Catherine Gildiner, GOOD MORNING, MONSTER

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

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

Dr. Catherine Gildiner: Thank you for inviting me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: That was so great. I loved that.

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

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

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

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

Catherine: And that the father would tolerate it.

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: No way. Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

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

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

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

Zibby: Bye.

Sara Evans, BORN TO FLY

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

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

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

Sara: No way!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: [laughs] Too late for me.

Sara: Me too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Yes, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Of course. It was my pleasure.

Sara: Have a great day.

Zibby: Bye, Sara.

Sara: Bye.

Nancy Jooyoun Kim, THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE

Zibby Owens: Hi.

Nancy Jooyoun Kim: Hi. How are you?

Zibby: Good. How are you?

Nancy: Nice to meet you.

Zibby: Nice to meet you too. How's everything with you?

Nancy: Good. How about you?

Zibby: Good. I know this is going to sound crazy. I was just at lunch with my dad. He wrote a book called What It Takes, which is a business-type book. It's being published in multiple languages. He said, "Who's your podcast with?" I said, "Nancy." I told him a little bit about your book and your background. He goes, "Oh, my book just came out in Korean." I was like, "I don't think she speaks Korean. She's from LA." He's like, "Maybe her parents." I'm like, "I know her dad passed away." He's like, "Maybe her mom." I was like, "Well, she came here when she was four, but maybe." Anyway, he just gave me this book. He signed it and he said for me to send it to your mom. [laughs]

Nancy: That's so funny. That's great.

Zibby: It's in Korean. He didn't even give me a copy.

Nancy: She'll be the only one between us who will be able to read that. I can't read that myself. Thank you so much. That's so sweet of him. Congratulations to him. That's huge.

Zibby: Thanks. If you're interested, just send me where I should mail it to her. She'll probably be like, what on earth? [laughs]

Nancy: You can send it to me. I'll explain it to her. She'll appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Zibby: No problem. Anyway, thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I am really excited to talk about your book and your life and all the rest. Thanks for coming on.

Nancy: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.

Zibby: Nancy, can you tell people who haven't read your book yet, which is probably most people because it's just coming out, what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Nancy: The Last Story of Mina Lee takes place in Los Angeles's Koreatown. It's about a complex mother-daughter relationship between a Korean immigrant single mother named Mina and her American-born named Margot. The book begins with a death. Margot discovers her mother's body in their apartment. The plot unwinds in a dual narrative that alternates between the mother's point of view in the past and the daughter's point of view in the present. During this process, Margot not only learns more about her mother's life, but she learns about her own life and her own self as well.

Zibby: It sounds great. That's the perfect description, uncertainty, a mystery, mother/daughter. It's got all the elements. This is right up my alley.

Nancy: I just really wanted to write about the complex interdependence between mothers and daughters, the ways that they need love and sometimes even resent each other. This premise allowed me to explore all the different nuances of being in a mother-daughter relationship and also having the extra -- the tensions are heightened by the differences in language because Mina only speaks Korean and a little bit of Spanish while Margot speaks primarily English. As you can imagine, as a teenager as she gets older and she wants to describe her feelings and her motivations to her mother, she hits all these blocks. It became extremely frustrating for her.

Zibby: It's hard to imagine a relationship without fluid language between two parties. That's the cornerstone of how you relate to somebody that you love. To have that taken away, especially between a mother-daughter relationship, is for sure worth examining. What's happens then...?

Nancy: There are lines within the book where Margot says things like, "What would be the point of me learning Korean?" She only thinks that she needs it to speak to one person in her life. Yet it requires her mother's death for her to finally realize what that exactly means. Suddenly, her mother dies. Her mother is her only connection to family. She becomes kind of untethered in this world, which is quite devastating for her. We watch her pull through. I think the mystery itself of her mother's death gives her this distraction for her grief.

Zibby: You had a quote in the beginning when Margot is talking to her friend. You say, "Agreeing to the same white lie is what makes family family, he says." She was like, what about if people agree? What if family agrees to two truths? He's like, I don't know, maybe they're scientists. [laughs]

Nancy: That was a little nod toward sometimes the fragility of the stories that our families tell ourselves to survive and the ways in which parents and children, sometimes we keep things from each other no matter how much we love each other because we're attempting to either protect the other person or protect ourselves. That's a very human impulse, in my opinion. Obviously, Margot has a lot of reasons to be angry at her mother for keeping secrets from her. At the same time, as she gets to know more and more the depth of her mother's story and how complicated she was, she could see how her mother, in order to survive, literally had to submerge so much of her history and her past just to get through everyday life. I think it's hard to just be a working-class single mother and imagining how she can work so many hours a day and also attempting to process things with her daughter, explain things to her daughter in a different language, which is almost impossible in a way that's nuanced and complicated. Through this process, Margot kind of forgives her mother in an interesting way. This book is just the beginning of that relationship in a lot of ways.

Zibby: I was wondering with the book, how much this is tracking your own life. You wrote so beautifully about your father and his tragic death on his way home from a hiking accident and your mother and both of their stories and when they came to the United States. You wrote in Guernica and Los Angeles Review of Books. I felt like I really got to know your whole backstory. Maybe you could share a little more about what it was like, your knowing their stories and also even your father's reticence to share his past and the pain that he masked in the past and then how he leaving your family affected you.

Nancy: In a lot of immigration stories, there's so much trauma involved, usually. A lot of times, immigrants are either running from something or running toward something. Even though this novel is not autobiographical, I think that something that I could really relate to are the types of silences that exist within families and how loaded those silences can be and the ways in which daily life won't allow you to access the truths behind those silences until something as horrifying as what happens to Margot, which is finding her mother's body in her apartment, happens. Like Margot and Mina, within my own family, my father spoke English, but my mother, she didn't speak English. A lot of the tensions and the misunderstandings that happen between mother and daughter, that's something that I could definitely relate to. It's very difficult to describe unless you've experienced it. It seems like, how could you live with somebody under the same roof and not speak the same language? It just almost doesn't make sense. Growing up, parents and children, the language that they use is typically elementary. It's things like, did you do your homework? Did you go to school? What did you eat today?

There's this point where Margot just begins to grow separately from her mother as an adolescent. She sort of begins to abandon her past as she gets closer towards going to college and thinking about what she wants to do with her own life. These are all frustrations and things that I could definitely relate to. Mina never really needs to know English to get by. That's one of the beauties of ethnic enclaves, places like Koreatown, Chinatown, where people can come to this country and they can survive. They can work and find basic ways of getting by without learning the language. Pretty much, in Koreatown, you have an accountant. You have a bank. You have a post office. Mina works in a mostly Latinx area of LA. She really only needs a little bit of Spanish to communicate with her customers. As Mina's spending so much time at work and then Margot's focusing on figuring out how to get out of Koreatown, they really split apart. These are definitely frustrations that I think that I can relate to and a lot of other immigrants and the children of immigrants can relate to.

Zibby: A hundred percent. You also include in the book what it was like growing up looking different. I don't know if this was your experience growing up in LA or if this was just fictious for Margot's background, but how she longed to look like all these tall, blond-haired, beautiful, white students. PS, I would also love to look like a tall, blond student myself. [laughs] I think that's a common aspiration.

Nancy: What's interesting is I think the assumption is that if you grow up in diverse places you have exposures to so many different forms of beauty and concepts of beauty. Margot does grow up around a very diverse group of people. At the end of the day, she is very lonely growing up because she has no siblings. Her mother works all day long. She only really sees her mother at night when she's very tired or over the weekends when she's helping her mom at her mother's store in [indiscernible]. She spends probably so many hours of her life watching television. I think that so much of children's formation of how they view the world and how the world is idealized is through TV. I'm imagining Margot growing up in the eighties and nineties. I'm sure there were some forms of diversity on television at that point, but I don't feel like she had a ton of role models. I don't think she necessarily saw herself in a lot of the television or the movies that she was seeing.

There's this sense that there's a gap between her lived experience and what she's seeing in this public and social way, like, if I had those things, that is what success looks like. There's this huge gap, which is actually really sad when you think about it because in many ways Margot's mother, Mina, even if she doesn't fit the traditional standards of success in her country, in many ways she is a successful person. She's a woman who had so little and managed to create a life for herself. She managed to feed her children. She managed to send her children to school. I think being a single mother is a huge accomplishment in and of itself, especially in a country that's so foreign to her. There's this huge gap in understanding where Margot sees her mother as representing everything she doesn't want to be when she grows up. She wants to have a nice at least middle-class life. She wants to have certain nice things in her life. In reality, if she had known more about her mother's story, I think she would've appreciated her a lot more and seen, wow, this woman is actually very heroic.

Zibby: I think it takes a lot for kids to actually get out of their minds and consider their parents to be heroes, especially at a younger age, but even, I would argue, a lot of -- I think it's very hard to be objective sometimes as a child, even an adult child for some people. [laughs]

Nancy: Right, because our parents will always be the people who are reminding us of what we're not quite doing, even if you're in a very loving environment. Obviously, they're doing that for a specific reason. As children, we can sometimes see our parents as the boss, the person who doesn't see me for who I am. There's so many ways that parents and children -- I think that's what makes this book really interesting. It's interested in the nuances of those emotions, even if some of them are uncomfortable or maybe even, I don't want to say embarrassing, but I think they're hard to write about and talk about.

Zibby: Basically, Margot just wants a role on Beverly Hills, 90201. What is she going to do? Instead, she's going home to Koreatown and whatever. She's never going to be happy in that environment. That’s tough.

Nancy: Right, exactly. I'm sure she watched 90201.

Zibby: Of course. Who didn't? Come on. How did you become such a good writer? I really feel like you are a fabulous, fabulous writer. Your nonfiction stories about yourself really read almost like novels and made me so excited to read your actual novel. How did you do this? Tell me about your whole writing history.

Nancy: That's so sweet of you. I've been writing for a really long time. I started probably when I was a kid just playfully, imaginatively. I used to draw these little cartoons and write these little stories. The plants would be characters. The lawnmower was the bad guy. I remember writing these really elementary stories as a kid. Then in junior high and high school, I started writing really bad poetry, which I think a lot of kids at that age write. [Indiscernible] writing bad poetry or writing really melodramatic songs. I definitely had that streak in me. I've had streaks in my life where my work was just too demanding. Writing for me has really just been about practice and discipline and endurance in a lot of ways. I feel like I just put the time in and the hours. I know that's really hard to do for most people. The way that I was able to really complete this novel after so many years -- I graduated from an MFA program in 2006. That was fourteen years ago.

Since then, I've written two novels. This is the only one to be published. For me, what worked is to find the story that literally only I could tell. Once I had a sense of purpose to my writing, it made the discipline required a little bit more accessible, I would say. Writing as a discipline is really hard because I think there's no obvious rewards immediately. Nobody really knows what you're doing. Everybody's like, oh, you're writing a novel. That sounds fun. They don't really get what's going on behind the scenes. There's no real way to explain it very well, also, while you're working on it. It just sounds like some abstract story. You're still figuring it out, so you can't even really talk about it. What helped me was to find the story that I felt only I could tell and to have that sense of purpose behind what I was doing. Once I had that sense of purpose, I was able to muster the discipline that I think I needed to actually complete the book.

Zibby: What was that sense of purpose that you felt? What did you need to get out with this book? What was the driving force?

Nancy: I feel like this book, it's a story that I had never read before. I feel like it's something that captured things that I have always wanted to say to either my mother or maybe to other people and that I could not say in real life. That's the beauty of what fiction can do that I think is really amazing. I remember when I was an undergrad [indiscernible] had given a talk. This was many years ago, probably fifteen, sixteen years ago. Somebody in the audience asked her, they loved the dialogue in her novels, and were they based upon real conversations in her family? She said something like, no, they're conversations that I always wished had happened. The purpose of this novel is in a way to create a kind of impossible conversation that could've never happened while Mina was still living between a daughter and a mother. I feel like to have this sense of purpose of having this extraordinarily important conversation and talk between two people who really love each other but can't quite access each other really focused my attention in a way that narrowed it and made it a lot easier to accomplish as opposed to thinking, I'm going to write about immigration, just to really zero in on something that felt manageable to me. On the way, obviously I would explore all sorts of other things.

Zibby: Wow. Then when you were actually doing the writing in that space where nobody really understands what you're doing, where did you like to do that? Where did you work? When and where? What did you do the rest of the day when you weren’t writing and all of that?

Nancy: I actually began really focusing on this novel during a point of transition in my life. I was living in Seattle working a full-time job. My husband got a job down in California. It allowed me to start all over because now I had to find a new job. I began to put together freelance editing projects and more project-based work so I could work from home. For me, this novel really was written in the mornings before I had to do my regular day job. I tried to put together at least two to three hours per day working on my book. I tried to work on it about five days a week. That's very hard for a lot of people to do. It just is, whether it's because they have children or the demands of their job. I found that working on a book almost every day allowed me to access almost a fluidity or subconscious space where I was returning to something. There's something kind of meditative about it. I think it's probably similar to how professional athletes or certain artists have to wake up and it just requires this disciple where you get into it. It's a little bit easier every time. That was the process for me. I just woke up in the morning, try to get it out of the way first. If I waited until later, life would just take over.

Zibby: That's how I feel about exercise, which is why I basically never exercise. [laughs]

Nancy: It's actually very, very similar. Then for the rest of the day, you feel recharged and you feel like you've gotten something done. That was necessary for me.

Zibby: As opposed to maybe not getting out of your pajamas all day in pandemic mode. What has this time been like for you with your book? When we went into the pandemic mode in March or whatever, I'm sure your book release felt so far away. Now suddenly, here we still are and it's coming out. How has this whole thing been for you?

Nancy: Obviously, there's aspects of it that are so difficult. Nobody imagines this situation when they're thinking of, I've been writing for this long and I'm finally having my first book out. Now I can't even go out and celebrate. There's so much that I can't do that I would love to do. I can't go to my bookstore and see my book on the shelf. That's one of the [indiscernible]. At the same time, I try to just remain grateful every single day. I know that this has been such a huge honor to have a book out in the world. I feel like people who will connect with this book will connect with this book. They’ll find a way to it. The story matters to me. Obviously, I want people to read it. Just that this story exists and is out and there's this possibility of people finding it is really wonderful to me. Every day, I just try to remain grateful for that. I'm actually loving the virtual aspect of things, to be honest, because I feel like I'm able to do a little bit more than I normally would be able to. I'm able to connect with writers in different regions. There's no travel involved. It's kind of fun going to online readings because you don't have to put on shoes. You can turn off your camera. You don't have to put on anything, pretty much. You can still be a part of this community. I do think that there have been some pluses to it in a way.

Zibby: I love going to book readings. I have four kids. It's often hard to get to Brooklyn for seven on a Tuesday or something like that, so I felt like I was always missing out. Sometimes I would go to book readings and there would be like ten people there, which is crazy, even though the authors are super amazing and the book was fabulous. It's hard to get people all to congregate at these appointed times. Now I feel like we can all pop into bookstores across the world if we want. There is a sense of liberation in that.

Nancy: You can have dinner while you're at a reading, which I know sounds weird, but you can. There's fewer excuses, almost. I've been to some wonderful readings. I really miss the live events. There's always the hangout afterwards. There's always the energy of those events. At the same time, I think we're doing pretty well considering the circumstances.

Zibby: Maybe you shouldn't actually eat dinner while you're giving a reading. Maybe if you're in the audience it would be okay.

Nancy: If you're in the audience, I mean.

Zibby: Okay, good. I'm picturing you rolling up with --

Nancy: -- [Indiscernible] fold laundry.

Zibby: It's true. The function of no video always being an option is huge. Who knows what people are doing? I'm sure somebody's done a funny skit about what people are actually doing behind the black little boxes in the Zoom screens. They're funnier than I could potentially ever be. Who knows? Have you found it easy or hard to write during this time? Have you been working on a new project? What's coming next for you?

Nancy: I started working on a new novel which also takes place outside of Los Angeles's Koreatown. It's about the separations, the silences within a family after the mysterious death of the mother five years ago. I'm still writing. I'm probably not as productive as I was before the pandemic, obviously, because so much is going on in our world. It's been a comfort. I love it, just getting back into the pages. This is my favorite stage of the process. I love the early stages when you're just learning about your characters and you're like, oh, my gosh. You get this idea just out of nowhere, or you're in a scene and they say something and it makes you realize, maybe she's suggesting something about her past. There's this really interesting part of discovery that I love in this stage. It's great. I love this part. This is the best part, actually, the beginnings. Once you start revising, it gets so hard.

Zibby: Yeah, because you're out of that same mental headspace that you referred to before. Now you just have to dip into it in certain parts.

Nancy: That's when you start getting really sharp about things and you start realizing, oh, there's this plot line that totally just dropped off. Now I have to remove that and figure out why that was in there in the first place. Right now's a really good time in terms of where I am with my next book.

Zibby: In terms of this book selling and the publishing journey, if you will, what's the synopsis of how you sold your book and how that all happened?

Nancy: It really began with an agent finding me. She actually read that Guernica piece that you're referring to about my father. It's called "Heaven Lake."

Zibby: It was so good.

Nancy: Thank you so much. My agent who's incredible, Amy Elizabeth Bishop, just reached out to me. She said, "Do you have anything?" I was like, "I do, actually. I have this novel that I've been working on for about five years." It was a pretty straightforward experience. I didn't have the same experience with my first novel that I wrote. It went through over twenty rejections. This was a much more straightforward experience. I think it's because of what I was talking about earlier, just having that sense of purpose, that really clear sense of purpose. A lot of people wonder, where am I going to find a story that only I can tell? That sounds like some kind of magical thing that drops in your lap. I think it's more a matter of just finding and being true to what truly keeps you up at night, what truly you want to spend time with, what truly at the end of the day matters to you. For me, it was all about exploring this one complicated relationship between a mother and daughter. The purpose and the clarity was very obvious in the manuscript. That helped it sell, in my opinion.

Zibby: Love it. That's great. Do you have any other advice? I know that you've already given a lot of great advice to aspiring authors. Any other parting tips?

Nancy: Yeah, I do. I'm not particularly wise. I'm still new to all of this. I would say something that has helped me a lot is I've surrounded myself with extraordinarily supportive people. Through the years, I've had so many relationships that were less functional. This is one of those industries where you need to be surrounded by people who believe in you a hundred percent because there's so much rejection. It's such an uphill battle. I think that really surrounding yourself with people who support you and believe in you no matter what is so important. We can't choose everyone that's around us. My strategy has always been, I've been much more careful about sharing things with those people and really identifying who I can trust and who's going to support and love me through even the hardest parts of this journey. That has made a huge difference. I couldn't have survived all of this without my husband who is very supportive and friends who hadn’t even read my book but who just always gave me the sense that they believed in whatever I was working on and that it was important.

Zibby: That is just all-around great life advice. Surround yourself with the right people. It's true. That really is the secret to the whole thing, is just saying, is this person good for me or not? and figuring out a way to have the strength to say goodbye to the people who aren't.

Nancy: That is really, really hard. Yes, it's super hard. It's something that I'm still learning to do, but I feel like gradually moving in that direction. I am definitely seeing major improvements in me reaching the goals that I need to reach.

Zibby: It's obviously working because you have a book coming out. You're a beautiful writer. Your book is getting on the shelves whether you see it or not. It's like a tree falling in the forest. [laughs] If my book is on the bookstore shelves and nobody sees it, is it really there? But it is, so congratulations.

Nancy: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It's been such an honor to talk with you.

Zibby: It's been so fun. Awesome. Thank you so much. Send me your address so I can send you this book.

Nancy: I will. I'm not sure if I have your email, but I guess I'll send it through Justine, my publicist. Thank you again. Bye.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Elizabeth Ames, THE OTHER'S GOLD

Zibby Owens: Elizabeth Ames is the author of debut novel The Other's Gold. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth has lived in Seattle, France, and Rwanda since leaving the Midwest. She currently lives in a Harvard dormitory with her husband, two children, and a few hundred undergraduates. At least, it was that way until this year when everything is going virtual.

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

Elizabeth Ames: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: I'm particularly excited because I feel like we've been trying to plan this for like five years or something ridiculous. This is one of my longest to-do podcasts that I've had on the list.

Elizabeth: I know. My book has been out for almost a year, but I really appreciate your flexibility. I'm happy to be on anytime.

Zibby: I'm sure it was my fault. I'm not trying to say it's not.

Elizabeth: We were back and forth. Obviously, we all had quarantine time. There was sort of, maybe that's only going to last a few weeks. Maybe it's going to last indefinitely. We don't know. I'm just glad we found a time.

Zibby: Me too. I know we're doing video and audio. For the podcast listeners only, you are in this gorgeous library at one of the houses at Harvard. Just tell a little bit about it and about writing The Other's Gold in that library. It must have been amazing.

Elizabeth: People who aren't familiar, Harvard has I think twelve, I don't want to get it wrong, but I think it's twelve undergraduate houses outside of the freshman houses. This is all funny to talk about, or not funny, but strange to talk about now thinking about, how will it be this coming fall? Last year and the year before when I wrote this book, I moved into this house, Quincy House, with my husband and our then six-month-old. I guess I'm taking it too far back.

Zibby: No, go back.

Elizabeth: Okay. I'm in this beautiful library. Every house has its own library. This is the Quincy House cube that I just ducked in for this short time to chat with you.

Zibby: It's beautiful. Wait, keep going back. I like that. So your husband's a professor. You ended up at Harvard.

Elizabeth: He's a professor.

Zibby: What does he teach?

Elizabeth: He's in the department of folklore and mythology. His PhD is in African and African American studies and anthropology. His class this fall is going to be The Art of Emergency: Storytelling in the Time of -- I'm going to get the title wrong, but it sounds like a very timely class. Storytelling in the Time of Trauma? I've got to look at the [indiscernible]. The department of folklore and mythology, I think it's a cool department.

Zibby: Gosh, I want to go back to school. I miss taking classes. Should I learn about this? Should I learn about that? Education is so wasted on the young. At the time, I was like, if I drop French, I can go out Thursday nights. [laughs]

Elizabeth: What time to get up, I know. When we moved here, I had this vantage from this library where the students work. I could look out over the courtyard, which is so idyllic. It's so manicured and green. Students would be walking to class. I always say I love campus novels. I always hoped I'd write one. Then when we moved into a dorm, I thought, this is the time. If I'm ever going to write a campus novel, I have to do it now when I have this really useful perspective for a writer. I'm an outsider in that I'm not a student at Harvard. I don't really have much of a formal affiliation with the university, but I live in one of the buildings and work with all these students and have literally a privilege and a joy to live amongst them while they were going through this really intense time of being away from home. I was going through this really intense time of becoming a parent, living here with a six-month-old. That was what got me thinking about the book. This is so weird to be a new mom amongst all these sophomores. I lived mostly among sophomores. Seeing them be dropped off at school by their parents, and their parents just looking at me with my baby so longingly, giving me the, it goes so fast. I believed that from day one. Also, obviously seeing parents drop their kids off at college is really a -- while you're wearing your baby, if you weren’t already weeping, you will be any minute.

Zibby: [laughs] Oh, my gosh. Tell listeners what The Other's Gold is about.

Elizabeth: The Other's Gold, it follows four friends, Alice, Lainey, Ji Sun, and Margaret, from when they meet their freshman year at a fictional college, Quincy-Hawthorn College. I just mentioned Quincy House. The college is named in part after Quincy House, but it is an invented college in New Hampshire. They meet their freshman year. It follows them from that time to when they start having children or not. It's a thirteen-year time period. It's structured around the worst mistake made by each of the four friends during that really intense and transformative twelve years.

Zibby: I was particularly drawn to Alice and her situation with her brother and the accident and how she talked about it and processed it and wanted to tell her friends but didn't want to tell her friends. How you go through life with secrets, I feel like that's one of the most powerful things in books. What do people do with their secrets? What causes people to do things? Does it matter if you're young or old? What makes something forgivable and not and all the rest? I was just wondering about developing her character in particular, if you could talk a little more about how you decided on her narrative trajectory, if you will.

Elizabeth: I always feel like when you talk about characters you start to sound so nutty. You're like, she came to me. I do think she came to me maybe third or even fourth. How does a character come to you? That's the part that actually feels like magic to me. I think there's a lot of things that you can try to invite characters in your mind, but they just kind of come knocking. Then you start thinking about them. I feel like when you get really into it, then suddenly everything's grist for the mill. You'll hear people talking. I remember at some point actually, speaking of Alice because she becomes a doctor, I was sitting by these two doctors at a coffee shop listening to them talk. They were talking about children and one who hadn’t had children and she had wanted to. They were just having this pretty intimate conversation about their careers and their lives. I was just thinking, Alice, Alice. She's a doctor. She struggles with her fertility. Those were just strangers in a coffee shop. Once the characters arrive at your doorstep, then you start to see them everywhere. They're really present.

Zibby: Did you have a college experience anything like this? Did you have three girlfriends that you roomed with? Did you base the window seat off of a dorm room there? How real to life, if at all, is the book or parts of the book?

Elizabeth: I always say I feel like I could count the actual things that came from my life on one hand. I went to a large state school, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is a great school. Part of my fascination with small liberal arts schools is probably fueled by the fact that I didn't go to one. The idea of the en suite dorm room and the smaller sometimes claustrophobic environment, I think my curiosity about that partly fueled the book. I've been very lucky with the long-term friendships I've had. I've never been part of a quad like that, of a foursome. I think that partly inspired the book too, was just the curiosity I have about those kinds of friendships where you're living together, taking classes together, eating together, dating, breaking up, sometimes going on to marry each other or not. It's just such an intense time. Your bond is forged so intensely. Then I would see these groups of students just completely inextricable. I was curious about how that friendship forms and then how it's weathered and tested once you're not in the environment that totally supports it.

