Zibby Books

Zibby interviews psychology professor Dr. Tovah Klein about her accessible, wise, and compassionate new guide, RAISING RESILIENCE: How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty. Dr. Klein explains how the pandemic reignited a desire to help parents navigate uncertainty, whether daily stressors or large-scale crises. She shares practical strategies from her book, from self-talk for stressed parents to sharing difficult truths in age-appropriate ways. Resilience, she notes, is built over time through everyday experiences and the security provided by loving relationships. The conversation highlights how parenting is not about perfection but about adapting, connecting, and continuously learning.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Dr. Klein. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss raising resilience, how to help our children thrive in times of uncertainty. Thank you. 

Tovah: Thank you. 

Zibby: Okay, tell everybody about the book and how the pandemic really set off your curiosity and how you delved into material to get this book out. 

Tovah: Yeah, so it's something I had been thinking about for a long time to the point that I had written a proposal for a book on parenting during uncertainty because it became clear to me over many years of work that what I was doing all the time was helping parents face uncertainty.

Whether that was daily uncertainty, like the teacher doesn't show up at school or what side of the bed is my child going to wake up on, or big uncertainty, like we've just been flooded and we've got to get out or, you know, we're moving and what's it going to be like in the new place. So, and then big disasters.

And so I had already been conceptualizing this idea that when we support parents, What I'm doing in my everyday work or following disasters or trauma is helping parents navigate that so that they could be steady for their children. And I was kind of mulling it over and I'd never finished sort of this idea and then the pandemic hit.

And I thought very quickly, oh, this seems very uncertain. I don't think any of us know what's ahead. And I was running a program for children and suddenly we closed. And so I thought, well, I really need to get back to that idea of uncertainty and everything I know from beyond the continuum, from the daily uncertainties to the big uncertainties, to trauma and disaster, it's a continuum.

How do we support parents and really how do we support children so they can grow and thrive and succeed? Despite of or in facing whatever life is going to give them, because it's going to give them a lot of things, good, bad, and otherwise. 

Zibby: One of the most sort of reassuring to me, at least things that I got out of the book was that no matter how crazy the world gets or whatever's going on with you, your family or the world in general, the loving connection between a parent and a child is so protective that it can offset all of that sort of risk.

Tell me more about that. 

Tovah: Yeah. So you know that parent child relationship, which I feel like we don't even talk about enough in the general we do in research and in science, this what we call relationship, it's two people. It's a loving caregiver. It's usually a parent, but it could be a grandparent. It could be another caregiver.

Every child needs at least one to protect them from stress. from toxic stress, if that's in your life, and from big stress. What we call trauma because what the parent does in relation to the child is provide literally a protective layer, not to hide them from the bad things going on, but to interpret it to say, this is what it is.

Here's how we got to safety or. What can I do for myself to stay grounded through this tense time, whether that's, you know, the transition from summer to school, which is very unsettling for parents and children, um, to a parent is sick, maybe not deathly sick, but sick. And is in the hospital, you know, how do I steady myself so I can go back to my child and say, this is scary, but it's going to be okay.

That protective buffer we know from years of science is actually what mitigates the stress. So what does that mean in my book? There's a lot of reflecting on the parent's self. Who am I? What do I bring to being this parent? What do I bring to this relationship? Because the better we know ourselves, the more grounded we are in the moment Even if it's hard.

Even if it's hard. 

Zibby: And I like that you had some specific things, even during tantrums and what parents can do to sort of talk to themselves. Let me see if I did this, but even things like saying, okay, it's not going to be this way forever. Or like, yeah, difficult moment, but then it's going to pass. Oh, I thought I had dog eared it, but now I can't find a way to I wanted all those quotes, but I will.

Tovah: Yeah. I'm the adult here. I have to be the adult. 

Zibby: Maybe I'll just say. You have a section where you reassure parents by saying, like, this is the self talk you should be doing, like, here are things you could say while things feel out of control, tantrum, back to school chaos, whatever. So what are some of those things?

I know it was like, this, almost like a, this too shall pass. 

Tovah: Yes, that's exactly what it is because in those moments, those heated moments, whether it's a three year old, whether it's a 14 year old, like zinging something at you that you're like, holy smokes, did my child just say this to me? And you want to like attack back.

What we need to do is say to ourselves, some version of I'm the adult here, and this is just a moment. This too shall pass. So when parents come to me across the ages, across time with something they're really caught up in and it can be really challenging and it can really hurt and parents can take it very personally.

Some of it is depersonalizing it and saying, wait, this is a child. Wait, I forgot. She's eight years old. That's a child. This is a two year old. They're not out to get me. So one of my favorite mantras when my children were young was just to get into my head, he's not out to get me. And then I would sort of laugh to myself, feel like, okay, I'm going to exhale.

My feet would be planted and I'd be like, you're upset. I've got this gave him a moment to have that tantrum, and I would be comment on what your child feels in spades. As we say, they feel our attention. They feel are calming down, and it doesn't mean that you're gonna go through life relaxed all the time.

It doesn't work that way. But it says Mommy or Daddy have their feet planted. They're okay. And they're going to help me. And that's what children need. They read us all the time. They feel us. They soak us in. 

Zibby: Um, I mean, so much of, I mean, this sounds obvious, so much of the parenting is your own relationship and what triggers you and all of that.

And now I look back to some of the times when my kids were really young and I could feel like almost like the blood rushing to my face. It was like so out of control. And even now with like tweens and teens, there are moments where. Like there's this, there's this fear that like they're going to diverge and never come back.

So they'll be rude. And then a few minutes later or something, and then they're just like, they're nice, wonderful, warm selves. And I was like, oh, phew, they came back as if like disappear. 

Tovah: Yeah. We tend to split off when something good is happening. It's all good. When something less good or negative is happening, it's all bad.

Rather than saying sometimes I'm nasty or miserable at home. I say that at home because most children, you get these great reports at school. I remember going to one of my kids, but we were having like a rough go at home. I went to high school and the principal came over to pull me aside to tell me what a great student in person, more importantly, person he was.

And I thought to myself. I need to let him struggle at home and show his true self at home. It's just like when he was a toddler, right? They've got to get the, like all that angst out and it's because they trust us, right? If you really trust your parents, you can be your good self and your rotten self at home.

And then, you know, you've got Steady secure base, you know, we always talk about secure base with younger children what people forget is that secure base although you're pulling more and more into the background as children get older. You're still there. They still check in they still need to know that they're loved even after a bad day a bad, you know Calculus test or a really rotten moment between you and them.

They still need to know like we've got this relationship and we can come back together. There's some people call it repair. Sometimes it's called reconnection. You know, we study this in the stress literature, those kind of breaks in a moment of time in a good, loving relationship, have the room to come back together, and you can see that actually strengthening the relationship.

Zibby: So for parents, I know you outlined five different buckets of things that we should know for parents who are thinking, okay, that's all well and good. Obviously I love my kids, but I still don't feel like my kid is that resilient. Like what can they do or what is, what are some of the most important things that maybe they hadn't thought of that they can actually sort of do when raising resilient kids?

Tovah: Yeah, so, you know, we think of resilience as like a thing, like a one dose. thing. And in fact, when my publishing editors were like, you know, let's call this raising resilience. I was like, Oh, I don't think so. That's a buzzword, but they were like, everything you're writing has to do with resilience. So I had to rethink it a bit and say, yeah, you're right.

Because what resilience is about is about this relationship and something that's being built every day. Yes, it shows itself during challenging moments or during hard, devastating moments, but it's being built all the time. So the first thing I'd say to parents is you've got to get to know yourself, and that's hard.

And I have lots of questions in the book, reflective questions, right, for that. Take a step back and exhale a little bit before you intervene. Or tell your child what to do in a heated moment is one, give children more of a chance to tell you what's going on or be upset. The second is children really need a narrative.

This is what parents do. We tell our child what's going on. So often parents think when bad things happen again, small bad or big bad, we should avoid it or we should cover it up. I don't want my eight year old to know that there's a war going on. You know, I don't want my teenager to know these things.

Well, they do know either because they're in social media or they're in the world or they're hearing it from their friends or they're feeling it in the house, right? Secrets are not good. So it's a question of what does my child know and how can I frame this to let them know? Yeah, something bad happened.

I have this. example in there of my own son in middle school. And, you know, he says, mom, did something bad happen when there had been an attack in our city? And I said, yeah, what do you know? And he was like, no, tell me this. And I said, yes, something bad happened. He said, was anybody hurt? And I said, yes. And people were hurt, you know, but they caught the person.

No, it's going to get hurt and we're safe here. He was going trick or treating. And then he ran out the door with a smile on his face. And I think the important thing is that when he came home and they went through the candy and you know, Halloween was done, he was like, okay, now tell me what really happened.

Like he was ready for the details then. And I had to think, how do I tell an 11 year old in a way that's real and true and helps them feel safe? And that's always our job. What's the narrative? How do I fill in the pieces of information that they have? Because that's what helps them feel safe and face the world.

It's not hiding it from them, right? We all have a story. We all grew up in something. Some people who grew up in war, some people grow up in a pandemic. Some people grew up 9 11 and post 9 11, like whatever it is. That's your story. And the question is, can you understand it so that it doesn't continue to frighten you and it has a place in your life and you gain strength from it.

Zibby: Interesting. So you are like, for those who don't know, like the guru of, Of kids, like everyone, I mean, it's no surprise that Amy Schumer wrote the introduction and was like, I need you, like, you are, you are my guide. It's not just my kid. I'm like, totally not surprised. Why do you think this is? And don't be humble here.

Like, I obviously you have the knowledge, but many, many people, what, what do you think it is? And. You know, I'm sure you've reflected on it a little. 

Tovah: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that question. Yeah. I reflect a lot. It's why I wrote a book that says you really got to reflect on yourself. 

Zibby: Right. Right. Right. 

Tovah: You know, I I'm 30 years into a career that I still love.

I love children. I love working with parents. I'm going to take a guess that it's two things. One is I truly love what I do, right? There's a lot of joy, even in really tough moments with parents, with children. And I think that comes from very connected to the individual in front of me. And I think that genuineness comes through.

Then the other thing is, and dads often say this, they say, I mean, you don't preach. And I'm like, what do you mean? I don't preach. You don't just tell us what to do. And I'm like, I can't tell somebody what to do. There's so many factors in this. I can figure out with you what's going on, can figure As best we can, we're not always right, but as best we can, and I can help figure out ways to shift what you're doing so that we're better supporting your child.

But no, there's no such thing as a how to that works for every parent, every child. And if anything, it makes us feel terrible. Like I remember picking up parenting books. Which there weren't as many when my first child was born. He's an adult now and he wasn't sleeping and I was so sleep deprived and trying to get through a day and really feeling like I was losing my mind and picking up these books that were very blaming.

You know, if your child's not sleeping by six months, you're doing something wrong, you know, parent. And I thought I never want to blame a parent like that because we're all doing our best, even if our best is not good enough. And so I'll give you an example. A few years ago, I run a center for young children and parents, and There was a child when the mom would come in to pick him up.

It was usually the mom would come to pick him up. We do like a circle time. The teachers do this beautiful circle time. And he would run and sit on somebody else's lap and she would just sit and smile. So I chatted with her about it because I could see he really wanted her. He was like three years old.

So I said to her, listen, when you go in, I want you to just scoop him up. And she said, I think he's happier with other people. And I said, no, I know it seems that way. So scoop him up, put him on your lap and let's just see what happens. He melted. And from then on, she would go and scoop him up, sit him on her lap.

You know what happened? She tweaked it a little bit and it wasn't so much. I didn't say you're doing anything wrong. I just said, I think he needs something different. And she said at home, he became like a different child, cuddly wanting her. They were in a little standoff. He didn't know how to signal to her.

I need you. She took it as he likes other people more. We all have our moments of that. It's nothing wrong with us, but hopefully you have a support who goes, I think his message is different to you. And teenagers are the same way. We take them very personally. You know, we, we go like, Oh, she hates me. Well, maybe for 30 seconds or, you know, an hour, but they need us.

And so I think it's that, you know, both a warmth, but also my willingness to get in there and say, I know you're doing your best, even if it's not great right now. And I know your child needs you no matter what. And then the other thing is, I have a lot of humor that comes out in these moments because being a parent is humbling and funny if it's done in a respectful way.

And so I think that comes through as well. I hope it comes through. And I love people. I really do. 

Zibby: Yeah. Well, being able to say, my child is not out to get me. I mean, that's right. 

Tovah: I have one child, and if he's listening, he knows who he is, that I had to use that over and over, like, he's not out to get me, he's not out to get me.

And then I would laugh in my head, go back to this, whatever age child, and be like, I'm here. You know, you have to do that. You have to be humble or it doesn't work.

Zibby: I feel like that's such a good example you gave because we want to give our kids space, but then like, I think that's one of the trickiest things to know.

And obviously it's, you know, for each parent it's different, but just, you know, I don't want to be a hovering parent, but I don't want to be too just, you know, I mean, it's But it's just remembering that everyone, like, I need a hug sometime. Right. We all need hugs. 

Tovah: Yeah. Yeah. It's nuance. It's very much nuance.

And if it's, I mean, I tell this to parents all the time. I speak to professionals about this, what we know, whether it's from science, from years of experience, the two together is really what my book is. It's yes. It's science. Yes. It's my own studies, but it's also equally important years of experience is that you're not going to get it always right and you shouldn't. I mean, I talk in the book about DW Winnicott. I had the pleasure of going back and rereading him. It's really not about perfection for reasons that we don't even think about, which is let's just say you could be perfect, which is impossible.

It, Winnicott wrote about infants. If that was the infant's model, they would go out in the world as they grew up and completely fall flat on their face. Because nothing's perfect in the world. The world's just the opposite. It's mishap, mishap, mistakes, trial and tribulation. If it's in a loving, basically loving relationship, then children are very forgiving, thankfully for all of us.

They're very forgiving. If it's a harsh, disconnected relationship all the time, that's a different story. But if you can say to yourself, I'm probably good enough, and I'm working to be a little bit better each day, and there's love, you're okay, but we need a lot of support as parents, friendship, if you have a partner who supports you, you need to turn to your community in some way, because none of us can do it alone, it's why parent groups are so successful, often when I run those, you know, parents become friends, or they meet other people, but sometimes they say to me, Wow, I thought I was really struggling, but actually somebody's struggling far more than me.

So that context can help. I'm not alone. This is how it works. We all need that. We need to be humbled. 

Zibby: What if there's someone listening who's like, Oh, shoot, I haven't been doing things right. Or, you know, is it too late ever? 

Tovah: You know, this is what I tell my college students. I teach Barnard and Columbia college students, which is another reason I'm always energetic.

I've got like this whole continuum of people up through teen late teenagers, young adults is that it's never too late, or I wouldn't have gone into psychology. There was like a, well, you're done, you know, 15, you're finished. There would be no hope in the world. Let's face it. So there's always room to say, how do I shift what I'm doing or how do I go back to my child?

Let's say they're 12. And you say, you know, I've been really hard on you. And even if in your head, you're thinking I've been hard on you my whole life, because we tend to do that with our first borns. We're a little harder on them, little higher expectations. You go back to your child and you say, you know, I've been really hard on you.

And I've been thinking about it's really not. It's not fair. It's not right. And so I'm going to give you a little more room to try these things out, or whatever it is, or you just shift what you're doing. I'm going to be less hard. I'm going to move back a little bit. I'm going to, you know, be a little more distant, not in an unloving way, but in a way that allows my child to try things and come to me when they need me.

There's always room to shift practice, but there's always room to repair. Sometimes it's much harder for people who are listening, who have a lot of wounds that That they may have caused their child inadvertently. None of us go out and plan to hurt our children ever. I worked with parents who were abusers early, early in my career.

And I was like, wow, for the most part, most parents don't want to be doing this. That was an eye opener to me. So that's why there's support programs. That's why there's what we call interventions. You know, you don't give up on somebody cause they're addicted to drugs. You say, is there a way that I can help this person?

You know, whether that's your spouse or your child. So. Relationships can repair even when it's really hard. And sometimes that means therapy or intensive therapy. Sometimes that means hospitalization in extremes, but it doesn't mean you can't change. And I want to say to every parent listening, I promise you, Children are forgiving, but we have to shift ourselves first because it has to be genuine.

Zibby: I love that. Okay, three quick tips for parents with back to school stress of their own, with the craziness of life, with how busy everything is, new routines for kids, new teachers, new this, everything up in the air. What are some, what are three things parents can do aside from make sure to listen to the kids?

Take care of yourself and is there anything or any fun game or just like quick tip sheet. 

Tovah: Yeah, quick tip. I think the first one is exhale, right? Well, we race, race, race through something. We are so aroused and so freaked out that our children suck that in. So it really is about self first. It's gonna always be about self first.

Two is if you're transitioning, let's say you went on vacation those last two weeks and now you're coming home. We tend to split it off, right? Vacation was so fun. Oh, now we're back to home. Remind your Children. This was really fun. We're going to also do some fun things at home, even though we got to go back to school.

So maybe you have like a backwards dinner, you know, the week before school, or you make some great dessert. I'm always food oriented was probably isn't great. You know, you plan a fun Saturday activity to remind children that We're still connected and having fun at home because we tend to split that off.

And then I would say the, the third, if you want three tips is when you go back to those routines because children of every age, and by the way, adults thrive on routine, meaning I know what comes next. So when you go back to those routines, you can do sort of a slide in. You don't have to show up at home after this wonderful vacation, say, okay, we're back to 8pm bedtime.

Even if you cut it close and school is starting in a day or two, you can still say, yeah, we're back. We're going to go to bed a little later these three days. And by next week, we'll be on more of a schedule. So be lighter on yourself so that you can ease into the routines. It doesn't feel so rigid to the children or to you.

And then embrace as the parents, the beauty of being back in the school routines. I think parents get a little depressed too. Oh, I'm back at work five days a week. Whereas I had flexibility in the summer. Oh, I got to get it out the door in the morning. None of us like that. Right. So to be lighter on yourself and realize there's actually some good in this.

There's some good in having my children at school all day and me at home or at work. 

Zibby: Love it. And just on the writing side, do you have advice for aspiring authors now that you've written your, your second book here? 

Tovah: That's such a good question. I found my second book so much harder to write than my first one, even though I was like deeply in it, like this is me.

And I have a fabulous co writer, you know, who's on the book, Billy Fitzpatrick, who's got a master's in cognitive science. So it was fun. But what's my advice? Be light on yourself. I was so hard on myself. Like, I'll never, I was doing the kind of thinking we don't want our children to do. I'll never get this right.

I'll, I'll never. And fortunately I had Billy to sound things off. She would say, yeah, yeah, Tova, here's what we're going to do. Here's the layout. I'd say, oh, okay. I can write that part. So I think you have to take these things one step at a time. Like you have the big idea. And the overall, but you have to break it down and you have to embrace whatever you've written today, even if it's one paragraph, that's good because we tend to go to everything that's not working.

And then if you can, and I find this very hard, find the space time wise and place wise to have some writing time. That's free of everything else. I learned this program like on the computer where you can get it to like, turn everything off and then sort of buzz you after an hour. Like I had to do things like that to say, just focus because focus is so important.

It's hard. And then you get this beautiful book. 

Zibby: Yes. And then here you have it right in your habit. 

Tovah: Yeah. Yeah. 

Zibby: Raising resilient authors. 

Tovah: That kind of feels great. Yeah. I'm thinking about that for my next one. Something about adults. You know? 

Zibby: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We could all use that. Yeah, for sure. Okay, Dr. Klein, thank you so much for coming on today.

Really appreciate it. Congratulations on your book. And thank you for so many friends, kids and family. So many people have been through your program who have turned out so well. So thank you for that. 

Tovah: Thank you. Thank you. So nice to see you. 

Zibby: Nice to see you too.

Zibby welcomes picture book author Josh Funk to discuss his popular series, Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast, with a special focus on the latest adventure, ATTACK OF THE SCONES. Josh shares the inspiration behind the series, which started as a simple story for his kids and evolved into a whimsical, action-packed world where breakfast foods have grand adventures. He explains how each book in the series tackles a different "fridge problem" and discusses the creative process behind the books, including how the characters and storylines have developed over time. (Tune in to hear from a very special nine-year-old guest!)

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome Josh. Thank you so much for coming on Mom's Don't Have Time To Read Books, to discuss your whole series of Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast, particularly Attack of the Scones.

Josh: Thank you so much. 

Zibby: How was that? 

Josh: For how excited to be here. And there's, there's not, it's not just the two of us, right? We seem to have a special guest. 

Zibby: We have a special guest today. It was supposed to be two, but it looks like one, one special guest, which is my son who is nine years old. 

Zibby's Son: Hey. 

Josh: What's up? Hey, nine year old.

I'm Josh. 

Zibby: Okay. Nine year old is going to join in asking the questions as well. 

Josh: Awesome. 

Zibby: Okay, we read Attack of the Scones, except we had a little cliffhanger because the Wi Fi went out and the last three pages didn't load. And so. 

Josh: Oh no. 

Zibby: There was that. We were, we were left wanting more. Tell us about Attack of the Scones.

And for those who aren't familiar with the whole series, maybe just backtrack. How did this whole series come to be? 

Josh: Yeah. So Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast was the first book I ever had published. It was around. I don't know, I guess it's 12 or 13 years ago, I was starting to write for children, and I have kids, they are now in high school and college, but when they were little, I was reading a lot of books to them, and I learned how to write picture books, it took a long time, I kept writing some really, really terrible ones, and then eventually, uh, they got better, and then eventually, they got better.

And Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast was sort of at, I wrote that at the time where my writing kind of got to the point where it was almost publishable and all the other ideas. And there were many and many stories and many drafts that I wrote before that, that were really just practice books. But ultimately this was the first book that I, uh, had had published, it came out in 2015.

It's illustrated by Brendan Kearney. All of the books in the series are. And. It's about a pancake and a French toast. The whole series is about a pancake and a French toast who are friends, they live in a fridge, and they have adventures. And that's really all you need to know. You can read them in order if you want, but you don't have to.

I think there are some little things hinted at here and there throughout if you do read them in order, but, but really you can read them each as a standalone. And so, the first one was they're racing for the last drop of syrup, and it's just called Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast. And for some reason, that connected with, Readers and booksellers and librarians and, uh, the publisher was really excited.

They, they're called Union Square now, but they were called Sterling at the time. And when they published this book, they put a lot of publicity into it because they had a good feeling about it. And that really gave me a huge leg up because it, it. exposed the series to a lot of schools, librarians, and booksellers, so that they were actually interested in another one.

And so I wrote a second one, and they were like, let's see how sales do for the first one. And, but then it, uh, they were pretty decent, uh, looking ahead to it. So they actually acquired the second one before the first one even came out. And that's called The Case of the Stinky Stench, which is a mystery.

And I always try to think of fridge problems that kids and humans could have. So when I'm writing these stories, Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast was originally inspired by my kids. They were, they were fighting over what to eat for breakfast, a pancake or a French toast. And I thought, oh, that would make a fun idea.

Pancake and a French toast arguing. And they argue about the last drop of syrup. And that's because that's what they would argue about. And so that one was a race, but that's sort of a fridge problem that you or I might have. You know, have you ever opened the fridge and there was only one slice of pizza left or one piece of cake left and you had to argue with the sibling over who got to eat it or something like that?

And, and so with the second book, I always have a question, a real world question, like, have you ever opened the fridge and smelled something kind of funny? And That's what happens in the case of the Stinky Stench, where Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast have to help, help Inspector Croissant try to figure out why the fridge smells so bad.

And then the next idea I had, I, I loved Brendan Kearney's art so much, I just wanted to write more stories, so I thought, has anyone ever opened the fridge? And Things are a little bit too cold or frozen, like someone turned the thermostat down, they get a little frostbite, um, maybe your cream cheese turns into a block of ice.

And that's what happens in, in Mission Defrostable, which is another, I changed the genre with every book as well, which is kind of fun. So the first was a race, the second was a mystery, the third Third one is an action adventure spy thriller, Mission Defrostable, and in that one they help Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast help Agent Asparagus try to figure out why the fridge is freezing over.

And then I would actually, I was visiting a lot of schools and libraries and bookstores and the most common question I got was, how are Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast not stale yet? And so the fridge problem for book number four is have you ever opened the fridge and you want to take something out?

You're excited to eat it, but it was all moldy and spoiled and gross and disgusting and yeah, that's happened before and that's what happens in short and sweet. They do go stale but they visit Professor Biscotti, who has a de spoiling ray. Unfortunately, her de spoiling ray works a little too well and shrinks them into tiny little kids.

And so that one, the genre of a sci fi comedy, like, um, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, mixed with a magical body swap of, like, Freaky Friday or Big. And then I thought what else could happen in a fridge? What are the problems? And the next idea I had was, well, a light bulb went off and, and, uh, and I was like, oh, that's, a fridge problem.

Has anyone opened the fridge and the light bulb was out? I mean, that happened to me recently. I was staring at the wall in Home Depot for like half an hour trying to figure out which was the right light bulb anyway. But so but yeah, so that in that one is called the Great Caper Caper, which is obviously a heist.

And it's basically Ocean's Eleven in a fridge. It's a Lost Veggies heist. And the evil Count Caper, which is a type of food, he steals the lightbulb. And so Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast have to steal it back. That's why it's the great caper caper, the great caper the food, caper the robbery, which is the second meaning of caper.

And so we've had five genres, and then the newest one that comes out, um, in the fall of 2020, for so September 3rd. I'm not sure when this comes out, but so the fridge problem is, have you ever accidentally left something in the fridge that didn't belong there? Like that time I put my iced coffee down with my keys and I, and I couldn't find them the whole weekend.

I got locked out of the house. It was terrible. I had to walk everywhere, but anyway, so that's the fridge problem. I'm not sure you got to the ending or not, which we probably shouldn't spoil anyway, but I will say that. So that is attack of the scones, which is the newest one, and it is an alien invasion.

Now, based on who is actually riding the scones, which I don't really want to spoil, even though it's like a large part of the book, like it's like a third of the book. I mean, if we have to, because of questions..

Zibby: We know,.. 

Josh: Okay, you got that far. So there are hints. I got actually got the idea for this book after the third book, but I kept having to push it off because I didn't have a good enough title or a good enough reason to write it.

So after the third book, I noticed something about the first three books that there was, you know, and I wanted to use that as those were the things that were going to be invading the fridge. But I, I noticed that they didn't exist except for one time in book number one, there, there was one in book number one.

And so. I, I thought, well, I, I have to make sure that, like, we don't accidentally put any of these things in the fridge in books numbers four and then five, because what happened was, I, I knew I needed to address the, are they spoiled thing, because that's what kids kept asking me, so I had to bump this idea.

It was going to be book four, but then I had to bump it and then I had a great title for the Great Caper Caper, but I didn't have a title for this one yet because the things that are actually invading are not scones. Scones are just the spaceships that they're invading on. And so Attack of the Scones is a, is a great parody title, but I didn't have it yet.

And so I did the Great Caper Caper next. And then this. is finally I got back around to doing the story I wanted to tell, which should have been book four. But yeah, there's a lot of fun things about this series that you don't really get to do in picture books a lot, which is especially if you do read them all and read them in order, like in Mission Defrostable, I'm spoiling things, but I mean, this book's been out since 2018.

So if you haven't read it, that's on you. But so in Mission Defrostable, the, the, the, The villain is actually created by something that happens in the first book. There's a big bean avalanche in book number one. And the bean avalanche, I retconned in that the villain was created by this bean avalanche. Now if you go back and look in book one, You know, you just see the bean avalanche.

You don't see the actual villain from book three. We didn't think that far ahead. But in book three, we said, Oh, this is what happened. And we had a little flashback scene where, you know, it's in a sepia tone. So Brendan like it's so we actually they do connect in some ways, but it's kind of like you don't have to watch every Mission Impossible movie to see them, you know, to get what's going on or every Fast and the Furious movie like you know what's going on.

But if you've seen them all, then you're like, Oh, yeah, that was the big brother of this character. character and it makes sense why he wants revenge or whatever. But so yeah, so in this book, Attack of the Scones, it does tie back to something that is in book number one. And um, I've been looking forward to doing, sharing this for a while.

I know I just chatted for a long time, but that, that's sort of the history of the series and it's been going on for over 10 years and uh, well, I've been working on it for over 10 years. The first book came out about eight and a half years ago, but that is book number six comes out this fall and uh, Attack of the Scones.

It's, uh, it's a good one. 

Zibby: And do you have another one after that? 

Josh: I do, and I've written it, and the editor just accepted the final, final, final edits. 

Zibby: Yay! 

Josh: Announce the title. I will tell you what you, I will tell you the fridge problem. Wait, I think I have a fridge problem. Wait, what was the fridge problem?

Now I'm blanking on the fridge problem. I have so many things that I have to keep track of, but so I will tell you the genre that we are doing. It's, so we had a mystery in the case of the stinky stench, but that was, to be fair, it's not really a very good mystery. That was actually supposed to be a holiday book, but the publisher liked it so much.

They said, you know, we take out all the holidays. We want to sell it year round, which is great, but the actual stinky stench again, spoiler alert. It's a fruitcake. There's no other holiday stuff in the book that makes you lead you to thinking it might be a fruitcake because that's a, that's a holiday garbage.

I mean, holiday food. And so I, I thought that. So it's not a very good mystery, as far as mysteries go, like with clues and things like that. They're just kind of like running around the fridge, like sniffing and saying, Where does it smell? Oh, there it is. Funny stuff happens along the way. But it's actually probably has some of my favorite jokes in it.

There's the part where Inspector Croissant trips by Miss Steak. Miss Steak, get it? It's a steak who's a lady with French fry hair and stuff. But so anyway, this one is actually going to be another more specific type of mystery. A whodunit. So, I can tell you that that is, and I'm so focused on Tag of the Skulls, I'm not really in like, writing it.

So I don't remember what the fridge problem was. 

Zibby: That's okay. That's all right. 

Josh: Yeah. 

Zibby: Well now, whenever we open the fridge, we're going to start thinking of all the different problem searches. And we'll just send you our ideas. 

Josh: Yeah, I'm down. Or write them yourself. I would love to see them if you write. You have ideas.

That would be cool. I don't want to take your ideas. 

Zibby: I'm not good at picture books. I actually wrote a picture book. Thank you very much. But yeah. 

Josh: I was actually talking about you, nine year old. Yeah, not me. You should write it. Yeah. 

Zibby: Yeah, he wasn't recommending me. That would be weird. Oh, I 

Josh: mean, you know.

Zibby: That would be weird. So I did a podcast with this guy, and then I came out with the exact same book. He'd be like, yeah, that was a mistake. Uh, how did Baron Von Waffle come about? 

Josh: So, I mean, when I wrote the first book, I was Kids books, you know, whether they have a message or not, my books all tend to be about friendship.

Not just the pancake books, but I mean, the Attack of the Scones will be my 20th book. And in the last eight and a half years, and I've been very, very fortunate. The next eight and a half years are not going to have nearly as many books, but I will say that when you're starting out trying to become an author, you don't break too, too many rules.

You can break some rules. I mean, I write in rhyme, which is often frowned upon, at least in the industry, because it's really hard to write in rhyme or it's easy to do badly. But I, I did that. I mean, there's, you break some rules, everyone breaks some rules, but to try to, they, they, I knew neither one of the characters could get it at the end, or they would have to work together to get it.

But that didn't seem like it was the right idea, at least for me. But if my kids inspired Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast, then. You know, if they were fighting over a food, the last drop of syrup, the last piece of pizza, I would just eat it. And that I am Baron Von Waffle. I knew somebody else syrup and they'd have to just be okay with that, you know?

And it wasn't like the world was going to end if they didn't get the syrup. And in some of the future books, the world will end if they don't save the fridge. But, but yeah, so I think, you know, that's how Baron Von Waffle, it came. I knew that somebody else had to get the syrup. And I think that, The way, why is he Barron von Waffle?

Honestly, because of the, the books are written in rhyme and I need to find the right rhythm and rhyme of a word to go with it. And so that's kind of what it was. I see. You have a question. Let's let's jump to your question. 

Zibby's Son: So in a book one, you know how you said that your kids fighting over pancakes and waffles inspired you to do the book.

What inspired you? For them to like, go through like avalanches and like fall in lasagna. 

Josh: That's actually a great question. So originally when I started writing the book, there wasn't very much action. And it was the two characters were sort of arguing about who deserved the syrup. Now, to be fair, I started writing this book in 2012 when it was sort of the height of the second, Obama election, and so there was a lot of political stuff going on, him and Mitt Romney going back and forth, and so in my head, I was, it was like a political rally, I don't know why, or a political debate, I was like, each one of them was saying why they got the syrup, and why a French toast is better than a pancake, and why a pancake's better than a French toast, and it started to get really ridiculous, and, and I thought it was funny, it was like, oh, well, you know, I'm French toast, we were the first to the moon, and then the pancake was like, well, we got to Mars first, and like, but they were just talking.

About it and saying who deserved it and one of my critique partners actually said to me that there's not enough action in this book. You have to have some action and have have them going to different places. Have them different pictures on every page. You just can't have two characters, even if it is a funny pancake and a French toast.

You can't just have him standing there talking. You have to have some action. You have to have different pictures. Scenes happening on all 16 spreads throughout the book and I was like that is a great idea So it needed to turn in from turn into well out of a political race and into an actual race And so that's where I got the idea I got the idea rather than that is why they cause a giant mess along the way and caused Culinary chaos, as I like to say, that is, that is how I got the idea was from a friend of mine who was a writer.

They were the ones that suggested you need more action. So that's how I took it. 

Zibby's Son: I have another question. So in Attack of the Scones, you said that the scones are just their spaceship or their ship. But since every other food is alive, how come scones aren't? 

Josh: Yeah, so I don't know if every other food is alive because sometimes they sit on like a piece of cheese or something or stand on things.

So that's a very good question that I'm just going to say I don't really have a good answer for. You kind of just have to, and maybe they are alive, who knows, I don't know. Suspension of disbelief. Just kind of have to go with it. One of the regrets I have from this series, and it's, is that I have them end with, sharing the butter in book number one.

I don't think they eat it. Once this, once this book series kept going, I was like, I'm not sure that they eat or they don't eat food. So like, I don't know what they're doing with the butter. Why are they in the butter? The butter is like, it's like, Hey, we can split up that butter right there. And then the butter's smiling, and then you see on the next page, it's like, a third of the butter is missing, and they're clearly holding pieces of butter, and the butter is still smiling!

And so I was like, I don't, what was I thinking? I, like, if I could undo one thing, it would be something about that ending, like, cause I don't really know, I don't, they don't eat. Nor do they go to the bathroom. That actually was a problem in the most recent book. There was, with my, my editor, one of the, one of the last edits that they had were, there was a scene where they were in the whodunit, they were searching in a bathroom.

Like some of the characters were going to the bathroom and they looked at the closets and toilets and, and my editor was like, I really don't want to think about their toilets. Can we do that? And I was like, you know what? We're just going to say that they don't use bathrooms. So there's no bathrooms, but there's also no eating because they are food. I think I know what your next question is going to be. I have a guess, but let's just see. I'll say.. 

Zibby's Son: It's not a question at the end of the first book. I love the page. Like,.. 

Josh: Oh, the gatefold, the page that folds up. That was not what I thought you were going to ask. What I thought you were going to ask was, are there ever going to be people in the fridge that end up eating?

And the answer to that is no, there are no people in this world. So there, there aren't any people in this world, but, um, but as the gatefold though, that is a great, I, you know, I didn't even know. That the book was going to have a page that folds out at the end. I mean, we all know what center folds are, but it's a gate fold.

The last page folds down, and that's what it's called. When I saw the digital versions of the book, I knew there was a vertical page. I thought it was going to be one of those that you just turn the book sideways. I didn't know it was going to fold out. And all of vertical. the series have that page that folds out at the end afterward.

And, uh, and I, I think it's pretty cool. It's, it's definitely super fun. And I think it, it adds a little bit of element of charm that sets, sets these books apart from other books. Sometimes I will say, I know that it, It does sometimes get damaged more easily because of that, but just means you have to buy a second copy.

So I think that's why the sales are so good. And another thing too, and we didn't do this in the first book, but once we started doing more, every other book has a band at the end that Brendan has made up. Brendan Kearney, the illustrator, he makes up a fan name. Now the version I sent you of attack of the scones was missing it.

The funny band name in this one is, is, uh, Brad Zeppelin. But in, he's got the, the Peach Boys, Spuddy Polly and the Croquettes, uh, Juice Springsteen, a whole bunch more. What, in the fourth book, he had a whole festival where there was like, Jimi Hendrix and Apple McCartney and a whole bunch. But so, that's another thing that he does on, uh, at the end of every book, starting in the second one.

And in the first one, it just, once we had the first one down. We kind of knew we could just keep pushing it even farther and explore the world deeper and make, make everything a little bit more nonsense. And yeah, it's essentially Toy Story in a fridge. 

Zibby: Have you ever thought about replicating your actual fridge?

Like replicating the book in your fridge. 

Josh: I've seen some people take photos. One of the best April fool's day, and I know this is not going to air anywhere near April, but one of the best April fool's day things that I've never done it, it was never done to me, but I've seen people do, and they always tag me is to put little googly eyes.

Um, in the fridge, just get, all you do is just get like a bag of a hundred googly eyes and just put them on all the foods. In fact, that's a good one for kids to do to their parents is to put some googly eyes on all the food, not the actual, actual food, like the containers I'm talking about, like don't actually stick it on like, you know, every chicken nugget should not have it.

So I haven't, I haven't made my fridge like this. I will say, you know, I'm, I'm actually vegan. And so, but I still couldn't resist some of like the mistake joke, like we had to have that. I couldn't not, not do that one. So. 

Zibby: What is your pick? French toast or pancakes or waffles? 

Josh: So, yeah, I always ask kids, who's on team Lady Pancake?

Who's on team Sir French Toast? I'm, I'm, I'm Baron Von I already told you why. If my kids were fighting over something, I would just eat, eat it. And so I am Baron Von Waffle, but I love those waffles that you get at the hotels when you pour the batter in. They're not usually vegan, but, but yeah, that's my favorite is, is those batter when you like flip it over and it beeps after.

Zibby: Yep. Yep. 

Josh: Yeah. Those are the best. 

Zibby: Remember how we stayed at the Hampton Inn? You could pour the 

Josh: Yeah, the Hampton Inn always has them. 

Zibby's Son: Is that the one you eat your broccoli? 

Josh: Yeah. This episode is sponsored by the Hampton Inn. But, uh, yeah. We actually, no, we got one of those little, like, tiny ones that cost like 10 at Target and it's lasted.

It makes like the individual waffles. So we make those with the vegan waffle mix. Vegan pancake, pancake batter works just the same as waffle mix. 

Zibby's Son: Oh, you mean those little, this things? Yeah, exactly. You put the batter in, then you close it? 

Zibby: Yeah, yeah. 

Josh: Oh, You gotta, you gotta make sure to clean it afterwards, but as long as you do, um, yeah,.. 

Zibby's Son: I see.

I see people on YouTube like melt gummy bears or gummy rooms. Oh, and oh yeah. Don't that they put the batter in the pancake thing, they close it, then they bake it or like whatever it's called. Then they open and then they eat it. 

Zibby: Clearly we need more restrictions on, on YouTube. 

Josh: Yeah. 

Zibby: Yeah. . Okay. So what advice do you have for an aspiring children's book?

Josh: Well, for children or adults, I guess I would say, I have advice for both, but I would say for, for adults, I think that my best advice, I have a resources for writers section on my website and it's, it's mostly kid friendly. Well, it's entirely kid friendly, but it has links to other places that might not be.

But you know, you, the best advice I have is to keep writing new things. Because if you write a story and you're like, this is really important story to me. And it's, you know, it, it, it's about something very, very personal. Chances are your first story is not going to be the one that gets published. You're you're going to improve as you write, you know, Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast was probably my 10th or 12th manuscript that I had written because the first, but I needed to write the first 10 and submit them to agents and editors, which was a mistake looking back on it.

But everybody does that and you have to write them and revise them and get Feedback from friends and other writers and, and go to conferences and share them and get critique partners and, and, and go back and forth. And you need to do that with, you can't, but chances are your second story that you write is going to be in, starting off in a better place than your first one will.

And your third even better than that. So, you know, keep writing new things. And don't get tied to one idea too, too much because it's also a business and like, it's hard with who knows what's marketable and over time things change and there's ebbs and flows to all of that. And so, you know, I jokingly say, don't, you know, stay away from the farm when you're writing a story because we have enough.

Children's books about farms. We've had them since the beginning of time for picture books, at least. But unless your book is going to do something drastically different with farms, like the, the animals are going to learn how to type and send a letter to the farmer, like the Clackamoo, or, you know, it's like a, they're, they're having a punk concert, like punk farm by Derek or Saska.

So like. You have to do something different because we have enough farm animal stories, but for kids, I think the best thing for, for kids to do, if you want to, if you have any interest in maybe being an author, which by the way, when I was a kid, I did not think I was going to be an author. I wanted to, at first I wanted to be a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.

I wanted to be a, um, a rock star. Then I wanted to be a software engineer, which I am still a software engineer. That's my day job. And then I wanted to be a picture book author. But, you know, who knows, 10 years from now, you might be doing a different podcast and, uh, you'll have me on to talk about how I've been teaching kids how to do ballet.

You know, I mean, who knows? Probably not, but you never know. I still don't know what to do. 

Zibby: Moms don't have time to do ballet. 

There you go. Coming to you live, 2034. 

Josh: Exactly. And, but so, but for kids, I think the best advice that I have is just, you know, you need to have fun. Both reading and writing, because the more that you read, the better you're gonna know what makes a good beginning, and a satisfying ending, and great characters, and despicable villains, and compelling dialogue, and awesome action scenes, and read all different kinds of things, read fiction, non fiction, picture books, chapter books, graphic novels, comic books, fantasy, mystery, biographies, read all kinds of things, because that way you'll know what you like, and once you know what you like, just write something that you would want to read.

Write something that entertains you. Write something that might entertain your friends or your family. Because if, if you're writing something that makes you laugh, chances are it'll make other people laugh too. And, you know, and, and that's what I like to do. I like to write funny stuff, silly stuff, goofy, sometimes gross out stuff.

I don't know, a lot of kids like scary things. Like any kind of emotion that you can make people feel. But yeah, so write something that you would want to read. And if you like it, chances are other people will too. So just read a lot. And have fun with it because, you know, not all writing is to make a book writing can also be something where, you know, when I grew up with my friend, Ben, he and I used to write stories together as kids.

And I didn't know it at the time, but he he knew he wanted to. Write and act and be in TV shows and movies and Hollywood. And, but we just had fun writing and he became the editor of the school newspaper. He went to Harvard and was on the Harvard lampoon and he has one picture book you might be familiar with called the book with no pictures.

He goes by BJ, but the two of us used to hang out and write and Yeah, we, but, like, we just had fun doing it, and you never know if it's going to turn into a book, or maybe you'll end up wanting to write for TV shows, or movies, or, I mean, they can't start, I'm a big video game fan, you can't start making a video game until you have a story for it, you know, like, I like the Zelda video games, and, so if, if, games like that, you need good characters, and you need a good story before you can start Coding and animating that stuff up.

And so it really all all of those things on a screen. They all start with a story And so yeah, just having fun writing because you never know where it's gonna take you. 

Zibby: Amazing. What do you say? 

Zibby's Son: Thank you! 

Zibby: Oh my gosh, I'm talking in a normal voice. Thank you so much. 

Zibby's Son: Thank you so much. 

Zibby: This was really fun.

Zibby's Son: Thank you. 

Zibby: Really appreciate all your time and effort and.. 

Josh: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks. Thanks for having me and definitely, you know, tag me on all the things when when it's done. Yeah! 

Zibby's Son: Yeah! 

Josh: It was good talking to you, and you too in the back. Bye. 

Zibby's Son: Hey, say goodbye. What are you reading? 

Josh: What are you reading over there?

Zibby's Son: It's called Out There by, I can't pronounce the name, Something Miller. 

Zibby: Out There by Something Miller. 

Josh: Oh, sounds fun. Yeah, I don't know, I'm more into like the mysteries and fantasy are my two favorite genres. 

Zibby: Oh, nice. 

Josh: You into graphic novels at all? 

Zibby's Son: Yeah, we love them. 

Josh: You love graphic novels? 

Zibby's Son: Are you reading a graphic novel?

No. 

Josh: I'm actually going to a book event tonight with Rajani LaRocca and Kate Messner. The two of them are doing a si I'm just attending. I'm gonna go to their signing at, uh, the where are you located? 

Zibby: We're in New York City, 

Josh: New York. That's what I thought. Yeah. It's in the outside Boston. So the silver unicorn is a fun bookstore in the Boston suburbs.

So I'm gonna head out there right now. 

Zibby: Amazing. 

Josh: And it was good to talk to you. Thank you for taking 

Zibby's Son: Thanks! 

Zibby: Thank you, bye. 

Zibby welcomes back award-winning author Chelsea Bieker to discuss MADWOMAN, a brilliant, urgent, heart-smashing, darkly comic, and absolutely unforgettable novel about motherhood, memory, generational violence, and the menace of an untold past. Chelsea shares the inspiration behind the book, which she wrote during the pandemic as she started to confront her own past. She delves into the intensity of motherhood, the societal pressures that mothers face, and the lengths women go to save themselves and others. She also discusses the long-term effects of domestic violence, a theme deeply rooted in her own childhood experiences. Finally, she shares her journey as a writer.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Chelsea. Thanks so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Madwoman. Congrats. 

Chelsea: Thanks, Zibby. It's so good to be here. I love talking to you, so I'm thrilled for today. 

Zibby: Yay, me too. It was funny because I was reading some of the reviews and how one of them said, you know, this is a, like, maybe it was you who said I wanted It's a book that makes you sweat, or I want you to sweat when you're reading it, or something.

So I mentioned this. 

Chelsea: I probably said that. 

Zibby: Yeah. I think you said that. So I mentioned it to my son because I was working next to him like all day yesterday and I'm like, this is a book that makes me, I'm supposed to sweat. So every like half an hour he'd look over and he's like, sweating mom? Sweating yet?

So anyway, it was great. Okay. Tell listeners about the book. 

Chelsea: So this is my third book, it's my second novel. I wrote this, I had the idea back in 2018 around then and, you know, was still working on my other books and kind of put it down, but it really just stuck with me. And when lockdown happened, I suddenly, I was supposed to go on a book tour and instead, as we all were, I was just at home with my two really young children and I started writing this book in earnest at that point.

I think it was just a time when I was really kind of understanding my own past in a new way, you know, I think as we age and also our kids get older, I don't know, for me, it's been true that I've kind of had to reprocess certain things that I experienced. So I was kind of going through a big upheaval in that and, you know, You know, it's really a book about sort of the urgency and immediacy of motherhood while we're doing all of that really deep self work at the same time, which I just feel like all of my friends are doing that, that deeper self work and that healing work.

And maybe it's generational, but you're doing it alongside parenting. young kids and it's like a pressure cooker at times. So I think the book really has that energy of it, of that feeling. And it's really about, you know, how far women will go to save themselves and each other. I felt that I had to explore these, the issues in the book are, you know, domestic violence, friendship, female friendship, motherhood.

And I just wanted those all to kind of like combust together. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, I have to say you sort of hit the nail on the head with the kid part. I mean, I can't speak to the violence aspects, although I want to talk to you about all that because it was so powerful and really just gripping and amazing and upsetting and all the good things that a book can do.

Not good, but you know, bad things that make you feel, which is a good thing when you read. Nevermind. You know what I mean? Yes. Anyway, with the kid part, it's like all the things, when you got really, and not you, when your character got really angry at the post office. Because her kid got yelled at for playing with the Legos on the counter and it's like why would you put Legos on the counter?

And they were like it's from Lego Masters, which by the way, I love love watching Lego Masters and all those things like okay Now the kids are getting ice cream and now she's doing this with the kids and now like it's just so real like that Is what happens in the course of the day and you just like Put us right in there, except, of course, as you said, you layer on these huge themes and big plot elements in the background.

So the kid piece, nailed. Did you just like have a, an event with your kids or like a moment and you just came home and wrote about it or it all just came? Mixing into the pot. 

Chelsea: Definitely a mix. But the scene you mentioned in the post office that that happens pretty early in the book. So I hope that readers will the readers I've heard from so far seem to be relating to that moment that she has in the post office with her two Children.

And I think I really, you know, that really happened to me pretty much like I have definitely cried in the post office on more than one occasion, but that was, that was a big one because I, I think in that moment, it hit me really hard that so few spaces are actually carved out for mothers and children.

And the first line of the book is. The world is not made for mothers yet. Mothers made the world. And I felt that really strongly when my kids were small, especially because, you know, you're really showing up in the world as this new person and you just see all the little ways that like things become very difficult or spaces just really aren't created with you in mind.

Uh, and the post office, that moment, I was like, wow, I'm just here to do something so simple. But. I feel like I'm set up for failure at every turn and, and this, yes, this Lego display, which is at child height, any kid would want to play with that. And then sort of that feeling. I really wanted to explore that feeling of judgment that comes so often toward mothers.

Especially in public from strangers, you know, maybe you felt it. It's the worst feeling and it feels like really full of shame. And, and I kind of left the post office that day feeling like, I guess I'm not really meant to be anywhere. Like, I guess I'll just stay at home. That's how it kind of felt. And I wanted to reflect that in the book.

I wanted to show her in those kind of those moments that really do happen and they feel so difficult in the moment. And we can look back and kind of laugh at that moment. But man, I was not laughing that day. So. 

Zibby: I've had many moments like that. Of course, then when she does stay home to, you know, unearth And one of her kids gets hurt.

Her husband's like, uh, don't you think it's time for a nanny? What do you think? 

