Zibby is joined by New York City’s premier “house call veterinarian,” Dr. Amy Attas, who takes us into the exclusive penthouses and hotel rooms of the wealthiest Manhattan pet owners in her heartfelt and hilarious new book, PETS AND THE CITY. Dr. Attas describes her 30-year career and shares anecdotes from her most memorable home visits, including when a dog swallowed his owner’s blue pills… She expresses her love and dedication to her work and even shares some practical advice for pet owners.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Anastasia. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss The Other Side of Nothing, a novel. Congratulations. 

Anastasia: Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Zibby: Of course. You wrote a really good book. It's really good. I read the whole thing and I'm sorry this podcast kept getting delayed, but I really did.

And you know, it's good and it's heartfelt and you raise a lot of really interesting points about, particularly about parent child relationships and, you know, love and loyalty and, you know, doing the best you can, made me kind of sad and happy and that's anyway, great job. 

Anastasia: Well, I, what I, what I really wanted to achieve was to make it realistic as possible.

Like I think so many times with books about mental illness, it can be kind of sensationalized or, or it can be glossed over like everything turns out fine in the end. And I think for most families out there and most individuals out there, it's not like you can manage it. You can get to the point where you can manage your mental illness and you can have a life that's fulfilling and happy and all of that, but it's also.

There's a lot of people who continue to struggle. So I just wanted to be realistic about that. So I hope it's my, my intent was not to, it was to make it hopeful. 

Zibby: It is hopeful. 

Anastasia: Yeah. 

Zibby: It's just, you know, sometimes you have to go through the harder times to get to, you know, I mean, that's like life. It's just life.

Anastasia: It is life. It is life. 

Zibby: Back up for a second. Cause I jumped into all that. Can you please tell listeners? What your book is about. 

Anastasia: Sure. So it's basically a story about four people on two cross country journeys. It's two sets of two. The first involves Julie and Sam that are, they're young adults. They're extremely talented artists and they're also both attempt suicide survivors and they meet and fall in love in a residential psych facility and then they escape and leave everything behind.

With the intent to embark on a journey to fulfill Sam's destiny, which he believes is to recreate this iconic Ansel Adams image and start his career. And. For Julia, she had created this second chance bucket list while her dad was dying. And she wants to try to fulfill some of the things on the second chance bucket list, which she are basically things she promised her dad, she would give a second chance to.

And so initially their goal is to do those things as they cross the country. So, and then the other journey is the moms, Julia, Julia's mom is Laura and Sam's mom is Arabella. And when they find out that their kids have disappeared and authorities won't really do anything to help. Search for them because they're young adults, the moms decide that they're going to try to find them.

And so they take off on after them. And it's kind of a desperate search because they really only have a handful of clues to follow. And, but they're intent on trying to find them knowing that their kids have some risks that they face just in their own lives. So that's basically, so it's two cross country journeys, but it's also journeys, internal journeys.

Obviously it's. It's both a physical journey, but it's also an emotional, psychological, and, you know, it's about relationships changing. And, and mostly it's about what it's like, not just to be someone who struggles with mental health challenges, but to be someone who loves someone who struggles mental health challenges and not being able to, as I put it, love them better.

Like you can't, can't love someone, make them better through love. Like you, love is important. And it's critical, but it's not, it's, it's, there's limits. So that's what it's about. It's also about art and philosophy and, and beauty and all sorts of good things.

Zibby: And you have had experience with this, with your nephew and your child, yourself, and then yourself. Can you talk about that? 

Anastasia: Sure. One of the things I feel really strongly about is hopefully this book will help people to talk about these things and to feel like we can help break the stigma, but also to let people know that there's resources out there.

Because understand my nephew attempted suicide many years ago, 12 years ago now, and things were quite different back then. I was out of, I was out of the country when it happened. And my sister didn't want to ruin my trip. So she didn't tell me what was going on. And when I got back, I was heartbroken for her and for my nephew.

