's why we say things like everything happens for the best. It's a stupid thing to say when really awful things happen, but it's really not because something good is going to always come, maybe not from that one thing. You always have the ability to make something good happen again no matter how badly you mess up. So yes, it's very personal.

Zibby: Sonali, when did you start writing? When did you know you wanted to be a novelist? Have you always loved to write? How did you embark on this part of the career and the business of writing?

Sonali: I always loved to write since I was a very little girl. In fact, there's a story in my family where I was doing my math homework. This was back in kindergarten. Instead of doing my worksheets, I was writing couplets about the cover of the worksheet, the plus and minus signs. I was making up these little poems based on that. Instead of yelling at me for not doing my homework, my mom got on the phone with her sister and raved about how, "You should read these cute poems Sonali wrote," which explains a lot. I think one of my oldest memories and a lot of my coping mechanisms as a child were always related to writing. I always kind of identified as a writer. Growing up, it wasn't something that was deemed a career that you could use to feed yourself. It was very sensibly not deemed so because it is a hard career to use to feed yourself. It takes blood, sweat, and tears. Even then, it doesn't happen for a lot of people. So that was wise. I went to architecture school. I have several degrees in things. I have worked as many things.

This was the overriding dream. I really got obsessed about it or it became a thing that I thought I really wanted to do after -- [laughs] This is the drama that I was talking to you about, the Bollywood-style drama. About ten years ago, I got TB. I was quarantined. It was for six weeks, ten weeks. I was basically stuck in the home for a very long time and feeling very sorry for myself. I had been trying to write. I had already gotten into the whole, I'm going to write a novel someday. I was trying to write a very complicated novel and really failing at it. It had become this big thing that I didn't know how to do. Then when I got sick, a close friend said to me, "Why don't you write something you love? Why don't you write something you'd love to read?" I had this love story sitting in my head. It just poured right out of me. Those three months when I was stuck at home, I fell in love with the story and wrote it. From that point on, I became obsessed with publishing it. Of course, the publishing journey is a different beast from the writing journey. It took me a good two years to finish that novel, another two years to sell it. That's basically where it started. Once you have created a world and a character and been part of that magic, I think it's impossible to back away from it. That was how I felt.

Zibby: What advice do you have, then, to aspiring authors who don't have TB and can't dedicate themselves for -- although, I feel like as a society now we have all been through, in part, the experience that must have been so unique to you and so awful and isolating at the time.

Sonali: Unfortunately, yes. Of course, when it becomes a community experience, it's a whole different thing. [laughs] Let's talk about the writing advice. I do want to stop and say those three months were just the time I vomited that story out. It was not anywhere near ready for public consumption. It wasn't like I got those three months, I wrote that story, and I was done. I did have, at the time, two children who were in elementary and middle school, a husband who traveled five days a week, a large extended family, so a very full life. If you love to do this thing, you have to start becoming very focused on what you're willing to drop off your plate because you do have to. We're not going to be quarantined forever, and none of us want to be. Time in isolation is never going to be handed to you. It is something that you have to choose and curate your life to make space for that. That's the first thing.

Then one of my favorite quotes is if you can stop writing, you should. I do believe that the only reason anyone should really be doing this is -- because it's such a heart-wrenching and hard thing to do in the first place, if you're doing it for any reason other than the fact that you really simply cannot not do it, then it's going to be that much more of an uphill battle. Why would you want to do that? My advice is learning how to distribute your energy and learning how to focus your time and making space for this thing which needs a huge amount of emotional energy, even more than time. One thing that these past months have taught me is that isolation and solitude don't equal productivity. Productivity is a factor of how you manage your mental and emotional energy for a creative endeavor. We all also live our lives. Without lives, you can't create meaningful story. You have to find that balance of what you're willing to let go of in terms of your time and energy and what you're willing to focus on. I think once you have learned that, then most everything else follows, is what I want to say.

Zibby: All right, I definitely need to be a little more conscious of how I'm expending my energy. That's my main takeaway here.

