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 Claire. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss I Promise It Won't Always Hurt Like This, 18 Assurances on Grief. 

Clare: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's really nice to see you.

Zibby: Claire, I know I sort of accosted you in the, in the halls of the LA Times Book Festival to tell you how much I loved this book, but oh my gosh, you're so amazing. I'm so sorry for your loss. And I am, I know I'm not supposed to say, I don't know, there are all these things I'm supposed to say and not say for the book, but um, I'm sorry.

And the book is heartfelt and beautiful and amazing and it's going to help countless people. So thank you. 

Clare: Thank you. Thank you. And please don't worry about what to say. I don't ever want, I don't want this book to, to come across like a list of things we shouldn't say, because actually what you've just said, I'm sorry, is exactly what we should say to people who have lost people they love.

Zibby: Thank you. I want to just read a passage. Is that okay? Can we start off with that? Are you okay with that? Okay. There's so many places that I dog eared because they're so great and useful and helpful, but mostly it's your own experience, which I want you to give context for, but let me just read this page, if that's okay.

Okay, so you've gone to bed. You say, when I wake, I know instinctively that it isn't morning. There is a thickness about the dark, a chill in the air. There's something else too, a sound from one of the children's rooms on the top floor. Quietly, I slip out of bed and climb the winding staircase to find a sliver of light beneath one of the doors.

I push it open. Can't sleep? Tear stained cheeks shine in the half light. Want to talk? A shake of the head. It's just, the sentence disappears. I sit on the bed and offer a shoulder, and we sit in gentle silence. I think of how dark those nights were after Alex died, how long it was before I could switch off the light.

I think of how sobs turned me inside out, and how I thought they would never cease. It's just, it's just everything, isn't it, when it's dark? It's the silence in the room pressing against the noise in our heads. It's the what ifs and the what now, the if onlys and the whys, worries that seem reasonable, even laughable on daylight, swell in the dead of night, when the house is quiet and there is no one around to divide them into more achievable steps, to make plans and offer comforting hugs.

Sleep becomes impossible. Sometimes there is no solution. We can't change decisions made years ago or take a different path. We can't bring back the people we loved. We have to let our hearts cry and accept that it hurts. We have to believe that it really is darkest before the dawn and that soon the skies will be streaked with reds and golds and the ache in our chest will subside.

Oh, Claire. It's hard to read without crying. It's beautiful. 

Clare: It was hard to write without crying. But, you know, books should make us feel, shouldn't they? Whether we're writing them or reading them, they should make us feel something. And that is as true for fiction as it is for non fiction. So that passage, that passage is talking about one of my living children, obviously and I suppose what, one of the many, many gifts that my son's death gave to me was an enhanced compassion and empathy for people struggling with things, whether that is the, you know, the, a huge monumental problem with or actually a very small problem that just feels enormous because it's the middle of the night.

And so I, I'm very grateful to my son because the five weeks that he lived has taught me a great deal. 

Zibby: Can you tell listeners what happened and more about who Alex was and your experience? 

Clare: Yeah, Alex was one of twins. So I had, uh, I gave birth to twin boys in 2006, Josh and Alex. And when they were five weeks old, Alex died from meningitis.

He suffered a severe brain hemorrhage and we had to make a decision. And the decision we made was to remove him from intensive care and to allow him to die. 15 months later, I had a surprise second set of twins. Evie and George. And so my life sort of went from mother of two to mother of one to mother of three or four, depending on which day it was and how I felt about it.

So it was a very, very, very difficult time and continued to be a difficult time for many years. 

Zibby: And in the book, you, you take us through, you've structured it as a helpful guide, right? 18 things, you know, every chapter more useful than the next. Like, I promise you won't always fear the worst, and I promise you won't always feel so guilty, and I promise you won't always be winded by someone else's happiness.

Every chapter has one of these things, these reassurances, well, assurances, that's why you put it in the subtitle, I guess, but it's really your own story that is most helpful because you are guiding the way by saying, like, this was the worst thing that could ever happen. It happened. And somehow I got through it in that I continued to live, but the way in which you did so felt like the darkest of times humanly possible.

But yet here you are and you can write about it. And anyway, the way that you melded your own story was so compelling. And I don't know, it's hard to read the book and not just want to give you like the biggest hug and also to say thank you on behalf of everybody else, you know, for whom it will help. In the book, you talked about how writing it required you to sort of disconnect and that some days you were just a mess and can you talk about that and even how you found the inner strength, calling, whatever, to keep going when it was so difficult? 

Clare: The, I think the most powerful thing about memoir specifically, not autobiography, not self help books, but memoir is this lived experience.

And this experience is related by someone who is just like you, just an ordinary person who has been through a terrible thing or a profound experience and has learned something from it. And in order for that memoir to be powerful, to be helpful, to resonate, it has to be completely honest and authentic.

