Adam Mansbach & Camila Alves McConaughey, JUST TRY ONE BITE
Zibby is joined by the duo behind the new picture book Just Try One Bite, Adam Mansbach and Camila Alves McConaughey, to talk about their collaboration as well as their personal projects. Adam shares what it was like to write his prose poem, I Had a Brother Once, about his late brother, why it took him so long to write, and what it has been like since he completed it. Camila also discusses how and why she started Women of Today, an online community that connects women with the intention of helping everyone find exactly the support they need. The three also talk about their respective relationships with sugar and food overall, and how that inspired the messaging of this picture book.
Transcript:
Zibby Owens: Welcome. We have two amazing guests here today on “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.” We have Adam Mansbach. Am I pronouncing that right? Mansbach?
Adam Mansbach: Mansbach (mans-back).
Zibby: Mansback, okay.
Camila Alves McConaughey: Adam, you have no idea how many times they’ve tried to get me to pronounce your last name properly. I’m just like, you don’t want to hear. I was like, you don’t want to hear it.
Zibby: Thanks for making me feel better. Also, Camila McConaughey. Did I pronounce that one right? Yes?
Camila: You got that one right.
Adam: Whereas I can’t spell your last name no matter how many times I try, so we’re even, really.
Camila: Perfect.
Zibby: They are the coauthors of Just Try One Bite, the new children’s book, but they are so much more than that. This is their collaboration. Welcome. Excited to talk about your children’s book and your careers and everything. How did you two partner up on this book?
Camila: Adam, you want to take it?
Adam: Sure. We’re lucky enough to share management. We both are at 3 Arts Entertainment. Word came to me that Camila was looking to do a children’s book and looking for a collaborator. They thought to bring me in. We all got on the phone and talked about it, quickly realized we each had three children and a lot of other things in common and a similar outlook on some of these issues around parenting around eating. We started brainstorming about what this book might be. Then we just took it from there.
Zibby: That’s amazing. I have four kids, too, by the way. I’m just throwing my hat in the ring of kid overwhelm.
Adam: Oh, wow. You’re overqualified.
Camila: I don’t know how you went for the fourth because I haven’t been brave enough for it. It does seem like you neither, Adam.
Adam: Listen, I don’t even know how I ended up with this many. I’m real foggy on some of the details.
Camila: I had this thing in my head of what I wanted to do, the message. You don’t want it to be something preachy and things like that. My first language is Portuguese. I write long. I’m like, there is no way I can come up with a short version of what’s in my head. Honestly, Adam, we got on the call, we talked, as he said, and boom. The man just put it into words like that. When I saw it, I was like, oh, my gosh, that’s exactly what we talked about and what we
Zibby: It’s so crazy, Adam, because your other books were such failures. This seems so unlikely that you would do a good job with this book.
Adam: Yeah, I just try to keep plugging away. No amount of failure will stop me from continuing to write a bunch of rhymes.
Zibby: I did really like the rhyming thing. Not all children’s books, obviously, rhyme. This was great. My kids do not eat healthy at all no matter what I give them. Turning the whole concept on its head to make the parents the ones who don’t eat healthy is brilliant. I loved it.
Adam: That was fun. When we figured out that approach, it really crystalized for me. Then, it’s funny, when I saw the illustrations that Mike Boldt did, it really brought a whole other dimension. I’ve never been in this position before. I’ve always had illustrators on board early on. It’s a very different process to see the words go out and the art to come back in. Now when I think of the rhymes, when I think of the family in the book, I think of the characters. I think of his illustrations. He did such a good job that they’re now inextricable to me from the text, which is kind of the highest praise I can give an illustrator.
Camila: It really is amazing, the work he did. I was showing somebody last the night, the book, actually. They’re like, he just really made it as if you were at the dinner table with this family. I was like, you’re so right. He made it very cozy. You’re there with them.
Zibby: I particularly liked the peas in the cuffs of the pants. That was a nice touch. Hadn’t thought about that. If only I wore pants with cuffs.
Adam: Classic move.
Zibby: Oh, my gosh, it’s really awesome. There’s this book by called Sorry Grown-Ups, You Can’t Go to School! It’s the same thing, this reverse psychology. You two should package the book up or something. This is how you deal with school. This is how you deal with food, all these hapless grown-ups who just can’t get with the program. Not that you need a partner. By the way, I interviewed Ricardo Cortés, your illustrator for the other books.