Sonali: It's not like I'm great at it either. It's a day-to-day struggle. I sound like I've got this, but I don't. [laughter]

Zibby: At least you know what you're working on. That always makes it better. Sonali, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for sharing Recipe for Persuasion and all of your great stuff. Thank you.

Sonali: Thank you so much, Zibby. It's a great show. Thanks so much for all the support. Stay safe and healthy.

Zibby: You too.

Sonali: Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Amity Gaige, SEA WIFE

Zibby Owens: Amity Gaige is the author of three novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize in 2014. Now she has just released her latest book which is called Sea Wife and has been launched to great acclaim. Published in eighteen countries, Schroder was named one of the best works of 2013 by New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Kirkus Reviews, the Women's National Book Association, Cosmopolitan, Denver Post. There are literally ten other ones, so I'm going to stop. Amity is the recipient of many awards for her previous novels including Forward Book of the Year Award for 2007. In 2006, she was named one of the Five under Thirty-five Outstanding Emerging Writers by the National Book Foundation. She has a Fulbright and a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Literary Review, The Yale Review, and One Story. She lives in Connecticut with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.

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

Amity Gaige: Thank you for having me, Zibby. I'm glad to be here.

Zibby: Your novel, Sea Wife, by the way, was in the window in the only bookstore I've seen in real life in the last two months. You got prominent placement for your beautiful cover.

Amity: I am so happy to hear that. It is such a pretty cover. It's this robin's egg blue. It kind of sticks out.

Zibby: It does. It's great. It's very peaceful too even though there's a lot that goes on. [laughs] Can you please tell listeners what Sea Wife is about?

Amity: It is about a family of four that decides to scrap their conventional life in suburban Connecticut and go on a boat in the Caribbean for a year. It's told from two perspectives, and finally three. There's the husband and the wife and then their little daughter who pipes in towards the end. It's written in a unique way in that the husband and wife alternate a narration as frequently, sometimes, as every other line or every other paragraph. It's kind of telling the story together. You realize as you read on that they're telling the story from different timeframes. It's really Juliet, the mother and the wife, the woman, the protagonist, it's really her story. There's so much you don't know as the narration starts. All you know is that she's reflecting on their time at sea. You get to read Michael, the husband's, perspective as well. It alternates between the two of them for most of the book.

Zibby: And you know that she has a penchant for closets. [laughs]

Amity: Who doesn't? Yeah, she does. She's sitting in a closet at the beginning of the book. It was just a lot of questions about why. You know she's undergone some sort of loss. Her children are fine. Her mother is there helping. The rest of the story's unpacking what happened as she looks back on the journey.

Zibby: I love how when you were describing how she lost her closet to begin with, you write, "But I am a mother. Gradually, I just gave them all away, all my spaces, one by one down to the very last closet."

Amity: I wondered if you related to that. [laughs]

Zibby: I completely relate to that. I also related when you said about the husband, Michael, how he was morbidly funny and how he got funnier and funnier "while I, who had been funny, got less funny." [laughs] That was so spot on.

Amity: Right? I know. We used to be funny. What happened? Thank you for saying that. A lot of those lines are definitely culled from my own insights or from, certainly, friends. A lot of this book is inspired by so many conversations with so many women. I'd had a friend of mine, Susan Choi who wrote that great book Trust Exercise, we were talking about Sea Wife and she found another line. A couple of other women have mentioned the one about "Even though we were both educated people and we understood things about gender roles, we just signed up for the same kind of stereotypical gender role set we thought had been consigned to the cultural ash heap." She and a couple other women have brought that up. Little nuggets throughout the book about how it feels to be in a contemporary marriage, to be a woman, a working woman, a mom with her own ambitions, a lot of stuff about that.

Zibby: Here's just one more line when you wrote, "We're just a hyphen between our parents and our kids. That's what you learn in middle age. Mostly, this is something a mature person can live with, but every once in a while, you just want to send up a flare. I too am here." I feel like, Amity, I am now reading your diary, is what's going on here.

Amity: [laughs] It's so funny. You're picking out a lot of the lines that I definitely really relate to. There's a lot of that in there. There's also stuff that I don't. There's stuff that since I had to represent different points of view, I really had to imagine my way into especially Michael's consciousness. He's my male character, and I wanted to give him a lot of depth too. The line you just read is from him, so there we go.