And in order to be honest and authentic, it can often be quite painful. And so writing it, although ironically, I, I started writing the book because I felt I had reached a point in my grief that I could talk about it and I could be helpful in my accounts of it. Actually, as I started writing the book, I realised I still had some processing to do, some grieving to do, and so it unlocked quite a lot that I think I hadn't dealt with.

Um, it forced me to take every emotion out and look at it and try and articulate what it was about it that had changed over the last 18 years. And it was hard. And there were, there were chapters in that book or sections of that book that I couldn't where I cried a lot, sections that I couldn't write in my house, because we live in a different house now, we live in a different time now, you know, you have sort of phases, don't you, in your, in your life, and this phase of my life is a really happy one, and I didn't want to pull all that early grief.

up into this life now, into this house that's full of binding sports kits and, you know, family dinners and all the sort of happy things. And so I wrote those bits when I was away with work, when I was staying in hotels, traveling. around the world and I could cry and have a glass of wine or a cup of tea and no one would knock on the door and no one would ask why my eyes were red and I just sort of left little pockets of my grief in hotel rooms around the world.

But it was very, it was cathartic, you know, people talk a lot about writing being Therapy and this book certainly 

Zibby: was that would be a neat idea actually to have like a grief room in a hotel and you would just go and anyone grieving could come and just leave their grief there and you would it would be like you know some sort of cleansing right to know that everyone who's come before you also was letting go of their grief there.

Clare: It would be amazing. I feel like it would need some very strong grade filter to sort of suck it all out. So it just wasn't pouring more grief into you. 

Zibby: Yeah, that's true. Well, maybe it would have to be a really happy color or something, you know, have to have great music or I don't know, something that you wouldn't normally associate with it.

But Claire, so this is not, so you are, uh, you have a major career as a best selling, amazing author cranking out books. You're amazing, and yet you decided to take on this project in the interstitial periods. So why? And talk about your other work as well. 

Clare: So, so yes, my, my official career title is indeed an amazing author of amazing bestselling books.

That is how I'm described. 

Zibby: Um, you can use that, you can use it, put it on your website. It's fine. Take it. 

Clare: So what happened was, was this, there's a backstory to this book. And the backstory is that In the, in, in the weeks after Alex died, a woman that I'd never met before came to my door with a bunch of daffodils and she had lost a child many years previously.

She'd been sent to meet me by a mutual acquaintance who thought that it would be helpful for me to talk to her. And she had come to promise me that it wouldn't always hurt the way it was hurting men, that I would be able to to smile again to laugh again to do all these things and I didn't believe her it didn't seem possible because I felt as though I'd been thrown from the top of a skyscraper and should buy all definitions be dead but somehow I was just about alive but it just felt like my, my organs were shutting down I couldn't breathe I couldn't walk my hair was falling out it was it was horrific and so I looked at this woman who was Not just surviving, but thriving and I thought you're, you're, you're lying.

It can't, that can't be true. And then what the way grief has felt to me is, is like a long train journey where you're engrossed in a book or you're talking to someone and you don't notice the miles pass and then you look up and the landscape through the window is totally different. It's no longer. city, high rises and houses.

It's open fields and trees. And you don't know what point it changed. You just know that it's completely different to the way it was when you started your journey. And for me, that point of recognition was four years ago. So it was the 14th anniversary of Alex's death and I forgot the date. And when I realized what day it was.

After I'd got over my guilt, because obviously a mum's first instinct about anything is to feel guilty. So after I'd stopped being guilty about forgetting, I realised that, that I had, had taken this, this long journey. And so what I wanted to do, I was thinking about The promise that the daffodil woman had given me and how I hadn't believed it, and how she had just had an audience of one.

She'd just come to my door, and I was in a very privileged position where I had a platform where I could talk to many tens of thousands, however many people might want to listen. And so I, I posted my thoughts on grief on what was then Twitter and is now X. And those tweets went viral, 18 million people saw them.

And I was suddenly inundated with people with messages from people who wanted to talk about grief. And it became very clear to me that this is a conversation that we need to have, that it's not enough just to say, time will heal, that actually, It's really important to look at exactly how grief manifests, because grief for me is like a, it's like a chronic illness.

And anyone who is, is listening, who, who suffers from a chronic condition, a hidden disability, something that you live with forever will understand this. That you can't be cured of it. You're not going to get better from it, but you do learn over time to manage it. And you'll have symptoms that ebb and flow and flare ups that are triggered by certain things and your chronic grief will be different from someone else's.

It's this collection of symptoms. And so I wanted to write, I promise to look more deeply into each of those symptoms and to pay it forward. I suppose, after that. woman's visit to me all those years ago. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh, that's amazing. And by the way, Twitter should use that clip of you saying, Twitter, that is now called X.