Zibby: My sophomore year I lived in a room very similar to that. We had a common room. We had two little rooms with two of us each with bunk beds. It was so tight. You couldn't even open the dresser drawer without sitting on the bunk bed. The four of us, we did everything together. I remember my dad got married. I was like, I have to invite everybody I'm rooming with. That's non-negotiable. It is so interesting to see, even if you took this little group of us, what's happened over time. You could take any cluster, really. I think that's what's so great about books like this. My group of friends, it's just a little microcosm. It could happen to anybody because life is so random. Any characters you pick, all these horrible things and great things are going to happen. It's just a mishmash, like a commentary on life. That was a ramble.

Elizabeth: Are you still friends with the three people who were your roommates?

Zibby: I roomed with one girl. Then there were the other two. The two in the other little room went to St. Paul's together, so they had been friends before. I'm still close to them. We go on girls' trips once every other year at this point. Now I don't know when we'll see each other again. One of them lives in Denver. One of them lives in Hong Kong. Then my roommate died on September 11th.

Elizabeth: I'm so sorry. I think I've actually read your essay about that. I'm so sorry.

Zibby: That's okay. It's okay. We were friends after school. We lived together after school. She was twenty-five when it happened. I have so many of those memories and all of us on campus together just totally embedded the way you're saying. If there was a social or whatever, it was us with the guys. It was just that time. To lose someone in the group is also, when you go back, it changes the way you look at everything that had happened. Even when we go to reunions, I'm looking around. It's just not the same. The book kind of took me back to that intensity because you don't get that with anyone, I feel like, at this age other than -- there is an intensity that comes with parenting in the trenches together that's similar because you're in it. You're stressed. You don't know what you're doing. There's too much to do in the same way that I felt like it was at school. I think you do get that with some new parents, especially first time around, but not in that many other junctures. Maybe if you're working in a really intense environment. I didn't really have this big corporate setting where you might bond with people in your class or something.

Elizabeth: I think you're right. I think that's what's interesting to me about that span of life. As adults, it is unusual to have that kind of same intensity of the circumstance. I felt like because I was becoming this new parent alongside these students who were kind of forging their own new families, it did highlight for me the similarities around your identity changing. When you come to college and you're figuring out who you are, so much of that I think is forged as a result of who you befriend, which can be totally random. You're sort of like, I want to be like this person. I want to not be like this person. Then that rachets up through college. The moments I tried to choose in the book around getting married or not, career choices, or other touchstones where you're thinking about your identity -- what does it mean if this person marries someone who I really loathe? What does it mean if my friend chooses not to have kids or another friend can't have kids? or all these times you define yourself against even your closest friends. Like you said, when you're new parents, your identity is -- that's a complete upheaval, the first time especially when you're just -- I feel like for most people I know, that change from not being a parent to being a parent is huge. I felt like those moments bookending leaving your family, starting a family, even though they felt so different, they have some things in common.

Zibby: Totally. I totally agree. Speaking of family, I'm sorry, you can probably hear my son screaming in the background.

Elizabeth: No, you can't apologize for that. That's a side effect of this Zoom life. People have to be aware that children exist in some working people's lives.

Zibby: So you've been up there. Have you been there the whole time at Harvard with your -- well, now he's not a baby anymore.

Elizabeth: I moved with my husband and first baby when she was six months old. Now she's four and a half.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh.

Elizabeth: I know. The students who started when we started, they already graduated. I guess this will be the start of our fifth year and a very strange year. I've since had a second child who's only ever lived in a Harvard house. It's a really amazing community. I always say I was kind of weary about moving into a dorm as an adult with a baby. [laughs] I lived in this apartment in a sleepy, really child-friend neighborhood of Cambridge known for being family friendly. I didn't have kids. Then I moved into Harvard Square. It's family friendly in its own way. It's also more like, you can go out and do stuff that isn't as easy to do when you have a new baby. There are other families. There are dogs. The students are amazing. Talking about it now, I just feel sad because we don't know what it's going to look like this year. Even if there are some students in this house, we won't be eating in the dining hall. We won't be having the kind of casual interactions with students that make it feel so warm and community-like, and with other tutors and other families and pets. So much around education is just a big question mark. I think this is a really special place to have kids. I felt so lucky for the people that my kids have met.

Zibby: I bet they have the best babysitters ever. You have access to the most brilliant, awesome babysitters. I feel like I should just come there to poach some sitters or something. [laughs]

Elizabeth: They're so busy, though. The ones we've had are so amazing. They have a lot going on in the schoolyear.

Zibby: I'm sure that’s true. So when did you write? How long did it take to write this book? Did you outline? I know you were talking about the organic nature in which the characters developed. Did you start with that timeline of the bookends that you just mentioned? Was that a "do not change" type of thing for the outset? How did you start it?

Elizabeth: Actually, it was, again, kind of college-like because it was four years start to finish. I was just thinking about this because I started taking notes, emailing myself, notes app kind of notes, when my first child was born. I just wanted to jot down some of the feelings. It wasn't even fictional yet. It was just like, I got to figure out how to write about some of this, really just intense feelings. I want to write it down now while it's so fresh. Then we moved here. I started really getting to work on it once we started having some childcare. When my first child was eight months old, we had a very part-time nanny share. I did some of the tentative first steps on this book. Then when she was a year and a half, I think she was nineteen months, she started at this little preschool daycare. Then I really got cooking. I had been working on the book but not in such a consistent way, in a very piecemeal way, but always walking around thinking about it but not just actually banging it out.

Then when she started at this daycare, I really figured out how to prioritize my time and be more efficient. I would drop her off and oftentimes go to this coffee shop that was really nearby that has no internet. I would just get to work. It was maybe a year of thinking, a year of writing, and then selling the book and then doing some revisions that year. Then it came out. It was kind of fast. I had written a book before this that isn't published that took a really long time. It was a lot more labored and protracted. This book came much more quickly. I felt a lot of joy, not necessarily with the content, but with the flow, when you really get into a project and you're just feeling the flow. I think that helped make it happen faster, and the fact that I was just so conscious of my time. I always say I closed my tabs sooner. I always have so many tabs open on my browser. Once I was working on this work and knew how precious my time was away from my young baby, I was just like, close these tabs. Open Word. Get to work.

Zibby: Love it. That's good.

Elizabeth: That's such a meandering answer. I'm sorry.

Zibby: No, that was great. I loved that. It's true. I feel like sometimes the less time I have, the more I get done in that time because I have to maximize every second of an hour. If I have four hours, then I might, well, I must have tons of time, I'll go read the paper.

Elizabeth: I heard an interview with Helen Phillips at the Boston Book Festival. She talked about that same thing, how she's had decreasing time with each book, but she feels like she's become a better writer and makes better use of this time. Her writing's become more concentrated and powerful. I'm probably misquoting her. I feel so encouraged when I hear people talk about it in that way. I think, well, you wrote this book, The Need, when you had this little time. You were doing it in these chunks, and it's so incredible. I was sort of totally deluded. I felt like when I was in graduate school at twenty-four, I thought you have to publish a book before you have a baby or you never will. Obviously, there's evidence throughout time that that's not true. I just had this notion that if you didn't publish a book before you had a baby it was all over for you. It's so archaic. I don't know how I got this idea, but it really stuck with me. For me, it was the opposite. I got so much more productive. My career as a writer didn't really take off until after I had a baby. I think it's helpful for people to hear, especially "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," that it isn't always the derailment that you might fear. I can't speak to this during times of no childcare. Certainly when childcare is involved, people with small children can still do a lot.

Zibby: It's a whole new set of life experiences to draw on and include. The perspective of living through it versus just knowing about it informs the writing in such a richer way. If you can find the time when you're a mom, for sure it's not over. Are you working on anything now?

Elizabeth: Not much. I'm back to emailing myself. Even, it's degraded to texting myself at this point, so jotting notes and things. I need to get more organized. I'm texting, emailing. These notes are everywhere. I got to start pulling it all together. Not too much. I think if we have a little bit more childcare in the coming weeks or months or if I just get more -- people also get up really early and write or they write in the night. It's possible. Also, I've just been so distracted and all the things that we're all feeling during this time.

Zibby: It's okay. I didn't mean that you had to say that you were doing anything.

Elizabeth: I'm working on something, but very scattered. I like to call it the filling-up stage. You're filling up. Then you're going to put it out.

Zibby: It's true. It's so important. How can you make sense of stuff if you haven't processed it? It all is part of it, so don't feel bad. You're like the five hundredth person who's said the same thing, so don't worry about it.

Elizabeth: I know. I listen to the podcast. Of course like all of us, I'm distraught and stressed and all these things. It's a very intense time. It is encouraging. Even prior to this time I felt like hearing from people who talk about the rhythms of their work as being -- some people write every day and are super regimented, and some don't. There's just seasons in your life, as with all things, where you're super productive or you're more fallow. I think that a lot of writers think if they're in a fallow season, well, this is it. It's like new parenting. It's a similar mindset where whatever trouble you're having, especially those early days, your child is having all these sleep interruptions, you're like, this is my life now. I guess I never sleep. I don't sleep. Then a couple years later, or hopefully for some people a month later, you're like, I totally forgot about that time. I think it's similar with writing in the sense that people -- I'm comforted when I hear about people whose books I revere having forgotten how to write a book between books. Each one invents itself. Maybe the difference is just that they did. You know you can do it. You don't necessarily know how, but you know you can do it. Hopefully, you can do it again.

Zibby: I feel like you've already sprinkled in all this advice and inspiration. Do you have any parting advice to aspiring authors?

Elizabeth: One piece of advice would be to prioritize your work in the way that it is in your heart. If you can prioritize it that way in your day, that can be really meaningful. I feel like I always put writing below a lot of obligations for a long time, like my day job. Obviously, it's a huge privilege to be able to move writing up the list. If you can at any point -- for some people, that's grad school or a fellowship or just doing worse at your day job. Honestly, just doing a worse job at your day job and better with the thing that your passion is really for, I think that's something that was useful to me. For me, that meant starting the day working on my book instead of getting to it after other things. The other piece of advice that I was thinking -- it's hard to give advice not knowing what someone's doing. For me, having a baby, I would walk around with her so much to try to get her to take a nap. I wasn't listening to my headphones because I felt like she's brand new and I need to be very alert and not distracted. That was really useful for me. I listen to podcasts. I love podcasts. This is weird advice to give on a podcast. For me, finding some time that's generative. It can be walking or even in the shower or swimming, just some time when the voice in your head is the one for your book and not other voices or music or other things. I think that can be an actual practical tip to try. See what happens if you just only listen to your own thoughts for a walk if you're stuck.

Zibby: Sometimes I don't want to hear my own thoughts. [laughs] That's why I like to listen.

Elizabeth: No kidding. I know. I want to these chats.

Zibby: Someone, I can't remember who it was, but somebody said that part of their writing process was that on their commute to work every day, no radio allowed. That was her time to think about what she would maybe want to write at lunchtime. Now I'm forgetting who that was. My brain is just falling apart. It's like what you were saying. She had that protected time. I mean, she was driving, but whatever part of your brain that that uses is only a tiny bit compared to imagination.

Elizabeth: Isn't it wild that that sounds -- I'm like, that sounds so boring. Don't you want to have the radio on? My impulse is, turn it on. I guess that being bored is so crucial for creative work. You have to be bored. We're not bored as much, or we haven't been, maybe, these days.

Zibby: Yeah, it's true. Planned boredom episodes, I think that's our new thing here.

Elizabeth: [laughs] Do you have the time for some boredom?

Zibby: Making time for boredom, there we go. Thanks, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and for sharing your experience and for letting me feel like I got to spend a half an hour in the library this morning, which is a huge perk.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much for chatting with me. It was a pleasure. Even though I just spoke out against -- total silence on your walk. I love listening to podcasts. It was a pleasure to be part of it.

Zibby: Thanks. You too. Have a great day.

Elizabeth: You too. Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Cat Deeley, THE JOY IN YOU

Cat Deeley: Yay! I did it. Hello.

Zibby Owens: Hi. How's it going?

Cat: Really good. How are you doing?

Zibby: I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for doing this podcast with me.

Cat: Oh, my god, you're more than welcome. Are those all your books?

Zibby: Yes. Well, these are part of my books. They go all the way up and over. I have more in the closet.

Cat: You've color coded them.

Zibby: Yes, I have.

Cat: That's very, very, very organized. I'm slightly jealous of your organizational skills.

Zibby: I must say, I didn't do it all myself. My husband and his business partner and his girlfriend, they were here for July 4th weekend. I was in the process of redoing the whole thing. They're like, let's all do it together. Everybody was here picking up books. It was a team effort.

Cat: I hope you served margaritas or something like that or did something to get it done faster.

Zibby: We did. We had a proper celebration, so not to worry.

Cat: Good. [laughter] How are you doing?

Zibby: Good. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Your children's book is so precious. I love it. The Joy in You, it is so adorable and heartfelt, oh, my gosh. Congratulations on the children's book.

Cat: It was always an ambition of mine to write a book. I loved English literature at school. I had the most amazing teacher. If I had gone to university and life hadn’t taken the turns that it did, I probably would've studied English literature at university. It was always something that was in the back of my mind. I'd love to write more, actually. I have two sons, Milo and James; Milo, who's four; James, who is two. Like any other mom, by the time it reaches the end of the day, I am frazzled, worn out, tired, completely inarticulate. I can't really string a sentence together. I know what I want to say, but I can't actually get it out. The idea behind the book was if I could say everything that I wanted to say to them in the most eloquent way possible, so have all the thoughts and feelings and emotions and ideas [indiscernible] and then top and tail it with love, that what was essentially what I was trying to create and have a book that you could talk about and you could discuss. It would open up conversations between you and your child too.

I think it's so important to engage with them and any ideas that they have or thoughts that have, actually talk to them and be as honest as possible, obviously within what's appropriate for their age and things like that. How I find my own boys anyway is that they are very resilient. They can cope with anything as long as you tell them the truth and you're honest with them. The minute you aren't or you hide things, it's the unknown that scares them, children. That suddenly becomes the boogeyman under the bed. They get the vibe from you too when you're doing that. The more we can be open and honest and engage in conversations about our kids, whether that's about emotions or life or situations or whatever they are, I think the more it gives them their chance to be able to be empathetic when they get older and also reach their full potential as an adult too. That's what you want. Essentially, it doesn't matter where you come from or what your background is, you want your children to be happy and kind. We all want the same thing, happy and kind. That's what we want. We want them to be able to empathize with other people because I think that will create a better world than what we're living in right now. I think everybody wants the same. When I first started doing the book, it was actually just going to be about boys to begin with. Then I started playing with ideas and talking to Random House. They were like, "This is silly. It doesn't matter who you are or what your gender is. These are big ideas that everybody should talk about."

Zibby: I couldn't agree more. I have four kids of my own. They're a little older, five to thirteen. Yes, happy and kind.

Cat: Four?

Zibby: Yeah, four. [laughs] So I'm well-versed in the children's book world. I'm very reliant on them and grateful to great children's books. Like you, at the end of the day I'm a mess. When I find a book that both I want to read and they say, "Read it again. Read it again," and I don't mind, then that's amazing.

Cat: It's so weird. As parents, we've all got those books that touch us as well. That was the other thing as well. I wanted to write something that I loved reading. The Giving Tree and The Wonderful Things You Will Be and all of those type of books, How Much Do I Love You? I'm a weepy mess by the end of them.

Zibby: Me too. I pull it out. They're like, "Read this one." I'm like, "Oh, no. This is the one that makes me cry." They're like, "Really? Let's try." I'm like, "No. Every time I read this book, I cry." Then I cry. They can't believe that a simple book can elicit the same huge reaction every time even though I know what's coming. [laughs]

Cat: I know. You know exactly what's happening. Listen, I think that that is a really important thing for children to see too. I was not a big crier. I was not hugely emotional, actually, before I had my babies. It's this weird thing where -- you know how they say the day your baby's born the mom is born too? There's a definite almost palpable switch that happens to you, I think. It's definitely changed me, but in ways that I actually really like. It's definitely made me much more patient and actually much more loving towards other people as well. It's interesting how much it changes you.

Zibby: Do you think it pervades your work life too, like every interaction, or mostly in the personal sphere?

Cat: No, I think every single interaction, actually. I always feel a bit like even when I'm just out and about, you just never know what's happening in somebody else's life at that specific moment or time when you interact with them. I think it's very important that we approach people with just a little bit of kindness. By the way, I think ourselves too. So often as women, we're the care-ers. We're the sorters. We're the people who organize. We make things happen. We get things done. We split up fights. We feed people. We cook for people. I think that we could do with being just a little bit kinder on ourselves too.

Zibby: That is definitely, definitely true.

Cat: Sometimes I juggle and I'm like, oh, my goodness, what have I done with my day today? You think about it and you're like, we should be running this country. [laughter]

Zibby: Sometimes, though, at the end of the day, I'm like, ugh, I didn't spend enough time with this kid or that kid. What did I really get done on my list to do? I didn't do enough of this. I feel like you can easily have those metrics not live up to your expectations. It's a matter, I think, of picking the right ones.

Cat: Agreed. I think the kinder you are to yourself, actually, the more you get done. Whatever your moment is -- for me, I love yoga. That's my thing where I move my body. I would probably have the body of a seventy-six-year-old. I'm very stiff. I'm not flexible at all. I've been doing yoga for twenty-five years. Still, I'm just like a regular person. I'm not like Madonna or anything like that. It makes me feel good. It makes my body feel good. It reminds me to breathe. It just gives my head a bit of space. Whether yours is shopping, reading a book, watching a movie, praying, meditating, whatever you want to do, you find your thing. Even if you take twenty minutes when you need to, take twenty minutes.

Zibby: I think that's exactly what your book is teaching kids. Find your thing, whether it's dancing or wandering or anything they want. You can't do it wrong, painting, dreaming. The line I loved the most in your book was right at the end when you said, "If you ever lose your way or you don't believe you can, just look beside you. That’s where I'll always be cheering you on and believing forever in the wonder that's you." That's so sweet. I love that.

Cat: It's even better when James sits on my lap. He calls himself Jamesy. I said, "Who's this?" He's like, "Jamesy." He's like, "Who's that?" I'm like, "Mama." I just dissolve into an emotional puddle of a mess. My thing, when I think about it, I think that small people, they're like little seeds that just need feeding and watering and light on them. Then their brains kind of explode almost like trees and branches going off them. I feel like the more we can stimulate them and try all different things with them, the better they are. Either they’ll find something that they really do love or they won't, but that's a life skill that they’ll learn too, learning to cope with something, A, you're not very good at, or B, you don't really like. That's perfectly okay as well. I just always think, what if Stevie Wonder had never played the piano? What if Tiger Woods had never picked up a set of golf clubs? What if Picasso had never picked up -- there are millions of people out there that have not reached their full potential just because they haven't tried what they want to do.

Zibby: That's why sometimes I'm like, what if I was supposed to be the most amazing sculptor but I still have not tried to do -- what if? How would I know? [laughs]

Cat: Totally, or knitting or [indiscernible] or whatever. There are plenty of things. What if you'd never tried it? I feel the more we can throw at them -- I don't mean exhausting them or anything like that, but try this, it's something new. Let's try this. They don't have to be Stephen Hawking. I remember being a kid and a moment of joy that I remember was I was bodyboarding in the ocean, not surfing because I wasn't big enough. I was probably about eight. I remember being in the ocean. The ocean's a little bit scary when you're eight because you can't quite tell what's coming where and how it's going to -- that almost adds to the excitement of it. That's what made it so great. Either the wave that comes is going to tip you off and throw you down to the bottom and roll you around or it's going to send you hurtling into shore. You're going to squeal with delight, and I'm going to race my brother back and it's going to be amazing. I remember staying in the ocean until my feet were blue. I loved it so much. Even simple things like that, I think that's one thing that we're all learning from being in the situation that we're in right now with the global pandemic. It's about finding the simple things that bring you so much joy. It doesn't have to be -- yeah, you can learn a new language. You can learn a musical instrument or whatever you want. It can be a simple as making the perfect cup of coffee or going to the ocean or making the perfect Victoria sponge cake, whatever it is. There are so many lovely things that you can do. It doesn't have to be brain surgery. It can be small but really scrumptious at the same time.

Zibby: I totally agree with that. I think people who might not know you would argue that you did find your thing. You've been a host of a major TV show. You've gotten these all primetime Emmy nominations. By any objective standards, you're a success at work. You have that. How did you find that? How did you figure out, oh, I would be such a good host for a reality TV dance competition show? I wonder if other people would be really good at that. How would they even know? [laughs]

Cat: I do get what you mean. It was never that specific. You know you have those books when you're little where you have to write what you want to be and how tall you are and then you do different pages? It said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I said I wanted to be Julie Andrews. That was what I wrote at eight. Unfortunately, Julie Andrews has Julie Andrews covered. [laughs] That was kind of what I wanted to do. Then I was quite academic at school. I quite enjoyed school. I liked studying and stuff. I did have someone ask me a question, you're so lucky, you do what you do. But I grew up in a very small town from working-class parents. Entertainment wasn't the family business. There is no reason why I should be doing what I'm doing apart for the fact that I really like people. I don't care whether you're Beyoncé or Meryl Streep. I just like people. I love chatting with people. It's my thing. I like working out how they tick. I like conversations. I like how it's formed their life and where they’ve gone and how their journeys happen. That's part of the reason why I love the dance show too. Some of the stories you hear, you would think, oh, my goodness, that would be enough to crush the human spirit. Yet somehow these kids not only survive and thrive and move on with their lives, but they also channel the negativity and spin it around and make it positive. They put it all into doing this thing that they love that they have this amazing talent for. Don't get me wrong, they have to train. They work. They do all that. I think that you can find it. You don't necessarily have to be born into it. It's what I said. There is no reason why I should be doing what I'm doing, but I am. You know what? There will always be people who are doing better than me and driving Rolls-Royces. That's fine too.

Zibby: Who wants a Rolls-Royce anyway?

Cat: Exactly, unless you're going to drive it into a swimming pool.

Zibby: In a music video or something. [laughs]

Cat: That would be fun.

Zibby: That's amazing. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors, particularly people trying to write a children's book?

Cat: Oh, my goodness, no. I don't have any. This is my very first one. I would love to write more, actually, maybe a little bit older next time. I have an idea for another book that's based on a little girl who's a tomboy. Then I also have a very dark one which is to do with babies and baby monitors which is a bit Gone Girl. I'm not going there yet, but I have that idea too. My next book that I've got to read is Normal People. Have you read that?

Zibby: I'm embarrassed to say that I have not read it, but I have watched the show.

Cat: And?

Zibby: So good.

Cat: See, I don't want to watch the show until I've read the book. I'm going to read the book first. The show is sitting there waiting to go for me. I want to read the book. I'm always like, book first, then show.

Zibby: I know. I usually am too, but my husband wanted to watch the show. I was like, I'd rather do something with him.

Cat: Let's blame him. Blame him.

Zibby: I'm going to blame him, yes. I've had the book for a very long time. I'm embarrassed that I'm the only one in the world who hasn’t read it.

Cat: I haven't either, though. What's his name? What's your husband's name?

Zibby: My husband? His name's Kyle.

Cat: Blame Kyle. Let's namecheck him and blame him.

Zibby: Yes, I blame him for everything. [laughter] Did it take a long time for you to write the children's book? Did you just pound it out in one day? What was it like?

Cat: There was lots of backwards and forwards. There's lots of backwards and forwards. Sometimes I also disappear down the hole a little bit where I've got an idea. For instance, there's a line in the book which is, "Dream as big as the night full of stars." I started to then research what the biggest thing in the universe is. It's called the borealis blah, blah, blah. I disappeared down this hole. Random House said to me, "You do know you could just say a night full of stars and that would bring you back to where you started to begin with? But you disappeared into the abyss of the most enormous thing in the universe." I was like, yeah, fine. You know what it is? There's so much backwards and forwards because sometimes you need to be accountable to people. I think it always helps to get people's opinions too. You think that writing a children's book is so easy, but there's so many layers to it on what you're trying to say and how you want to say it and where we're going next. It's quite tricky. It was a lovely, lovely experience too, lovely experience.

Zibby: What's coming next in terms of -- then I'll leave you alone. I know I've taken a lot of your time. What's coming next in terms of your regular life versus your book life? Do you know with the whole pandemic what's even on the [indiscernible/crosstalk]?

Cat: No, I don't really. Essentially, what's happened is Milo has been off school since March, so that's six months of homeschooling. I'm lucky. Milo is four, so I don't have to teach him algebra and Latin. I've taught him to read in the time that we've had at home, which is lovely. I would never get the chance to do that normally, ever. It's really special. Then James is two. He's got all these cute little -- he's gabbling. He's got all these weird little picadilloes with his language where he's like, "Mom, mom, mom, [child noises]," which is the cutest thing too. Normally, I would never get the chance to hang out as much. They're at that age where they want to hang out with me. It's not like I've got two teenagers at home where I'm thinking, they’ve not seen their friends. I've actually been really lucky. Then Milo goes back to school in September. We do all the press for the book. We're doing worldwide press as well. Then when the pandemic hit, I was shooting a new show for Disney. We shot about five of them. We've got to wait and see when we can go back into the studio and protocols and all that kind of stuff. Basically, it's just a big wait and see, I think like everybody, right?

Zibby: Pretty much.

Cat: How have you been? Have you been okay?

Zibby: That's a whole nother podcast. You don't want to know my whole story.

Cat: How old are your children?

Zibby: Five, seven, and I have two thirteen-year-olds.

Cat: Twins?

Zibby: Twins, yes.