Adam: Oh, yeah?
Zibby: Yeah, a year or two ago. That was fun.
Adam: Nice.
Zibby: This children’s book is an amazing collaboration, but the two of you individually have done such amazing things. Not to change the whole tone of this conversation, but Adam, I read I Had a Brother Once. It was so powerful and amazing and beautiful. I’m really sorry for your loss and just so impressed and moved and emotional from reading your book. I have a line I was hoping I could read if you didn’t mind. If you do, then I don’t have to read from it.
Adam: Sure.
Zibby: Camila, have you read that book of his? It’s a prose poem.
Camila: I have not.
Zibby: Oh, my gosh, you have to read it. This is at the end of one of the sections. You said, “I’m throwing clichés at the wall. They say a velvet calm descends when people have decided, gather their supplies, chosen a place, an hour. Their moods lighten, and their loved ones think they’ve turned a corner, which they have, a different corner, but in my head, that’s where he always is, sitting in his car with me screaming ‘Don’t do it’ from the backseat like some spirit cursed to be unheard. And my mother’s mother’s father’s parents, the famous rabbis’ kids, the minyan-makers of Burlington, Vermont, they squat atop the glass floor of the distant beyond shaking their great woolly heads and asking, why of all things did it have to be gas?” It’s amazing. I know that in the book you wrote about how hard it was to even write about it, the self-referential writing of it. You could see how you couldn’t even write. You were like, here it is. I don’t want to start it. Here I go. What was that like for you, writing this book?
Adam: It was a writing process really unlike any I’ve ever experienced before. It took me eight years to write a single word about my brother. Then when I did, I write that whole book in three weeks or something in the room I’m sitting in right now in this very intuitive and intense and emotional process where I really had no idea where I was going. One of the reasons it took me that long to write about him is that I couldn’t get a handle on what form that book ought to take. I think first as a novelist. It was like, is this a novel? Is this a screenplay? Is this an essay? What form could this possibly take? The first book I ever wrote was a book of poetry. Aside from the rhyming kids’ stuff and the Go the Fuck to Sleep stuff, I don’t generally think to write in those forms. Very much by coincidence, I’d been commissioned to write a piece for an SFJAZZ performance. I was asked to do a thing with a band a couple of weeks before this. It happened to be, also, the week that my brother would’ve turned forty.
All of these things came together. I came back from this week with a bunch of poets who I really respect and some of my closest friends and people I hadn’t seen in a long time. I had been bathing in the power of poetry for a minute. I came back. It kind of unlocked the subject for me. It allowed me to write in a way that no other form had. I think because you can get away with so little scaffolding in poetry, you can make ideas interlock simply by proximity. You can move from idea to idea with just a certain kind of rapidity. You can also push off from the shore very fast. I sat down and wrote for a day and had twenty pages. Psychologically, that makes you feel like, okay, I’m on my way here. This is becoming something quickly. It was a very weird writing process. My family was like, what is happening? I would stagger out of the room and not really be present because I was just so absorbed in the work. So much of what I wrote was stuff that I had been thinking about for those eight years, but a lot of other stuff was stuff I was actually figuring out in the writing process. There were connections I was making, thoughts I was having, ideas I was weaving together in the process of doing the work that were revelatory to me. I was sort of flabbergasted, just staggered by everything that was happening. It was very intense.
Zibby: Oh, my gosh. The end result, it’s heartbreaking but absolutely beautiful. I’ve lost a loved one to suicide. Not in my family. I know that pain. Not yours. I know you’re not supposed to do that in grief. I’m sure we’ve all had losses at this point in our lives. I feel like when I was younger, I’m like, oh, I’ve had loss when I was in my twenties. Now everyone’s had loss. I’m in my mid-forties. I’m very sorry.
Camila: What a blessing to be able to express that in such a beautiful and inspiring way, Adam.
Adam: Thank you. I will say that my life and my work-life balance feels much better to me having written that book. In all of that time leading up it, between my brother’s death and actually writing the thing, everything else I was doing, even if I was into it — I was into all of it. I was doing work that I felt good about, but I also felt — in the back of my brain, there was this part of me that felt like everything I was doing was an avoidance of writing about him, writing that book. Everything else was, comparatively, some light, easy, trivial shit if I didn’t actually do this. Having done it makes things feel different for me in a way that I’m grateful for.