That was the most beautiful way to ever reference that. I was like, I need to use that as a sound clip. Of course, that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about the beauty of the words that you were saying as well. And that's amazing that you've tapped into something which is so clear. And that is why there are There's this whole field of grief experts and, and grief books and yet it's not working quite right, right?

You know, like it still can't fix the pain like people's pain seems to be it is too big, right? You can't a book when you're not ready for it. I mean it took you a very long time, right? Alex would be much older now. It's not like you did this the next year. Right. He would be like, absolutely. 

Clare: So Alex will, so Alex's twin is now 17.

He'll be 18 in November this year. He is driving. He's, you know, choosing college places. He, he's almost an adult and that shadow next to him is always, it's always going to be hard for me to think about and see, but this. book, the writing of it, the conversations it's led to. And that's been the most amazing thing has been going on tour and meeting people who have lost people and bringing their names into the room and talking about them, laughing about them and crying together and having those, you know, even those conversations that you just, you just said, we're talking, we're laughing about Twitter and X.

And then you said, Oh, obviously that's not what I'm thinking about. But that juxtaposition, that, that sort of meshing of laughing, but then also talking about something quite poignant, that's real life. That's what we need to get better at. We don't need to reserve quiet sort of reverential spaces for grief.

What we need to do is bring grief into our everyday messy, chaotic, funny, sad lives and just normalize it because this is an experience and an emotion that we are all going to have to deal with. 

Zibby: You're absolutely right. Yes. Claire, talk about you're becoming a writer and the regular work you do and how, because in this book, the gift of your writing is abundantly clear as well.

Like you as, the craft of it, the way you, you write. talk about small details, right? Everyone listening to this can now picture a woman sitting at your table with the daffodils and you a mess. I mean, that's a gift, right? To be able to put somewhere, someone with all, all of those details and facts so that it's in my head now, right?

It's in anyone's head. And you use this for that. For thrillers for everything. Talk about that and how you... 

Clare: I do. I mean, I, I think I've always been a writer. I think most writers have always been writers. And certainly I was a voracious reader as a child. And I knew for a long time, the power of, of words on me as a, as a reader, but it was quite a while before I connected them.

To the fact that I could write and realize that I could create a scene that would have resonance in a reader's mind. I was a police officer for many years. I was a, um, a public order commander. I was a detective, lots of other things. And although it seems like a very different career, There's a lot of storytelling in being a police officer.

You are, you're finding true stories, but you're nevertheless telling stories. You're listening to the accounts from victims and witnesses and suspects, and you're picking through to see what's, you know, who's the reliable narrator, who's the unreliable narrator. You're finding the story that the forensics have to tell, that the cameras have to tell, and you're piecing all of that together and writing a compelling narrative for an audience, for a judge and jury.

Because that written evidence is hugely important. You know, it's going to explain to a courtroom, not just what's happened, but what impact has it had on everyone? So when I left the police and I left because I was in a mess. tasks. My priorities were were very skewed. I was desperately grieving. I was really struggling to bond with my second set of twins.

There was a lot going on and I needed to step away from work, but I also needed to earn money and the only thing I knew had to do was, was right. So I went my own way. I wrote for magazines and newspapers, I wrote for businesses, I wrote website copy, anything that, that I could be paid to write, I wrote.

And in the evenings when the kids were asleep, I wrote a debut novel called I Let You Go. And that debut hit the New York Times bestseller list. It sold a million copies in 40 languages. I never went back to the police and I've been in a full time author since 2015. 

Zibby: Unbelievable. That's amazing. It's like, it's just amazing.

It's such a story. 

Clare: But do you know what? I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be an author if my son hadn't died. Not because I was writing about him, but because he was the trigger for me reassessing my priorities. He was the trigger for the outpouring of emotion that suddenly had nowhere to go except into a novel.

He's been the reason that I've had this huge life shift and I'm now doing this incredible job. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, it's, it's on brand for this book for you to find the good, right? For you to turn something tragic and, and be hopeful about something in life as a result because that's part of some of these inspiring words that, that you share.

And by the way, the police stuff in the book was also fascinating. I mean, Um, totally fascinating. If I could just read one line towards the end about grief, so this is another piece of grief that people don't talk about, and I think that's part of what the book does well is unearthing all of these truths, right?

Then making them okay to say and think and feel and, and all that. And you say, Yeah. Yeah. Looking back, I can see I was almost territorial about bereavement. There was no room for anyone else's loss. So talk about that, because that's really interesting. concept. 

Clare: Yeah, we didn't talk very much about the ugly side of, of grief.