Cat: Wow, that's a very full house with no school.

Zibby: It's a very full house. They are going back to school. I know that's happening for at least a month or two until they cancel it again. At least, I'll take those mornings that they go back.

Cat: By the way, I think they're going to do the same here too. My four-year-old doesn't understand social distancing. They're going to go back and it's going to be flu season. They're all going to get runny noses.

Zibby: We just got our flu shots today, actually, because our pediatrician was like, getting COVID and the flu, forget about it. Got our flu shots done. I am not overly optimistic about the schoolyear, but at least for a little bit. Like you, I love talking to people and finding out what makes people tick, and so I'm glad to have been able to do that with you and get to know you better and all the rest. Thank you so much for all of your time.

Cat: Lovely to talk to you too. Thank you so much. Lovely to chat to you. I'm so jealous of your books on your wall.

Zibby: Just --

Cat: -- Invite some friends over and give them margaritas.

Zibby: Invite some friends, and you'll get it done in no time. [laughter]

Cat: Thank you.

Zibby: Thanks, Cat. I wish you all the best. Buh-bye.

Cat: Bye, darling. Stay safe.

Zibby: Thanks. You too. Bye-bye.

Cat: Bye.

Caitlin Moran, MORE THAN A WOMAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caitlin: Forty-five.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caitlin: It's not going to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: You're welcome. Buh-bye.

Caitlin: Buh-bye.

Catherine Cho, INFERNO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine: That's okay. [laughs]

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

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

Zibby: Yay!

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

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

Catherine: -- I do.

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

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

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

Catherine: No, I'm not jumping around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care. Bye.

Catherine: Bye.

Lisa Donovan, OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER

Lisa Donovan: I'm glad to meet you.

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

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

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

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

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

Lisa: That would be great.

Zibby: Someday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Are you already thinking about your next book?

Lisa: Oh, yeah.

Zibby: Yeah? Memoir? Fiction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Why not? Have a great day.

Lisa: It was nice to talk with you.

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

Lisa: I will.

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

Lisa: Good. Take care of yourself.

Zibby: Thank you. You too.

Lisa: Talk to you soon.

Zibby: Okay, buh-bye.

Kendra Adachi, THE LAZY GENIUS WAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kendra: Totally. I'll take that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kendra: You can do it on a walk.

Zibby: I'll do it on a walk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: I love that.

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

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

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

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

Kendra: I will take it.

Zibby: So watch out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kendra: Same.

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

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

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

Sue Miller, MONOGAMY

Zibby Owens: I interviewed Sue Miller a while back. I'm releasing her episode today. Thanks to all of you who listened to my very personal heartfelt episode that I released this weekend about my family's losses. Thank you. I'm sorry I made so many of you cry. Thank you for all the direct outreach as a result of that episode. I had to get it out of my system. Anyway, Sue Miller, critically acclaimed and loved by readers, Sue is recognized internationally for her elegant and sharply realistic accounts of the contemporary family. Her books have been widely translated and published in twenty-two countries around the world. The Good Mother from 1986, the first of her ten novels, was an immediate bestseller, more than six months at the top of the New York Times charts. By the way, I totally remember my mother reading this when I was little. Subsequent novels include three Book of the Month main selections: Family Pictures, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; While I Was Gone, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and The Senator’s Wife. Her novel The Arsonist and her nonfiction book The Story of My Father came out recently as did her latest book which we talk about in our interview which is called Monogamy which, by the way, I keep leaving in front of Kyle just to give him nice reminders that it's so important. [laughs] Not that he needs some. Her numerous honors include a Guggenheim and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. She is a committed advocate for the writer’s engagement with society at large having held a position on the board of PEN-American Center. For four years she was chair of PEN New England, an active branch that worked with writing programs in local high schools and ran classes in prisons. She has taught fiction at, among others, Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, Smith, and MIT. By the way, we did this interview from her bathroom. I even made sure that she took her shower cap and moved it out of the screen, so we were immediately bonded for this interview. Anyway, enjoy.

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

Sue Miller: I'm completely in sympathy with the title. I'm glad to be here.

Zibby: [laughs] It's such a thrill for me because growing up, my mother had your books. The idea that it's come full circle and I get to interview you, I just get such a kick out of it, as does she. Your latest book, Monogamy, was so great. I'm so excited that we're going to do a book club about it. I just fell into these characters' lives. Would you mind telling listeners who might not know what it's about a little about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Sue: It is a character-driven book, completely, as most of my work is. I'm really interested in exploring human nature and human foibles and so forth. We have two main characters in this book. Graham, who's a bookseller, the husband in this quasi-monogamous marriage, an ebullient, enthusiastic guy, he loves good food. He's a little overweight. He loves wine. He loves his wife. He loves books. He needs to have people around him. He needs to have people love him also. He's married to Annie. They’ve been married for about thirty years. She's a quieter personality. She's also much smaller than he is. They’ve gone to a party once years earlier as Santa Claus and one of his elves. She's a photographer. At the moment the book begins, she's about to have a show for the first time in some years and is full of anxiety about her career. She's basically been full of anxiety about most of her professional life. She's particularly anxious now because it's been a while since she had a solo show.

You get, at the beginning of the book, a flavor of their life together and the way they exchange. I move around between their brains, essentially, in third person and enter them and explain them a little bit or have them explain themselves. Then quite early on in the book, it gives nothing away, really, or maybe a little, Graham dies in the night of a heart attack. Annie wakes up and he's dead in the bed next to her. She's numbed and shocked and then, as she must, begins to call other people to whom this will really matter. That includes the other main characters in the book. They get introduced, actually, by being at the end of these phone calls. The first person is her daughter with Graham, Sarah, who's in her late twenties and is in San Francisco. They have a reasonable relationship, but it's a little strained. Sarah has loved her dad enormously, he kind of rescued her through a tough childhood and adolescence, and has a lot more difficulty with this quite reserved and, as she sees it, unknowable mother.

Then she calls, actually, the next person is Graham's first wife, Frieda, who has been, by his wish, very much a part of their marriage, partly because they’ve had a child together who is Annie's stepson and is very much, of course, in Graham's life. She's just a member of the marriage in a certain way, Frieda. Then she, Frieda, turns -- you're with her now. She calls her and Graham's son, Lucas, who's in New York. Basically, the book moves around among these characters and their grief and what his death means to them and then how they connect to each other after the death and what happens between and among them after the death. There's a lot that happens. Graham is not out of the picture in a certain way because his relationship to them and their memories of him and things that happened with him and so forth take up a lot of the energy as the book moves along too. That's the basic way it's set up, I guess you would say, and the people we care about, or I care about and I hope I make you care about along the way.

Zibby: I cared about them so much from the very beginning. You spent so much time orienting us to Annie and Graham that when he died, I was very sad about that as opposed to having it happen on the first page before you get to know him. I felt like you really got us into their marriage and the bookstore and his character and what he was like and them sitting drinking wine. I knew that's what the book was about, but I kind of forgot once I was in it. Then it happened and I was like, [gasp]. I felt a sense of loss, so well done. It was so good. I couldn't help but think this must have happened. You couldn't have made all this up. Have you gone through something or a loss like this? It just seemed so vivid to me, this whole scene. How did you come up with this? Did you lose somebody really close to you? I know about your father from your memoir. Tell me a little more.

Sue: I had a friend a long, long time ago. I was remembering, his wife died in her sleep. He really told me about that, how just incredibly strange it was to wake up and have her dead. I think my father's death informed me a lot too. I was with him as he died over a long period of time, ten days or so. That's it, probably. I've never had anyone that I was in love with die, and especially not in bed next to me. [laughs] Sorry, that's no thing to laugh about.

Zibby: No, it's okay. [laughs] Then I noticed you gave both Annie and Frieda mothers who both were battling Alzheimer's as well in the book. That was one of the common bonds that they had, perhaps with your experience with Alzheimer's yourself or you wanted to just put that in. What was that about? What made you put that?

Sue: It was in part that. I was thinking that there needed to be ways in which they became friends. Annie resisted it very much at the beginning thinking that it was too modern and silly, she thought of it, and a little embarrassing, almost, to welcome this person as a friend who was once married to Graham and had a child with him. Frieda had less trouble because she’d lived with Graham through the whole era of the sixties and seventies when all the rules about how marriages were supposed to work were deliberately broken, at least by people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as far as I could tell. They needed to have ways to slowly become very close friends, which they do. So I just gave them that. When my father was ill, it was so comforting to me to talk to my husband then, just to talk about what was so funny that had happened that day in his crazy world that I was part of and had to agree to go along with and then, of course, awful things too. Frieda says that that seems to her to be the nature of this disease, that it's amazingly funny and amazingly awful at the same time. That's what they share with each other. Then over the years, they're always together at holidays. Frieda's just always there because Lucas is there, her son. Since they all live in the same neighborhood, it would be strange not to have her there. Graham very much wants her there. He's continued to have a really warm relationship with her, regrets what he did to their marriage and that sort of thing.

Zibby: It was so neat how you had the stepmothers get to know -- or maybe not the stepmothers. Yeah, the stepmothers, get to know the other child by the other -- [laughs].

Sue: Yeah, the children get along better with the stepmothers. Each of them has his or her own reasons for having trouble with his or her own mother. They did this almost trade for a while when they're entering adolescence and then through adolescence. Each of them is more helped by the other mother who's not really his or her own mother.

Zibby: How do you do it? How did you invent characters, particularly Annie but also Graham and I guess every supporting cast member in this book, that are just so incredibly real? I feel like you inhabited this character of Annie more so than almost any other character I've read in every little detail and how she does every little thing. How do you structure that? How did you come up with her? How do you make sure to show the reader so much about her? It seems like magic to me.

Sue: It certainly is in the sense that I really can't account for all of it. I love the close third person. That's the voice in fiction that gives you the most fluid access to a character so that you can sit a little bit away from the characters in the third person and talk about what she's doing. Then you can step right forward into her brain and essentially speak in her voice and speak about her reactions and speak about what she's saying to herself. I think a lot of it is that, the wonderful fluidity of a third-person narration. The other thing is I make an enormous number of notes before I start to write anything so that I could feel that I know the character quite well, just notes, for instance, about what they hate, what they believe, what sort of books they like, or things like that. I've always done that just in very simple ways. I'm not writing a book at that time. I'm just making notes to myself.

Then as soon as I begin to write, anything they say, it's sort of like you feel you know someone maybe if you're online dating or something and you think, this person sounds so interesting, and then they speak and you think, oh, my god, no. This is how I would imagine. I've never done it, actually. Or you think, this is such an interesting voice. As soon as I began actually having them speak to someone, that just does it for me. I invent the voice and that makes me comfortable with everything else if I feel it's right. I love doing it. That's one of the main impulses for me in writing fiction, is to make what I hope are believable characters. My sense is that when you get mostly deeply engaged in fiction is when you actually sort of think these people are real. You know they're not. You know they're fictional. That's what I want to get you very close to believing anyway.

Zibby: It's like when you're in a movie theater and next thing you know you're sobbing. Two hours before, you didn't know who that character even was. Now you're completely emotionally invested. It's a longer version here, more immersive almost. What part of this book was the first germ of the idea for you? Was it Annie? Was it Annie and Graham? Was it the thought of a loss? Was it dying in the sleep? Which was part of it was like, oh, I think I'm going to write about blah, blah, blah?

Sue: It was actually, had to do with my father's death and then the aftermath of that. After he died, I was just swept by grief. It just would not release me for a couple of years. I tried therapy. I tried this and that. I was on antidepressants for a while. I decided I would write a book about him, also about Alzheimer's disease. At that time, the stuff you could read about Alzheimer's disease was either sort of sappy, you've got to get a hobby and you have to be with friends. It just wasn't useful to me. Then the other thing you could read was incredibly technical stuff. I felt I wanted to write a book addressed to the reader telling her or him something about my father and also talking, to some degree, about the kind of moral or ethical issues I felt were raised by my being the one with him. I felt also as I was doing this book about him that I uncovered new information. I talked to friends of his. My sense of him really changed over the course of writing the book. I felt connected to him in a new and different way. That made me feel different myself in my relation to him. I wanted to explore that feeling of contact and change after death with someone and in this case really falling out of love with someone and then falling back in with someone long after he's dead, in Annie's case. That was the sort of feeling I had about that great mystery of death and the way one can change over time, the way one feels about the dead person.

I started with that and then thought it will be Annie. She was the first character. This will be this woman who -- I thought of some things. Then Graham arrived. Once he was on the scene, he made me immensely comfortable with everything else in the whole book because that's the kind of guy he is. [laughs] I was charmed by him. I also wanted to present him as a complicated person, someone you'd have to think, well, that wasn't so nice. You might even feel that he's awful. In some ways, he is awful. He sort of recognizes in himself, this terrible need in his -- anyway, I wanted to make him as complicated as possible while also trying to make you like someone very, very complicated. That was the impulse, really, was to have this whole thing after his death that goes on with Annie in particular. It happens with other people too, a kind of shift each of them feels, each character, about Graham's presence in her or his life, and not always good. In some cases, they're looking at everything with a little more distanced eye too.

I described this before. When I was taking psych classes in college and afterwards, we used to do these sociograms where you make a circle and you put all the people you're considering around the edge of this circle. Someone acts or something happens to one of the characters. You trace these radiated lines, what it means to this person and what it means to this person on the circle. Each of them reacts. Their reaction crosses the circle to this character and this character. By the end, you just have this web of connection and feeling and whatever else is going on, anger or joy. That sort of was what I wanted to do be doing, was to just watch this circle of people and all their connections with each other, the ones that worked, the ones that didn't work, and look at how complicated but try to make it easy for a reader to enter and to look at too. It was a world.

Zibby: Was it hard? Tell me about what it was like writing this book. Could I have a visual? Where did you write it? Was it at home? Did you like to go to a library? Where did you write it? Then because it's so immersive, did you ever have trouble putting the work aside and going back to your real life?

Sue: No, I didn't have trouble like that. [laughs]

Zibby: All right, that's good.

Sue: I wrote it over a long period of time. I wrote it in many different places. Basically, most of the time I wrote it in my office. We have a little place in the country, and I wrote it some there too. I write in longhand, first draft, so I can move around. What I like about it is I can move around the house, one of the things I like about writing in longhand. I write in little books. That was the way I wrote it, essentially, and the places I wrote it. There was a lot going on in my life and in my family's life right then, and so there were periods of time when I wasn’t working at all. Now my granddaughter lives in Germany. She's young. She's twelve. She's sort of also old, but she's young. When she comes to stay, I just drop everything. About four or five years ago, she began to come and stay for the summer. That was just a huge open space in terms of my getting any work done and that sort of thing. I've never been incredibly disciplined about my work, I'm afraid. It took a very long time, this book, and probably benefited from that in some way or another. I had these pauses where I could just stop and think about it and make a few little written notes in my notebook and so forth to think about for the next time I actually sat down. Then I just type all that stuff in and then pull it out and then write over that for the next draft and just type it back in again. I waste more paper. More trees have been consigned to death by me because of all the in and out that I actually physically do instead of just changing things on the computer and not having to use that much paper, which would be much better to do, I know, but that's the way I work.

Zibby: I forgive you on behalf of everyone because at the end of it, then you've got these masterpieces. There you go. It's worth it. Everybody has their own process and everything. How did you get to be a writer at the very beginning? If you go all the way back to the beginning of your career, how did you get your start?

Sue: I always wrote. I wrote as a little kid. I always invented stories. I can remember these little girls down the street a little bit younger than I. I must have been in fifth or sixth grade. They must have been in second or third. They would wait for me to come from down the street to their house. We would proceed on to school together because they wanted me to continue this fairy tale, essentially, that I'd begun with them. Then I wrote a lot all through my childhood, silly, horrible things. I actually won a Scholastic fiction award in high school. A lot of very distinguished writers have won that, Truman Capote and Joyce Carol Oates. I entered this world of real writers in a certain way. I wrote a couple of novels after college, one right away and then one that took a lot of time because I got married and I had a child. I got divorced. I was a single mom and working and so forth.

I never thought of it as a career, somehow. I just assumed I would always do it. I didn't much care about publishing at that point. Then at a certain point in my life, in my mid to late thirties, I began to send out a few short stories that I'd written. It sort of occurred to me. I'd gone to a few writing classes just to make myself finish things, which I rarely did. I just wrote because of the circumstances of my life. I was looking at other writers and thinking, I'm actually a lot better than they are. [laughs] Actually, my teacher encouraged me in that case. I just began to send things around. They got taken, almost everything I'd written from the first story I wrote. They didn't get taken right away. I had to send them to six places or something starting with the places that would've paid me a little bit of money, or a lot of money by my standards then. Then when my son was a little bit older, when he was about ten, I really started seriously writing a novel. I had two unpublished novels that I'd written before then and quite a few short stories.

Then I thought that I would write something that might get published. That was the first time I thought it. I was probably thirty-eight or so, something like that. And it did. It was The Good Mother, which was my first book. It just changed my life in this astonishing way that was really shocking and discomfiting. I sort of thought I was in charge of my life and I knew what it would look like. With the short stories that I'd published, I was able to begin to teach writing here around the Boston area which is a great area to be in for part-time work like that because there's a lot of writing programs and a lot of writing requirements at various colleges. There are a lot of colleges here too. That's what I thought my life would be like. I would write and I would teach and go on living at the same sort of quasi-poor. That was fine with me. There was nothing about that I didn't like. Then suddenly, all of that changed. I did feel for a while, really out of control, that I was not in control of my life, and discomfited by it a little bit. That's the story.

Zibby: Wow. Once you had this major success, did you find it hard to follow it up? Did you feel pressure to perform on your next books? Were there things in the works? How did it affect your writing, this huge success that you had?

Sue: The main thing was I was determined not to do the same thing or even the same kind of book. My first book was narrated in the first person. At the very center of it was a courtroom drama in which my main character loses custody of a child. I just stuck right with her. It was a very dramatic plot, to say the least. I really decided deliberately that I wanted to do something very unlike that because I didn't want to be -- now that I had a publisher who was waiting for it, I didn't want to be doing the same thing and become the person who always wrote that. Although, now I'm the person who always writes about family and domestic life. That's the way I'm categorized. I ended up always writing that anyway. The second book that I wrote, my father is ill and dying during that period of time. Again, I was sort of slowed down. It was about a whole family. I moved around from person to person in the family. It covered about forty years of their life together, a family with an autistic son. Everyone's response to that person in the midst of the family is different and is complicated.

Again, it's like the sociogram, that book was, essentially, all of these people whose lives were connected. There was much more to be really angry about for everybody, or troubled about, in that book. I just wanted to announce, I'm not doing anything you think I'm going to do. I loved that book. I like them all, but that was amongst my favorites. I don't know. I haven't ever organized them, this is my third favorite book and this is my sixth favorite book. Anyway, I dealt with whatever pressure there might have been by just saying, there's not pressure on me. I'm doing what I want to do. There was a little pressure to do something very different, that's true, but I wanted to do it. I wasn't doing it because it was different, a little bit, but not all the way.

Zibby: How do you continue reinventing what you want to say and do? What advice would you have to aspiring authors, people who are starting out who want to have a career like yours, for instance?

Sue: This would not be something I think you could deliberately do, but I think it helped me a lot not to feel I was launching a career. I was doing this thing I wanted to do which might or might not be the center of my life. That made it easier for me to please myself with what I was doing. Also, to just go as slowly as you can. As I say, I had written two novels before The Good Mother. I had sent one around a little bit, but instantly sort of didn't want to do that. I think just to wait until you feel really, really certain of the book that you're sending out, until you love it yourself, it's the very best you can do, and not be so focused on -- I was old for a writer. My first book came out when I was forty-six, my first novel. It's hard to say let time go by. There certainly are people who have written wonderfully very young. I'm not prescribing anything, but I feel like I benefited by being a little bit more relaxed about things. The other thing is just to read and read and be asking yourself all the time, why do I feel this way about this character? Look at what's on the page. Just practice in that way, rob some people technically, essentially.

Zibby: Do you have a type of book you like to read in general or a certain genre? Do you like to read what you write type of books, or totally different?

Sue: Both. I like to read what I write. I also like a lot of other different kinds of books. One of my favorite writers is Alice Monroe. The form she writes in is completely different from mine. She's utterly brilliant. Then the British writer Tessa Hadley, she's much more interested in writing about adolescence and growing up. Although, there are a lot of quite wonderful -- she's a wonderful writer. I really love her work. Some of Brian Morton's work, I just wait for his next book to come out. It's varied. I just read this really wonderful book by the unfortunately named Michael Crummey, he's a very established Canadian writer, called The Innocents. It's just as different as it could be. It's set in Nova Scotia with a few children whose parents both die. They set up living alone in the nineteenth century, I think it is, or maybe the early twentieth, but I think the nineteenth. It's the story of their complete innocence, of their not knowing anything about anything. It's an amazing book. I can't recommend it highly enough. So that sort of thing. I like to read some nonfiction. I move around a lot. I think I'm more judgmental of books like mine, domestic books. I'm more critical of them because it's more like the work that I do, probably. I think [indiscernible] should've done that better than you did.

Zibby: [laughs] You wouldn't want to see the novels that I have stashed in my drawer, then. Anyway, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thank you for so many delightful moments reading Monogamy over the last couple weeks. I'm excited for you to come to my book club and talk to everybody there. Now I want to go back. I have to read your memoir about your dad because it sounds like such a moving, emotional experience and relationship. Hopefully, by book club I will have read that too.

Sue: Great. It will be good to see you again. I'm very glad to have met you from my bathroom to your bedroom or wherever.

Zibby: Exactly, this is the Zoom universe. [laughs]

Sue: Thanks so much.

Zibby: Thanks. Buh-bye.

Sue: Bye-bye.

Deshaun Watson, PASS IT ON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zibby: Have a great day.

Deshaun: You too.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Julia Phillips, DISAPPEARING EARTH

Zibby Owens: Hello. Thank you for joining today for my conversation with Julia Phillips who's one of the five 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award finalists. I'm Zibby Owens. I'm the host of "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," the podcast. Each year, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Awards champions emerging writers and recognizes innovation and excellence in contemporary fiction. This year, the award marks it's twentieth anniversary of celebrating the next generation of outstanding fiction writers. The 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award finalists include Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay; Julia Phillips, who's here, Disappearing Earth, congrats; Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age; Xuan Juliana Wang, Home Remedies; and Bryan Washington, Lot. You can see interviews with all the finalists at nypl.org/ylfa. Today, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Julia Phillips who's nominated for her novel Disappearing Earth. Welcome, Julia.

Julia Phillips: Thank you. Thank you, Zibby. It's nice to be here with you even virtually. It's nice to be here on this Zoom call with you.

Zibby: It's nice to be on this Zoom call with you too. Just more one sentence of background about you for people who might not know. This is your bio, which obviously you know. Julia Phillips is the debut author of the nationally bestselling novel Disappearing Earth which is being published in twenty-three languages and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A Fulbright fellow, Julia has written for The New York Times, ​The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. She currently lives in Brooklyn. Okay, that's it. Now we can just chat. Welcome. Tell me about finding out that you were nominated for the Young Lions Fiction Award. What was that like?

Julia: It was so exciting. It was so wonderful. I'm a big fan of this award and this program and the New York Public Library in general. Because of quarantine, I'm afraid I had too much time on my hands to refresh the library's page and Twitter account and think, I wonder when they’ll be announcing that this year, just because. No particular investment or interest for myself, just because. I spent quite a few weeks sort of pestering the account before I got the wonderful, wonderful news that I was on the list. It was so exciting.

Zibby: Aw, that's awesome. The Young Lions Fiction Award is now celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Do you feel like it means even more in the context of being part of the anniversary year? What do you think?

Julia: I would buy that, absolutely. I got very excited about the nineteenth and the eighteenth and seventeenth too. It's hard for me to see that it would mean so much more right now, but actually, I like the way you put that. Maybe it does. It's much more meaningful now, the twentieth. How could you resist that? That number is irresistible.

Zibby: And it's 2020. There we go. It's great. [laughs] I want to talk a lot about your book, but I also just want to ask if you have an earliest memory of visiting a library.

Julia: Gosh. A lot of my early memories of visiting libraries blend together a little bit. A library was a big after-school staple for me of doing homework or being dropped off to do homework and not doing homework and just reading books in the aisles when I was a little kid. All of those sort of blend together in one happy homework-shirking memory that lasted many years. I recently found a newspaper clipping from when I was seven. My public library had a Write Your Own Novel program for kids. We got these blank books that we filled up with our own stories. I wrote a very, very plagiarized novel that I think was the plot of a Christopher Pike book -- I don't if you remember Christopher Pike, loved it, sort of scary teen novels -- about a dead body found in a snowman. I was very supported in that by the librarians and the staff. They were really loving and let me write all sorts of wild, plagiarized, half-baked horror stories. They were wonderful.

Zibby: I feel like I will never approach a snowman in the same way again.

Julia: You never know what's inside.

Zibby: You never know. Terrifying. [laughs] It sounds like they were really supportive of your development. That's amazing. Did they help you find books that maybe set you on this path as well, or was it more of fostering of your love of writing?

Julia: It was a fostering of all of our love of writing and a fostering of whatever creative direction we needed to go in. I think I spent a particular amount of time illustrating the cover and put most of my focus there and wrote about forty words in the rest of the book. I think I lost my steam for the story pretty quickly, probably because it had already been written by somebody else better.

Zibby: It hasn’t stopped a lot of other people. [laughter] Where did you grow up, by the way? Where are we picturing this library that you were in?

Julia: I grew up in Northern New Jersey, in suburban New Jersey about fifteen miles outside New York.

Zibby: Do you remember the first time you want to the New York Public Library? I know I'm putting you on the spot.