Camila: That’s beautiful.
Zibby: Really amazing. Actually, speaking of brothers, my brother produced Barry, by the way, the movie you wrote.
Adam: What?
Zibby: Yeah, Teddy Schwarzman.
Adam: That’s your brother?
Zibby: Yeah.
Adam: Oh, my goodness, wow. I love Teddy.
Zibby: Crazy, right? I didn’t even know that. I was reading your bio before this. Last week, I just accidentally interviewed somebody who wrote Mudbound. I didn’t even know she was the screenwriter for Mudbound. I called Teddy. I was like, “Teddy, I’m accidentally –” Now today, I was like, “Teddy, do you know Adam? I’m about to interview him.” He was like, “Yes, of course.”
Adam: That’s so funny. Wow. Give him a hug for me.
Zibby: I think he thinks I’m trying to creep on all the screenwriters for his movies.
Adam: That’s so funny.
Zibby: That’s my brother. I’m older.
Adam: Shout-out to Teddy. I love those guys. The whole Black Bear crew is great.
Zibby: You’re the most versatile — every kind of writing. There’s no kind of writing you don’t do. It’s pretty awesome.
Adam: I try to mix up it. Try to keep myself guessing.
Zibby: That’s amazing. Camila, Women of Today — I don’t know, Adam, how familiar you are with this not as a woman, but whatever. It doesn’t matter.
Adam: I’m familiar. I’m a fan. I’m a big fan.
Zibby: You’re a fan. Good. It’s the most amazing community. Her Instagram, I was just telling her, is so hilarious, bringing in her mother-in-law and really sharing so openly and honestly, which I love, particularly one in which she wasn’t feeling well back in January. You said, that’s why I’m using this beauty filter. I was like, how nice that she said that. I assumed there was no filter on that. I never would have known. It’s very refreshing to have that total authenticity. How did you even start this whole thing?
Camila: Women of Today really came from a passion of learning from each other and building a community where you have bigger conversations. It started in 2005. I’m going to get myself into trouble here with the years. The reality is when I started these conversations, we weren’t having the conversations that we’re having today. I lived in so many different countries. Even on the south of the United States when I was living in different locations, I would realize that in a matter of days, I would have a community that could jump in, help me find things. In a matter of a week, I’m like, I know where the schools are or what doctors to go to, the kids’ activities, this, this. If I’m talking to somebody, they go, well, I don’t know this, but maybe my cousin does or somebody I know does. I was always connecting and learning from other people. Then I’ll come home or different places, and it would be very close, very tight. You just had your handful of people that you would call to ask questions. I was like, we need to have an open conversation, especially between women. We have men, too, in the community. It is majority women, but we have men as well. I was like, we just need to have open conversations about things and learn from each other.
Really, the community started with the basis of, how can we do better for ourselves, do better for our family, do better for our community, and outside of that? That’s what the whole website is about. When I first started, so many people that I worked with was like, no, it has to be your name. I said, no, this is not about me telling people what to do or how I do things. This is me going, hey, I’ve learned this. This worked for me. I’m sharing it with you. What have you learned that you can share back with us? I can learn something from you. We can learn something from each other. What has worked for me might not work for you, but it might work for somebody else and vice versa. All the content that you see on the website and you see on the Instagram, it really is what the community is asking us to represent. Trust me, I did not start with a bunch of food. That was not my thing. As the community started, it got food-heavy because there really was a need that they wanted to do better for themselves in food. They were struggling quite a lot with that. There it is. We got anything from food to beauty to hacks to work to science. We got a little bit of everything. We’ve been able to be very present during the pandemic with everybody at home. The community really got to shine and do a lot of social work as well. It’s been quite a journey. I take a lot of joy out of it.
Zibby: Wow, I would’ve assumed that you were this amazing, passionate cook.
Camila: I would say I’m a passionate cook, the joke being that, if I’m in a good mood, the food is great. If I’m a little bit off, it doesn’t matter if I cook that recipe a thousand times, it’s just not that good.