And, and it was this side that I wasn't prepared for. I was prepared for sorrow, for sadness, for sobbing gently into a starched handkerchief. I wasn't prepared for turning into such a horrible person, which I did for a really long time. And yes, I felt territorial. I felt I was the one grieving. No one else could grieve for my son, nobody, you know, grandparents, friends, godparents, all the people around, the medical professionals, everyone who his tiny life had touched is allowed to grieve.

I mean, how, we're allowed to grieve for people we've never met. It's the concept of someone's loss that we can grieve for, but I wouldn't allow that. I had no time, no space for anyone else's grief for someone they'd lost. I just was, it's selfish. It is, it's a very allowable form of selfishness, but it is nevertheless selfishness.

And for quite a long time, I was consumed with this very, very selfish feeling that my experience was like nothing anyone else had ever been through. And Deserved, sort of, I suppose, all the attention. Not in a kind of, I'm center stage, come and shower me with, with, um, you know, attention, but just, there was no room in my life to think about anything or anyone else.

And I was very relieved when that passed, because I was, because I knew, I knew it was an unpleasant characteristic that I'd suddenly acquired. But it took a long time before I felt like I was me again. 

Zibby: I mean, in a way, that's who is the me, right? It's a different me. The old, I feel like with any big life shifting loss, like the old you is gone, right?

And then there is someone new who takes their place, but it doesn't make you not a good person, right? It just, it's self preservation, really. It's just how to get through. 

Clare: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Absolutely. But I remember thinking at the time, I remember feeling very alone. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Clare: And I think if If this book does one thing, I hope it will just help people realize that they're not the only people feeling the way they do.

Zibby: Well, it's absolutely beautiful. How are you managing promoting this book and then whatever you have coming next and writing whatever you have coming next and like, what does that look like timing wise on, you know, these, these books? the lines of a timeline and all of that. How are you doing all this and what is coming next for you and all of that?

Clare: It's, yeah, it's been an interesting year, actually. I've, I've got a new thriller out, a mystery called The Game of Lies. And so I've done some events in the thriller and mystery space and some events in the grief and memoir space. And there is a very different kind of energy to them. You know, I sort of turn up at my own pace my crime events, very sort of, you know, almost jazz hands and let's have a really fun night talking about fictional murder and mayhem. And then I turn up to the memoir events just in a slightly more, I suppose, thoughtful and open environments. But then a lot of my readers cross over between the two. Um, and we end up talking about both books.

So I'm, I'm, I've always been very open. I, you know, much like you, I, I think it's really important to talk about how we feel to, you know, be honest and authentic and show our real selves. And so I've always talked about grief. I've often written about grief, you know, albeit through the filter of a fictional character.

So for me, it doesn't feel like two different jobs or two different projects, they're just different parts of my world. And I think that for most of my readers, that's how it feels as well. 

Zibby: Have your three living children read the book? 

Clare: One of them has. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't suggest that they should, I didn't ask them to, but my books are, you know, they're in, in the house and I saw one of them, uh, one of, a copy of one of my books in, of I Promise in one of my kids rooms.

Um, and I said, Oh, you're reading I Promise. Are you okay? Is there anything you want to talk about? And he said, Yeah, do you know, I, I just never realized how strong you were. Which was very lovely, and made me cry. 

Zibby: So amazing. Oh my gosh. Well, you are a gift. It is a gift to be able to share like this. It is a gift to be able to get through all of that, to parent through all of that.

I mean, parenting, twins, if you're not grieving is really hard, I say from experience and, you know, to put, you know, to be compromised in such a huge way. Oh my gosh. Anyway, your son is right and you are incredibly strong and so, so helpful. I can just feel the many people who are benefiting from this. I, it's just a gift.

So thank you. Thank you for doing it. Thank you for delving back into it. 

Clare: Thank you. It's so lovely to talk to you about it. It's really lovely to talk to you about it. Um, and I'm really grateful to you for amplifying, for spreading the word, and hopefully this book will reach the people who need to read it.

Zibby: I was thinking this morning, as we were getting on here, I was like, I wonder if Claire's even in the mood to talk about this today. Like, what if she's having this, like, super upbeat, awesome day, and now we're talking about this part of her life, which is so hard. Like, what if she doesn't feel like it? You know what I mean?

Like, what if, what if that's, like, not the, not the vibe? 

Clare: I am, nowadays, I think I'm very at ease with the fact that grief is a thread that runs through my veins. It's just a part of me. And, you know, it's not something I need to dig out particularly. It's just, it's just there. And I talk about it and sometimes I cry a bit, but that's okay too.

Zibby: That's okay too. Well, again, I wish I could give you a big hug after this conversation, but thank you. Thanks for coming on. 

Clare: Thanks. Okay. Thanks, Zibby. 

Speak soon. 

Zibby: Okay. Bye. Bye bye.