Chelsea: Yes. Yeah. And, and in the book, you know, she has a lot of anxiety going on because of her upbringing. It's hard for her to lose control or give control to someone else or even accept help. If help is around, it just feels so unsafe for her to do that.

And, and that was also something I experienced in young motherhood was like. That feeling that I couldn't really relinquish that control or something terrible would happen. And I wanted to explore that too. I was like, all those things kind of find their way in this story. I mean, I still feel like that. 

Zibby: I feel like I have my, my, my older kids are 17 and I'm still like, oh my gosh, like be careful.

It's terrible. 

Chelsea: Yeah. No one can really prepare you for what. That feeling is like, right? Like you could rationalize it prior to experiencing it. And you're like, Oh, surely I'll be well adjusted. And then you kind of get into it and. It's a feeling that you can't describe, it's so all encompassing, that feeling of responsibility for your child, so.

Zibby: Which goes totally counter to her own father, whose sense of responsibility differed, or he showed his love in quite odd ways, if in fact it was love, but, which could be debated, but he was incredibly abusive, and the way that you detail the violence was really horrible and terrifying. Tell me about how personal this was.

If you can, if you want to talk about it, you don't have to talk about it. I read in the acknowledgements, it sounded like it came from some experience, but tell me a little bit more about that. 

Chelsea: Yeah, it definitely did. I mean, I grew up, my parents had a really volatile relationship and my father was really emotionally and physically abusive to my mom.

And I, I, I just was born into that. You know, there was never really a moment where that wasn't the atmosphere for my childhood. And I think that it's interesting, you know, I've written about my mom so much. It's a reoccurring theme for me. It's, you know, our relationship was sort of the greatest heartbreak of my life, but it wasn't until I was really writing this book that I had to kind of confront it.

You know, there was always just this family story about her that really was centered more on her addiction. Mm hmm. And like her addiction was really the cause of everything that had gone wrong and being a mother myself and, and kind of revisiting my childhood, I realized, well, yes, her addiction was there, but there was this other piece that no one really wants to talk about, which is the fact that she was being abused every single day for many, many years.

Mm hmm. And no one can mother under those circumstances, you know, I think the book really touches on that. It's like motherhood is hard enough in the best of circumstances. And so try to do it. If you're living under this absolute domestic terrorism every day, you can't, I mean, and, and she couldn't. And, and so I think it was me.

getting further to the truth of her experience of motherhood, which was totally derailed and tainted by the violence she was experiencing. But that's not really the story that was sort of presented, you know, it was easier to focus on her being an alcoholic and, and the, the entwinement of addiction and all of it is super prevalent too.

And that's in the book as well because it's all connected, right? It's all connected. But to me, it was sort of shifting what the, bedrock of it was from addiction to violence. I was like, yeah, the reason she Is doing the things she's doing. It's because she's living in this heightened experience every day, wondering, will I survive the day?

You know, and that being a question of your day is, is really changes how you show up in the world. So I wanted to explore that here. And. Yeah, I think it provided a lot of, I was able to gain a lot of compassion for her in the process of writing it and what felt like some sort of redemption that we never got.

I got to feel a little bit in writing this book. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, I'm sorry that that's what you were born into and that you had to contend with that and that your mom had to deal with all of that. But. How interesting and sort of freeing to reshape the narrative now and look at it in a new way. I mean, that's healing, I would think.

Chelsea: Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I hope that readers can sense that for themselves. The fact is, is that just statistically, like, we've all been touched by domestic violence in some way. Um, whether you know someone or you've experienced it yourself or you grew up around it. I mean, it's so prevalent. That I really do think it's the thing that that we've all maybe encountered or brushed up against in different ways.

So I think it's universal. 

Zibby: Then you also weave into the narrative, you know, what a mother will do to protect her child. Sort of in a different way when we're talking about, you know, How her father dies and I won't give anything away, but you know, that whole prison, I mean, it's pretty early when you first introduce it, but you know, the mother is in prison when you meet her and we'd learn more and more as the book goes on as to how and why everything went down and the neighbor and just like all, all of the things, but it's almost like it just never ends, right?

Like she escapes because he dies, but then what? Like prison is better? You know, does she ever, you know, is she at peace? Does she feel she made the right decision? I don't know. All those questions just kept turning around. 

Chelsea: Yeah, I, I was so interested in those long term effects, you know, because the narrator of the book is living a much different life, right?

She has a really beautiful life that she's created and she has a very peaceful family dynamic and she's worked really hard to get there. And yet, you know, she's sort of surprised at how she can't quite close the door on it so easily. It's something that she has to kind of process through and look at.

And I think the book in some ways is all about that. It's all about how we kind of have to face our, our shadow self before we can really truly be free. Um, we can't just pretend things didn't happen. And at least in my experience, that has been very true. And that's definitely what this character is at times very comically figuring out, you know, she would love if she could just pretend like she's a different person that never even knew those people of the past.

And I think she tries that she really tries to see if she can do that. And the answer is no. 

Zibby: She did, um, you know, in the book, she had confessed to an early boyfriend, which she of course, you know, Regrets. And then she decides not to say anything to her husband, which then of course puts another layer in her relationship.

And it's like self sabotage in a way, right? You can't totally connect with someone if you're hiding your identity and all of that. And we watch and see how that goes. Sort of affects their marriage as it, as it goes. Tell me, tell me about that piece and when you're only offering up part of yourself to someone who's theoretically as close to you as possible.

Chelsea: Yeah. I think she think when she kind of sets off at 17 on her own to create this new life. I think she thinks she will only be lovable if she's not tainted by this story that she has to carry. To her, it feels so burdensome to have to tell someone over and over, this was my childhood. These are, this is the situation with my parents.

Totally complicated and crazy. Like she's just tired of that. She's like, what if I just pretend like none of that exists and will I be more lovable if I show up in that more simple way, if I can kind of come to the table without this suitcase of trauma, will I be just easier to love and will I be able to find a greater happiness and normality?

I think that's a big thing she's after. Is she just wants this normal life what she has decided is normal and she just doesn't think she can get there if she's coming to the table with her with all of her scars showing, you know, and and I totally get that impulse. But what she really does find, like you're saying, is that it's very hard to create true intimacy or be known by another until we kind of peel back that, that layer and, and show who we really are.

And maybe we can all relate to that on some level. 

Zibby: Did you? Try that with some relationships and then have it backfire. Not that this is any of my business and you don't have to talk about it. 

Chelsea: No, I love it. No, not like this. Like, not to this level. I think it was more of fantasy for me. Like, like, what she does in the book by totally, like, Pretending the past didn't happen.

That's more of a fantasy. I love to think about when I'm writing fiction, writing into those sort of like personal fantasies, and that would be one of mine. I mean, the idea that you could just sort of decide, you know, I am not dealing with this anymore. Like, this is not my story. I'm done. I'm not going to carry it around.

I'm just going to pretend that I have, like, you know, I grew up with two parents and a happy dog and like a sibling, like in a yard that that was kind of like, Always my fantasy. And I never did that. It's funny because I met my husband, actually, I met my husband in high school or even younger, I've known him that long.

And so actually he kind of. There was no escaping. Like he just knew my life because he was the observer in some ways at a young age. And so he didn't get that convenience of not having to deal with, with everything. But yeah, I think it's, it's more of that fantasy feeling. Like what would it have been like to just pretend that I was a different person?

Zibby: And so when in your childhood or adulthood, when did you start writing? I know we discussed this last time, but as a, you know, refresher in case anyone's listening for the first time, having discovered head of women. 

Chelsea: Yeah, I was, I was always journaling and doodling and I was a huge reader, so it just felt natural, I think, at a very young age to kind of put feelings and thoughts onto paper.

So I was always doing that, always keeping a diary, kind of exploring how I was feeling and, and books were such a comfort. I think all of us readers know, you know, it's like that is such a companionship. I feel like my relationship to books is one of my foundational relationships in my life. It's one of the most beautiful relationships that I'll have in my life is to reading and to, to books and feeling understood.

In those deep ways that you can only sort of experience through that sustained attention of reading on paper, I think so that was always there. And then, you know, when I was in high school, I had a wonderful English teacher who stepped in at just the right moment, like they often do. And she kind of was observing that.

I was reading a lot, not like school reading. I actually wasn't a good student, but she saw that I was always reading my own thing off to the side. And she was like, why don't you write book reviews for the school paper? And that was life changing because otherwise I had almost no direction. And that gave me this, like this path to follow, like, Oh, I guess I could study journalism.

I guess I could work on this newspaper. And it gave me a lot of purpose. And it also kind of trained me really fast to be able to write quickly and meet a deadline and, and get a byline, like to see your own byline in the paper was really powerful for me. I was like, wow, I'm offering something to someone else and I'm writing about something I'm interested in and it just felt so good.

So I am always, I'm forever grateful to that teacher for kind of seeing me in that way. And that's just a lucky strike, I think, because you could easily kind of get lost in the shuffle. And so many people do, but she was able to kind of just turn me a little bit in a good direction. And I think it just went off from there.

But writing fiction was always what I was like doing on the side. 

Zibby: Wow. Teachers, the power of teachers just cannot be, cannot be understated, right? 

Chelsea: It cannot. I know. I feel like so many people have that story. Like, oh, and then came along this teacher who kind of, you know, said that one little thing to me that was so life changing because maybe we underestimate, you know, how porous we are at those younger ages and those, like, respected adults.

Yep. That maybe aren't our parents, you know, really matter like that. That can be very powerful. So I felt lucky for that. How old are your kids now? Well, today's my daughter's 10th birthday, actually. So yes, I'm 10 years in decade of motherhood under my belt and my son just turned six. So,.. 

Zibby: Oh, amazing. I was going to.

I was wondering if they were of the age where they could read some of your work yet, but not, not so much. 

Chelsea: Not yet. Yeah. 

Zibby: What are you working on now? 

Chelsea: I'm working on a new novel. I started it about a year ago. It just started with a faint little idea and it's really grown. I'm in that really fun part right now with it where It's exploratory and I'm kind of figuring out what it is really about because my experience with the writing process is usually like, I'll start with what I think it might be about and then the book just shows me what it's about.

And that's how I actually can tell something is going right. If I start to be surprised or I feel like, Oh, I didn't know that this book was going to include that or all those little connective threads start to form. And that's kind of where I, where I am with it right now. So it's. It's been that really fun baby phase of it.

Zibby: Anna Quindlen tells this story in her keynotes and everything about how she was writing one book and the dog like walks in and she literally says out loud, there's a dog in this book? Like she didn't even know. 

Chelsea: I love that. I love that. That to me, that's like why I write is that feeling of discovery that can really only come.

On the page like in the process, you know, I just think that's that's the magic for me.. 

Zibby: In addition to.. So, you have all your writing and dealing with kids and all that and promotion, obviously, of all the books. What do you like to do? Like, if you have half a day free and you don't have anything due, what's, what's like your dream day?

Chelsea: I like reading. No. I don't. I, I've been very into, I don't know. I just love long walks. I sound so boring. I'm like, I just need a long walk. If I can take like a long walk every day, I'm happy. Movement. I love, I like to movement has become so much more important to me in the last decade than ever before. I don't know.

I just feel like every day I really have to engage in some way with. Either walking or swimming swimming has become really big for me in the last year where I'm doing a lot more regular swimming Which feels really good for my soul and it's so therapeutic and feels so amazing So, I don't know. I'm just I think every day it's like, how can I fit that in?

I mean, honestly the B You're so inspiring. I look at you and I'm like, I have no idea how you do everything you do But you're out there doing so much good work in this world and doing so many. I think you have such a gift at making authors feel so seen and so special and so celebrated like that. That just feels like one of your amazing gifts and I don't know, that's inspiring to me.

So just, I'm trying to just think about how can I be really present? How can I really show up for the people I love the most in these deeper ways? And celebrate them. You know, I heard maybe it's a thing that kids are saying now. It's like give people their flowers now. Like tell people how you feel now.

Don't wait. Doesn't have to be a special occasion. Just, I don't know, just being present with people and making them feel good. Seen and special is something you're so good at and something I strive to do as well. I think that's becoming more important to me as I get older too. 

Zibby: Thank you for saying that.

That's really, really nice. Some days I am just struggling to, like, deal with myself. So, you know, with no sleep and whatever else. So hearing something nice is, is really wonderful. It doesn't always feel like I'm always doing stuff, even though everyone says that all the time. Anyway. 

Chelsea: You're incredible. No one, uh, we can all see it.

Zibby: Thank you. Thank you. Well, I really believe that all authors deserve to be celebrated. Like I believe that from, in my soul. It's not like a thing I'm doing to pass the time. Like I, you know, I read a book like yours and I feel like the pain of what you went through. Even though you don't, it's not a memoir, but like you can feel it, right?

You can, you can just like feel it seeping through the pages and yet there it is. And you can feel the frustration of motherhood. And you know, that the fact that like every day is like, who knows what's going to happen. And like, you're also dealing with so much stuff and you know, you're put right back into that moment and you're put into this situation where you understand the pain of others.

I mean, that's like total magic, and it's amazing, and then we all just get to dip in whenever we want. I mean, I know it sounds so silly, but like, I really believe it. I think it's amazing. 

Chelsea: It is. The fact, I just think it's like the number one way that people can build compassion and understanding for others is through reading, right?

It's like forever. That's how we connect to others through story and through. Really feeling that emotional truth. You're right. Like this book is not a memoir at all. None of my fiction is, all of my fiction takes some really wild like turns, but definitely, I just want to clarify to everyone, like definitely did not happen to me, but, but I am, it's almost like I blow those up.

To get at that really capital T, like emotional truth. And that's kind of what I go looking for when I'm reading as well. And you, and you know it when you see it, like you feel it. And, and that is the magic of, of reading and writing. So. 

Zibby: Amazing. 

Chelsea: We're, we're so lucky. Like, just to talk to you today, I'm like, I'm the luckiest person on earth.

I get to like, talk to Zibby about books. What could be better than that?

Zibby: And my son has this internship and he's like, okay, I'm going to go to work. And I'm like, yep. I'm going to go to work too. He's like, you're literally just like sitting at your desk talking to people. 

I was like, I have the bad job. I don't know what to say. 

Chelsea: The ways they cut us down, man. The ways they get, they're like, what, that?

Oh, you wrote a book? Who cares? I'm like, listen, some people think this is cool. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Well, Chelsea, thank you and congratulations. And I know this is going to help a lot of people in addition to just captivate with like sort of the twists and turns. And so I don't know if it'll make people sweat, but stick with it. You will find your sweaty readers. 

Chelsea: Yes. Thank you for having me on and you actually have a hard cover of my book before I do. So, it's cool to see you holding it. Yeah. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Chelsea: How does she look? How does it look? 

Zibby: It looks amazing. I actually like highlighted some passages which of course I forgot.

Chelsea: Yeah, I can't wait to see it. 

Zibby: I'll read this as we as we close. The dance of managing both motherhood and trauma was slowly eroding me. That is such a good line. That is such a good. 

Chelsea: There you go. 

Zibby: Okay, well I'm happy to send you my, my highlighted copy. Oh yeah, I'll just, oh yeah, then I have a big circle around Lego Masters.

Chelsea: So funny. Yeah, Lego Masters. He's local. Portland loves local, so local above all else. 

Zibby: All right. Thanks Chelsea. Have a great day. 

Chelsea: So good to see you. 

Zibby: Thanks

British journalist and internationally bestselling author Helen Russell returns to the podcast to discuss THE DANISH SECRET TO HAPPY KIDS, a refreshingly funny, witty, and heart-warming roadmap to raising kids the Viking way—and helping them be happier, healthier, and more independent. Helen shares the experience of moving from London to Denmark, initially just for a year and before she had children, and discovering the unique parenting methods that prioritize unstructured play, spending time in nature (regardless of the weather!), and genuine connection, aided by the supportive social systems in the Nordic countries. She reflects on how these practices have shaped her parenting journey and her own perspectives on happiness and well-being.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome back, Helen on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. So excited to discuss the Danish Secret to Happy Kids, how the Viking way of raising children makes them happier, healthier, and more independent. Congratulations. 

Helen: Thank you so much. Lovely to be here. 

Zibby: Your book was so great. The thing about your writing is it's always, your voice is in it, like we learn more about you, and so it's not just like, Here's advice on raising kids.

It's like an experiential sort of memoir where we also learn everything we need to know about raising kids and Denmark and everything else. So, thank you for that. Very entertaining. 

Helen: Oh, I'm so pleased. Yeah, I always wanted to be. I am, I am definitely the idiot in these scenarios. I am learning and using my journalist background to speak to the best experts and then the best Viking parents who are guiding me through the process.

So yeah, I'm definitely learning along the way. 

Zibby: Yeah, I love that. You even have a section where you have a fictitious conversation with a friend to teach a science lesson. Idiot. Readers. Exactly what you're trying to get across, which was great. You're like, friend says, and I say, and friend says, and I say.

I love that part. That was really funny. Yeah. 

Helen: There's a lot of confusion. I think many of us don't really know much about the, the nuances and the granularity of perhaps the Scandinavian and the Nordic countries. I certainly didn't before I moved there. So yeah, I wanted to help the reader along a little bit.

Zibby: Yes, there will not be a pop quiz on which three countries are Scandinavian versus Nordic because I don't want to fail and that Greenland is not a part of anything But anyway now I know so it's all good Okay This book was so interesting because what we take for granted about kids and child rearing and all that stuff is now Thrown out the window, right?

Start with how you move to Denmark, which you write about in the book and from London and with your husband. I want to hear what he does for Lego. Does he still work for Lego? 

Helen: Yeah, so he, so I moved, yeah, from, from London as a carefree, child free woman and only ever planned on going to Denmark for a year when my husband got his dream job working for Lego.

Uh, in Denmark, and so, yeah, he's not, he's not on the sort of actually making the toy side, sadly, but lots of my friends are, so it's still very exciting. And we only have a plan to be there for a year, so Denmark had just been voted the happiest country in the world, and I wanted to find out why, so I started researching into that.

I'd been trying to start a family for years, had loads of fertility treatment, nothing was working, stressed in city life, as many can probably relate to. Um, and then halfway through my first year of living Danishly, I found out I was Finally, unexpectedly pregnant. And so that kind of took things in a different direction.

And suddenly I was seeing how these, these Nordic people, who always seem to top the happiness child charts, how they were built from the ground up, really. And I went on to have surprise twins. Um, so I was really kind of learning every day what parents in the Nordic countries did differently and how children, yeah, grow up happier and healthier and what they were doing differently and what we could learn from them.

Zibby: I mean, some of the things, I think our common sense, but we don't do it anyway. Do you know, like being in nature, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that's important, but we don't, I don't like force my kids out of nature and it's raining and we stay inside. And yet in your book, you tell us that, wait, I think I dog eared this page, that the chemicals in the rain itself can help kids, which I found.

Yeah. You said, did you know that raindrops release special compounds that combine in the air we breathe? I geek out at dinner after a day's research into the glories of weather and inhaling those compounds improves our mood. Why? Lego Man is a details man. And then you talk about, as water and air molecules collide, they create negative ions.

What are air ions? Damn. Um, well, air ions, and then you keep going, anyway, you tell us, but basically, being in the rain itself. self can change your mood, which 

Helen: is like, amazing! Everything from mud, they're even transplanting mud to some nurseries and kindergartens because they see that it's so good for kids.

But yeah, I think because the Nordic countries historically, you had to be outdoors to survive, survive in a harsh climate. They were just used to being outdoors, no matter how awful it was outside. And the weather is awful, like a lot of the time. Sunny today, but generally terrible October through, I don't know, March, April, May.

So you kind of had to get used to it. So I think, whereas many of us grew up with the idea of it's raining, oh, we'll just stay indoors today. They just went out anyway and always have done. So they have this thing, free Luftlieb or free air life. And it's just part of the culture here. You just go outside and, as you say, yeah, UNICEF studies show that children who spend more time in nature tend to be happier and healthier.

So, as you say, it's common sense, but we just don't do it in much of the world. 

Zibby: But I feel like having a scientific reason to do it makes me want to do it more. Yes, it's not just your grandmother says, it's actually, oh, science says, yeah. Yes, exactly. Science says. There was one vacation I went on with the kids and it started pouring rain and the water wasn't working and in the hotel that we were staying in, and we went outside and I gave them water.

like shampoo in the rain. Like, you know, like I washed, I used the rain as like the shower, all the like tiny little hotel bottles, like on the pavement. And they were like really little, my twins were little at the point. And like, you know, we were outside and they were like laughing and screaming. And it was really like one of the best times we've ever had, even though at the time we were like, Oh my gosh, it's freezing.

I don't know. It just makes all those memories, but maybe it was, maybe it was the science of the rain. So now I know. 

Helen: Yeah. You know, we're all, you know, as adults in this sort of. This lust for wellness, everyone's going towards cold water swimming. Well, it's often cold here and people are still out there in the cold water.

And yeah, so it's all the things that we are kind of being sold back to us. That if we just took a step back a little bit, we'd see we had all along and could try and get more of in our lives. 

Zibby: Well, I jumped right to rain, but your story is, is much more chronological, and you start with even getting pregnant, and then you start with paid leave, and the amazing benefits that the government of Denmark gives to families, and how life changing that is, and even how Do people in Denmark are just so happy getting married and divorced?

It's like not a big deal. So like, they like marriage so much, you said they just like to do it over and over again. 

Helen: I know, yeah, really high divorce rate, but also really high remarriage because they love it so much. They don't mind doing it more than once. And yeah, it's really interesting. So parents in, in Denmark where I am, um, get 52 weeks.

Parental leave to share between them. There's no stigma attached to that. The men have to use some as well. After which, you are guaranteed a place in high quality, uh, local, local government often run childcare from six months onwards, and that is 75 percent subsidized by the state. But I always like to point out, it's not just because the Nordic countries like to be uh, all friendly and fluffy and kind.

It's because it makes sense. We've seen that for every 1 invested in early childhood education, the broader economy gets back at least 1. 50. So childcare pays for itself. And Denmark and the Nordic countries are doing this because they, they see that it makes sense. They see it, that many women are happier if they're able to have a career and a family.

So they're just making it possible. And then the working mothers, 80 percent of mothers work. So their tax money goes to fund. The next, the next lot of parents in the system kind of works that way. So yeah, it's, it's a very different way of life. 

Zibby: Oh my 

Helen: gosh. 

Zibby: And you mentioned even the boxes that they give out to the parents.

And then you sort of slid in that you lost your sister to SIDS when, in the 80s. And I'm so sorry about that. terrible. And then you grew up an only child. Tell me, can you talk about that? 

Helen: And yeah, of course. Yeah. So my sister died of what used to be called cop death and now it's sudden infant death syndrome in the early eighties.

And now we know a lot more about putting children down on their backs, for example, so that they could, their airways are free to breathe. Um, and in Finland, as everyone was learning more about SIDS and how to prevent it, they thought, well, hang on, if we could give, Every parent, an affordable, safe way to let their baby sleep.

Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that sort of bring down infant mortality rates? So yeah, they made this baby box that every new parent will get. And the, it's got everything you need for a new baby. So it's got the diapers, got maybe a pacifier, some clothes. And then afterwards, it's got a little mattress and the new baby can sleep in the cardboard box.

And because everybody gets it, there's no stigma attached. There's no sort of thinking that the, the Jones is two doors down. I've got a fancy cot and you've only got a cardboard box. Everybody uses it. It's, it's, they're very proud of it and it's spawned imitators in other places around the world, but actually it's brought down the infant mortality rate hugely in Finland.

And yeah, a lot of the ways that they deal with young babies in the Nordic countries, like letting them sleep outside in their carriages, but they're strapped into the baby carriages so that they can't roll over onto their front, so they may have like a duvet or a comforter on top, but it's not going to, you know, restrict their airways.

Because they, they're strapped so that they can't get stuck underneath the duvet. I'm trying to mime. This is no good on a podcast, but they thought about all of this. And so of course, as you say, that was really in my mind, becoming a new parent. As any new parent, you spend all of your time, hoping the baby will go to sleep and then listening to just chip that they're still breathing.

And, you know, and so I was very hyper vigilant about all of that stuff, but the, the Danish way and the fresh air. Um, really reassured me. And yeah, I found a way to be able to cope really enough to, to go roll those dice again. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. So are you happier? Like you've done the thing, you've done the sliding doors moment of your life and like are living the other life.

Like, what do you think your life would be like had you stayed in the UK and, or if you had stayed in London versus now? And You know, how happy are you? How happy are any of 

Helen: you? I'm very grateful for all that Denmark has brought me. But I think, you know, I, I, as we talked before, my last book about how to be sad is that we can't be happy all the time.

It's a beautiful, glorious state of joy, but it's not all the time. So of course there are the, the things that blindside us and the, and the, The personal things that will, will come out and really get at us. But I think what the Nordic countries do really well is they remove the barriers to happiness.

They, they take away reasons for unhappiness. And so I'm, yeah, I'm pretty happy. I'm doing pretty well. The sliding door thing is a weird one for me because I just, you know, you never know for sure, but certainly the way I was living in London was not conducive to A, getting pregnant or B, not getting pregnant.

having a family and ever getting to see them. So yes, it's really been helpful for me this way. But I think in this book, because I know I love Denmark, and I'm so grateful for all that it's given me, but I won't be here forever. My family and friends are still in the UK. And so I won't live here forever.

So I wanted to in this book to really distill the things that I can take with me to steal and use wherever I am in the world. So I don't want it to be too much about, Oh, don't the Scandinavian countries have it all great. And to make people green with envy, that there are things that we can export and there are things that we can not export.

vote for or lobby for or just think about a bit differently. Yeah, I guess I just 

Zibby: Yes, no, I should have, I, I'm sorry if I didn't properly put it in. The book is about, is intended to help people who don't live in Denmark extract some of the benefits so that we can have happier children and lives no matter where we are.

This is not a travel guidebook or a, you know, proselytizing to, to, 

Helen: you know. This is lovely. Come visit when it's not raining. 

Zibby: I know. Well, aside from the weather, it sounds, it sounds good. You know, the infrastructure, I mean, even just you saying 52 weeks of paid leave when here, everybody is just lobbying for really any paid leave.

And you know, the system is so terrible. So I don't know between that and the food too, you talked about with the food and eating whole foods and 

Helen: healthy. I mean, they, they have specific, I mean, the reputation for dangerous pastries isn't for nothing, but they also have a specific word. For, um, tooth butter, when you slather on the butter, the butter, the lurpak, so thick that you can see your teeth marks in when you bite into the bread.

That's lovely. They also love like wieners. They love like frankfurter sausages, but yeah, they tend to serve like three hearty meals a day, a couple of snacks in between. And I don't know about you growing up, but there's none of the whole, um, you must eat your broccoli first or there's no dessert, there's not kind of ultimatums or blackmail or bribery.

It's more like, there's the food. If you're hungry you'll eat it. If you're, if you're not hungry, maybe you'll be hungry the next meal. And yeah, that, that pressure taken off, I find as a woman having grown up with all of the fun eating issues that many of us pick up over the years, it seems to produce a much more healthy approach to food, which I really value.

Zibby: And you said how there, it's all about strong, not thin. 

Helen: Yes, isn't that amazing? And it makes sense, of course, that kind of the Viking ideal. I spoke to someone in Norway who said, um, we were having a talk, we were having a talk on Zoom just like this, and he said, show me your arms. And I thought, oh, hello, what's going on here?

And he said, yeah, you'd survive in the wild. Like, that would be considered, like, good arms, because you need strong arms to survive. So it's, it's strong, not thin. An emphasis on training rather than going to the gym to be lesser. It's. It's training to get stronger, which is just like a little kind of shift in the way you approach it.

That makes a big difference. I really like that. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, I don't know. I don't know what to do with the fact that like I live here and I'm doing everything wrong and like, 

Helen: no, I think, you know, there's, there's lots of things that I plan to steal

Not just because the Lego connection or Hans Christian Andersen or any of that stuff, but kids play for a lot longer in the Nordic countries than they do in the US and the UK, play exclusively until the age of six or seven in Finland. And it always makes me laugh because they love play so much that they named it twice.

It's the New York, New York of, of the recognition, but there's a, there's a word for unstructured imaginative play and that's lie in Danish. And then there's play of it's a board game or a sport or musical instrument, that's spieler. And so. They, they make sure they have time in their lives for all of these different types of play.

It's really encouraged and it means that even adults kind of have a more playful nature than perhaps I'd encountered elsewhere where the pace of life maybe is a bit more intense. But yeah, that, that idea of, of play is really important for being healthy and happy and more creative thinking feels really helpful when you work in jobs like we do where we have to be able to think creatively, but often we're so busy.

Thank you. That kind of falls by the wayside. So the idea that having permission to prioritize that and that actually studies show, again, going back to science, studies from Cambridge University and, and Danish studies show that children who learn through play get to the same point in the end. There's no difference.

There's no advantage to sitting a child down with books rather than learning through play. So I'm trying to trust a little bit and let my kids do it that way. 

Zibby: Someone gave me the game Higgy. Higgy? Higgy? How do you pronounce it? Oh, the 

Helen: word is who they it was a 

Zibby: game. That's exciting. It's a game. Yeah, it comes in like a little box.

Like at dinner we always try to play these like little conversation games because they're really funny and make us laugh. Anyway, so that's one of them and I've loved it so much that I've now given it as a gift to some other people. How do you play? What do they do? I know, you know, it's, there's no board, there's no board or anything.

They're just like little cards that come in like a white sort of plastic case or something like that. And then you read the cards and their questions and things like that, designed to like help you get to know the people better, but it's fun. 

Helen: Oh, so yeah, so it's that kind of cozy togetherness. So yeah, that's nice.

And, and the soft skills and the collaboration and cooperation is, is prioritized throughout everything in, in Denmark. It often feels as though things maybe take a little longer, things go a little slower, but it's because those, those moments of connection, those togetherness soft skills are really important.

Really highly valued and prized, which I found a bit weird when I first came here. I came from London. I came from a really fast paced life, but actually now when you think about a I and how the world is changing so much that it's going to be those skills for connection and collaboration and hopefully creativity to that.

That's what our kids will need. So Fostering those feels like a really good plan. Yes. Good plan. I'm on board. I'm on board. It'll be a 

Zibby: great 

Helen: game. It'll be great. 

Zibby: Yeah, yeah. And so what, what is your next project? 

Helen: Well, I am writing a novel right now. Yes, it's very exciting. Um, but as you know, it's a very different headspace, so I'm going off into my imaginary world, but I think, you know, when you have a family, It's very grounding because you can never feel too lofty about anything because there will be somebody who needs something mopping up, or needs something cooking for them, or needs something washing for them.

So I'm trying to encourage self sufficiency, Dane's very good on that, and I'll let my kids do a bit more around the house and help out a little bit so that I can crack on with Writing the novel, but yeah, it's interesting. This book especially has been one that obviously my children have been a lot more involved in than my other books.

So it's my sixth, but suddenly this is the one that they're kind of aware of. And they're like, oh yeah, you, you said this, so you have to let me play now. And you, and you said I could do this myself, so I'm going to do this. It's interesting. They're quite invested. And hopefully that will give me some time to be 

Zibby: able to do the next book.

We'll see. Yes. Well, they'll be so excited. I mean, you know. How is book marketing in Denmark work? Like, is this a big book in, like, did the Danes adopt it as, like, a, you know, a big testament to their strength. 

Helen: Oh, that's a very kind thought. Um, not so much. I think, so, internationals moving to the Nordic countries are very supportive and interested, and Danes who are curious about how they appear to outsiders.

And Danes are very good at that. They're, um, for a country that always comes top of the happiness polls, they could be pretty cocky or arrogant about it, but they never are. They're very interested in what people think about them, which is very, very good. Kind and generous, but yeah, in Denmark, it's more like, well, this is taken for granted.

This is normal. So things like hygge and things like the emphasis on play or being outdoors or risky play or not, not over praising their children. The fact that I've written about this. My Nordic parenting friends think, of course, like, why wouldn't that be the case? It's just how it's been forever. So, no, for them, I am a strange recitalist, writing about them, and they're like, how is this interesting?

And I try and explain, well, it doesn't quite work like this in other places around the world. We don't sing at school every day in other places around the world, so it's quite fun that you do that here. Wait, can you, can you say any more about the novel? Oh, well, it is, so I, I love, um, a story about a woman in the, in her 20s or 30s, finding herself as much as the next woman, but I wanted to write something for people in the life stage I'm in and beyond about what happens then when maybe you're out of the trenches of early parenthood, but you've also still, um, given so much and, um, and taken on so many roles that perhaps you might not have chosen to and what happens when that all becomes too much.

That's what I'm doing next. I love it. Oh my gosh. Gorilla comedy combined. Comedy. We'll make it up. 

Zibby: Comedy. All right. Thromedy from Helen Russell. Stay tuned. So what advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Helen: Oh, I think, what do I think? I think you just have to do it. I think, um, I speak to people quite a lot and I, and I speak in schools quite a lot or at universities and there's a lot of people, of course, who will say, I would like to write a book.

And I say, oh, that's great. Have you, have you done any of it yet? They say, no. And I say, well, you kind of just have to, to get out that, of course. That terrible first drafts, every first draft is terrible. Just get to the end of that terrible first draft, and then you can go back with a different part of your brain.

And a journalist background was really helpful for me because I would get from my creative side. I would get down the first draft and then I'd go into my editing mode with a different colored pen, always got pens in my hand, and I could be really critical and go through it and say, that's terrible, could do better.

So I think printing things out, red pens. Getting the End of the Terrible First Draft, and also so many of us consume so many stories these days, be it books or TV or movies, that actually, if we just trust ourselves, we have an idea of the rhythm of speech and what will keep a reader's attention. So I think, um, Yeah, just get some peace and trust yourself and go with it, get to the end of that first draft I'd say.

Love it. 

Zibby: Amazing. Well, Helen, congratulations. I really enjoyed the book. It was entertaining and I learned a lot and it made me definitely think differently about my own parenting as we struggled to get out the door this morning. So 

Helen: thank you very much. The battle to get shoes on is real. Yes, exactly.

Lovely to see 

Zibby: you. 

Helen: All right. Thanks 

Zibby: for listening to moms don't have time to read books. If you love it, please leave a review and follow us on social at Zippy Owens and at Zippy readers.

Award-winning journalist Bianca Bosker joins Zibby to discuss her instant New York Times bestseller, GET THE PICTURE, a gripping, hilarious, and gorgeously written exploration of the art world. Bianca delves into her journey through that world—from working as a security guard in a museum to selling art at high-profile galleries. She describes immersing herself in the lives of artists, gallerists, collectors, curators, and art dealers, which led to a book that is part user guide to the hidden logic of the art world and part personal quest to live a more expansive life. She reveals how art has completely changed how she sees and experiences life—the frozen food aisle, for example, is really an art installation!

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Bianca. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Get the Picture, a mind bending journey among the inspired artists and obsessive art fiends who taught me how to see.

Congratulations. 

Bianca: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It's so nice to speak with you.

Zibby: It's my pleasure, and I'm so excited that we got to connect at the LA Times Festival of Books, and made this happen. Awesome. 

Bianca: They really put the festival in book festival, I would say, right? I mean, the food, the music, it just felt so celebratory.

I loved it. I didn't want it to end. 

Zibby: Yeah. I mean, I was a little tired. I have to be honest. But it was great. Well, your book is fabulous. I'm not surprised. It became an instant New York Times bestseller. Congratulations, though. That must have felt amazing, right? 

Bianca: Thank you. Yes. So, so exciting. It's like, you know, you just, I mean, the book was five years in the making and, you know, you, I think every author, obviously, um, you wants their book to find as many readers as possible.

And so it's a dream come true. 

Zibby: It's amazing. Well, all the experiences that you write about and all the time spent, I mean, it's obvious. It's like people have to give you a hats off to spending your life doing all these things and then writing about it at the same time so the rest of us don't have to do it.

Right? Isn't that the thing? It's like we get to learn through you and live vicariously, and yet we don't have, we're not, like, in Miami or at an arcade, you know, all the, all the things that you do. So congratulations. It's exciting. So tell listeners more about the book. 

Bianca: Yeah. So I would say that my like short elevator pitch, which I have honed at dinner table parties or at dinner parties and at cocktail parties by just kind of seeing when people's eyes glaze over is that it is about the years I spent disowning my regular life as a journalist To sell art at galleries, work with artists in their studios, patrol museum wings as a security guard, and more, all as part of this journey to understand why does art matter and how do any of us engage with it more deeply.

And to me, the book is part user guide to the hidden logic of the art world, which is very hidden and very deliberately hidden, and also a quest to learn how to live life more expansively. I mean, this book for me really started from a place of not Appreciating art, of not knowing how to engage with art, of feeling like I was, you know, I didn't know enough, I didn't belong, and something clicked for me where I began to have this steep, gnawing fear that by turning my back on art, I was missing out on something really big.

And the people also really drew me in. I am a writer who is obsessed with obsession. And there was this magnetic passion of people in the art world that just intrigued me. I mean, I'd never met a group of people willing to sacrifice so much for something of so little obvious practical value. And they also had this, really intriguing approach to the world.

You know, I felt like I was living this claustrophobic existence, whereas they had this expansive lease on life. They acted like they'd access these trap doors in their brains. And they also told me I lacked visual literacy, which they said was downright dangerous in a world so saturated with images. You know, pitied me and, um, it got me really intrigued on whether I could see art and whether I could see the world the way they did and what might change if I could.

And as you said, my way of trying to figure that out was to insert myself in the middle of the action. 

Zibby: Wow. I love how at the end you're like looking at the supermarket in a whole different way. 

Bianca: Yeah, really. I mean, it just, I mean, art, yes, like opened me up to experiencing beauty in so many more places than I ever did before, but also like experiencing The everyday, the way that we experience art, right?

Yes, like that. I, I write about this experience of a guest standing in the frozen food section and I was totally sober at the time, but sort of having this experience of being like, Oh my God, all of this is an art project. Like, what if it was, I mean, and there's something really exciting about that. And artists do that.

They have this ability to walk down the street and sort of examine like a parked car as though it's a sculpture and take that extra beat, linger on just the sort of. miraculous fragility and impossibility of the everyday around us and experience that jostle that we get from art everywhere. 

Zibby: Have you figured out what makes someone inherently an artist?

Bianca: Hmm. I mean, I do believe that there is an artist in each of us to some extent. You know, I do think that artists, like capital A artists, people who self describe as artists, who work in studios with, you know, paint or computers or cameras, what have you. Certainly there is this sense in which it is not even a decision.

Like I, I remember asking, you know, artists, you know, why they did what they did. And their answers made it sound like I was asking them why they eat food or drink water. You know, they were like, well, that's just what I have to do to survive. Or it's just the way I was born. And they really described it as, you know, less a career than just kind of a lifestyle and existence.

Um, and I think by that same token, you know, I should say that my book and my journey really focused on emerging up and coming artists, which to me, these are people who occupy the highest stakes and least covered part of the art world. You know, we hear so much about the big money, the big names, and it is not at all representative of most people's experience in of the art world.

I mean, most people are like, you know, at their, at every sale is a celebration, you know, artists are scrimping on rent so that their art can live better than they do, right? Like the art sleeps soundly in their studio. They're waking up on a friend's couch covered in cat pee. And I wish that was a hypothetical, but it's not.

And I think that. There's often this way in which artists are described as these streamers and sort of like fanciful people. And on the one hand they do have this fascinating approach to life that's we can each learn from. And on the other hand, they are freaking survivors. You know, they are people that just can figure out how to put one step in front of another and both keep the lights on, but also keep doing what feeds their souls.

And just going back to the artist and each of us, you know, I write about how, for me, I believe that art. I came to this understanding that art is, as scientists and artists tell us, fundamental to the human experience because it helps us fight the reducing tendencies of our minds. And I believe that there is an artist in each of us to the extent that we struggle to keep our brains, which they do automatically, from compressing our experience of the world.

You know, art is a choice. It's a fight against complacency, and it's a decision to live a more complex, more nuanced, more interesting, and more beautiful life. But you have to work at it. It doesn't just happen. You've got to work at it. 

Zibby: I mean, it's not so different from writing in a way, right? It's how you see the world, what is, what makes someone a writer, how, why do you do it?

Like all the same questions you could put to writing a little bit, right? What do you think? 

Bianca: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think that, you know, I, I got very interested in this question of what is art, exactly, prompted by an experience I had in which a nearly naked performance artist sat on my face for an art performance.

And it raised a lot of questions for me about, you know, where does art begin and end? How do we know it? How do we recognize it? And I was interested to And what am I doing with my life? Yeah. I think that I was really interested to learn that, first of all, the experts have largely like thrown up their hands at defining art, but also that for thousands of years, all Art was really considered anything involving human ingenuity and skill.

And so when we talk about art these days, we tend to, so think of it in this narrow bandwidth of painting, sculpture, maybe poetry, but it used to be that art was anything like passing laws, training horses, blowing glass. carving marble. And so while my own business card doesn't include the word artist on it, I do think that this is a question that I've been like grappling with and the conversation I've been having with a lot of readers about well like, is a writer an artist, right?

Is a non fiction writer an artist? Is a journalist an artist? And I will say I've had interesting experiences of going to art exhibits and museums and seeing some of the work. I remember there was one video piece in particular and I was like, That's a video art? I was like, that's journalism to me, you know, like you, you sort of, you know, made a documentary.

And so these are really interesting, boris lines, but yeah, I don't know. I'm still grappling with whether or not I get to call myself an artist. 

Zibby: I'm still, I'm still impressed you have business cards. 

Bianca: Well, they still have my old books cover on them. I 

Zibby: haven't gotten the new 

Bianca: ones 

Zibby: made. I actually just got some really cute business cards from the store.

And I was like, well, maybe I'll get these business cards and I'll start giving them out. And now I bring them in this little tin. I'm like, I feel so important. Yeah. No, it's great. 

Bianca: And I don't know if anyone ever does anything with them, but it makes me feel like I've done something by getting someone this, it's just a small offering.

Exactly. 

Zibby: Yeah. But now, then I get people's cards and I, and then I get home from these conferences and I'm like, what do I do with all of these? And then I shove them in a drawer and I don't know, I'm a waste, it's a waste, but anyway. Go back to being, actually go back even further. So I saw you went to Princeton, but tell me like your life before then and when you knew you were someone who was obsessed with obsession or however you said it earlier, which is so cool.

Bianca: So I would say, yeah, I grew up in Portland, Oregon. I was an only child, so I did a lot of reading. Books are a very good one person activity and I, I will say that I was, obsessed with art. I mean, art was a huge part of my life. I, like a lot of kids growing up, I painted and in high school, I actually flirted with applying to art school.

And then at some point, adult Bianca grabbed the wheel. Um, and in college I studied economic, you know, I mean, I was an East Asian studies major. I learned Chinese, spent a lot of time in China, but like, I took classes in economics, never took classes in art history, took a few art classes along the and, and then Kind of consoled myself with this idea that if I wasn't going to be an artist, at least I would appreciate art and that dream lasted about as long as it took me to move to New York and try to start seeing art on a regular basis where I just felt like I was totally out of my league.

And as I said, kind of backed off and for a long time, we weren't on speaking terms. But I, through college, I did a lot of writing and journalism. I was a Part of a group called the University Press Club where we were like local student freelancers for publications, which is so fun. I got to get paid and write for professional editors at places like the Trenton Times and I did a brief detour into the world of management consulting for various reasons.

Didn't stick for a lot of other reasons and returned to journalism. I worked at HuffPost for a few years and then quit to Train as a sommelier. And that journey became a book cork dork. I wrote a book before that about Chinese architecture, mark academic book. And then I've been working as a journalist and author and perhaps artists.

I don't know what we want to call it ever since. 

Zibby: Wow. That's amazing. So after you got, well, first of all, when you were going through all of these experiences, did you always know that you were doing it to make it a book in the end? And did you approach it differently? Like, and how did you record all of that in the time?

To remember, were you like, journaling every day? Or did you say like, I'm just gonna figure it out and maybe it'll be a book? 

Bianca: Yeah, so, I mean, I will say that as a journalist, I have the Sickness that infects a lot of journalists, which is to say that I can't do anything without thinking that it could become a story like I go on vacation, and I'm like, Oh, interesting.

Like, maybe this could become a story, you know, and you know, I think that my brain is very much fly paper, and I'm just constantly looking for ideas and inspiration. And so That's sort of the approach I take to everything, which is, um, not always the healthiest, but that's who I am. And I will say that, you know, for this, yeah, I embarked with this idea, you know, like, you never, you can't take anything for granted with a piece of writing.

I'm always like, I'll believe it when I see it. Like, when it's there, and it's printed, and it's live, like, then I can say I have written a book. Um, and until that point, it's just, you know, you're kind of keeping your fingers crossed. But no, I was going into it with this idea that it could become a book.

You know, for readers who aren't familiar with the book, as I alluded to before, I did take a somewhat untraditional approach to the reporting. I did interviews, I read books, you can see a lot of them behind me. These are actually like stacked too deep. There's a lot of art books and there's more that I'm staring at around, but I also believe in learning by doing.

And so I decided that I wanted to go and work in the art world. I wanted to figure out how it worked, how, like I said, any of us could engage with art more deeply by throwing myself into the center of the action. Because I think, first of all, the miraculous often emerges from the mundane. And I also felt like from my last experience with Cork Dork, you know, it's one thing for an art dealer to Politely tell you how they sell a painting and it's another as I've now experienced to spend five days on your feet, schmoozing millionaires during Art Basel Miami beaches fairs and selling thousands of dollars worth of art from the backseat of an uber while people are doing cocaine around you and those give you different insights into what's really going on.

And so along the way, yeah, I You know, took notes in notebooks. I recorded audio. I would make notes to myself just about what I was experiencing and what I was feeling and what I was thinking about. And it was very funny to kind of read back some of the early notes that I made to myself as I got further on in the journey.

Cause I was like, Oh, how embarrassing that you didn't know that Bianca, like how embarrassing you didn't know that artist was, or like, how could you not have understood this, that, the other, but. The reality is that the art world is very opaque by design. I think that there is a way in which it views secrecy as key to its survival.

And it's true that there are a lot of things that go on that could pass for absurd, unethical, illegal, anywhere else. And so if you haven't taken this sort of mafia like vow of silence, you're viewed as a risk. And as a journalist, you're viewed It was very difficult getting access, to me, surprisingly difficult getting access into this world.

It was also, though, a different experience. I had also, you know, done some recording for my last book, and, um, in that case, I was drinking a lot of wine, and so I remember, in particular, listening to one audio recording of myself tasting through these wines during a wine tasting, and it was, you know, It's a really horrific experience to listen to myself getting drunk.

Like, as the audio goes on, I'm like, you're getting very loud, you're slurring your words, like this is just, ugh. So I already am not wild about listening to my voice, um, thank you to podcast listeners for listening to my voice. You know, I don't know any of us like hearing our voice recorded back to us, but that was a particularly cringe worthy experience.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. And so what are you diving deep into now, if anything? 

Bianca: Yeah. Well, so I have. For the last few months, Get the Picture came out a couple months ago, and so I have been diving deep into the world of helping it find its way into the world, and so I've been on book tour. Obviously, you know, we got to meet in LA for the Festival of Books, and now I'm beginning to think about, yes, what's next?

So I have a couple of stories in the works. Um, I'm a contributing writer at The Atlantic, so I write most regularly for them. So I have a few kind of things that are simmering, a couple pieces in the works still about the art world. And then beginning to open myself up to try and think about what might be the next adventure.

I mean, I think these books for me emerge out of an intellectual curiosity, but also a kind of spiritual hunger. You know, I think that, you know, this book took five years and for something to sustain you that long, I think it requires more than just. Like I said, a kind of intellectual curiosity, and rather, some kind of human need that I need to figure out.

And both books, for me, grew out of these encounters with these incredibly passionate people who really knocked me off my axis. They really made me wonder if everything I thought about how to live life was wrong. And that sent me into These journeys to try and uncover a different way of looking at wine, a different way of looking at art, but also, like I said, a different way of living, and I do feel that the immersion in the art world has done that for me.

I mean, my whole relationship with color, for example. I mean, I've never thought of color as being a hedonistic experience, like biting into like a fatty, juicy burger. And now it is. There is a building on the Upper East Side that is this, uh, glows this orange in the late afternoon sun that literally moved me to tears.

And I am not a crier. And you know, or that experience of Of being open to experiencing art everywhere. I went recently to the American Dream Mall in New Jersey, which, if you haven't been, is, I mean, an absurd art installation in its own right. Like, it has an indoor full beach, it has an indoor amusement park, it has ice skating rinks, it has an aquarium, it has pool.

Many other things. I'm a train. Anyway, and I remember going through the aquarium and I was like, anyway, it's a total trip and I was like, these are sculptures, man. This is incredible. And I think that there's something really exciting about that ability to keep seeing the world with new eyes that art helps us see.

to accomplish and integrate into our lives. 

Zibby: So you're obviously incredibly bright and articulate and passionate and all of this stuff. And now you've had great success with the book. Are you happy? Well, 

Bianca: for the kind words. I am happy. I think, I mean, I think I'm as happy as, you know, any, any of us can be. I don't know.

I mean, I feel very, gosh, I love that question, which I've never been asked in an interview, but no, I feel very. fortunate and fulfilled. And I think, you know, look, I am someone for whom books have always been just a kind of North star. I mean, I am someone who like, doesn't get really excited about seeing movie celebrities, but if I'm in a room with a writer, like I start sweating, you know, if there's a writer that I admire, like my heart starts pounding, like I'm trying to figure out what am I going to say to, you know, introduce myself as anyway, a man on the street in New York that I passed on It's probably quarterly that I am convinced is gay to Lee's and like one day I will work up the nerve to say hello to him.