Julia: [Indiscernible] first time I went to the New York Public Library, but I have a lot of sharp memories actually in more recent years of going to the library as a sort of celebratory event. It always feels so special every single time. Now I've been in New York for about fifteen years. Still, every time I go it feels like the most special thing in the world. I think it's the lions outside. It makes it feel very, very special every single time. The architecture's so wonderful. Every room is a mystery.

Zibby: Now that you're about to have your first baby, you can discover the children's room which is also really special.

Julia: Oh, my gosh, okay, that is on the bucket list for post-quarantine baby life. Taking [indiscernible] to the children's room, for sure.

Zibby: Now that I know you've been writing since you could basically hold a pencil, tell me about how you got from your first plagiarized novel to your Book Award-nominated Disappearing Earth debut actual novel here in 2020? What happened in between with all your writing and the Fulbright and all the rest that got you here?

Julia: I always wanted to be a novelist. I was a big reader as a kid. I was really lucky to be supported by some of my early teachers. I remember my second-grade teacher especially being supportive. I was trying to write a novel in a notebook about a girl who was raised by wolves. I would take up all her time reading out loud from this second-grader's notebook. She would say, "Keep going. That's great." I really took that "Keep going. That's great," and chose to hold onto it very tightly and always dreamed of writing fiction. I ended up studying fiction in college and also studying Russian which was a big hobby of mine and a language that I love to study. I had been working on a different novel manuscript that I pictured would be my first book. I'm very lucky that it was not and that it went into the drawer it went into. As I was getting to the end of that process, which was quite a few years, I started thinking about what I imagined would be the second book. I thought maybe I can combine this interest in writing and this interest in Russia and set a novel there. With that big plan in mind, I spent a couple years applying for, as you said, a Fulbright, this grant in creative writing that would fund my living in Russia for a year and beginning to research a book of fiction. I got that after a couple years. I moved to Russia and started researching the project that became Disappearing Earth. That whole process started in 2009. The book came out in 2019. It was a really educational and challenging and wonderful decade of work on this book. I'm so glad and grateful to have had this project all this time. It's been a really beautiful thing in my life.

Zibby: Do you think it was those words of your teacher that made you not give up? That's a long time to persist and feel that the project was going to come to a good conclusion. I feel like giving up might have been a tempting option along the way. Instead, not only did you finish, but you crafted this award-winning beautiful novel. What made you not quit? How did you keep going?

Julia: It's interesting to think in the context of the Young Lions award because I've been learning a lot and reflecting a lot about publishing and about writing and about the creative process recently and about youth and the creative process, or speed perhaps. I've been thinking about how in the past when I wanted to publish a novel at twenty-two and didn't publish a novel at twenty-two, I thought, there must be something very, very magical about twenty-two-year-olds who are publishing a book. Maybe there is a magical thing or a magical thing about a thirty-year-old that published it. I've been thinking more and more about how integral support is in creating speed. Everyone's writing incredible books. Everyone can write incredible books. Everyone's doing the work. If you are supported by the people around you, it makes it a lot easier. That's as true as it is in second grade as it is now. When you have people around you who say, "I believe you can do this," it is motivating and really helpful. There are so many folks who do the work with an enormous lack of support. Yet when I look back on my writing ambitions, I really count my blessings in how I felt supported by that teacher or supported by my mom who didn't think it was whacky for me to be studying creative writing. That support was really huge for me.

Zibby: That's so important. It's tough to not be supported in basically anything. Having a cheering squad can't be underrated. That's for sure, especially in writing which is much more of a solitary profession. Knowing that once you look up from the keyboard there are people rooting for you to actually finish, that's a huge help.

Julia: It is. It's a selfish road for me toward arriving at the realization of how important it is to support other -- when you find people that you're excited about or find people that are dreaming of a thing that you're dreaming of or have their own dreams, how little it takes and how much it benefits to say, "Keep going. I want to support you in this. I want to do everything I can to support you in this." That is hugely meaningful to folks. It certainly was hugely meaningful for me.

Zibby: How do you think you so accurately nailed the voice of the sisters in the beginning of the book as they're wandering around the beach and the annoyance of the older sister? All of that was so pitch perfect as a mother of four children including two daughters. All of those dynamics, it just seemed so real. When I heard you were pregnant, I was like, she must have older kids too because she totally nailed this. Not to say you have to have your own children to write children well, but how did you do it so well? What do you think?

Julia: That's so kind. That means so much to me that you say that. That means a lot to me that you say that. There's so much doubt in the process. Certainly, their voices took a lot of revision and a lot of, talk about support again and community, a lot of feedback from more experienced authors and peer writers and friends who are parents and friends who said -- I remember very, very well a wonderful writer named Dionne Brand who I had the good luck -- she read that first chapter and said, "Why don't you go on YouTube and listen to some kids?" The characters are eight and eleven. She said, "Why don't you go on YouTube and listen to eight and eleven-year-olds talking and then revise?" I was like, thank you so much. [laughs] Absolutely trying to channel their voices or get their voices right was a -- whatever result there is, is a community effort, for sure, a community effort to ensure that I was listening closely to how kids talk and express themselves to each other and not just sitting in my own mind fantasizing about a precious eleven-year-old who is never resentful.

Zibby: I am now thinking that maybe there's a marketplace for kids who want to get job experience helping authors who want to perfect their voices. You could search by age and just have a phone conversation with a kid. Look at that.

Julia: It honestly was, upon reflection, pretty troubling how easy it was to go on YouTube and search "eleven-year-olds uncensored." [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. When you were actually doing the writing, obviously you did a lot of research to make sure everything was just right, did you have the whole format outlined? Did you have the different people in the community? Did you outline? Did the characters just come to you? What was the driving force of starting this story versus how it ended up? That was a lot of questions.

Julia: I love all of those questions. I tried to make as many decisions as possible about the book and the structure of the book and the arch of the book prior to starting writing. I mentioned that I'd previously been working on a manuscript. That manuscript, I kind of started with a feeling and a tone and a setting and not a story at all, really. I thought, as I work on it, I'm going to come into the story. I'm going to learn what the story is. Seven years later, I realized, not the case actually, for me. That process, at least with that project, didn't give me clarity the more I worked on it. I kind of stayed in the same place where I had started of having a feeling and no concrete decisions around that. When I started this project, I wanted to approach it differently. I wanted to make some really strategic choices around its structure, who would be speaking and why, what information would be conveyed in each chapter, what the point was.

I wanted to have an elevator pitch, which I still practice now. I say the book is about two girls who go missing in the Russian Far East and how that affects the people around them, two girls who go missing in this remote Russian community and how that affect people around them. Over and over, I would say this to myself to try to focus on what the book is about. From the start, I thought, it's going to be over the course a year. Each chapter is a different month. Each focused character is a woman or girl in the community. I really wanted to approach it with as many decisions made as possible. As I got to the end of the writing process, I spent the last six months outlining even more heavily. I was a couple drafts in at that point, or a few drafts in, and yet went back and re-outlined all of the chapters and the whole project to try to get more clarity. I found that every conscious decision I could make really helped the work for me. I find now as I approach new projects, as much outlining as I can do in advance helps me a lot.

Zibby: Then once you sit down to tackle the writing, where is your happy place for writing? Where do you prefer to write when you can? What do you wear? Do you have any traditions or superstitions when you're writing? What does that process look like for you?

Julia: I don't have a desk. I write in bed or on the couch. I handwrite my first drafts. That helps me a lot. That's a superstition, for sure. I find writing on the computer to be a little bit more -- I pay more attention to what I'm doing in some way. It is more tempting to delete or to go back. I'm a big fan of drafting over and over and over again. To just get out that first draft really fast and messy is helpful for me to do by hand. These days, especially a few months into being inside my apartment walls all the time, I've been thinking about what a happy writing place looks like and what a productive writing place looks like. I think how much I've taken from changing my setting before and being on the subway or walking around or having things pop into your head. I've been missing that. I wonder if it is less a specific place and maybe more a state a mind or a feeling of movement of engagement with the world that helps me a lot. I don't know. Still figuring it out, I guess, is the answer.

Zibby: Have you been able to do any writing during the quarantine?

Julia: I've been doing some writing during the quarantine. I've been really motivated and inspired and blown away by some friends who have put together different accountability groups. Every day, morning writing session or a once a week free-writing session together or weekly check-ins. That's been really incredible. That being said, as you mentioned, I'm pregnant. As I get more and more pregnant, I do feel that the fetus is sucking all desire to move out of me. I've been very, very unaccountable these days.

Zibby: I think you have every excuse in the book.

Julia: I love what you're saying because that's what I tell myself in my head as I get very behind on the things I should be doing.

Zibby: Your body is actually doing a zillion different things right now that you just can't put your finger on to build another human being. I feel like if you want to take a week to just let your body do its thing, the work will follow. It's not like you're going to stop writing.

Julia: [Indiscernible] for the past week where I've done nothing.

Zibby: You've done a lot. It's just you haven't gotten it on the page.

Julia: I haven't gotten it on the page.

Zibby: That's okay. There's plenty of time, maybe less time once you have a child, but who knows? Maybe not.

Julia: Different kind of time.

Zibby: Different kind of time. What was it like when you sold your book? What was that moment like after all this time and effort and work? Then you sold it. What was that feeling like? What was that experience like?

Julia: It was the most miraculous experience of my whole life. That feeling really started when I got my agent. With the previous manuscript I'd worked on, I'd queried a hundred agents. I was very focused on the agent hurdle and spent a lot of time thinking about approaching agents as I was working on this book. A lot of the strategic decisions I was making from the start were around, it's important to me to have an elevator pitch because it's also important to put that in a query letter. I was thinking about how I can better position myself in the future for developing a relationship with an agent, I hoped, one day. The experience of my agent taking this book on, I will never forget where I was. I'll never forget how it felt. It was the moment when dream and reality met. I just felt like I passed out of my real life and went into the life I had fantasized about. I screamed, jumped up and down. I couldn't handle it. Everything after that felt miraculous in such the same way. It felt like my agent had opened the door and let me into the life that I had dreamed about. It all felt like a dream. It still feels a dream. After a few months on social media as I was promoting the book as it came out, I realized that I kept using that language over and over again. I kept saying, this is like a dream. This is like a dream. This is a dream come true. This is such a dream. It started to get a bit disturbing that I was sort of saying, help me, I'm totally disconnected from any sense of reality. [laughs] Certainly, a lot of dreams of my life have come true. That has been bewildering and magical and does feel impossible.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. By the way, if I were your agent right now hearing this, I hope that whoever it is, he/she is listening to this. I would be swooning. That is so nice.

Julia: Suzanne Gluck, I love her tell and I tell her every second. [laughs]

Zibby: I'm sure she knows. It sounds like you're pretty expressive. Still, that's pretty awesome. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Julia: Yeah, I do. My first advice would be to be patient with how you've heard this before because it's not outrageously novel. My three go-to pieces of advice are three things that I tell myself over and over and over again and kept forgetting to act on sometimes. Upon reflection, I think if I just do those things more, things would be better. Write as much as possible. Read as much as possible. Build a community or embed yourself in a creative community. Writing as much as possible just to practice and lower your own inhibitions and un-paralyze yourself and see what works. Reading is the best possible education in writing for which there is no equivalent. Community, to me, it seems like -- my book is so much about community. I keep on talking about it. To be able to connect to other people and learn from them, learn from their work, cheer them on, be in communication with them about what they're working on, to be part of a creative team -- that can be in person. It can be online. It can be on Twitter. Just to connect with other people in this pursuit of something that, as you said Zibby, can be very isolating and is so personal and so strange, this channel that you're trying to tap into of creativity in yourself -- it's such a bizarre thing. To connect with other people through that is really the most beautiful and hopeful and inspiring activity you can do. It motivates your work and it makes it much better, in my opinion or in my experience for sure.

Zibby: That's the only person I was asking.

Julia: [laughs] The only one you're going to hear from right now.

Zibby: The only one. Who else? Not in my little square. I actually listened to your book instead of reading it. Usually, I read. I downloaded it and listen to it over a series of trying to actually get of my house and run and walk and all the rest. When you have your baby, god willing everything is great, and you go one day on a walk with the baby when everybody's out in the open, I want you to go back and listen to the first chapter. You are going to be filled with this sense of panic that I was filled with, and anxiety. [laughs] That's my little assignment for you post-childbirth.

Julia: In my writing group, that helped me so much with this book. I remember very well a woman in my writing group reading it. At the time, her two kids were just about the same ages as the two sisters who go missing. She came to the group and she slid the papers across the table. She was like, "I think your first chapter is pretty effective. I will not read any more of this book." [laughs] Best possible feedback, thank you.

Zibby: When you do that, you have to DM me or something. Thank you, Julia. Thanks for being a part of this conversation for the Young Lions, the New York Public Library, and all the rest. Congratulations on your nomination and all of your success. Well-deserved.

Julia: Thank you so much, Zibby. This was so wonderful to get to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much to the New York Public Library, one of the best places, if not the best place in the entire world, I think.

Zibby: Thanks.

Kate Riordan, THE HEATWAVE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Kate. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about The Heatwave.

Kate Riordan: Yay! Thank you for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Did you intentionally pick a shirt that matched the cover?

Kate: No, all my clothes are green. [laughs]

Zibby: Good, perfect. Excellent. I just wanted to make sure.

Kate: It's a good idea. I should've gone with that.

Zibby: For people who don't know, could you please describe what The Heatwave is about?

Kate: The Heatwave is about a single mother, a divorced mother, Sylvie, who's returning to the South of France where she's from with her younger daughter, Emma, for the first time in ten years. Ten years earlier, she lost her eldest daughter, Elodie, there. The book really is about finding out what happened ten years ago. It's sort of a suspense novel, really.

Zibby: What is it that inspired you to write this story? I know it's not your first novel by any stretch. How did you come up with these characters? Why this story?

Kate: I first of all really wanted to set a book in France. That was my starting point. I'd been looking for an excuse for years. I went as a child and spent many, many years in France. My French is not actually very good, but my heart's in the right place. I do love it. I always wanted to write a book in France. Then I really wanted to write a book about sibling rivalry. The initial idea was to have it written from the point of view of the younger daughter, the youngest sister, Emma, who's thirteen/fourteen in the book, and have her living in the shadow of this older sister that was killed ten years earlier and how she deals with that. She's half resentful and half adoring. Then I found when I was writing in Emma's point of view, it was a bit flimsy. I didn't feel as though it was coming very naturally. I thought I'd try out writing in Sylvie's voice, Sylvie being the mother in her early forties. It suddenly took off then, the book. Then it became a book about mothers and daughters and a toxic relationship between a mother and a daughter. Then I got really into that. I'd found my book then. It came quite easily after that. There was a lot editing. I'm not saying it was that easy, but I felt immediately as though I'd got the right story when I started writing from Sylvie's point of view.

Zibby: I loved how it wasn't just from Sylvie's point of view. It was almost as if it was a letter to Emma. It's like, you came in and I was giving this to you. As a reader, you feel like you're just sort of listening in on a mother's conversation with her own child telling her this whole story, which was so great especially as things escalated and got very exciting. [laughs]

Kate: I enjoyed doing that. Actually, I had a discussion early on about, do we like this second-person narrative? Is it confusing? I really stuck up for it and thought it made it more intense. It's really an apologia to Emma. Why is that? What's happened? What doesn't Emma know? That was another reason for moving the point of view into Sylvie's head so that she became a more interesting narrator because, actually, the whole point is Emma knows very little. If you as the reader are stuck with Emma for the whole book as someone who's totally in the dark, I was worried that it would become quite frustrating for the reader. Whereas with Sylvie, there are flashbacks in the book. The present day is actually 1993, but it flashes back to the seventies and eighties. That enabled me to let Sylvie in the past reveal clues as to what happened one by one. Hopefully, that draws the reader on and propels the narration along.

Zibby: It was super successful. I feel like from a craft perspective and structure and everything, it was just perfect. Both went in tandem letting us stay in it and yet getting enough of the backstory, just enough at each time to really care even more. I thought it was awesome.

Kate: Thank you. I was just going to say that with the editing, I've got to thank my editor in the UK and my editor in the US, Grand Central [indiscernible]. They really worked me hard to make the book tight and said things like, "She's sitting by the pool again. Things need to happen." I have them to thank for a lot of that. I did the nice atmosphere and they helped me narrow down the action.

Zibby: The atmosphere also was fantastic. I felt like it was my biggest vacation in this whole quarantine time where international travel is not allowed. All of a sudden, I could smell and taste and see and hear everything going on in the South of France. It was such a nice little respite. In fact, I put it in my newsletter this week and said if anybody wants a trip to France, pick up The Heatwave. I have all these people saying, thank you, I got it. I feel like I took a trip with you. That's really great. I loved also, as you were mentioning before, this whole relationship with mothers and daughters and how fraught it is. There's some stuff in here that's very much relatable to really any mother and daughter, and any new mother especially, who's trying to get to know their child. You never know what you get. I've said this before, but before I was a mother, I thought that I would have a lot more control over how my kids turned out. As I've had more and more kids, it becomes very clear to me that I have no control and that they're kind of born the way they're born. All I can do is straighten out the edges, but the bed is made. Here's one quote. You said, "Although my joy is laced with fear, it's the kind every parent feels, the kind that hurts your heart and makes the world seem as amazing as it is hazardous. I am a mother." This is right when she becomes a mother and is trying to figure out how to process this in the context of the world.

Kate: Before it all goes wrong.

Zibby: Before it all goes wrong, yes. Although, it goes wrong kind of slowly, and so you get to go along with her, which is great. Tell me a little about that part of the narration, the relationship between mothers and daughters and your own perspective coming into it. Did you take anything of this from any part of your life or relationships you've seen or friends or relatives? Did any of this germinate in a part of your life?

Kate: The thing that really is strongly drawn from my life is actually Sylvie's relationship with her younger daughter, Emma. In the present day in '93, a lot of that is me and my mom. I'm my mom's only one. My parents split up when I was five. I've got great stepparents and it's all great. Mom and I were very close. That is very much us. In terms of Elodie, who is the difficult child and the child that Sylvie really struggles to bond with, that is very much me having -- well, it sounds bad saying having fun with, but really letting my imagination go. I suppose I've been influenced by other books and other films in that sense. Something like We Need to Talk About Kevin is an obvious example of that, a mother who actually -- my Sylvie started off with a much more idealized idea of motherhood than maybe Eva does in We Need to Talk About Kevin. She becomes more and more ambivalent as times goes on and starts thinking -- there's those questions of nature and nurture. Are the problems with Elodie my fault? Is she born this way? Then what happens is when she, ten years later -- she decides she's not going to have any more children because she thinks she's terrible at it and she couldn't cope, possibly, with another one. Then she falls pregnant again with Emma by accident. Then Emma's really easy. It all slots into place. It's exactly how she dreamed it would be. Then she starts thinking more and more and feeling about this, gosh, maybe it is actually to do with Elodie rather than me.

I think even if a mother has a fairly straightforward relationship with their child, there's always loads of guilt in there and worry that you're not getting it right or that you're going to stir up troubles for your children. They're going to be in therapy forever because of some small mistake you're making down the line. It's probably also interesting to say that I'm not a mother. I didn't have children. It didn't happen for me. That's a whole other story. I felt actually quite liberated to write this in many ways because I didn't have to -- I'm not saying women writer who are mothers shouldn't write a book like this. For me, there were no qualms about writing a book that my child would one day grow up and read and maybe think, did mom feel like this about me at any point? I could just go for it. I felt as though I've got lots of mom friends who, there are things they don't say. There are still taboos. You might say, oh, god, I'm finding it really hard. For instance, I think a lot of moms don't want to admit that it's often quite boring, being a mom of young children, and very repetitive. You feel like you've lost yourself a bit and you've just become mum, or mom. [laughs] I could explore all that and really go for it. I was trying to do a little bit of a service to mothers everywhere in that sense. That sounds ridiculous, but I can be really honest because I don't have children. I think actually a lot of you feel like this sometimes, and that's fine.

Zibby: Thank you. Thank you for the service on behalf of moms everywhere. I appreciate it.

Kate: [Indiscernible/laughter] medal.

Zibby: Medal is in FedEx right now. Thank you. Can you talk a little more about your decision not to have kids? Is it private? You don't have to.

Kate: I'm actually quite open about it. I don't mind talking about it. I actually had loads of miscarriages. I had always been quite ambivalent about motherhood. I wasn't sure it was for me. I need a lot of my own space and time. I'm not good with noise. I was never sure that I would be terribly good at it. It maybe wasn't taken out of my hands. I could've maybe kept going. I had made the decision that I didn't want to try anymore. I felt as though my body wasn't my own. I felt the hormones were making me mad. I just stopped. It was a real relief, actually. I have dogs instead who are much easier, probably. [laughs]

Zibby: I don't know. I find kids easier than dogs. I've had a couple dogs. At least kids, you can reason with them at some point. I feel like dogs, I don't know if they understand me. I love dogs, but I don't have the gift of dealing with dogs.

Kate: I have two rescue dogs. One particularly is completely nuts. I've actually put her to bed in her crate with a cover over because otherwise she would be growling and jumping up and wanting to see who you were and hear your voice. You couldn't do that with a child, probably. That would be seen as a bit cruel to put them to bed and lock the door.

Zibby: That would probably not be a good idea. I would not recommend that. [laughs]

Kate: That's the good thing about dogs. You can do that. It's allowed.

Zibby: That's true. I've realized that the child equivalent of that is basically putting them in a trampoline. They can't really go anywhere. You zip them in. It's contained. There is a noise factor, but it's usually outside. The trampoline as a modern-day playpen for kids up to however old. Sometimes you can just throw your partner in there, zip it all up. [laughter] In terms of the structure of the book again -- I know I'm jumping around here a little. I've always been wondering, when you write two timelines like this and you have such discrete stories going, two at a time -- essentially, you're writing two books at the same time. Then they have to somehow marry at the end. Did you write one of them first and then the other? Did you write them both in tandem? How did you approach the writing process of the story?

Kate: I started off just writing random bits that interested me because I have to coerce myself into writing quite a lot. I really love it when I do it, but I sort of avoid it and I fight it. When I'm writing a book, at the beginning, I write bits that I'm interested in, and so they’ll be all over the place. I actually work with Scrivener quite a lot because I find -- I don't know if you know that program.

Zibby: Yep.

Kate: It means you can move things around much more easily than you could in Word. Often, I'll write sections and then move the order about. With this one particularly, I've written a lot of the more difficult scenes, shall we say, the bits that go in the last two-thirds. The flashbacks are chronological. They see Elodie growing up. I needed more at the beginning. The softer bits, the bits about when she's pregnant and she's still getting on with her ex-husband Greg, a lot of those were actually slotted in and written quite late. If you do that, then you can play around with it. You can also find little patterns. If in a 1993 scene, there's sort of a theme going on, you can maybe have a little hint of that in the flashback that follows that ties those two things together. It might be something to do with the house and a little feature that crops up in the house that reminds the reader that this is the same place. I think that can add to atmosphere and the idea of the place almost being haunted by memories. I do lots and lots of moving about. Even old scenes, I will then rejig and add in different nuance.

One of the main things I had to work on on the edit quite hard was actually to make the more dramatic scenes -- this is hard not to give stuff away with this book. Elodie is a very troubled child. There are scenes where she's being a bad child and kind of scary. Some of that stuff, I had to work on because my editors felt maybe some bits weren’t scary enough. I was actually being too subtle with it, which is interesting to me. I've got a half-brother and sister, but they're quite a lot younger than me. I did grow up more or less as an only child. I was putting in sibling rivalry scenes. My editors were saying, "That's kind of normal," and I was thinking it was really disturbing and dark. I had to up all that stuff but keep it on the right side of -- I didn't want it to get stupid. I didn't want it to become almost farcical and too grim and too gory. With that, ideas of callous and unemotional children who you worry might grow up to be psychopaths, there are a lot of tropes they use again and again. It's very hard to escape them entirely. I didn't just want the neighbor's cat ending up dead. I wanted to do something a little bit different if I could. Working on those bits was fun. I've gone on a massive tangent from your original question.

Zibby: That's all right. I enjoyed listening.

Kate: I don't write in order by any means. I mess around and come back to bits and then slot it all in as a jigsaw at the end.

Zibby: Tell me about how you have to motivate yourself to write. Tell me about that, even though you've decided to be a writer. [laughs]

Kate: I know. I know. I'm a masochist. Yes, I love it. If I've had a good day of writing, I feel so, so calm and lovely and yogic that evening. I think, I'm just going to do that again tomorrow. I'm going to have a proper routine. It all goes out the window. It's really weird. I don't understand that resistance because it's my job. If I couldn't get any more book deals, I'd be distraught. Who knows? They get done. I've written five books. Maybe don't beat myself up too much because they do get done in the end. I never miss deadlines. I was a journalist before I was a writer. I wasn't even on monthly magazine. I was on weekly magazines. That really suited me because I'm quite quick at getting stuff done. I quite like that, doing a little bit of research, write it all up. Then boom, it's done. It's in. It's complete. I can move onto something else. Whereas with a book, it is a kind of, we'll see you in a year. I find that quite tricky to navigate because I've always been a last-minute person. You really can't be a last-minute person if you're writing a ninety thousand-word novel. You'd have a nervous breakdown if you left it until the last month. I have to be consistent. I walk around with a lot of guilt. I'm coming around to thinking that actually a lot of days when I think I'm, we say in Britain skiving, I don't know if that's a word in America, where you're kind of bunking off, these are all really British terms, but when you're shirking and not doing the work you should be doing. Sorry, what was it?

Zibby: Maybe procrastinating where you're putting it off?