And also just to hear that she felt. It'll prepare to take him home, but she also like, I don't think a lot of people realize the trauma of being a parent in that situation, hopefully none of us will ever be in that situation, but you know, they had, she had to agree to put him in a coma, then she had to agree to leave the room when they took him out of the coma, because in case she was the reason that he had, you know, it's, it's, it's one after another, like heartbreaking thing.

And she was mostly alone dealing with this. One of the things that really hit me hard was that she said so many of her friends didn't know what to say. So they didn't say anything at all. And silence is the hardest thing, because I think for most people, I think if anyone out there who's, who's struggled with depression or bipolar disorder, or, you know, any anxiety, you already feel alone.

Like you already feel like you're the only one that feels this way, which is one of the hardest things. And so sometimes just being. Told by someone else. Oh, I, I, I go through that too. It helps you to feel less alone. And when you're the parent of someone who's in this situation and your friends pull away, not because they don't care, but because they just don't know what to do, it leaves you feeling more alone.

And that can be like heartbreak on top of heartbreak. My sister told me she, as she put it there, it's not a casserole disease. No one drops off food. No one sends cards, like the things that you would do if your child had cancer or your child had some other illness or was in an accident and the community kind of wraps you up and takes care of you.

That doesn't happen with suicide attempts because. Or with suicide. I just was at a luncheon the other day and a friend told me that someone had died that was close to her and she pulled me aside to tell me that it was, uh, that they died by suicide and she didn't want to tell the whole group because it's still, there's still that, I guess the stigma, I guess that's the only thing I can say it is. I mean, I think it's getting better. It's getting much better, but it's still there. Yeah. So I also suffer from depression. My daughter suffers from depression. I think I modeled for my daughter, how to be a really good masker growing up because nobody would have known.

Like when I tell people, they're always like, what you like, you know, There's this surprise element. And I think that that's partly because we've all gotten good at it, right? Anyone who suffers from depression, anxiety, our, our goal is to not let people know, and we become really good at the fine. How are you answer to everything?

And often I think people, you know, when you, when you see magazines, when someone dies by suicide, and it's always the surprise and all the people going, I would have never known. And that's the reality. Most of so many people are living with it and don't talk about it. And again, I think just makes people feel more alone.

And I've been on the both sides of it, where I've wanted to make my daughter better. I want to fix everything for her. And I can't. And that's, that's also. Really hard, but I know that I'm doing that to my family too, when I, they can't fix me either. So it's, you know, you, you kind of, I understand, and I have empathy for people who are in both situations.

And I hope that that's what the book does is give people who aren't in that situation or who are a feeling of, of empathy for the other side and for themselves. 

Zibby: Thank you for sharing all that, by the way. Really personal stuff. And, you know, I think it's important to remember most parents really do just want their kids to be okay.

And, you know, that every day there is an undercurrent of fear constantly that something will happen. And the idea that your child is your own child. Your child's worst enemy, you know, in a way that they are the harm you're worried about, but they are the precious gift as well as is hard to wrestle with.

It's complicated and there's no clear path there. So I deeply, you know, empathize with how.. Yeah. 

Anastasia: And that's one of the other things I really hope that people will understand and, and reach out for help. There's so many more resources now than there were even just years ago. And not just resources for people who are, again, for people who are in that, in that situation where they're in, they're feeling that way and they are in an emergency situation.

There's also some of the same resources can be used for people who are family members and don't know what to say. 

You call nine eight eight and get advice on what to say to someone who you think is, is at risk. So there's like a lot of things out there that people don't know about. Yeah, that can be helpful.

But I think you're right. That's one of the reasons I think that's another reason why there are people have a hard time after an attempt to talk about it or to express sympathy because when you're when someone's had an accident or when they have cancer, they're they're struggling to live. 

And it's hard to accept that. Like somebody could want to die and say to somebody about their, their loved one that wanted to die or that wanted to die more than they wanted to live where we as a society are uncomfortable with death generally. So the idea of somebody wanting to die is really makes us really uncomfortable. Not that it should or shouldn't.