It probably isn't gay to Lee's. I'm just probably like, you know, thinking all elderly well dressed men look the same. I don't know. But since get the picture came out, I have. I've been just so thrilled to hear from a lot of readers who have written in to share how much the book resonated with them, and to share the sort of things that they see in the book that I see in the books that I love the most.

You know, the way that the book continued, the journey of the book for them continued beyond the pages. Of the book, if that makes sense, that, you know, and so that is a thrill that does make me so happy. And, you know, I think at the same time as a writer, I'm not going to lie, like writing is agony and ecstasy.

Like in the moment when I'm writing it, I'm happy because there's nothing else I'd rather be doing. And I'm also miserable because it's hard and I'm wrestling with so much crippling doubt. And I'm like, you know, every piece, I feel like I sit down to the blank page and I'm like, how? You know, how do I do that?

And that's part of the excitement is that every piece is different. Every piece has its own challenge. Every piece. forces you to learn something new about the world and about your craft. So, you know, and then, you know, aside from that, I'm very lucky to be happy outside of my writing endeavors as well.

You know, knock on wood. 

Zibby: Awesome. Are you happy? I don't know what made me ask that. I was just like curious, you know, you're so I don't know, like analytic and this is going well and I was just like, I'm wondering like, you know, when the camera's not on, I don't know. It's none of my business, but thank you for allowing me to ask.

Am I happy? Yes. I am happy right now, but you know, it's not to say I wasn't like crying yesterday, you know, like things. Of course. You 

Bianca: know. I know. Try me in an hour. Let's see how it's going. 

Zibby: Yeah, exactly. Well, 

Bianca: I 

Zibby: feel like you've, you know, already sort of imparted advice by the way that you're talking about your writing journey and process and, you know, implicit in that is, you know, to find something that is worth your time to research and dedicate and yourself and write about and all of that.

But what advice, what other advice would you have for aspiring authors and journalists 

Bianca: Yeah, well, I think that, first of all, you know, writing is, you just have to do it, right? I mean, I think that there's, uh, and that is the hardest part, is actually doing the writing. Um, I mean, I can't tell you the number of things I will do to avoid actually writing.

I mean, my, like, like, the grout in the, uh, Shower is never cleaner than when I'm on deadline.

Like the, the, the, you know, the urgent chores that I will invent to get out of wrestling with a sentence is, you know, truly a testament to human creativity. I will say that, you know, I think that on the one hand, the industry is an absolute mess. On the other hand, there are more outlets, perhaps than ever, to write for.

It's not going to say that you're going to get the money you probably deserve for what you're writing. But nonetheless, I do think that when it comes to writing, it's important to build up, especially for journalists, I think it's important to build up a body of clips, right? Which means, like, articles that you have written.

I think if you're an aspiring non fiction author, I think that's important. I do think that there is something really wonderful for all of its flaws. About the world of journalism and nonfiction which is that any good editor can't say no to a great story idea So if you have a fabulous idea and it and what is a fabulous idea may depend on the publication Like what is the right story for the Atlantic may not be the right story for?

food and wine or I don't know a Bloomberg Businessweek, but I do think that that is the best kind of an incredible ticket in, um, if you can find it. And then I think that, you know, the other piece, I think it's, it's just practice. It really is just practice. And again, doesn't get easier with practice. Um, but nonetheless, parts of it get easier and I think you become less precious.

And I think I at least have found, and I learned a lot actually from artists. There was an artist I worked with, Julie Curtis, who really helped me to understand the process. Of creating and not be freaked out by it. You know, I think, you know, she she just she just understood to make peace with the fact that they're going to be these predictable challenges along the way there is going to be this feeling of breakdown at some point with the work that will be a piece for a point where you think you can't move any further further with it and all hope is lost.

And then you just move through it and you just push through it and you just figure it out and I just, I love that because I do not have that equanimity about me. But I do think that just revising is the other thing. I do think maybe the difference between like good writers and great writers is just the difference between draft 2 and draft 12.

Zibby: That's a great sound bite, I love that. Amazing. Bianca, thank you so much. I'm so impressed. I can't wait to read what you write next, and I'm now going to start following along on all your Atlantic pieces and doing more of a back deep dive, I don't know, deep dive in retrospect. I don't know. The retrospective, it would say.

Exactly. Exactly. The retrospective. Bianca Bosco, retrospective. 

Bianca: Anyway, all right. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much. Such a pleasure speaking with you. Have a great day and hope we, hope we all stay happy. Hope all of our listeners are happy too. 

Zibby: I agree. Yes, you do.

Thanks for listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. If you love it, please leave a review and follow us on social at Zibby Owens and at Zibby Readers.

Zibby chats with bestselling author Sara Goodman Confino about BEHIND EVERY GOOD MAN, a deliciously entertaining 1960s political rom-com about a DC suburban wife who catches her husband cheating with his secretary… and decides to run the political campaign of his (very handsome) opponent in a Senate race. Sarah highlights the research and her personal connections to the novel, including insights from her elderly relatives who vividly remember the era. She also reflects on the evolution of her characters and the themes of motherhood, self-discovery, and resilience. Sarah reveals that she recently left her teaching career to focus on writing full-time, and touches on her previous novels and upcoming projects.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Sarah. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss your novel Behind Every Good Man. Congratulations. 

Sara: Thank you. 

Zibby: I really love this book. I love your voice. I love the characters, the unexpected things, the mom, the kid, I mean, all of it. It was so fun and the Jewish element and women's empowerment, I mean, all of it.

So many great themes. Such a fun story. I would turn pages the whole time. So thank you for this one. 

Sara: Oh, thank you. I had a lot of fun writing it, honestly. Just researching it, just everything. It was great. So, tell listeners what your book is about, please. So this one is set in 1962. We have our main character, Beverly Diamond.

She is a 27 year old wife and mother to young children, and her husband is running a Senate re election campaign in Maryland for a sitting senator, and her father's a retired congressman, and she walks into her husband's office and catches him cheating with his secretary, you know, the ultimate cliche.

And he tries to be like, Oh, well, you know, since we had kids, you're not paying attention. She says, Nuh uh and kicks him out. And he tries to frighten her and is like, well, you're going to have to downsize. And I did a lot of research with a lawyer friend. He actually was totally bluffing on that. And she says, well, no, I'm not downsizing. I'm going to get a job. And he's like, well, what are you going to do? And she realizes the one thing she knows is politics. So she goes to the opposing candidate and says, if you want to win this thing, I'm your new campaign manager. And it's just so much fun. I really enjoyed writing this one. I've loved rereading it.

Like this is my favorite thing I've done by far. 

Zibby: Oh, I love it. 

Sara: I think every author has to say that with every book, but it's true. Like this one really is my favorite.

Zibby: I mean, it would sort of take the wind out of people's sails. If you were like, this book is okay, but like, read my last one. You'd be like, okay, so where did this idea come from for you?

Sara: So, I think it piggybacked a little bit off of my most recent one, which is Don't Forget to Write, which I'm going to tell the little backstory of that idea. 

Zibby: Yeah, yeah. 

Sara: The day that one came out, my editor emailed me and was like, what's next? And she had just rejected my previous idea that I was 40, 000 words into, and I was not thrilled about that.

And a bookstagrammer had actually called me the Marvelous Mrs. Confino that morning. And I joked that I was going to put that on my classroom door, which I did. I had to peel it off yesterday and ripped my nails. It was my last day of teaching yesterday, which is intense. But I had that Mrs. Maisel idea.

And my editor said she wanted a character with similar vibes to my previous heroine, but not a copycat character. And I was like, I have no clue what that means, but okay, I'll try and figure that out. And we were on the beach and I just had this Mrs. Maisel feeling in my head and I loved the idea of the early 60s when everything was so bright and colorful and pre Kennedy assassination, but there was still a lot going on beneath the surface that kind of wasn't being addressed yet that we knew was going to reach a boiling point.

So I had fun with that era for Don't Forget to Write and when it came time to do the next one, I just had this idea of a scorned woman in my head and I wanted someone who could get revenge without it being, like mean and evil. She was just going to stand up for herself and do the right thing for herself, for her family, for everyone, really.

And I don't know, I got that idea of the cheating husband and then I wanted something that she could do. I didn't want it to be like, oh, I'm just doing this for me. And I don't know, the politics thing just kind of came up. I definitely realized once I sold the book that I knew nothing about politics in the 1960s, so I had to do some research there.

But one of the more fun things, too, is my aunt and uncle have actually been my research team for the last two books. They are 87 and 91 right now and remember literally everything. It's crazy. Like, my uncle graduated from UPenn Dental School. in 1958. So for Don't Forget to Write, he knew everything about Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore in that era, and then they moved down to D. C. after that, and so he just knew everything. So like, I remember I would text him sometimes and just be like, how did you get from here to here before they built this road? And he'd send me a map, and how long it would take in 1962 to get there, and like,.. How do you know this? So that was really a lot of fun getting to use them for family.

My uncle, actually, when I told him the premise for this book at first, said, Oh, you should have her catch him at the colonial manor motel. I'd never heard of this place in my life. And I was like, what, what is that? And he tells me like what restaurant is sitting on its property right now. So I know exactly where it is.

And he said, Oh, that's where everyone used to go to cheat. And if you cheat, and if you looked at the book, it was all like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington signing into the motel. And that actually became the climax scene of the book. My favorite chapter in it is with the colonial manor motel. And it was just this little thing that I would have never known about if he hadn't.

So I actually dedicated this book to that aunt and uncle because they, I couldn't have done this without them. They're fantastic. Oh, and they're very excited about that. So that's fun. 

Zibby: I love, by the way, when the daughter Debbie, when she's talking about cheating and she's like living with a cheater and she's like, what, you saw a cheetah and I didn't, let's go to the zoo.

Oh my gosh. So funny. 

Sara: So my friends who have read this are all like, oh, so that's max. My now four year old. I'm like. Yeah, pretty much. Okay. By climbing into mom's bed. We just got him out of our bed by buying a cot for our room that he now can get in. It's. A lot, but there's definitely some influence with the kids there.

So my seven year old is very excited that the whole thing with learning to ride a bike is in there because that was definitely him and he wants me to tell everybody that, you know, the five year old son is based on him. 

Zibby: You know, it's so funny, you know, as we're talking, it's like graduation season and I was on Instagram per usual and saw an old friend of mine who I've sort of lost touch with posing in a photo with her.

And I was thinking to myself, like, that kid slept in her bed for so long, like, and she was like, I don't know if he'll ever stop sleeping in my bed. And I was like, yeah, I don't know either. He's pretty old. And I was just looking at the two of them and I'm like, I bet he stopped sleeping in her bed by now.

You know? Like, yeah. You know what I mean? Like, it all, it all works out in the end. 

Sara: There's so much like that with motherhood. Like, I remember freaking out that he wasn't walking yet at almost 15 months. And, you know, you don't see anybody crawling in the grocery store. Like, they all eventually walk. But especially when it's your first, you're just like, oh no, like, everybody else is doing this and you aren't.

And, you know, he eventually walked just fine and never stopped. And yeah. 

Zibby: We had a, a late walker too. Can we talk about the mom character in this book? I think she's one of my favorite characters and definitely reminds me of several women I know very, very well. But I love how you, the evolution of her character and how she's portrayed in the beginning and how she sort of turns a corner and why and what we realize about her and then like the penultimate act and all of it.

Like so awesome to have a mom like that because she must have been born. Right, when was she born? Like 1920ish or something? 

Sara: Uh, a little bit earlier even. 

Zibby: So tell me about her and sort of the role of the wife as you see it in those generations. And crazy, by the way, that the main character is only 20, Beverly's only 27.

I mean, it seems like, She's so in her element. She must be in her 40s, right? 

Sara: Definitely feels like that now with how, you know, you hit 40 and suddenly you're like, okay, I don't really care if you don't like me anymore. Like we're good. It's fine. You know, some of that I think definitely comes from the banter between me and my mother.

We have like fans on Facebook. It's hysterical because people just love how we bicker with each other about literally everything. And you know, some of it's an act, some of it, you know, How we actually are. And there's just that role of the Jewish mother who, you know, she's got to pick at you a fair bit because that's just the way it is.

What they do, but it's also loving. And I think my favorite interaction between Bev and her mom is actually when they're getting ready to go to Rosh Hashanah and Bev has gotten everybody else ready. Everybody's ready to go. And she realizes she forgot to buy herself a dress and her mother just goes and pulls one out that she bought for her and says, I remember what it was like to have to put yourself last.

And, you know, I think we don't. See that a lot of the time until we become moms ourselves and realize how much sacrifice there really is in being a mom. Like when your kids are little, you kind of give up who you are in a lot of ways. And it's hard to find that again sometimes. I mean, I definitely have struggled with that partially because we had my second son in May of 2020.

So right in the midst of COVID and everything. And, You know, I was entirely a mom during that period because there was no one to help me. And, I mean, my mom did come over. We were a bubble together. But, and I did spend his first year teaching while wearing him. It was me and a baby head on Zoom, which, you know, it's good birth control for the teenagers.

Not really, they would sign out if my mother's are Kim, but it really kind of is finding yourself back in your element and figuring out who you are outside of just being a mom and figuring out all of that, and I think it's interesting how Beverly initially doesn't see that with her mother. She sees her mother as kind of selfish and her mother is very like, I am the most important one.

And. By the end, she definitely sees more of herself in her mother. She sees that struggle going on. And, you know, when she first moves in, Millie paints it very much as, Oh, I'm here to help you. That's all I'm doing. And it takes, I don't want to spoil anything. But Bev eventually realizes that Millie has also left her father, and she's now got to get her parents back together.

So that idea of, you know, you look at your parents marriage as an outsider, even though you grew up in it. And I think that there's a lot of growing up in that and sort of recognizing what your parents went through and seeing yourself in that sometimes. That's really eye opening. Like seeing my mother as a grandmother has been a really cool experience for me because there's that meme, you know, when I was growing up, you'll get what you get.

And my mom as a grandma, you know, okay, darling, would you like your grilled cheese cut into hearts or stars? And you look at that, you're like, you were not my mother, like, what? And, I just, I love being able to see that change, that relationship, and just, I'm seeing her in a new light, and I think that a lot of that came through in this book.

Zibby: I love that. Wait, you mentioned, and I saw on, in our group chat, that you are no longer a teacher. Why did you, what happened there? 

Sara: So, I've been teaching for 21 years, right now, and while I love it, the end goal was always to be writing. So part of the reason when I decided not to go into journalism, I called my mother crying from a parking lot at the University of Maryland, what, 23 years ago now, and was like, I don't think I want to do this.

And I like the idea of teaching because I knew I wanted to write. I considered law school and knew if I became a lawyer and ever wanted to have a family, I was never going to have time to actually sit down and write a book. So I loved having the summers to write, but I kind of thought that each book would be about the same level of publicity and work and that I'd be able to keep doing this.

And it's definitely exponential, not linear, when you have more books out, which, It's a lot right now. I am also struggling to have any time to write because my four year old is still napping at daycare sometimes, which means he's up until 10 o'clock at night, which is a nightmare, as most of my writing time happens after the kids go to bed.

And my husband just took a job working as an archivist for a musician, and so he's on the road a lot. And when he's out of town, I have zero writing time. I get just. My kids are four and seven and they need a lot. So right now it just made more sense to take a step back from teaching and see if I can make this work full time, which I teach primarily electives.

I teach journalism, creative writing, and I run the newspaper. So I teach those kids for multiple years. So having to tell them that I wasn't coming back next year was, I mean, I cried, they wound up comforting me. I thought they were going to cry, but they got it. And that was a really. special moment for me.

I had one of my journalism students say, you taught us to follow our dreams. How can we not be happy when you're following yours? And I bottle water works. I started bawling. They threw me a going away party the other day. It was the cutest thing. I wear a ton of leopard print. They had little leopard print party hats and they did a pinata.

I mean, they really went all out. And the gift that they gave me, they got me a notebook. They know that I plot on paper and they all signed it. So I would remember them when I'm working and it just, it was really sweet. So it was a hard decision, but I also couldn't justify getting this far in my writing career and then having to stop.

So, you know, I took a year of leave. I can take up to three years of leave and we'll see what happens. And if it doesn't work, I'll go back, but fingers crossed. We'll see what happens. 

Zibby: Wow. So take me back a little bit to the other books. Talk about your first novel and get up to this one. 

Sara: So my first novel is not the same as my debut novel, actually.

I only know a handful of authors and I think you may be one of them, actually, who got their first novel published. 

Zibby: No, no, no. I did not get my first novel. 

Sara: Okay. 

Zibby: Are you kidding? 

Sara: Okay. 

Zibby: No. 

Sara: So that's not just me. 

Zibby: No. 

Sara: My debut for The Love of Friends was the fifth one that I wrote. So I actually self published two back a million years ago, one of them is still in print, one isn't, and then I scrapped one of them, landed an agent with my next one, which never actually sold, and then For the Love of Friends was my debut, which is a story of a 32 year old single girl who is in five weddings in the same summer and starts a blog to deal with all the craziness, and you can tell immediately where that's gonna go.

And it was mildly inspired by a few friends weddings. My best friend and I are great now, but there was a full year where her ringtone was the Darth Vader theme music. Her wedding was a lot. So, I mean, she read the book before it even went to my agent, but when it came out, she kept calling me and being like, Oh God, I did that to you, didn't I?

And I was like, little bit, but we're good now. And then my second one kind of grew out of that. One of my favorite things that authors do is when they bring back characters from a different book and it's just kind of an easter egg for people who read a lot of the same stuff. So, the grandmother in For the Love of Friends was a huge fan favorite.

She is loosely inspired by my own grandmother, who is a total nutjob, which she's 97 now. She was a nutjob 40 years ago though, so it's not like it was an old age thing. She's always been. So that one, She's Up to No Good, is the story of Jenna, who's 34. She's actually Lily, the main character in For the Love of Friends first cousin.

And her husband springs a divorce on her. And she's kind of lost for about six months. She moves back in with her parents. She doesn't know what she's doing with herself. And her grandmother shows up and is like, come on, we're taking a road trip to my hometown in Massachusetts. And Jenna agrees to go because her grandmother otherwise is driving herself at 87 with no driver's license, which, you know, As one does.

That one was inspired by my grandmother who announced the same thing at 91 and I had a one year old at the time and was not going to drive her 10 hours. But I started thinking, where would I have to be in my life to be like, hop in the car, we're gonna go. Because I've done a couple road trips with my grandmother, which, you know, were interesting to say the least.

And that one is a dual timeline so they get grandma's backstory and she starts talking about her first love who she wasn't allowed to marry because he wasn't Jewish. And she eventually, Jenna meet the younger character meets her grandmother's first love's great nephew and of course sparks fly there and the two storylines eventually converge together.

And then don't forget to write the one that kind of led behind Every Good Man is set in 1960, like I said, with the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel vibes, and it opens with a 20 year old girl, Marilyn, who gets caught making out with the rabbi's son, by which I mean everyone catches them because they go crashing through a stained glass window during the middle of Shabbat services, and her parents try to tell her that she has to marry the boy, and she's like, no, it's 1960, not 1860, and we only kissed, I'm not doing that.

So they send her to her great aunt who is a matchmaker in Philadelphia to kind of straighten out for the summer and her great aunt is not what she expected and that one is a whole lot of fun. So, and then here we are. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Wow. So a lot of divorce in these books, but you're not, is there divorce in your family?

You're not divorced or were you divorced before this? 

Sara: I'm not. No, my mom keeps being like, okay, we got a couple of divorces and my next one is actually about a widow. She was like, should I be worried here? But I think part of that is when you're looking at characters, especially if you want to incorporate kids in any way, if you want to have a romance element, well, there's got to be something that happens so that they can actually find love again.

If they're already happily married, the romance element kind of fizzles out right there. So I think that's kind of why I did that. 

Zibby: But wait, tell me more about your next one. 

Sara: So my next one, which I'm not that far into because children are not sleeping in my house right now. I don't have a title yet, but it has sold.

It is 1916, in the same era and my main character is a 30 year old widow. Her husband died two years earlier and her mother moves in to help take care of the kids for two years. And after two years, she says, you know what? I'm ready to do this on my own. She sends her mother home. And a couple days later finds her mother in law on her doorstep with five suitcases, and she announces she's moving in.

So she tries to get rid of her, and fails miserably at that, and then realizes the only way she's getting rid of her mother in law is to marry her off. Only to discover her mother in law is also trying to set her up sometimes with the same men. And they eventually find common ground. It's a fun one so far.

I'm really enjoying writing both perspectives on that one, and seeing where it goes. 

Zibby: Wow, that's so great. And you're at Lake Union, which is a, an Amazon publishing thing, which I also write under. So how has your experience been in general terms? You know, 

Sara: They've been awesome to be honest. Like I kind of, we sold at auction, we had three different authors and I went with Lake Union because they promised they'd be able to market it in ways that a lot of the big five publishers weren't going to be able to with a debut author.

Yeah. And they've really come through on that. I mean, uh, Don't Forget to Write hit number two in the entire U. S. Kindle store during first reads, which was crazy. I will say the coolest thing that happened with that, when it was number two, Freda McFadden had the numbers one, three, and four books. And she actually reached out to me, congratulated me, and told me she was downloading Don't Forget to Write, which was the classiest thing ever.

Like, that is such goals right there. So that was very cool. Uh, my editor just left, which I am nervous about, but the new one seems great so far. And yeah, I've had no complaints. They've been wonderful. 

Zibby: Amazing. Well, this feels very cinematic, I have to say. I feel like there could totally be even like a little series about this character.

Have you shopped it around or is that? Oh, on the list of things to do? We've had little nibbles on all four so far. 

Sara: We haven't actually gotten anywhere with any of them, but we have had a little bit of interest, so we'll see. You know, sometimes it moves. It's a lot of hurry up and wait in this industry.

Like, um, we'll see where it goes. I keep joking, I would be happy to, like, let them set it on Mars if they want to make this. I don't care. Like, I'm fine. 

Zibby: I really liked how you had a Jewish woman character, family, how you wove in Rosh Hashanah, and all the things, right? I feel like in my book Blank, which it's the same thing people commented, like, how nice that you don't have like a stereotype of a Jewish family, and I, I'm like, why do we have to say it?

Really? Like, are there that many stereotypes? And so, yeah. Normally I wouldn't say that, you know, I would just say how great that there's a Jewish family, but I'm wondering if you've gotten that comment as well and, you know, in today's day and age, I know you have the part about, you know, the receptionist saying, uh, the, the boss saying the receptionist is Jewish and she shouldn't work there and, you know, you've referenced, uh, All the exclusion of country clubs, which I know very well and all that.

So tell me about that and sort of where you are with that in terms of the world at large. 

Sara: So the country club incident actually happened to my grandmother in 1967. She went to get a job. I'm not going to name the country club, but it still exists in the D. C. area. I drove past it a couple of weeks ago and might have stuck up a certain finger, it's fine, but she went to get a job there, and they were like, oh, we love you, you're perfect, we just have to get rid of the other one, she's Jewish, and my grandmother ripped up her application and said, you don't want me either then, and walked out, and that has just become family lore at this point, but I loved that.

And when I wrote that, I finished this book well before October 7th. I had no idea how timely it was going to be when the book came out. You know, it's funny with my first book. So for the love of friends, I made my character half Jewish on purpose. I was not sure that people were going to read a book about a Jewish girl who is in these weddings and everything.

And I was nervous about it. And nobody said a single word in 2021 when that one came out. So I thought, you know I'm just going to go for it. This is my experience. And then the kind of bizarre thing that led me to all of these Jewish authors who I'm now connected with is I did the Jewish Book Council for She's Up to No Good, which is a great organization that hooks Jewish authors up with speaking engagements around the country.

I had a fabulous experience, but I'm watching all these presentations. And like 90, 95 percent of the books are about the Holocaust. And I'm sitting there like, hi, I write happy, funny books. Please don't kick me out. Like, am I allowed to be here? And it was just really interesting. And then later I was talking to Jean Meltzer about the same thing.

And we were like, we write happy books. No one dies in our books. Like it's all good. And we really came up with this concept of how we need more Jewish joy and, you know, suffering is part of our heritage. Half of our holidays are about people trying to kill us, but there's more to our experience than that.

We're not just our suffering. And I think the black community has a very similar, you know, experience with publishing, to be honest, where people are much more interested in the sad stories, the stories of trauma and suffering and not the happy stories that are there, that are important to tell as well.

So that really has become a driving factor for me in some of these stories. People are like, are you going to keep writing Jewish characters? Well, yes, I am. I think we need more happy Jewish stories out there. I got a comment from a book club, but it It took, I'd say, close to a month to try to figure out if it was a compliment or an insult, honestly.

It was a group of women in Texas, they had no Jewish friends, they didn't know any Jews. And, what they said to me that they liked about whichever book of mine they read, I don't even know if it was She's Up to No Good or Don't Forget to Write, was that my characters were Jewish without that being their entire personality.

And at the time I was like, I don't know what that means, but I'm gonna smile and nod and say cool, thank you. Thanks But the more I've read, I'm starting to understand what they meant, because there are definitely some books out there where it's almost like the Barbie movie, where like Ken's job is beach, where you see some characters and it feels like their whole personality is just Jew, like written across their chest.

And I think it's important, especially right now with all the antisemitism, with all of the demonization, that people see that we're people above all else. Like, we are, You know, we go to a different kind of house of worship. We celebrate some different holidays, but we're people. And I think that gets lost sometimes, which it shouldn't, but it does.

So that's been kind of eye opening to me as well. When, you know, you get some reviews and they're like, Oh, I wasn't familiar with Judaism. And I'm like, but it's a human story. Like, okay. So I don't know, that's been different. But I do have another family anti Semitic story that's going into the next book.

Just to say funny moment, my other grandmother, who died in 2009, she was from Armenia, and very old country, like, you know, thick accent and everything. She was volunteering in a hospital at one point. And she was taking like the lunch or breakfast order for this woman. And she offered her a bagel. You know, she was like, do you want toast or a bagel?

And the woman gets all offended. She goes, I would never eat a bagel. I'm not Jewish. My grandmother just looked at her and was like, lady, do I look Chinese to you? Cause I like egg rolls and like chow mein, you can eat a bagel. And, you know, it's just one of those things, like people really think like that, like that's kind of crazy.

And we're starting to see it again. My seven year old a couple of weeks ago asked me why people hate Jews. And that was just such a heartbreaking moment that he at seven needs to ask that question. So I'm going to keep putting out these happy stories and let him know that our whole history isn't suffering.

And no, not everybody hates us and we're going to try to make the world a little better as we can. 

Zibby: I love that. Amazing. Keep going. I'm sure you have so much advice as a teacher for 21 years, a couple tidbits for our listeners. What advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Sara: So the best piece of advice I have, I completely stole from Stephen King, but it is the best advice I've gotten.

You know what? If somebody is going to tell you how to be a successful author, he is a good person to look at. In his book on writing, he talked about how you need to treat writing like a job. If you needed money, you'd get a part time job and you'd go. Even if you're tired and don't feel like doing it, you'd go because you need the money.

If you don't treat writing the same way, you're never going to finish a project. And there are so many people who are like, Oh yeah, I'm going to write a book someday and they never put their butts in the chair and sit down and do it. So that is the most important thing. I come and I sit in this room after my kids go to bed, even if it's way, way later than I want it to be.

And I see what I can come up with and some nights it's not much and some nights it's gold. And it really is directly correlated to what time those kids go to like sleep at night, but they'll eventually get bigger and put themselves to bed, right? Like that'll, that'll happen someday. Right? 

Zibby: Yes. 

Sara: Okay, good.

Zibby: And you'll feel like you've been training at high altitudes. You know what I mean?

Sara: Yes. 

Zibby: Because then you'll just be able to crank it out and be like, oh, wow, persistence. 

Sara: I did not think that it'd be easier when they were like infants to do that, but somehow this has been rough, but that really is it. You have to sit down and you have to do it and you have to really treat it like it is something you're getting paid for that you need to do.

Or you're never going to finish a project. And that was really, you know, I used to write over the summer and then once I had kids and they were too young for camp, I didn't have my summers anymore. And I really had to take that advice. The other best piece of advice, and I really wish I knew where I got this and I have no idea, but it's, if you are writing a chapter or a scene and you don't want to write it and you're like, Oh, I have to write this scene to get to whatever I want to write.

Skip it. Cut it out completely. If you don't want to write it, your readers don't want to read it either. And that's really revolutionized my writing. Because I used to write very piecemeal, and I would write like the candy scenes that you totally wanted to, and they'd be like, ugh, I have to get there. And the problem is, that doesn't work.

So that's the other piece of advice that I give all of my aspiring writers. 

Zibby: That's a really good one. Okay. 

Sara: I did not make it up. I stole it from somewhere and I don't know where. So whoever did that, if you're listening, thank you. 

Zibby: I mean, my two cents now that I have slightly older children is that it is crazy.

Anything you get done during this time is like a bonus and there will be lots of time, God willing, to keep cranking out the books. And I feel like there's all this pressure in publishing to like a book a year, keep up the pace or whatever. And like, just cause there's that out there, it doesn't mean your readers forget you.

Like, as you know, as a reader, like we read the stuff that we want by people we love whenever it comes out and we don't say, Oh, it's two years and three months instead of a year and a half. Right. So I would just give yourself, this is totally not my place, but I would just give yourself a little grace.

You're going to get it done and you're going to miss those little cheeks. 

Sara: Anyway. I've already been told I'm not allowed to hold my seven year old's hand at drop off anymore. I'm very embarrassing, apparently. 

Zibby: Oh. Anyway. Well, Sarah, thank you again. I really enjoyed the book. Congratulations and look forward to your next one.

Sara: Thank you so much. 

Zibby: Okay. Thanks. 

In this bonus episode (a live event at the Nantucket Atheneum!), beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand interviews Zibby about her bestselling debut novel BLANK. Zibby describes her journey in the literary world, from this podcast’s humble beginnings to breaking into publishing and opening a bookstore—always with a desire to treat authors like rockstars. She also delves into her trajectory as a writer, reflecting on the rejections she faced at the beginning, the personal losses that inspired her memoir, BOOKENDS, and the relentless determination that led to the publication of BLANK. Finally, she and Elin discuss the realities of being an author in today’s market—from the emphasis on marketing to the importance of social media (and BookTok!).

Transcript:

Elin: Welcome to Nantucket. 

Zibby: Thank you, Ellen. So fun to be here. 

Elin: It is so fun to be here. We've had this on the books for months and months and months, and I've really been looking forward to it. So, Zibby is a force in the book world in general, but specifically in New York City.

Now, the way I met you is I'm trying to, I'm, I'm going to get, I'll, I'll get it wrong. I noticed a post on your Instagram possibly about Jane Rosen's novel, Eliza Starts a Rumor. And in this novel, there is a scene that makes fun of Upper East Side moms and Jane was slated to do a book group. In on the Upper East Side and they canceled her because they heard it was somebody read it and thought it was snarky.

So I was so outraged that I immediately followed Jane, bought her book, read it, posted about it, and then I started following Zibby. And I'm going to say that was January of 2020 before the pandemic. Does that sound right? 

Zibby: I think so. I was also outraged by that and immediately offered to host a book club for her instead of the snarky Upper East Side group.

So it ended up working out really well. And it got me here apparently, so who knew? 

Elin: Yeah, exactly. But, um, tell the audience like how you got started with this monumental sort Project life that you have going on everything you have going on. 

Zibby: It sounded so funny to hear my bio being read because i've just gotten back from a week long Family vacation with those four kids who just escaped already from here and we've been like living out of suitcases and I feel like i'm only mom and i'm like wait there are actually other adults here and I I do have a job and anyway, so it was nice to hear I I got into this after I had stayed at home with my kids for 11 years, but prior to that, I had been writing my whole life and always wanted to be an author and had gone to business school.

My background, I always wanted to also start a business and I didn't know how anything was going to mesh, but somehow eventually it did. I ended up getting a divorce from my first husband and had all this extra time every other weekend where I could get back into reading and get back into writing and remember sort of who I was after all that time.

And so I did, and I got back into all of it. I tried to sell a book that I thought was so clever, 'cause I was gonna call it Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books, the book. But nobody thought that was funny except me, or maybe other people who weren't in publishing at the time. So I didn't have a platform at all, and it's very hard to sell a book for those who are authors out there or wanna be authors without a platform.

And a girlfriend suggested that I start a podcast, so I took that name of my rejected novel. Moms Don't Have Time to Read books. And I said, okay. A friend said, start a podcast. I was like, why not? What's the worst that can happen? So my first episode, I sort of hunkered down in my bedroom and just recorded it into my phone after I Googled like, what's the easiest way to start a podcast.

So it started with that. I interviewed, we have a mutual friend here tonight, but I, my first guest was Lee Carpenter, who I went to business school with and I interviewed her about her book and I realized, oh my gosh, I love this more than anything. I get to just sit and ask all these questions of authors that I always want to know.

And I used to go to book events. I mean, I still do, but I used to go to Barnes and Noble, I would have the calendar on my fridge and I would always go, but then I would leave sort of wanting more, like somehow the questions asked weren't what I wanted to know. So now I can ask like, okay, so where do you get your hair done?

I mean, they're not all superficial, but like things like, okay, well, seriously, how did you come up with that? Or what is it like being famous or just whatever I feel like asking? I can ask. And usually people are curious about those things too. So it's ended up working out well that inspired the rest of it.

And one thing has just led to another over the last 6 years and everything that seems like a good idea I test out and try, not everything has worked, but this is what's led me to become a publisher, which was designed to make the author experience better and have my own bookstore, which has been amazing.

Elin: Okay, so let's dig in a little bit on the podcast. So you, Tim told me this, I could, did not believe it because Tim and I have a podcast and we have, how many episodes do we have, 12 per season, 13. You interview a different author every day. Is that true? 

Zibby: So for four straight years, I interviewed. I had, I released seven episodes a week.

Then I thought, okay, maybe I should go back to five a week. But now I, that's very frustrating because I keep interviewing more people. So like, we just did a huge blast with like 30 interviews this month. So it all evens out basically the answer. Yes. I interview somebody every day, although I don't interview them every day.

I interview like five people in a day and.. 

Elin: That is just so crazy to me. Now there's no way. You're reading everybody's book. Is there? Is that possible? 

Zibby: I can't read them all start to finish. Okay. But I've learned how to prep everybody's book. 

Elin: Okay. How do you do it? Cause I want to know. 

Zibby: Okay. Let's get into it.

So first I have to schedule it all and then I schedule it so that I can pace out like how much time I'm giving myself to read each book. And then some books I know I'm going to want to linger on every page and those I give like two weeks of time to read and I read them at night and I'll read them like for an hour at my desk during a workday.

But I speed read a lot of them. 

Elin: Okay. 

Zibby: I can't always like relax with a book. Some books, I'm more interested in the author. So I'll read the first 50 pages and then get into a conversation about the author. So it depends on if it's a novel or if it's a memoir, if it's self help. Sometimes I have to throw in a children's book because I'm like, Oh my gosh, I can't, I can't do my week.

I have to do a children's book to make the, make it all work. But yeah. Sometimes, like your book, Swan Song, I had this whole week that I allocated to read the whole thing. And I read every word. And actually, my daughter, who was just here, was like, you guys, don't bother mom. She hardly ever gets to finish an actual book.

Elin: Aww. That's so cute. 

Zibby: Which I did. Oh my gosh. So I do different amounts. But if I know I'm going to love it, which I can kind of tell, you know, you can kind of tell if the first, the first page or two, then I give it extra time and I read really quickly and I read every night at least for an hour before bed.

So it all adds up. 

Elin: And how long does the, how long does your podcast conversation last? 

Zibby: 30 minutes. 

Elin: And what are your favorite questions to ask? 

Zibby: I have some standard questions that I ask, you know, tell the audience about your book, blah, blah, blah. But my favorite ones, I just, I come up with them as I'm, as I'm going the way you would at a conversation with a girlfriend or something like,.. 

Elin: Yeah. 

Zibby: I don't have prepped questions.

I started when I started out doing it, I was very nervous and I was overprepared as if it was like a school final and I would type out like 12 to 15 questions per episode, including quotes with like the page numbers in parentheses. And I did that for like two years until finally an author was like, why do you send everyone the questions ahead of time?

And I'm like, oh, you know, cause I'm prepared and I would have like seven printed out things on the floor next to the books and everything. And then I realized, wait, I don't have to do that. And once I got good enough at doing it and practiced enough and relaxed enough, I realized, wait, I don't need these questions.

I can just be prepared and then see where it goes. So that's what I do now. 

Elin: And is there one or two authors that have stood out of all these, I mean, I, my mind is blown, but is there, because that's a lot of authors, you guys, are we all agreeing? That's that's a lot of authors. Like, how do you even remember their name or remember the.. 

Zibby: 1900..

Elin: No. Okay. 1900.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Elin: Tim, are you back there? Okay. 1900. We are so slacking. 

Zibby: Chop chop. 

Elin: Has, have there been one or two that have stood out like sort of above the sea of 1900? 

Zibby: I mean, there's some where I've been particularly nervous and 

Elin: Such as? 

Zibby: Like Matthew McConaughey, where I was 

Elin: Okay. 

Zibby: Sweating almost as much as I'm doing right now.

And like Andre Agassi, who was actually my second guest. 

Elin: Oh, oh my gosh. 

Zibby: Alicia Keys. But to be honest, for me, the more exciting thing is interviewing people. People I've had sort of author crushes on forever, right? And then I finally get to talk to them, like someone like Jojo Moyes or ..

Elin: Right. 

Zibby: Marion Keys or Sophie Cancela or you.

And that's so exciting to me. 

Elin: Yeah. 

Zibby: It's like, oh my gosh, they've been in my life for so long and they've just been a flat name on a cover. And now they're like a 3D person. And it's so exciting. 

Elin: I know. I totally agree. Because Tim and I, we've had a lot of slip. Well, we've had a lot. We've had, we've had, you know, a handful of celebrities on our podcast.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Elin: And but the people, I think the person I was most excited about was Maggie O'Farrell, who's one of my, I think is the best writer in the English language. And we had her on at the end of season one, and we're having Ina Garten on at the end of season two. And that will also be so exciting for me. 

Zibby: How do you prep for your podcast?

Elin: Oh, Tim does it. I obviously do nothing. I just show up. I don't have time. Moms don't have time to prep for podcasts in my house so Tim does the prepping and I do nothing. The, the moms don't have time to brand is so ingenious and I was so drawn to that after our initial introduction, how, I mean, I know how, but can you talk about how you came up with that idea?

Zibby: I came up with it because I had started writing a lot of personal essays, which I used to do. I started writing for 17 Magazine when I was 16. But then I was deep in mom life and I started writing for a scary mommy and the today parenting team and all these outlets all the time and after a while I had a lot of essays and my husband Kyle who's here tonight said, you know you should really turn all those essays into a book and I just I said moms don't have time to read books and I was like, that's so funny.

That's So that's how I came up with it. 

Elin: Okay. That's amazing. I'm just like, and then, and then what you did was you, you took the idea moms don't have time to, and then you did an anthology. So can you tell us some of the chapter titles of the essays in that book? 

Zibby: So during the pandemic, I had, when the pandemic hit, I had started the podcast, but I started with one a week and at the time that felt almost insurmountable, like how was I actually going to do one a week?

Uh, so I had started with that and I had also started doing these pop up, uh, podcasts Book fairs and salons in my apartment in New York City, where I would just invite everyone to come over. And I would have an author to kind of like this, but it would be at home and they would talk and everything. And so I, and so that was sort of an informal book club, if you will, and a precursor to the bookstore.

So I had been doing all that and when the pandemic hit, I felt like I was in a really good position to quickly pivot, whereas the bigger, publishing houses and organizations needed to, like, think about it and make strategic decisions. And I was like, Oh, no, I'm just going to start interviewing anybody who needs help.

I couldn't believe what was going to happen to all these authors with their book releases. The whole thing so well. So I started this Instagram live show where I would interview four authors a day. And I started this online book club and did all these other things to sort of draw out the authors and give a platform to them when the world was so unpredictable and one of the things that I thought would be fun is getting them to write original content, which I had sort of thought about before the pandemic, but then when it hit, I was like, well, come on, they're not really doing anything else.

Like I can ask these authors for as it like, what are they going to say? I'm too, I'm too many events. So anyway, basically I guess preyed on these authors because of that and said, would you mind, you know, writing for this website? I'm going to put an, uh, an essay up every week so that people have things to read and original content.

So I did, I put them on my website. Right. And then after the first three months. I was like, gosh, I've released a lot of books by these authors, which was so exciting when I had like a word document in my email from Lilly King. I'm like, oh my gosh, no one's even read this except me. It was cool. So I realized I really loved that and I loved working directly with the authors.

After three months, I was like, I have a lot of these. So I copied and pasted them all into one big document and I was like, oh my gosh, it's a book. It's long enough to be a book. So then I went out to this one publisher I had met with before the pandemic who said that they could get a book out in like two weeks. And I was like, no way, that's awesome. Which of course is not true. But they did get it out in about eight months, which was not bad. 

Elin: Right. 

Zibby: So in that I asked authors to write about, the first one was about five things moms didn't have time to do. And so one was like, moms don't have time to read. Moms don't have time to work out. Moms don't have time to have sex. Moms don't have time. I mean, we don't run. Anyway, I thought these would all be really funny topics that would inspire moms. Don't have time to sleep. Moms don't anyway. And they wrote essays inspired by these topics. So I got that whole anthology together, but I didn't mean, I didn't mean it for it to be an anthology.

So then I thought, well, now I want to do one on purpose. So I went out to a whole nother group of authors, picked another five things moms didn't have time to do. And release that as a second anthology. 

Elin: Amazing. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Elin: Absolutely amazing. And then after that, you called me and said that you were starting your own publishing company, company imprint company house, house, your own publishing house.

So tell, tell our audience about that. 

Zibby: Yeah, it seems crazy looking back, but I loved working with the author so much. And I kept hearing about author dissatisfaction and how disappointed people were and people would show up at my apartment and show up really nervous and like nobody is I don't even know what I'm doing and I only have a couple things or I'm so disappointed or this out of the other thing and I felt so bad because meanwhile at the same time I still was trying to be an author myself and had not succeeded in that and I've been writing forever so I knew what that feeling was like and wanting to get to the end of the road and then the idea that they would then.

Be served dropped or not. Celebrated when I feel like every book is like a cause for celebration, sort of devastated me and everybody was like, Oh, what was me? The state of the publishing industry, like enough already. There must be something we can do, which is sort of my attitude towards most things.

Like, come on, like, what can we do to fix this? So, uh, I started gathering information, talking to lots of people, thinking about it. Is there another way? Why is every, why is it insurmountable? And because I hadn't been in publishing, I didn't see as many roadblocks, probably as someone who had worked in a publishing house, who at the time, by the way, all those people were like, you cannot do this.

Like, that's hilarious that you want to start your own publishing house. And I was like, no, I, maybe I can. So I sort of tested it out. I spent a year doing a fellowship with just a couple authors. Cause I thought, well, maybe instead of a publishing house, I'll just work directly with authors and mentor them and I'll pair them with editors and see how that goes. But it didn't quite scratch the itch because it didn't address the biggest problem, which was sort of author treatment, if you will. Um, and I, I actually had a call with this distributor at the, at the beginning of that year, a fellowship, and I had a call with them and they were like, Oh, Hey, well, what about this? And what about this? And what about this? And I was like, I have no idea what I'm doing. Obviously I cannot start this publishing house. So I spent the year working with the authors, getting more information, getting really well educated on everything, partnering with really smart people and coming up with the whole business plan.

And then I just did it. And I was like, what's the worst that can happen? I fail at trying to help authors. I fail in celebrating the great work of people I think are amazing and deserve to be celebrated, and it doesn't work. Okay. Well, if I fail at that, that doesn't sound too bad. I'll try. 

Elin: So for those of you out there who are thinking like, what kind of terrible treatment are the authors undergoing?

I will tell my own personal story. Okay. So my first novel, The Beach Club, which is bought, I'm pregnant with Max, so it's bought in 1999 and I get an advance of 5, 000. And I'm like, okay, you know, my, my agent promised me lots and lots of money. I didn't think 5, 000 was lots and lots of money, but we did not have any other authors.

So I took it the advance for 5, 000 and then they would send me out on, it came out, my son was six months old. They would send me out on like a, to a book event, but they would not pay. Any, anything. So I'm on Nantucket. I have a six month old. I had to fly. This is back in the day of Islander. I would pay my own ticket for me and my lap child to fly to Hyannis.

Then I'd have to rent a car, get the baby, put the bucket seat in it, drive max to the bookstore where they would not have advertised and like three people would show up. And this happened to you guys for five years for five books. And I would cry, call my agent and cry. And my publishing house just did not care about me or my Nantucket books or any of that and then you're saying to yourself Why are you sitting here Ellen and it's because after book five I switched publishing houses I was sitting on a novel called barefoot and they deemed that my breakout book and my agent moved me to a different publishing house who then took over and and really said, we're going to make you a superstar, which they did.

Now it did not, it was not overnight because they took me on book six. I did not hit number one on the bestseller list until book 23. So it was a 17 book, very, very slow climb for five books. And the years when the kids were very little, I mean, I was just treated terribly, like so mid list, it was bottomless, really bad.

Zibby: Yeah, I didn't realize that publishers picked like, okay, we're picking this is the book we're going to make into a bestseller and the other ones by the time they get to bookstores, it's been predetermined. 

Elin: Yeah. 

Zibby: Maybe bookstores don't even take that big a quantity. 

Elin: Right? 

Zibby: The whole system is sort of, you know, not rigged, but predetermined in a way it is predetermined.

It's not, it's not because of the people who work in publishing. This is nothing personal. I really do believe that most people I've met who work in publishing love books and want the best, but structurally the organizations are not set up for success. 

Elin: Right. And a lot of times they'll take too many books.

So when I was at my first publisher, they had a list of like, I don't know, 53 books or I don't so many, maybe 200 and then little Brown would have only 50. So they had more assets to allocate to each author. So it really depends where you end up, but a lot of it starts with the agents and the hype and you know, how much money the advances, I got a 5, 000 advance.

They're not going to spend a ton of money on my book. 

Zibby: So why, why did you not give up? 

Elin: Well, John Irving. When I was at Iowa and John Irving came to speak and he said, if you can do anything other than write, do something else. And I realized that I just could not do anything else. I was going to write regardless.

That was just what I wanted to do and what I was driven to do. And so I just kept, I just kept doing it. And I would love, I would love to say, like, I was so ambitious and I was so driven. It wasn't that. It was just like a second nature, like I was just going to keep writing books. And then if they sold great and if they didn't great, but I mean, I was so happy, obviously the book six broke out, but think about, I have a lot of authors come to me with one book and they're like, I can't sell it.

And I'm like, you have to write a second book, dude. Like you have to. And they don't want to because they're so attached to the one book. But my best advice for somebody like that is write a second book, write a third book, because it took me six books to get even launched. 

Zibby: But this is what happens in Swan Song too, is that someone writes a screenplay and finally gets up the courage to show it.

And the man who she shows it to says, You know, good job. Way to go. But no, like this is going nowhere and it's too small. She's like, my life is too small. It's based on my life. Like I thought I was mining my pain for, you know, having some end result. That's great. And he's like, no, no, just keep writing.

Maybe in five years you'll be better. And she's like five years. I know it's true. 

Elin: Yeah. Um, so I want to turn our attention to your novel Blank, which I thought was absolutely phenomenal. So many. So many things to talk about in this novel. So it's about a mom, a wife, a writer who has had a very successful first novel that was made into a film and now she's on the hook for the second novel and she has no ideas.

You guys, you cannot imagine, like for me, this is a thriller. Is she going to get it done? Is she going to get it done? And I'm like sweating and, and like turning the pages as fast as I can and thinking, Oh my God, she doesn't have any ideas. And literally like, this is me up at night. She starts ideas. She leaves the, you know, one of them gets stolen and I don't want to give too much about the book away, but for me it's a complete thriller and I'm like, Oh my God, Oh my God.

And it really, it addresses a lot of the issues that we just talked about in the publishing industry. But tell me how you came up with the idea for blank. And I don't know how much you want to give away about this. So you, you, you say.

Zibby: I'll say. Okay. So as I mentioned, I kept trying to sell books all the time that I was launching the podcast and then doing the book club and all these other things and I kept getting rejected.

So I would get a rejection letter, close my email and then like click over to zoom and interview somebody about their book and which is great. I was so happy for them But I was like, okay Well, I know everybody says don't give up don't give up but like maybe it's just not gonna happen for me like maybe i'm just never gonna have a book sale and that's okay and i'll just be like I'll just write for fun and I'll be the reader that I am.

And that's okay. I guess I'll have to come to terms with that. But I kept trying because every time I would give up, I would like pick myself up off the floor and be like, well, this is really what I still want to do. Like, even if it doesn't work. So I kept trying different ideas. I sold eventually. Through so a lot of luck and at different attempts bookends and memoir of love, loss and literature, which is when I told my life story about a lot of losses that I had gone through.

I lost my best friend on 9 11 who had worked in the North tower and she had been my college roommate and my best friend came on all our family vacations. Her name is Stacey, which bifurcated my life forever. And there was a before and an after, and I just couldn't get past wanting to tell the story of what that was like because it happened two weeks when I was Two weeks into business school and just even the juxtaposition of like all my classmates caring about the section group deals for fleeces.

And yet I was like bringing DNA strands to the armory to try to identify her, which no one ever did, by the way. So it was not to bring down the mood of this discussion, but I just, I felt compelled, I had to get this story out. I had to tell the world about her. And just like process the fact that someone you love so much can just disappear in a puff of smoke.

Like all that was left, it was like a strand of her hair on a sweater I found in a box. Like, how is this possible? We were 25 years old. So I, and I, then I had a lot of other people I love die in a short period of time and all while I was struggling to like figure out accounting, which on a good day, I can't figure out how to do.