Zibby: Wherever they appear on the page, we know where they're coming on. [laughs] No, I'm kidding. Obviously, it's fiction. I'm not trying to suggest that this is all what's actually in your head. I'm really just poking fun.

Amity: Let's admit it. We always think that the author is the same as the characters. I do too. We often imagine that, that they're the same. Of course, they're not. My family is all intact. We never left suburban Connecticut. It's more of an imagination than anything else.

Zibby: I heard that you did learn to sail so that you could write this book.

Amity: I did.

Zibby: How was that?

Amity: That was a nightmare, but I am a better person for it. Walking that back a little bit, I started with this idea that I really wanted to set a book at sea. I love describing things. I love books with a strong sense of place. I definitely think that Sea Wife is kind of in that category. The setting is so important. I did my best to certainly learn everything I could about sailing and about maritime life. I interviewed many, many families who live at sea. I visited them. At a certain point, I knew that I needed to sail on my own -- not on my own. I ended up going to the Caribbean to Grenada for a ten-day sailing course, which frankly wasn't a lot, but I learned everything that I needed to know to write Sea Wife, which is not just how some of those parts of the boat work. Sailing is very complex, so I did need to know what a winch and sheet and stanchion are. It was more that I really needed to feel the wind at sea and hear it and hear a whistle in the rigging. I needed to feel what it feels like to try to walk when you're below or try to sleep in a storm, all of those sensory aspects of things. That's what I got when I went on that sailing course. Since we did meet some weather, I also really needed that to inform some of the later scenes. Basically, the last quarter of the book is one long journey into the middle of the sea. It was very necessary that I went and took that journey myself. Also, my characters are really novice sailors. They're not pros. It helped that I wasn't trying to be an expert about sailing. They were more like me. Juliet is more like me in the sense of, she was like, "Okay, I'll do this for you, honey. I want to try to save our marriage. I'm depressed myself. I need to have an adventure and maybe try something new." She was extremely weary and skeptical. I think the real journey of the book is really hers, which is that she needs to break out of that fear and indecision, and sail. Really, that's what she ends up doing.

Zibby: Wow. Your structure, as you mentioned before, is complicated in that one point of view is at the end after the adventure. One is at the beginning from a different character's point of view. Then you interweave a third. How did you keep that all straight while you were writing? What did your desk look like? Do you have it all in your head? Do you have notecards? What was the process like for you?

Amity: That is a really good question. It was kind of controlled insanity, I would say. It was definitely my most ambitious thing that I'd done. Not only was it quite difficult to try to write about the sea when I'm not a sailor, but also to structure the book exactly as you said where it's back and forth in time. It also has a strong narrative, but it has these moments of meditation. Say one characters comes under Michael, he meditates on helicopter parenting. Then Juliet comes and meditates on poetry and women poets. I thought of the book, I like the metaphors of waypoints in sailing. In sailing, there are waypoints, which are just legs in a journey. Sometimes those waypoints are in the middle of nowhere. If you're going to cross the ocean, you still have to aim for something, but that point might be just coordinates in the middle of the ocean.

It was very similar in writing the book. Let me just get to this waypoint. Let me get to this waypoint. I'm going to sense or intuit my way from one to the next. I hope that we are going towards -- I knew where I wanted to go, but I did not know the waypoints. I was constantly pushing towards the final goal in the journey, but there was a lot of movement on the way. One thing I hope about the book is that the reader feels both those things too, both the narrative tension in terms of the total journey, which is across the sea, and also the momentum of these waypoints and these pauses where one character remembers or reflects on things. Those are also quite important. As you're reading the book, there's a sense of forward movement and also pausing. I think they're both important. Of course, if somebody wants to read it all in one sitting and just power through it, I love that. I've gotten some readers saying, I stayed up all night, or I lost sleep to read this book. I think that's a huge compliment. There also are these poetic moments of stillness in the book.

Zibby: And also with Juliet being a poet and having her own poems. It's perfectly fitting.