Kate: Yeah, that kind of thing. Actually, I think I am doing work in my head. I'm walking the dogs and I'm making little notes on my phone. I do more work than I think I do. Things are percolating all the time, hopefully.

Zibby: We're going to go with that one. Non-stop workaholic. [laughs]

Kate: Yeah, I never stop.

Zibby: Never stop. Slow down already. Come on. So are you already at work on your next novel? What's going on in your time now?

Kate: I'm busy at the moment with stuff for The Heatwave, which is really fun, like this kind of thing. Yes, I've started. I've done about a fifth of a book set in Italy. I was due to go to Italy this summer with my parents, actually, and do some research. I was really looking forward to that. Obviously, that's been postponed. If The Heatwave is about mothers and daughters, this is about marriages. I split up with my husband quite recently, which is totally amicable and nice. I'm forty-two. I think it's an interesting age, early forties, late thirties. You're still very much young enough to start again. Not that being fifty is not young enough to start again, but you know what I mean. You're probably halfway through your life if you're lucky. It's a time where you think, what do I want the rest of my life to look like? Is this enough? It's exploring those kind of things. I keep saying to my ex, it's not going to be about you and me. It's not going to be about you and me. Don't worry. Inevitably, you do draw from your life a bit. I'm really looking forward to that. There's some American characters in that as well who I'm looking forward to writing. Maybe I can do a research trip to the States as well.

Zibby: Totally. Come visit. I had the same thing. I got divorced five years ago. I'm forty-three, so when I was thirty-eight. I'm remarried now. I feel like hitting your fortieth birthday, there's a big shift and recognition you only get one life to live and life's too short to be miserable type of thing, so you might as well. It's still a big step and a big risk. I am really eager, then, to read your next book.

Kate: You might like it. It is a really interesting age. I've got lots of friends who are going through similar things. It's all happened around the same time almost as though it's contagious. Lockdown finished a few friends off as well in terms of their marriages and their relationships. It's just strange times all around, really. I'm hoping I can write something that speaks to people about that stuff. I have written a few books now. I used to write more historical fiction. As I've gone on, I've got more confident and maybe being happier to write stuff that's closer to me. When my mom read The Heatwave for the first time, she said, "This is like you." She didn't mean that Sylvie is me.

Zibby: Uh oh. [laughs]

Kate: Or Elodie is me.

Zibby: Elodie, okay. Good.

Kate: Imagine that. But just that it felt as though it was me speaking. I thought, yeah, that's a confidence thing. I think the next one will be even more that way, maybe. [laughs]

Zibby: That's great. We'll get all the way to maybe a memoir in forty years. Who knows? You'll work your way slowly there. What did you and your ex decide to do about the dogs, just out of curiosity?

Kate: Currently, he's between places at the moment because I've bought him out, so I'm in the cottage. They're with me all the time at the moment. We're going to have a week on and a week off. That will suit me because I like spending some time in London. I've got family there. I live in the Cotswold in the middle of nowhere. I like having that city/country thing. I think that will work well. Currently, I am kind of a single mom to them. It's quite hardcore some days, especially when it's raining and I have to take them out. It's been very nice and very amicable. He's a big support to me, always. As divorces go, it's been a good one.

Zibby: Do you ever feel scared? If I were in a big cottage in the middle of nowhere with just me and my two dogs, I feel like I get scared all the time outside of cities having grown up in New York City. Anytime I'm in any sort of wilderness, I'm like, what's that noise?

Kate: I was like that to begin with. The first night we spent here it was so dark. I couldn't tell if my eyes were open or not. I was born in London. I'm like you. I've got used to it. Luckily, weirdly, it's 1750s, this cottage, but really not very creaky, fortunately. What there is is a lot of spiders at the moment because they're all coming in to mate. Every night I'm having to deal with these huge house spiders. I've really grown up in the last couple of weeks. That bit's not fun, I must say. So fairly soon would quite like another husband.

Zibby: Or perhaps just an exterminator.

Kate: Maybe I'll get a cat or something. They can get the spiders. Apparently, they do.

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?  

Kate: This is also advice to me. Give yourself a break. Don't beat yourself up all the time. I always talk about this because I love Stephen King. He wrote a book, On Writing. It really, actually, intimidated me because he's got this prodigious work ethic. He said if you're not writing two thousand words a day, then what hell are you doing? You're not really a serious writer. You don't, obviously, want it. It really made me not write for ages because I thought I'm just not doing it properly. I would say do what you can. Also, read. Read, read, read. I was a reader way before I was a writer. You will learn what you like and what you don't like and what's effective. If you read a book and you're on the edge of your seat, you can look at why that is. Look at it like a construction. That's the best way to learn, I think. So there you are.

Zibby: I totally agree. If you end up needing to do research on American divorcées, you can just DM or something and we can keep this conversation going.

Kate: That would be great. [laughs]

Zibby: Thank you. Thanks, Kate, for coming on. I absolutely loved this book. I've recommended it a hundred times in everywhere I recommend books. Just the way you write, and I know we talked a lot about structure and all the rest, but your actual writing style is so beautiful. I just loved it. I just loved it. I emailed your publicist in the beginning. I was like, I love this book.

Kate: Thank you. I love that. That's really made my day. Thank you.

Zibby: Good. Have a great day. Stock up on the green shirts for future interviews. [laughs] Good luck with the dogs.

Kate: Thanks so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Have a great day. Buh-bye.

Kate: Bye.

Sheila Grinell, THE CONTRACT

Zibby Owens: Writing is a second act for author Sheila Grinell. She led the team that opened the Arizona Science Center as the CEO, which welcomed nearly 400,000 visitors a year, and by the way, is one of my favorite places to take my kids when we go out and visit my mom and stepdad during the winter months. A graduate of Bronx Science High School and Harvard University as well as the University of California at Berkeley, she currently lives in Phoenix and has written two books, The Contract and Appetite.

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

Sheila Grinell: My pleasure.

Zibby: I have to ask first, I read that you were born in a taxi. Is that true?

Sheila: That is true. It even says so on my birth certificate.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Tell me the story behind that.

Sheila: It's the end of the World War II. My father, who was stationed in the United States, was not present. My grandfather took my mother downstairs into a taxicab. I was the first child. My mother said, "The baby's coming. The baby's coming." Oh, no, no, no. He took her downstairs. It was New York City. They called a taxi. The taxi's moving to the hospital. My mother says, "The baby's here." Evidently, my head emerged. My mother had the presence of mind to reach down and close my nose because she didn't want me to breathe. The taxi pulls up into the hospital yard. My grandpa runs out, gets a nurse. The nurse runs back and completes the delivery in the backseat. Then when I was old enough to understand all this, I said to my grandpa, "Grandpa, what did you do?" He said, "I gave the driver a big tip." [laughter] It wasn't good for my mom because this is a long time ago and since I was contaminated, they put me in a separate room. My mother went to the maternity ward. She wasn't allowed to see me for almost a week.

Zibby: Oh, no. That must have been so hard.

Sheila: Right. I know when I had my baby, I was out of the hospital in two days.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. That's quite a story. I also just read your piece about how you feel now that you're in, I don't know what to call it, assisted living or continuing care.

Sheila: Continuing care retirement community.

Zibby: Continuing care retirement -- oh, right, CCRC, because your husband has Parkinson's, which I was so sorry to read about. Tell me about writing this piece and what it's been like for you having to transition to this type of living arrangement to help with his care.

Sheila: Parkinson's is a very slow, nasty disease. It's not only movement. It's also cognitive and emotional. It affects your seeing and your hearing and your speech, everything, but it is slow. My husband was diagnosed in 2011. It's been creeping up. I got to the point where I knew that something's going to have to change. Everyone says if you're going to move into one of these places, move early so you can enjoy it together before you can't enjoy it together anymore, so we did just about a year ago. At first, it was really wonderful because my husband had some blessings that he hadn’t had before. He hadn’t driven in three years. Here, he could just walk to the bistro and get a burger when he wanted. He could take the exercise classes and chat with the ladies. There are far more women here than men. A lot of them are widows. My husband is charming. He has a great time. We walk together and they all go, "Hi, Tom. Hi, Tom." No "Hi, Sheila." They said, "Hi, Tom." He felt invigorated. I was relieved because there's always somebody around. He has a little alarm button. He presses the button, somebody's here's in five minutes. They have it set up to take care of people who are old and infirm. In the future, I know I'm going to need more help. I'm not going to be able to wash him and move him around. I'm not big, but he's bigger. We're set up. I was enjoying it. Then COVID came. Even though we're an independent living, we're not in a nursing home, there is a nursing home on the campus. They use the nursing home rules for all of us, which meant no visitors at all, no more communal dining. They bring a meal to our door. Somebody drops it off at our door and rings the bell and runs away. They're keeping the disease away, so we have to deal with it. I'm okay. When everything got quiet, I was actually able to concentrate on the next book. I'm writing my next book.

Zibby: Let's talk about your writing. Tell me, now that you’ve mentioned it, what is the next book about? Then let's go back and talk about the previous two books.

Sheila: The next one is a story about a pioneer young woman who comes west, contemporary pioneer. She comes west to find a better life. She winds up in Phoenix where I am. It's post-pandemic. I'm writing it as if it's three years from now. Hallelujah, I hope it's post-pandemic then. People's lives will have been changed. They’ll be expecting different things. My young woman falls in with a real estate developer. That's the name of the game here. For the last twenty years, thirty years, forty years, the whole metro area has grown tremendously. It's real estate developers who have a vision of the future. They decide where you're going to live, what you're going to want, where the transportation is, where the schools are, where the parks are. Are there any other amenities? They decide all that. Some of them do it with a great deal of vision and respect. Some of them are unethical. Some just want to make the buck. Some are cheats. I'm plopping this young pioneer woman into this post-pandemic environment where people are designing the future. We'll see what happens.

Zibby: Wow. Even just the exercise of imagining a post-pandemic world again and how this will have affected things is an interesting exercise in and of itself.

Sheila: Yes. That's why I'm only going three years out because I think beyond that is beyond me.

Zibby: Now let's go back to The Contract. Tell everybody the plot of that book as well. What inspired you to write that story?

Sheila: It's about a bunch of children's museum designers, Jo and Ev, man and wife. Jo is around forty-eight. She says, I've got to make my mark now. She thinks that if they're invited to bid on a contract in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh, she thinks, this is it. I'm going to go for this. It's going to make my name. He is a different kind of person. She's got all the balls. He's got the soft side. He just wants to stay home and make things. They go. It doesn't turn out the way she thought. She learns a lot about her culture, about her work, about her marriage, and about herself and what she can tolerate and what she can't. That's why I wrote the book. In this day and age, I was mulling over, how do people become tolerant? Shouldn't they? When? What makes it happen? What are the impediments? This was in my back of my mind. I wasn't even quite aware that it was in the back of my mind. Then I met my friend, name not to be announced. I met a friend, wonderful woman. She's a professional, kind, generous, very thoughtful. Her sister came to visit. The way she talked to her sister shocked me. She was completely contemptuous. I said to myself, wouldn't you have learned by now to tolerate her? Then I realized, oh, I can use my experience in Saudi Arabia. If I'm going to write about tolerance, that's one extreme. Jo and Ev, my designer couple, they live in Oakland, California, so I have both extremes.

Zibby: You've had a whole career in museums and a whole museum life. You were able to bring that in to inform all the details of this book. What made you start writing to begin with? I know you have another book as well. How did you transition or how did you incorporate this element of creativity into your professional life?

Sheila: The Contract had to be set in the museum world because my own experience in Saudi Arabia was the museum world, and I had to make it real. You can't make up stuff about Saudi Arabia. It's just too far out. Back to, how did I become a writer? Well, I didn't. [laughter] I have to take you back to the beginning. I had a whole other life for forty years.

Zibby: Let's go back.

Sheila: The beginning is in high school. I had a marvelous teacher. I hope you had the one teacher who changes your life. A lot of people have them. There's one math teacher, Dr. Dotti, I had him for three years. I went to college thinking I'd be a mathematician. I got there and they had made me take physics. Mechanics was okay. Then when they got to electricity and magnetism, I didn't know what was going on. I said, I can't do this. I have a scholarship. I have to do well. I'm going to have to go home. A friend of mine said, "What do you like?" I said, "I like my English composition class." She said, "So major in English." So I did, not being so intellectually greedy. Then I went to graduate school and I got a master's degree in social science and sociology. After my education, I was prepared for everything and nothing practical. I was in Berkeley, California, at the time. This is 1969, which is a time of great social unrest like now, only very positive. It was free speech and anti-war and the beginning of women's liberation. It was an exciting time. Alternatives were big. I ran into a physicist who was starting a science museum. He wanted it to be an alternative, not telescopes and steam engines behind glass cases, but light and sound that you could actually play with. I thought, sounds great. It's math and science. It's humanities. It's an alternative social institution. I'm going to do this.

I started my first job. I joined Frank Oppenheimer. We built the Exploratorium, which has been widely emulated around the world. My first job turned into a career. I worked in it for forty years. It was fabulous. I helped start museums in different places. I wrote a book about museums. I instructed people all over the world. Then I moved to Phoenix in 1993 for one last shot. It was really going to be from scratch. I really liked the from scratch, starting things up. I moved here, got the Arizona Science Center up and running, made it a little bigger, mentored my successor, thought about things. Then suddenly, it was forty years and I was done. It was like a little switch. I'm done. This institution still needs to change and become even more contemporary, but it doesn't need to be changed by me. It needs to be changed by a digital native. I'm done. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I needed to change. I started consulting. Then the universe intervened.

My mother had a stroke. She was living back east with my sister. I went to visit her. I saw her first in April. I said, "Mom, you don't seem to really know who you are anymore." As the stroke multiplies, she was really losing her personality. "Mom, you don't know who you are anymore. Do you want me to tell you your story?" She said yes. I said, "Okay." So I told her her life story in forty-five minutes. I cleaned it up. I finished. She said, "That was interesting." I said, "You won't remember, but I'll tell you again." In May, I go to see her. "Mom, would you like to hear your story?" "Yes, I would." I started to tell her story, but she couldn't pay attention for forty-five minutes, so I told her a few chunks. She said, "That was interesting." I said, "If you won't remember, I'll tell you again." I go to see her in June. I start to tell her her story. She couldn't even put the chunks together. She was out of it. I took a walk. It was like somebody stabbed me in the belly. I said, I have to write her story. In retrospect, I was mourning her in advance. I was trying to keep her because she was going away. I came back to Phoenix. I wrote her story. I went to the Piper Center here and got an editor. I finished it. I shared it with a few friends. Then I realized I wanted to write more. I think the old English major came back.

I enrolled in community college here. It was such fun. It was so different from everything else I had done for my business life. There were sad, lost twenty-year-olds and a bunch of other older people trying to recharge their batteries. I had a wonderful time. I kept taking classes. I'm in my third short story class. I'm looking at the story in my hands. I say, "It's too big. It's not going to fit in twenty pages." The guy sitting next to me said, "So write a novel." I went, "Okay." That started me on the journey on my first novel, Appetite. I didn't have writer's block, which was a tremendous blessing. I think it's because I already had a successful life here. I was already an asset to the community. So if I screwed up, it wouldn't matter. At least, that's what I told myself. It worked. I worked away at it. It took quite some time because I was still consulting. Then got it going and realized this is really what I want to do and I'm continuing to do. There's a bunch of advantages to having another career besides just having the freedom to fail. I realized that a lot of the skills from my past lives still pertained. I know how to commit myself to a five-year project with an uncertain outcome. I know how to stick to a schedule and budget. I know how to stop second-guessing myself all the time. I knew how, when I was in over my head, to go get some expert help. All of this was kosher. I used all those skills in my writer life too. The big disadvantage about my second life is that it's going to be shorter than the first one. I've got to hurry up and get more books under my belt. I don't think that way. Every project, every book is its own thing. You just live in that book for the years that you're in it. Then the next one comes up.

Zibby: That's amazing. How did it feel to publish a novel? How old were you, if I may ask? You don't have to answer, but when Appetite came out. You don't have to say it. You don't want to say it. It's fine.

Sheila: Very old.

Zibby: Very old, okay.

Sheila: Zibby, I could be your mom. I started writing in my sixties.

Zibby: That's fine. Started writing in your sixties. Then you had a novel published. What did that feel like? I know, as you've said, you've accomplished so much professionally in other areas. By the way, I love the Arizona Science Center and have been there many, many times. Love it. How did it feel when it first came out or you first saw it on a shelf? To have that happen and feel that, what was it like? I can only imagine.

Sheila: I was living in a different world. When you're writing, you're writing. I'll give you an example. If you know Phoenix, maybe you know Changing Hands, wonderful independent bookstore. I had the launch there. Just before the launch, I was so nervous. I had called a friend of mine who's a personal trainer. I said, "Work me out." In my other life, I would stand up in front of a room full of 1,500 people and by force of will, make them shut up. It’s not possible in the new life because it's different. When you're standing up talking about science museums, you have the museum, you have the board and the donors and the staff and the visitors. You have all these people behind you. When you're standing up to talk about your book, it's just you. Art is so much more personal. I had to make a shift from a more public persona into a private one and revealing that private one. That was different, exciting, and a little scary. Now I'm much more used to it. I think it's a privilege to be able to plumb your own depths in a way that makes sense for other people.

Zibby: That's amazing. I love that. Having gone through this journey, what advice would you have for aspiring authors at any age?

Sheila: Most people, when they start something, think about the reasons not to. There are reasons not to. They're probably valid, but ignore them. There are reasons to. The main reason is because you don't lose your old skills and your old personality, but you can exercise it differently. I feel like I'm still engaged with the world, but I'm exploring it in a different dimension. That's how it feels. My advice would be, go for it. Whenever I give talks or readings, people come up to me afterwards. You can tell by the look on their face that they're want-to-be writers and they're looking for help. They say, "I had this great story. I had this wonderful and fantastic experience. I just can't seem to get to it." I say, "Make yourself a promise, twenty-one days. One hour a day for twenty-one days." Science says that twenty-one days is what it takes to form a habit. Also, my other piece of advice is to work on your craft. If you can't massage a sentence into what you want it to be, you won't really be able to tell whether you're expressing your story or not. Work on your craft. You can take classes at a community college if you have one. I was lucky enough to have one right by. You can find a critique group. Go online. There's tons of them. Do whatever you do, but write. Work on craft. Then see what you have to say.

Zibby: Wow, that's so inspiring. I love this. It's so encouraging. It's just so encouraging. You take everything, every skill in your brain, and you melded it all together. Now you're producing in little installments, novels and delight and entertainment for so many other people. It's really neat. I'm very impressed.

Sheila: I hope when you read the next one that I've got it right, that it is accurate post-pandemic, but also, delightful.

Zibby: I can't wait. Thank you for sharing all your stories and for coming on my podcast and for all your great writing. Thank you.

Sheila: Thank you so much. Zibby, I have to tell you, you must be the nicest person in the world. What you do for books and readers and writers and stories is just splendid. Thank you.

Zibby: Aw, you're welcome. Thanks for saying that. Take care, Sheila.

Sheila: Bye.

Heather Cabot, THE NEW CHARDONNAY

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

Hi, Heather. How are you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather: Hundred of interviews. Part of that is because, first of all, just getting my arms around this industry, the learning curve was, I can't even tell you how steep it was. This is a topic, not only is it, it's complicated, it's controversial, but it touches on everything from business to politics, to science, to medicine, social justice. It's so rich. There's so many different facets of it that are really nuanced. In the beginning, it was really just working the phones and talking with people and figuring out what were the various threads of the story I might want to follow. It was a lot of talking to people and then traveling to meet them in person. I cannot thank my family enough, my husband. The book is dedicated to my husband because he did so much heavy lifting when I was traveling. Since adult use is not legal in New York, a lot of the folks that I needed to follow were out in California and Colorado and Canada and all these other places. I would have to go away for -- I usually tried to keep it to two or three days. If I was going to the West Coast, I'd try to just cram in a ton of interviews. My family on the West Coast, my two sisters, and my parents when I was in Arizona, everybody let me crash with them. That was always nice because I was able to fit in some family time too.

It was really a team effort because to cover this kind of a story where it's happening in so many different parts of the country -- it's such a fragmented industry. Every state is different. To really understand that, you have to go these places and meet those people and talk to people there on the ground. It was a total adventure. It was a lot of fun. I'm so thankful that I had the chance, again, the time to just learn and talk to people so I could absorb it all. I'm still learning. By the way, I'll just say, the industry changes so quickly. That was the other challenge with this story. It was like covering a news story. Certain characters in the book, I thought something was going to go a certain way for them. I thought I was going to go with one character to do something. Then that deal fell through. So many things were happening in real time that when I finally sat down to write the book, I really had to calm myself down because I kept worrying that I was missing something. It's a book, and you do have to stop writing at some point. I think that was the hardest thing.

Zibby: What was the actual writing process like after you did all the interviews?

Heather: Oh, my gosh. I was thinking about it today because I knew you were going to ask that. I think I started in May.

Zibby: I don't want to be predictable. This is depressing. I'm sorry. [laughs]

Heather: I want to say it probably took me, in total, about nine months to fully write it. What happened was it was due in September. I wasn't done yet. We had moved. I kept getting extensions. Then I turned it in in January. The whole process altogether was over three years. It took me a year to do enough reporting to actually put together a book proposal that I thought was solid enough that could really explain that there was a story here. There had been other books written about the cannabis industry. I wanted to tell this new story with these great characters. I really wanted to do a narrative. I needed time to find those people and find those stories.

Zibby: I have to say, I went and googled all the people because I was like, what do they look like? You created really great [indiscernible]. I was like, Chef Jeff, what does he have on the menu? He has [indiscernible]. I was like, ooh, my next party. I don't know. If we ever have [indiscernible]. Did you go to Kate Hudson's birthday party when you reported that, or did you just hear about that?

Heather: No. Actually, what was funny was I hadn’t actually met Jeff yet. The way I met Jeff is kind of the way -- this is going to give you a window into how I did the reporting. I met Jeff because I was reporting on Snoop and Ted's venture capital firm, Casa Verde Capital. For those of you when you read the book, you're going to find out about how Snoop and his business partner Ted Chung decided that they were going to create this venture capital firm, not to invest in growing or even selling marijuana. They actually were investing in the software and all of it, the tech behind the industry. They had incredible foresight. I had been interviewing the partners that actually managed those investments. I was telling one of them, this really nice guy named Yoni Meyer, I was saying to him, "I'm really interested in these cannabis restaurants." It was at the time that West Hollywood, I think they had just awarded the very first licenses for these weed cafes, essentially. They were going to be, really, the first ones in the country where you could actually dine in public and have some type of, whether it was a vape or whatever, paired with your food. I just thought that was really fascinating. I said, "Do you know anybody who's in this space? Do you know anyone?" He said, "Actually, I just invested in one of these startup restaurants. I want to introduce you to the partners."

We met the partners. I started talking a little bit more. Then they started telling me about Jeff. Then I found out he had a cookbook. I got his cookbook. There's so many recipes in the cookbook that were Jewish recipes for Jewish holidays. I was like, that is so funny. I just really wanted to meet him. The Kate Hudson thing actually happened, I think her party was probably two weeks before this time that I actually flew out to California to go to a private party that he was catering. I wanted to be with him in the kitchen because I wanted to understand all of his methods. Again, I'm a complete voyeur. I don't know anything about any of this. I wanted to learn from him and see his methods. That had just happened. Actually, it was top secret. No one really knew about it. Then I guess her people gave the story to E! It was out there, so he could talk about it. No, I didn't go to the party. She posted all over Instagram about it and it was written about, so I was able to glean some of the details. Then obviously, I interviewed Jeff too. It was fun to see him right after that happened too. He's cooked for a lot of people that he can't say who they are. He's been cooking for celebrities for a while.

Zibby: Wow. I love his pot-zaball, all these corny, funny pot-Jewish combos. Who knew?

Heather: I loved his mom. His mom Sylvia was so lovely and gave me so many great stories about him as a kid. That was my favorite part, was learning the backstory of all these people. What I really was trying to do was I wanted to write a book that would appeal to anyone just as a really great story. The fact that cannabis is the backdrop is just kind of the way it is. I was trying to find people that, their story, anybody could relate to. In a very human, universal way, they were characters, whether it's as an entrepreneur, whether it's as a parent or a mom who is going back to work after leaving her profession for a few years. They all had different reasons for why they wanted to get into the business. That really resonated with me. I tried to really bring that out. Interviewing Jeff's mom, for example, spending time with Beth's mom and her family, that was such a great experience. I'm so thankful that they allowed me into their world because it helped a lot.

Zibby: Ted Chung became one of the main characters in your book. You track him throughout his teenage years to being an Asian American. The way you describe him is sort of too laid back to fit into the stereotypes there and how he eventually went to this very WASP-y school and had to fit in with the blue bloods that he wasn't familiar with and then becomes this complete maven in this industry and ends up hanging out with Snoop Dog. How can you not tell a story about a trajectory like that in someone's life?

Heather: The thing about Ted that I always found so fascinating about him is he really is kind of a soft-spoken, stoic guy. Then once you get him talking, he really reveals a lot about himself. I just loved hearing about his family, his dad, what sparked this entrepreneurial zeal in him. What I also was struck by was how that experience of going to college and really feeling like he was on the outside, how that completely shaped the rest of his life and the marketing agency that he founded, Cashmere, which is all about marketing to multicultural markets. The reason why he did that is because he could see that himself. He felt marginalized. It was just so smart. I feel like he brought all of that to cannabis as well. He's one of those people that people will say he's a visionary. To talk with him about the insights that he had about where cannabis was going to go and then to see that he was actually really right on, that was really fascinating for me to see that and to be able to tell that story. In a lot of ways, this book is about marketing. It's about rebranding. It is a business book. I'm not necessarily saying that cannabis is the new chardonnay. I'm saying it might be. These are some of the people that are trying to make it so.