So I wanted to tell that story and I kept going back to it. Finally, I wove in books and I told it through the books that it had been in my life forever. It was something everybody could relate to. So I sold that memoir, which was thrilling and amazing. And I felt so good to finally Get that story out for many reasons, mostly personal, but just very excited.

But then all of a sudden I had this editor who was wonderful named Carmen. And I told her that like my lifelong dream was really to write and sell a novel. And that I had written several novels that hadn't sold. I wrote a book after business school called off balance that didn't sell. And many others, I wrote a book called 40 love about falling in love.

Again, at 40 with my former tennis pro, who's now my husband, Scandal. Read all about it in bookends. Anyway, anyway, so I kept pitching the whole time we were doing gearing up for a publication of bookends. I would pitch Carmen all these different novel ideas, like, okay, what about Lover's Leap, a book set in the competitive backgammon world, um, about, you Which I thought was so clever and still do, by the way, because Lover's Leap is a move in Backgammon.

You know, when you get a six and a five. But anyway, it doesn't matter. So, I kept pitching her ideas that she didn't like. And I kept going and kept going. And then finally she was like, Okay, well, Bookends is about to come out. And if you're going to do a novel with me, I'd really like to be able to announce it.

So that you can talk about it on your book tour and all this. And I was like, Oh my gosh. And so I went to my family dinner with my, you know, my family every night we have dinner or whatever. And I was lamenting this and being like, you guys, what am I going to do? Like, I have to come up with a good idea.

And I just like, keep looking at this blank page. Like what, what other ideas can I come up with? And my son was like, well, why don't you just hand it in blank? Just like, and I was like, wait, that's such a good idea. That's what I could write my book about. I could write a book about someone who hands. Her book in blank is a commentary on the publishing industry and how it's all about marketing and it doesn't even matter what the book is.

You could make a bestseller out of nothing and that'll be the book. And so that's the book I wrote and that's the book my character in my book wrote. So it's very meta. 

Elin: It's very meta. Yeah. And also I'm thinking to myself, I wish I could get away with that. Just handed a blank book. Yeah. Nothing in it.

Just, it's just, it's empty. 

Zibby: The character did think about contractually the 60, 000 words, copying and pasting the word blank 60, 000 times, but ultimately she just handed it in blank. 

Elin: Yeah. So one of the interesting things about this novel is that it does mention like the marketing and the advertising and the, and the publicity.

I do a, well, this year, most every year is I do 14 or 15 events in 12 days. Yeah. And I just get it out of the way. Now there is an, it is unreasonable for publishing houses to expect that someone like myself who is sitting in a room or in my case out by my pool or at the beach writing a novel for a year to be also able to go out and talk to people and meet and have events with, you know, three or four or 500 people because those skill sets are so, so different.

And yet that is what every author is expected to do. So can you talk a little bit about that? 

Zibby: I've never had the 300 people in a room problem. This is a big crowd for me. Let me just say, 

Elin: Oh, good. Well, I'm happy. Thank you. 

Zibby: Yay. It makes me feel really good. Thank you. No, but it's true. You do have to, and actually this is one of the things I really like about it because I am comfortable in, in, in.

I am almost more comfortable in the marketing of the thing as I get having worked in marketing and doing that and I feel less sort of vulnerable than I do when I'm trying to like put my heart and soul on the page and, and like, you know, hand show somebody. That, but you definitely have to put on two hats and it's, you know, today I was, say I flew home from Dublin, which I have never been able to say in my life, but there you go.

If I can say it, I must. So anyway, I, I was like, this is great. My kids will be on their iPads. I'll have like eight hours. I'm going to just get like 10, 000 words done on my next novel, whatever, it's going to be amazing. I did like nothing. I read 60 pages to try to figure out what I was writing and then I fell asleep.

It was much easier for me to then go to my emails and think about the marketing of another anthology that I have coming out in October and making those plans and emailing those authors and making visuals and whatever. So I, I think it helps when you have that, when you think that part is fun, but most authors not, I would say half and half do not think that's particularly fun.

And you have to, because even the best publishers, like, all it does is help if you are willing to go the extra mile. I mean, for my, for Bank, I went to like, what, 45 cities or something crazy, crazy town. It's crazy. But I thought that was so fun. And I'm like, when am I ever going to get to do this again?

I'm going to go to Minneapolis. It was great. 

Elin: Okay. Because that's not how I see it. Cause I also went to Minneapolis and I think I probably texted him and I'm like, I have to go to Minneapolis and then I'm going to Denver. And then I'm going to St. Louis. 

Zibby: You've been to these places a lot. Like some of these places I've never even been to and I'm like Mall of America.

How fun. 

Elin: And also like, I mean, I don't know, you maybe have a little bit more time because I'm on such a tight schedule that people will be like, you know, I'll have friends that live in Minneapolis and they'll be like, Oh, do you want to go to dinner? And I'm always like, I, I cannot, I can't do one single thing.

I can only go to the event. Like sometimes I'll get my hair done, get my hair done, go to the event, go to the hotel and do room service. And then. 

Zibby: Yeah. See, I don't ever do my hair. So that saves me all that time.

Elin: I don't have the energy. But I don't ever have energy to cycle. 

Zibby: I dry my hair in five minutes and I have lunch with someone.

So there you go. 

Elin: So you do like to do that. You like to go see your friends in like all these different cities. 

Zibby: I mean, I did not. Can't at least spend the night in Minneapolis. 

Elin: Oh, okay. 

Zibby: I flew in that morning and then I left at like four o'clock. 

Elin: That's a lot. It's a lot. Okay. So let's talk. 

Zibby: How do you feel about the marketing of it?

I mean, you barely need to market anymore. Right. But like, how do you feel about having, like, I mean,

Elin: Yeah. 

Zibby: You have a built in audience, which is like the holy grail of publishing, like become an author where you just announce you have a new book and it immediately sells. 

Elin: Right. But I do a fair amount of like a ton of marketing.

So like this year, I mean, it's of course out of proportion because it was my last day on target book, but I did all kinds of interviews, all kinds of podcasts. I had CBS come to my house. That was an all day affair. You know, I'm always on CBS this morning, which is so nerve wracking. I don't know how you feel about Good Morning America, but you're I'm on live and they never tell you what they're going to ask you.

And that's. It's so nerve wracking. I have a lot of people do send me Q and A's and I'm constantly, and then you have to do extra content. Like if you're me, you have to do extra content for the big retailers. So this year it was Walmart. Who else did I do extra content for? I can't remember, but Walmart has its own edition.

Oh, Nantucket Book Partners has its own edition. So I was doing extra content for that. So it's like this whole other job. 

Zibby: So it doesn't end. 

Elin: It doesn't end. No, I mean, does Stephen King tour? Probably not. But I mean, I'm not, I'm not. 

Zibby: Well, I think about that too, because it's like Nicholas Sparks's person is always like, okay, like, have you booked the pot?

I'm like, Nicholas Sparks does it really needs beat? Sure. Like it's still Nicholas Spark. Like the biggest deal authors, in other words, still want to get on a podcast, right? You think that it's like in the bag. 

Elin: I'm going to say this, and this is probably going to be really scandalous, but this is true. The very big authors, and I'm not saying it's Nicholas Sparks, I'm not saying it's Steve, Stephen King.

I'm just saying their advances are so enormous. And they have to earn them out just like we do. So they have to sell millions of books or hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of books to even make a dent into their advance. So they need, because a lot of times I think, and also when you're looking at a Nick Sparks, what do you guys do?

You go to the bookshelf and you're like, I think I've already read this, right? Because you've, they're all exactly the same and you, not his necessarily, but like, let's say they're my books. I think I've already read this. Like you have to make the effort with each book to make it different. And, you know, I'm friends with Jim Patterson.

He puts out a book every nine weeks and he does, he puts out a book every nine weeks. That is, that is a true fact. And, Yeah. 

Zibby: He's been on my podcast like six times and I just got another pitch. I'm like, wait, seriously? 

Elin: Yeah. He's always wanting, he's, he is still, he always wants to promote the book, whatever it is that's in his nine week window.

He's always out there promoting because people will look at it and say, I can't remember if I read this or not. They just see his name and they don't really pay attention to the book. So I think that most authors are out there podcast yesterday and she's an introvert. Right. And she does not, she does not go on tour and I'm so envious, but she, I mean, she sells a bajillion copies.

Um, what do you think about, this makes me wonder, what do you think about like social media and book talk? 

Zibby: Yeah. I am grateful that whole new generation of people are reading. I think that's amazing. I think that although now I feel there's a backlash, there was something recently, I guess a lot of people, well, I won't get into it.

But now people are saying book talkers and book fluencers think of too highly of themselves and really you have to be deeper into the book. Now there's some sort of backlash happening, but in general, I think it's great that there is a new way for books to get a lot of attention because it is virtually impossible to stand out in a crowded bookstore with like thousands and thousands of books.

How do you do it? So the fact that people are being so creative and this one book talker. Who I interviewed, um, Betty Coyote, for instance, like she acts out every book and she'll like even put on like a little hat and costume or sunglasses and like pretend to be a character and like she did Blank and I thought, I thought that was the coolest thing.

She's like, I'm Pippa Jones and here I am typing and I was like, that's so fun. So I don't know if it sells books. I think it's great. 

Elin: Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, whatever, I don't, I don't, I don't look at any of it. And I think that the titles they pick are sometimes strange, but, or by, by, by strange, I mean, random, like you don't, you don't know what's going to catch their fancy.

And these are people that are way younger than me, but they, they. They move a lot of copies, which is like super exciting, like Emily, like Colleen, first Colleen Hoover was like an enormous recipient of BookTok love and, and look at her, she's, and I love Colleen so, so much. 

Zibby: And are you on TikTok? 

Elin: Emily? Oh God, no.

Way, way too old for that. Wait, wait, wait. 

Zibby: She dances and my kids have not forgiven me. 

Elin: No, I know. No, that's definitely not happening. Can we talk a little bit about owning a bookstore? So then on top of all this is to be open to bookstore in Los Angeles. 

Zibby: Yes. I did. 

Elin: Crazy town. 

Zibby: Crazy. Particularly crazy because I live in New York City, but I don't, I don't like anything to be easy.

So the reason I even did that, well, I've always wanted, I mean, every book lover, like, well, not every. Many book lovers always think, wouldn't it be amazing to own my own bookstore? I think that I used to think that all the time, but I didn't actually think that one day I would have my own bookstore until the moment, basically that I had my own bookstore, but I had told my husband about it over and over again.

And I had looked at spaces first I looked at some spaces in New York city just to like dream. Would this even work? And then I like found out the rent and I was like, this will not work. And then I thought, how is any bookstore in business in New York city? Like, this is crazy. There's just no way, but anyway, so I put the idea away and then we spent a lot of time in LA.

My husband's a producer, my brother's out there. He's also a producer. So that's like our happy place. And when I don't have my kids, when they're with my ex, we go out there a lot and have like all of our friends. And I lived there after college. So when I'm there, I, I'm like a different relaxed person, even though I'm working all the time.

But anyway. There was an Amazon books store like in the Pacific Palisades where we have a place and spend a lot of time and Amazon closed all their bookstores. So I was like, Oh, Hey, now's your opportunity. There's no bookstore there anymore. Why don't you just take over the space and open a bookstore?

And I was like, Oh, that's really funny. And I barely even had time to call the broker, but it was like a Saturday and I was like, just for fun, I'm just going to call and just see how crazy it would be to like operate that space. Anyway, the broker laughed me off the phone. It became an eve selling around.

So. Anyway, it wasn't gonna happen, he said, but I do have this really cute place in Santa Monica on Montana Avenue, and the owner is dying to have a bookstore there. And I was like, no, no, no. It's too far. Meanwhile, I lived in New York City, but it was too far from the Palisades, which is 20 minutes away. But anyway, so I refused to look at it.

And I was like, no, no, no. It's too far. And then he kept following up with me. And then finally I was like, well, I'll just go see the space. Like what's the harm. And I went in and it's this it's 823 square feet. It's like the size of the stage. Practically. It's not that big, a little bigger than the stage.

And I walked in, there's windows, like the corner location, windows everywhere, and I could just see it. And I was like, this is amazing. It's like out of a movie. But I have to renovate the whole place because at first I thought, Oh, I'll just do a pop up. But I was like, well, I can't do a pop up cause I've got to deal with these walls.

And like, you know, the ceiling is terrible and I'll just, and I'd love like renovation. Anyway, so I decided I'll try it. I'll do a short term lease and I'll do it. And also I wanted to address another part of book discovery, which is that it's so hard because finally I did have these books of my own and I'd have one book like on a very high shelf in a giant Barnes and Noble, which by the way, is like a miracle that's when Barnes Noble even takes your book.

But I was like, I can't find my book in Barnes and Noble. How is anybody going to just like happen upon it and think this looks great if it's completely hard to find. So for my bookstore, and I, I do a lot of roundups, like these are books that are great for this. These are books that are great for that.

So I thought I'll just have the shelves be based on mood or based on fun theme. So when I'm not even here, people can walk in and instead of having 18, 000 books, I'll It'll be curated for them. So there's one book, like one bookshelf called Reeling from Divorce because so many people are coming in being like, I have a friend.

And I'm like, yeah, okay. And you know, books that make you laugh, books that make you cry, motherhood malaise, feeling really anxious. So all these fun shelves so that you have a tiny place where you can start out and then you end up finding the right book for you. So I thought it would be really fun. And it is, it's really fun.

Elin: And is it really fun and it's not a headache. 

Zibby: No, I mean, I have a great manager. We have a fabulous team. We have like seven part time booksellers and our manager used to work at an H and M, but as an author, actually half our team is authors and we all just love books and it runs really well now. And it's great.

I'm going out. In a few days. 

Elin: Oh my gosh. That's so awesome. I'm so, I'm so happy. Okay. One more question. Then we're going to take questions from the audience. So start thinking of your questions. You're obviously a working mom at this point. Your kids are younger than mine. My kids are grown up. They still live at home, but, um, well, two are, two are in college and two have graduated and now live back at home. It's so great. 

Zibby: There was, there was such a funny line, by the way, in swan song where there was a retirement party and yet the daughter Casey was home and he's like, I never thought that like we couldn't have our moment because the kids are home at my retirement party. 

Elin: At my retirement party.

Yeah. I mean, that was a good one. That's also me. 

So how do you manage the life work balance? No, I also want to preface this by saying that a lot of. Women writers don't like this question because it's not asked to men, and I do agree it's very annoying that this question is no one asked John Grisham how he manages his work life balance with his kids because what's the answer?

His wife doesn't, but I will ask you how do you manage your work life balance? 

Zibby: I'm not offended in the slightest. Uh, I was a stay at home mom for 11 years. It's fine. I, I'm very, very invested in the kids and I'm around them all the time. I still plan my work days around the kids. So my team knows, like I leave at 2 30 every day and I go pick up the kids.

And then I work from home in the afternoons. I'm online all the time. I'm working until after they go to bed, but my appearances are like what I try to do is around their schedules and I was just invited to do an event like the second day, like their second day of school at six o'clock and I was like, Oh, that sounds like fun.

I was like, you know what? I think they're probably going to need me at home. I'm like, I can do an event another time. Like, I don't have to go do that. So I tried to plan everything around them and what I anticipate their needs being. That said, They're on their iPads a lot. I try to involve them in everything.

So, like, for your book, for instance, like the whole time I was reading it, I was sharing things with them. Like, oh my gosh, like this is happening. This is happening. And then they get into it. Like, well, what happened? Did he die? Who did it? Like, what happens? You know? So they, so they feel like they're experiencing it with me.

Also, they've become really huge readers, particularly my younger two kids, my older kids. I don't know. I lost causes, but the younger kids are, are, you know, they, we, on our trip every night, they would, like, bring a book to dinner. And I'm like, maybe this is a bad thing, but I kind of think this is an awesome thing.

So, I involve them with everything. I try to make them see that what I'm doing is not like a random work call. Like, I would never say that. I'm like, I'm going to interview the author of, you know, whatever. Book and this is what it's about. So I think transparency and inclusion and you know, I'm stressed out a lot.

I won't lie. Like I'm always doing something, but also I have two kids who are in boarding school, so that helps because they're 17 and my two younger kids happen to be very self sufficient. Well, not very, a little. Well, okay, fine. Well, anyway, and I'm divorced and remarried. So I have every other weekend without the kids.

So essentially for most of the time at home, there are two kids part, you know, 80 percent of the time or something like that. 

Elin: Okay. 

Zibby: So does that make it better? 

Elin: It does. It makes it, I mean, it makes it a little bit easier, but it's still hard. And, you know, the famous line that when you're a working mom, when you're at work, you always want to be at home and when you're at home, you always want to be at work.

So you can't win, but yet we're doing okay, and you're doing great. 

Zibby: You too. 

Elin: Thank you. All right, you guys join me in thinking Zibby Owens. This has been so great. 

Zibby: Thank you. 

Elin: Thank you. 

Zibby interviews renowned rock climber Beth Rodden about A LIGHT THROUGH THE CRACKS, an intense, breathtaking memoir about Beth's harrowing experience of being kidnapped at twenty years old on a climbing excursion in Kyrgyzstan, her journey through trauma, and her transformation into motherhood. Beth describes the challenge of revisiting her worst memories and shares how climbing helped her cope with the physical and mental trauma. She and Zibby also explore her relationship with fear, her recovery from various injuries, and how becoming a mother changed her perspective on life and climbing.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Beth. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss your memoir, A Light Through the Cracks, A Climber's Story. Congratulations. Congratulations.

Beth: Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here. 

Zibby: I have to say, I have you to blame for being tired because I couldn't stop reading your book the other night and it scared me. Like, parts of it were scary in your story and I was so sort of agitated by it that I couldn't sleep. I was like, I can't believe this woman went through this.

I can't believe I feel like I just went through everything she went through. And I know this is only a small part of it. Of the big story, but still, your experience in Kazakhstan being kidnapped, I mean, oh my gosh, I just can't even believe it. So, well done, in the writing, for giving the reader the most, like, immediate visceral experience of this horrific thing.

Beth: Thank you. Yeah, it was, it was a hard part to write about, but cathartic in a way as well, to Try and go back and unpack a lot of those memories and those experiences and put them onto the page and try and kind of like Release them a little bit 

Zibby: So why don't you go back and tell listeners about that experience?

but about the whole book and you are like one of the most elite climbers in the on the planet. So congratulations for all of your success. I can't believe, I mean, I watched Free Solo, so I feel like I can talk about climbing. I feel like I know enough to discuss, but what you've done, I mean, I don't even know how you, I'm just so impressed with you on so many levels.

It's like amazing. Okay. So tell listeners about the book. 

Beth: Okay. The book is memoir of my life. It's obviously I'm a climber. I'm a professional climber. I've been a climber since I was in my early teens. And so that's all I've kind of known, but I feel like that's kind of the backdrop to like a coming of age story and a processing trauma and becoming a mother and yeah, just trying to be a human in life.

So the book covers a six day kidnapping that I went through with my boyfriend at the time and two of our friends and Kyrgyzstan, and then it kind of goes into how I buried that trauma. The climbing community back then was not really accepting or understanding of how to deal with trauma in a gentle, soft, compassionate way.

It was very much a, um, celebratory thing to skirt death in climbing back then. So I just dove back into climbing. And like you said, I was able to sort of push the sport forward for a The better part of a decade and really elevate my career and climbing, um, in ways I never thought, but that all started to crumble after about 10 years, I went through a divorce, I found love, I got remarried, we had a child and honestly, becoming a mom was sort of the biggest transformation that I went through.

It really was like this crystal clear reflection of, you know, You know, how I was living in the world and it inspired me, honestly, to go unpack all that trauma, uh, that happened 15 years earlier and, um, yeah, and, and continue on and see where I am today. 

Zibby: Gosh, I love how you, you end it with your mom bod, which is hilarious.

Which I'm sure, I'm sure is about most people would even want, but, uh, that's another theme that really courses through the book is food and what it meant to you to be truly hungry when you were in captivity, right, for six days and, you know, even the re jiggering of your digestive system once you got back and all of that and introducing food again.

But your lifetime history with, uh, how you felt about your body and food and climbing and deprivation and all of it. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Beth: Absolutely. You know, I came into climbing when I was about 14 and I feel like I was this innocent kind of green kid that ate when she was hungry and didn't eat when she was hungry and didn't kind of differentiate between any types of food is good or bad or but the climbing community.

Was very much, even though it wasn't at the forefront of conversations everywhere, it was very prevalent that being thin was the way to success. So I'd have mentors and people I look up to say things just kind of, you know, subtly, like I would order bagels with cream cheese and they would say, you're not going to get up anything today, Rodney, after eating that, or they would say something like, you know, I lose five pounds before every competition and not in a malice way, I don't think, but more in a.

Like here's a tip kind of way. And so early on in climbing, I definitely developed a very disordered way of eating and how I, a relationship with food and very restrictive and very in control. And in Kyrgyzstan, that was kind of highlighted because we only had a bar or a half of an energy bar per day each.

So we were living on, you know, a hundred, maybe 200 calories each day for six days. So we were definitely very hungry. And when we came back, yeah, that, that cycle of trying to be restrictive and trying to be as light as possible definitely came back in full force. 

Zibby: Tell me more, and I know you wrote about it, and it was so impactful.

So, actually being starved, like, by somebody and not having access to food. What happens to your brain and your thoughts and your body, like, what is, what, physically and mentally, what is that really like? 

Beth: Well, we were stationary all day, and then, so we were hidden all day. And so, we had just hours and hours and hours to think and let your brain spin.

And mine would always spin to The hardest thoughts. And then also I think it was some sort of comforting thing that it would always spin to what I wanted to be eating. We were also freezing. So I always thought of hot food, but it also, it just made processing or redirecting thoughts very difficult because all you're focusing on is how hungry you are, which makes it a highlight, how scared you are.

And then as far as what happened to my body, since we were laying down, hidden all day, you could, I could slowly start to feel my ribs poke out, my hips poke out, my clothes that I wore for six days straight became looser and looser. And so it was just this sort of decline in how I was able to process things mentally and then my body just became skinnier and skinnier and skinnier.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. The scene with your mom, when, she was talking about did you need a therapist when you got home, right? She had offered you a therapist and she was like well I have a therapist and you're like well why do you need a therapist and she's like she has to like take this deep breath at the doorway and say you know, it's not easy knowing your child is, you know, at risk, more than at risk across the world.

You can't do anything about it, which of course is like everyone, every parent's nightmare. How much did your parents know? And how, if you were to do it again, you know, would you go right back and would you go right into therapy? Like, cause you didn't really. deal with it at first. Like, it was amazing. You just, like, went back to life.

And I'm sorry to dwell on this part of it. It's just so unique. 

Beth: Yeah, no, not at all. Yeah, I didn't go to therapy right away. And therapy, I feel like, was kind of a shameful thing in the climbing community back then. It kind of showed weakness is how people perceived it. And so, yes, if I were to do it all, if I had to go through something like that again, I think the, my therapist would be probably one of my first phone calls after calling my parents.

So I think it's an incredible tool if you're fortunate to be able to, um, afford it and have the means to go. And yes, I mean, my poor mom now being a mom, I just can't, I can't imagine, but at the time I was newly 20 and I just, I couldn't understand like why would you need this, mom? You didn't do anything.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. You also had a scene with your dad that was really powerful. I think, as a parent, I'm reading this both, from both perspectives, right? As the person this could happen to, and then the parents. But, you have this one scene where he says the wrong thing. He shows you a picture of your captor, and it just sets you off.

And he was like, I'm so sorry. And you had, you know, been communicating with him in such a positive way where you could say something like, Oh dad, like the mortar is loud. And because of his experience, he knew that feeling and you almost didn't have to say more, but then this one sort of misstep like sets the ground shaking.

Cause he was like the most reliable and steady. Tell me about that and how this whole thing affected your parents and you and your relationships. And if, and when it kind of, you felt that Like, back to baseline, if you will. 

Beth: Gosh, I don't know if I felt back to baseline for many years after that with my parents.

And not because they did anything, you know, wrong. Obviously, none of us had any training in this. None of us knew what to do if one of the family members got kidnapped or whatnot. But yeah, with my dad, it always felt like As a competitor early on, I had all these superstitions and my dad was always, and both parents, both my mommy and my dad were very good at like catering to those superstitions, like I needed to eat at the Olive Garden before a competition, I needed to rent our car from Hertz, and so they were always really good at that, and then when my dad misstepped a little bit, and obviously he would have no reason of, you know, Knowing how, how to walk this line by showing me a picture of, of a capture.

It just felt like such a break in the foundation of my understanding of how I could trust him and how he could help me along maybe, maybe too much as a crutch, you know, but I feel like once he was able, once we were able to actually even just talk later that conversation and he was able to say, Oh, I'm sorry, I had no idea.

I feel like that started to build the baseline, but honestly, I feel like I couldn't even admit it to myself and, and then even talk to my parents about Kyrgyzstan until 15 years later, it was just something that was, You know buried after that because I didn't know how to deal with it. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh And yet you surmount all these challenges which seem really superhuman So you have climbed the face of El Capitan like without ropes, basically 

Beth: Well, there's yeah, it's a weird.

It's a weird nuance in climbing. So Free soloing is without the ropes, and that's the movie everybody's seen with Alex. Free climbing means you use the ropes and all the gear for protection, but you're not allowed to grab them as, to help you up, if that makes sense. You're just allowed to use the, the rock to go climb up.

Zibby: How did you do that? I don't even understand how it's possible. 

Beth: Yeah, it's, it's just a lot of training, a lot of preparation, baby steps. You know, you don't just start climbing. And that's your first climb. You know, I had many, many years of climbing in the gym, many, many years of climbing outside and slowly working up to it.

So it's just, you know, a big puzzle and you just start whittling away at the pieces. 

Zibby: But you must have this different relationship with fear than most people, right? Like most people can't even, like, I can't even get up a ladder. I'm like scared of bunk beds, like, and you're scaling the biggest mountains in the world.

What do you do with your fear? Do you not feel it? Do you not have it? Or do you just know how to cope with it so much better? 

Beth: You know, honestly, I think at the peak of my career, I buried it. I, it was there. I was, I was not proud of it because I didn't think that most professional climbers should be scared.

But I had a way of dealing with it and bearing with it, bearing it. Sort of, again, a baby step mentality. I would sit there, I would kind of talk to myself and I'd say, okay, well, what are you afraid of? And I'd go through all the safety things that I had and, you know, this rope can hold a bus and. You're not, you don't weigh as much as the bus and you have all these points of safety.

And so I think it would just be this sort of methodical thing on how I would talk to myself about the fear, about the steps on how I was safe. And, but again, you know, the first time each year that I would go up on Al Cap or be 3000 feet in the air, it would be scary. And it would be this thing that I would slowly acclimate to. 

Zibby: Wow. Just beyond impressed. And also you had so many injuries along the way. Tell me about some of the climbing injuries and the ones sort of towards the end of your career. And now how has your body all of it? 

Beth: Yeah, I've, um, I've had my fair share of injuries and towards the end of my career, I feel like my body just kind of became unraveled a little bit and broke down, I think with all the compounding stress of burying Kyrgyzstan and a divorce and all that sort of thing. It just really added up and my body was the way that it manifested in injuries. So I've dozens and dozens of finger injuries. That's something that's really probably not common for most people because you don't think that you'll injure your fingers, but for climbing, that's one of our biggest tools and that's one of our biggest assets.

So, you know, little pieces of connective tissue would pop and tear in my fingers. I've injured my shoulders a bunch and had to have surgery and broken my ankles. But nowadays, I feel like I'm able to climb and yes, I get injuries along the way, but I don't feel like it's, um, as at the rapid pace that it once was.

Probably also because I'm less frantic to, you know, get up that sand hill. I'm not running up that sand hill anymore. I have a much calmer pace with, with climbing and with my body. 

Zibby: But you're still doing it. 

Beth: Yeah, absolutely. I did it yesterday. 

Zibby: So, oh my gosh. Wow. And how does being a mom play into all of it?

Beth: Gosh, being a mom was honestly, when I went through the biggest transformation, I think, I think climbing and being an athlete. Yeah. It's amazing, but it's a very selfish pursuit, you know, every day. It's just how can you make focus on you to push your desires forward. And so becoming a mom really slowed me down in that way.

I also had a really tough physical postpartum. So I really had to slow down and let my body heal and understand. This kind of new body that I was in that I had never heard about. I'd never experienced. I didn't understand how to let, let things like a prolapse heal. You know, I knew how to heal a finger injury, but I had no idea how to be able to stand upright, you know, without being in pain.

And nowadays I feel like it's also slowed me down in each day, right? I'm less frantic. I just try and go out and as much as you can enjoy a day out in the, in the woods with a young kid, it's also, you know, very sporadic and very frantic. It's um, yeah, it's been a pretty amazing thing, honestly, to see how I've been able to change just because as an athlete, I feel like I knew, I thought I had it all figured out, you know, like I was winning somehow in life and.

But it's amazing. It's opened my eyes to another way to, to walk through this life in many different ways. 

Zibby: Well, I was so pleased to see that your sponsors stuck with you when you decided to sort of shift and that telling women's stories, women athletes, aging, not aging, but, you know, transitioning through different parts of their career is so important.

And how do we do that for women and, and how does the community support them? And it seems like you have felt very supported throughout, which is wonderful. 

Beth: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, climbing and sports in general have traditionally not been there to support women through pregnancy and becoming a mom. It seemed like sort of the unspoken time when you bowed out or you accomplished everything and you retired or.

You know, took a different role and you know, that wasn't my experience. That was my biggest fear, but my sponsors stuck with me and we've really been able to develop a different path in, in being a professional climber and, you know, making climbing more equitable, talking about ways to, to keep climbers and keep athletes relevant and impacting the community.

So yeah, it's been a pretty eyeopening experience. 

Zibby: Well, some people feel that writing a book is like climbing a mountain, which you have now done both. And I'm sure that in comparison to what you normally do, the book writing itself was a piece of cake, but maybe that's not true. How was that experience for you?

Beth: Absolutely not a piece of cake. It was very hard, very long and arduous. I couldn't have done it without Eva and Mark, the two people that really helped me. And, but I do think it was. Kind of like a big climbing project or whatnot in that, you know There's all these pieces that you want to put together to make the final Thing and and that was pretty cool to see how it was done Had similarities, but honestly, I found it way more difficult.

I don't know how all of you that are actual authors and writers, uh, do it. It's, it's a amazing experience. It's fascinating, but yeah, I think I'm much more apt to climbing rather than. 

Zibby: In the book, you were really disappointed when you went on the Today Show back when you were 20, and Katie Couric wasn't there that day.

Did you ever get a chance to talk to her? 

Beth: I've never met Katie, no. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Okay. I will. I'm going to try to put you in touch. Not like we're BFFs or anything, but I write for Katie Couric Media, so let me see if there's any way. 

Beth: Oh, thank you. Yeah, that was, uh, that was a big, a big letdown, but it was, uh, it was all good.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. So what now? Looking forward. You're going to continue climbing? Are you going to write anymore? Are there new interests? Like, how are you, what are you thinking about for the next couple years of your life? 

Beth: I hope I can keep climbing as long as my body allows. It just feels good to me. You know, it's like yoga or something.

It just feels right. And then as far as writing goes, I don't, um, I think this is, this is the book. This is the book. Yeah. I can't, I don't foresee me, um, yeah. Pursuing or, undertaking another big, big writing project. But you know, you never know in life. 

Zibby: Yeah. You never know. Do you have advice both for, well, really for anyone who's trying to get through anything?

Because I feel like your resilience is off the charts. So how, how can you impart that wisdom to others? 

Beth: I think the thing that I try and think about with anything is just the baby step mentality. You know, I think I can get really overwhelmed by seeing everything in front of me. And. Not understanding how to get from the start to the finish, but then if you, I can break it down.

I feel like that happened in captivity when we were held hostage. It's like, obviously you didn't know when the end was, but if you can just get through this minute and this hour that, you know, that works. Same with a big climb, you know, if I think about it as this whole big thing, it doesn't. It's a bit overwhelming, and so I just try and break it down, or with anything, honestly, just baby step it out.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Are there books that you've read since that have helped you, or helped even for the climbing part or the mothering part or the hostage part or any of it? Has, has there been a book or two or whatever that have helped you? It's been really helpful for you. 

Beth: I really love Glennon Doyle's books. I feel like it's just amazing to show the human part of humans.

And I feel like that was really instrumental to see, oh yeah, we're not machines. You know, we're just, we're humans and we do our best. So, her books I absolutely love. 

Zibby: Amazing. Great. Beth, thank you so much. Wow. What a story. It like really got into my bones. You know, I just felt it and that's a gift to be able to do that in writing.

And again, what you've survived is superhuman and it's amazing. 

Beth: Well, thank you. 

Zibby: I'm really glad I learned your story. 

Beth: Thank you so much for having me. I really do appreciate it. 

Zibby: Okay. Congrats. 

Zibby chats with podcaster and writer Molly Stillman about her laugh-out-loud and heartfelt memoir IF I DON’T LAUGH I’LL CRY: How Death, Debt, and Comedy Led to a Life of Faith, Farming, and Forgetting What I Came into This Room For. Molly describes her childhood with a mom who was a Vietnam War veteran—and what it was like to lose her at seventeen to an autoimmune disorder caused by exposure to Agent Orange. She also shares how she squandered an unexpected quarter-of-a-million-dollar inheritance in less than two years… which filled her with shame and embarrassment. Finally, she describes her writing journey, the challenges of revisiting painful memories, and how she balances humor and seriousness.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Molly. Thank you so much for coming on Mom's No Time to Read Books to discuss, If I Don't Laugh I'll Cry, how death, debt, and comedy led to a life of faith farming and forgetting what I came into this room for.

Molly: I'm so honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh, it's my pleasure. I really could not put your book down. It's so good, and you know, the way that you write, as if you and I are like sitting on the couch chit chatting, and the, how you write about the writing from the beginning to the conclusion to the like, like you feel like you're, in a special book situation.

Do you know what I mean? Like, yeah. 

Molly: Yeah. 

Zibby: So tell me about that. Tell the listeners about your whole story and your decision even to make it so, you know, breaking down of the third wall type of thing. 

Molly: Yeah. Well, it's so funny because I was, I mean, I've always been a writer and I talk about this in the book, you know, my mom was a writer.

And so, I mean, that was just, I think, in my blood from the time I was little and I was constantly writing and I was the kid that always had a million different journals and, you know, making up stories. And when I was in high school, I had an English teacher, Mrs. Broughton, who really was the first one who kind of identified in me.

She was like, you are a gifted writer. And she was like, don't ever let anybody ever squelch that. And I had never been told that before. And so it was like, oh, okay, maybe I'm actually good at this. But then I went to college and I was a creative writing major, and I had a professor who once yelled at me for, like, my very, uh, colloquial style of writing, and was like, you know, you know, you would never get published because this isn't formal enough, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I was like, but, I mean, if I write any other way, then I'm not being true to myself.

But then, of course, like it always happens, I had another professor who was like, don't listen to him. You know, like, he doesn't know what he's talking about. But she was, you know, she really actually helped me, I think, lean into my own unique style of writing. And so when I was in college, I started, uh, you know, she said to me, she was like, the only way you get better as a writer is just to write.

And so this was in the early 2000s and so that manifested itself in the form of a live journal. And, you know, it was just kind of this place where I started just kind of putting my thoughts. And what I really thought I wanted to do with my life was be a comedy writer. I wanted to be, a writer on SNL or I had applied for jobs like writing for The Tonight Show and Conan and stuff like that.

And so I thought that that was kind of what I wanted to do. And so this, this blog became this house for all of my writing. And so I say all of that to say that, like, it really took years and years and years, like decades. I mean, this was, you know, over 20 years ago at this point that I was, you know, just constantly writing every single day.

I'm really glad that there's an archive button so that nobody reads all of that really bad stuff I wrote in the early days. But just the ability to realize, okay, what connects with people? How do people consume a story? And so probably after the first like five or maybe seven years that I was blogging online, and I realized that, oh, there are people like all over the world reading this.

One of the best compliments I ever received was when I met a reader in person. And she said, Oh my gosh, like meeting you, I, I feel like you just talk the way that I read what you write. And I was like, Yes, that's exactly what I'm going for. And so I just kind of leaned into that. And when I first realized that I wanted to write this book and tell this story, I knew that I, because memoir is my favorite genre.

And I love beautiful memoirists. I mean, I've, I've read, you know, David Sedaris, and I've read Jeanette Walls, and I've read a lot of these kind of like well known memoirists. And I was like, that's not my style. Like, I'm not, I'm not ever going to sound like them. And so I just was like, no, I have to be true to myself.

And I've got to be who I am on the page. And I want, if I were to ever run into a reader of this book, I would want them to say, yeah, you're exactly how I pictured you based on how I, when I read your book. And so I just leaned into that and funny enough when I started submitting proposals, uh, most publishers were like, we don't want to publish this.

Nobody's going to want to read it. But I'm really thankful that HarperCollins said, no, somebody wants to read this. So they said yes. And I had an editor who also saw my vision and really also helped me make the book. Stronger because of that and help me lean into more of what was my voice and so it's been it's just a really huge compliment that you say that because that's something that I did really intentionally and I like to invite the reader in and I want them to feel like they know me from the moment that they open up the book so that I kind of earn the right along the way to tell the story the way that I do.

Zibby: I love that so much. I feel like there's always, there are always these people who try to get you, I think, well intentioned people who are giving advice based on what has worked for them or what they know. And it's like not the right advice for you. Somebody once, somebody once, when I was trying to write a book the very first time, which ended up not selling, but fine.

I'm, I mean, clearly I'm not over it. I'm still talking about it like 20 years later, but it's fine. This editor I was working with was like, you can't put an exclamation point. In a book. And I was like, what are you talking about? I have exclamation points, like, all over the book. All over. And she was like, no, no, no.

But you can't do that. You have to take them all out. And I thought about that. I was like, how? And to this day, like, this person ended up being a novelist. never, you know, very literary novelist who would never have an exclamation mark. And I, of course, am not that way. Do you know what I mean? Like, but, but we have totally different audiences.

So for as many critics as there, you know, anyway, I'm glad you listened to yourself. 

Molly: Yes. And I, I will say like my, my editor is amazing because there were a lot of times where, because again, having been a former comedian and comedy writer, there were definitely a lot of like exclamation points or like little asides or jokes I would make in that first manuscript where my editor was like, I think you think this is funnier than I was like, I was like, No, I think this is hilarious.

And so I actually that was a really good exercise in like dying to self, where there were a lot of moments where I was like, I had to pick and choose. Okay. what actually makes this book funnier or makes this, the way I tell this story better, or what do I, like, want to die on the hill of? Like, are there any?

And so there were some things that I just had to let go and be like, okay, you're right, I'll cut that. Even though I think it's really funny, I'll cut it. But then there were other things where I was, I mean, she wanted me to cut it, and I said, I'm putting my foot down, like, I'm leaving this in here. And there are a couple of things that I've had people message me and be like, I cackled at this and I texted her and I was like, I told you, people think this is funny.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. I mean, meanwhile, we're like starting this conversation about the book as if it's, All hilarious, and it is. The way that you write about even the most tragic of times is so funny, and that is great. But there are many poignant moments that you write about in all seriousness, including telling your mom's story.

And I have to say, having read The Women, like everybody in America, I guess, and feeling like, you know, I got to know Kristin Hannah's fictional characters and knowing that one of them is sort of based on your mom and her own memoir Home Before Morning, which is so great you have right up up there, my gosh.

And I feel like I should go back and read it. Your mom was one of the nurses in Vietnam and her homecoming in particular and the after effects and the health effects that went undiscussed and Really permeated your family and, and ruined her life. I mean, all the things you write, these are heavy topics that you handle alternately with humor and gravitas and all of that.

So tell me about that in particular. And even then going into your own debt situation. I mean, tell me about the piece about your mom and, and. Finding your way to tell her story in your story. 

Molly: Yeah, well, you know, I, it was a large task going into this book because she was a larger than life figure. And for those that, that don't know, I'll just kind of give the 36, 000 foot view.

So my mom was named Linda Vandivander, and she was an army nurse from 1969 to 1970, um, in the Vietnam War. And her memoir, Home Before Morning, was published in 1983, and it was the very first non fiction account of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a woman, and went on to inspire the show China Beach, and yes, Kristen Hanna used it in the research of her novel, The Women.

And, you know, so when I, I was born in 1985, and so this was, I was born, like, during the heat of when my mom was doing publicity for her book still, you know, and it was the heat of the controversy around it. It was incredibly intense. controversial. There were entire groups and organizations that had been formed to discredit her, to say that what she'd written was a lie, and it was really, really painful for her.

But, you know, all the while, my mom is getting sober. She got sober the same year that her book came out. She had battled alcoholism for years after coming back from Vietnam, much like a lot of vets. But she got sober in 1983, her book comes out in 1983, she meets my dad in 1984, they get married six weeks later, and then I'm born in 1985.

And they're thrust into a legal battle fighting for my mom to have sole rights to her book, uh, all of the controversy around it, I mean, it was a lot. So, you know, I'm Kind of by osmosis, like, I'm just thrown into this lifestyle of being the daughter of an incredibly powershe's just a powerful woman who did not take any ish from anyone, but did it all with laughter and with a sense of humor.

And she had this incredibly loud, boisterous laugh that I have inherited. That you could hear probably a mile away. 

Zibby: Oh my god, I love, I love the scene, not to interrupt. I love the scene when you were working for, was it a governor? Or not the governor's office? And they told you you were laughing too loudly and disrupting people.

And then the governor was like, no, that's not true. Like, keep it up. Oh my gosh. 

Molly: Good old, good old Tim Kaine. Future vice presidential candidate. Yeah, I know. What a wild. It's my husband and one of my best friends. They call me, they're like, you're like my Forrest Gump friend. Like you have these like really weird stories where you interact with these like iconic people in history.

I was like, I actually, I take that as a compliment. But yeah, yeah, she just, you know, I inherited that, that big, boisterous laugh from her. And so when I set out to write this story, I was like, how do I tell her story in a way that. makes sense, brings people that don't know her into it and then also weave it into my life and how, you know, the, the war and the aftereffects of the war affected me even though I was born 15 years after she came home.

And so that was a really difficult task. I will say that the chapters where I write about her service and those and along with the chapter about her death and funeral. are, were by far the hardest chapters I had to write. In fact, I had to like literally go away to a place by myself for a couple of days to be able to do it.

And, and what I did was I actually, my mom was a voracious hoarder of things and journals and notepads and I have all of them. And so I spent the first 24 hours when I was gone and away just reading her journals. And so I have journals and notebooks from when she was in Vietnam and when she came home and when she met my dad and, and so it was really interesting kind of getting inside of her head to see like what was going through her head.

And so I tried to kind of, I don't want to sound like weird, but like channel that as I was writing it is like, how do I then convey what I gathered from, from her journal writing? into what I'm putting on the page. And because, like I said, she had a sense of humor, and I tell that story in the book of the Grotto of Lords where, uh, she fakes a healing.

And, uh, you know, she does like, stand up, stand up. And people think that she's being miraculously healed. I tell, I told that story in, like, specifically so that people could understand that, like, yes, what we were facing as a family with, you know, my mom's family being estranged, with her illness and the VA, you know, not acknowledging her illness and her PTSD and our financial issues, like, it was, it was a lot.

But my parents, like, that was a microcosm of how they handled those things. And it's not that they were dismissive of the grief. It's not that they were not dealing with it. It was If they don't laugh, they will cry and so like if they, if they did not choose joy in the midst of a lot of pain, like I actually think my mom would have died a whole lot sooner because I think that because she chose joy in the midst of what was just really painful and that my dad was really protective of her peace, of surrounding her with people that she loved.

brought her life and did not bring her down. And that, you know, they chose those opportunities, like, to make fun of their Catholic upbringings and fake a healing. You know what I mean? Like, that was, that was who they were. And so, and that's, and that's in a lot of ways how I am. And so, you know, as I was telling her story, it was like, I wanted to enmesh these things together of, let me tell the lighthearted side of them while also lacing the really difficult parts of it all throughout.

Zibby: Amazing. Oh my gosh. In the story, and I'm so sorry about your mom's loss by the way. I should have just said that in the chapter. Whatever you channeled and however you did it with the journals, like the effect of it was me sitting on my couch with like my hand over my heart and at times my hand over my face being like, oh my gosh, like the moment at the NSYNC concert where she has like a PTSD episode and doesn't even remember it.

And you're in charge. I mean, that's the thing too. It's, it's not just that she was going through all this. It's that you were so young and having to hold all of this really painful, serious stuff and that is hard. I mean. 

Molly: Yeah. 

Zibby: That is, any response from any child in that situation, you'd be like, oh, okay, I understand why.

Molly: Yeah, and I've had to as an adult because I think in a lot of ways and I talk about this a little bit in the book, not as much as I maybe wanted to, but I just felt protective of of it in some ways is that like I, I carried a lot of regret for years and, and you know, how I handled things or like if I was just being a teenage brat, you know, my daughter is almost 11 and so we're like deep in the tween.

Zibby: Oh my gosh, I am there. I have. 

Oh my gosh, we should talk offline. I'm like, this is the hardest summer. 

Molly: I know. And so like, and you know, she is amazing. She's a bright, smart, hilarious, funny, generous kid. And then there are the moments that the tween sass comes out. And I looked at my husband and I was like, I think I'm just getting paid back because I look back and I'm like, man, I was the exact same way.

And you know, I loved my mom deeply, but then there were times where, yeah, she was my mom and I was like annoyed with her and embarrassed by her just like every other teenager. And I've, especially around her illness or maybe just being frustrated with her or angry with her or like the night that she died, you know, I, I tell that story of how we were not on good terms when she died.

We had gotten in a huge fight. And so that is something that I have really wrestled with and had to deal with in therapy. And, and I think now as an adult, you know, I'm uh, an almost, you know, I'm nearing 40 at this point. And I, I've gotten to the point now where I think. I can't imagine, like, if I take myself out of myself, and I look at just, if I was just any other teenager, like, it was a deck of cards that I did not know how to play, and my parents didn't know how to play it, like, all of us were doing the best we could with what we had, and it was, A lot.

And I didn't, you know, I didn't have any sort of, I didn't go to therapy. I wasn't in counseling. Like I, I wasn't, uh, I didn't have a foundation of faith. I didn't have anything. And so in a lot of ways, like I just kind of had what I had right in front of me and I was doing the best that I could. And yeah, a lot of it I probably could have done better and different.

I was it. Well, or I was 13 or I was 15 and it's like, I don't know what I would have expected me to do. So that is something that I legitimately had to kind of work through and get to the point where I was giving my younger self grace that I didn't give to myself at the time. 

Zibby: Yeah, you could see that in the storytelling.

I mean, there is a compassion to it. 

Molly: Yeah. 

Zibby: It's so necessary. In addition to the loss and everything, your dad then gets remarried and moves to Florida. You're in college and you get this massive inheritance check out of the blue, which you thought maybe you'd get something, but never anticipated it being so much.

Had no sort of mentorship except for some random guy at the bank who you're like, he could have at least given me some pointers. Yeah. Literally anything. Literally anything. Literally anything would have helped. Yeah. Which ironically ends up leading you into all sorts of debt, which then you carry the shame of for so long.

So talk a little bit about that piece of the puzzle and even how it took your marriage and the tithing system and all of that to sort of find your way back. I found that fascinating. 

Molly: Yeah, so yes, my on my 21st birthday, I get this surprise inheritance from again, my mom's family was estranged. And so I get this surprise inheritance for a quarter of a million dollars on my 21st birthday, and you know, it's right at the beginning of my senior year of college.

And. this was, you know, not anything that I had any idea what I was doing. And so what happens when you give a, you know, emotionally unstable 21 year old a quarter of a million dollars? Uh, well, a lot. And so within less than two years, I had not only spent every last dime, I was over 36, 000 in consumer credit card debt.

And I had realized that for me, in a lot of ways, and this isn't as like, you know, fun and sexy of a story as like, you know, I got into drugs, and I was, you know, like, working at a strip club, and I was drinking all the time, like, I, I didn't do that, but for me, the way, one of the ways I coped with grief was by spending money.

And it is more common than people realize, ever since I started sharing my story, the amount of people who have come out and said, yes, like there is real science to this of when people just spend money because they think it's like a quick fix. It's a quick dopamine hit of something new and fun and exciting.

And all of a sudden, you know, most of America is riddled with credit card debt. So it's, it's actually way more common than we talk about, but it's just not as like, you know. bright flashing lights like it is, uh, with, you know, drugs or alcohol abuse. And so this was something that I had been really struggling with and I, you know, just really spiraled into feeling deep shame and embarrassment and regret.

And, and a lot of it stemmed with like, my mom would be so disappointed in me. Like this, this should have been her money. She should have been here to get this money. But I got it, and I screwed up, and like, yes, I did a couple of good things with it, but in general, like, I just was wildly irresponsible, and I'm embarrassed, and I'm ashamed, and so I hid.

And so I, I, you know, just kind of pushed everybody out. I wouldn't let anybody know what was going on. And when you do that, when you not only, you know, isolate yourselves and, and you're not truthful with what's actually going on in your life, but you kind of stiff arm people, I mean that the mental health effects of that are just terrible.

And so yeah, it was, it was not like an overnight fix. This was like, I, I re I hit the financial rock bottom in the summer of 2008 and it wasn't until the fall of 2010 that I actually. opened up with somebody who is now my husband to, to let him know, like, here's, here's what's going on in my life. And here's the disaster that I have gotten myself into.

And the first time that I had really opened up myself, uh, to him, you know, he wasn't, Shaming or condemning in the study was compassionate and he was like, we're gonna help, you know, I'm gonna help you figure out how to kind of figure out the rest of the way. And then also at that time, like, because I'd hit this kind of emotional rock bottom, this spiritual rock bottom, you know, I was at a place where I had been considering taking my own life.