Amity: Right. She loves her poetry. She's studying it and trying to be an academic. She also just is a sensitive person hoping to understand her own life experience through poetry which is something a lot of us do.

Zibby: After you write a book like this -- I know this is not your first novel by any stretch. I think it's your fifth. Did I get that right? Your fifth or your fourth?

Amity: This is my fourth. For a second, I was like, oh, my god, did I write another book and forget about it? [laughs]

Zibby: I'm sorry. I have it front of me, but I was not -- anyway, sorry. Okay, your fourth. After delving deep into what happens with a family away at sea and really going into the relationships, how do you then go back to your own family? Does that make you feel any differently about your own marriage or your own parenting or anything having examined this other fictious family's life for a while?

Amity: That's a great question. For sure. I think I felt that mediating on my own life and choices throughout the whole process of writing the book. As I was researching, I was meeting families who were living in nontraditional ways. I started out the book thinking these people are crazy. As I said, I'm not a sailor. As time went on, I realized that there was actually -- I've always admired people who take risks and adventurers even if they don't succeed, and sometimes especially if those adventures don't succeed. I was moved to see these people taking these risks -- not reckless. These are very good sailors. They know what they're doing. The children are extremely safety-conscious and everything. I admired them. It didn't make me want to go and set sail, but it reminded me how much it matters that a spirit of adventure is in my own life and to not live a life out of fear. Of course, you don't need to go sailing to prove it, but a spirit of adventurousness even in smaller ways. My own parents, one great thing they did with me is they were great travelers. We went to some strange places in the world. That made a huge impact on me because I had more perspective. I would get out of my narcissistic little box that we're all born in. That's very valuable. I want to bring that to my children. I want to be able to have them be brave in nature, and spiritually. I do want to do that. Then like everybody, I often don't and can't do those things. It's an aspiration and something to keep in mind and to do whenever possible.

Zibby: #Goals. [laughter]

Amity: Also, I will say, of course I thought a lot about marriage. I have a beautiful, supportive husband. Nobody ever believes that because there are these stressed marriages in my novels. [laughs] I would say that, of course, this sense of marital stress, it's quite common, especially when children arrive. It hits men and women quite differently, the arrival of the children. I think it's always so important to remember that the other person is a human being with their own dreams and to try to honor that, each spouse honor that in the other. I think that that's something that Juliet and Michael, they fail at. They try, but they don't do it in time. I guess if there was sort of a message that the book gives, it would be to try to do that while you can. Love each other while you can. Try to communicate while you can. Don't let the past or other wounds rob you of connection with your spouse or with anybody.

Zibby: Now that you have all that relationship advice out there, any parting advice for aspiring authors?

Amity: Aspiring authors, oh, my gosh. I'm a teacher. I've taught so many years. I love teaching. I think that aspiring writers should reach out and find community. They should find a mentor if they can or peers who are like mentors and get together and celebrate their writing. There is so much genuine community in sharing your work with others and hearing what they say. You don't need to wait for publication for that to happen. It's certainly one of the coolest things about being a published writer, is that suddenly that community really opens up and you hear from strangers. That's the coolest thing in the world. Until you can get to that place, you still share. Share. I think that's what we're looking for, recognition from others and to be seen by others when we write our stories. Don't wait.

Zibby: I love that. That was awesome advice. Thank you so much, Amity. This has been so much fun. I feel like now I want to go meet you for coffee or something.

Amity: I know. Maybe someday in better times.

Zibby: Someday, yes. In the meantime, Sea Wife, congratulations. So exciting. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Amity: Thank you so much. It was so fun.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Amity: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Christina Clancy, THE SECOND HOME

Zibby Owens: Christina Clancy is the author of The Second Home. She's actually a debut author, so she fits into my Debut Tuesday or my Beach Read Wednesday. Double trouble this week. Anyway, she loves Cape Cod. She enjoys living in the Midwest and grew up in Milwaukee. She now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and her two grown kids. She's a certified spin instructor and serves on the board of the Wisconsin Conservation Voters. She received her PhD in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and previously taught creative writing at Beloit College. She recently completed her second novel. That will be out in 2021. Enjoy our episode.