I'm just saying.

Zibby: No, you're absolutely right. I had a really close friend died by suicide, but she had made several attempts before she died. 

Anastasia: I'm sorry. 

Zibby: The, you know, we were younger, right? People are not always so kind about things like that and they don't know how to handle it. And, you know, anyway, so I, I, I come to this with some background, um, not the same at all, you know, not to compare, but,.

Anastasia: But nobody is the same. I mean, nobody's the same. We all are, we all, we all have our own things we're dealing with. 

Zibby: Right. But one of the, one of the moments in the book that kind of broke my heart was when the daughter had printed out all these things she wanted her mom to see. She didn't totally know that she wanted her mom to see all the reports about depression and everything else.

But she did enough that she wrote like four mom on it and then left it there. And the mom didn't find them and said like, oh my gosh, I was looking at all the wrong places. It just like broke my heart. 

Anastasia: I know. And I think that's the thing is, is that I know when, so my daughter was depressed for three years before she told me, and I remember we were, we were driving in the, it's like how much I remember we were driving in their Prius, I was taking her to a lacrosse practice or something.

And she told me, she started to cry and she told me that she'd been depressed for years and I was like, No, you're like, everything's going so great in your life. Like, and I named all these things and she was like, mom, you have all people should know. That's not what's on the outside. Isn't what's on the inside.

And I was sort of like, I should, I should know that. Like, and, but think that someone that's been struggling for three years and you didn't see it, it's, it's heartbreaking. It's. It's like, there's no other word for it. It's just, it breaks your heart and you, and you, you just want to make them better. You want to love them better.

And that's, that's. You know, you get the, when you get a phone call, like from a kid and, you know, and you, you're like, how, how can, how quickly can I hop on a plane? Like, it's just, it's, it's, it's hard to, yeah, it's hard to deal with, but, you know, like I said, it's, it's, you know, It's also at this point, my daughter and I openly talk about how are you today?

And I think it's one of the things I've learned, which is, is maybe a piece of advice out there for parents and for friends is I've learned to say, how are you today? Not how are you? Because how are you is such a, we're all programmed to just go fine. How are you fine. But when I say, how are you today?

Like it's sort of like, let's her be like, this is today is today's a good day. Today's not a good day. Like. Then we have a place to talk about it, so, for what it's worth. 

Zibby: I think you said that to me. 

Anastasia: That's right! 

Zibby: And I, it made me feel like where I took, I, you just said that and we got on and I like took a big sigh and I was like, I still said fine, but I thought about it for a minute.

Anastasia: Good, well you thought about it. Well, you know what, it's in all truth, like, listen, we can't all just walk around spilling our guts every time he asks us, how are you? Like, you have to be, you have to know your audience and you have to, and I think that's the other thing. People have to feel safe when they say it, right?

Like, cause you don't want to say it to somebody that's, that you don't feel confident will reply in a way that's helpful. 

Zibby: Right. 

Anastasia: So yeah, I'm not suggesting everything. When the woman in bonds says, how are you? As she's bringing up my groceries, It's not the time to tell her that. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Well, it was interesting how you have, like, the two separate mother child relationships.

Emma's just foils of each other in a way, right? Arabella, who you think is going to be the most, like, superficial mom type right at the beginning. And, and then, oh my gosh, what is her name? Laura. Laura. Sorry, we just were talking about her. Laura, who, you know, wants the best, but is also grieving, which is its own kind of pain. And then, you know, Sam, who has one type of thing, and then Laura's daughter, who has another, but is also carrying around what she believes is this like horrific secret. And yeah. I can't believe how that ended up turning out, by the way. And oh my gosh, because you just never know. So tell me about the two, like the two different mothers and what were you trying to do with each one?