I was, I was living alone. I was isolated. I was depressed. And I kind of had reached my limit. last straw. And for me, it was, all right, I've given everything else a try. I might as well step in the foot of a church. And, uh, I realize that's not everybody's, uh, journey, but that was mine. And I stepped foot in the foot of a church that day.

And I, for the first time, heard a the gospel and I, I got to hear that there was hope and that there was, you know, no condemnation for me and that there, I could, you know, be released of my shame and my guilt. And I'm telling you, like, it was a real, very, a very real experience of feeling a, a weight lifted off of my shoulder.

And it's not like it was like a, You know, overnight, everything changed, but it, it began this process of actually getting to the root of what was going on in my life and healing, uh, a deep part of me that had been broken. And so it was, you know, over the course of the next year and a half that I was just kind of surrendering and trying, stop trying to like, in our American culture, it's all like, You've got to do it yourself.

Like, pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. You can do this. You know, you are enough. Like, girl boss. And that was, that was a really like, for me, that was really a toxic message. And instead it was like, actually stop trying to control everything and instead release it to God. And, and he really did a deep spiritual work in me.

And, um, and then over the next year and a half, I got engaged. I got married and wrote my last check to pay off the debt. And, and so we've been debt free for Over 12 years now and, you know, it's not like it's been easy or, you know, that life's been this like cakewalk since then, but I don't carry that shame, that guilt, that it can just feel like you're drowning ever since then and so that's, that's obviously a huge part of my life and my story and my family.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Well, you told it beautifully and..

Molly: Thank you. 

Zibby: It's hard not to root for you. What, what is the PS to the book? Like now? I'm so invested. What has happened since the end of the book to now? 

Molly: Wow. Well, so, you know, my family and I, we live, uh, we, I touch on this a little bit at the book, but uh, yeah, we live on a farm literally as you and I are.

Recording this, my goats are currently walking up to my window and staring at me like, what are you doing? Um, uh, so no, I am not a comedy writer in New York City like I thought I was going to be or be on Saturday Night Live, but instead we live on a farm. We've planted a church here in our community with an incredible group of people and I get It's amazing.

to wake up every day just feeling incredibly lucky for the slow paced life that I live. And uh, we've got two beautiful kids and we just, we just feel really lucky for the life that we live. And, and I don't take a single day for granted. I get to see my dad all the time. My dad lives 10 minutes away and he's married to an incredible woman who my mom would have just loved.

Yeah. The woman I talk about in the book that my dad was with, she's no longer, uh, in the picture. And. We're not sad about that. And, um, my, my dad got remarried to a woman who was also a nurse, uh, not in Vietnam, but she was a nurse, born and raised, uh, in Cleveland, actually really close to where my dad's from, kind of small world.

She is also a widow. And so there's, she's in, uh, AA along with my dad. And so it's just, you know, It's just like she's got this loud boisterous laugh, just like my mom. And so in a lot of ways, we kind of feel like God brought them together in their later years in life. My dad just turned 80 and it's just been a really beautiful kind of redemption story.

And like I said, you know, our family is still going through a lot. Um, there's, there's a lot kind of, of painful stuff that have happened in the last couple years, but you know, we're, we're still doing it with, uh, kind of living life with a smile through it all. And, uh, I'm just feel really grateful. 

Zibby: Oh, Molly, thank you so much for letting all of us into your life through your book, through this conversation, and just all the people you're helping by being so honest and open and you know, SNL, whatever, this is so powerful what you're doing, so thank you for, thank you for finding your way to tell your story and making us laugh whatever way it ended up coming out.

So thank you. 

Molly: Thank you so much, Zibby. I'm so, so honored to be here. And thank you for reading this book and encouraging others to read it, too. 

Zibby: Please don't. If I don't laugh, I'll cry. Molly Stillman, go get the book. All right. Thank you. 

Ghanaian American cardiologist, cartoonist, and author Shirlene Obuobi joins Zibby to discuss her powerful, sexy, and emotionally brilliant new romance, BETWEEN FRIENDS AND LOVERS. Shirlene describes her protagonist, Josephine Boiteng, a former medical resident turned influencer who struggles with mental health, burnout, and an unrequited crush. She also delves into the novel’s medical and social media elements and the themes of love, vulnerability, and personal growth—revealing that she wrote this during a challenging period in her own life and used many of her experiences as inspiration.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Shirlene. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss between friends and lovers. Congratulations. 

Shirlene: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby.

Zibby: I was just raving before we started about how much I'm loving your book, so this is such a treat to get to discuss all the details. Tell listeners what Between Friends and Lovers is about, please. 

Shirlene: For sure. So Between Friends and Lovers is about my main character, Josephine Boiteng. She just finished her medical residency and is unable to move forward with a Typical job, uh, because she's dealing with a lot of mental health issues and burnout.

And so instead kind of sustains herself through a career as an influencer. She's also very much enmeshed in a family of wealthy socialites and his best friends with the, one of the male leads, Ezra has been in love with him basically for the last 10 years, but it's been, seems to be unrequited. And in the beginning of the book, she kind of decides that, you know what, I really need to move on, um, from this.

And she moves right on, right into the male lead, Malcolm, who is kind of everything that Ezra isn't, but probably everything that Jo actually needs. 

Zibby: Love that. Oh my gosh. And Malcolm, of course, is a, is a novelist, bestselling novelist who you do such a good job of, A, you know, physically, I feel like I can see him in my head in every scene, like the way you describe him, B, like his whole sort of personality and, you know, by alternating the points of view in the book, I feel like you're really letting us, you know, get this backstage view.

Like, I feel like it's mostly Joe's book, but with Malcolm where like you get to see, you know, all the things that she doesn't get to see. It's like this, which I love and develop like so much affection for him too. Right. And seeing, because you wouldn't know, I'm sorry for rambling, but like, if you were just reading Joe's point of view and like in a scene where he decides not to kiss her right away, you might not know why he was doing that.

But now we know completely why and respect it and all of this. So, um, so tell me a little bit about choosing how, how to tell the story. 

Shirlene: Oh, for sure. So it has a little bit of a different structure that I think a lot of other romance novels in the genre, first of all, it's a dual point of view, which might confuse people who walk in thinking it's going to be a love triangle.

I tell people it's not really a love triangle. If you, they have to focus on what's important for Joe and Joe's growth and her journey. And Joe's point of view is in first person. past, and Mal's is in third. I did that very intentionally as well to just kind of direct people to the point that, you know, I know Mal is, Mal's perspective is here, but it's there to help inform, as you very astutely picked up on, inform readers that this is really still about Joe, right?

And we're getting background on Mal, specifically because Mal's personality is, I call, he's, he's a lot more understated. He's very, anxious, he's introverted, right? Um, he's keeps to himself. He's undergone a growth arc himself off page. He's a little bit older than Joe by like, I think three years or so, and he's already kind of gone through what Joe is going through right now.

And so he, is not someone who would otherwise be very loud and seen, especially when compared to Ezra, who, who takes up as much space as possible every time he shows up. So I think I did that so that you could see a little bit of Mal's interiority as well and kind of understand why he is the one who's good for Jo.

And also to kind of make people focus and remember that this is, it's a romance, but I always write women's fictiony romances. It's still about her. 

Zibby: Yep. Yeah, I could see that. Well, it's also interesting, even with Mal's backstory, which you referenced, even his past relationships with women and like sort of the toxicity of some of his choices and all of that and like really going into that.

With the point of view of his friends as well, like sort of showing him and pointing out like, okay, you know, beware and you have a type and, you know, like look before you leap and all of that. Then we get even more of an insight into, into that, which I also found fascinating. So. 

Shirlene: Yeah. Yeah, I know. I think that, um, it would be really easy to read Mal as, I, I've seen people be like, oh, he's so perfect.

I'm like, he is not perfect. Jumping in is actually, the way that he even is jumping in with Joe is not necessarily, it's a little ill advised, right, um, especially considering his history. He just trusts himself a little bit more and also. Has gotten to the point where I think several times in his narrative, I have him directly say, like, if this doesn't work out, I will be okay.

I will go home. I will lick my wounds. I've been by myself for a while. I will be fine, right? Like, just kind of, like, that is, he hasn't changed dramatically from who he was, right? Um, but he does know how to recover. 

Zibby: And I love that you made him a novelist who's like getting a film deal and that you have the whole like we're reading a book but it's about a novelist and you know all that so that was also very fun.

Shirlene: It's so fun to include. I always say that I, because I'm a physician and I'm a writer, and so my, my characters are often what I do. 

Zibby: Well, I love the, the medical stuff in here as well. You know, even the scene in the zoo where, you know, the man falls off a carousel and not only does, not you, but Joe and Mal, you know, help in trying to save this man and having to break the ribs, break his ribs and saying like, you know, sometimes you have to hurt people to save them.

And I feel like that's like a metaphor also for the whole story. 

Shirlene: Ooh, yes, yes. I'm so glad you picked up on that. It's one of my favorite scenes. 

Zibby: It's awesome. Not to mention why they're even in the zoo to begin with, which is like one of the more outlandish social media. You know, situations as well. I'm like, they're not really doing this, right?

Wait, tell me more about Jo as influencer because she was a doctor, is a doctor, but was dissatisfied, emotional, like was not working from a mental health standpoint. And, you know, she's feeling conflicted even with these job offers that keep coming. Should I go back? Should I not go back? And is being an influencer enough?

But I didn't want to earn money, but blah, blah, blah. So tell me a little bit about that. And as a physician yourself, like, are you given opportunities to, you know, you, you said like, what's the word, like promoting snake oil and basically different things. So tell me about that point of view. 

Shirlene: Yeah, for sure.

So, um, I draw comics and I have a large platform that I talk about, um, comics and, and it's called graphic medicine basically. Right. And then I have a large platform. So I do sometimes get. Offers from different companies. And most of those offers indeed are from supplement companies, um, things that aren't really tested that don't have rigorous science behind them, but they offer me a lot of money, right?

But they offer a lot of monies because having like you being able to say, Oh, cardiologists, you know, It says that this, this supplement will save you from XYZ, um, has a lot of power behind it and you can drive a lot of sales. But there are a lot of physicians, a lot of people in the healthcare spaces and a lot of people who are on professions with some degree of power that a lot of companies are kind of trying to engage with in order to sell products.

And there's questions about the ethics behind that, right? And for Joe who, Jo went into medicine, uh, for several reasons. One of those, like, one of the prominent ones was that because, you know, she has to rely on herself and it's a reliable source of income, but that's a very slow way to get there. It's also because she really cares, and that's a central part of her character.

I think when people encounter her at first, they might think she's very brash. She's extremely blunt. Uh, she gets to the point, but she's She's quite compassionate as well. And so she goes into this field for this purpose and then can't quite hack it. And doesn't, isn't really able to dive herself back into it.

So, the influencer thing is kind of her way to still keep her foot in the door, right? She still gets to do the stuff that she likes. She still gets to do the education about health, but she does also feel a lot of guilt about that because it's not a lot of, it's not very patient facing. And, and in a lot of ways, I think in the story, I'm trying to show kind of this new, this other lens, right, where.

Yeah, like someone, she tells somebody she's got an MD, but all she's doing is, is content creation. People are probably going to judge her for that. She's going to judge herself for it. She's going to feel like she's not using her talents or her skills to the greatest, uh, degree and she struggles with that.

There's, you know, on top of that, there's the insecurity that comes with that, right? Because you make, you may make a lot of money when you have a deal. But if you go a long stretch of time without one, then, uh, she, you kind of lose your stable ground, which is, uh, she has several conversations with her agents, for example, um, that are kind of around that.

Zibby: So do you have an agent for social media for your platform? 

Shirlene: I only recently got one and it's really funny. I got one. A lot of what I've done on my platform was kind of, were things that I was writing this book and was like, I should probably do that. 

Zibby: No, I was reading it and I was like, am I supposed to be doing any of that?

Like,.. 

Shirlene: It's really funny. Like a lot of her health education, because I started writing this book in 2022 and I used to draw exclusively comics and then I started writing Joe making these videos where she's educating people about things. I was like, that is a good idea. And same with an agent. I did not have an agent until like a month or two ago.

Um, and I'd had a friend who had been offering to represent, like, share me with a representative. And I was like, it's fine. And then I wrote this book and I was like, oh, maybe I should just talk to them. 

Zibby: That was funny. Did she read the character? What's her name, Olivia? Is that right? 

Shirlene: Denise. 

Zibby: Denise. 

Shirlene: No, no, no, no.

I don't, I don't know whether any of them have ever read or intend to read this book. I'll keep it that way. 

Zibby: Okay, okay. Well, I did really enjoy that whole, that whole thing and having to, you know, constantly be thinking about how to turn your life and work into content. And yet, maintain some sort of barrier between your private life and not.

I also really appreciated that with Jo. And I really liked Renata, the older, you know, the mom, Ezra's mom, who you also develop as a character and there aren't often moms in like rom coms and books like this and I feel like we got to know her and how important Jo is to her, but have things happen with her professional and her personal life.

And tell me about that character and, and the decision to sort of make her, I mean, she could have easily been just like in the background. 

Shirlene: Oh, yes. I, I love Renata. She's one of my favorite characters. And I think, um, I was thinking about a few things with her. Number one, um, I think that the wealthy white mom was usually going to be the villain character, right?

The one who's like, stay away from my son or, or like is very snooty and looks down on Joe. But I really wanted her to be Joe's mom, basically. She's her maternal figure, right? She's full of love, right? She's feisty. She has this own career of her own, but she's also made her own choices and almost her own mistakes.

See her in those moments. I, I, I. One of my favorite things to do with Renata is show her in those moments of vulnerability, you know, where she is not just this superstar, supermodel project runways. Right. Um, and she's also not just Ezra's mom, Joe and Joe and Renata have their own completely separate relationship.

Right. And I, I just wanted to put that, put that there. I also felt that it was really important for Ezra and Joe's relationship to be, to have more weight Joe would feel as though if she were to lose Ezra, she may also lose his mom, right, and lose the one family she sort of has. And so I wanted to maintain that, no, like this fan, like this love that they have for each other is so genuine that honestly it was not ever going to be a possibility.

They were always going to have the bond that they do. 

Zibby: Did you know from the start, the emancipation sort of plotline that Joe has, has been on her own since age 16 and all that. 

Shirlene: Yes, yes. I, I always knew that Joe's would have come from an abusive household. I didn't exactly have the structure for what it looked like, but I always have the piece that she has not really, she's been kind of alone and on board for a long time.

That is her status quo. 

Zibby: Interesting. So how did this, idea come to you and how, what was going on with On Rotation when this, like, give me the timeline of everything. 

Shirlene: On Rotation was about to come out. So my first book was about to come out and we were, I sold Between Friends and Lovers on proposal. I call it my burnout book.

So, um, when On Rotation or when, when I sold Between Friends and Lovers, that was twenty, June 2022 just finished my first year of cardiology fellowship, and I had just also finished residency, internal medicine residency. COVID had, you know, I was an internal medicine resident during COVID, so that was very traumatic and the morale amongst myself and a lot of my friends was, you know, extremely low.

We were, there were running jokes amongst all of us about what kind of antidepressant we were using, you know, and we were just very burnt out. So I always, I call BFL my burnout book. Right. Which is like, if I weren't to do this, like what else could I do? Right. I also, I'm a big fan of love triangles, but I'm cursed with second lead syndrome.

That I always root for the second lead. I think the second lead is always healthier. Right. He always teaches the female lead something about herself. She always chooses the exciting one. And I wanted to turn that trope on its head because I wanted there to be, I wanted to really focus in a, in a romance on the female lead.

I wanted to be like, what does she actually need out of this? Right. And so, those two kind of ideas at the same time sort of melded into what we see now between friends and lovers, uh, with Joe's central conflict as well as kind of the relationship she has with these two men. 

Zibby: Wow. So interesting. Have you had anything like this in your own life?

Not that it's any of my business, but 

Shirlene: The center of a love triangle. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Shirlene: No, I have not. I have had, I've had several friendships like the one with Ezra. I've also, I know a lot of men like Mal as well. You know, it was actually, that was another part of it too, is that like, I feel like a couple of things, you know, we'd rarely get to see black men depicted as kind of softer characters, empathetic characters.

And I know, I know like four males. I actually, one of my friends who I think in the back of the book, I had him opal sensitivity read for Mal to see whether I was getting him right. Right. Because he's very similar to him. Um, just very kind. Very keeps to himself. There's also always in the gym. I was like, I know these guys.

Uh, my little brother is a lot like Mal as well. So I, I did craft them based off of some familiarity with people like them, relationships like them, but not exactly. 

Zibby: Interesting. And tell me your whole backstory. Like where are you from and when did you decide to be a doctor? And then how did the writing come into it?

And like, what's your whole life story? 

Shirlene: My life story. So, so I was born in Ghana. I came to the States when I was six. We started off in Chicago, then went to Arkansas and Texas. I went to Wash U for undergrad and Chicago for medical training. And I've actually just recently moved to Providence, Rhode Island to start my job.

So I've, I've moved around quite a lot and my mom is a physician. My mom is a neonatologist. So I was exposed pretty early on to medical medicine. She did residency and fellowship while I was in elementary and middle school. So I saw her in training as well. And she. So, like, when we moved to Arkansas, we moved to a very small town, and that was part of, for part of a waiver job, right, for immigration.

You go to a place that's underserved for a certain number of years and so, because we were in this itty bitty town, Balfour, Arkansas, I was also helpful. It was all hands on deck in the, in the hospital. So, I kind of, like, lived there. And, you know, like every kid sees their parent and is like, I'm going to be like you someday.

Um, that was definitely me and then as I got a little bit older, I really started to feel, I think that the reality of it is that it's very hard to motivate me to do things. Um, it's hard to motivate me to get up every day without a very clear like mission or purpose. And within medicine, you're needed in a way that it's hard to be needed in other professions, right?

In a very visceral way. I think I really like belonging to, um, to a family network and being a part of a patient's care journey is almost like being like led into their family in some way. And that is something that was very appealing to me. And then I liked the sciences, but I've always written and I've always drawn since I was a child, my 10th birthday party, I, I, Um, I asked for a book signing event.

I have my parents. 

Zibby: I read that. Yes. 

Shirlene: Yeah. And I, when I was 14, I self published a book that is embarrassingly, very easy to find. Right. Um, and so it's something that I've always kind of done. Um, and in my meta in the time of right before on rotation, I wrote on rotation during the pandemic and kind of in the, my off times between stints in the ICUs and it really became especially romance in particular.

Um, It became a source of comfort for me, if anything, to be able to kind of dissociate from the horrors that I was like experiencing in real time and the exhaustion and everything, and to, and to a story that still used elements of it. And very much a way to process the things that I was seeing, the, and encountering, um, and these new 'cause.

You know, when you're, you're, one of the things about being in medicine is that you. You meet so many people on the worst days of their lives, you know, and you see so many different families, so many different people under pressure, and it really informs how you think about love, how it manifests in the hardest moments.

And so I felt like a very, when people are like, why do you write romance? I'm like, it kind of felt very natural because it's not necessarily the genre that I read the most, you know, but it felt very natural to kind of explore that and how people come to love to each other and how they show it. 

So that's kind of my, it's my feel.

Zibby: Wait, what, what genre do you like to read? 

Shirlene: I read a little bit of everything. I read sci fi fantasy. I read lit fic. I recently started dipping my toe into thriller as well. Lately it's been, I haven't read as much as I want to lately because I'm studying for exams as well. So, but, uh, but, but. I, I actually, before I wrote On Rotation, I didn't read much romance at all.

Zibby: So when are you, do you have any downtime where you're not working on something or other? 

Shirlene: I have a little downtime before I start my job. I do have an exam in a week, um, and so like a really big one, and then I have another one in October. So it doesn't feel exactly like downtime right now, just cause I'm, I'm grinding, but you know, I find my, I find my little pockets.

Yeah. Okay. Thanks. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, I'm very impressed. Do you miss these characters? Like, will there be a future life for them in other books or are you writing something new? 

Shirlene: I am writing something new. It depends on how BFL does. I would love to write an Ezra book because I, I love Ezra. I, he's meant to be, uh, I think some people will love him too and some people will hate him.

He's not meant to be a villain. And so I not. 

Zibby: I'm not rooting for him as much. I have to be honest, but okay. 

Shirlene: Which is, which is totally fine. I actually. It's, it's very interesting to see who roots for him and who doesn't. Some people really root for Ezra. They're like, I don't really see the chemistry with Mal and Joe, and I would rather have something with Ezra.

And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. I don't agree.

But I do like Ezra as a character, and I would love to explore him growing. And so I would write an Ezra book. I've already figured out how it would start. 

Zibby: Oh, interesting. Awesome. Wow. Well, what advice do you have for aspiring authors? And what advice do you have for time starved people who can't seem to be as productive as you?

Shirlene: I think for aspiring authors, I will say the cliché one first, which is that you just have to finish the thing. I think it's when, before I finished on rotation, I would always get into a cycle of going back and editing things I'd written, like chapters I'd written before to try to get everything perfect.

But you really have to move ahead before you can zoom out and see what you need to fix and move and where. And then the next thing is to really, really try not to be too precious because sometimes we get so super attached to the words themselves, the sentences, the prose, and they may not, they may be beautiful, but they may not actually serve the story the way they need to, or they may not even serve, um, the reading experience.

And learning, one of the big things I had to learn was how to write, how to cut, how to trim, how to, uh, think about my audience as I write, um, while still maintaining my own artistic integrity. Uh, so those are kind of the, the two things I'd say. 

Zibby: Amazing. Well, Charlene, so fun. Thank you so much. Really love this book, Between Friends and Lovers.

Congratulations. And yeah, I'll be following along. Can't wait. 

Shirlene: Thank you so, so much. This was such a delight, Zibby. 

Zibby: Okay. You too. All right. 

Shirlene: Bye. 

Zibby: Bye.

Instagram sensation and webcomic superstar Cassandra Calin joins Zibby to discuss her debut graphic novel, THE NEW GIRL, a comically charming story about change, inspired by her own immigration experience. Cassandra shares what it was like to move from Romania to Canada at the age of 10 and then delves into her book's themes of cultural adjustment, puberty, and personal growth, as experienced through the eyes of her 12-year-old protagonist, Lia. Cassandra discusses her journey into drawing, the experience of growing meteorically on social media, and the creative process behind the creation of this novel.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Cassandra. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss your graphic novel, The New Girl.

Congratulations. 

Cassandra: Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Zibby: As I was just saying to you, my daughter, who is 11, is obsessed with this book, loved it so much and told me about it, which is why we're here. And then I did dive into you and I'm like, oh my gosh, how would I not even, how did I not know all of this already?

So that's the great thing about being a mom. My kids introduced me to the coolest stuff. 

Cassandra: Oh, that's awesome. 

Zibby: So can you please tell listeners what your book is about? 

Cassandra: Yeah, so to summarize a little bit, the book is inspired by my own immigration experience. I am born in Romania and I immigrated to Canada when I was about 10 years old, but the main character, Lia, is 12.

And during that time, I also went through my first period and puberty. So all these changes were happening at once. You know, new home, new school, new friends, new language that I didn't speak at all, and also new body. So all of these changes. Thrown at me at once and you know going to a new school and moving somewhere else is not easy to begin with so Leah had so many things to deal with throughout her journey and that's what the book is about how she tackles those changes and how she is on her journey to acceptance.

Zibby: Why did your family come to Canada? 

Cassandra: Because, well, in Romania, the situation was not that great. You know, there's a lot of corruption and also it was just after communism and the conditions, the living conditions were not great. Economically wise, it was not great. And my parents always wanted to immigrate and our options were either Australia or Montreal.

And my parents chose Montreal because all of their friends decided to move there, so we kind of came as a big community here. 

Zibby: Ah. 

Cassandra: And, uh, yeah, it all turned out very smoothly. 

Zibby: Wow. So then did you have to learn French and English? 

Cassandra: So English I knew a little bit, because growing up we had a lot of cartoons in English.

We had Cartoon Network, we had all those channels, and they were subbed, they were not dubbed. So we were listening to English constantly. And French, I had Zero knowledge. I just knew how to say hello, my name is Cassandra, and I'm 10 years old, or 12 years old, or whatever my age is, yeah. 

Zibby: So how, how did you get through that, and how does Leah get through that, and how can other people, it's a, you know, about to be the start of a new school year, what, Is the secret to getting through a period of a lot of change, especially for someone at age group.

Cassandra: Well, I was fortunate enough to have a welcome class, which is basically a class where immigrant students all come and no one speaks French. So we're all on the same boat. And that kind of helps because you got to have to navigate the language in the same way. You know, if one of your classmates doesn't speak French, but they speak a different language from you. You have to talk through gestures or through translation apps or you kind of have to figure it out. But it kind of reassures you because you're not the one standing out. We're all on the same boat. So that really helped. Fortunately. 

Zibby: I feel like one of the things about this age group in particular in this time of transition is that it feels like it's happening to you.

And yet to everyone, but it, everybody can be, I remember being very self conscious about everything that was going on. 

Cassandra: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Especially at that age. I feel like you're Very aware of everything that's happening, and especially if you're moving to a new place, it's such a big change. 

Zibby: Wow. Did you always draw?

When did drawing and illustrating and all that become an outlet for you? 

Cassandra: Oh yeah, I started drawing since I was a toddler. I think I was not even one years old. I basically, as soon as I could hold a pencil, I was drawing all the time. And I even drew on my parents furniture, and fortunately, they were cool about it, but at first they were, you know, a bit, you know, taken aback to see their furniture with a lot of scribbles everywhere.

But I was fortunate to have really encouraging parents and they always wanted me to pursue, to do whatever I love. So they really, uh, they were happy that I had a passion for art and they encouraged it and they bought me pencils all the time. And I even had a drawing table when I was little and I had a bunch of sketchbooks.

So, yeah, I started drawing since I was little and I never stopped. 

Zibby: That's amazing. You have like almost 3 million followers on Instagram. How, what happened and when did that happen? I read a little bit about how you were sharing your webcomic series and obviously very funny and you not wanting to get out of bed and your crazy hair and all the stuff, all the illustrations.

Cassandra: Yes, as you can see. 

Zibby: It's funny now. 

Cassandra: Oh, thank you. 

Zibby: But how did that all happen? And what has that whole experience been like for you? 

Cassandra: So I started making webcomics when I was in college. It was back when Tumblr was very big. So if you posted on Tumblr, you would most likely get reposted and, you know, reblogs and all that jazz.

So I was in college, I was kind of bored and I wanted to share my art with people because I was always drawing for myself. And someone suggested just go on Tumblr. It's great. And I shared my first comic there. And it blew up, it circulated so much, and I wasn't expecting that. So then I thought, okay, maybe I could do something with this.

So I just kept making those kinds of webcomics, which are about my daily life, um, beauty, hair, relationships, all that good stuff. And it kind of just went gradually and naturally, I grew an audience and then I started to post my stuff on Instagram and same thing, just organically grew. And here I am. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh.

What is the difference, and this is probably a stupid question, a webcomic versus a regular comic? Is the length the same? Is it like a comic strip that used to be in the newspaper? Is there a different format? 

Cassandra: Well, webcomic is in the term, it's on the web. So it's really purely digital. And also I think it's shorter form.

I don't know if there are longer webcomics. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but it's mostly, you know, four or five, six panels maybe. The punchline is right at the end, pretty quick, uh, versus a comic that is an entire book and you have to read and it's pretty short. You can have multiple comics, right? Multiple books, it's a series, more long form.

So yeah, I think that's the main difference. 

Zibby: So if there's somebody starting out today who's talented but hasn't really found their audience yet, what are your tips? Or is it too different since you're, you started at a different time? Like what would you suggest? 

Cassandra: I still think social media is a great way to start.

I think that if you are passionate about drawing, you know, don't be afraid to try it out and try Instagram, whatever there is. Facebook, I guess. I don't know if it's still big. I never use it, but you know, just put your work out there. And I think that is always a good idea. And of course, you know, with the algorithm, things can change.

So you really have to adapt, you know, now Instagram, it's a lot more reels. So let's say you like to draw, then maybe make speed drawings or make, I don't know, uh, some, some sort of animation video, you know, you really have to adapt based on what's, currently popular, but I just know that if you like what you do, it will show and people will be, you will attract people because they will see that you enjoy what you do.

So, you know, that's always a good thing. 

Zibby: Wow. You have any questions? 

Zibby's Daughter: Um, no. 

Zibby: I asked a bunch. 

Zibby's Daughter: I can't think of 

Zibby: Anything about the art, her pencils, what she is. 

Zibby's Daughter: How long did it take to make the book? 

Cassandra: So the book took about three years from, you know, from the concept to the script, to the sketches, to the final.

It's a lot of back and forth. It's a lot of teamwork. It wasn't just me. So, you know, I had an editor, I had people at Scholastic who were commenting and helping me out. There was the design team and we designed the cover together. So it's quite a process. It doesn't seem like it, but it's about two or three years at least.

Zibby: Wow. 

Zibby's Daughter: That's amazing. I would not have the patience. 

Cassandra: No patience. I think once you're in it, it's a lot easier because, yeah, at first it's daunting, but once you're in the rhythm, it kind of just, you don't see time passing as much. 

Zibby: As soon as she finished it, she asked me to look up to see if there was another book in the series and how many books were in the series and when could she get them.

But then we sadly found out that there were no other books to buy in the series yet, so are there going to be a book? 

Cassandra: Yes. 

Zibby: And when? 

Cassandra: Yes, we kind of spoiled it because on the website, whenever you buy the book, it says book one. 

Zibby: I saw that. I did. 

Cassandra: Yeah, we spoiled it indirectly, but yes, there will be a book too.

And I'm working on it right now. Actually, I have it right next to me here. 

Zibby: Can we see it? Can we see it? 

Cassandra: I don't think I can show, but yeah, it's on my computer and I'm currently sketching. Yeah. 

Zibby: Wow. And do you do all your sketching on the computer or by hand? 

Cassandra: So I do my thumbnail sketches by hand. Thumbnail sketches is like very small, quick sketches to make sure that each page is organized and what the panels will be, what the scene is about.

But the main sketches, it's on the computer and everything else is on the computer too. 

Zibby: And what program do you use to do that? 

Cassandra: I use Photoshop, but I want to try something new too. I want to try Procreate at some point, but Photoshop for now is really good. 

Zibby: When you're writing the script, since you're the one drawing it, like, do you already have something in mind and how much detail do you put in to the outline versus like, cause actually the two of us are trying to write our own graphic novel to be perfect.

Cassandra: Oh, cool. Okay. 

Zibby: Which has been really fun. Uh, and each time we have a scene, we kind of write a couple of things like, She's sitting here or whatever. Like, how do you know how to craft the scene in the right way? And what are some of the tricks of the trade? 

Cassandra: So one trick I have also is to have a timeline and I have actually a schedule in front of me and to make sure that the story flows you have to make sure that it's happening at the right time and I even have Leah's period schedule, so whenever she gets her period to make sure that it's consistent I have it all written down in the calendar.

Um, so that's really important to keep the continuity of the story. And also how I write my script is basically I try to visualize it. So I kind of have the scene in my head as a visual and I just write down whatever's in my head. Even if, let's say it doesn't really make sense, like as a conversation, but I just write it down, have it there, and then go back to it and see, okay, maybe we can tweak this, and maybe we can do this. Just basically writing whatever's in your head really helps, and then going back to it after. And especially going back the next day, not right after, because sometimes with a fresh eye you can see things differently.

Zibby: Do you have a vision of how long the series will be, or how many books will be in it, or is there something that you already know where you want to happen to like, finalize the series, or is this just you're gonna do it as long as you can? 

Cassandra: I'd love to do it for a longer time. I'd like to see her even as an adult, like, growing up.

I don't know. I have so many ideas in my head, so we'll see how it goes. But I even have ideas for her summer vacation and, you know, what is she going to do in summer and what's going to happen? And I don't know. I have a lot of ideas. We'll see. But I can't say more than that. 

Zibby: Okay. 

Zibby's Daughter: Um, do you have any more questions? Yeah, I'm trying to think. 

Zibby: What about something, some, one of the characters or something in the actual book? Are all the characters going to come back? 

Cassandra: Yes, they will. 

Zibby's Daughter: When, I forget his name, but um, the, the other boy from Romania at school. Yeah. Like that, who like, was from the same place, but kind of like, ditched you.

Zibby: Good question. 

Cassandra: Sorry. I didn't hear that. 

Zibby: She said, was there someone who also came from Romania, but ditched you in the same way that it happened to Leah? 

Cassandra: So it wasn't as harsh. I did exaggerate that detail a little bit, but yes, I had someone in my class who was from Romania, but their assimilation experience was different.

They were a lot more open to the idea of moving and they were just a lot more open minded in general. And I kind of wanted to show that everyone has a different experience when they immigrate. It's not just one way, you know, Leah was a bit overwhelmed. She was taken aback. She wanted to go back home, but some kids they're actually excited and they see it as an opportunity "hey, like Canada's cool". We can see so many things. I've never been to North America. I can travel around and see the United States. I don't know. Like some kids see it differently and I've known kids like that too. So I wanted to show that experience. It's just as valid. 

Zibby: What has it been like connecting with readers?

Cassandra: It's been great. I've been loving seeing parents commenting and saying that their kids have been reading the book like 10 times, 20 times in a row and someone even said that their daughter was talking to them as if they were spilling tea about their own friends. Like, Oh, look what happened. Look what she did. Look what happened between those people. And I love that. I think it's so cool. It's so awesome that younger readers are engaged and they're actually reading the book and enjoying it because my audience is mostly young adults, adults for my webcomics. So it's nice to, you know, reach a broader audience with this book.

Zibby: That's amazing. 

Well, what advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Cassandra: Oh, I always get this question and I feel like. I never know how to answer it properly because I think really, when you write a book, you really have to just trust the process, commit to it. Sometimes it can be daunting. Sometimes it can be, you know, you have ups and downs, you have days when you don't want to do it.

When you're just thinking, why am I doing this? Like I could do something that's taking way less time and is way less you know, energy draining maybe, but just trust the process. It is worth it in the end, you know, this book, like I couldn't be more proud of it and it came out. Even better than I expected.

So I think that, you know, if you're, if you're an author and you truly enjoy what you do, go for it. Trust the process and trust that it'll be a great product in the end. 

Zibby: Amazing. 

And did you do all the coloring and all of it too? Do you color everything? 

Cassandra: Yes. Yeah, everything, everything from the ink, the color, everything.

Zibby: So impressive. I mean, because you have so many, what is this, how do you decide how many things to have on the same page versus not? Do you know what I mean? Like some of your pages have like eight boxes and some of them have fewer and some have words and you know, all of that. How do you decide? 

Cassandra: It really depends.

Let's say I want to show an emotion and I want to emphasize it. Maybe I add more panels because I want to really get the reader in it. Like if Leah's feeling sad, I want them to actually get in that scene and feel for her. Or if let's say the scene is a bit at a slower pace, then we're going to add more panels just to make it breathe a little bit.

If it's faster paced, then obviously we're going to add a lot of panels at once and a lot of things happening at once. Just do like fast forward, right? So it really depends how you want the story to flow, what the scene is about, what the emotions are in that scene. Those all play a factor. 

Zibby: There's a scene where Leah gets her period and she's in excruciating pain.

I feel like she might need to see a doctor or something, but anyway, she said nothing about this pain is easing and you just can't help but, you know, really feel for her in this moment. What was the situation that put you in a lot of pain like this? 

Cassandra: Oh, so I've had terrible cramps all of my life, uh, since I got my first period.

And I just know that that pain can feel so isolating and so, you're so vulnerable in that moment because you don't even know what to do. You you're kind of just, and you saw on the bed, she's doing like so many positions trying to make herself comfortable, but nothing works. And I really wanted to illustrate that feeling of you're desperate for that pain to go away and you don't even know what to do.

You're just trying your best and going through it and it feels like it takes forever, even though it's like maybe an hour or two, but it just feels awful. And I wanted to show that. 

Zibby: It is amazing. Any other questions? 

Zibby's Daughter: No, I don't have any more questions. 

Zibby: Do you have plans for more adult books coming? 

Cassandra: For now, no, because this is my main focus, but I would love to do maybe something with animation in the future or, you know, something a bit different.

I always look for new projects and new challenges, so anything creative, I'm up for it. So we'll see. 

Zibby: By animation do you mean, like, A TV show about her? 

Cassandra: Maybe TV show. Yeah. That would be great if that could happen. If not just short animations or a movie. I don't know yet, but I'm open to anything. 

Zibby: Okay. Well, that's it then.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you for all of the advice, making my daughter and all the girls out there feel like they have someone who's their friend who they haven't even met until now because we got to meet you. So it's really wonderful. 

Cassandra: I'm curious what your graphic novel will be about if you can share a little bit, uh, like a general.

Zibby: Yeah, we can share. Yeah. You want to share? 

Zibby's Daughter: So it's basically about these girls who... Don't have very much. 

Zibby: Wait, I know, but just the premise of it. 

Zibby's Daughter: Well, so, uh. 

Zibby: Give her the title. 

Cassandra: No spoilers. 

Zibby's Daughter: It's called Diary Hunters. 

Cassandra: Okay. 

Zibby's Daughter: It's about these girls who, um, they're all friends from school and they stumble into their mom's, her, um, one of their, the girl's mom's office to look for the dot, uh, for yearbooks, but they come across her mom's diaries.

And when they start reading, they get sucked back in time to when, uh, they're, uh, they're Their mom, uh, her mom was her age. 

Cassandra: Oh, okay. Oh, interesting. 

Zibby's Daughter: So we have SOPA. 

Cassandra: Yeah. Oh, that's fun. 

Zibby: It's about this group of girls and one of their younger brothers, and they can go back in time to their mom's, through their mom's diaries.

And the whole point of it is that the girls realize that the mom. That they're, they're more similar than they thought and it helps repair their relationship and makes them feel less alone. So. 

Cassandra: Yeah, I love a mom daughter relationship type of stories. I feel like they're always so much fun to read. Oh,.. 

Zibby: We're working on it.

Cassandra: Yeah. 

Zibby: Working with an illustrator. 

Cassandra: Oh, that's fun. 

Zibby: Yeah. We're just having a good time. 

Cassandra: Are you planning to make it a series or just one book or? 

Zibby's Daughter: We were planning to make a series. 

Cassandra: Okay. 

Zibby: We thought it would be cool if all the girls could do it, because there are four girls. 

Cassandra: Oh, that's fun. Okay. 

Zibby: So maybe a, you know, a collection of four books, one from each of their 

Cassandra: Oh, that's awesome.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Cassandra: Yeah. 

Zibby: That's the goal over time. But, you know, 

Cassandra: I'd love to read it. I'd love to read it. 

Zibby: Thank you. Well, we can send you what we have. 

Cassandra: Awesome. Yeah. I'm a huge fan of graphic novels. So, yeah. Awesome. 

Zibby: Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Cassandra. So impressed by you in every way. And, uh, thank you for spending the time with both of us today.

Cassandra: Yeah. Thank you for having me. 

Zibby: Okay. Take care. All right. 

Cassandra: Okay. Take care too. 

Zibby: Bye. Thanks for listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. If you love it, please leave a review and follow us on social at Zivi Owens and at Zivi Readers.

Zibby speaks with debut author Elizabeth O’Connor about WHALE FALL, a haunting and exquisite novel about an 18-year-old girl on a beautiful but blisteringly harsh Welsh island in 1938, and how her life changes when two anthropologists arrive to study her island’s disappearing way of life, forcing her to confront the outside world. The conversation delves into the novel's themes of isolation, folklore, cultural change, and the interplay between nature and humanity. Elizabeth shares insights into her inspiration, drawn from her academic background in English literature and personal connections to coastal landscapes. She also delves into her writing process, next project, and best advice for aspiring authors.

Transcript:

#1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Lynn Barnes joins Zibby to discuss THE GRANDEST GAME, a brand new series in the lush, romantic, puzzle-filled world of THE INHERITANCE GAMES, where fan-favorite and new characters collide a year after we last saw them. Jennifer delves into the story, which revolves around Avery Grambs, a now 20-year-old billionaire heiress who designs a high-stakes game made to give someone a shot at fame and fortune. Jennifer also describes her writing process, including how her psychology and cognitive science background informs her storytelling and her love for crafting complex riddles.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Jennifer. Thanks so much for coming on Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss The Grandest Game and your whole career and everything else we decided to talk about.

Jennifer: Well, I am so excited to be here. 

Zibby: Oh, yay. Well, congratulations on The Grandest Game. I had so much fun diving in and getting to know your characters and all of it. Just super interesting. It's not the type of book I normally read and now I'm like, why do I not read these types of books? Like what is wrong with me?

I don't know why I'm like reading memoirs about people dying all the time. But anyway, so congratulations 

Jennifer: I'm so excited. You've read it these books, like almost no one but my editor and my mom really publication date. So like you're pretty much other than my mother and my dad is like halfway through. So you're the first person I've gotten to talk to who's actually.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Wow. Oh my gosh. Well. That's, I'm, I'm hugely honored, so thank you for that. Okay, well tell listeners about The Grandest Game, but also back up and talk about everything Hawthorne and all of it, like just go into the whole things for people who don't know. 

Jennifer: So we started with a series called The Inheritance Games, which was about an eccentric, puzzle obsessed billionaire who dies and leaves his entire Like 40 billion fortune to a teenage girl he's never met.

And that girl who is the protagonist of the book has no idea why to the best of her recollection, she's never even met this guy, but to inherit the money, she has to move into his sprawling secret passage filled mansion and live alongside the family he just disinherited for a year and that includes his four very magnetic very charming, very attractive grandsons, at least one of whom thinks she's the enemy, and a con woman and another one thinks she's the grandfather's last puzzle to be solved. In the original trilogy, there was a love triangle with those two brothers. And so there was an original trilogy, there's a sequel to that trilogy called The Brothers Hawthorne, and The Brothers Hawthorne is also a prequel to The Grandest Game, which is kind of the next phase of storytelling in this world.

The original trilogy, the core mystery was why did billionaire Tobias Hawthorne die? Leave Avery all her money. So there are individual mysteries in each book. There is danger and twists and turns. And reveals going back generations in both families. The Grandest Game is coming in with three characters who are somewhat new to the world.

They were all introduced in Brothers Hawthorne, but just as very secondary kind of characters and they're taking center stage. Because now, it's a book about an eccentric billionaire again. But this eccentric billionaire is Avery Graham. My protagonist from the first book, she is 17 when she inherits, she's 20 at the start of the grandest game.

And she has had this, like, tremendous experience over the course of the inheritance games. One, coming into all this money before she was living in her car and trying to plan for college, and then all of a sudden she's the richest. Teenager and one of the richest women in the world. And it's as she comes into this new life, but it's also this world sort of steeped in puzzles and riddles and games, because that is how the old man raised his four grandsons.

And after his death, his death, he's left all these games for them to play that sort of lead them to answers about why he might've chosen Avery. And at one point in the original trilogy, one of the brothers kind of is having this discussion with Avery about the games because the grandfather used to play these games where you'd go puzzle to puzzle to clue to clue like them with them every Saturday morning, just like is another way of pushing them and making them extraordinary and Avery, um, is talking to one of the brothers and he tells her like, the point of the game was never to make us extraordinary.

The point of the game was to show us that we already were. Uh, and to stoke this competition, and Avery, over the course of playing all of these games and coming into this fortune, she's gone through kind of like her origin story to become this powerful and very, very wealthy woman, and she wants to give that experience to other people.

So in The Grandest Game, there's an eccentric billionaire who is 20 year old Avery Grahams, and she has set up a game called The Grandest Game, which is a chance to win life changing amounts of money. So something more like 20 million. Each year in this game, and it's the same kind of game that the old billionaire Tobias Hawthorne liked to play, that he raised his sons playing, and that Avery, and in particular one of the other brothers named Jameson, loves these kinds of games and loves designing them.

So they build these grand, sprawling competitions that look different every year. So we're coming in for the grandest game for the second annual grandest game. The first annual grandest game was like, she flashes a clue. Anyone in the world can play takes you across the globe. There are private jets flying everyone from puzzle to puzzle.

If they are one of the first ones to solve it. So. Second annual Grandest Game is a more intimate affair. So it starts up and there are four wildcard tickets hidden somewhere in the United States. There's one clue released to them. So whichever four players find those tickets first get to enter the game.

And then there are three players of Avery's choosing. And so over the course of the book, we follow three protagonists. who are all playing the game. There is Gigi, who is the younger half sister of one of the Hawthorne brothers, who we have met just in Brothers Hawthorne, and she's kind of your sunshine, happy, random, always blurting things out character who really kind of wants to prove herself in this game.

She's just graduated high school. She's kind of lost and looking for direction, and this is something to do. You have Lyra, who has a, um, twisted past with the Hawthorne family that revolves around her father's death when she was very young. And it's very mysterious, but she knows that it is related to the Hawthorne family in some way.

And then you have Rohan, who doesn't even, he's so mysterious, he doesn't even have a last name. Um. Playing for these big grand stakes in this sort of organization of power he's in, he needs money in order to ascend to the top of that organization. So he is playing the game, coming to the game with the background of having created similar games of his own.

So you put these three together, on a private island full of luxuries like helicopters and masquerade balls and the most incredible ball gowns and they're getting ready to play just the most incredible mind bending puzzle filled game of their life. 

Zibby: Wow. So where are, where, how and when and Where is all of this coming from with you?

Where is the fascination with the games? Where, how did you, I know you've been writing since you were in college. You published books at 19 and gosh, that just made me feel so old. But anyway, which is amazing but tell me, like, you have to have a certain, and I know you have a PhD and all of that, but like, how does your brain work that you're coming up with all of the other puzzles and all of the plots and all of that?

Like take me through how you're piecing it all together. 

Jennifer: So I have always. So, um, I've always wanted to write some puzzle centric books. In fact, it's something I spent like 10 years trying to find a premise that would actually get one of my editors to let me write my puzzle book. So that's actually part of the origin of the original Inheritance Games series was that.

So for years, I've been wanting to write what I called my puzzle house book. I'm like, there's going to be this incredible mansion. And it's full of puzzles and riddles and codes. And that element of it was actually inspired because when my dad, uh, when I, right after I graduated college, my dad retired.

And then he and my mom spent like five years designing and building their dream house. And like, he sat down in Google SketchUp and he would draw a room and take it to the architect. And like, he helped design.

Zibby: Wait, what is Google, what is Google SketchUp? 

Jennifer: Or something like that. It's a program that lets him like draw rooms and he can draw furniture to put in the room.

Oh my gosh. I want to do that. Okay. And I might be getting the name of that wrong, but it became his hobby right after he retired was like, he would actually draw like what the cabinetry should look like and then sit down with the person who actually does that and they'd bring it to life. So they spent years doing this.

He used to walk the site like every day while it was being built. And he'd asked my brother and I, do you have any requests for the house? And of course I'm immediately like secret passage. I would like a secret passage. And indeed, like in the library of their house, there's this bookshelf that if you press a hidden button, it just disappears into the wall.

It's a floor to ceiling bookshelf. So I got my secret passage and I have this feeling the first time I ever walked into the house. Where I was like, Oh my gosh, this house is my dad. Like he has spent so much time on it. He has literally picked out every minute detail of this house himself. And I had the very morbid thought where I was like, Oh my gosh, one day he's going to be gone.

We're going to have to sell this house, and I don't know how we'll ever do that, but then my writer brain said, you know, but what if, what if it wasn't just someone who put themselves emotionally and mentally into a house, but what if it was someone who had actually like coded things into the house and built elements of different puzzles into the house?

What if instead of one secret passage, there were 50? And what if instead of being a house, what if it was like a 40, 000 square foot castle mansion? And so for years I wanted to write about my puzzle house, in part because I wanted to write puzzles, and I never had quite the right premise. And then with the Inheritance Games, one day I was generating premises for books using a theory from the psychology of fiction, which is a, this theory is one called Gossip Theory, which is basically the theory proposed by, um, Paul Bloom and others, that we like fiction because it basically co ops an evolutionarily hardwired liking for gossip.

And fiction just happens to be gossip about people who aren't real. And the brain is not excellent at distinguishing between real and not real when it's super immersive and when you're reading it through the pages of a book. And so I was like, okay, what would get the whole world gossiping about you at once?

And so I wanted worldwide gossip and I wanted it not to be a bad thing. And then I eventually come up with, came up with the billionaire dice and leaves you all his money. And then I was like, that's great. That passes gossip test and I was like, oh, and then you have to move into his puzzle house. So that's where the puzzles came from originally.

And since then I've fallen in love with it. So the writing process for all of the books has in many ways looked very similar. I do the puzzles very early on because the puzzles are the absolute funnest and easiest part for me. So I can do, you know, an 8 to 12 step puzzle sequence in a day. Where I just like sit down and make all the puzzles.

And I will have a document that just says like, here's the first, here's the, like, here's the clue. Here's the answer. Here's the clue. Here's the answer. And each puzzle can lead into the next puzzle. And I'll have that all written out. And I can literally just sit there and do that in a day. I keep a running list on my phone.

Whenever I see something in the real world, I was like, Oh, that would make a great puzzle. So I'll make the puzzles first. These books are also mystery books and specifically mystery series where you have some mysteries that are arcing across multiple books. For that I tend to use what I call the three mysteries method or the three questions method which is usually in each book there are like Three core mysteries that are going to play out over the course of the book or the series.

And so when I'm sitting down to start, I'll write out lists of possible questions that might form the mystery on all of these books. So for inheritance games, I always knew the big mystery was going to be, why did he leave her the money? But I wrote out all these candidates for the supporting mysteries and ended up with there's something that happened one year before the book started that split two of the brothers apart, Jameson and Grayson, and then there was basically who's trying to kill her now that she's inherited was the third mystery.