Christina Clancy: I'm truly so excited to be on your show. I heard about your show from Karen Dukess when she was on last year. I started becoming the most avid listener. Then when my book was coming out, my bucket list for my book is to be this podcast. I was so excited when I heard that I was going to be on it. You've made my day.

Zibby: Aw, that is so sweet. That's so sweet. Your book was so good. It was really, really good. It kept me up two nights in a row past my husband which almost never happens. I was like, I can't stop reading.

Christina: I'm so glad to hear that. I don't know how you read as much as you do. I'd like to turn the tables and just turn this whole interview where I interview you. It's amazing to me what you do with this podcast and all of your time.

Zibby: Thanks. I can't finish every single book. I just can't. I'm usually up front with the authors and say, you know what -- on the Instagram Lives, I blatantly am like, I didn't even open your book. I do my best. I love to read. I do it all time. I don't know. Every day is different. Anyway, that's really nice of you to say. Let's talk about your book, yay, The Second Home. For listeners who don't know what it's about, can you tell everybody what The Second Home is about? Then also, what inspired you to write it?

Christina: The book is about a family from Milwaukee. They're a very middle-class family. The parents are teachers. They own a house in Cape Cod, oddly enough, which sounds very fancy except it's been in their family for generations. The reason that the parents are teachers is so that they can spend their summers in Cape Cod. The house is kind of run down. It's from the late 1800s. Actually, it's older than that. It's from the 1700s. The house I've been talking about a lot is my grandparent's house which is next door which is from those late 1890s. The house is in disrepair. They go to the Cape each summer, and one summer with their two daughters, Poppy and Ann. They also bring along an adopted child named Michael who is new to the family and new to Cape Cod. He also has feelings for Ann. Ann has feelings for him, which as you can imagine creates some trouble. They get involved with another family. When they do, things go very badly. The family does not stay in touch. The siblings become estranged. About fifteen years later, the parents die. They have to come back to figure out what to do with the house. Everybody wants it. Michael, the boy that they'd adopted, has a legitimate claim to a third of the estate. He also wants to set the record straight. That's the book in a nutshell.

I was inspired to write it because I -- a lot of times when people ask me this question, I think I know how to answer it. Usually, I'll say that Poppy, the character who's the surfer, was the inspiration because I did meet a surfer when I was in Panama with my mom about a decade ago. She told me that she never went home. It bothered me so much. I wanted to bring Poppy home and figure out what could get her there. Then I think, really, the book is about when my own grandparents passed away. I think a lot of people with second homes feel this way, the house that everyone has so many memories of and cares so much about becomes very fragile because for a while we didn't know if we'd be able to keep it in the family. It made no sense for us. My mom and her sisters are spread all across the country like Jacks. They couldn't really agree on -- not that they couldn't agree. My mom had the first right of refusal, but who was going to take it? My mom was a single parent. We couldn't have a house on the Cape. Then my aunt lived in Michigan. She wasn't sure what to do at the Cape. Then my other aunt already lived on the Cape.

My mom was driving around one day with me and she said, "You know, it's just really hard when your parents pass away and you become the next generation. You have to figure out how to keep your family together or whether you will or what that family's going to look like." I was so struck by that comment and thinking about how that house kept our family together and the fear of losing it. It wasn't just the house that we cared about. It was about keeping the history of the family in one place. I think these houses can really become touchpoints for every person in the family. I think that's actually what the inspiration was, was that feeling, that fear that the house could somehow pass out of our family and we might lose our way. We might not have a reason to have reunions or stay together or look through the old photo albums in the den.

Zibby: What you did so well in the book was create such a sense of place and character, both. I could see this house. I could see Poppy and Ann and the parents and their house, but I could also see Anthony and Maureen's house. I could just see it, all of it, and feel it, and all the sensory things you put in. All of it just made it so real. Then with the parents and what ended up happening to them, I felt such a sense of loss myself. How do you think you did it? I know you teach creative writing and all that. What do you think it was that made these things just come alive so much?