Zibby: So maybe it should be called The New Chardonnay, question mark? [laughs]

Heather: Could be.

Zibby: Maybe for the paperback. Tell me about what it was like also talking to couples like Mel and Cindy McDonald who had to deal with really traumatic stuff like their son Ben who was in a horrible car accident and having all these seizures and wouldn't eat and the power of marijuana to change his health and to save his life, essentially. Did that sway you in one way or another in your own personal views of the use of marijuana or the legalization or any of it? How did it make you feel?

Heather: For me, this was never an advocacy book. I always approached it as a voyeur, as a journalist. My feeling going in and as I finished it was that I wanted to shed some light on this industry and how it had matured so quickly so that people could make their own decisions about it. I thought it was really important to pull the curtain back on the amount of money that's involved it in and the injustice of it in terms of the communities of color that had been cut out of this industry and being able to profit from it and also, when you talk about Mel McDonald, the strange bedfellows, the people who you would never expect to be not only involved in it, but evangelizing. I stumbled into Mel's story because of Beth. I don't want to give too much away about the book, but their stories converge in Arizona in the early days of Arizona's medical market. I really felt when I had the chance to actually get to know Mel and Cindy that their story in so many ways crystalizes why we've seen cannabis go mainstream.

It's just this idea that for so many people, it really is medicine. I never knew anybody who used it as medicine. It was nothing I ever was exposed to. To meet them, these devout Mormons -- he's a former federal prosecutor, as you'll find out in the book, a Reagan-appointed federal prosecutor who ends up having this aha moment at a time that he never expected it. I just felt along the way as I was meeting people and reporting the book, there was so many people like Mel, people you would never expect would get behind this. When I was working on the book, actually right before I finished the proposal, that was when former speaker of the house John Boehner who was an incredibly vocal foe of marijuana -- he had once said he was unalterably opposed to marijuana legalization. He joined the board of one of the largest multi-state operators in the US. That was head turning. I couldn't believe it. There were all these things that were happening like that. I was so happy that I had a chance to meet Mel and Cindy because I think they put a face on this idea of change and people changing attitudes and why they're changing attitudes.

Zibby: What about this whole other group of people who aren't using it that way, but the chardonnay moms who you talk about who are happy that they don't have to spend the time even drinking it. It doesn't go to their waistline. This the new-new thing. They're all sort of tittering about it. What about them? You think this is going to be adopted by moms' night out?

Heather: I think we're already seeing that, certainly in the marketing to moms. If you go to California, you go to any place where it's legal for adult use, you'll see these products that are labeled as microdose. It's this idea of it's like having a glass of wine. It's not going to leave you hungover. That's how it's marketed. I think that there's an appetite for that among a certain group of people. They don't want a headache. They don't want to gain weight. I think these businesses are very savvy focusing on that. What I also write about in the book is that alcohol consumption has gone down in recent years. There was an opportunity there for these companies. As this spreads across the country, as you see more states approving recreational use, I think you're going to see more product innovation around that. Then the other part of it is the growth of CBD. CBD, it comes from the cannabis plant, but because of the farm bill, when it comes from hemp which is a very low-THC variety of cannabis, that's legal. That opened a whole door for all of these companies that had been doing more THC products to consider doing CBD lines.

That's why you're seeing it now in Sephora and Bed Bath & Beyond and your local drugstore. You can buy it anywhere now. It's only really been since the end of 2018. There's not a tremendous amount of regulation around it, which I think is problematic. I think you're going to see guidelines coming out of Washington. My point is that because CBD is not intoxicating, it is more appealing to people. There are potential therapeutic benefits that people talk about. It certainly needs more research. Women are using it in large numbers right now for insomnia, stress, anxiety. There was just a big report that came out of a company called BDSA in Denver that tracks sales. Women are driving this. Women are going and they're shopping for CBD for all of these kinds of things that, I don't know about you, but all my friends, we're all dealing with sleeplessness and stress and anxiety. You can kind of understand why there's an appetite for it, but also why these companies are seizing on that. They know there's an opportunity there. I think we're just in the beginning.

Zibby: We're like sitting ducks, we stressed-out moms here who are at the tail end of the months of this COVID stuff. They're like, see our market opportunity. Wow, that's amazing. Now that you've finished writing and now that this book is coming out into the world, is this a case-closed situation for you? Is it the kind of thing where you have Google Alerts and you're just fascinated and want to find out everything more that's coming? Did this whet your appetite or shut it down?

Heather: I'm kind of ready for something new. It was great. I've enjoyed it. I probably will continue to speak and write about it through the election and obviously through -- it is a fascinating topic. I really care a lot about the social justice piece. I will follow that closely. I will probably continue to do some freelance writing about that piece of it, the gender equality, gender equity, and racial and social equity pieces of all of this. Those issues are really complicated. I think that as you see more states looking at legalization, that’s something to pay attention to. It's something I care about. It's definitely from that perspective. Am I going to be a cannabis beat reporter? No. It was an intellectual challenge. It was a really meaty, really amazing topic that I knew nothing about that I had three years to learn about. I met some amazing people and incredible entrepreneurs who risked it all. The book, it's about that. It's about, what drives somebody to go for it when they could lose everything? I'm fascinated by those stories. I think whatever I do next is going to be around entrepreneurship again. I don't think it's necessarily going to be in cannabis. I'm sorry.

Zibby: That’s okay.

Heather: I'm announcing it now. [laughs]

Zibby: Do you have an industry you have your mind set on?

Heather: I have so many. Right now, I'm just focused on this because I want to get through the election too. I was saying earlier about how the story's always changing, even to do any of these interviews, I have to constantly prepare and stay on top of what's happening. For the political scene and the business aspect, it really is changing every day. I still read my diet of all the newsletters. My inbox is full of these marijuana business updates for now. That's because I really feel like I need to stay on top of it. I need to be able to speak intelligently about it. I don't know. It's funny. If you would’ve asked me, would I ever write about this? my family and friends couldn't believe it when I told them that this is what I was going to write about it. Now they’ve seen the book and they know why I found it so interesting. I don't know yet. I figure I'll have time. We're going to be in lockdown for a few months, a lot of time to think about it.

Zibby: I know you have teen twins. I have teen twins, newly teen. What's the takeaway for them? As a parent, now that you've learned so much more about marijuana and CBD and all of it -- I know it was a byproduct of the business side or the passion for the people and the players in the industry. Along the way, I know you've learned so much included a lot in it. What advice as a mom are you going to give your kids knowing what you know?

Heather: What I tell them is what I tell them about alcohol, which is that this is not for you. We've had some really great conversations about substance use in general, substance abuse. Many people, there's sort of a folklore that you can't become a habitual user of marijuana. That is not true. People who have a predisposition to substance abuse or they have it in their families, they can be at risk. Also, it's a new industry. The illicit market is still thriving. Even if you live in a place where it is legal, you need to talk to your kids about the dangers of getting it. You don't know what's in it. That's for adults too, frankly. It really is. We had some really great conversations about that. We talked about brain development and why substance use before your brain is finished developing, particularly THC and alcohol, not a good idea, just not a good idea. Even more than that, my most important conversations with them related to this book were really around the racial injustices of the drug war and really being able to, especially this summer as our country is going through this incredible reckoning on race, to have a conversation with them about my work and the relationship to systemic racism and what I found out about how drug enforcement in this country has led to really devastating consequences for communities of color.

That was really meaningful for me to be able to have that conversation with them as well. I said to people, my kids were actually really embarrassed that I was working on this book originally. They were like, "Don't tell anyone what you're working on." They really were not happy about it initially. Once we started having some conversations about what I was finding out and the people that I met along the way whose lives were touched by the war on drugs and had relatives that were incarcerated or who had experienced stop and frisk and that kind of stuff, it was just really meaningful to be able to give them practical examples of how we need to stand up for injustice. We need to be aware of what's going on outside our little bubble. That, to me, was probably one of the most important conversations that I had with them beyond the "just say no" conversation, which thank goodness we've been having for a number of years anyway. It's not just one conversation. It's also modeling good behavior. It's an ongoing conversation. You hope that that dialogue continues. I hope it does.

Zibby: It's probably the best thing you could've done. If your mom is into something, then it can't be off limits. When I grew up, my mom smoked. Then when my friends started smoking, I was like, that's not cool. My mom does that. Maybe this is the most strategic way to handle it, really.

Heather: It's like I knew too much about it. They're so young right now anyway. They're only going to be freshman in high school. The only other thing I'll say for the parents listening, one thing that I didn't understand and if there's one thing as a parent that you will take away from my book other than just the fun stories, I didn't know anything about concentrates. I didn't know anything about cannabis oil. I didn't know anything about these other products. That is something as a parent you definitely want to familiarize yourself with. I go into more depth in the book about it. Basically, there are derivatives of the cannabis plant that can be made into oils. That's the stuff that's used in vape cartridges. It can be turned into kind of a wax that kids can -- there's a thing called dabbing where, not kids, but people inhale it. That's used for edibles as well. It can be highly, highly potent. There was a report that came out of Colorado last week, which for the most part since legalization has not seen an uptick in overall teens using cannabis, but this report last week actually found an increase in dabbing and also in vaping, even after the vaping crisis. What that says to me as a parent, you just need to familiarize yourself with what's going on and the different ways, the different forms that this can be used. Those forms can be incredibly potent. Certainly, smoking it as well, but these are highly concentrated forms of THC. I just think as a parent, if you don't know about that, it is something to research and be aware of because those forms can also be much more subtle. You don't necessarily know that your child has that. I think that's really important, just to be aware that the products evolve. They're all evolving quickly.

Zibby: By the way, Jeff, on his website, teaches you how to make your own cannabis oil. If you ever want to start experimenting, you could start there. [laughs]

Heather: If you're an adult.

Zibby: If you're an adult.

Heather: And you live in a state where it's allowed.

Zibby: I am not advocating. It's just putting the information out there. I'm not putting out a point of view. Heather, thank you. Thank you to The Strand. Congratulations on your book, The New Chardonnay, amazing. Thank you for including me in the launch. Thank you for everybody who listened and asked questions and everything else. Please go buy the book for anybody who hasn’t yet. There's a little link at the bottom right there, purchase The New Chardonnay.

Heather: Zibby, thank you so much. This is a dream come true. I've been listening to you for months. To be able to be interviewed by you, it was the icing on the cake. Thank you so, so much for your time and for all you to do support authors and to encourage people to read. It's so important. Thank you. Thank you to The Strand also for this opportunity. It made the launch week for me, honestly.

Zibby: Yay! Thank you.

Heather: Thanks, everybody, for joining us too.

Zibby: Thank you. Bye.

Robert Weintraub, THE DIVINE MISS MARBLE

Zibby Owens: Robert Weintraub is the author of The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame, and Mystery. He has written about sports for Slate, Play, ESPN.com, The Guardian, Deadspin, and many more. He's the author of four books including The Divine Miss Marble and also the New York Times best seller No Better Friend. He currently lives in Decatur, Georgia, but grew up in the large shadow cast by Yankee Stadium in Rye, New York.

Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm so excited to discuss Miss Marble with you.

Robert Weintraub: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Zibby: The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame, and Mystery is a deep, deep dive into Alice Marble's life. As I was reading it, I was thinking, what was it about her that kept you so interested? You must have spent so much time on this book. What was about her that captivated you so much? What made you write this book?

Robert: A lot of time and a lot of miles back when you could travel freely without worrying about things. I was so impressed by Alice's stick-to-it-ivness, the fact that she got hit with so many obstacles in her life constantly. She always rose back up on her feet and came back stronger. She was a great player, but came from nothing. She had to start playing on hardscrabble cement courts in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and really came from nothing to become this great champion. Then just on the verge of her breakthrough, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was in a sanitarium partially and was out of the sport for two full years and came back from that to win what we would call today the US Open, then it was called the US Nationals, and became the biggest star in the sport. From then on, it was one body blow after another, whether it was other battles with health problems that were debilitating but she kept going through them and a lot of personal issues in her private life and the war which ended her career prematurely, World War II, which really kept her from being an all-time great who everybody would know about today. As I came across and discovered yet one more pitfall after another that she managed to get back from, I just became so impressed with her. I started to idolize her. It made the travel and the long days in the archives going through these dusty old manuscripts and materials, it was easy because I was fascinated by every step she took from then on.

Zibby: You mention at several points in the book how this is what she recorded, but you couldn't verify it anywhere. There was no backup, so you're like, this is what she said. We'll have to take her at her word. It sounded like you had a lot of skepticism about some of it. How did you end up feeling about her retelling of her story? Do you think it was all accurate? What really happened?

Robert: Where the facts met the legend, she liked to print the legend, so they say. You have to put it in context. She talked a lot this espionage mission that she went on during World War II at the behest of the army intelligence to reconnect with a former lover who was a Swiss banker who was working with the Nazis to launder their money. Her assignment was to go and find him in Switzerland, reconnect, and find any evidence she could of this nefarious duty and then come back to America with it. She says she found it and was shot for her troubles by a Russian double agent while being chased through the mountains of the Swiss Alps. It's an incredible story. There's just enough truth or unprovable falsehood in it to make it at least sort of believe. However, as you say, I couldn't really verify much of it. You have to understand, she was a woman who was at these incredible heights of fame during the Depression when everybody in the country was on their knees, really. By the sixties, she was a forgotten figure. She had very little money because she didn't get to earn any through her tennis greatness because it was all amateur in those days. She was a forgotten figure living on the margins in Palm Desert, California. I think there was a lot, this is who I was and if I have to embellish my tale a little bit to get people to remember me a little bit more, then it's okay because I've earned it. I think she did earn it. She always had this maxim, give the fans what they want, whether she was on the tennis court or whether she was singing in a night club, which she did; or appearing on the radio, which she did all the time when she was at the height of her fame; or designing fashions. She also did quite a bit of her own and then sported them on the court and in public. She did many different things in her life. She always did it to please her public. I think this tale of her World War II derring-do may have gone along the same line and she just exaggerated for effect, as we say.

Zibby: It's so interesting because when you talk to memoir writers, there's this whole debate about what exactly is truth? Is it your truth? What do you believe? Is it your perception? Then someone like you comes in who tries to make sense of all of the interpretation and try to squeeze out all the facts. It's a tricky job. It's sort of murky when you have to rely on people's memory or their depictions of themselves.

Robert: You are not kidding. It is. You always have to take the fifty thousand-foot view. It's not always easy because you want to believe the memoir writer. You want to go on what she says was her journey at all times. Memory is tricky, of course. You never want to believe the person closest to the action because their memories are the least reliable. I found that for the most part she was accurate for what she remembered and talked about. She actually wrote two memoirs. Another one came out right at the height of her fame. In both of them, there's a lot of truth in there. There's just a little bit extra involved that was done either to sell more books or to give her what she thought was the true, as you mentioned, this true life that she thought about in her head as opposed to the facts that you come across in the newspapers of the time. I tried to walk that tightrope very carefully and not not give her the benefit of the doubt but at the same time not crap all over what she saw in her own life. [laughs]

Zibby: One of the things that you said that drew you to her and what drew me to this story and to many sports stories, honestly, is the ability to persevere and what makes some people be able to overcome things in their life and flourish and use their physical gifts and translate it all with a perfect combination of mental toughness and physical agility to become a huge sports star, whereas so many others, most people, can't achieve that. Then when I was reading about Alice and even the rape scene at the beginning of the book, even if you just had that -- then she had so many people die and drop dead next to her and one thing after another and then coming back from a two-year break. Nowadays on the tennis tour, we hear about somebody gets surgery or Djokovic is out for a little bit or something. Back then, they didn't have all of that machinery to rehabilitate people. Anyway, that was my long way of saying, first of all, what do you think makes some people able to overcome this type of adversity? Second, why do you think we're all just so drawn to stories like this?

Robert: I wish I knew what made people be able to do it. I would do it myself. It's really incredible, as you say. I didn't even mention her sexual assault, absolutely. She lost her father when she was very young. It's an incredible portrait of somebody who just refused to lose, to use a cliché. I hate to do that. Michael Jordan's been in the news lately just because of this documentary about him recently. He's somebody else who just manifested everything around him to use to a single-minded purpose, which was win games. I think Alice was maybe not quite that single-minded, but had the same sort of mindset, which was, this is what I want to do. Not only am I not going to let things happen to me that will derail me from that, I'm going to use them as fuel. That's really rare. It's incredibly admirable. It's just something in the brain chemistry, I suppose, that makes them, these rare few, for better or for worse and mostly for worse, something to overcome, as something to push them day in and day out. When she was laid up for two years, she got out of bed and began a really rigorous physical training program that we would take for granted today, obviously, but at the time was just unheard of. People were like, why are you skipping rope every day and doing all this physical training? She said, I'm going to get back to the top. I'm going to do what it takes to be there. That's what I want to do in life. You have to really admire somebody who sets aside everything else like that and uses that kind of motivation to get to where they want to go. It's so rare and so hard to do that. As I say, that's what really in the end drew me to her and to her story. For all the things that she did that we might question in terms of memoir writing, it was overwhelmed by the fact that my admiration for her was so deep because of her amazing comeback abilities.

Zibby: This book felt very cinematic to me. It felt like I was reading the movie that I was going to eventually watch. Do you have an actress in mind who would play Alice if this were to become a movie?

Robert: Wow, that's a great question. I suppose the first person just who leaps to mind, maybe, is Charlize Theron because she has that combination of great physical presence as well as the beauty and grace and all the other attributes that Alice had but is very believable as somebody you could see running her opponent into the ground on the tennis court and then changing her clothes and singing in a night club or going out on the town with one of her many admirers. There's probably no shortage of actresses who could make it happen, but Charlize is the first one that leaps to mind. Obviously, that would be great if it ever came to pass, but I'm not holding my breath.

Zibby: Still, fun to think about it.

Robert: Yes, very much so.

Zibby: You write about all kinds of sports, not just tennis. Tell me about your love of sports yourself. Do you love to play sports? How did you end up becoming an avid sportswriter?

Robert: I think I followed the traditional path, which was I played avidly until I realized I was not very good at them, and certainly not good at them to continue playing beyond high school, at which point I switched over to covering them. I worked in sports television for a long time and then when I had a family transitioned into writing because it was a lot less travel and long hours. I've just always been really fascinated by the history of sports and the day in, day out competition of sports and the outsized personalities that come with it and the things that we are talking about. People who wind up achieving greatness have these incredible qualities that so few of us have. I think most of us, certainly myself included, are drawn to that. By writing about them, I get to sort of walk in their shoes a little bit. I get to feel at least a little bit how it must have felt for Alice to be at her lowest of lows and overcome all that to get to this incredible precipice. I think that's what draws a lot of us to sports in general, is the fact that you get to see these athletes who are performing at this incredibly high level and knowing how they got there, each of them with their individual stories intact. It's really something that's fascinating. It's a drama that never ends. When we get sports back someday, hopefully, that will certainly continue to be the case. I'll keep covering it until the day I die. I can't get enough of, really.

Zibby: My husband is such a sports fan. This quarantine, I swear, I think that's been the hardest part for him. Whenever anyone askes, he's like, "I miss sports so much."

Robert: Him and me both. It becomes part of your everyday life. It really does. We can talk in the abstract about how seeing these great athletes perform is so much of it, but it's also just a daily thing that's part of your life. It becomes as much a part of your day as brushing your teeth or walking the dog, turning on the ballgame and seeing how your team did. When you take that away out of nowhere, really, that's very tough to overcome for all of us. In a way, we're all Alice Marble right now and we have to overcome this body blow. We'll get there. We'll get back to the heights. I'm sure of it.

Zibby: It's true. I feel like it's a double whammy with sports because you have the community of shared rooting for someone. To be a fan, you're a part of something. I feel like it's hard these days to feel a part of anything, particularly now. Then to have that taken away, what does it mean if you're a Denver Broncos fan when nobody's playing? I'll just say we've had a lot of Tennis Channel reruns on the TVs around here. I'm ready for some new matches.

Robert: Very understandable. Exactly, these live dramas missing from the -- the matches may be great, but when you know who won already, it kind of takes away from a lot of the pleasure, unfortunately. I'm with you. I'm dying for the return of live sports. I'm a big New York Yankees fan and Cincinnati Bengals fan. It's part of your identity after a long time. Especially, as you say, you become a community with your fellow fans. To have that ripped away from you, you start to question who you are a little bit. The sooner sports can get back and make us all whole again, that’ll be a good day.

Zibby: It's true. How long did it take, by the way, to do all this research and write this book? It must have been a while.

Robert: Two-year range from beginning to end including the preproduction, as they say, trying to figure out if it was really a book. Then once it was and I had a way to tell it, there were a lot of ways to go with it, but I had to kind of insert myself into the story a little bit more than I usually would be inclined to do because of the mystery involved and because so much of it is trying to figure out what exactly Alice did and did not do. I turned it into a little bit of a mystery story where I'm the dogged detective on the case just figuring out what in Alice's life and what happened was real and was not real. That took a little bit longer than usual, but about a two-year range, which is pretty standard for me for turning a book around. Some people take a lot longer. Other people who write a lot faster than I do and I'm envious of can crank them out in less time. For me, it's about two-year range.

Zibby: Do you know what your next two years are allocated to at this point?

Robert: Great question. Nothing set definitely set in stone, so I probably shouldn't talk about it, but more interesting tales of a fascinating figure. Let's put it that way, not necessarily involved in tennis, but another rich human being. Let's say that.

Zibby: Great. Awesome. Do you play tennis, by the way?

Robert: Yeah, absolutely. I love to play. I don't play as much as I used to with the family and the wonky knees. I definitely enjoy playing. I live in Atlanta where there's a huge doubles league scene, so I've played for many years in the doubles leagues around Atlanta. It's great. It's the kind of thing I hope to get back to when we can all shake hands over the net again. That's for sure.

Zibby: Exactly. I love tennis. I feel like it's like you're having a conversation when you're not even talking. It's so fun. That's what I love about it.

Robert: Every stroke is another witticism or declaratory statement. That's right.

Zibby: Yes. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Robert: Boy, that's an open question. I'll tell you, yeah. I would say certainly if you think something is worthy of a story to be told at book length, do it. Like I say, I started in television. I was a big reader. I always thought I could write a book, but at no point did I ever say to myself, let's just go ahead and do it, until the time came and somebody encouraged me and said, "You can do it." I said, "Yeah, you're probably right. I can." There's no alternative to just sitting down and doing it and banging it out. I would certainly say if you're writing a book-length treatise there, don't think about the big picture. That gets too overwhelming. Just think about that day's writing. What's this small little chunk that you can bite off and finish in the near future? Keep your goals small and easily attainable. That way after a lot of those goals are achieved, you find yourself with a big goal achieved as well, a big book all ready to be published. It takes some doing, but it's not beyond any of you out there. I'd say that for sure.

Zibby: I think that's good life advice in general. Anything could seem overwhelming unless you break it down into small pieces.

Robert: Exactly. That's the best way to go, as you say, hour by hour. If you look at the big picture, boy, you'll just bury your head under your covers and stay in bed forever.

Zibby: Yes, particularly these days, particularly at the thought of perhaps not even having school in the fall. Oh, my gosh. How old are your kids?

Robert: I have a twelve-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy. They are enjoying the idea of not going back to school very much, but I'm dreading it. [laughs] Like most people, you get more of a parent/teacher role this fall. It's a cross we all have to bear, it looks like.

Zibby: Yeah. I have thirteen-year-old boy-girl twins. Then I have a five and seven-year-old. My little kids are fine, but my twins, my thirteen-year-old daughter misses her friends so much that she's willing to sit in school all day if she gets to hang out with them.

Robert: Exactly. That's the other thing, the social component. This is beyond the dumbing down of our kids. It's horrible for these kids not to be able to see their friends every single day. I feel so bad for them. Can't get them sick either, so it's a rock and a hard place.

Zibby: Right, I know. I keep thinking this is probably the ideal time in my own personal life for this to have happened where I'm happy not really being that social and getting all my socializing done over the internet by talking to friends and family and just hanging out with my kids and being very settled. At so many other parts of my life, this would've been a total disaster when things were up in the air or when I was trying to meet somebody. Anyway, whatever, I'm going on a tangent here.

Robert: I hear you. Listen, as a writer, I'm a natural shut-in anyway, so this is right up my alley. In that sense, social distancing isn't a problem, but all the other aspects of it are just terrible. The sooner it's over, the better, absolutely.

Zibby: Yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks so much for chatting with me today. Thanks for the entertainment of your book. I will channel Miss Marble as I'm playing tennis later today and the resilience that she had.

Robert: Good for you, very good. Wear shorts. That was her big thing. She chucked aside the skirts and put on the shorts and changed the game forever. I would definitely advise you to not play the game in calf-length skirts if you can avoid it.

Zibby: You know, I actually wouldn't mind playing tennis in a calf-length. I love long skirts. I'm wearing a tennis skirt now. I hate shorts. I feel like I should've been born in a different era. I would've been happy with --

Robert: -- You were a pre-Alice Marble type.

Zibby: Exactly. Maybe one of these days we'll meet in person and could play some tennis and all the rest.

Robert: No doubt. I'd love to have a conversation over the net with you at any time.

Zibby: Sounds great. Thanks so much.

Robert: Thank you very much. I appreciate the time.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Robert: Take care. Bye.

Amy Schmidt, CANNONBALL!