And they're not always all apparent at the beginning, so the who's trying to kill her comes in like halfway at the midpoint of Inheritance Games. So for Grandest Game, I always knew. The biggest mystery for the Lyra character was going to be basically what happened to her father. So we come in and very early on we find out she has this back story of she never even met her biological father.

She was living with her mother and the guy she calls dad who later adopted her. And then one day her biological father basically kidnaps her from preschool. And it's a memory she had then suppressed, so she went through what most of her life having no idea this happened, but he takes her to this house, and he says a few cryptic things to her, one of them is, A Hawthorne did this, and then he goes up the stairs and he kills himself, leaving her alone in the house.

So she has this huge trauma and immediately repressed it and had no idea it ever happened to her until the events of the Inheritance Game started and then the whole world is gossiping about Tobias Hawthorne and Avery Grahams and as soon as she starts hearing the name Hawthorne in the news, she starts remembering what happened to her. So her story actually starts at the same time Inheritance Games did. That's three years before the start of The Grandest Game. Soon as Avery inherits, all of this is dredged up from Lyra. So she goes through this like crisis where she's like, I don't even know who I am anymore. I was like this happy, like 16 year old living my best life with my wonderful family and like, she knew she had a biological father. She knew he was dead. She didn't really think that much about that. And then all of a sudden she starts having these dreams. and flashbacks and she remembers this thing and it just completely throws her for a loop to where she doesn't even know who she is anymore.

She doesn't want her family to know she remembers. Um, and so at some point before the grandest game starts, she somehow gets a hold of the phone number of one of the Hawthorne brothers, which is Grayson Hawthorne, and she calls him for answers. And so this happens in the brothers Hawthorne, they have some very charged phone conversations last under a minute each.

They're not saying that much. But he eventually, in a time of crisis for him, tells her to stop calling. She feels betrayed because she thought he was going to help him. So then she gets a ticket to the grandest game that shows up in her post office box, like in her early chapters in the book. And she's like, the Hawthorne family had something to do with the biggest trauma of my life.

Grayson Hawthorne made me think he was going to help me and then he abandoned me. And, but this would get me like 20 million dollars and I'm not going to turn down a chance of having a one in seven chance of walking away with 20 million dollars so she goes to this private island with all of these feelings kind of in there so her mystery was always obvious and then I have to think a little bit about okay well what's Gigi's core mystery going to be in this book and what's Rohan's core mystery going to be in this book so I'll actually write out what those questions are you And then I write out every possible answer to the questions.

So just stream of consciousness. I'll spend a full day writing out possible answers. And then eventually, once I have all the answers written out to all the different questions, I start looking for ways they might dovetail or fit together. Or ways that I will like, oh, I like this one and this one and this one.

So I pick the three answers I'm going to do. But then the great thing about having brainstormed all the answers that aren't true is that now those all are living as red herrings in my subconscious. So as I'm writing the book, they can come up very organically without me planning to put in that red herring.

It's just my brain's already generated every possible answer there could be to these questions. So they're just sort of living there. So when I start, I know the puzzle sequence. I know the questions and the answers. I have an idea of the romantic arcs in the book, because there's a very strong elements of romance in all of these books is, um, subplots.

So I have an idea of what those arcs might look like and what some of the character arcs might look like. What, like, what is everyone, how are the characters arcing and what does that mean for different romances? And then after that, I don't like plan out an outline or anything like that. Um, but I do tend to then plan in short bursts.

So I'll have the puzzle sequence, I'll have the mysteries, and any day when I sit down to write, I'll have an idea of what I want to write that day. And so I will often start with saying, here's what I want this scene to accomplish and usually it's like five things at once, like it needs to establish this, it needs to show this clue, it needs to have a this moment, I want this kind of big romantic thing, and then I write about what those should look like, and so I do a lot of writing about what I want to write.

And then when I'm ready to actually block out the scene, I usually write just the dialogue of the scene, back and forth between the characters, and then I'll go and write the actual scene. And all of the pre writing on the day of is totally new for me, as of about seven years ago, so I have three kids, and the oldest is eight, and so, and the youngest is, or the middle is almost seven, and the youngest is three.

So when my now almost seven year old was born. I had a 15 or I had a 17 month old and I had a newborn and I was writing books. And at that point I was still a psychology professor and my middle child did not sleep through the night until he was like two years old. He was up three times a night for two years.

And so I've been writing books since I was a teenager myself. I'd been writing them my entire adult life, but suddenly I couldn't write the same way anymore because I was sleep deprived and I was writing in different hours. And there was. It's not as many hours in the day anymore. So I had a brain that couldn't write an entire scene at once anymore.

So I have to decide what's going to happen. And then I have to kind of decide the order in which things are going to happen. And then I have to write out the dialogue. And then I can write the scene. And ever since my second was born, that's just how I've written almost every scene where I can break the different things you have to do to write a scene down just to make it something that my brain can handle in a smaller chunk. 

Zibby: Wow. You're so impressive. I like just listening to you talk and hearing your brain work. First of all, that's fascinating and I feel like that's such a good A trick to just do the dialogue of a scene, because you have to get so much into it, right?

You have to distill it down to like its most important things, right? And how to communicate that. That's genius. I'm actually trying to adapt this draft of a middle grade novel that is not published and my daughter and I are turning it into a graphic novel and I'm like, oh, you just need the words really, right?

You just need, and I'm like, what an interesting experience. experiment versus like what I normally write, which is like on and on and on. So anyway, I find that fascinating that you do that. Tell me a little bit more about your background and how you started getting into all this, how you started writing in college, the fact that you're a Yale psychology professor, or you were, I guess, and all of that.

Just give me your, your other life, your brain development, so to speak. 

Jennifer: Right, so I started trying to write professionally when I was in high school. So I wrote my first attempt, I wrote my first like five or four attempts at a book my senior year in high school. And then I went off to college, but I always knew I wanted to major in something that wasn't English, because I was always kind of like an English writing person and then also like a math science.

Um, so I had a lot of different ideas, took a random array of classes my freshman year and landed on cognitive science as a major, which at Yale is interdisciplinary in between psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neurobiology, anthropology. It's basically just like any class in any department. That has to do with the human mind.

And so you take an array of those classes. I got into research and started working in a primate cognition lab and, uh, child cognition labs, really looking at like how our minds develop and how they might have evolutionarily developed. And so I fell in love with the science of things too. People are always like, Oh, those seem like two very different things, but in a sense, like.

Writing and psychology are both about the mind. They're both about understanding people. They're about beliefs and emotions and how people become who they are. 

Zibby: I was a Yale psychology major. I'll have you know. Okay. There's there too. So I get it. I feel like it was the best training, but go on. 

Jennifer: Um, so I did research all through undergrad.

I went on and did a master's at Cambridge where I did autism research and specifically looking at people with and without autism and how they respond to different elements of stories and how they create stories. Then I came back to Yale for my PhD in psychology. I was doing kid research. And at one point, one of my professors said to me, you know, if you're going to keep doing the book thing, because at this point, my, you know, I sold my first five books while I was in college.

And so by the time I was in grad school, these books were starting to come out and my, everyone was always so supportive of it. They thought it was so cool. No one had a problem with me doing two things, but one of my mentors said, you know, if you're going to do the book thing. You should probably segue into studying more of the psychology of fiction like you did kind of in grad school.

So then, um, I worked with a professor at Yale named Paul Bloom, who was really interested in the psychology of fiction. We kind of matched up and I started doing research. And then at that point, I was doing developmental research on kids and story preferences and those kinds of things. And then I eventually went on to become a professor at the University of Oklahoma, where I was a professor for almost a decade.

And I have this really neat story. split appointment where I was half in their professional writing program, which is a genre fiction writing program. So it's like you can go and you can major in writing, but you can write romance and YA and sci fi and fantasy. And like, it, it doesn't do any literary fiction.

It's all just popular fiction. Uh, and they have classes and all the different things. Specialties, and so I taught half in their program and then my other half of my appointment was in the psychology department where I had my own lab where we studied the psychology of fiction and the imagination as well as the psychology of fandom, and I loved it.

I loved that when you're a scientist, it looks so real. So different than people think science looks and especially with something like psychology, you know, I get students in my classes and one of the first things I want them to know is that they too could do science that no one had ever done. Because when you're talking about psychology, all you need are questions and thoughts about what the answers might be.

You need something you're interested in. So for me, it was, It was fiction. It was stories. Because as an author, I'd always be like, huh, I wonder what makes a good book title. And I noticed that like Game of Thrones and Hunger Games will have the word game in it. I wonder if that's a good word for titles.

And if so, why? And then you dig into the theories of things and like what theories might predict you'd like certain titles. And the wonderful thing when you have a lab is you can actually like, One of my graduate students and I actually generated, we were like, here's five theories and here's the kinds of words they predict would be good in titles.

And my graduate student went off and she designed the survey and we got like reaction time data and memory data and likeliness three data from hundreds of participants. And we were able to see that like actually all of the theories we were working with generated buzzwords for titles that outperformed controls on the desire to read.

And so we,. 

Zibby: What were they? 

Jennifer: And the ones we tested were theory of mind words, which are words having to do with the mind, so example titles would be things like a beautiful mind, or cruel intentions, because intention is a mental state word. Also words like secrets and lies and then there were, um, gossip words, so words like scandal and rumor and reputation were all very good words for titles.

There were morality words, and particularly it seemed like immorality words, like cruel or wicked. Might do some work there, and then there were pleasure words, which were words related to things that we are hardwired to find pleasurable, so those can be things like competition, or wealth, or beauty. So I had all these theories of what we found pleasurable that I'd worked on when I was on maternity leave with my youngest, just my, like, state kind of saying while taking care of a baby full time project and so even before we ran the test That's where the title inheritance games comes from because two of the buttons I was theorizing would be good to push for wealth and competition So I was like, how can I name a book wealth competition? And so inheritance is a wealth word and game is a competition word and that's where inheritance games came from.

And actually one of the neat things we do on the covers of the book is I have like the different buttons you can push. And so they're wealth, competition, beauty, danger, touch, which we usually do visually through something like warmth and power. And so when we're designing the covers of various Grandest Game books, we always try and make sure that every single button is being pushed at least once.

On the cover. So like for the grandest game, we have a glass rose. for beauty. We have a knife for danger. We have a spark of fire for warmth. Um, we have dice and a chess piece for competition. The tagline is only one can win because that's a competition tagline to things are golden and full of jewels, which is wealth.

Uh, and we did that on the Inheritance Games cover too. So you can actually go through every cover in the series and you can be like, what's your danger object? What are your competition objects? And so it's just even in the way we package the books and the way I write the back cover copy and the way I write the books themselves are, I have this giant workbook now of like 27 pages of questions I ask myself about all the things that theories predict we would like in fiction.

And at one point I actually just said, here's all the theories. I made all my predictions. And then I actually, it was like, what would happen if I wrote a book and did every single one of these things. As much as I could, and what happened with the Inheritance Games, which was my 21st book, but it was the first book I ever wrote that really took off.

Zibby: Wow, that's so interesting. Oh my gosh, so you can really break it down into something totally quantifiable. That's fascinating. 

Jennifer: And it's, it, it, the writer in me loves it because I can still be like, just as creative and just as invested in the characters, but I also love puzzles and it's a puzzle aspect too, to be like, okay, how am I going to get my competition note in this scene, because competition can come through something like a love triangle, it's a competition, it can come from.

Yeah. Through, okay, we're randomly going to play a game right now. It can come through characters who are rivals or sibling rivalry, or, you know, so when I'm revising, I'll actually often look at each individual scene and be like, I'll just make a list in the margins of what pleasures are in this scene.

What buttons. Am I pushing? How am I doing, like, in every chapter of the book on making sure that I'm pushing some of these buttons? And then the, like, puzzle solver in me who likes to quantify things and who was a scientist and loved looking at data and having graphs and stuff. That part of me is like, can take sort of a raw draft that's more written by the writer half of me and then say, okay, well, we're going to punch up this, this, this, this, and this.

So often I wait until I have my revision letter back from my editor so I can figure out what's kind of missing from the reader's perspective and the trained eye, which is usually like, we need more romance. We need more this pacing here, you know, a little more reveal and then I can do that and also look for answers to those problems using the psychology of fiction to find the answers.

Zibby: Wow. Are there books written about the psychology of fiction? Like all this research that you use? 

Jennifer: There, there are some good ones that will give you different overviews of different elements, so there isn't yet a book that kind of synthesizes all of it, but there's like, um, the storytelling animal by Jonathan Gottschall is one I pulled from, um, such stuff as dreams by Keith Oatley has a lot on fiction and theory of mind, Paul Bloom's book, how pleasure works, has a chapter devoted to fiction.

That's where I first learned about gossip theory, and he was one of my advisors at Yale, so I'd also heard about it from him. The pleasure theory of fiction comes from, uh, Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works. So it's kind of pulling from all over to get all of the theories, but there are all of those books out there that you can read to see any kind of one theory.

And then like as a writer, you just kind of like, Think about that theory for a while and be like, okay, what parts do I think apply? What parts don't, what more can you theorize like in your gut or based on the books you love, and then you just kind of integrate like the existing scientific theory with those intuitions and like every writer I've ever met has those intuitions.

You might not know you, but if you've read a bunch of books or watched a bunch of movies or written books, you kind of have those intuitions. So for me, it's just a matter of like using the intuitions I already have to inspire scientific questions, which I used to then research, but also then using the scientific theories to kind of elucidate where my intuition might be leaving gaps that I could fill.

Zibby: Amazing. Oh my gosh. Well, I could clearly listen to you talk about this stuff all day. Oh my gosh. Well, congratulations on The Grandest Game. Congratulations on all of your success. I love hearing what you have to say, and I feel like you need to teach a class on how to write using all these things or something, because I feel like cracking the code on what makes fiction work is something that everyone really struggles with.

So, anyway. Congratulations. Thank you. And it was so nice to meet you. I feel like we barely scratched the surface. There's so much more to discuss, but, um, I'm totally inspired by you. So thank you. 

Jennifer: Oh, well, thank you for having me. This was so much fun. 

Zibby: Wow. For me too. Thank you. What a pleasure.

All right. Bye bye. Thank you, Jennifer.

New York Times bestselling author Kimberly McCreight returns to the podcast to discuss LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER, a breathless, shocking thriller about a daughter who returns to her childhood home in Brooklyn after months of not speaking to her mother… only to find an empty house in complete disarray, food burning on the stove, and a bloody shoe. The story unfolds through dual narratives as Cleo races to uncover her mother’s secret life. Kimberley reveals the book’s personal significance, drawing from her own experiences as a divorced mother, and then delves into the themes of midlife, parenting, public vs. private selves, and complex mother-daughter relationships. She also describes her organic writing process and hints at her upcoming book (it involves a hiking trip up Mount Kilimanjaro…). 

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Kimberly. Thank you so much for coming back on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Like Mother, Like Daughter. Congratulations.

Kimberley: Thank you. Thank you for having me again. I really appreciate it. 

Zibby: It's my pleasure. I know this book is personal to you with your daughters and I saw you posting them on Instagram and I read about them in your acknowledgements and obviously the whole book is infused with this mother daughter relationship.

Two different sets of, of, well, mother daughter, father daughter. I mean, it's, you know, it's very poignant. So anyway, congrats. It's a great, great book. Tell listeners, A little bit better of a job of what the plot is than my rambling right now. 

Kimberley: No, I like your rambling, which gets to the heart of the book, which is always to me the most important part.

Yeah, so the book opens with a college student, Cleo, uh, who arrives home to have dinner at her childhood home in Parks of Brooklyn. Um, and when she arrives, she's there to meet her mother, with whom she has this kind of. Has had long had a contentious relationship and for the past several months, they haven't been speaking at all, but she's finally agreed to come home and When she arrives, there is food burning and there is blood on a shoe and her mother is nowhere in sight.

So, that kicks off the plot. Um, the book is narrated from the point of view of Cleo in the days after her mother Cat's disappearance. And also from the perspective of Cat in the days leading up to the incident. So, you find out both what happened to Cat as Cleo tries to uncover the truth, but also, There's a lot that Cat hasn't been telling Cleo, um, about her life, about her past, about what her real job is.

She's, um, as far as Cleo knows, she's just a patent attorney. And the reality is that Cat is a fixer for her law firm. Um, and that's just kind of the beginning of the complications in, in Cat's life. From Cleo's perspective, her mother is this kind of very perfect Park Slope mother, and the reality is a lot more complicated.

Everything from, you know, the relationship with Cleo's dad, Aiden, to Cat's past and her job. So this story is, I hope, very much a page turning mystery about what happened to Cat, but at its heart, it is really a story about a mother and a daughter kind of trying to find their way back to each other, or maybe to find each other for the first time.

Zibby: Oh, I love that. So beautiful. There's a lot about, um, Midlife. There's like midlife romance. There's not knowing how much to intervene with kids and how much to let them make their own mistakes, which is like the perpetual question, right? Like, how much is too much intervention? And like, when do you just let them do their thing and fail, and when do you rescue, and I don't know, I feel like I could talk about that all day.

Kimberley: Yes, perhaps we should match notes about the right answers. Yeah, exactly. 

Zibby: Kat, of course, goes to one extreme, I would say, you know, I've never, well, I mean, maybe she's just forging a path for the rest of us. Maybe we should interfere even more. I don't know. What are your thoughts on the, on the. 

Kimberley: Yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right that it's complicated.

There really is no right answer and I think that all of these issues were things I was interested in. Kat in the book is separated from her husband. I am now divorced. Um, so there's a lot in there. The book is very personal, um, to me. So there's a lot of that, those pieces that feel personally relevant or at least things I, I now know that I've known a couple of years ago.

And then in the motherhood part, yeah, my two daughters are 17 and 20, which I can't believe is true. I'm not as old as that would seem to make me, but. Yeah. So I, you know, me parenting them, I, I, because of my own upbringing, I think I've really come to motherhood with very much a blank slate. And that is both a challenge, but also an opportunity, uh, because I don't really have any preconceived notions about the way, the right way to do things.

I have read a lot of books and I have, you know, listened to a lot of experts and done all those things, but I have found that, you know, you have to follow your instinct, obviously, a lot of the time and there is no right answer. And I think that that the idea that there is a disservice, because I'm sure my kids aren't the same kids you have.

Um, and so the reality is every. The right thing to do is different in every circumstance, and luck plays a bit of a role, too. I think that I'm very close with my daughters, and I've gotten really lucky. I definitely erred on the side of, I say, like, drill sergeant meets prison warden. Um, that was kind of how I mostly parented.

And, you know, my daughter, Particularly my older daughter would say that's definitely true, but I think over time I've tried to focus most on empathy and understanding them and validating them as humans and trying to see them as people. And I think that works in all aspects of life, but I think it particularly works with parenting.

Zibby: Yeah. And even within the family. The kids can be so different. I mean, what works with one kid doesn't work with the next kid. 

Kimberley: What works with one kid doesn't work with the other. That's even true of my two, and they're two daughters and they're only a couple of years apart. But I find like, I butt heads more with one of them who shall remain nameless than the other one, um, because our personalities are more different.

And so like the other daughter, more naturally, I can kind of intuit where she's coming from and figure out a way to get in and connect. Right. Um, and with the other one, her brain just works differently than mine. And so I have to like, Take a minute before I react to that, but it's like, just, oh, it's so hard and so complicated every day, every single day.

I have no idea every single day, they'll come and I'm like, oh God, now what are you asking me? Like, I don't know, I have no idea. And the reality is you're supposed to know, or they need you to know. And so half the time I'm like, all right, I'm going to just, I'm going to try to pretend I know. Right now, because they do need you to do that.

Zibby: Yeah, that's true. Although I'm definitely the first one to be like, I think so, or like, when there's something, you know, I don't know. I'm always like, I'm in the same boat. I don't know. Is this person going to be okay? Or are they going to be, you know, I'm scared too. Or I don't, I don't know. It's probably the wrong.

Kimberley: No, no, I don't think so. 

Zibby: I make it up every day. I'm always making it up. 

Kimberley: I think that making, I think that again, I think when you have like ruptures with your kids and then repairs, I think admitting you don't know, I think admitting you've made a mistake and that you're sorry. I mean, all these things, I think.

You know, in the end of the day, are we treating them how to keep trying to teach them how to be people? And that means being fallible and, and not knowing sometimes. And I think that all you can do is, is, you know, I've, I've read more than once that they learn most from the example you provide and how you live your life.

And so I think that that's the best thing you can do is try to like be true to yourself and live honestly and be the best person you can be and all your interactions. Because I feel like more than anything, more than anything, what you see. I feel like they're watching what you do. 

Zibby: So, from the divorce angle, was that then coming from a personal place of being tired of the dating apps and meeting somebody in person?

Kimberley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, like, yeah, there's, uh, there's a bit about dating apps on it, yeah, I mean, for sure. Like, I've been on dating apps and they're terrible and also useful and all of those things. So, for sure. Like, all of that, those references came from personal experience. Absolutely. 

Zibby: Haha. And it's ironic, wasn't your last book, The Perfect Marriage?

Kimberley: Um, A Good Marriage. It was a few books ago. It was a few books ago, but for sure, if you want a recipe for evaluating your own marriage, which may or may not survive the test, writing a book called A Good Marriage will, um, will do that. It's just like the last time, asking yourself, wait, what, what, what about my marriage?

And so I actually think that a lot of what led me to write that book was kind of the, the questions that I was already having and I think a lot of as a writer, as you know, what you're doing is balancing kind of these subconscious questions you have for yourself as you sit down to work on any project.

So I think, you know, the, the questions, it wasn't as a result of writing that book. I think they predate.

Zibby: No, I'm, I'm kidding. Yeah. Although that would be terrible. Every book. 

Kimberley: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Led to that. 

Zibby: Led to that. 

When you talked about your own childhood having a blank slate of motherhood, tell me more about that.

Kimberley: No, it just was, I mean, you know, without getting into a lot of details about it, it was certainly like a challenging upbringing. So you know, as a child of a, uh, early divorce and a lot of chaos in my family. And so, yeah, I mean, I would say I largely raised myself, um, and so as a result of that, uh, like I don't, I didn't have a traditional, I didn't have a traditional parent relationship. And so, you know, I just, when I came to it myself, it really was a blank slate. 

Zibby: Well, in the book, we have neighbors and colleagues and classmates and all these people who are within the same inner circle of each other, and yet nobody actually knows each other, right?

There's something, people are hiding things like all the time or keeping all these secrets from each other in a way. I mean, I won't give anything away, but you know, as in life, I guess, right? There are things you hold back, but I feel like the things in your book that everyone's holding back end up growing bigger and bigger and bigger throughout the, the course of, of the plot.

So when you're writing a book like this, how much do you know at the outset, and did you know, do you know about the twists and all of that at the beginning? And how do you know when you're writing somebody, which pieces to like put out there and which pieces to hold back and reveal later? 

Kimberley: Yeah, I mean, it's really, um, ends up being kind of a dialogue between character and plot.

And to answer your question, I do not know, I know virtually nothing when I start out to write. So I don't outline in advance, I figure it out as I go along. And so I've just. I'm almost done, hoping to be done this week with my next book, a first draft. And so that one, I really, I almost look at my first drafts probably as what people would consider extended outlines.

So as I'm writing, I am learning about the characters and then figuring out the plot and it kind of will toggle, I'll toggle back and forth. I have a general sense of the spine and the structure and the main characters, but often I'll start out with a character, even a main character and realize that it's kind of, I've started almost on the opposite in the opposite direction from them.

Like either they seem prickly and they're actually nice or they're, you know, seem nice and they're actually prickly or what, what have you. Um, and I can, I realize that again, it's a kind of interplay between the plot and the characters because my books, I, I, I hope and I think are a balance of both and theme too, right?

So those, those things are all working together. But by the time I'm done a first draft, then I've kind of figured everyone out, which means the beginning of the book has a lot of problems in it. So I've got to kind of go back and start again. And so my process is iterative. And I would say I probably do in the neighborhood of you know, six or seven full rewrites of a book before my editor ever sees it. And that's almost like the entire book. Oh my gosh. To be written. So it's working with like a giant outline. And the virtue of that is I'm not tied to any outcome as I write a book. So if something's not working, I'm like, well, I'm going to abandon that.

I'm going to switch and, and those generally aren't again, huge thematic points. It will be, an approach to how I was going to get there. So when you talk about kind of these smaller secrets everyone has, I have now set up everybody on the chessboard and I'm like, all right, well, some, you know, I've gotten to point D on the map and point B isn't working.

So I have to like move that. And then, and so I start moving everyone around and, uh, reorder the book and, and often change characters, but I've got at least a framework. It's like building a house, you know, I framed the house and I, you know, I work at it. from, from that way. And so it's long, but I think if you outline your work is front loaded, you're just doing that work in advance.

I just can't do it without the process of seeing the scenes. I can't do it just with bullet points, but I do create a bullet point outline as I'm going along. 

Zibby: Hmm. Wow. One of the things that I, I found, like, very emotional is you had a line, like, even though they are biological kids, like, they have no compulsion to keep us in their lives if they don't want to.

Right? It's a choice. Like, we can just upset them, and then they can say, forget it. And that can be it. No matter how much love you pour in, it's up to them, essentially. It can be up to them. There's, you know, two people in every partnership, but I think that's part of the fear that all I feel like most mothers are feeling at all times, like, what if, what, you know, what could happen?

What's the worst that could happen that would push my child away from me forever? And it's another kind of loss, right? Lost by their own volition, but still like the loss that you fear at all times. Tell me about that. Cause I feel like that was very much, you know, even with Doug and his daughter and his, you know, part of the.

Kimberley: Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, I think the line is something like no matter how much you love them, they are not obligated to love you back. 

Zibby: Yeah, that's it. 

Kimberley: For me, it's interesting that is kind of liberating to, to remember that, that like my job as a mother is to love them and to make them feel accepted unconditionally and know that they are safe and know that they're loved by me, no matter what the world does to them.

And I think more that I look at. The relationship like that, it's kind of freeing because I don't have any expectations and you know, I guess I just take that part of it really seriously and then hope that if I'm doing that right, that the rest will flow from it. But you can't control. I mean, that's reality, because that's reality.

Like, who knows what will happen? Who knows the past, their life will take them on. And I'm not somebody who's in, has a relationship, uh, actually with my, you know, my family. So, you know, I, I know that that is a way, you know, life events can unfold in that way. And so there's a certain peace in that, I think, in accepting that it is something beyond your control.

And the only thing you can control, again, is, is how much you love them. In the best way you can, right? Whatever that means. 

Zibby: That does not bring me any peace at all. That gives me so much anxiety, to be totally honest with you. 

Kimberley: All right, well, we might have to find you another approach. You know, maybe you can meditate on it and get there.

I mean, listen, it's a work in, you know, it's a work in progress. 

Zibby: No, I'm kidding. I mean, I'm kidding. Obviously, I know, you know, all we can do is our best and love them as much as we can and all of that. But You know, I still want them to love me. 

Kimberley: I know, I know. But it's the same thing. There's a line another character says later on.

I think it's actually, it's somebody, Lauren, I think that Kat's friend who says like, they're not cakes. Like you can put in all the ingredients and put them in the oven and then like there's genetics. There are their life experiences. There are just so many things that are out of your control. That's more about like how they turn out.

Like, you know, do they, do they, do they? Are they using drugs? Are they, you know, like, succeeding in their life? Are they, you know, you, you can't control all of those outcomes. So, I guess for some reason, that brings me peace, you know, just to accept that. 

Zibby: Yeah. How did you pick the drug dealing plot? point. 

Kimberley: I don't know.

I, you know, like, I guess my theaters, I mean, usually the things in my book come from either my personal experience or what would frighten me and that would definitely frighten me. So I think that's where that came from and because I think it's one of those things that like looked at one way. So in the book, Cleo, the daughter is involved in some like drug running on campus.

Um, so there's, you know, it's at least contained in the sense that there's generally not a lot of violence involved, et cetera. But, you know, I, I think that you can see how easy it would be if you're a kid to get into something like that and how it could quickly get out. Of control, but actually in the book is not actually the biggest danger either, which is part of the recurrent theme in the book is that cat is, and I think I have fallen prey to this a lot.

As I have learned one thing my older daughter does, which I wish she would stop doing is to share with me stories about the things she did in high school that I didn't know about. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Kimberley: What are her favorite things to do now? She's like, just tell me a story the other night. She's like, and then this, I'm like, no, I don't know.

Never tell me the story. Because I had no clue it was going on, whatever it was. And obviously, you know, she's fine. She's great. She's doing well now. But like, it's the reality is the things you're worried about. Inevitably, there's something else that you're, that you don't even know what's going on that is actually what you should be worried about.

Zibby: Yes. Then the strategy of, of worrying is just not helping me out as much as I hoped. 

Kimberley: Yeah, exactly. Like just worrying, weirdly, does absolutely nothing. 

Zibby: Yeah, totally. 

Kimberley: Yeah. 

Zibby: Well, tell me a little bit more about the next book. 

Kimberley: Yeah, so my next book is called, at least for now, Someone Else's Husband. 

Zibby: Uh oh. You're going to make everybody very nervous.

Kimberley: Like, it's my husband? Whose husband am I talking about? 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Kimberley: So it's set in New York again, um, which I do like to set, I think all, but like one of my books has been set in New York. But it's got a young woman who I, I climbed Kilimanjaro last year and part of the storyline is, is flashing back to a hiking trip and there was a group of men on the trip with her as a single person.

And then when the book opened, she has been found, she's dead. And he, you know, the, the scenario from the perspective of her in the past and the wife of, uh, one of the men on the trip. So, you know, it's, it's, Ultimately, I, I, it is kind of a love story, um, and so, uh, but it's a complicated, as my books often are, complicated trajectory to get there.

But I got to write a little bit about Kilimanjaro, Klan of Kilimanjaro, which was fun. 

Zibby: What was that like? 

Kimberley: It was incredible. I mean, it was certainly like my own little, like, eat, pray, love moment, but it was, I highly recommend it if you want to step off the face of the earth at some point. It's, um, it's pretty remarkable.

Zibby: Wow. Did you have to train forever and all of that? 

Kimberley: I have trained for a lot of stuff, usually like on an ongoing basis. I had, was training for a half Iron Man at the time. So I was, I had kind of was already in shape. 

Zibby: You just threw it in. You just threw it into the mix. 

Kimberley: Threw it in. But it's actually not, it's actually not that.

It requires a basic level of fitness, but it's not like the hardest part is camping. You camp for eight days on the mountain without showering and without, you don't, you, you don't have to set up your own tent and stuff, luckily, but there's people to help you, but that was the hardest part. I'm not a camper.

So I was very over that by like 24 hours into it. 

Zibby: Gosh. So what advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Kimberley: Let's see, advice for spying on authors, I would definitely get a couple really trusted readers of your work, and not just one, like, it can be a critique group, and that's obviously ideal to give you feedback.

It is impossible to accurately assess your own work in your head, uh, so you do need feedback. But make sure that they're people you trust who will be honest with you, but also productive. I have been in critique groups where there can just be people who are really motivated to show how smart they are, or to, you know, just give feedback, kind of how they would write something rather than helping you be the best writer you can be.

So that is really critical. Also set yourself up so that you can keep at it without giving up. So whatever that means, depending on your life situation, take a job that gives you, You know, be a teacher. So you have summers to write or just know that it could take a really, really long time. It took me writing full, almost full time, a decade and five unpublished books to sell my first, which is reconstructing Amelia.

So that, and I used to be an attorney before that. And so some of the books were written while I was working some not, and you know, it just can take a really long time and a lot of work and some people get lucky quickly, but make sure you give yourself time. To, to really give it a go. 

Zibby: Why did you not give up?

Kimberley: Uh, 'cause I'm an insane person. I , I don't really know , I, no, uh, that's not true. I had destroyed my career. So I had had this really fancy law career. I, you know, worked at one of the best firms in the city and I, once you are a few years away from having given that up, you can't get it back. And so I think that, you know, I also got some early success.

I got an agent and I wrote my first book in a year. And got an agent right away and he owned a book at a big agency and he almost sold that book. Almost like there was an editor who wanted it and she couldn't convince marketing. So when you get early success, I thought, and I was not an English major. I had never written anything.

And so I thought, okay, well, just logically, if I did that in a year, if I keep working, I should get there eventually. So. That was kind of kept me going for a really long time. And then I had destroyed my career. So that I was like, uh, you know, this has got to work. I just put, you know, I doubled down here.

So, but by the end, right before reconstruction, Amelia sold, I had started to look for a job again, because I thought this is not going to work. Cause it was, I was a decade in, I had written all these books. So I finally got my first job offer 24 hours before Amelia went to auction. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Kimberley: And that was working bad.

I graduated from the university. to do Pennsylvania Law School, and it was working back there in their writing department, in their communications department. So I called and said, I have to turn down the job. I sold my book. So it's kind of, it was one of those kind of great kismet kind of stories. Wow. Wow.

That's very inspiring. 

Zibby: It is. No, it is. You know, you just see it. It's never known. 

Kimberley: Well, you know, you worked at it so long too, like it's a, I mean, it's a hard, you have to just, you know, keep at it and keep going, like keep your head down and keep, keep trying to get better. I mean, that, that's like, you just can't keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Those early books. I just want to be clear. It's not like, Oh, poor me. This should have sold. They were not good. They were really, it's like, I wouldn't go back to them. So I do think like you just have to commit yourself to the work and putting the time on. 

Zibby: Love it. Still, it helps to hear from someone else, you know?

Kimberley: Yeah. Do you know how many times now I Google, I'm like, I like Google other writers giving inspiring speeches all the time. Like still, I'm like, all right. Okay. Okay. I'll get back on the worst. So like it's because it, you know, every book is its own problem. Every blank page is, you know, you know, you have to face that each time and start again.

And so it doesn't, you know, you've done it. And so that's easier, right? Like, cause you're like, I've done it. So I surely I can do it again, but you still have to do it again. 

Zibby: Yeah, I know. Where's the shortcut? 

Kimberley: No, I know. Somebody should come up with one. That would be helpful. 

Zibby: That would be, well, I mean, I think they did.

I think it's AI and that's not suitable for us either. That doesn't cut it. Um, well, congratulations. I really enjoyed this book. I really loved all the themes, the suspense, the twist. I mean, all of it, you know, and the setting and the relationships and any book that makes you kind of rethink the relationships the most important to you and think about how you can sort of improve them is, is like a gift, right?

Because it's Thank you. 

Kimberley: I really appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, that's what I hope is that people will just ask them self what themselves what the answers are for in their, you know, like, I don't have the answers, of course, or I hope that I have them for me, maybe, but I do hope it has people ask the questions.

Zibby: Amazing. 

Well, thank you. Congrats. Enjoy the, enjoy the tour and everything else. 

Kimberley: Thank you. Enjoy the summer. 

Zibby: Okay. Bye bye. 

Kimberley: Bye. 

Zibby speaks with debut novelist Sarai Johnson about GROWN WOMEN, a stunning, tender, elegant novel about how four generations of complex Black women attempt to heal old wounds and redefine happiness for themselves… as they raise a new generation together. Sarai shares how her own complicated relationship with her mother and a desire to depict Black motherhood with nuance and depth inspired this story. She also shares her writing process, literary models, and best advice for aspiring authors.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Sarah. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Grown Women. Debut novel. Very exciting. 

Sarai: Thank you so much. 

Zibby: You're so welcome. I feel like we are, we are deep in the mom space. You've just had a baby two weeks ago.

Your book is all about mothers and daughters and my whole life is about like motherhood. I feel like right, especially right now. Okay. Tell the listeners what your book is about, please. 

Sarai: So grown women is about four generations of mothers and daughters in a black family, Evelyn. Charlotte, Corinna, and Camille.

The story sort of opens with Charlotte, who is pregnant and teenaged and newly fled from an overbearing mother named Evelyn. She does not originally intend to keep her child, who she names Corinna, but she does, and unfortunately makes a lot of mistakes in raising her. It's not until Charlotte becomes a grandmother to Camille that her life is truly changed.

Camille. offers her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother an opportunity to sort of rethink and redo their trauma and their relationships while they attempt to collectively raise her. 

Zibby: Wow. Excellent summary. You know, you really speak in the book to the ambivalence of motherhood, of what it means to be a mom, how some moms are ready, quote unquote, right?

And some are excited and some aren't, and it takes time. And sometimes being a grandmother is the thing that can make you feel more ready to be the mother all along. The way that you write is absolutely beautiful, truly, and You conjure up these women in such detail. They're so visual and there and you talk about sort of the, the golden glow of not Corinna, the mom, the older. 

Sarai: Charlotte 

Zibby: And the role of education.

And I mean, there's just so much in this book. Okay, so where did the idea for the book come from for you? 

Sarai: So it comes from sort of two places. I, you know, I'm a reader, obviously, but I read a lot of books that I felt like represented Black women and Black moms, in particular, in sort of flat, sort of, either they know all the answers, they're sort of saints, or they are evil, or essentially really deeply troubled with no sort of dimension to them.

And I was frustrated in not seeing sort of a nuanced portrait of Black women and black motherhood. It also comes from a very personal place of trying to sort of figure out my own relationship with my own mother and While I was writing this I became a mother and I was asking myself like what do I do with the difficulty of my own relationship with my mother as I sort of Attempt to build this relationship with my daughter.

Zibby: So tell me more about your relationship with your mother Let's just go right there. Pretend I'm your therapist. Okay. 

Sarai: So, it's a, it's a difficult relationship. There's a lot of, how do I say, critique. A lot of judgment, criticism. As I sort of grew older, it became more difficult to connect to her in a sort of meaningful way.

My therapist would say there's a lot of jealousy in the sense that I've more educated than her. I just generally have more than her, but it took a long time for me to sort of understand that someone hurt her, you know, she, that she was hurting in a way. She sort of projected that onto me and I was trying to figure out what to do once I got to this place of like understanding that's where this comes from.

And I realized I could either stay angry or sort of try to do something with that information and think through like, why did she make this choice? And how can I make different choices? And what does that look like? And in many ways, that's how grown women came to be. 

Zibby: Well, this is great. And now I think I need your therapist.

Sarai: I have a great therapist. It was like for 10 years. 

Zibby: Oh, that's amazing. 

Sarai: It's a lot of therapy. 

Zibby: There's one, it's a particularly powerful, I mean, there are a lot of powerful scenes in the book, but one in which, I know I shouldn't get all the C's mixed up and I know that's even like a joke in the book when she's debating naming the daughter and she's like, aren't these C's going to be confusing?

And she's like, no, it's fine. But when her daughter gets pregnant at about the same age as 17 that she was pregnant, she immediately asks her daughter. Okay, well, you know, how do you, when do you want to get rid of it? Do you want me to make you the appointment? Do you need money? Blah, blah, blah. And I think it kind of knocked her off her, you know, knocked her backwards and how can I not knock her?

What's that expression? Knocked her off her feet or whatever. Surprised her. Whatever. It doesn't matter because I don't think her first reaction was to necessarily get rid of the baby. And she was asking her mom then, well, did you want to get rid of me and how did I come to be? And in truth, she had wanted to, you know, not keep her originally and yet ended up keeping her and it sort of in that moment it became clear I think to her that that was not the original plan necessarily and that it was definitely an option and and then when she comes around and says no I'm going to be here for you and she's so She said, why, it's the right thing to do.

And she was still so surprised that that was the path that her mom took, even though it was right. Like, that she knew right and wrong and all that. Tell me about that scene and painting that portrait and, you know, what that does to both parties in that moment. 

Sarai: So I think Charlotte's initial reaction was actually to sort of protect Corinna from sort of living her life.

Life in a way, but also I think Charlotte also is more clear headed at this point in her life than she was when she became a mother and is able to sort of think my daughter is not an extension of me, you know, and I think that is such an important sort of period of motherhood is realizing this child is not me.

This is a completely different entity and sort of realizing I can do. Something for my daughter here and being the support that I did not have and Corinna realizes she, well she, I think she knew all along that she was not necessarily wanted, but she realizes that she, Is a source of pain for her mother in a way that she did not know and she sees an opportunity also, I think when Charlotte comes to her and says, we're going to do this together, sort of an opportunity to connect, which is something that Corinna like desperately, desperately wants is connection.

Zibby: Yeah, well, and tell me about sort of the legacy of education, right? Because they start off with Evelyn, who is. Um, is the, from the family of well known physician and they come from one sort of station in life and then there's the lack of education sort of as the generations unfold and, well, for a little bit, talk about the role of education and, and how it affects the women and is there that same jealousy?

Sarai: So the, it's really interesting, I wanted to do something interesting with education and sort of the lack of education and sort of the way that people can sort of rise without it. based on sort of choices that they make. So we have Evelyn who has a PhD in literature, she's a writer, etc. And she pursues academia at a time when women, Black women especially, were not necessarily embraced in that world.

She encourages Charlotte to do something similar. Charlotte I don't think has a mind for it in the same sort of way, and that frustrates her and Charlotte's pain sort of causes her to sort of, I wouldn't say fail, she doesn't fail, she struggles deeply, and she, I don't think she wants the same thing for Corinna and she, the way she responds to that is not necessarily the right way to respond to that, it's not the right way to sort of push, you know, a child forward, I would say, and Corinna also does not have sort of the same sort of drives that Evelyn has, but she has a different sort of desire to succeed that she pursues through the cocktail mixology and she sort of rises through that without a traditional education, but also sees that Camille.

Life would be easier for Camille if she sort of pursues a more traditional education, which she, she does, but not quite in the way that Corinna envisioned. And again, it's about the way that our children are not an extension of us and the choices that we make or what we want for our children do not necessarily always line up with us and our ideals.

Zibby: I remember when my parents got divorced when I was 14. I promise there's a reason why I'm saying this, but I felt like my mom felt like I was an extension of her, like how I looked and how, you know, and I was like, what could I do to make her the most angry to show just how mad I am. And I was like, I'm going to gain a lot of weight and I'm going to show her.

Anyway, this is my maturity. Yeah, we do what we can. 

Sarai: Definitely, definitely. I understand. 

Zibby: And even Charlotte was upset that her daughter wasn't even as traditionally beautiful as she had hoped, too. There was also that, which I found very interesting. You know, you don't often see that where the mom is like, well, she's not cute.

I mean, that's not exactly how it was portrayed, but. 

Sarai: Right. And Corinna has this, she understands that she doesn't look like her mother. And that's also like a source of frustration for her. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Sarai: And that. That's my experience. Also, I do not necessarily look like my mother and I could tell that that frustrated her and it was just like a push and pull.

Am I part of her? Am I not part of her? What disappoints her about me? You know, that sort of thing. 

Zibby: Interesting. But you're beautiful, though. So I'm sure that wasn't the thing. Oh my goodness. So when you were writing, tell me about the process of writing the book, and I know you teach and you edit and you do all these amazing things and, you know, your education is like off the charts.

Talk about writing it, how long it took, the process, like all the behind the scenes. 

Sarai: So the process is not very straightforward. So I actually had been working on something about the Camille character for a long time. I'd written several short stories, like in grad school, trying to figure out like who Camille is, what drives her, where does she come from?

And I started working on something. Probably like in 2019 that I was, I was going to write the origin story of Camille and I showed it to someone and they were like, I think this is a book. And for some reason I was like, I'm going to do that. That was like a great idea. So I actually left a full time job to work on sort of a outline draft.

Well, my husband was like, I'll cover our living expenses and you can figure this out for a little bit. And I wrote the outline. In a very sort of fits and starts sort of way, I realized, like, there's a lot of advice about, like, you set aside two hours in the morning and two hours at night, and you just write, or you have, like, a word count that you meet, and that was not working for me.

So I, I, I did other things while I thought about the book, and I only wrote when I was, I was clear headed, like I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do, and when I was doing other things, I was also, you know, of course, thinking about it. reading books that felt in a similar sort of genre, similar themes to what grown women eventually turned out to be, which would be like Cora Hedora is probably by Gail Jones, one of the number one, Beloved, White Oleander, et cetera.

And I read like I was in school, like, you know, highlighting, Figuring out, like, what I wanted to say, what themes didn't sit right with me, what tropes didn't sit right with me, what I wanted to convey based on sort of older text and what I wanted to avoid and all that kind of stuff. So I spent very little time actually writing and a lot more time thinking and reading.

And it took probably about a year or two before I was ready to submit to agents. I had. I was sharing with friends and my husband listened to me read numerous drafts and At that point, my current agent asked me to make some revisions and I think they signed me in 2021. So I think it took about two years.

Zibby: Wow. So do you ever regret your decision when someone told you it should be a book? 

Sarai: I don't know what I was thinking sometimes, like, I kind of jumped over the like literary magazine submission era and went straight to the book. And I think a lot of that has to do with like, I don't necessarily gravitate towards short stories.

I'm much more like a novel person. So when I think about writing a short story, it's not as easy to me. Like it doesn't necessarily make as much sense, even though there's some stunning short stories out there that I really love and appreciate, but novels. I love and sort of have spent more time with, so I understand that more, I think.

Zibby: What are you reading now? 

Sarai: I just finished, it's by Etef Rum. Uh huh. Her first one, A Woman Is No Man. Yes, that's right. Just finished A Woman Is No Man and I just started The God of Small Things. 

Zibby: Mm, amazing. I feel like there's some similarities with your book in Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. Have you read that book?

I have not. It's a multi generational, it's more siblings than moms and daughters, but it's the same like complicated relationships and over time, I don't know, there's some, the pacing even a little bit. Anyway. 

Sarai: I listened to your interview about it. Oh, thank you. That's so nice. I'm very flattered. But I have, I have it on my Libby 

Zibby: list.

Excellent. I look forward to getting to it. Excellent. Amazing. And what are you working on now, aside from having a, an infant and a toddler? 

Sarai: I am thinking about, I have written parts of it. It's about a young black millennial woman who sort of rejected her mother for being kind of a simple housewife, instead of As she perceives is the correct way to be a woman, you know, pursuing a career and, you know, goals outside of the family, but in the book, she's going to sort of move back towards understanding her mother and appreciating her work in the house.

Zibby: Amazing. Wow. Well, hat's off to you. I mean, I was not, my brain was so fried after my kids when I had a newborn, so. 

Sarai: I was, when I was pregnant, my brain was not functioning at all, and as soon as I gave birth, I was like, oh, I can get back to thinking. 

Zibby: Okay. Well there you go. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Sarai: I would say. It's important not to keep your work close to your chest for too long. If you're working on it sort of in a solitary way, it won't progress in the way that it needs to. If you are to share it with readers, other writers, I shared it with just like my friends. And the more that I was able to sort of talk about it with other people, the more it made sense.

Mm hmm. So I think often. It's maybe it feels embarrassing to sort of share, especially early works with others, but it's better to share, to show it. Better to reveal it to whoever you can, whoever will read it or will listen. 

Zibby: Excellent. Amazing. Well, Sarah, congratulations. I really thought your book was beautiful.

I love the way you write. I really do. Even like how each, at the beginning of each chapter, you have like such a punchy line and you know, the smell of the catfish and I don't know. You're just It's, it's very, you're a very good writer, but you probably know, but I agree with the consensus. Best of luck.

Sarai: Thank you so much. 

Zibby: Okay. Take care. Bye bye.

Zibby chats with author Caro Carver about BAD TOURISTS, a propulsive and deliciously dark novel about three tight-knit friends who embark on an extravagant post-divorce trip to the Maldives… only to realize the resort of their dreams is harboring a killer. Caro describes her own trip to the Maldives, her use of a new pseudonym and genre (she uses CJ Cooke for her gothic thrillers!), and her love of writing stories that resonate with women. She also shares details of her difficult childhood in a violent household and the challenge of raising children while processing past trauma.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Caro. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Bad Tourists, a novel. Congratulations. 

Caro: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and chat about it with you.

Zibby: Oh, yay. Amazing. I love the whole premise of a post divorce trip with your girlfriends. So fun. I feel like that should definitely be a thing. Like it should have its own name, right? Why not? 

Caro: Yeah, absolutely. I, when I, I, I think I heard about someone doing that on Instagram and I was like, yeah, that, that, that should be a thing, you know, it's a new chapter and it's a new start.

So yeah, we should celebrate that. 

Zibby: I love that. And this is also kind of a new chapter, new start for you with your new pseudonym for this book and new genre and all of that. So it's very fitting, you know, you should have taken a trip for this. Perhaps you did. 

Caro: I did. 

Zibby: You did. Amazing. Where'd you go? 

Caro: I went to the Maldives.

Zibby: Oh, well, there you go. 

Caro: Yeah, it was after, yeah, right, it was after COVID. So it was like, you know, we'd cancelled quite a few little trips or, or like multiple times because things kept getting shut down. So I was like, right, we're going away, we're going to the Maldives. So yeah. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. And so is that where you wrote, did you write it then?

Now I'm getting the timing. So when did you do what? How did this happen? 

Caro: This was two summers ago, just almost two years ago. I guess it was sort of, yeah, no, it was this time two years ago. We went, I'd had the idea. I'd had ideas for sort of two sections of the book, if you like. The, the scene in the guest house, which is at the beginning of the book, um, that came to me years ago, actually, and I, I didn't really know what to do with that, but it was, it kept coming back every time I went to stay in that particular guest house in Glasgow, it came back as a story.

And then I had the idea for the divorce trip, and we went to the Maldives, I think, like May 2022 and I think when I was there and I had just a chance to unwind for the first time in so long, cause Scotland, we had really tough Covid rules, and so my children were off school for months, and I was having to work full time still, from home, while homeschooling four kids, it was just awful.

Disaster and I was really at the end of my tether so that the trip the week in the Maldives was the first time that I just stopped and so ideas came for books and for this novel and by the time I came home it was all there and I spent the summer writing it a first draft of it and it was all the characters were just fully formed just told me what was what and it was a joy to write honestly it was it was just a pleasure to be in the company of these characters i know i sound bonkers when i say that. 