Zibby: My husband is the cook in our family. After the pandemic, he’s like, “I never want to do this again. I can’t do this.” The kids wouldn’t eat anything he made. He was just standing there dejected, so sad. The children’s book in particular, this whole thing is very welcome. Although, I was a little disappointed by all the reminders not to eat sugar because that seems to be an impossibility for me. I don’t know how sugar-heavy you are in your life. Cutting it out, I keep trying, and it just fails.
Camila: I have a question for you. When you were a child, in your household, was the conversation about sugar present or not?
Zibby: No. Well, it was about sweets.
Camila: There we go. This is so funny to me. I’ve been talking about this book. I say, hey, Adam and I are not here to tell you what to do as parents. We’re not telling you to follow a certain direction or another. We would like to tell you that the conversation about the relationship with food and how it affects your body and what’s good and what’s not, that should start early on. The earlier you start that, mostly likely, you’re setting your kids up to a long route of better-for-you habits. It’s going to be easier. I always joke — I think it’s a real thing, as you said. For me, growing up, look, I come from a family of farmers, so the relationship — my dad is farming until today. We have a farm together. The relationship from seed to table, it’s very clear. It’s like, boom. We never talked about sugar. I could have as much sugar as I wanted. What do I struggle with until today at my age? Sugar. Then I see my husband. His parents had the conversation and monitored. Let them have it, but not as much. They understood. He can now sit at a table, have a little bit of dessert, and he’s like, I’m fine. I’m satisfied. I’m like, how do you do that? I still struggle with it.
Zibby: What about you, Adam? Sugar? Not an issue?
Adam: Sugar is one of the things that — with my kids, I’ve been very deliberate about keeping them away from refined sugar until they’re maybe six or seven because what I’ve seen it do is just kind of burn up people’s palates. If you give young kids sugar — it’s such a strong flavor. It’s so pleasurable. I was just reading this Michael Pollan book where he’s talking about the evolutionary reasons that we are so attracted to sugar and the whole history of it and how before we had easy access to refined sugar, it was all about fruit, this whole fascinating history. It was survival based. A food that was high in sugar was telling you it wanted to be eaten so that you could help to spread its genetics and also telling you that it wasn’t going to poison you. We really developed this evolutionary connection to sugar. The sugar in an apple is very different than the sugar in a Twinkie or whatever. What I’ve done with my kids pretty successfully is really limit their refined sugar at a young age so that by the time it opens up a little — my thirteen-year-old, even my five-year-old, they’ll try something now, and they’re like, eh, it’s too sweet. If all they get is that note of sweetness, it’s not that interesting to them, which keeps their palate a little wider. Camila, I don’t know if I told you this, but my cousin was married to a Brazilian woman. My brother was also married to a Brazilian woman, so I’ve had all these conversations about — first of all, both of them could cook. I learned some dishes and stuff, so I got a few Brazilian dishes in my entourage. The funniest thing to me was always, we’d be talking about some fruit — my cousin’s wife, Simone, would be describing some amazing-sounding Brazilian fruit that I’d never heard of and googling a picture. I’m like, oh, my god, that looks incredible. She’d be talking about a mango or a papaya. I’d be like, “What do you do with papaya in Brazil?” She’s like, “We put honey on it. We put sugar on it.” I’d be like, “What?”
Camila: We crystalize it with sugar, yes.
Adam: I’d be like, “So you’re taking the sweetest possible fruit and then dipping it in sugar? Okay, that explains some things.” You’re coming from a culture where’s that what you do with fruit.
Camila: It is very true. You guys know this, sugar acts like a drug in the brain. You get addicted. It’s proven. We did a whole thing on Women of Today. Maybe you want to check that out. We have a whole sugar talk on Women of Today. We had different experts come in and talk to us about it. I’ll tell you how I got my sugar thing a little bit down. I don’t know if you have tried this. For me, it was chocolate. I used to wake up and eat chocolate. I used to have a piece of chocolate before I went to bed, next to my bed, literally, take a bite and then go to sleep. It’s horrible. To your point, Adam, retraining your palate, it’s where the change happens. If you don’t, then your palate is always going to tell you, eh, it doesn’t taste that good to me. For me, I had to do slowly, like walking down to the dark chocolate before we slowly — little baby steps. Now I have that vegan chocolate. Do you know that brand Hu?
Zibby: Yep.