Marisa Porges, WHAT GIRLS NEED

Zibby Owens: Dr. Marisa Porges is known for her work on gender and education, leadership, and national security and is the author of What Girls Need: How to Raise Bold, Courageous, and Resilient Women. She is currently the eighth head of school of The Baldwin School, a 130-year-old all-girls school outside of Philadelphia that's renowned for academic excellence and preparing girls to be leaders and changemakers. By the way, Dr. Porges actually went there. Prior to joining Baldwin, Dr. Porges was a leading counterterrorism and national security expert. Most recently, she served in the Obama White House as a senior policy advisor and White House Fellow at the National Economic Council. She also has served as a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Council on Foreign Relations. She also worked as a counterterrorism policy advisor in the US Department of Treasury and as a foreign affairs advisor in the US Department of Defense. In all these roles, she stood out as one of a few, if not the only, women present, at any given time. Dr. Porges started her career on active duty in the US Navy flying jets off carriers as a naval flight officer. She earned a BA in geophysics from Harvard, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in war studies from King’s College London. She's won a million awards. She currently lives in Philadelphia with her family.

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

Dr. Marisa Porges: Thank you for having me, Zibby. Great to be here.

Zibby: What Girls Need, this is the ultimate question. [laughs]

Marisa: I think it's on all our minds, right? All the time.

Zibby: All the time. What do I even need? I don't know.

Marisa: That's where it starts. It starts from thinking what I wish I had, what I wish my friends and I, when we think about the real world. We want to give it to the next generation, our girls, our daughters, our kids.

Zibby: Totally. Your career has been so interesting. I can't believe you were a naval pilot. You were, I don't even how to say it, naval air force pilot. You were in the White House. Now you're running a school. You're just the most badass person I feel like I've ever interviewed. [laughs] It's so cool.

Marisa: Thank you. I'll take badass. I hope we all realize how badass we are because we all have our badass moments. I did have a choose-my-own adventure of a career, so there's that too.

Zibby: It was so great in the book how you just sprinkled it all the way through. Now you're in the cockpit. You were banging on the fuel gauge. You relate this somehow to the board games that I should be buying for my daughter in my completely boring standard life. [laughs] Thank you for distilling your experience down to help other people there.

Marisa: Oh, my god, I think we all have these fun stories. We need to think about it in new ways. It was fun in the book to be able to share of some them with readers.

Zibby: Before I go into some of the tips and advice and everything, what do you think it was about your upbringing that got you to this place? What did your parents do right? What led you to accomplish all of this stuff, do you think? Do you think it started with your upbringing, or not?

Marisa: One hundred percent. I think this is part of the lesson that I realized recently, to be honest. I think it came to finally the aha moment when I was here running a school. I run an all-girls school now. It's actually the school that I grew up at. I went here. Part of it was coming back and then seeing through a new lens as to what young girls can be given and what we need to do from an early age to really help them realize their badass self. I do think it happens young. I think it was that moment where my dad helped me brush my knees off or whatever it was when I fell on the playing field and said, no, go back out. Do it again. Compete. Be healthy. Enjoy competing. The idea that I wanted to fly for the navy when I was a kid, I think it belies our age, it was Top Gun. For those who grew up watching Top Gun, that moment, I wanted to be Maverick. That was my thing. It was an era when the rules still hadn’t been changed and women couldn't even fly in combat. That wasn't mentioned. It was just, okay, go for it. Why not? It turned out I was too short for the cockpit, so I had to be Goose, not Maverick. There is that. We figure out a way. This is what I've been encouraged to do. It is part of who I am. I see it now in little ways for young girls, particularly elementary-school girls, those moments where we say, no, you can do this. We want them to puff up their chest and say, I got this. I say there's one picture that was on the wall of our school where a girl drew a picture of herself and said, no one will say no. You think, oh, my goodness, her poor parents when she's a teenager particularly. I wish I was thinking no one's going to say no when I was an adult all the time. I've had my moments where I didn't go for that job. I didn't go for that moment. I could just go on and on about how I think we need to start this early for our kids.

Zibby: It's so important. It's so smart to give the parents the tools now to make sure it all happens. Just one last question on your bio, how did you end up back at your school after the way your career was going? What made you come back to Baldwin?

Marisa: I know, that's the crazy one. I had the good fortune of when I was in the White House, I got a phone call one day, literally. I was working the West Wing. They rang up. I thought they were going to ask for advice or for money. There's that. But no, it was the head had just retired. They wanted to see if I was interested in leading the community that had given me so much. I threw my hat in the ring, again, because I'd been taught to be a healthy competitor. Had no actual thought that they would take me. Look, crazy thing is I'm now leading the school through a pandemic, so there's that. I think it's just a lesson to go for it. It's a lesson that we all need to remind ourselves and remind our friends. I say this to my girlfriends all the time. Just go for it. It doesn't matter how crazy it is. The things out of left field are sometimes those opportunities that take you in directions you would never imagine and are the most fun and impactful. It's totally that lesson of life for me.

Zibby: This is the corollary. This is the just say yes. [laughs]

Marisa: Yes, exactly. Just say yes.

Zibby: One of the principles that I really responded to in your book is talking about how to make sure our daughters have a voice. How do they build that voice and hone that voice? I feel like I could've used this when I was growing up. I was so shy. This was really hard for me. The situations when you're in the White House and Obama's sitting there and you regret not speaking up, I was in far less tense situations and felt like I couldn't talk in work meetings and all the rest. You had so much great advice for girls. How can we help them? Tell us a few basics of how to start. Then I love so many of your specific advice, like even ordering takeout. Let's start from the broad and go down to more of the specific.

Marisa: The broad is recognizing that these are skills that I still struggle with sometimes. I have to remind myself to speak up in a meeting because it maybe feels too natural to just wait for the perfect moment. There's never a perfect moment. Any women out there know that a man isn't going to wait for the perfect moment. They're just going to talk. We need to as well. We want our girls to remember that and practice it. It's about finding ways in little, everyday ways to encourage our girl's voice and reinforce that her voice matters in an age-appropriate way. It's not about speaking out inappropriately, but saying, no, we want to hear from you. You're at the dinner table, making sure your daughter's speaking out when your son maybe is dominating the conversation. Even if it's an adult conversation, what does she think? Asking her to be involved. This idea that when you're ordering food -- this is a lesson I took from one of our students. She remembers when she was a kid, that her father used to make her order pizza when they called, a reason not to use the app on your smartphone. Not her brother, but she would have to make the order because she didn't like doing it. It felt totally uncomfortable. Yet then she got older and she said, "It's not my favorite thing. I'm still an introvert, but I do it. I can do it. I know I can do it." These are the safe little ways that we just teach our girls to practice that muscle memory of speaking so when they have their aha moment for their career or just that time when they want to tell their boss, "Excuse me," what they need, they feel empowered to do so.

Zibby: It starts with Chinese food, apparently.

Marisa: Apparently, Chinese food or pizza or whatever, Thai. Take your pick.

Zibby: Take your pick. [laughs] Also, how you suggest inviting debate, that you should always debate every side and open it up for conversation and say, should TikTok be allowed? Let's talk about it.

Marisa: These are funny things. Again, it's not every day. I think sometimes we make it about, it has to be all this, and so parenting becomes overwhelming. Finding a natural moment where you don't cut the debate off, but where you encourage her to keep going. Frankly, it's a helpful way to fill time in the car when you're driving home from the game or something and it feels endless. It's also just a moment to help your daughter, again, realize that you care, that you want her to practice her voice, that it matters to you, the number-one role model in her life. She's going to say, I'm going to do it other places as well.

Zibby: Even when you were like, don't ask how was science today? that you should say, what did you say in science class? How did you handle that? What questions did you ask? These are such great specific tips that are not so hard to implement.

Marisa: Again, it's little tweaks. The little things make a really big difference. Hopefully, it helps make parenting easier. One thing that I came upon as well is this idea of helping your daughter practice her ask, this idea that you want her to ask. If you practice this in negotiating, the next time she asks for something, anything, even if you decided what your answer is going to be -- yes, I'm going to let you have an overnight sleepover; yes, we're going to go to the amusement park; yes, you're going to get the thing that you've been asking for for ages -- say, huh, go back and make a pitch. Give me three reasons why. Come back in thirty minutes. Come back in an hour. Make her practice the art of asking. Then again, regardless, you don't have to change your mind. The answer could still be no if that had been your parenting decision to start. Maybe you say, well, the answer's no this time. Here's what worked and here's what didn't when you pitched.

Give her the little bit of feedback. I really liked when you did this. You used your emotion well. God, that PowerPoint was great. I had one kid who actually -- a girl at my school showed me the pitch deck. She and her friend used to make PowerPoint decks. This is how clearly her parents helped her spend her time to give her something to do, make PowerPoint slideshows when they wanted a sleepover on a weeknight. She showed me pictures of the cupcakes they wanted to make and the movies they wanted to watch and the tent they wanted to build in the living room. I don't know if they got their Thursday-night sleepover, but they just loved the process. Candidly, it made them better at this idea of the ask. They had actually come to my office to ask me, the head of the school, for something that everyone else had said no to. I said no as well, but I reinforced that the asking was good. It's what we want to see from our kids and our girls especially.

Zibby: My daughter did something similar with three friends at her day camp because she was aging out and they wanted them to extend it. The girls all got together. They put together this whole presentation and pitched it to the head of the camp. They extended it for the summer.

Marisa: That's fantastic. What a fabulous lesson to her because in that instance it went well. She got this positive reinforcement. I hope that you remind her of that. When we get off our call today, say, hey, by the way, I was really proud of you for that. That was super cool. Do that more often.

Zibby: Totally. I should bring that back up.

Marisa: Sounds like she's great at it already.

Zibby: I remember as a kid my curfew was so much lower than everybody else's. I went around and I called every parent and asked what the curfew was. I made a whole spreadsheet. I didn't have Excel, of course, back then. It was like, kid's name, mom's name, phone number, curfew. I was like, look at this data. Mine is earlier. It's not safe. I will be having to get home by myself. And so she raised it. [laughs]

Marisa: Wow, look at that, analytics from an early age. That's on your life resume 101.

Zibby: It's true. I've kind of forgot about it until now.

Marisa: This is the art of persuasion. It is such an important skill and something that statistically women aren't as effective at. It's not the reason why there's still a pay gap, but it plays into the nature of how pay gaps continue as well as other things that I think we all continue to see out there. Whatever we can do for the next generation so they don't face these same challenges.

Zibby: You even pointed out how men have such a higher rate of interrupting women and how there was that one example in the boardroom where people got up and spoke. Maybe it was at Google. Was it at Google? You tell the story. [laughs]

Marisa: There's countless examples. It's funny. When I was looking for stories to include in the book, there's some places where you could see a hundred examples of men interrupting women in work, in public. The most crazy example was they’ve actually done a study at the supreme court. The female supreme court justices get interrupted more often than male supreme court justices. You think the pinnacle of our judiciary system, and the women are still getting interrupted more often. They’ve done studies, actually, in schools and in co-ed environments. I have the good fortune of leading a girls' school now. In co-ed environments, boys speak out and interrupt girls more often than the reverse. You take that same young girl and you put her in a single-sex environment, a single-sex play group, and she will speak out and speak up as often as the little boy did when they were in class together. We need to counter that. It's a social norm. We know our girls want to speak out and speak up. We just need to help them practice it.

Zibby: You also talk a lot about fostering the competitive spirit and how sports play a big role for girls especially because at least they get that experience on the field. You give all these examples of leaders like Meg Whitman and others who are all -- she was playing lacrosse and squash at Princeton, which I didn't even know. Tell me about how fostering that love of sports can really help our girls too.

Marisa: Being competitive is something that in particular right now I think a lot of parents shy away from. We think of competitiveness as a bad thing and it's a maladaptive behavior. Unfortunately for our girls, a lot of times they read that as, I can't compete even the things I want to be good at because I don't want to put my friends down. It's going to be embarrassing if I win, not if I lose, but if I win. It's not just on the sports field. It could be the spelling bee or the poetry contest or other places too. Any man or women, father or mother would say, you got to be competitive in the real world. It's the, go for that job. It's the, go for the apartment. It's the, go for whatever it is you want. Takes a little bit of competitive spirit. Every study shows that competitiveness makes you perform better personally. You run faster when you're running against somebody just by the nature of the adrenaline that gets going. We want to find moments to help reinforce this with our girls. Sports are an easy one because they're widely available for girls and for boys.

Yet by middle school, most girls opt out of competitive sports. There's peer pressure and social norms at play. A lot of times, they just give up on it. Whether or not they were going to be the Olympic athlete is just something that goes by the wayside. This is where I'd say, do we let our boys opt out as easily? I remember one mom on the sideline of a sporting event here at school. She says, "We tried four sports for my son until he stuck with swimming. We kept going because we knew it had to be part of his day. For our daughter, we let her opt out. Sure. She wants to do something else. She's more artsy than not." I would challenge that mom to say, well, it's not about whether she's going to play sports in college or go to the Olympics. It's about helping her practice being part of a team, being resilient, and being competitive. Or try the poetry contest at the library, the spelling bee at school, any moment where you have to throw your hat in the ring, be judged against your peers, practice winning and losing, and just realize that being your personal best is a good thing even if it's in a competition.

Zibby: It's so true. Thank you, by the way, in the book you gave all these boardgame examples for little kids. I was reading the book and I had Amazon open in another browser because I read your book online. It was like, Diplomacy, Catan Junior. What can I get to help my kids? Never too late.

Marisa: Right. There's little easy ways that we can just naturally -- it doesn't have to be this grandiose thing that makes parenting so much more difficult. It's just about thinking a little bit differently about what games, what books we have them read, what the daily interaction around the dinner table is like, and just small things we can do to reinforce these key skills for our kids, our girls.

Zibby: I really loved that you said use the things that come naturally to girls as their competitive advantage. Don't try to make girls have, necessarily, the same skills and then be better at them. Go with what they have that's great and really blast those things out.

Marisa: We get challenged when we think about how to prepare our girls. You're try to make them like boys. We're like, no, no, no, I'm trying to help them own their personal best self. It's about being your personal best, being competitive in whatever it is that she wants to do and she's eager to engage in. It's also about the fact that so many of the skills that come naturally is a generalization, but studies show to our girls are really the advantage that will set them apart when they're adults in work and at home, this idea that they naturally empathize more readily. Empathy is something that places higher for now. This is what employers want in their work environments, that we communicate, our girls communicate in really helpful, natural ways that build consensus, that solve problems. These are things that are their advantage. We just want to reinforce them so that they really own their best girl self just as young women as adults.

Zibby: There are obviously so many things. Right before I did this, I was talking to a friend of my husband's who just had a little girl. She's two years old. He was like, "I need some parenting advice podcasts." I was like, "Fantastic, I'll send you this one." He's like, "I live with three women and this little girl. What do girls need?" If there was a summary of the most important things for a new parent, dad or mom, to know what they should do a hundred percent, what would that takeaway piece be?

Marisa: It's about finding little moments to reinforce her voice and helping her speak out because I think that's where it starts. I think it's about finding role models. It doesn't have to be whoever the VP nomination's going to be, that level role model. It's the daily role models. It's her mother role modeling. It's the aunt. It's an athlete you see in social media that you're like, oh, just look. Use those as daily reminders of how we want our girls to own themselves. Always pause and remember to share lessons of our own challenges, failures, foibles, not in the least because studies show that those lessons get reinforced better, they get remembered more often by those listening. These are the times where our girls think, wow, this is what the real world's going to be. What am I going to be like when I'm older? They sop it up. Particularly our young women, they have ears for miles. They hear everything we're saying. Now when we're navigating virtual school for a lot of us, there's more and more of those moments where they're hearing and seeing us navigate really challenging times. It's a perfect opportunity to just be honest with them and say, hey, this is how I'm figure it out. It's not going so well because... Again, age-appreciate ways. It'll look different for an elementary school girl, someone in middle or upper school or high school. Just sharing with them how we're navigating these moments so that we help them do better than we do. That's the key. That's the ticket, I hope.

Zibby: How are you navigating this moment? It's so funny. I'm sitting here talking to you. Usually, on this computer I'm Zooming with all the different headmasters of my kids' three different schools. It's the lower school and the middle school and all these different schools because everybody's back-to-school planning. How can we handle this? How are you getting through this? Do you have to listen to your own internal voice for your school? Are you trying to aggregate consensus? What are the skills you're using? How are you making up your mind, essentially?

Marisa: It's a crazy thing. It's interesting. I was frantically setting up the system for the podcast today. You'll see I'm no longer in my office. We relocated around campus in order to social distance and spread out all our girls, and so I no longer have an office, interestingly. I'm here in the office next to our gymnasium making sure I can talk to you this morning. It's hard. It's hard for all of us. One thing I remind all of our parents, anyone listening, is go easy on your teachers and your kids' school leaders because we're all just trying to do our best and make this is safe as possible for our students, our families, and our teachers even as we realize that in-person learning is ideal. It's where those connections get made between the girls and their friends, the girls and their teachers, and where so much of the learning happens, even as we were fortunate to really have great success with our online virtual program in the spring. I'm sure like your kids, we all went virtual from mid-March. That was that. Like a lot of our peers, you're really leaning into the data trying to figure out, what are public health officials saying? What metrics can we use? What tools? Can we use masks, social distancing, hand washing to help protect our kids?

Then how do we deliver not just the core academic program, but those other things, those other moments that our kids really need, particularly our girls, to socially/emotionally thrive? We need them to get through this next year. It's not going to be forever. We need to remember that. We'll be able to help them catch up. We have the good fortunate here of being able to support a wide diversity of students and families with tools to help them get through the year academically. We also need to find moments that they can connect with each other, that they build those relationship skills that are so important, particularly in adolescence, so that they understand how to be compassionate and empathize and connect with others. For parents to remember that so that even as we're building the school program of what the day looks like, remote or in person, we're also finding these touchpoints to reinforce the social/emotional ways of being in relationship, skills that our girls in particular really need at this age to be able to navigate not just the year ahead, but the rest of their lives.

Zibby: It's so true, oh, my gosh. I feel like my daughter is mostly concerned about lunch. Lunch was her one time to let her hair down and hang out with her friends. Now that is being predetermined who she's going to have lunch with. Anyway, whatever. I have so much respect for school leaders through this whole process because this cannot be easy, especially dealing with the personality types of all the parents too who have such strong opinions. Hats off to you.

Marisa: Of course, because it's the most important thing we have. It's our kids. Candidly, our teachers feel the same way. It's the students. This is what we do. For that moment, if she's not going to be able to sit next to her friend in class because we're doing assigned seating maybe in order to make sure that we can navigate the whole reality, and yet, here's a perfect lesson in teaching her adaptability. Lean into the change. It's not forever. It's just a moment. She'll have to navigate it. Then also to build in rewards, build in other moments. She can't have lunch with her friends, maybe. Perhaps this is the time to say, on Saturday afternoons we're going to have socially distanced picnics with three of her friends at the park outside or over Skype or FaceTime or whatever the natural technological way is that isn't about school, but is about connecting and is not social media. I think sometimes, a lot of times, our kids rely on social media. That's not the natural way to connect and build relationships. There is something to be said for real-time interactions like we're having right now. It's going to be a strange reality for us all. The more and more we get kids used to that and helping them realize it's just not forever but it's for now and it's what we need to do to keep each other safe and healthy and the community side of that -- one thing we're doing at our school is we're having all our girls pick at least one person or maybe a few that they're doing this for. They're actually going to write down and sign a community compact that says, I am doing this, I'm taking precautions, I'm wearing masks for...their favorite teacher, their grandparent, their mother, their friend who is immunocompromised or otherwise has health concerns. At the end of the day, that's what we need to do to get through this all.

Zibby: That's good advice. That's really nice. I love that, and even what you were saying about sports. We're not even having sports. Anyway, not to keep talking about mine.

Marisa: We're not there yet, but it's a conversation. It's something that all the school heads are talking about on a regular basis, about what it looks like. We've delayed our sports season at the moment. We're figuring out, what does it look like to have safe sports? We're seeing what's happening in Major League Baseball and the NCAA. You think, what does that look like for volleyball for our girls? It's hard. At the end of the day, safety is paramount. They can train. They can go for runs and get outside. It's going to be a tough year in that way. We've actually built in recess for the day for middle school. It's an age where they left recess behind. Now suddenly they need to let the energy out and go socially distance, it's crazy to say, but be outside and run around.

Zibby: Just tell me for two seconds about writing this book. How long did it take to write? When did you decide you were going to write this book? Did you have the whole outline? How did you approach it? When did you do it? All of that good stuff.

Marisa: Zibby, that's going to be, maybe, more crazy. I don't know. This may reveal my crazy. I'm just going to warn you. Two years ago about, a little over two years ago, the idea all came together. I teach a leadership class for the seniors at the school. In all the conversations, I started telling stories, some of the stories that are in the book, about my time in Afghanistan, my time interviewing Al Qaeda in Yemen, my time flying for the military. It's oftentimes lessons of failure that I had in those moments that I was sharing with the girls as they were thinking about, what is life going to be like in the real world? and what skills they need. Then over dinner with a friend, a parent at the school, this idea came together. I had the good fortunate of having a publisher interested right away. I wrote the book. Candidly, there's the deadline that forced me -- I'm a deadline-driven person. For those listening, deadlines help. I had my first child not quite a year ago.

Zibby: Congratulations.

Marisa: There was an impetus of, let's get it done before the other baby, the book baby finished before the baby-baby arrives. I had the good fortunate of having a very supportive partner. Another lesson for all our girls is having a partner who builds in time and allows you to do that. He was the one who would take the baby and say, "Go write your book at the coffee shop for the morning so we can get it done." I had the good fortunate of a supportive community. It was something that I was inspired to do.

Zibby: Wow. I don't think that's too crazy.

Marisa: Okay, good. Then I won't share that there was some writing going on in labor delivery.

Zibby: No! Okay, that might waver into crazy territory.

Marisa: I know, but it was extended. I brought my laptop. I just wanted to get it done. That was the moment of pure crazy. Again, it was the deadline. It was the fear of what happens when the baby arrives. It's also a good lesson of it doesn't have to be perfect to be good enough. I think moms everywhere need to remember that sometimes, particularly now. A B+ will do often. Then I had good time to edit and things like that. Sometimes we just need to let it go and move on.

Zibby: That's good advice. Do you have any other parting advice, having written this book, to aspiring authors and also to parents with young girls? You basically already did that, so let's just say to aspiring authors.

Marisa: This is one that other people have taught me and I'm still working on. It's the sharing of your stories. Despite me just oversharing about labor and delivery, I'm a very personal person who keeps my stories close to my vest. Lessons of failure, it's taken a long time for me to share the things that I write about in the book of my transition out of the navy and how that, for me, was something that felt like a failure that I had to grow to accept over time. These other personal stories both are what audiences want to hear, it's what my students want to hear. I think it's what makes interactions like this, Zibby, like your stories about your own girls and how we're sharing that, it's what makes it most fun. For any writer out there, for me, that was what helped me turn the corner, was when I really got comfortable sharing my personal story and feeding that into the narrative.

[phone ringing]

Zibby: Awesome. Time is up. We got the phone ringing. You're onto your next. [laughs]

Marisa: I know, exactly. Interrupted by reality, which is the way it is these days.

Zibby: Good luck. I don't envy you having to lead your school through this in this time. They are so lucky to have you. If you ever want to come to New York... No, I'm kidding. I love my headmasters.

Marisa: Philly's waiting for you, Zibby.

Zibby: Okay, that's true.

Marisa: It's a crazy time. I look forward to hearing how your kids do. We all got to get through this together. There's that.

Zibby: Yes, all get through it together. Thank you for all the tips that I'm going to implement right away. Thank you.

Marisa: If you need more, there's actually on my website, whatgirlsneed.com, there's resources, reading lists for parents with girls in mind, so other things that we help each other with.

Zibby: Perfect, more for me to do. [laughs] No, I'm kidding.

Marisa: It's the distraction.

Zibby: Totally, I need it. Thank you.

Marisa: Great to talk, Zibby. Thank you so much.

Zibby: Great to talk to you. Buh-bye.

Charlotte McConaghy, MIGRATIONS

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

Charlotte McConaghy: Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely.

Zibby: Your novel, Migrations, oh, my gosh, so good. Lots of questions. First, please tell everybody what Migrations is about. Then also, what inspired you to write this as your debut novel?

Charlotte: Migrations is the story of a woman who decides to follow the migration of the last flock of Arctic terns on their journey from the Artic to the Antarctic. This is probably going to be their last migration because the book is set in the very near future during the peak of the extinction crisis when most of the animals have either gone extinct or they're headed that way quickly. It's the story of Franny's life and all the moments that lead her up to taking on this journey. In terms of inspiration or where it came from, it's a hard one to pin down. It didn't really come in any kind of formed pieces. It came in a lot of different fragments. I knew that I wanted to engage with my concern around the climate crisis, but I didn't really know how to do that. First, I went traveling. I went exploring Ireland, which is where my ancestors were from. I went to Iceland, which is the most beautiful place. I fell in love with the greylag geese. That got me thinking about migratory bird and the incredible journeys that they take and the type of people that study these birds. That's how Fanny, the ornithologist, came into my mind. I was imagining how amazing it would be if we could actually go on this journey with the birds. Then as I got to understand Franny, I started to realize what kind of world I needed to place her in to really be able to tell her story with impact and also safely engage with my own fear around the climate crisis. That's how the environmental side of this book got slowly drawn in. That was to support her.

Zibby: Wow. By the way, you’ve gotten already just such amazing press about this book. It's just fantastic. Everybody's so excited to read it. It's already such a hit. I hope that is making you feel good.

Charlotte: Thank you. It is.