Zibby: You don't if there's ever a place for you not to sound bonkers, it is this podcast where many people have said the exact same thing before you.

So, it's totally fine. 

Caro: Oh, I, I just loved it. I had so much fun writing these women. They were just the best. And I was just, yeah, I thought, I want to do this again. I want to write more of these sort of books that are just fun and they, they examine female rage in a way that I hadn't done before. 

Zibby: So interesting. 

Caro: I was excited by that. 

Zibby: So you got your start very early. I love the little clip of you at age five, winning whatever prize you did or, right? I'm assuming you were holding up some sort of prize. Maybe you weren't five. 

Caro: But anyway. I was, I was five in that photo, actually. Yeah. It's in my office here.

So I know. 

Zibby: Aww. It's so cute. 

Caro: I was, I was just so little. 

Zibby: Give me the story of how you got your start and how you were motivated by violence and now you're writing about rage and I feel like there's a theme coursing throughout. So, uh, tell me, tell me your story. 

Caro: I grew up in East Belfast during the sort of tail end of the Troubles.

And my home life wasn't great. My father was abusive and really violent. My mom, obviously, was subjected to that, as was I. She was, my mom was 17 when she had me, so she was vulnerable. And we lived in a really rough part of Belfast as well, and we were really poor. And yeah, so there was just this, this very unsettling atmosphere at home all the time, constantly.

And I, I remember writing specifically to, to deal with that because I didn't know, I was too young to have a language to articulate. What was actually very normal to me was not normal at the same time because I was so scared all the time and I had places I went to that I wasn't scared and I wasn't unsettled but then I would come home and feel on edge and writing really gave a way to just manage that, I think, a way to cope.

And then as well as my home life, there was the, the stuff going on in Northern Ireland. So I've been writing for forever and it was just such a compulsion that, yeah, I, my stories were like containers for all these feelings and these things that were going on and, and I was able to control the uncontrollable, if you like.

I, I didn't really see, although I wrote stories when I was a child, I, I turned to poetry quite soon. So I, I was a poet actually, first, and it was only the birth of my son when I was, when I was pregnant with him when I was 29, and I had a pregnancy condition that was very painful for me to walk. So I read a lot of novels in the bath, which was the only time I could kind of relax and feel.

And I guess that brought the sort of novels to my mind again. So that's when I started writing novels again, and I've been writing ever since. So yeah, this is my 10th novel, I think. 

Zibby: Wow. What a story. Oh my gosh. Well, I'm so sorry that you were the, you know, an abuse victim, if you will, and how you've sort of shared it openly is so powerful.

You know, a lot of people can't, don't, don't do that. And it's, it's wonderful to see you. What you can do with that material to, you know, be like, I'm sort of taking back this narrative and watch out. What is your, what's your relationship with your parents like now? 

Caro: Well, my, my father, he was the victim of childhood abuse as well.

So this was, I mean, this was a continuation of violence, right? A cycle of violence and he committed suicide when I was, uh, 13. died. We, we got the news on Christmas morning, which was not wonderful. So yeah, so that, that he was only 35. And I suppose as I've got older, I've, you know, thought a lot about, I guess I have more sympathy for him because, you know, I can see how his childhood contributed to how he was.

He was just out of control and wanted to, I guess, regain some of the power that he had lost. But. You know, yeah. In my novels though, I, I think I'm really invested in writing women's stories, particularly because of what I grew up perceiving in, in Northern Ireland as well, that, you know, women, it was not a great place to be a woman at all.

And I would sort of hear these stories from my mom and from my grandmother and they would really, they've stayed with me because I. I just felt that these incredible, smart women, all their opportunities were taken from them. And this is not the middle ages, this is, you know, 19, my mom was born in 1961, you know, and Yeah, she, a lot of her opportunities were just cut because the fact that she was a woman.

And that's been something that I've wanted to write about in various ways. And I, I just love celebrating really, really smart, savvy women on the page and, and the way that they, um, manage sometimes the prejudices that are thrown at them because they don't take them lying down. Just like the women that I knew, they didn't take it, you know, easily.

They, they railed against a lot of the prejudice and it in some ways made them incredibly strong as human beings. But maybe not. in ways that, you know, they didn't have the career success, they didn't have the kind of outward markers of who they were to celebrate, but I saw it. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, in Bad Tourists, you also do have one, you know, the character Jade who is You know, not who's the same thing has befallen her.

I'm like, why do I, why am I struggling with these words? Who is also being abused? Oh my gosh, what is wrong with me? And you write about that, you know, in sort of harrowing detail as well. And that fear, which now I see, you know, 

Caro: Yeah. 

Zibby: You know, I feel like, like, we all have to like, make sense, make peace with our demons in some way.

Right? And sometimes you end up just like rewriting all the stuff that like, doesn't go away. Does that, do you feel like that happens? Like, Oh, I'm not going to write about this in this book. And then it seeps its way in. Yeah. 

Caro: Yeah. Always. There's always something that comes up. Cause Jade, I hadn't, I hadn't actually, I until I started writing she wasn't there, like the other women were there, but she wasn't.

And I started this new chapter and it was just a different person talking. So I felt, I feel like a medium, excuse my dog, I felt like a medium because there was suddenly this young voice and she was very scared and very vulnerable. And so I just went with it. And, and yeah, her story I just felt was something that was quite familiar to a lot of women that she was in the Maldives, newlywed, outwardly celebrating, deliriously happy, but not.

And yeah, so her, her, her story was just there of domestic violence and the kind of control that her new husband has over her. But it's such a, I think that's when I hear of, stories of women, you know, facing domestic violence and control in a relationship. You just think, really? Still? Is this still going on?

And of course it is. Um, and I, I think, well, I don't know. I, I write because I, one of the reasons I write my stories is because I want people to feel seen. And I, you know, the experiences we have can make us feel very alone. But if we encounter them in a book, we don't feel alone so much and so it was important for me to, to speak to that experience.

Zibby: Wow. And I hear it's also going to be a Paramount Plus production. Is that right? I read that. 

Caro: So I haven't, we haven't got a streamer yet, but the company, so it's, it's actually a UK and US kind of production and they haven't got a streamer on board yet, but they've the company in the uk I've worked with Paramount Plus before, so who knows.

Zibby: Oh, I see. Okay. 

Caro: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really exciting. I, because I, I saw this so vividly in my mind that the whole kind of story was just cinematically in my head. I am really excited to see it on the screen because I just think it'll be incredible. I, I think it's, it's just one of those. books that will really translate across really well into a TV series in particular.

So, and I, I did love White Lotus and the whole idea of a resort and all the different, you know, interweaving of people's lives and where they're at is, is just brilliant. So, yeah.

Zibby: It's like, it's like, White Lotus Meets Big Little Lies, right? You must have used that. Right? Because the women's friendship and all that.

Caro: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good way to capture it actually, the sort of vibe of this book is very much White Lotus Meets Big Little Lies, which is just, yeah, I want to write more of these sort of books because that's just the best description. So much fun, right? And especially, although Jade is a young character, you know, I've seen a lot of reviews so far that have mentioned the age of these women, that they're in their 40s, that they're perimenopausal.

And I think that was a conscious choice on my part. And I'm glad that people have picked up on it because I don't feel we see a lot of this chapter of women's lives represented in books, and yet it's a very interesting moment and when I was writing Jade, I was reflecting on my younger self when I was in a controlling, abusive relationship in my early 20s with a man very like my father.

And not as bad as Jade, but I, I still, I didn't have to do any research to, to write Jade and to understand what it's like to be sort of controlled like that and to be very in a position like, what do I do? But I was thinking about that and I was thinking, you know, I, I'm, I'm interested in writing about the way you grow as a woman and the way you change.

Like, the me in my mid forties is. just so much stronger. I don't have the, the figure of my 22 year old self, but I, you know, I, I, I feel the people that just messed with me and controlled me back then, you know, um, no, you wouldn't want to cross me now. And I, I'm not alone in saying that, like a lot of women I speak to and a lot of friends of mine aren't the same, that they are they're overcome a lot of, I guess, micro challenges as well as macro challenges.

They've built careers at the same time as looking after children and picking up the invisible load and it has made them titans and we need to celebrate that more. It absolutely blows my mind that women at this age are seen as invisible and like, not as beautiful and all of this crazy talk. We need to be celebrating these women.

Zibby: I, I agree. Let me jump on that bandwagon, please. As a 47 year old, you know, like, woman in very much in the throes of it all, so. Yeah, right. If we, I mean, I'm sure by the time this comes out, we just acquired, I run a publishing company too, and we just acquired a book called It's Getting Hot in Here about a very menopausal, menopausal woman who um, yeah, you know, menopausal rom coms, because like why not, you know, anyway.

Caro: Yeah, I love that. Sign me up. I will be reading that. So hard. 

Zibby: Your next trip to the Maldives, I'll send you a copy. Please. Although actually, I just read that, that the Maldives, not to get political, have banned all Israelis from even going there. Did you hear that? 

Caro: No, I didn't. Or maybe I did, actually. 

Zibby: Yeah.

Maybe I did, but I didn't. Yeah. Oh, well. Crazy times. Crazy times. Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. No, the Maldives has always been on my, my wish list. In fact, one time I tried to book a flight, uh, book a trip there, so I, I found the hotel and we can only go for like four days and I was like, oh, it can't be that far. 

Caro: Yeah.

Zibby: Yeah. Then I went and looked at flights and it was like, plus 24 hours. 

Caro: Yeah, yeah, it was definitely a long ways away to fly. So for the next book though, because I've just turned in the next book, As Cara Carver, I don't have a title yet, but it's set in Capri, which is like an island off the coast. The coast of Naples in Italy, that was amazing.

That was, I was just there at the end of April and beginning of May and it was, it was so beautiful. It does make you question your life choices, like why do I not live there, right? Why am I in, I mean I love Scotland, but why am I not in Capri, so. Yeah. Amazing. 

Zibby: I know. Every place except for, I live in New York City, full time.

Like, what am I doing here? I also have four kids, by the way, so related very strongly with your homeschool work COVID situation. You know, like so many other people. How do you, how do you handle your, you know, experience with, with COVID? Unsavory gentlemen and raising kids and sharing the information and all of that, like, I always struggle with what to tell my kids about basically everything related to my past.

So, you know. 

Caro: Yeah, I think it's probably, you know, we're raising our generation. I think our raising kids. Like, we don't have our childhoods to draw on here because we didn't grow up with the internet. But I also think that, I don't know, I just think in some ways, you know, we romanticize our childhoods a wee bit because I spent all my childhood on the streets with, like, being gay.

Approached by unsavory men, like, very young. So it's, it's whether it's on the streets or in person or on screen, all of these things can, can happen. I, I think I'm just very four star with my kids, so I, I just say it as it is. Like, for example, I always struggled to tell my kids that Santa Claus was real.

So I would just say, my kids would say, is Santa Claus real? And I'd say no. And they would make a conscious decision to, uh, ignore me. So, my kids did believe in Santa Claus for years, but they just wouldn't talk to me about it, because I'm very forthright. I'm just, I just say it as it is. And so, I suppose we have a, a very honest relationship in our, in our household when it comes to talking about things that are not appropriate and protecting themselves.

And, um, maybe not surprisingly, I have raised a bunch of blazing feminists. So even my son. So yeah, I, and I like that. I, I like that, you know, we're in a moment where we can be open about things like mental health. Even when I was growing up, it was very taboo to talk about depression. I mean, yeah, astonishingly so actually.

And so it makes me I want to talk about things. I want to make sure that they are prepared for the world and that they know they don't have to follow any particular path. They don't have to have children. They don't have to get married. They don't have to follow gender roles. So I'm very, um, firm on that with them.

Zibby: Maybe you need, like, a companion parenting book, you know? 

Caro: Oh, God, no. 

Zibby: How to Raise a Feminist or something. I don't know. Could be good. There must be a book. Is there a book? I would Google it after this. If there's not a book, you should write it. You could even co write it with your kids or something. 

Caro: I did a, you know, I did a project years ago because one of the things that really struck me when I became a parent when I became a mother was. 

Zibby: Oh, I saw that, your anthology.

Caro: Yeah, I did a project called Writing Motherhood because I was just, well, I mean, many things struck me when I became a mother, as I think happened to all of us, but I think one of the things was that there was no literature at the time on motherhood. Like, there was plenty on sleep routines, the Gina Ford manuals, but there wasn't as much Dialogue, as there is now, on the institution of motherhood, and I find that really astonishing.

And similarly, as I began to approach my 40s, I remember reading a poem by Mary Ruffall, I was teaching it actually, a poem by Mary Ruffall, the American poet, and she was talking about keeping a cry log when she was in menopause for the number of times she cried each day that month. and she was talking about menopause and I remember being struck that this was the first I had heard that menopause might make you cry all the time.

And now there's a lot of material and literature on menopause, which is fantastic, but we seem to have had these times of just silence around women's issues and, and, yeah, it's always, enraged me a little bit that we don't, I think it's, it's important that we, we represent that we have this in literature and that we publish it because it's being written, it's just not being published in the past.

Zibby: So true. This friend of mine, I talked to earlier and was like, yeah, I'm just having this pain in my, And I was like, you know, it's probably just menopause. 

Caro: Yeah. 

Zibby: Menopause is everything. It is. It's like everything that could be going wrong with your emotions and your body. It's probably just that. 

Caro: For real.

For real though, because I had, I had these weird joint pains in my fingers. 

Zibby: Me too. 

Caro: I was like, yeah, I was like, what is this? Why do I, I, do I have pain? arthritis. What is it? So I googled it and it said could be perimenopause or menopause. I was like, I thought it was just hot flushes. That's what I've been told that you get hot and your period stop.

That's it. 

Zibby: So our kids are going to grow up knowing a whole lot more. They'll be far more ready. 

Caro: They hear it all. They hear it all. My son, my daughters are so vocal about like their periods. So he's a bit like, geez. 

Zibby: Yeah, I know. Sometimes I'm like, okay, simmer down, guys. 

Caro: Yes, we, we, we don't need all the information.

Zibby: Oversharing. 

Caro: Exactly. Exactly. But what a difference in, like, my, the way I grew up and now it's, it's a huge leap and I think a lot of it is really positive. 

Zibby: I agree. I totally agree. I'm curious what happens with the next generation, but I guess we'll hopefully see what their kids end up like. 

Caro: Oh, I know.

Zibby: Okay, so what is your next book gonna be? So this is the one that's set 

Caro: in Capri. 

Zibby: Oh, I'm so sorry. We just talked about that. I always like.. 

Caro: No! 

Zibby: Okay, I'm sorry. It's set in Capri. You just said that. 

Caro: I can give I can give little bits of information, like I, we haven't, I'm just waiting on my edits and it's going to be published again in the UK and the US.

It's a film reunion, so we have a link back to the late 90s, early 2000s. I like that. I, I, I just, I like looking back at the past, those times and this is what these characters do. I think it is White Lotus y again because the hotel that they stay in plays a really important part and actually when I went to Capri I, I wanted to find the hotel that was in my mind and I did.

It was, I did, it was so freaky and I was so excited, but like, it was just, it was perfect. It was right on the edge of this cliff, it had this view of the Bay of Naples, it's unreal, just the flat out ocean. You can see Mount Vesuvius, you can see Sorrento, all the little islands, and it was super pricey, but I, we stayed there one night, my husband came, and we, we stayed for one night, right, because I was like, I have to, it's not enough just to see it, I have to stay and, and kind of know this place, so, and they had this old wooden elevator, it was full on out of a Wes Anderson movie, just all perfectly Italian elegance and it was just exactly like the hotel I had pictured in my mind.

So I was, I just find that when I, When I go to a place that the book is set in, it enlivens it, and it's so important to me that that energy is there, the authenticity is there, and you pick up things that, you know, I didn't know that it's illegal to wear flip flops in Capri. 

Zibby: No way, I didn't know that.

Caro: They, they are very particular about their aesthetic, because they're so glamorous. And um, you're, you're, it's, you're also not allowed to walk around without a shirt on. Like, because you get a lot of these beautiful, you know, resorts that guys just take the shirt off and I suppose they don't want that aesthetic for their residents.

So but it was, it was wonderful. I just, I picked up so much and I just feel it made the book just lift up that bit more. So 

Zibby: I think you need to, maybe you need to leave some breadcrumbs about like where you're going to go after that. I feel like you're picking all these fabulous spots and I just want to go and follow along.

Like I'll be like sneaking, you know, like turn around, I'll be coming, like who's the creepy podcaster who's showing up at all my destinations, but they sound so fun. So thank you. 

Caro: You're welcome. 

Zibby: Um, okay. So what advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Caro: Oh, keep going, keep going. A writing career will have so many moments of feeling like you're just not cut out for this, that you'll never produce something that you're happy with.

You know, I just think you got to keep going. I've had so many peaks and troughs in my writing career. And I, I did have some moments where I thought my career was over, very dramatic, but it wasn't. It was a really tough time, but you just keep writing and you do actually get better, uh, if you just persist.

I've written, quite a few books that will never see the light of day, but that's okay because it's not wasted. It's actually all just teaching you things. There's so much to this art that I never knew, and that's partly why I continue to teach at Glasgow University because everything that I've learned skill wise You know, it goes into that I teach MLIT students and PhD students.

So the, the, the thrust of what I'm saying is just keep going. If you've got the love for it, you just keep going with that project and be very patient and persistent and you will get there. 

Zibby: I love it. Very inspiring. Uh, Caro, thank you so much. Thank you for the book, the adventures, and all the advice and everything else.

So thank you. 

Caro: Well, more than welcome. 

Thank you. 

Zibby: Okay. All right. Best of luck. Take care.

Caro: Thank you. 

British novelist Clare Pooley joins Zibby to discuss HOW TO AGE DISGRACEFULLY, an utterly hysterical, quirky, and reassuringly wise novel that centers around Lydia, a menopausal woman and empty-nester who is lonely and suspects her husband is having an affair… so she decides to help out at a senior citizen social club. She finds herself surrounded by very eclectic and mischievous seniors who, after an accident, must band together to save their community hall. Clare delves into her journey with sobriety and breast cancer and shares how an anonymous blog eventually led to a successful writing career. She also shares her perspectives on aging, highlighting the power of living every moment to the fullest, regardless of age.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Claire. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss how to age disgracefully.

Congratulations. 

Clare: Oh, thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for asking me. 

Zibby: Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm always thinking about how to age. Maybe not totally disgracefully, but, you know, I'm not sure I'm going to be at Pasha, but maybe, you never know, in Ibiza. Ibiza. Tell listeners what your book is about, please.

Clare: Oh, well, the story sort of revolves around a lady who's about the same age as me. She's called Lydia. She's menopausal. Her, her two, uh, daughters have left home and gone to university and she thinks her husband is having an affair. So, so she's not terribly happy and she takes this job from the local council working as a coordinator for this new senior citizen social and she imagines that her day is going to be filled with older people playing bingo or knitting or doing jigsaws, and needless to say, it doesn't turn out like that at all.

The people who turn up for her social club are rather eclectic, very badly behaved, and they all have very interesting backstories that we gradually discover. Anyway, to cut a long story short, right at the very beginning, a terrible accident happens and the council threatened to close the, the hall that the social center, um, uses.

So they join together with the nursery next door and try and save to save their hall and all sorts of rather hilarious hijinks in Sue . Yes, they do.

Zibby: So I read, after I read the book, I went and then I saw the author's note, which explained how you started with the prologue and then had to figure out who to make all the characters, but that the idea of the minibusters started first with how everybody would be confessing their, their crimes and all of that.

And then you delved into who the characters were, which I found fascinating in terms of process because I would have assumed you would start sort of with the characters. Well, anyway, just tell me about how this whole thing came to be and how you. Were able to even just like interweave all of their stories and get to the end.

It seems like a a feat. 

Clare: Yeah, I mean it's I I never understand those authors who are able to plot everything in advance you know and I know people who have these incredible whiteboards and they they detail exactly what's going to happen in every chapter and everything and and I just I'm, i'm in awe. I mean, I just can't do that because I sort of have to you get to know my characters really well before I know exactly what they're going to do and how they're going to react and how they're going to interact and all of that sort of stuff.

So when I start a story, I have a beginning and I have an end. Funny enough, I always know what the end is, even if sometimes it changes a bit, but I know roughly where I'm going. And I have a few key scenes in my head and then I just start writing and hope it all starts coming together and generally what happens is initially it feels really awkward and really wooden.

And then what you hope is that at some point this sort of magic thing happens where your characters just start improvising and doing their own thing and then you're just writing down what they're doing and, and that's really what happened here. So I had this scene in my head, which became the prologue.

And I started with that, which is, is this group of, um, of, uh, senior citizens and young children being pulled over in a minibus on the motorway by policemen. And all of them start think that it's them that the policeman is looking for. And they all start confessing to various crimes. And then we have to work out.

what crimes have been committed by whom. So that, that's sort of how I work, which is a little bit haphazard, but luckily it all seems to come together by the end. 

Zibby: Well, I love how you sort of intersperse the point of view of different characters. And we get to know Lydia, but also Daphne and Art and Ziggy and how everybody's story, you know, ends up overlapping in different ways.

Art starts out, you know, really wanting to continue to be an actor and his agent is having none of it. And, and, and he's like, why would it have to end? Like, and I think that's the theme throughout the whole book is sort of why would Why does it end? Like why does anything have to end when none of us feel any older than when we were younger?

And our bodies are like changing, but we're not necessarily changing so much, and our interests aren't necessarily changing so much, and what, what, where do all these expectations of of, of aging in our culture come from? And why can we not just do more stuff? Right? 

Clare: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I, I'm 55 now.

I don't feel any different from the way I felt when I was 35. And I don't imagine I'm going to feel any different when I'm 75. And I was just getting a bit fed up with reading about older characters in literature who always had sort of minor parts and, and they were generally seen as rather sad, old, depressed.

And I thought, actually, I want to read a book about older characters who are really bossing it and ones who are showing the younger generation how to really live life rather than vice versa. So yeah, so that was quite important to me and it was, it was great fun to write, to be honest. 

Zibby: I bet. And I, I read that you were empty nesting and sort of feeling, you know, that frustration yourself and many of your peers and, you know, not, not to say, you know, I'm 47.

So I'm, I'm right behind you. I'm almost 48. Oh my gosh. So, and I know there's like a scene where she's like, I'm 53 and like, when Lydia's just like, oh my gosh, the rest of my life and like, what do we do with these ages? Like, what do we do with these numbers and what does it even mean? And how do we, you know, the panic that comes with it.

Clare: Yeah, and, you know, the truth is it shouldn't have to mean anything, you know, and I, you know, I didn't want to retire. I mean, I'm lucky I do a job that I love, but I don't ever want to stop. So I have huge sympathy with art who, you know, whose career as an actor has never really taken off in the first place if you don't want to retire.

So, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I, I think 70 is the new 50 is the new 30. 

Zibby: I love that. I know occasionally, my dad says, he'll look in the mirror and be like, who is that old guy? You know? 

Clare: I look in the mirror and I think, why is my mother here? 

Zibby: Yeah. That's really funny. I know. I, I turn into my mother more every day.

It's, it's, I can't believe it. Except now she's doing better stuff with her aging than I am. So she, I think she actually looks younger than me, but we all make our different decisions. Tell me a little more. I have to say, I have not read The Sober Diaries and I really, really want to now that I know about it and I've sort of fallen in love with how you write and your personality and voice on the page and all of that.

And I know you've gone through a lot yourself and you've been sober for, what, nine years now? Eleven years? What is it? Yeah, nearly ten years next year. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Congratulations. And that combined with, um, breast cancer and writing about it and blogging. Tell me, tell me about all that. What was your life like before you started the blog?

And then like, how has everything changed? 

Clare: Okay, well, so I have to take you back to 2015, which was the year I quit drinking and, uh, basically I was a mom with three young kids. And I had stopped work for a while after my, my third child was born. And I thought, you know, I'm just, and I've had a really full on job in advertising for 20 years.

And I thought it'd be really great to spend more time at home with my kids just for a while. And it was great, you know, and I was very privileged to be able to do that, but it was also really hard work and I found that instead of drinking less, I started drinking more. And there was this whole mum wine culture and it was all about me time and sort of feeling grown up at the end of the day.

And, and I got to the point where my wine habit just got more and more out of control. And I was drinking 10 bottles of wine a week, which was huge, way more than the government guidelines. So as a result, I was anxious all the time. I was an insomniac. I, my whole life was sort of stuck in a rut and I felt like I was just being a really bad mom and a really bad example to my kids, you know, so.

Anyway, I realized I had to quit. I didn't want to tell anyone because I was so ashamed about the whole thing that I didn't want to talk to my doctor or my family or my friends or alcoholics, anonymous, you know, anybody. But I had to do something by way of therapy. So I did what I had done as a teenager when I needed to work stuff out and I started writing.

But instead of writing a traditional diary, I thought, okay, this is 2015. People don't write traditional diaries. They write blogs. So I sort of Googled how do I start a blog and I set up this anonymous blog called Mummy was a secret drinker and I wrote in it every single day about what was going on in my head and it was because it was anonymous it was brutally honest and I really didn't think anyone would find it because I wasn't publicizing it but it went viral and people all over the world started reading this blog and saying yeah I feel like that too and I do the same thing it was a lot of you.

And then I wrote it with a lot of humor. I mean, it's a black comedy effectively. And then eight months after I started writing this blog, I got breast cancer. So I started writing about that and after a year, more and more people started saying you should publish this as a book and I ended up with a publishing deal with Hachette.

And, uh, and I published a book called The Sober Diaries based on that blog in the beginning of 2018. So, so yeah, over six years ago now, but you know, I still get messages from people every single day who've read that book and, and say it's helped them. So, you know, it was a great thing to do and by this stage, writing was my new addiction.

So I switched to, uh, fiction and the rest as they say is, is history. 

Zibby: Wow. When did you decide to sort of come out and not be anonymous anymore? And what was that like? Oh God, it was terrifying. 

Clare: I mean, I was kind of outed by one of the mums at the school gate. 

Zibby: Oh really? Oh my gosh. 

Clare: So what happened was I had, so this is when I, I, been blogging for about a year under this pseudonym, uh, called myself Sober Mummy.

And I threw a party to celebrate ending my cancer treatment and, uh, so I invited a whole load of friends and family and I told this sort of story, I did a speech and I told a couple of funny stories in this speech and then I went home and I wrote in my blog, as I always did, about what I'd been up to.

And I wrote about the party and I wrote about the speech that I made. And then I was. I went out shopping and I was walking down the King's Road in Chelsea in London and I got this, I remember vividly getting this email from one of the mums at the school gate, who I didn't know that well, but I'd invited to this party because she'd been really helpful when, you know, when I was, you I had all these hospital appointments and everything.

And I was reading this email and it said, Hi Claire, I've been reading this blog for about six months and, and, you know, and it's really funny. And I often sort of read out bits loud to my husband and say, this sounds just like the sort of person I might know. And I think it's you. And because she'd been at the party and then read the blog, she'd put two and two together.

And, and it became clear to me that, you know, I thought that nobody, nobody I knew was reading this, but it became clear that actually quite a few people I knew had been reading my blog and just had no idea it was me. And I'd always changed enough details to try and keep it, you know, keep my identity secret.

Anyway, at that point, I thought, look, I've got I've got to start telling people that it's me and and also enough time had passed. It wasn't also raw. I wasn't so embarrassed and ashamed about the whole thing anymore. And, uh, yeah, so I, I sort of gradually came out and then then the book was published and I did national TV, radio, press and suddenly everybody knew my innermost secrets.

And that was, yeah, that was terrifying. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, I mean, it's amazing. What a story. And I'm so glad you shared. I mean, imagine if you hadn't, you know, where would your life be? What would have happened? 

Clare: You know what? Something I learned, which I, I often tell people in case it helps, which is, you know, I was really, really scared about people knowing the worst things about me.

And, and I, if I'd been able to pull out three days before the book you know, went on sale, I would have done. I really would have done. I was having this terrible, uh, recurring nightmare where I was walking down a street naked and everybody else had their clothes on because that's how it felt. It felt like I was about to walk down a busy shopping street with no clothes on.

And, and what I learned is that when you make yourself really vulnerable and when you tell people, all the, you know, the, the bad things about yourself. People are generally really, really kind because everybody has something that they're struggling with. And, you know, And the thing is, once you're that honest about your life, nobody has anything left to throw at you anymore, there's no need to feel scared about what people might think and what people might say, because you've sort of put it all out there and they've thought it and said it, and you've said it, and, you know, there's nothing left to be afraid of, so, you know, it does, it's, the thought of it is really scary, but actually, you know, vulnerability makes you really strong.

It's an extraordinary sort of, yeah, it's an amazing thing to do, really. 

Zibby: Love that. Vulnerability makes you really strong. It's, it's true. It's true. People see themselves, right? And they, they feel less alone. 

Clare: Yeah. 

Zibby: They're not the only ones. 

Clare: You feel like there's, there's nothing left to hide anymore. And, uh, you know, that's, uh, yeah.

So it's a very empowering thing. 

Zibby: I had a memoir come out a couple of years ago and for me, it was. When the NetGalley link went live, right, for the advanced people, and I was like, Oh my God, I can't take it back. Like, I can't take it back. It's out there. Not that anyone necessarily read it, but I remember just like sitting in my bed being like, Oh my God, I can't, like, how do I get it back?

I can't get back. 

Clare: I know I did exactly the same. And even now, so I've now published the book that's about to come out is my fourth book. And you know, I, that netgalley moment is still terrifying. If anything, it's because you know, more, you know, first time around, I didn't even know it was on my, I didn't even know about netgalley when I, my first book was sort of published, but, but now, you know, waiting for those first netgalley reviews to come through is terrifying.

Zibby: So it seems like in the novels that you switch to next, there's always a bit of an ensemble cast and things going awry and, and the assumptions we make about other people and how people respond in groups and when bad things happen and, you know, how does that affect a group dynamic of people who come from all these different places and are suddenly united, right?

I feel like they mostly have that kind of thing going. 

Clare: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. I mean, in each each book, I've explored completely two different issues and through different characters, but the thing they all have in common is this sort of community. And I guess, as you say, the theme of The difference between what we show and who we really are.

And I love playing with that. And I love playing with the way different characters will perceive the same person. So, uh, you know, so for instance, an Iona Iverson's rules for commuting, I love the fact that everybody had a different personal nickname for Iona. And it told us a lot about them, how they sort of are.

So, yeah. So that's something I think they, they all share. 

Zibby: Well, I think a lot of. writers and just a lot of people, we're always having to make these quick judgments about people that we see out and about, right? We don't even realize how fast our brains are, like, figuring stuff out, and you know, often wrong, right?

But like, okay, this person is this way or okay, this person on the subway is whatever, you know, we just have to do that to like get through the world and navigate and yet, does that even help us? You know, it's like that human thing. Yeah. 

Clare: And often I, the things we, the assumptions we make about people say more about us than they do about them and, and I love exploring that. And I love reminding people that, you know, what you see is not, absolutely never what you actually get. 

Zibby: Yes, totally. Tell me what it's like being part of the sort of British author scene of, like, funny women writers. Like, I feel like you must all, like, get together and have coffees and laugh and, you know, how does that work?

Like, who's in the posse and, you know, what is, how does, what's it like for all of you over there? 

Clare: Oh, you know what is being friends with other authors is, is such a joy because it's the sort of, you know, it's the sort of job where, that nobody else, I don't think can properly understand because it's so, you know, there are some amazing highs, but there are also some, some real sort of, you know, some real lows in the process as well.

And you're constantly being, you know, reviewed and judged and, you know, it's, yeah, it's a very unique sort of position to be in. So having other author friends where you can go, ah, my book's on netgalley or, you know, and remind each other that, you know, one bad review is not the end of the world because you for every one bad one you've got a hundred great ones and we have a habit of always focusing on the negative and not the positive so you just have need to have friends who can constantly remind you not to do that and you know not to spend ages looking at good reads and you know all of that sort of thing so uh so yeah so other author friends are really important and you know often a lot of, I mean, I meet people at festivals and that sort of events and that sort of thing, but a lot of us meet through social media.

So, uh, and what used to be called Twitter, there's a big sort of community of, of authors on, on Twitter and we all support each other. And it's a sort of, you know, it's, it's a very, it's a really supportive community. And, uh, you know, we, yeah, I think, I think we all understand, you know, how tricky it can be.

So, so yeah, we were very, um, we're very supportive of each other generally, you know, yeah. So it's, uh, I, I don't know what I would, I would do without them, but there's also always a sense of imposter syndrome. So, you know, I went to this dinner recently and there were some, there were about 10 of us at this dinner.

It was organized by my Swedish publisher and it was over for a London book fair. And they invited all of their British authors. So there are about 10 of us. And, you know, Jojo Moyes was there, and Lisa Jewel was there, and David Nichols was there. And there's this great picture. If you look at, if you go on my Instagram, you can see it.

There's this picture of this dinner with all these really famous authors. And there's me in the corner, this expression on my face like this. This won't work on a podcast, but I'm looking like this and that's, that's my imposter syndrome face, because I was sitting there thinking, I do not deserve to be at this table.

And I think all authors have, especially women, I think, have this imposter syndrome. You know, I am not part, really part of this club and yeah, I don't think I'm the only one that feels like that. Although I'm not sure Jojo Moyes does. 

Zibby: Aww, I love that so much. Are you touring in the U. S. or no? 

Clare: No, not at the moment, I'm afraid.

I'm, I'm going around the U. K. But, um, yeah, I'm not, uh, at the moment, I'm not doing the, the U. S. I think maybe when the paperback comes out, I might be able to get over there. I'd love to. I love, you know, I, I, I love visiting the U. S. And my, uh, my eldest, uh, daughter is now studying in Canada. She's at McGill.

So I've been out that way a bit as well, which is great. 

Zibby: Oh, that's wonderful. Awesome. I'm actually coming to the UK next year at the end of the summer. 

Clare: Oh, amazing. Where are you going? 

Zibby: We're going to, I'm bringing my whole family to the Taylor Swift concert. Wembley. 

Clare: London. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Clare: You're doing a fun one. 

Zibby: Oh, I'm Wembley.

Clare: Yeah. I would love to do that. Yeah. I'm, I'm a Swifty. 

Zibby: Amazing. 

Clare: To get tickets. We, yeah, but didn't manage to, so if anyone out there has a spare ticket that they, you know, do let me know. . 

Zibby: Um, amazing. Well, Claire, thank you so much for chatting. I am literally gonna get off this Zoom and buy the Sober Diaries 'cause it sounds like a book.

That would be one of my favorite books for all the reasons, you know. 

Clare: Oh, thank you. Thank you. 

Zibby: Fabulous. But, but in, but not to, not to disparage How to Age Disgracefully, which is also fabulous, and, you know, now I'm a fan, and I'm sure everybody who reads this book will be, and I think this is incredibly empowering for all of us as we age, for people who are further along in aging, and for everyone who's like, why does the fun have to stop?

Like, let's just do this. Like, come on, let's keep having fun. 

Clare: Hurrah. Thank you so much for inviting me. I've really, I've had great fun chatting to you. Thank you. 

Zibby: You too. Okay. Take care, Claire. 

Clare: Bye. 

Zibby: Bye bye. 

Zibby chats with bestselling author Tom Seeman about ANIMALS I WANT TO SEE, a lyrical, tender, and insightful memoir about a boy who grew up in a family of fourteen in the projects of Toledo, Ohio, and journeyed from child janitor with big dreams to teenage petty criminal to student at Yale and Harvard. Tom describes his wonderful mother, whose resilience and kindness shaped his life and shielded him from his alcoholic father’s abuse. He also touches on his life-changing scholarship to a private high school and the small act of kindness that transformed his life. Finally, he reflects on the role of luck, nature vs. nurture, and the power of persistence and positive thinking.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Tom. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Animals I Want to See, a memoir of growing up in the projects and defying the odds.

What a book. Oh my gosh. Congratulations. 

Tom: Well, thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed your podcast as well. 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Honestly, your story, I read every word. I could not put this book down. I can't believe I just, it's so inspiring and so amazing. I want to see what's on your list of things to do today and like the projects that you still have coming because I'm sure you have some sort of list, but wow.

Can you tell listeners about your whole backstory and turning it into a book? Just what is the book about? 

Tom: Well, sure. So I grew up in a family of 14. In the projects in Toledo, Ohio, you know, on welfare, food stamps, the whole lot in a primarily black neighborhood, you know, we were one of the few white families there.

So there's a lot of interest there, I think, and things that happened. I had a fantastic mother and a very difficult father. My father was alcoholic. But on top of that, I think he was a mean guy who I think hated his life and took it out on his family. You know, the people that would put up with it but my mother was like a saint.

You know, my mother just Not only was incredibly hard working, just thinking about, you know, I have four kids taking care of those four kids with even with help and my great wife and all that. My mother, you know, doing it all alone with no help other than from her brothers and maybe her mother while she was still alive.

But my mother doing all that work. But then in addition to that, she would go the extra mile, you know, which is modeling great behavior for me and her other kids. I think she would not just make a dessert, but she would, you know, she would make an elaborate dessert, right? She would make pinwheel cookies instead of just chocolate chip cookies where she has to roll out the dough and then roll the chocolate and the vanilla together and then cut them.

And then as soon as she made these dozens of cookies, They would disappear, right? Because these 12 children would eat them up right away. So her artistry would just disappear and she would sew and she would make dress Easter dresses for my sisters. And she would make, you know, Christmas presents that, you know, we thought were new, but she had made them.

She would make stuffed animals and stuff them with her old nylons. We, you know, discovered later when they would open up what was inside. Just a tremendous example of going the extra mile. Which I think I've emulated in my life just naturally, right? By the example that she showed. So it's a great story of a boy, myself, who was very driven, obviously, if you had the book, who was a lister made lists.

And always believed he could change his ending, you know, and that's, I think, the great hope. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, to the point about your mother and going the extra mile, the fact that every scene you have her in, she is calm. She, you know, she just doesn't get ruffled, it seems, except maybe once or twice she got upset.

But throughout, just whatever happens, the good, the bad, she is this, like, steady presence of, you know, support. But not indulgence, you know, it's just amazing. Like what a role model this woman. Oh my gosh. 

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. She, you know, my father was somewhat abusive and she would just stay calm through it all. You know, there's a scene in the, where the, you know, at night these, the boys would throw the beer bottles or bottles or whatever onto this concrete next to our house.

She would go out and clean it up and just say, well, they just have nothing better to do. Or they, you know, this is what they need to do or whatever. And yeah, she was just a sea of calm, as I say in the book, I think, and she was amazing that way. But on the other hand, you know, she was also, if there, I wouldn't say a weakness, but if there's any shortcoming, it was that, you know, that praise side.

And so I think I sought praise, which ended up being a good thing for me, maybe because I sought praise from my teachers. I sought praise from many outsiders. You know, I became this very reliable, hardworking kid who would go the extra mile myself. You know, when I was a janitor, a boy janitor, I would clean behind the toilet, you know, where no one would see just naturally when no one was watching, I would do these things because I think of the example of my mother and my own drive.

And then eventually, of course, as you grow older, people notice that about you, they notice, they don't notice everything you do, but they notice some of the things you do and they start to say, Oh my God, this is a special boy. He's doing this extra stuff. This is the kind of kid we need to get behind and so the book is, you know, in addition to being about my family, it's about, I think, a collection of the small kindnesses that were done for me over the course of my life.

And I think I realized that more by writing the book, because you think, you know, you, you know, that people did good things for you in your life, but when you're writing them all down and creating a book out of it, they began to add up, you know, and you see that this collection of small kindnesses. became a life, you know, my life.

And I think writing the book made me a kinder person because of that deep realization. 

Zibby: Wow. I love when, well, not love cause it was sad, but also great when your dad doesn't pick you up from the art class and the policeman has to give you, the policeman tells you how to get home on the buses and gives you the money and says that you know, he'll give you the money, but you have to promise to sort of pay it forward to the next, to somebody else.

And how you wove that in the story and even towards the end, when you're like, this is what I've been doing with my life is paying it forward. 

Tom: Right, right. Yeah. That scene, I was given free art classes in one of the many remarkable things that happened to me. You know, I have this belief also that in order to know what to hope for, you have to be exposed to the outside world.

And so my world was very much. And all the kids in my neighborhood was very much closed in in the projects. And so I began to get these opportunities to go outside and see what the world had. And one of those was these free art classes. at the Toledo Museum of Art. And so I would go every Saturday and my father, you know, would go off and drink or whatever and not pick me up sometimes.

And this one scene where I'm standing outside of the museum, seeing all the kids get picked up and I'm counting how many are left and I'm getting more and more scared as a little boy that I'm not going to get picked up. And the policeman sees me crying when everybody else is gone. And he helps me take the bus home, which for me was very liberating because then I learned how to take the bus.

I was scared that first time, but not only was he kind, but the bus driver was kind about it. I had to change buses downtown and change to the stick me bus, which took me kind of close to my house. And then I walked down the street and then I realized, Hey, I can do this. And yeah, the kindness of that policeman, he could have just, of course, ignored it or let me go.

But it's just another in the, in the long list, the long litany of kindness is done for me. Yes. 

Zibby: Wow. You also make it clear that some of the things that end up being life changing could so easily have gone another way. You know, the biggest thing being when you just Checked the box off when you took the entrance exam, and you just checked the box for, I guess, Catholic Central or one of the schools in that area, and you end up getting this full scholarship and everything, but you're like, what if I hadn't checked the box to send them my scores?

What if? 

Tom: Absolutely. The checking of the box story lives in infamy in my life. I often tear up when I tell the story, which was, you know, when I was in grade school, all the siblings before me had gone to public public high schools, which in our area were not that good. And I had this vision that the best school for me would be one of the Catholic schools in Ohio and Toledo.

In particular, I think, you know, the Catholic schools are really the only private high schools there. There isn't that set up like in the east coast here where I live now, where there's all these private high school. So when you think about going to a good school, you think about a Catholic school and I thought I could afford central Catholic because I had a paper route and I did odd jobs like shoveling snow and I thought I could get a job at the school and I and I added it all up and I said, Oh, I can afford to go to the least expensive school central. And so I went to take the Catholic schools admissions test and I saw on the list, I checked the box for central and then I saw on the list, St. Francis to sales, which is the college prep in my neighborhood. It was the sissy school cause you had to wear a coat and tie. It was all boys. And I was aware of the school because we played our football games near there. It was across town. And, uh, so I checked the box for St. Francis, not thinking much of it.

And then about a month later, you know, I get called to the principal's office, sister Anne's office. And she says, there's someone here to see you. I thought I was in trouble. And it was father McManaman from St. Francis. And he said, tell me, Tom, why did you check the box for central? First of all? And I said, well, I could afford it.

And I explained my calculations. And of course that impressed him. And these calculations, by the way, were done solely by me. I didn't pass them by my parents. I didn't pass them by my teachers. I was very self driven, self sufficient kind of kid. And he was very impressed and he said, why did you check St. Francis? And I said, well, I'm sorry. I can't afford St. Francis. So I'm sorry. I checked the box and then you came all this way. And he said, no, I can tell you can afford St. Francis because I can give you a full scholarships. I'm tearing up right now. Um, it was sorry. It was a life changing moment in my life.

No. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. So amazing. 

Tom: And I got those when I get to St. Francis, you know, I start hanging around with very different kids. I was doing some really bad things in my neighborhood. I was starting to do things that if you got caught, you know, you could get arrested. And when I went to St. Francis, I started hanging.

I was placed in the highest class based on my test result. So I was hanging around with the nerd guys. Even though I was also a big football player, I sort of chose this group as my guys and, you know, we spent four years together. We have this group of five, we're still close. We just had a, we just had a reunion and at our house, we have a house in Maine and we had a reunion at our house in Maine, um, just like six months ago, we were all there and, uh, well, you know, we talked about things that we didn't talk about at home or among my friends in the neighborhood, you know, religion and the future of the world and.

Why are we here on earth? Why did God make us? And all these big questions and I immediately dove right into this and would write things down and run home and look in the encyclopedia as my mother had gotten us to look things up that I didn't understand and it was just an opening of my life. 

Zibby: Well, you know, your book raises so many big questions.

Your life becomes sort of a conversation point, if you will. Because it's about what is it about the individual that makes some people able to sort of overcome whatever obstacles are set in their way, right? You and you show us in great detail what it was like, even just growing up with this many siblings, but also, you know, where you were and how you had to sort of make do with everything and your determination to like, get through it.

And also luck. I mean, even all the injuries you had, I'm like, What? He, like, got something, like, into your, the bone of your foot, and your mom's like, here, just, like, wrap it up. And I'm like, what if, what if this had happened? What if you'd gotten an infection this time? You know, what about all these times with your head when you were getting it banged against the sidewalk?

And I'm like, oh my god. So, it so easily all could have gone another way. And I'm curious, I know in the end you were just like, my siblings have all been great too, but I'm sort of wondering, like, what happened and to what do you attribute, obviously you're incredibly bright, but like, what is it that makes some people able to overcome and others not so much?

Tom: Right. Well, I think at the core, it goes to the whole question of nature versus nurture. You know, how much of it was inside of me when I was born versus how much of it did I pick up along the way? And people say, well, you were raised in the same household with all these siblings, so you had all the same influences.

And that's not completely true because, you know, maybe my mother treated me differently, or maybe my father was meaner to me, which in the end maybe was a good thing, or maybe I had different friends and I had, you know, the teachers, I was the teacher's pet and maybe my brother wasn't or whatever, who knows all the influences that made me into what I am.

But I think what helped me in my darkest times. was that I believed I could change the ending, you know, and I don't know if all my siblings believe that or not. I mean, we've all gotten out of the projects. Nobody's on welfare. Nobody has a substance abuse problem. So we have all good outcomes. But we have a vast array of socioeconomic outcomes.

You know how successful it depends on how you define success, of course. But how successful is each of the Children and, of course, all the other kids in the neighborhood, how successful or not were they in getting out. But I was driven by this belief that I could change the ending and you know, I think that people believe the stories they tell themselves.

And if you tell yourself that you're helpless and I went, some situations are helpless, I understand that. But many times we tell ourselves we're helpless. One, if we tell ourselves the story that we have some hope, if we just take action, you know, we might believe that story. So that's what I had inside of me.

That drove me. I had a, you know, I had a way of looking at the world with wonder. Uh, if you, you know, if you read the book, you'll see how many times I look at the world with wonder and see things in a positive way rather than a negative way. The great example being the early scene where we go out into the field behind our house and we turn over, you know, junk and there's a snake and I'm so thrilled by this.

Or by the Queen Anne's Lace or whatever in the field. And really, the field, when you grow up, you realize the field is a dumping ground of trash, you know, that people were throwing there. You know, an old refrigerator door, a piece of plywood, all these things in the field. But for me, it was a field of wonder.

Zibby: My gosh and even just all the, the things you decided you wanted to see, right? Like that it was possible, whether it was, and then at the end when you saw, not to give things away, it was like the scene where you actually saw the tiger, like it brought tears to my eyes. I mean, this book was so moving. I know you said in, in the book that it was President Bill Clinton who encouraged you to do it.

And there's a big jump because we don't really find out how you're even doing it. Friendly with President Clinton and how it came to be that he suggested you do the book, but could you fill in the dots there? 

Tom: Sure, sure. So I had been thinking about the book for a while because I'd be You know, I'd be at a dinner party or something and then and people would say, so, you know what, you know, how will you raise or something?

And people would go around the table and I would tell my story and people were not expecting that, of course, because they were looking at me and probably creating in their mind a back story for how I grew up. You know, I grew up, you know, in upper middle class or something. And instead, I'm telling them I grew up in this giant family in the projects.

And so as people were showing more and more interest in it, I got the idea. And then I was at an event, I've met president Bill Clinton a few times, and he's famous for really focusing on the person he's speaking with and he was doing this with me the second time I met him at an event and he was, he had, he was talking to me and really listening to the story.

And of course he grew up poor too. So he said, you have to write this book. And so I wrote the book and then I recontacted him and I said, Hey, I wrote that book. Do you remember? You told me to write it a number of years ago. Will you give me some support? So he gave me a blurb for the book, which appears on the cover of the book.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Zibby: Wow. 

Tom: Yeah. 

Zibby: Well, even without a blurb from him, the book would be wonderful and, um, but that's, uh, that's great. I mean, some of the scenes I can't stop thinking about, some of the things like, you know, the cat, the scene with the cat when you were growing up and the mean things that happened, you know, in the neighborhood and getting your, you know, Halloween candy stolen, and I know that that happens in all these sitcoms and whatever, the, you know, the Halloween candy getting stolen, but.

I mean, the, the, the way you wrote it and the devastation and even not being able to sleep on a pillowcase that night, I mean, it's, I know in the grand scheme of things that was one minor thing, but it's just something so universal, right? That everybody is getting their candy and has a right to eat it and you don't even get that.

Tom: Right. It was, it was actually kind of a violent event, you know, cause you're a little kid and you get pushed down and you're and your pillowcase of candy gets stolen. You know, we used our pillowcases, as you said, to collect candy. So that night, because my pillowcase was stolen, I didn't have a pillowcase on my pillow.

There are, what people don't realize about those environments is that even when you have like a wonderful mother, like we had, and we had a safe place to go home, and good food that my mother was able to pull together with food stamps and all these programs that were given to us. There's a lot of bad things in the environment that are happening around you.

I won't talk about the cat scene because it's kind of a bad scene. But yeah, these things are happening around you and you're seeing things that other Children just aren't seeing. So the disadvantages of those kinds of neighborhoods are very real. You know, there's a lot of violence. I give a few instances of that, like where the guys are Yeah.