Anastasia: So one of the things I wanted to, to kind of illuminate is how some of this is intergenerational. Like the way that you're raised, the way that you're taught to, to handle emotions has a huge impact on you moving forward in life. And to change that pattern is also difficult. And in Laura's case, Julia's mom, she was raised sort of as a, uh, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Don't nobody wants to see you cry, go to your room. If you have to cry. And when you're done, you can come back out kind of thing. I have friends who had parents like that. Like it was just not, you didn't cry. Like what was the point? And. I think that that that's hard to get over. And so when her husband dies, she, her way of coping is to, to do that is to just, she gives herself a time to cry in her room, and then she gets on with life.

And our daughter sees that who had a father who was very emotionally available and so she was raised more with this idea that emotions are okay. And in fact, they're good and you should talk about them and you should look for meaning in things and you should look for art in every day. And that's, that was all coming from him.

And the mom sort of like this, there's this time when they're, she's recalling watching a movie with her dad and her dad. And she'd get into this whole conversation about generational gaps and, you know, malaise and, you know, youth and all of this. And her mom just goes, it's just a movie, Paul. And that's like her way of dealing with everything is you just, you box it off.

It's just this, it's just that. And so she doesn't actually know how to cope with her daughter's loss. She doesn't know how to help her daughter grieve because she doesn't really know how to grieve herself. And. So when her daughter starts to fall into this depression, she basically gives her time and space, which is what she wants.

She wants time and space. She doesn't want people asking her how she is. She wants to just put a box around it. So she has to learn how to, to, to open herself up for her daughter. And the other mom Arabella was raised with a stiff upper lip. She's actually British and she was literally raised by parents with stiff upper lip, but she's put all of her hope and love into her son and she wants more than anything to fix him and to save him. And so she basically is willing to almost do anything. She lives for him in a way. And she has to like, kind of accept that as she goes through the book, she has to kind of accept that she can't love him better. Like she has to, she has to acknowledge that there's, that, that she's the kind of mom who, when she hears about other people at a support meeting, she thinks, well, that's not my son.

Do you know what I mean? We all do that too. Right? You, you hear about extreme cases of something and you think, oh no, my kid doesn't. I think we've all done that, particularly with teenagers and young adults, right? 

Zibby: There's a book that just came out or is about to come out. It's called Yes, Your Kid. And it's about like teen sexuality.

Yeah, it's like it's someone's kid. 

Anastasia: Exactly. Like you hear about the group of kids who are smoking marijuana behind the school gym and you're like, no, no, never my kid, but it's somebody's kid. 

Zibby: Yeah, yeah. 

Anastasia: Somebody's kid is doing that. 

Zibby: Or maybe some parents are like, oh yeah, yeah. That's my kid. That makes sense.

That checks out. Oh my goodness. How in your road trip here, how did you pick the places? I know you said it was the Ansel Adams photo. So of course you like end up with a certain place, but as you're going across the country and stopping and tell me about how, I know you went on this trip yourself and, you know, the whole thing.

Anastasia: I took the trip with my daughter, actually. She, I had decided that I needed to see what it was like to, to take the trip from New York to Yosemite and to do it quickly. And ironically, well, strangely, I'm not sure what the right adjective is here. When we did the trip, we ended up doing part of it super fast because it was during the election in 2016, and we were actually in the car while the election results were being delivered.

And we were so stressed that we just kept driving because we couldn't conceive of stopping and like it felt like if we were in the car we could put off acceptance somehow. I don't know. I guess that's revealing my politics. And so we actually did drive through the night most one of one, one of the nights drove through the night most of the night. And then when we got to Yosemite and we were hiking around and taking lots of pictures and sort of seeing what you, and I was talking with, I met with park rangers and I met with members of YOSAR, which is Yosemite Search and Rescue, to kind of ask them questions about, well, what would you do in this situation?

How would you handle this? They gave me all the forms. They would have people fill out. They were super helpful. When we went to look at the moon rise, there was a ton of cameras. Like I've never seen so many cameras set up at a place in my life. And I, so I asked one of the photographers, is there something special going on?