Christina: First of all, the place, I know very well. It was nice to write about two places I know well, which is Milwaukee and then also Cape Cod. It was funny. It took me a while to realize that I could write about a place I know, to give myself permission to do that. I don't know why it felt like there was permission needed to write about Milwaukee. Originally actually, the story, it started out where the characters were in Evanston, Illinois, which seemed kind of like the near-east side of Milwaukee to me. Then I kept thinking I should go spend more time there so I can figure it out. A friend of mine who's a writing instructor said, "Why don't you just set it in Milwaukee?" It was such a revelation. I was like, oh, I can write about a place I know. Then even writing about businesses that I know or places that I know well felt a little bit like I was doing something wrong. I'm just going to name Shahrazad, this restaurant I like. I'm going to name the Urban Ecology Center because I was on their board. It was fun to do that. Then in Cape Cod, I gave myself the same liberty to write about all the places that I know and love there.

The only risk of doing that with place is that if you get one thing wrong, people will go crazy. They won't be able to get it out of their mind the whole rest of the book. A bookseller friend of mine was saying that somebody wrote about a car and they used the wrong horsepower for it within the first ten pages of the book. The whole rest of the book he couldn't even focus. I was very careful to try to get everything right. The copy editors were amazing too. It was fun to see how they would -- if I named a restaurant, they would actually pull up the sign for the restaurant and the menu for the restaurant to see if they put periods after each initial, like for PJs. It was fantastic to have them go through that level of detail also. The place really spoke to me. I think I live in my skin anyway. You can probably tell that from the writing. I just feel like I'm always almost more there than there, so that helped.

Then the characters, once I had them in my head and I went through my first draft and started redrafting, they became so alive to me. One of the most fun things I did with the book where -- after I sold it, my editor said, "Why don't you go through the last third and just add a few more surprises? Just sprinkle them in so that it doesn't read like where you're going to expect what's going to happen." That was so much fun. Then I thought, oh, I know what Maureen would say here. Ed could do this. Connie could -- I just started thinking about how the characters would surprise me. I think those are the magic moments in writing, when you get so immersed. You let the story wash over you. I just had that happen again with my second book. For a long time, I was just building it, building it, building it, struggling with it. All of a sudden, my head was so deep in it that I would wake up with these characters talking in my head. I just couldn't wait to write about it. As hard as it is to get to that point, it's amazing when it happens.

Zibby: Wait, what's your next book about?

Christina: It sounds different than the book that I just wrote, but my editor assures me it sounds like a Christina Clancy novel. In 1981, and actually in the '70s mostly, in a town called Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which is near Chicago, oddly enough there used to be a Playboy resort there. The women who worked there were the daughters of dairy farmers and slaughterhouse workers and factory workers. They had no experience being anything like a bunny. Suddenly, they were bunnies. I follow a woman who's from a neighboring town who gets a job. She's a very unlikely bunny. It follows her coming of age and her experiences with recognizing what it's like to inhabit a woman's body and be looked at and be the object and sometimes limbed by a male gaze. I had the best time writing it. It was so much fun. I think it'll come out next year.

Zibby: That's really exciting. I read your essay about your son leaving, The Washington Post essay about your son going away to school, and is it okay that maybe you're not going to miss him that much? I know that's not exactly what you said. [laughs] How there were all these support groups for the parents, you're like, well, he's ready to go. I'm ready for him to go. It's okay. That was great.

Christina: I wrote that. Then afterwards, I started feeling really sad. I was like, am I just a hypocrite? Now he's back home. He's at USC. Because of the COVID situation, he was in Greece studying and he had to come back home. Now we don't know if he'll be there in the fall. The emotions are totally different. I want him to go back. I want him to be able to resume his fun life as a student.

Zibby: It's tough. I also read your essay in The Sun, I think it was. That was your life, right? It was a personal essay?

Christina: Yeah.

Zibby: I was reading and reading. I was like, this is a book. This is another book. You should write that. Not that your fiction isn't fantastic. It's amazing. Your life story reads like fiction, really. It was hard to believe. The relationship with your dad, oh, my gosh, I couldn't believe how it ended.