Camila: I love them. The hazelnut chocolate’s my favorite. Now I have that. I have a little bit. I’m good. I have little moments. Us women, you know, we go through our times of the month where it’s like, give me the sugar. Do not ask questions. That’s it.
Zibby: That seems to be my time all month. I don’t know. I would like it to just be once a month, but no. Plus, I think I’ve obviously messed up my kids now listening to all of your good advice. I’ve been a little unrestricted about giving them sugar. Now, of course, I’ve ruined their palates. They’re messed up forever, but oh, well.
Camila: No, they’re not messed up forever. You just have to retrain the palate. I do a version with the kids where we used to do Friday, have whatever you want. It’s Friday free-for-all. Stay up late. Watch a movie. Pizza night. What treats do you want? They started with, all three, they just wanted candy. I’m like, okay. I’ll drive them to the gas station. Go in. Pick whatever candy you want. They did. They would come in, watch movies and stuff. Then after we did that for a while, it was like — now that they got the power of choosing what they want and getting what they want, I was like, “What about instead of candy, let’s do a dessert? What’s your favorite dessert?” One is cake, this or that. “Okay, so let’s go and get it.” We would go to a bakery or a supermarket and get that dessert. Then after they did that for a little bit, I’m like, “Should we make it? What should we make?” That process of giving them the power and then in the middle of that, sliding in information about how bad the candy is versus a real dessert, now a dessert that you buy outside and dessert that you make it, and then now when it gets to Friday night, they’re just like, let’s have a little ice cream. We did it last Friday. I was like, “Let’s do it, guys.” We went to the supermarket. They were so fired up. Again, they still get two things each.
Zibby: Don’t they want the leftovers? I feel like we’d get the ice cream pint and the next morning they’d be like, okay, breakfast.
Camila: You have to watch that.
Adam: The gas station is where you went for candy.
Zibby: I feel like my next book should be Scarred by SnackWell’s. I’m like, I can a whole package of these because there’s no fat. I’ll be fine.
Adam: My father is vegan. I grew up with a vegan father in Boston in the eighties. Vegan food in Boston in the eighties was not delicious. To me, the treats in my house — my mom ate fairly normally, so she had her drawer of chocolate and stuff like that. The vegan food was all this very heavily processed fake meat kind of stuff. I would get these packages of Morningstar Farms fake bacon, which was made to look like bacon. I guess the thinking was you stopped eating bacon, but you want something that looks as much like it as possible. It had a fake strip of fat, even, in it. You would cook it. I don’t know what it was. It was mostly sodium, it seemed to me. It was very salty, crispy. We thought that was good for us, but it was probably more heavily processed than anything else in my house.
Camila: You’re touching such a good point there because, honestly, we haven’t come that far from what you’re describing right now. The fake meats and all that stuff, it’s all overprocessed things and things that are not necessarily that good. I’m more to the philosophy of, have whole foods. It’s what we talk in the book. It’s what we talk in Just Try One Bite. Have whole foods. Your body’s going to tell you what it can take, what it cannot take. It can communicate. If you have majority of whole foods and not just overprocessed foods, it can do its job. It’s got a good fighting weight to go against the other stuff.
Zibby: I like how you guys called them slow foods instead of fast foods. That was good.
Camila:
Zibby:
Camila: Look, I’m going to jump in here first. Then Adam can go next because this is his expertise. For me in terms of an advice is to really look for people that you can do great partnerships with if you’re not the person that has the — it takes a different talent to really be able to put a message in an engaging way, in a fun way in a limited amount of space. If I personally would’ve sat down and wrote this book, I’m pretty sure I could relay the message. I’m pretty sure it could be fun. I don’t think I could’ve done funny. I don’t think I could’ve done rhyming everything. Rhyming, forget it. It would be impossible for me to rhyme with my Portuguese. I think that if you are a person that’s it’s like, “Listen to this. Hey, I really have this passion for this. I really want to express this way, but I have no idea how to do it. I know it’s not my strongest suit,” it’s to go and find somebody that can inspire you to really express the right way and then can hear you. The beauty of what Adam did, Adam was able to listen what I was passionate about in our conversations. A lot of times with writers and people — we’ve worked with a lot of creative people. They come in with an idea. They want to lock into that because they’re taking the autonomy. No, this is my right because it’s my expertise. This is what I do. I’m coming in loaded. Finding somebody that you can partner with that can actually share the voice, I think that would be my advice, somebody that is looking to somebody to partner with. Really, the author on this, Mr. Adam right here, can talk from the author perspective.