And he said, this is a once in a lifetime moon. That's rising right now. It's called a mega beaver moon. And I was like, you gotta be kidding. I looked, it was true. And at that, actually, I did not have that in the book at the time, but that became the, just for them having to drive quickly because he wants to capture that moon.

So it's sort of like reality, like the trip actually informed way more of the book than I thought it would. Does that make sense? Like totally, totally. And then I realized like, there are certain things that I wanted them to do that wouldn't work out like time wise. This was a book that was really tricky from a timing perspective.

I had to like time myself reading parts of the myth of Sisyphus to see how long it would take to get from this page to this page so that I would know what they would have, what would have happened in that timeframe, stuff like that. So lots of timing and good. It was super interesting and the trip cross country was fabulous.

I mean, this country is so beautiful. It really is. There's just the changing, you know, geography and the people you meet and it was just, we really, I mean it ended up being a really cool bonding thing for my daughter and I to do together and I highly suggest it. Not in five days though. 

Zibby: How long did it take for you to write the book?

Anastasia: The first draft probably took me nine months to a year, somewhere in there. I, but I, I started writing it in 2016 and it just came out so, or it's coming out in a couple weeks. So, you know, the whole process, I mean, obviously, you know, as a publisher that from the time you actually get the final manuscript to the time you see it, or the time you sign with their publisher to the time you see the book on a shelf is about 18 months, two years.

So there was that, but. So basically I finished it in 2022. I mean, with all of the drafts and, you know, you do all the developmental edit and then beta readers and then copy editing and proofreading and design pages. There's so much that I did not know. I mean, did you find that when you were first? 

Zibby: Yes. I had no idea.

Anastasia: Like all the steps? 

Zibby: All the steps. Some more than others, you know, some publishers have a lot more rounds, right? 

Anastasia: Yeah. 

Zibby: Other places. 

Anastasia: Yeah. 

Zibby: There's, it's a lot. 

Anastasia: It's changed my experience of bookstores and libraries because I walk in and I think all of these books went through this. 

Zibby: Yeah. Like it's not all a lot though.

You're right. I think after a while you'll be able, you know, you'll see which ones when you're reading them and you're like, oh, this didn't go through that level of line. Right. 

Anastasia: Yeah. 

Zibby: It's not the author's fault. Right. Cause you're comparing that book to, um, you know. 

Anastasia: To others. 

Zibby: But anyway, what advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Anastasia: Oh, first of all, read, read, read and read. I always tell people to read. There's two ways that I read a book. Now I can read it as a reader. I can read it as a writer. And sometimes if there's a book that I really feel is gorgeously written or where there's character development, that is just like I admire or inspire me, like, and then I will read it both ways.

First, I'll read that as a reader, just to enjoy it. And then I'll read it as a writer. Like, how did they do this? And so that's my first piece of advice. And my second piece of advice is don't give up on yourself and believe in your own process. Everyone comes at this differently. Some people you're going to hear, they wrote their first draft in six months and it was perfect and, um, you know, and other people, it takes 10 years to get it out and both ways are, are, could be right based, you know, it's just who you are and how you write. So don't give up. 

Zibby: And where do you think Julia would be now?

Anastasia: I think that Julia is, she is working as an art teacher in a middle school, how is she doing today? I think she's doing okay. I think she's managing things really well.

I would, I would guess that, that she's, she's come out of it on the other side. Like one of the things I like to say about the title is you can look at the other side of nothing. It's nothing, or you can look at the other side of nothing is everything. And I hope that she's in the latter camp and you know, I think so many times, like, just like with the cover on the covers of half dome, half dome is remarkable because of what's missing.

And so many of our lives are defined by what we no longer have taught us something. And so I think that she's learned from her father's death and other experiences that she's had, uh, you can take the experiences of your life and make your life better.

Zibby: I love that. Anastasia, congratulations. Thank you so much.

And I'm rooting for you. 

Anastasia: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. Have a great rest of your 

day. 

Zibby: Okay, you too. Bye bye.