Christina: That was a hard essay to write.

Zibby: I bet.

Christina: It was funny because when I worked on that essay, it was originally about the preppy movement and The Preppy Handbook. I don't know if you remember the preppy movement that much, The Preppy Handbook particularly.

Zibby: I do.

Christina: I never knew it was a joke. I always thought it was totally serious, like, you must be a prep. I lived in kind of a preppy community, as I write about. I reread The Preppy Handbook from beginning to end. Actually, if you haven't read it for a while, it's so interesting to go back and look at. The whole essay was about my experience being a prep. Then I just had a little bit of my dad in there. I sent it to the editors of The Sun. Most writers would give their eyeteeth to be in The Sun. They have such a devoted readership. When I got feedback from them, they said, "We love your essay, but we think your dad's really the story." I was kind of offended. I was like, no, I want to write about The Preppy Handbook. I thought they'd rejected it. Then later on, they were like, "Didn't you get our email? Do you want to write it?" I was like, oh, my gosh, you guys still like it? I worked on it. It was very cathartic to publish it, to have people from my high school read it and get back to me. So many said, "I had a bad high school year too. Nobody knew. People didn't know about my dad. I was really struggling. I didn't know how to say anything." They felt so grateful for that essay.

Zibby: Do you think that part of what you do in fiction to put together the family the way that you wanted it to be growing up that you never had? Maybe that's too simplistic or armchair therapist. What do you think the role of fiction is in helping you with your own issues?

Christina: One of my friends said that I waste my best nonfiction on -- or I waste my fiction -- I'm sorry. I need to rephrase this. He said that everything I put in nonfiction I should put in fiction. He's like, "All your best material, you're wasting on nonfiction." I thought that was really interesting. It's almost like a way to write a diary. The things you're anxious about tend to be what you write about. Even though you're turning it into a story about other people, maybe I was working on this book -- I never thought about this until now. The Second Home, my kids were getting older. Our family was about to change. Maybe that was just a way for me to hold onto us and what our life was like before everyone would go.

Zibby: Of course, it's actually not a home that makes a family. The home is just -- not that it doesn't have a lot of soul, but a family can transcend a physical place. It can't be destroyed by one demo truck or whatever else.

Christina: It's more just the memories, I think.

Zibby: It feels painful. Losing a place that’s important to you like in The Second Home, it's a loss. It's something that you can grieve in and of itself. It seems silly to say in the context of the craziness of the world right now, sitting around being sad about your family home, but I think it's a physical loss that you feel when a touchstone of your life disappears. It's a rootlessness, almost.

Christina: Yeah, and a place you go back to again and again and again. There's a certain cadence to your life, a certain rhythm. We have a summer cottage. It's very simple. In fact, I think it has the first toilet ever invented. We have to close it every winter. My life seems to make some sense when I go back every year and I go through all the routines of opening it up and having the well pump turned back on. I'm thinking about who's going to be there, all the people that populate it over the course of the summer and the memories that we have of playing Parcheesi and so on. I think it just makes your life make sense sometimes to have one place you go back to again and again instead of always going somewhere different.

Zibby: I agree. My mom and stepdad sold the house that we had gone to my whole life. All the books that I had even as a kid, now I have here with me in my house. It was almost as if I had finally grown up more because of that house going out of our family than I had getting married, getting divorced, getting remarried, having kids. The cleaning out of that particular room of mine that was, here at age -- it happened a couple years ago, but still in my forties. It's emotional, passing of a torch.

Christina: It can definitely make you feel [indiscernible]. It's kind of a new era when you let go of those places. You realize you're jumping into something new, which I think right now, given all the turbulence in our lives, maybe those second homes are going to be even more meaningful to people, just having one constant in a world that's in complete flux right now. I keep wondering how the second-home market is going to work this summer. I think most people are renting places for longer period of time, which actually I like. When I was a kid, we'd go to Cape Cod. We would get to know all the kids. We were there long enough. We'd go to the ponds. We'd want to be there at the same time the next day because maybe that cute guy from Connecticut was going to be there or whatever. I like that kind of repetitive visit and longer visit.