Fighting out in front of our house with two by fours hitting each other and you know, you just don't see that in a normal upbringing. My children aren't seeing that for sure. 

Zibby: So I know you say at the end of the book how obviously a very film not obviously but you say how philanthropic you are now and all of that, but is there anything that you think haven't grown up this way?

Systemically there can be changes or what we can all do or what you can do or we all should do like what what is the take away. 

Tom: I think a couple things. I think that thing I said earlier about giving Children exposures to things so they know what to hope for. You know, I'm involved in the boys and girls clubs quite extensively here in Boston.

It's a lot of different clubs together in one large organization. I think that does that. I think an act of kindness to a stranger every day. Going back to my theme of Mhm. How my life is a collection of small kindness is that I added up to something really big. I think trying to do an act of kindness for a stranger every day, you don't know when that's going to make a difference.

You know, the guy across the street, you know, black guy across the street took us fishing one day. And he didn't think that was going to change a life. You know, he probably just wanted to go fishing with some kids. But, you know, when you add that to all the other kindnesses that were done, eventually it, you know, sort of breaks the band and it makes a big difference in someone's life.

And it has the added benefit of making you a happier person, by the way, because when you do acts of kindness to actually make you a happier person and gradually a kinder person. Yeah. 

Zibby: And how did your dad's behavior growing up affect your own parenting? 

Tom: Yeah. So there's that scene in the fourth grade when all the students in the class are asked to say what each of their, what is the greatest thing each of your parents has given you?

And I say, well, my mom, the greatest thing she gives me is that she's always there for me. And the greatest thing my dad has given me as an example of what I don't want to be. And this, you know, my teacher gasped because all the children before me had said all these glowing things about their parents.

And And I come out with this thing, it shows, I think, first of all, how I was thinking at a very young age, but also how his negativity maybe affected my life in a positive way, because I saw what I did want to be, maybe, and I saw what I don't want to be. So, yeah, my father, how has he affected my own parenting?

Well, obviously, I've tried to be the opposite kind of parent from him. I've tried to be there for my children, but I've also tried to be you know, an example of a very hardworking adult to, you know, there's this balance between being there for your kids, but also working hard so that they see, you know, not a man of leisure, but a man working all the time to do the best at whatever he does, you know, even this book is an example of that, you know, going, they see me going hard at it, you know, because I didn't write it so it sits on a shelf.

I wrote it so it would be read and I'm trying to get it out there, you know, so they see that behavior and I think it's a balance between those things. Which was not what my father was. 

Zibby: And what happened from the end of the book to now 

Tom: Yeah so the book ends sort of late Yale years and then when I'm going off to Harvard and then I jump forward in that one chapter as you said when I actually get to see one of the animals on my list I've seen many many animals in the wild around the world and my family now participates in that and they they love it, too It's kind of a fun pursuit, but then I, you know, I, I, I graduate, I start working and I ended up working at McKinsey, which is where I meet my wife in Europe, I'm in the London office and she's in the St. Petersburg, Russia office. And I meet her at a McKinsey event, and then I start a company with some McKinsey colleagues in Berlin, Germany, when I'm married with my wife and we have our second child in Germany and that's successful. And then I buy my first company in the U S when we come back and that's successful.

So I've built a life of sort of owning companies, making them better and selling them. And that's what I still do today. So it's been a successful business career. It's been a successful family life. So I've sort of, you know, realized my dreams from way back, way back when I was in the projects. Yeah.

Zibby: Amazing. How old are your kids now? 

Tom: My kids are 19 to 25, four kids. Yeah. Yeah. So the last one is going off to college. 

Zibby: Crazy. So do you ever have, I mean, it seems you're so rational about so many things and obviously occasionally you get emotional and even here, you know, but in the book occasionally as well.

What are the things that. There's a lot of trauma in the book, right? And this, I don't, it's, how do you, how do you deal with that? 

Tom: Yeah. Well, I've never been through therapy, but writing this book was very therapeutic. Actually. I realized a lot of things about my life. I realized a lot of things about my family.

I came to a lot of new realizations through this, but you're right. I'm a fairly rational, logical guy and so while I do have emotions, I think on the scale. You know, my Myers Briggs type tells me this, you know, I'm, I'm definitely more logical and rational than I am probably emotional and, um, it's actually something I work on, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. 

Zibby: And what advice would you have for someone trying to write? 

Tom: Yeah, that was difficult, you know, because, because I'm a business writer more than anything my whole life, you know, so I write in a certain way and I actually hired a writing coach for this book, which, uh, at first I tried to do it without that.

And I realized that my style just wasn't, for example, you know, my writing coach said, look, you're in business. I wouldn't just think I could jump in business and do really well at it and know all the stuff, you know. The same with writing, you know, she's written her whole life. She said, for example, you don't know how to connect scenes together.

You don't know how to keep it moving for the, for the reader and make it interesting. You know, you have all these small snippets, snippets of things that happened in your life, but you have to keep it moving, connect them, see what's important in them. You know, the old, the old thing from William Faulkner, you also have to know when to kill your darlings.

You know, you have to know when to cut some, I'm sure you've heard that you need to have to know when to cut something out, but and there were some things that I really always thought would be in this book that are not in this book, you know, because she helped me cut them out, things that didn't help the narrative along the way or whatever.

So I think that's, that was a very big move by me and I, I hired just the right person. I don't know how I was so lucky, but I hired just the right person to help me with that. And then I think you have to be ready to do a lot of promotion, which I'm not used to doing, you know, a lot of, a lot of self promotion, a lot of talking.

Um, a lot of things like this, uh, where I'm not normally doing things like this, but you know, as the book points out, also, I love new experiences and I see this as this wonderful new experience that I'm, that I'm able to go through that so many people writing books don't get to have, you know, so many people dream of writing a book and having it go somewhere and I'm sort of living that now and it's really fun to have this new experience that I probably never thought I would have.

Zibby: Amazing. Well, your story is really inspiring and the book itself is a great book and you can't help but root for you. I mean, it's amazing. 

Tom: So thank you. 

Zibby: Yeah. Congratulations. 

Tom: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and for rooting for me. 

Zibby: My pleasure. All right. All right. Bye Tom. Take care. 

Tom: It's be great to meet 

Zibby: You too.

New York Times bestselling author (and former flight attendant) TJ Newman returns to the podcast to discuss WORST CASE SCENARIO, a chilling, heart-stopping, unputdownable thriller about a commercial plane that crashes into a nuclear plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota. TJ reveals how her conversations with pilots about their deepest fears led to the book's terrifyingly plausible premise. The discussion delves into themes of personal sacrifice, ethical dilemmas, and the balance between duty and family. TJ also reflects on the pressure of writing after her previous successes and gives updates on the screen adaptations of her earlier books.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, TJ. Thanks so much for coming back on. Moms Don't have time to read books to discuss. Worst case scenario.

TJ: My pleasure. Thank you for having me on again. 

Zibby: I have taken this book now on several flights, and my kids are like, put that book down, remember? 

TJ: This one's cover, I, you know, I always say the books are great to read on planes because it makes, like, a whole experience out of it. You've got the sights, the smells, the seas shaking with turbulence.

It makes it like a Disneyland ride but I do get the cover on this one. I would maybe take the dust jacket off. 

Zibby: Well, it goes to the fact that I have been having trouble putting this book down because every time I pick it up, and I was trying to explain this to my kids and I'm like, okay, imagine you're in the middle of like a really great movie and then you keep having to pause it and only go back and watch for like five minutes.

Like all you want to do is like go back and watch it because that's what the book feels like. Like you're in the middle of like watching this cinematic movie in your, you know, in your own head because it's so gripping. So that's how I feel. 

TJ: That's such an interesting way to describe it. I mean, people have told me that the book, you know, they can't put it down and it is that sort of, you know, propulsive read, which is what I was aiming for, which is always great to hear, but no one's ever described it as like pausing a movie.

That's such a good description. Yeah. 

Thank you for that. 

Zibby: How I feel. Okay. So tell listeners, this is now your third book. Tell everybody what it's about and, and include the story that you tell in the book about interviewing all the pilots and how you came up with the idea. 

TJ: Awesome. Yeah. So when I was doing research for my first book, Falling, which takes place on a plane, as does my second book, Drowning.

I was a flight attendant for anybody who doesn't know I did it for 10 years. That's how I wound up writing aviation thrillers. And when I was doing research for Falling, my first book. I would talk to pilots all the time about, you know, like, like the nuts and bolts of flying, like policies, procedures, you know, the craft of flying an aircraft.

I would ask them questions, but I would also ask them questions about the, uh, psychological and emotional side of being a pilot. And the one question that I would ask every time I'd talk to a pilot was, what's your biggest fear as a pilot? What's your biggest fear? And the answers kind of surprised me because they started getting fairly repetitive, fairly fast.

There's a lot of similar fears. They fear wires getting caught up in power lines. I think that goes back to when they started flying, you know, with smaller airplanes, they fear decision making making the wrong call in an emergency or freezing up and not being able to make any call at all. They think about their families and they worry about, you know, turning their spouses into widows and widowers.

And like I said, the answers, they became fairly similar. There was a lot of the same stuff. Nothing really caught my eye until one day I had a pilot who looked me dead in the eye and said, my biggest fear is a commercial airliner crashing into a nuclear power plant. And I stopped and thought he was joking, honestly, so I started, I kind of like dismissed him and started saying, you know, all the reasons why I wasn't afraid of that.

You know, it's like we live in a post 9 11 world. They've, they've shown that these, these facilities are fortified and able to withstand, you know, an incident like that happening. This isn't, this isn't real they've shown us that this is this is fine And the whole time i'm talking he's just listening to me and nodding and when I finish he goes and that's exactly what they want you to think and it was one of those like hair on the back of your neck stands on edge moments where you're like oh, you just said that with a confidence that I'm not comfortable with.

And so that was the moment years ago that the seed was planted. And when I went back to write this book, which I wanted to be big, I wanted to be as big as I could possibly get. I knew I had to go bigger than falling, had to go bigger than drowning. How big could I get this? And I remembered that and so I started researching to see, you know, was there any validity to what he said?

Is, is there, is there anything there? And it did not take long for me to, to discover that he knew exactly what he was talking about. And I have to tell you, Zibby, the research for this book terrified me. I mean, to the point that I almost didn't write the book because I was not sure I wanted to live in the world that I knew I was going to have to create for the time that it would take me to write this book.

The research terrified me because the premise for this book is completely plausible. 

Zibby: As I was reading it, I was like, okay, I know this all seems scientific and real, but I can't like read it and go about my day to day life believing that this could happen. So I'm going to put this back in the like things I'm not going to worry about category because I can't handle it.

I'm going to go with it for the book, right? Because if you keep all these scary things like too close to the surface, you, you're like paralyzed. 

TJ: Sure. You know, it's a fascinating thing of being a human, right? Like, Horror movies are one of the most popular genre of films out there. Thrillers and mystery and true crime, we love it, can't get enough.

It's this weird balance of we love to be terrified, yet also don't want to be. I think that it has something to do as humans that we like that sort of dress rehearsal. Like, that's why I like the type of stories that I tell, which are all like, I was a flight attendant, so I'm safety and security focused.

As a flight attendant, I was trained to look at worst case scenarios, to look at something and go, what can go wrong? And what am I going to do about it? Because that's a way to be prepared in case something does happen. And I think that we like to read and watch those stories. sort of stories because it lets us get close to that fear and get comfortable with it and know ultimately that things are going to be okay.

If you, it's sound, the book sounds terrifying and it is, and it genuinely is but if you've read any of my books, you also know, like, I come from a place of hope and that there's always a way out and that, you know, I like writing survival stories and rescue missions and showing the best of us and how we meet a problem you and and fix it and I'm no spoilers for the book.

Um, I'm not saying, you know, everything gets wrapped up but that is the angle that which I come from it and I think that that's how I sort of combat that fear because like I said in this book I'm doing research and i'm reading, you know Government studies and i'm reading pieces by you know, the former chair of the nrc and they're laying out in no uncertain terms Yeah, there are there are situations that if they come to pass would be catastrophic on a level that we do not have a solution for.

And this is, you know, these are the officials that are saying this. Some of my research, like, it would be covered in highlighter and pen and then it would just stop and in the margins, I remember at one point I just wrote, Oh my god. Because it's just, it's, it's crazy. And these plants are in our backyards.

They're right, they're right there. I flew over one just yesterday. 

Zibby: I have to Google now where they are because you also make a point that they're just in ordinary communities and people just going about their business and maybe they think, you know, should we settle here? But usually they just, you know, it employs people in the village or the town or whatever and it's just like part of life and you just go about it with that suspension of disbelief in a way that like something bad could happen, happen at any moment. But, but you really teach the reader, and I found this so fascinating, all about like the canisters, and the pool, and the evaporation, like what should we do, and taking us through the scenarios, and making cases for both. And as the people working in the power plant debate how to handle each scenario with like the clock ticking, and the president on the phone, and all the things, they're like, we learn about, you know, the, the canisters and the, and like seeing the one guy.

Oh my gosh. I mean, we learned, I learned so much that I never even understood about how the plants and the radioactive waste, all of it was taken care of and how. Risky it is so risky. 

TJ: You and me both. I learned a lot too. And I think, you know, when I flew for 10 years and I'm separate of my stories, I'm always interested in just flying.

I'm, I'm, I'm a curious person like that. And I loved understanding how things work. And I got good at asking pilots so many questions about flying and about the aircraft, which is an incredible thing. Incredibly complex piece of machinery with all sorts of integrated systems that talk to each other that you can't learn how to fly a plane, you know, by reading an article on it or, you know, even being on a plane, you have to understand this.

So I would have all these questions with pilots and they'd go through all these complex, very scientific, very technical, very, you know, everything about how this works. And I'd listen and then I'd say, okay, so basically the this to the that, and then if you do this, it's like that, and they'd be like, yeah, that's that.

So I think I, through that, I got good at sort of looking at a really complex situation and going, okay, what is, what's the essence, like, but what is like the most important thing that if you can at least grasp that, then you'll be able to kind of fill in the rest of the blanks and I think that helped me with my research for this book because, boy, I didn't know much going into it either.

And there's, it's a, it's a huge, complex, uh, that's kind of incredible and fascinating and beautiful in a lot of ways. 

Zibby: And I don't mean to, I didn't mean to like overstress that this is about science and facts because really the book is about the people and it's about their relationships and their innermost fears.

And I think one of the biggest themes in the book is like, what is your allegiance to science? to society at large versus to protect your own family. Like, how do you, and how do you carry both of those things when you're trying to do something good, but it comes at a cost? Where is the line? And that is endlessly fascinating.

TJ: That is such a good, good, good way to put it. What is your allegiance to? I mean, and, and it's an ethical dilemma that really doesn't have a clean answer. You know, we're talking about an event that could mean literally catastrophe for generations to come for this country and for the world because it's all interconnected.

But at the same time, the people on the ground, the individual people, what about them? And if it's not about one individual, what is the whole it's a, it's an ethical dilemma of, you know, it's a, it's a trolley dilemma, which, you know, a trolley problem, what do, what do you do? And it was fun to dig into that.

And I, in the book. There's a, not to give too much away, but there's, you know, the overarching problem of what do we do? We're facing a nuclear meltdown that could literally end life as we know it. We're also at the same time, there's a parallel storyline of a rescue mission of one person. And I think I did that for the reader and also for myself to remind us why we're fighting this hard.

I think it's hard to grasp the totality of something as big as this could alter life as we know it for the planet. That's hard to grasp, to a certain extent. And so I think I kept toggling back and forth between those two storylines to remind us again, like, what are we doing this for? If we're not willing to work this hard and sacrifice this much for one life, then what is this?

Because the whole is nothing but the individual. 

Zibby: You had that great line when the firefighters are feeling very pulled and one of them says, like, I didn't become a firefighter to not save one person. Like, they couldn't in good conscious turn away. So yeah, I mean, there's that and like what's right in front of you versus what's conceptual, right?

There's like that primacy effect and like immediacy of it, but then also the families of the firefighters and the families of the people in the plant and you know, particularly one boy and what happens and you know, it's one of those things I think about a lot, and it came up, you know, even in the pandemic with all the people who are on the front lines, right, but they had their own families, like, but they had to go serve, and in the military, and like, how much sacrifice do you give, right?

And how much does your family even understand, especially young kids, when that is what you're doing? 

TJ: Yeah, that you're, you're completely and totally right. And that's, I actually hadn't thought about it in terms of the pandemic, but flight attendants, that's my background. You know, we're first responders.

We are first on the scene, you know, that's what we're on board for. We're not there for service. We're there for safety and security. And, and that is what we're for. So my mind is kind of with that, with this book. Which was a departure from the first two. It wasn't, I mean, it's not a spoiler to say that the plane crashes on the fifth page.

So it's like this, this book takes place not on the plane primarily, but in this community, in this town. And I turned the focus to firefighters, first responders on the ground. And that's so interesting to think of the pandemic, to think, you're right, there were, during that time, you know, I remember seeing, you know, pieces, Where, where doctors would be renting a house or something and would go to work and then come home and not see their own family just because it was like, we didn't know, we didn't know anything.

And they were willing to sacrifice, put themselves out there every single day in front of this and not see their family and not bring it home to them. Like every single day, it's, it's, it's, it's one thing to be a hero in a moment. It's another thing to make that what you do day in day out and every choice that you make.

Notice we're talking about doctors and nurses, right? We're talking about firefighters. We're not talking about Thor. We're not talking about Iron Man. You know, these are everyday people that do these heroic things and, and I'm, I always love looking at that angle because That's us. That's who we are as people.

And I saw every day on the plane in a million different little ways. And when I would sit on the plane and I'd look out at these ordinary people, these strangers that I was with that I knew nothing about, and I would think, you know, okay, if something goes sideways, what are we going to do? Who are these people going to become?

Who's the hero? Who's the coward? Who's the comic relief, you know? And I love looking at the, the people that would encounter an issue and say, what would they do? And this, this plane crash happens at a nuclear facility in a small rural town. You know, the, the type of location that doesn't get the same attention as a big market.

You know, it's not New York city. It's not Los Angeles. It's not Chicago. This is, you know, rural Minnesota. How much attention is a nuclear power plant built in the seventies getting in rural Minnesota? 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. So you mentioned the need to, to go bigger with this book. Did you feel pressure writing it after being so successful?

I mean, it's one thing to write, you know, as you did sort of in the galleys on airplanes and all of that, and then it becomes like a blockbuster, but then to have to do it again under your own shadow, what was that like? 

TJ: Yes, there's, there's absolutely pressure there. I think anybody, no matter how successful or, or big or small or anything, if you're putting art out into the world, I think there's always going to be that pressure of how is this going to be received?

What is this? What is, what is this going to look like? What is this going to feel? And yes, I have been fortunate enough to have some big success. Um, so yeah, I always feel like I have. Big shoes to fill that I've set down myself, but I have to say it was kind of nice. I didn't feel the pressure on this one that I felt on Drowning my second book.

I think the pressure of a follow up was so terrifying because it's like the question of like, Can I do this? Was it a fluke? Am I a one hit wonder? Was that just like, I got lucky. I don't actually have what it takes to, to do this. I'm not actually a storyteller. You know, it was just a one time thing that hit the right timing and the right moment.

And when I think when drowning, I was able to prove to myself, which is the most important person you got to prove to of like, you can do this. Keep going. It's okay. It's always going to be scary there. You're always going to feel pressure, but like you can do this. And so I think writing this one, I was able to let that pressure go, which was a weight lifted off of me that I'm so glad is, is, is gone.

So this one, yeah, there was pressure, but it was, it was different. It was more just, I don't want to disappoint. I want to be able to keep delivering. I know that I can, but I want to keep doing it. 

Zibby: That's awesome. Speaks well for all the other books to come. Are you, did you already write your next one? Where are you on that?

TJ: Working on that. I've got a few projects that I'm working on. You know, this book was an interesting departure, I kind of dipped my toe in the water of, you know, like I said, can I do this if it's not on a plane? Is this something, not only can I, I write stories like this if it's not set in the world of aviation and on a plane, but will the readers go with me?

Is there any interest in this? And, and the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive that, yeah, they'll, they'll go with me and they'll, they'll, you there along for the ride plane or not, which is, which is great because I've got a million stories that take place in the world of aviation on planes.

Cause you're not a flight attendant for 10 years and only have a couple of good ideas. Like I've got a lot of ideas in that world, but I've got a lot also that aren't in that world. So we'll, we'll, we'll see. We'll see. 

Zibby: What is your update on screen adaptations and all that. 

TJ: Yeah, so Falling and Drowning are both moving forward and that's very exciting.

Falling is with Universal Pictures. I'm doing the adaptation for that. I'm writing the script, which has been the best, um, learning experience imaginable and has completely changed me as a novelist has completely changed me as a novelist doing the work of taking this story that I wrote nearly 40 drafts to get to the point that it was finished product.

I knew this story backwards. I lived with these characters for years and I thought I'd figured out the best way to tell this story and then you go, okay, now, how do you take this 300 page book and turn it into a 100 page script? And how do you translate everything in this book that's inside, internal, and, and translate it into a medium that is entirely visual.

It has been the most amazing learning experience and it has forced me to become a relentless editor as I'm writing because like in a script, you have to trim all the fat away. Nothing's on the page unless it's the story. And it forces you to look at every scene, every scene, every plot point, everything I go, is this actually necessary?

Is this something that serves the story, or if I take this out, will the story still be the same? And it just forces you to get a laser focus into story, and it, it changed the way that I wrote this book, that I wrote Worst Case Scenario, because I just had a different angle because of that so falling falling is a great movement forward drowning is with warner brothers and we have academy award nominated director of Captain Phillips 1993 the second Bourne movie Paul Greengrass directing which is wild and adapting that one is uh, steve clovis of what his resume is insane, but his most well known credit is a little, little set of films, you know, the Harry Potter films.

So. 

Zibby: Yeah, just a little. 

TJ: Just a little thing. I'm not sure if you've heard of this, this series called Harry Potter. So yeah, knowing that, that this guy who took one of the most, you know, Iconic and well known and well loved literary universes and translated it into a cinematic universe that is as equally loved that are totally separate, yet he managed to maintain it.

The essence of what those books are in a way that satisfied all the readers like, that's an order so tall, I can't even imagine and he just knocked it out of the park. So to know that that is the guy who's handling my story is just, it's, it's very exciting. 

Zibby: That's amazing. 

Oh my gosh. I mean, so many fun things.

Like, aren't you just so excited? 

TJ: I am. There's a lot of fun stuff and it's like, you know, I don't talk about it every day, obviously. So when I have a conversation like this, it's like, Oh my God, look at that's happening. It's just like a fresh reminder and it's just, it's wild. I'm so, I'm just so grateful.

It's just insane. It's all just insane. 

Zibby: Well, it's so deserved. And I have to say, this was my favorite of your books. And I am, as you know, I mean, they're all good. They're just keep getting better. I mean, it's not to say they weren't really great, but like this, I don't know. This was, this is my favorite of them all.

TJ: It means a lot. I had to say a lot of people have said that and it kind of surprises me to tell you the truth, but this one, the emotional center in this one, the, the relationships in this one, I, I think they go a little deeper. Yeah, then the other two into that sort of very human parental child. Yeah, I think they go deeper in it.

That means a lot. Thank you. 

Zibby: I think you have a lot of like the aftermath of loss in the moment, but like, and even in backstories of so many characters and families and it's, it's like a, a side character in the whole thing. I know they're facing imminent death, but, but there is a lot of real loss in the way it affects.

It's families and people and emotions and all that that courses through it that feels very, very authentic. 

TJ: That's such an interesting way to put that too, that it's like a presence, like a side character. That's really interesting, but yeah, it is, you know, past, when you're looking at your future, I think you can't help but confront your past too.

And when this is with the interconnected community of a small place where everyone's got past and, you know, that comes forward and wrestling with that. Yeah. Yeah. This, this book, this was hard to write. I'm not going to lie. This book was really hard to write and emotionally, I think to dig into that and, and I think as a writer, sort of standing on the precipice of if this is it, if you're facing the end, what comes up and I think it, it, it was tough to write.

It was tough to write and, and I'm grateful that readers seem to be, um, connecting with it in, in those kind of ways too. 

Zibby: Are there pieces of your past that you mind for this sort of sadness, the way like an actor thinks about something sad before he starts to cry? 

TJ: I think so. I think that, I mean, like. I think as a writer, I don't know how to separate myself from what I write, you know, we always dig from the well of our own experience.

So yeah, there is, there's a lot of, there's a lot of me in this book, there's a lot of me in all my books, you know, and then the same way there's, it's none of me, it's the same thing. It's like, none of these characters are me and all of these characters are me. I think, you know, as a writer, again, I don't know how you separate.

the two. So yeah, this one, this one's intimate. I went through a lot of plain x boxes writing this one. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. No, no, it's in, in a good way. Like, look, this is what, this is why I write. This is why we read is to going back to talking about scary things. It's like, This is how we have dress rehearsals for fear, for grief, for loss, for regret, for hope, for, you know, triumph, for bravery.

Like this is how we have dress rehearsals in a fictitious way of emotions that in real life. We may not want to touch, we may not want to go there, it may not be healthy for us to have a dress rehearsal of our own mortality and our loved one's mortality every day. That's not probably a place we want to live in, but to be able to go into it for a few hours, for a few days, you know, as you, uh, Read a book or watch a movie.

That's a healthy. Um, I think it's good self care. It's like emotional health, self care of sort of putting those emotions on, but being able to take them off to, I don't know. I think you're right. What advice would you have for aspiring authors? Keep going. You, you know, the stories that you have to tell and that you want to tell and the only you can tell, tell those.

I, you know, it's fairly well known. My story is kind of out there that, you know, I, I was not handed this. easily or or quickly. It was a overnight success that took a couple decades to get there. And, you know, I faced a lot of rejection getting to this point, but I just knew I knew in my bones that my first book falling would connect with people if I could just find the right person to help me get it out there.

And so I just didn't stop until I found that right person. And I think that writing such a uphill, excruciating, you know, thing to do, vulnerable thing to do, scary thing to do, and trying to publish work is that to the nth degree. Gotta believe in it and you gotta want it. If you're doing this and you do believe in it and you want it out of there, you're just masochistic and you just feel like self punishment.

You know, it could be that too, but I have a feeling it's probably more that you believe in the story too and that you believe that this should be out there. So just keep going. All you need is one yes. And they're out there. 

Zibby: Love it. TJ, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on and thank you for the edge of my seat entertainment.

And I can't wait to do our event together at Zibby's Bookshop. 

TJ: I know! I know, I'm so excited. 

Zibby: August 26th? 

TJ: Yeah, August 26th, 6pm. 

Zibby: Yeah. It's 26. 6 p. m. So if anyone is listening, well, if you'll be in the LA area at that time, come hear us talk about even more stuff at Zibby's Bookshop in Santa Monica. Thank you.

TJ: Thank you. This is wonderful. Thank you. 

Grief activist Lisa Keefauver joins Zibby to discuss GRIEF IS A SNEAKY BITCH, a warm, irreverent, and powerful guide for those navigating grief and those supporting the bereaved. Lisa shares the harrowing journey of losing her husband—a massive, undiagnosed tumor caused a scary shift in his behavior and culminated in a series of catastrophic strokes that took his life. Lisa delves into the complexities of grief, and then she and Zibby explore the importance of rituals, shared stories, and the need to normalize grief as part of the human experience.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Lisa. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, an Uncensored Guide to Navigating Loss. Thank you. 

Lisa: I'm having a little surreal out of body moment being on this side of the microphone and being in conversation with you.

So thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it. 

Zibby: Oh, it's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. First of all, I feel like we should preface the episode with the same thing that you prefaced the book with, which is this sort of non gendered, you know, thing. Bitch announcement that you're not getting, you know, so maybe you should talk about that.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I recognize that it has a gendered name in our culture and as you mentioned in conversation with my publisher, I thought, oh, we'll put a note up front. This is really about the ways in which I'm calling out our culture around our false narratives about what grief really is and the way it can be sneaky and sort of reclaiming it and owning it.

And so that we can understand a little bit better how to navigate grief. So there's not a, this is not a gendered slur slam or slur. This is really a reclaiming of like, we're going to name what's, what grief is really like and, and go from there. 

Zibby: Yeah. Well, It's sad to say that your book comes from a very personal place, which you write about obviously in the book, and I'm so sorry for your loss and I'm very grateful for you going deep into it and telling us sort of the moment by moment of what the experience of losing your husband was like.

And I was hoping you could, you could share a little bit about that. You know, I always hate to do this to. People I talked to about grief where it's like a beautiful day out and whatever. And like, I'd like you to go to your deepest, darkest, most horrific moment of your entire life. Go there. So I'm sorry.

Lisa: Well, I appreciate the acknowledgement but also, first of all, there's never a day in someone's life. It's been almost 13 years since Eric died that I don't relish an opportunity to talk about Eric. So I welcome that. And I think most grievers would say the same. Yes. And I do want, I'll tell you a little bit about the book is definitely for grievers and educating grievers.

It is not a memoir, but I, I knew very clearly from the beginning that I needed to weave in a little bit of not just my professional training as a social worker, but my personal narrative too, to sort of like, yeah, My bona fides, if you were, as it were, so yeah, 40 years old, I was married to the love of my life.

We had a seven year old daughter and the year before he ended up dying in my arms, he began to become a completely different person and I won't go into the details, but he went from being the most loving, most involved, co parent, co household manager, carry a spider outdoors, You know, instead of killing it kind of guy to becoming an a geographer to becoming getting lost, going places, physically looking unlike anything he had ever looked like before, becoming frankly quite dangerous and scary.

And just our lives turn upside down from doctor to doctor to doctor. No answers being dismissed, being told he had a mental health issue only to discover, uh, after a year of, of surviving, like living in a household with a stranger, making safety plans. You know, just trying to figure out what was happening in our lives.

I got a call to come into the ER because they had finally, after a year, managed to do a scan and it turned out he had a grapefruit sized brain tumor that had shifted his brain stem. And I can still remember to this day, the ER doctor, his neurologist had come down and looked at us both and said, I literally don't understand how you're walking or talking.

It has shifted your brain stem in such a way that. That's like impossible and a few days at home passing our nine year and a wedding anniversary he had a 13 hour surgery the attempt the goal was he's probably not going to survive this but we're gonna have some time We're gonna reduce this tumor We're gonna figure out what's next kind of and after a 13 hour surgery and thank God they let me in to post op Seeing him went home at 3 in the morning to check on my daughter Friends family were there came back to the hospital three hours later.

No sleep, and he had slipped into a coma and another 14 hour surgery and all kinds of interventions for the next week and they discerned that he had a series of catastrophic strokes that were you know, he was meant he was never gonna wake up and so I found myself calling in everybody including bringing my daughter into the hospital to say goodbye to her dad at seven years old, I had them take out all the leads and you know, his face, everything was swollen obviously from brain surgery and try to make him look the least scary version of himself he could and then laid in bed with him for about nine hours until he died in my arms and then he took his last breath and I somehow took my first breath without him.

And I stood up and I went home and I told our seven year old daughter that her dad was dead. Still, like I said, it'll be 13 years this August and I've experienced other losses since and obviously been witness to so many other people's losses in my work and it still sometimes feels that way like I'm telling a story of somebody else's life, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's how I arrived. That's one of the ways in which I arrived here to be doing this work and so passionate about my work as a grief activist. Yeah. 

Zibby: I'm so sorry for everything you went through. You know, when you wrote about it in the book, you described sort of the moment of being in bed with him.

I feel like you said you were there for nine hours. 

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. I think they took his life, you know, they took him off life support around eight, nine in the evening and he died around six in the morning. So we, I just laid there and yeah, absorbed every freckle and relive the 12 years we had together and told the, sneaky thing, so many sneaky things about grief and loss is Eric was our memory keeper.

He had the memory of a vault and I have the memory of a sieve. And so I really spent that time trying to record everything about his physical experience about what he's, I mean, he didn't smoke great, we're in the hospital, but like what he felt like telling the stories to just try to like lock it in my brain.

Cause I knew I wouldn't like, he was, he's always the person I went to to be like, where did we travel and what was that restaurant? And what movie did we watch? And so that was that experience. I tried to write a little detail about that. Yeah. 

Zibby: Oh, so terrible. I'm so sorry. I also find it a crime that nobody diagnosed it earlier when he was clearly symptomatic.

I just, the healthcare system is so broken for that to have happened. 

Lisa: I just finished treatment for breast cancer, thankfully. And I'm so grateful to see that I'm clear and I was misdiagnosed for a year. I went from doctor, doctor with a lump, had mammograms, had exams, was told it was nothing. 

Zibby: How is this possible?

Lisa: It was triple, triple positive breast cancer. I was like, did I do something in a past life? Like what is happening here? 

Zibby: Oh my God. 

Lisa: I'm okay. And I'm so grateful to say at this moment, I'm cancer free. And it's, I mean, there's, I've just have so much gratitude for this moment, but that everybody's loss is profound and complex in their own way.

I do think, and I was just saying this to somebody else. The ambiguous loss that I experienced in that year when Eric was physically present, but he wasn't him, but we didn't know why. That took me years to really come to process, like I was processing as death loss as well as can be expected in a grief illiterate world and, and all the things that I was having to do.

But I think it really took me a couple of years into my grief when I really had to like own and name and process the ambiguous loss that it means. And, and for folks listening, if you have somebody in your life with dementia or Alzheimer's or addiction where someone is physically present, but not themselves, that's such a profound loss that we don't name and then yeah, so. 

Zibby: Could he tell that he was changing or not? 

Lisa: No, and that was what made things really sticky I would say something to you and you would get really aggravated and just talk about like this is really who I am and you know, he would sort of right when in that small window of time. So July 29th was when we were in the ER and August 16th was when he died in my arms So I'm literally talking two and a half weeks. So in the four days or five, like in the week, basically, we ended up after they discharged him to come home for a couple of days before he went in for that first surgery, they gave him some medications that helped reduce the swelling and imprint on his brain.

And in that little window, he was, you know, we recognize what had been going on. We made amends with each other. We talked about what, thank God we'd had some advanced care directive conversations so that I wasn't making a decision that I didn't know. So there was that little window where he was well enough and medicated enough where I think he could understand.

I don't think he understood fully the impact, but he got. Yeah. So I mean, there's some relief for me a little that he could come to grips with why things had become the way they had. It had just become a very scary, you know, I mean, I was making like safety plans, you know, it was just like a it's just a surreal 360.

I don't know what the description is there, but he did. No, I think in the end and we made, we had a little pocket of window to tell each other we love each other and to make amends and to begin to grapple with why our lives had been the way they had been. So, yeah. 

Zibby: My goodness. Well, in the book, you do a really painful, great emotional job of describing grief and the Passage that resonated with me kind of the most is this confusion after in the immediate aftermath of a loss.

We're like, how is the world still going on? Like, how is, I don't think I dug it.

Lisa: I think it's the world still spinning. 

Zibby: Yeah. And like, how, how is the key still opening the door? And how is the world still spinning? Someone worried about, you know, a line or what it's just like all the things that people talk about and do in life and you're just like, but the world to me, my, the universe must have changed because my universe changed so much and yet it doesn't.

So tell me about, and I also feel like when people are grieving and when they are feeling like that, there's nothing that will change or make that better. Like you can't anticipate how crazy it will feel right and you can't when you're in it. Right, reassure someone that it will pass, because it feels like it will never pass.

It's just sort of awareness and making sure that you know also that other people are going through those feelings at the beginning as well. 

Lisa: Yeah. I think normalizing it, which is what I try to do throughout the book, particularly when I explore the chapter around what happens to our grieving brain, which is part of why we feel crazy, but also just, you know, this is a shock.

Our bodies go into shock and we basically are in a chronic stressor state. And so, of course, everything feels crazy and overwhelming and our, you know, I offer this manuscript. Our lives are built by the stories we tell of our experiences and a death loss or some other catastrophic loss is akin to the manuscript of our lives being torn to shreds and then handed back to us with no instructions on how to live our lives.

So, of course, we feel lost and disoriented. There's physiological, neurological effects going on our brain. And to your point, you know, yes, to an early griever, you can't necessarily convince them. But I didn't have anyone in my life and remember, I was a clinical social worker. No one around me knew anything about grief.

Like we didn't talk about it. We didn't understand it. And so while I may not, the book may not be able to convince a griever that it will end or that it's normal they're happening. I try to do in, in the book, walking through different examples of why it's happening, why it's temporary, the things that you can do to help sort of mitigate.

Against the brain fog and the grief brain and all of those things. But yeah, the world is still spinning and people are still complaining about traffic and their husbands. And, you know, I mean, literally like planes are flying overhead. I was like, how are planes flying overhead? You know, and how does the door, yes, as you said, how does the key unlock the door that Eric's never going to walk through again?

I've never met a griever in my entire career who hasn't had that experience of disorientation and the world being sort of ripped out from underneath them and good news, I've never met a griever over time who hasn't found their bearings again and who hasn't found some stability underneath them and found that the world does not feel like such a spinning topsy turvy place and it just takes time.

Zibby: It's almost a reluctant stability. Like you don't want the new world. You don't want the new normal. 

Lisa: Exactly. Exactly. That's a weird thing. It's, you know, this happens in fits and starts for people in different ways. It's like when you have that first moment of laughter, which I remember having, or that first moment of normal or stability, it's like a good news, bad news scenario.

It's like, thank God, because how can you sustain, withstand a life that feels so upside down, and guilt or shame, or I don't want to be happy with a life without my person. You know, if we're talking about a death loss, it's that both and of those, those moments. And we have that so much in life and especially in grief.

I think I refer in the book to smiling, right? Like when you're smiling because something amazing happens, but crying because your person isn't here to tell them about it. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Lisa: That feels to me the ultimate reminder of the, yeah, of the ways in which when the world stops spinning, we are grateful and yet sorrowful all at the same time that it's not spinning in that way anymore.

Zibby: Yeah. Yes. What do you tell patients or? You call them patients, right? 

Lisa: Clients, clients. 

Zibby: Clients, clients. 

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. 

Zibby: I know that didn't sound right. 

Lisa: No, that's okay. 

Zibby: What do you tell clients about sort of place based grief or like places that trigger your grief or that some, like a, like if you were to go into that same hospital again or a car ride or just something like we all have those moments, like how do you sort of clear the air barring, you know, crystals or smellings, you know what 

I mean?

Like what do you mean? How can you do it? 

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you have rituals that you believe in, spiritual rituals or religious rituals, I really am a big believer in rituals, just as a side note, and really wish that I had grown up in a family that had more. I grew up in a non religious, non spiritual family that I had more of those to rely on because I think they are meaningful in the way that they ground us.

When the world feels so spinny, but when we're thinking about, and this will depend on how far we are away from the loss. But when we're talking about what you're calling of triggers, like place based triggers, it's the car or the hospital. Sometimes by the way, the triggers are smells, songs, sounds, movies that the, I mean, the, the thing is there.

Part of white grief is a sneaky bitch is, you know, they can pop up anywhere. You know, to the degree that we know we're going to having to be going to a family reunion at the house or we're, you know, to, to the degree we know you might be encountering a trigger, I would say sort of make a plan, sort of remind yourself that you might be triggered.

What is your escape plan? Can you same with the holidays? Can you find a buddy to call, you know, like what kind of space can you allow yourself? Can you notify somebody? I might just need to. You know, peace out and that's what's going to happen. So gifting yourself the permission or finding a friend who's said, like, you're going to have to just hold me cause I'm probably going to cry.

Right. And just, and also making space for that and not trying to put on a happy face for the things that pop up when you're in a coffee shop and a song comes on that was never played on the radio, but as your song and somehow is playing, which has happened to me so many times over these last 13 years.

You give yourself grace and space. I think that most, the best thing I can say to somebody, so much of our harm and grief or what we is all the shooting we do all over ourselves, 

Zibby: you 

Lisa: know, the ways we should and shouldn't ourselves. So when those triggers come up and you're in me, if you're driving, pull over, be safe, right?

If you're in a coffee shop and you don't want to cry in front of people, although I say cry in front of people, if that's what comes up for you, go to the bathroom, excuse yourself, do your best to name it this is a trigger. This is what's happening. It's gonna pass because no feeling in the history of the world has ever lasted.

Not the ones we want, not joy and delight and amazement. Gosh, darn it. I wish we could hold on and not sorrow or despair or shame. And so the more we grip or resist, the longer it's going to stay. So when those triggers come and you maybe can't avoid it because you can't, not go to those places or hear that music or see that movie.

Do your best to release that resistance and allow it to pass through because it will. And the more we do that, that's how we metabolize, metabolize our grief. The more we resist or shove it down, the more it lingers and hangs around in its sort of raw and unprocessed form. And the more it sort of harms us over time.

I also just want to name, like, sometimes you're at work. Like I got called back to work two weeks after my husband died. You know, which, and that was like luxurious for a lot of people to have less time. 

So, you know, sometimes you can't, sometimes you can't be with the trigger. You gotta, you're in a meeting or, you know, you don't have that luxury.

So just make sure that if you have to hold it together and you, you know, pinch your cheeks or do whatever you have to do to get back in the room, that later on you make space. Later on in the day, later on the next week, let that out. Discharge that experience. You know, so I just want to name, like we can't all just be like, you know, you might be interviewing somebody on a podcast or you might be doing something official where you can't be with it, but just make sure you process that trigger at some point.

Zibby: Has your own podcast, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, helped you with the processing? And I know you've had on such amazing guests and, you know, what have you sort of taken away from their experiences? 

Lisa: I really have. I know you get this because you do this. Like every time I have a guest on, I learn one or two or 12 things just sort of at the intellectual level, but also about my own grief about how I show up for other people's.

I mean, I mean, I don't have as many episodes as you, but 90 something guests, it's hard to pick them all out. I mean, one that's been standing out to me recently, this from last season was my conversation with Colin Campbell. Who you've probably met who wrote Finding the Words in part because his reliance on ritual was so profoundly important to his own and his wife's own experience of grief.

It really, again, almost 12, 13 years after my Eric's death got me thinking differently about how I might incorporate ritual in my own grief, especially because I've been going through new ways of grief through my own cancer diagnosis and everything that has come as a result of that. So I think that is a guess, but everybody is wisdom, their shared stories, their vulnerability, the connection that we gain when we are vulnerable with one another. It's all been, I don't know, just a weird metaphor popping in my mind, like fertile soil for my own grief and the metabolizing of my own grief, but also fertile soil for how I show up for other people.

Yeah. 

Zibby: Yeah. Amazing. So how often do you do it? Weekly? 

Lisa: Yeah. This last season I did it weekly and I actually recorded my podcast all the way through my cancer treatment. So I was showing up on video bald with sores on my head. There was a week I had no eyebrows and no eyelashes and it was a real circus.

But the reason I did it is I, these conversations are so important. Grief and we never know what gifts and connections and sense of belonging we're going to have when we're in conversation in general, but particularly around the hard things that we tend not to talk about and everything about who I was, which happens in all kinds of losses.

We lose not just our person if it's a death loss, but we lose our own identity. 

Zibby: Mm hmm. 

Lisa: And who we are in the world and with cancer and breast cancer in particular I mean losing a breast and the hair and all the things and chemo brain is real let me tell you the podcast and those intimate conversations were about the only thing that made me feel like me 

Zibby: Mm hmm 

Lisa: And I could anchor back to that where we started with the spinning world, like I could anchor myself in the world in a way because it was like, Oh, this is what I'm meant to be doing. This is where I get to show up as the Lisa I've always known, even if all these, you know, external things don't look at all like the Lisa that I knew. And that's been I mean, the show is just one of the biggest gifts in my life. 

Yeah, for sure. 

Zibby: Amazing. 

Lisa: Yeah, I love it. 

Zibby: I love it. Well, good for you for not stopping.

As you were talking, I was like, if I was going through cancer treatment, would I stop podcasting? Probably not. Do you know like, right. 

Lisa: I mean it's. 

Zibby: It's, you have to keep your job, like you have to do your, you know, to the extent that you can keep anything the same when something terrible is going on, you know?

That's always helpful. 

Lisa: And I want to give permission because I do think, and I talk about this a lot in the book, sort of our cultural baggage that we take into our grief productivity and capitalism and all the crap that makes grief even harder and causes us to suffer unnecessary. So I don't want to You know, sort of be braggy about, like, I kept working and doing the podcast.

Zibby: No, no, no. 

Lisa: I didn't take advantage. And I didn't, like, there are plenty of other things I sat down, but I really had to take, like, and this is a, I talk about this a lot in the book too, and this is an invitation to anybody listening who's grieving, is like, it's an invitation periodically, sometimes hourly, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, when you're in the depths of despair, of grief, to, like, evaluate what resources me and what drains me and the answer to those questions are going to vary sometimes hour by hour or minute by minute, especially when you're in the early phase of grief and for me. And so, you know, early on in my treatment course, I mean, I went and gave a TED talk between diagnosis and, and starting the surgery.

But as I was, you know, going through, I just kept booking guests, but I, I had to check in, you know, weekly with myself, like, can I really do this? I turned, you know, I stopped teaching my university course the following semester. There were other things I sat down, but I really had, we all, this is the invitation I talk about throughout the book, and I really tried to offer invitational languages when we're laid low by something like loss, a profound loss.

I'm not going to use the word gift, but it is an opportunity or a reminder to really realign with our values, to check in with our needs, to figure out where we resource ourselves and what are the resources, and to give ourselves the permission that that can change over time, and that isn't a sign of failure or weakness.

And actually, the more we resource ourselves in the way we need to, which sometimes means doing the work and sometimes it means not doing the work, the more capacity and agency we have and the more bandwidth that we have to do the hard work of metabolizing loss. And, yeah, so for me, it was the right answer this time around, you know, and that particular piece of my work.

But there was plenty, believe me, that I sat down. 

Zibby: Yeah. No, and I, I didn't mean to say, like, full productivity ahead. I meant because, like you, I get so much joy and I get so much out of the conversations. It's purely selfish. You know, I would hate to keep it up. 

Lisa: Exactly. I was like, no, I need to be. Cancer journey, much like grief, is a very inherently isolating experience.

And so being in conversation on the podcast was like one of the ways I felt not just tethered to my own identity, but tethered to the world. 

Zibby: Yep. 

Lisa: Because my whole life was just doctor's appointments and chemo chairs and radiation appointments, you know? Other than that.

Zibby: I feel like you have joined. There is like this grief expert community, right?

You're all, I don't think people understand how close different grief counselors are and that there is this whole group of you who is, lifting each other up. And yes, many of you have books and many of you have podcasts, but you are all in service to everybody else. You're like the grief angels or something.

Lisa: Oh, I appreciate that. I feel so grateful to have that community because I didn't have that in the early years of my loss. I didn't know another widow for a long time, you know, my age, but yeah, we lift each other up and of course support our work. But you know, Megan, of course, and Claire Bidwell Smith and all those folks, I think we just also show up for each other in a way, a knowing way.

Like I see you, I got you. Whether it's like an anniversary or whatever is happening, it's, I'm, I'm beyond grateful for my community of grievers and grief experts and to be a part of that is kind of a pinch me moment to be honest. 

Zibby: Yeah, it's good to switch gears to close here because you have written an actual book in addition to all of I have written an actual book.

So for the right on the writing side of things, what advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Lisa: Well, this is my first book, it won't be my last, and I actually had to finish it between diagnosis and turning it into my, my publisher, which was a real doozy woozy situation. I think my experience was a couple of things.

I gave myself time, I set time. I mean, I made it a ritual. That's where I brought ritual into my life. 

I created ritual, turned off the noise, had a couple, you know, I had a certain ritual that I had when I was really in the depths of writing that was sort of about the writing process for me that was really helpful.

The other thing is I had been collecting this data for years. You know, I had had Word documents and social media graphics that I had just been trying out all of this over time. So it wasn't like I sat down to write from scratch, and none of us really do. We just sometimes don't have physical representations.

So I gave myself permission to sort of cull all that I had put out in the world or put down in my own journals and the, and things that I had learned. And then the third for me. And this might not apply to all kinds of books, but I even when I write my next books, I think it will show up in the way was every time I caught myself trying to speak in a voice that wasn't mine, speak in a like quote unquote professional voice, although I very much bring my professional lens or speak in a researcher voice or a expert voice instead of My voice, which is my authentic voice.

I'm showing up as your wise best friend is sort of the mantra I kept thinking about in and that was really important to me I just I would call myself because I would get stuck when I was trying to be somebody else Yeah, when I was trying to be a different kind of writer Yep. And I would just be like, that's not the book that I'm writing.

That's I just can't write that book. That's for somebody else to write. So coming back over and over again to like, is this something Lisa would say? Is this a Lisa voice? And that took some courage because there was definitely some imposter syndrome as every author has ever had in the history of writing probably.

But it was a really meaningful and when I narrated my book because it's an audio book as well and could read it. And really read it out loud for the first time after reading a million iterations of the book over time. I felt so proud and reminded that I really was able to bring my, in that case, literal, but you know, metaphorical voice.

And for me, that was most important because really this book in particular, I wanted, if you don't have somebody in your life, who's grief literate, who knows how to support you, I wanted you to feel like you have me and you can come back to these pages over and over again and feel like somebody gets you wherever you're at and that as a writer was, yeah, just such a gift and such a profound thing to do. Yeah. 

Zibby: I love that. That's so nice. So comforting. And I just know that there's somebody out there who just took a deep breath knowing that you were out there for them. I mean, it's, it's really a gift. Anyway, Lisa, thank you so much.

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I know we didn't even get to a lot of your subsequent losses and all the things that have happened since, but you know, 

Lisa: You just got to have to read the book or maybe we'll have another conversation another day. 

Zibby: Well, thank you so much for being just of service to so many other people.

Lisa: Oh, thank you for having me and for this conversation. It was wonderful. 

Zibby: All right. Have a great week. Okay. Bye bye.