Zibby: I know that a lot of it is focusing on the environmental piece, which of course is a huge part of this novel and differentiates it from so many others. I feel like not enough has been said about the character and the relationship and the mother-daughter drama and her abandonment issues and dealing with her parents and her grandmother and how that affects her relationship later in life and remorse and trauma. There's so much here. The migration, that's part of it, of course. It's almost her own migration through her own life that is so spectacular in this book.

Charlotte: Yeah, that's right. As I said, Franny was the one who came first for me. It is a story of family more than anything. That's the touchstone that I always came back to when I was writing it. She's this real lost soul. She's a wanderer who moves from place to place through her life. She's searching for home and family and a place to belong, but it's probably something that's part of her contradictory nature. It's hard for her to have those things because she does have this instinct to drive, to be moving, and to be leaving. We see that really manifested in her passionate but troubled relationship with her husband. Because she didn't grow up a family, she found one instead in the natural world. That makes her keenly aware of its loss. For me, it is a relationship story more than anything. I wouldn't know what to sink my teeth into if I wasn't writing about relationships.

Zibby: There was a lot of dunking into cold water. I feel like I needed a blanket after I finished this book in part for all the times that poor Franny was underwater and all the rest.

Charlotte: But she loves it. It's fine.

Zibby: She loves it. I know. She's like a fish of some kind of. She can survive when others can't. I'm like, oh, my gosh, she's back in the water. Tell me a little about the sleepwalking and the sleep torturing, essentially. Where did that piece come from? Franny has this darker side where she has these habits that are very not only self-destructive, but externally destructive. Then it comes out on herself a lot as well. Tell me a little bit about how sleepwalking fit into that. What made you choose that as a device to harness her anger in a way?

Charlotte: I suppose the idea was that she's such a migratory person when she's awake that even this kind of drive to always be moving was afflicting her while she slept, that idea that she couldn't control her wandering feet. This became a really difficult burden for her. It also meant that she wasn't just hurting her husband emotionally by going off and leaving him, but she was sort of threatening him physically because she lashes out as she sleeps. She kind of enacts this lifelong trauma that she's had around being abandoned and things that I don't want to give away because they're part of the secrets in plot that she means to reveal to the readers. There's a lot of stuff that she's buried down really deep. I think the sleepwalking and sleep-acting out is a way of that just manifesting, really. I think that that's something that happens potentially when we don't deal with our trauma. Franny's certainly someone that doesn't deal with things. She runs and tries to outrun them. I think there's a point where you can't get away from it any longer.

Zibby: Tell me a little about all these dual timelines that you interweave so seemingly effortlessly and different places and different times and backwards and forwards. The way you just played with time was really amazing. Tell me about the writing of that and how you kept track and structure and everything.

Charlotte: The story's told in, as you said, the two timelines, the front and the back story. One's set in the present day with the ship journey. The other timeline goes back and looks at the big moments of Franny's life. I actually wrote the book as you read it. I didn't separate out the two timelines because it felt important to write it as you read it just to keep a sense of the pacing and the rhythm of it all so that I could be feeling how it would be read. I chose the nonlinear structure for a couple of reasons. The first one's really simple. I just get bored easily when I'm writing. The thought of writing an entire novel from a single first-person point of view in a linear structure just wasn't maybe challenging enough for me, or maybe it was too challenging. It's a more natural space for me to move around a bit in time. I think it allows you to experience those major moments in Franny's life in a really intimate way with her. Instead of getting told about them in dialogue, you can kind of feel them because you're inside them. It's a great way to build tension as well. You can establish a clear transformation between her past and present. She used to be like that. Now she's like this. I wonder what happened to change her in the middle. You can seed in little clues. Then you can build to these really climatic reveals and information. That's ultimately to create catharsis for the reader. The only thing I would say about doing that is you just have to keep them linked by a theme. If they reflect each other and explore the same thing, then you can do as many timelines and as many characters as you want.

Zibby: It takes a lot of skill to pull it off really well. Hats off to you on that.

Charlotte: Thank you.

Zibby: How did you even start writing? Did you always know you wanted to write? Did you always want to write a novel? How did we get to this point where I'm holding your book in my hands?

Charlotte: I actually started writing when I was fourteen. I started books. That was my first novel. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I was a huge, huge reader and lover of stories. When I was fourteen, at the time I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, so that's what I wrote. I was very lucky that that book got picked up a publisher in Australia. That started me on this journey of publishing. I did several series for YA readers. They're fantasy and sci-fi epics. I think I was about twenty-five when I decided I needed to learn more about story craft. I did two degrees in screenwriting at the film school here, which sounds a bit of an odd choice, but it was actually excellent in terms of teaching me about structure and character transformations and theme and all that really juicy story craft stuff. Then after I graduated, that's when I went traveling. I decided I wanted to challenge myself to write something really different, which is how I came to Migrations. It was certainly the hardest thing I've ever done, the most difficult project. There were definitely moments where I thought I'd never finish it and I didn't know what it was about. I think it was the training that you get when you write every day for a decade that prepares you and teaches you the discipline you need to be able to understand that there's ebbs and flows and highs and lows while you write. You've just got to ride it out and really stick with something and finish it. I guess I got that practice because I spent most of my school life writing instead of doing homework or studying for an exam. Maybe I got a head start.

Zibby: It's so funny to think that writing is really like cheating on school when the whole point of school is to educate people who can be brilliant enough to write.

Charlotte: It was a bit like that. I made a decision early on when I got out of school and I didn't want to go straight to uni, which was a bit of surprise for most people. I just wanted to focus on writing. I don't know if that was the right thing.

Zibby: What about in your own life? I know in Migrations, there's a lot of really difficult family stuff. I won't go into it, but there's just a lot of stuff that happened to Franny and her family and all the rest. I was just wondering if any of it came from any personal space, if there had been some sort of trauma in your life or some mental illness even, perhaps, in your family. I'm being very personal. You can totally ignore this question. I was just wondering if there was something on a personal level that inspired any of this.

Charlotte: That's a really interesting question. I guess it's the idea of how much of me is in Franny. Look, I've been very fortunate in my life that I haven't gone through the same losses and griefs that she has. She had this really difficult life. My life's been great, really. [laughs] I've had a really loving family. There were difficulties. My parents split up when I was young. I had a single mom. She moved around a lot. We worked out by the time I was twenty-one I'd lived in twenty-one different houses. That was by no means traumatic at all. It was just a different experience. I suppose that it made me a little unsure about where I belonged and where my home is. I guess that's one of the reasons that that infused Franny's character. She's this wandering searcher. She's made up of a lot of things that I wish I was more of and a lot of things that I'm really glad that I'm not. A lot of her damage is, instead of it being a way for me to explore my own personal trauma, it's more of a way to explore a larger grief about what's happening to the planet. That sounds strange. I had this real concern and fear for the wildness that we're losing and a longing to have wildness in my life. I didn't quite know how to explore that. I brought it to bear in the internal pain of a person and hoped that that would be how we could access that feeling to make it more intimate and personal, if that makes sense.

Zibby: It does. It totally makes sense. I can see that reflected in the story. You had one line where you said, "The rhythm of the seas' tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed." I feel like that set the tone for the whole thing. You can see the sea going in and out, and in and out, and yet all of the things around it in fast-forward shapeshifting quickly, quickly, and not in good places. I know this is such a passion of yours. How do you approach this aside from obviously raising so much awareness with this book, for instance? Not how do you sleep at night, but what do you do to change it? What can we do to change it? What's your strategy and plan? What do you think in terms of activism or education or all the rest?

Charlotte: Education comes first, obviously, and starting the conversation. We want people to be aware of what's happening. That's one reason I wanted to write about this just to try and give voice to some of what's happening and my own concerns around it. In terms of the way I live, I'll try to do as many small things as I can because they all add up. If we're all doing the small things, they add up to major change. When I say small things, I am talking about, I don't eat meat. I know that’s not something that everyone will be able to do. If you can reduce your meat eating, that's amazing. Things like composting, worm farming, switch your energy to renewable energy providers. Ride your bike instead of driving your car, if you can, or walk. Lots of those smaller things, think about the products that you're buying and whether you can recycle them. Try to reduce the waste so things aren't just going into landfill. The biggest thing that we can actually do is contact our politicians because the change has to come from above, unfortunately. We can do a lot of smaller things. They do work. But we really, really need to change the systems that are in place because they're not supporting the planet. They're actually doing incredible damage.

Zibby: My daughter, she's thirteen, but from the time she was born she's been obsessed with polar bears.

Charlotte: Aw.

Zibby: I know. Who knew that over her, even, lifetime that the risk to polar bears would've escalated as much as it is? She's become this big advocate, preventing climate change and all of this stuff. I'm intimately aware. It's funny to have it brought to forefront by a child instead of necessarily by me. I do feel that this next generation is so aware already, not that I wasn't growing up. There was Greenpeace and all this stuff. It's not like I wasn't aware, but I think there's a newfound dedication to preventing their globe from losing all these species and everything.

Charlotte: It's wonderful to hear that your daughter is really aware of all this stuff. We are in good hands with them, with the next generation, but that doesn't mean that we can rest on our laurels. We've got to start slowing this down now because by the time it gets to them it might be too late.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, do not wait for my daughter. [laughs] Certainly, do not wait for her, the little impact she -- I'm kidding. The fate of our country certainly cannot rest on her. That's for sure.

Charlotte: You never know. She might wind up being the first female president.

Zibby: She might. You know, you never know. You never know. So tell me what you're working on next. I feel like you sold another book. Am I right about that?

Charlotte: You are right. The next book's coming out this time next year. I've spent the last year and a half writing and editing it. It's called Creatures, All. It's the story of a wolf biologist who is charged with reintroducing wolves into a forest in the Scottish Highlands in order to rewild the ecosystem. It's a love story and a mystery. Ultimately, it's a story of the healing power of nature, which is recurring theme for me apparently.

Zibby: I see that. It's good you know. Sometimes I talk to authors who have written ten books and they're like, it turns out it's all about my dad. [laughs] At least with nature, it's pretty clear-cut.

Charlotte: It makes sense that people return to the same themes, the ideas that they love or that fascinate them, or maybe they're trying to work through some terrible issue of themselves.

Zibby: Yep, that's so true. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Charlotte: Firstly, I would say -- this is a cliché, but it's really true. Write from your heart. Write about something that you really, really care about, something that matters to you because you have to sustain interest in this thing for a long time. You've got to sustain your passion. It's so easy to just start something on a whim and realize halfway through that, actually, you've lost interest or you don't care about it anymore. That's probably the main reason that so many start and don't finish books. Chose something that matters to you. Chose something that isn't necessarily about what the market wants or what you think people will enjoy because it's much more important to write about what you enjoy. Write the book that you want to read. That comes through to readers. They can really feel that passion. That would definitely be my main piece of advice. Practice heaps. Build the skill. You don't have to necessarily write every day, but you do have to write a lot. Otherwise, you're not practicing a skill. It's a skill like any other. Just be determined. Don't give up. Don't take no for an answer. There's a time for everything. If you're having trouble with one book, then maybe it's time to start a new one. I could go on all day about this stuff, but they would be the main points.

Zibby: I think another thing you should add is always end your chapters with a bang. I feel like your chapter endings were always, they were so good that you had to keep going. I just feel like that's always really important in moving things along.

Charlotte: Totally. Also, especially if you're moving timelines because sometimes people hate that. It really annoys them. If you can leave them on a note of wanting more, then they're really happy to come back to that timeline or that scene. That's a really good point.

Zibby: I'm just adding tips for you there. [laughs]

Charlotte: Please do.

Zibby: Charlotte, thank you so much. Thank you for your book and for all of your advice and for raising awareness for such an important issue for everyone on the planet and just for taking the time to talk to me today. Thank you.

Charlotte: Thank you so much, Zibby. It was lovely to chat. I really appreciate you having me on.

Zibby: My pleasure. Have a great day.

Charlotte: Thank you. You too.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Raven Leilani, LUSTER

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

Raven Leilani: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: This is such a pleasure. First of all, your book, Luster, has been on every single list of good books. You must be over the moon. It's gotten so much attention and success and everything. What has this been like for you?

Raven: It's been really, really surreal. Truly, when we acquired the book, I think the main concern in the publishing industry at the moment, a year ago in the before time, was how do you publish a book during what is sure to be a very insane election year? Then we had the year we had. There's so many things that happened that almost make it feel inappropriate in a way to be talking about my book. I feel really heartened that people have rallied around books and that people are connecting with my book. That's really the dream, is that you put the book out there and people care about it. I used to work in publishing. I've also seen the other side of it. My expectations were very managed. I had an idea of how this goes. It's really just surpassed my expectations.

Zibby: It's amazing. For people who don't know what Luster is about, can you give a little synopsis about the plot? Then what inspired you to write this book and come up with the story?

Raven: In a nutshell, Luster is about a young black woman who is trying to lay claim to the right to make art. It's also about her relationship with a man who has an open marriage, but more so the relationship that she develops with his wife and child. That's the general plot. In writing this, I'll say when I start any project, I don't really know what it's going to be and what it is or even what I mean by it until I'm maybe halfway through. When I got to the page, the thing that was really in me was I wanted to depict a black woman who is full of yearning and desire and was seeking connection in a way that feels human. I wanted to make room for her to stumble, to make mistakes, but also for her to express that earnest id part. [laughs] I wanted to write about art. That was sort of the second half and more just because it's the thing that always finds its way into my work. Artmaking but also the role of failure in artmaking is really important to me because I think that is eighty percent of the endeavor. I wanted to talk bluntly about that.

Zibby: Do you perceive all different forms of creativity as art regardless of the medium?

Raven: Yes, a hundred percent. I think that no matter what you're making, if you're making it, you're making something from nothing, there are hurdles that you have to jump in order to be able to realize that vision. It's a hard and occasionally demoralizing state to be in, when you have a thing that you want to communicate and you cannot effectively articulate it or create it. I wanted to write about how you potentially move from that state into one that feels generative. For me, being able to write about it in a way that felt honest I hoped would feel liberating. I know that while I was writing this, I was in my MFA. I was in school. I was working full time. That is generally the framework around how I wrote anything. Really, anything I've ever written has been those off hours after my nine to five. My journey to even writing this book, it was really jagged. It wasn't straightforward progress. I felt it was important to talk about the idea of it, that sometimes there are hurdles. Sometimes there are detours. That's okay.

Zibby: Take me back to the very beginning of you to find out how we got. Where were you born? When did you start to like writing? When did you know you were a writer? Just take me along your jagged path that you just referred to.

Raven: It's funny. I've been writing technically for a while. The event of my childhood was when my mom and I would go to Waldenbooks. We'd get one new sketchbook and one new journal. I actually currently have an entire wooden chest of all the journals I kept. I was constantly writing. I grew up Seventh Day Adventist. Part of that is keeping the Sabbath. My means of rebellion was writing privately, these little private stories. It really wasn't until pretty recently where I really wanted to make a real go of it. I was living in DC. I'd been there for four or five years working and paying my student loans and just trying to work. Then it was 2016, 2017 and I decided to come back to New York to pursue my MFA. I was really looking for a community of writers. With an MFA, you never know. You don't know what that will actually yield ultimately. I knew I needed an environment where there was a certain seriousness and rigor around the work. You can find that in a number of different ways. That was the moment where I was like, I'm really, really going to try and do this thing. It was four years ago. I was like, I feel really serious about this. I have to at least try it and go after it. I will say in the years before that, I was really just doing, like I mentioned, I was writing after work and writing short stories and submitting them everywhere, like hundreds of places. I mean, not hundreds of stories. I kept an Excel document with all the rejections from the literary magazines. Those were the first steps I took to try and be serious about it. It's honestly been a journey. Most of the work has been work that is private and so almost invisible. Right now, I'll say it feels like a dream to have a visible thing in the world.

Zibby: It's so amazing. By the way, just little tip as an aside, I also kept a whole cabinet of all my journals from the diaries I kept growing up. I have different formats and whatever was trendy at that time, the different cars. I have piles and piles. Recently, my thirteen-year-old stumbled upon them. Keep them locked up until you're ready to have all these questions of whatever it is there. [laughs]

Raven: That's so funny you say that because when I was getting all of that stuff out of storage -- it was my parent's storage. I was taking it home with me. My boyfriend was with me. He happened to pick up one of the journals. I was like, no, you cannot see that. [laughs]

Zibby: Exactly. Some were pretty chaste, like, I had my first slow dance today, the green marker. All the yearbooks with all the messages in them, I'm like, let's just keep all these yearbooks [indiscernible/laughter]. Oh, my gosh. You never know where these things are going to end up. Meanwhile, Luster is so vivid and almost with this brazen sexuality. There is no holds barred. In fact, my niece was listening to us and I was like, this is not the podcast for her to be sitting on. [laughter] I don't know how this is going to go. Tell me about not only writing about all the sexual feelings and experiences and everything from not having the right batteries for the vibrator to all the fantasies before and getting ready for the -- why is he not having sex with me? Just so much stuff, how do you feel now that that's totally out there? How do you feel about that?

Raven: I will say I didn't actually anticipate the intensity of the response to those things in the book because I feel like I just wrote it the only way I could, which was in a way that made room for that, the parts of bodily drama, the parts of sex that are concrete and ugly in a way. It's important to talk about not being able to find the right batteries for the vibrator. This is a character who feels deeply and cares deeply and is really seeking that out in the world and making mistakes in service of that. It's actually kind of tricky to talk about because there's so much about Edie that's sublimated. If we weren’t privy to her interior, to her candid thoughts, she would be a never different character if we only saw that external behavior. It's not that she is always earnest in that she's expressing herself, but her core is earnest in that she is full of yearning and full of desire and unabashed in a way that she tries to satisfy those carnal real human needs.

When writing the sex, that too, it felt like an extension of her seeking. Writing when she's not having sex and then she's dying to be touched, I didn't want to write a character who was actually aloof. She makes jokes about wanting to be that and wanting to curate an image that looks like that. You mentioned fantasy, what it looks like when you come up against the fantasy and you have to reconcile it with the flesh as she does with Eric. The role that fantasy has in reinvigorating that connection between them, the way it's obliterated when they get to know each other is really fun to play with. I think the realities of the body and of however many bodies in this space revealing themselves to each other is really fun real estate to play with. It was important for me to make room for the way to be silly and strange and contradictory and to be really direct about especially the drama inherent of the female body. There's so much that's always going on that I think we are conditioned not to talk about and also to pretty up. I wanted you to know what was happening with her bowels. I wanted that backstage work to be forward.

Zibby: What you just said a minute ago about how from looking at someone on the outside, looking at Edie on the outside, you wouldn't know all the things going on on the inside, that's the main gift of writing. You finally get to pull the curtain back on a person or a character and figure out what the internal monologue is. Then you figure out all the things that you can potentially share with somebody, so many things that you wouldn't know because we don't talk about. Maybe everybody's looking for batteries, as an example, I'm just saying. I think that's one of the greatest parts about being able to share the interior life of a character.

Raven: One hundred percent. Whenever the question of -- I don't know if people ask it anymore, so maybe I'm resurrecting an old argument or question. The idea of the death of the novel, the reason why it will never die is because the way you can represent consciousness on the page. I don't think there is another medium that can depict it in that way.

Zibby: I totally agree, except perhaps memoir.

Raven: Right, which is writing as a medium.

Zibby: Writing as a medium is unparalleled access. Without it, I feel like we would lose so much connection with people. That's what people are searching for every time they open a book, truly, is connection, no matter what form that may take even if it's escapist or they want to forget their life own life. Now I'm sounding ridiculous.

Raven: No, that isn't ridiculous. That is why I open a book, is because I want to be absorbed in the reality of someone either like me or totally unlike me. It's like writing. Reading, it's an act of discovery. This is my taste where I love feeling like I'm looking at a thing that is authentic in the way that it is not studied. I love the feeling of being a voyeur, of looking in on a private moment. I think the novel does that so well.

Zibby: You're absolutely right. It's not like people are going to sit down and tell you about it. Somehow, it's okay to write about it. Then we can read about it. Somehow, that's all socially acceptable. Let's just go with it.

Raven: Totally. Getting on a stage and performing this with the content of this book, I'm also a severely introverted person, so this is the only way I could have ever written a thing like this, is written it on the page and then released it into the world.

Zibby: I was so shy as a kid. I went a whole summer on a summer program not even opening my mouth and just thinking about language so much. How can some people talk when I'm finding it so impossible to even form a sentence? and just being such an observer all the time. Yet as soon as I would pick up a pencil or whatever, it's like, whoosh! [laughs]

Raven: Yes. I feel that so hard.

Zibby: Then it's almost like people can't know you until you have that release onto the page because it's only a fraction of yourself that you present to the world.

Raven: To that, I will say that it's funny, I feel like I've had some interactions since releasing the book where people who know me personally will say something like, "It is so strange interacting with you now that I know that that was inside you." [laughs] Writing, that medium, is the best way I know how to express, it's not autobiography, but how to express myself. It is the only way I know how to say precisely what I mean. In real time, I feel like I never do.

Zibby: That's why sometimes when I talk to people and they're like, "How can you be so open? How do you write all that stuff? I could never," I'm like, the harder part is going through the rest of life without being able to say it out loud. The easiest part is that it can come out this way. I guess there's always, do you feel comfortable sharing it? If I couldn't do that, I don't know how I would even sort through what I was thinking and feeling. Anyway, I digressed from your amazing novel a little bit. I also wanted to talk about the way you talk about race in the book because you did such a beautiful job. I was sort of disappointed with myself because I always like to find quotes that maybe people don't talk about that much. When I was reading your book in the Kindle, I was like, this is a great quote. It's like, eighty-one people have also highlighted this. I was like, oh, for god's sakes. I'll read it anyway because I still thought it was interesting. This is the passage where Edie is comparing herself to somebody, another up-and-coming black woman in her office and talking about the competition and that she feels she's about to be passed over and also their relationship between each other. You said, "And then I miscalculated. Too much anger shared too soon. Too much, can you believe these white people? Too much F the police. We both graduated from the school of twice as good for half as much, but I'm sure she still finds this an acceptable price of admission. She still rearranges herself waiting to be chosen, and she will be because it is an art to be black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things, and she is embarrassed that I am not." Tell me about this popular passage.

Raven: Writing those scenes, I wanted to be really careful because I didn't want to make any grand statements around a correct way to be black. I wanted to write two professional black women who have very different tactics to pretty much the same needs, which is survival. They're both, in their own way, trying to survive in an environment that does not allow them any real margin for error. Aria's response to this is to adhere to this impossible standard, to flatten herself to make herself more palatable. Edie's response is refusal in a way. The fact that they cannot find kinship is each other is perhaps -- they may both be actually complicit in that, but more to blame is the environment that has pit them against each other. It was interesting to write these two black women who are both hungry, who are both trying to advance, and who can see that in each other, who in a, perhaps, different context would be able to seek [indiscernible] in each other but are unable to, which I think is really real but also devastating in a way that they are both really truly in need of a friend and of kinship. Because of their environment and because of the demands that are foisted upon them in how they might survive in this environment, it makes it almost impossible. Those were real sad sections to write even though Edie within her mind is deeply judgmental of Aria, and also envious. Those were scenes where I really just wanted to talk about some of the ways that that hunger can manifest and the way a lot of black women are meant to rise to the occasion in a way that flattens them.

Zibby: Interesting. There's been so much talk in the news and everywhere right now, it's so of the moment, talking about black women in publishing or black people in general in publishing and the shift that's occurring and how it has been and how we hope it will be. What has your in real life experience been, not in your character's life, being in this industry? Do you think that it's ripe for change?

Raven: Yeah, I think that there's a real reckoning happening. Just a few months ago, I feel like a lot of black people working within this industry were very vocal about not just the uppercase versions of marginalization that they experience in this industry, but the very small demoralizing almost mundane moments. There's a lot of work to be done in terms of what kind of stories we prioritize, who we allow to tell them, and who we invest in. I do think that, I hope, that that reckoning will usher in a different way of going about inclusion. I feel like those words like inclusion, diversity, in practice have become kind of like these sexy, almost -- I don't know how to articulate it. These things that actually mean so much and that make us better and make our art better, I think it cannot be a surface-level change. It has to happen in a real fundamental way before we make any progress.

Zibby: So what is coming next for you, Raven? Are you working on a new book? What's the plan?

Raven: I'm really excited to start working on my second book. I'm not really in the work of that yet. I have a handful of books still in me that I would love to be real whenever I have a moment. Currently, I'm really taken up with the task of ushering this book into the world. It is in the world, but that's mostly what I'm doing right now.

Zibby: That's okay. [laughs]

Raven: That too is kind of a dream, that that could be my work. At some point when this dies down a bit, I'll be able to get back to work, get back to the page.

Zibby: Enjoy it. Soak it all up. It's amazing. Last question, do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Raven: One hundred percent. A common concern and question that I think that I was trying to mull over and also that I know a lot of writers who are trying to get their work out there are thinking about it, which is when can I call myself a writer? I think you call yourself a writer because you're doing the work, because you're actively working on your craft. It is really wonderful to receive affirmation and validation and acceptance from a literary journal [indiscernible]. I do think that, for me at least, those moments, they were kind of rare. Much more of the process was doing that private work and trying to figure out what worked and what would stick. I feel like the private work is meaningful work. As long as you are putting in the work, then you are a writer. As long as you're working on that craft, you are a writer. That's what I would say.

Zibby: That's awesome. Thank you so much. Sorry for all my distractions. Thank you for rolling with it. I appreciate it.

Raven: No, not at all.

Zibby: Thanks for sharing everything. I'm going to think of you next time I'm doing a mental purge on the page. You're out there doing the same thing wherever you are and sharing that connection. Thank you so much for coming on.

Raven: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Raven: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.