Adam: When it comes to collaboration, what Camila’s saying is exactly right. It’s very important to be able to listen and come with an open mind and have a really free-flowing exchange of ideas. Depending on the project, that can get very involved. There can be a lot of give and take. People can get very entrenched in their positions and start becoming defensive or start just litigating. Sometimes that can be fruitful. Sometimes that’s how it needs to go. There are writing partners of mine who — I have a screenwriting partner who will come and stay with us when he and I are working because we work best in a room together. He has the freedom to travel. I do not, but I have the freedom to let him stay in this room that I’m sitting in right now. My daughter, Viv, was like, “All you and Danny do is yell at each other.” I’m like, “Yeah, but that’s the process. To you, it sounds like yelling. To us, it sounds like friendship. That’s our dynamic.”
Camila: In our process, Adam, we didn’t fully agree with everything. We had back-and-forths of questions and everything. I remember I was actually in the South of France in the middle of the night sitting in this little staircase talking to you on the phone going, “But what about this? What about that?” We had the back-and-forths, but it was not painful.
Adam: No, it wasn’t, but we did have the back and forth. There should always be that back and forth. To me, collaboration is such an interesting thing. For years, I didn’t really do it on a creative level because I was just writing novels. I was alone in a room, just me. The collaboration didn’t come until that novel was sold and an editor was telling me how to change it. Of course, by that time, you’re heavily entrenched in your position because you’ve spent years. To switch that mind state and be open and receptive and also figure out how to get to the bottom of a note is really important. I find that more and more as I do more and more, not just collaborate with writers, but now that I do a lot of screenwriting and I’m getting notes from the studios, notes from the producers. It’s an art to be able to listen and take notes, but it’s also an art to dissect the note and get to the core thing. I think Camila and I did a little of that. It was getting from, there’s something not right about this line or something not right about this sentiment. Sometimes that’s intuitive. You don’t necessarily know exactly what’s wrong with it.
I would see this with my students, too, when I taught writing when I was in a workshop setting. Somebody will put forth an objection, but it can be a lot of unpacking to get to the root so that you’re diagnosing the disease, not just the symptoms. Somebody might think the problem is with a piece of dialogue, but if you really talk it through, you find that that’s just a symptom. The real problem is with the character, for example. Some exec is telling you something that is totally incomprehensible. You know that if you ask too many questions, they’re going to see you as a problem. It’s like a game show or something. You’re like, all right, if I ask four questions, I’m a problem, so I only have three questions to figure out what in the world this dude is trying to say to me. It makes no sense to me, but I got to address it. I got to make him feel like he’s a genius for saying it. It’s across all art forms. I remember very early on in a good friend of mine’s career as a musician, he was doing jingles for commercials. I would always be in his studio because he lived around the corner from me. I remember he was doing music for a network that no longer exists. The note they gave him, they were like, we want something that sounds like Tito Puente, but not Latin. The two of us just sat there for hours. Tito Puente, but not Latin. What do we do? I feel like I’ve been getting that note ever since. Make it Tito Puente, but not Latin. You’re like, all right, I’m on it. I’ll have something to you first thing Monday.
Zibby: I know you needed to go, Camila. Now we’ve run totally late. I’m sorry. This has been so much fun. Thank you both for chatting about Just Try One Bite. I know it will be a huge success, so congratulations in advance. It was really great to meet you both.
Camila: Thank you so much for having us.
Adam: Thank you so much. It’s good to see you, Camila.
Camila: You too.
Adam: Next time will be in person, right? We’re going to be in LA.
Zibby: Oh, yeah? I want to come. I’m in LA a lot.
Adam: You’re in LA? The one event we’re doing together is at The Grove in LA.
Zibby: When it is?
Camila: April 1st, I think. No, no, no.
Zibby: I’m going to look it up. I’ll look it up.
Camila: April 3rd at Barnes & Noble in The Grove.
Zibby: Very exciting. Awesome. Camila, I’m sending you my books.
Camila: Please do.
Zibby: Bye, both of you. Thank you so much. Buh-bye.
Camila: Bye.