Zibby: So how did you end up writing a debut novel now at this time in your life? How did this happen now? Tell me about it.

Christina: I was writing a lot before. I have a PhD in creative writing. I've written essays in The New York Times or Washington Post or The Sun. I have published a fair amount of short fiction. I love short fiction. I'm a complete short story addict. I read them all the time. I kind of want to be buried with my short start collection. [laughs] I think that the craft of a short story, I just appreciate it so much. That's all I worked on, was short stories. Then people would say you're not really an author until you have a book. I'd kind of bristle at that a little bit thinking that, no, I'm still a productive writer. I have to say there is something super satisfying about writing something as big as a novel and tracking the characters and putting it all together in a way that there's an arch from beginning to middle to end that I don't know now that I'll be able to go back to short stories. It just took me a really long time to learn how to do that.

One thing I tell people is I've gone through multiple drafts on this book and then also another book that I worked on for my PhD thesis that just never really quite had a plot. It takes a long time because the first time you write a novel, you have to recognize one thing that you're doing, which is you're telling the story to yourself the first time. You're just creating this landscape. You're inhabiting it with characters. You're just kind of populating things. Then when you go back and you revise, that's when you start telling a story for your reader. I think a lot of people who try to write novels and think that they’ve failed or who give up, it's because they get frustrated at one of those points along the way when they're writing. It's just a sticking with it and getting back into it and trying to make that transition from telling the story to yourself to your reader, which I think makes a book -- that's where the magic takes place.

Zibby: Wow. That's really, really interesting advice. I've never heard anything like that before.

Christina: That PhD did something, huh?

Zibby: [laughs] I also loved, by the way, your Modern Love essay about your friend's ex-husband and his new girlfriend being in your spin class. That was priceless. You need to send these around again. You wrote in that 2014 or something, a long time ago. It needs to breathe new life because that's such a good essay. I'll put it in the show notes when I do this. At least I can do that. Wow, go you.

Christina: The Modern Love essay, one thing that I love about that essay is -- I'm sure a lot of writers can recognize this. Sometimes you just know a story. The minute they walked into my classroom, I was talking about, okay, we're going to climb a four-minute hill. It's going to be really hard, and whatever. That's what I was saying. In my head, I was like, I've got a story here. I cannot believe he's in my class. The funny thing about that essay is that the couple, they're really good friends now. I think that is really, maybe, in a way wasn't my place to enter that situation. At the same time, it kind of made it funny in a way. It was meant to be funny. I think a lot of us can relate to that feeling of when your friends get divorced you take it really personally. You can tell this from my book. I'm super nostalgic about things. I just want things to stay the same. Even though they both ended up in a really good place and they're totally at peace with what happened, I wasn't. The editor, Dan Jones of Modern Love, the day before it was published, he called me. We were talking about it. He said, "You know what I love about this essay?" This is right after he said about three million people read it. I was like, "What?" He said, "You just make such an ass out of yourself." [laughs] I was like, yep, I guess I do.

Zibby: It was really fantastic. Do you still teach spinning?

Christina: I do. Because of COVID, I haven't had my classes. I love teaching spinning. It's the best money I ever spent, was getting certified. You meet the nicest people. I never dread a class, never, ever. I never wake up and think, ugh, I have to teach a spin class. There's just this wonderful energy when you walk into a spin room. I don't know what the future of spinning is right now.

Zibby: I know, the future of anything. Christina, thank you so much. Your book, as I said at the beginning, I could not put it down. It kept me up. That doesn't happen that often. I just really, really enjoyed it. It's really a pleasure talking to you. I share that same appreciation of all nostalgic elements and not wanting things to change, so I get it. It was just really great. Congratulations on your pub day and everything.

Christina: Thank you for having me on the show. I truly listen all the time. It's just a total thrill to be on it. Thanks for all you do for writers, especially a debut writer like to me. To get my name out there through you means so much.

Zibby: Aw, it's my pleasure. Hopefully, I'll meet you in person one of these days.

Christina: Great. Thanks a lot, Zibby. Buh-bye.