Zibby welcomes back author Jacqueline Friedland to discuss COUNTING BACKWARDS, a bold, gripping, and timely dual-timeline novel about how women’s bodies have been used against them in American society, both past and present. The book follows a young attorney who takes on a pro bono immigration case, only to uncover a shocking pattern of medical abuse at a detention center. Jaqueline shares the real-life inspirations behind the story, including her background as a lawyer and her deep fascination with the history of eugenics. The conversation also dives into the novel’s exploration of marriage, infertility, trauma, and personal resilience.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome Jackie. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about counting. Backwards. Congratulations. 

Jaqueline: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. 

Zibby: Yay. Wow. This book was really good. You did a great job and I learned so much.

I found it so fascinating. It ends up being like this empowering like Erin Brockovich style, unexpected story in a way that you go into it with a marriage and a relationship, and it's like this slow Vern that becomes this fabulous wide story that. It applies so much to today. Anyway, well done. Great job.

Jaqueline: Thank you. Thank you so much. I started with the marriage as a main plot point because I think a lot of times when women take on these hard cases, it does impact so much of their personal lives, and so there is the bigger, legal question and the political situation, but there's also how it's impacting her personally, and I wanted to show that.

Zibby: And so much revolves around fertility and our desires and our family and the losses that we've had versus what we want to create and why, and all of that. Why don't you go back and just summarize the plot of the book. 

Jaqueline: Okay, so the story is about a young attorney who goes. She takes on a pro bono immigration case, contrary to her usual corporate life, and she goes into an immigration detention center to meet her first client, and it's an all female center.

And while she's there, she begins to suspect a pattern of medical abuse relating to the women's right. To reproduce. And when she tells people, nobody believes her, nobody supports her. She only has the support of her elderly grandmother, and she decides that she has to go it alone and take these, this case and defend these women no matter what it costs her in her marriage, in her job, and so on.

And then chaos ensues. 

Zibby: Wow. And you used to be a lawyer, right? So this comes from a, 

Jaqueline: I did. 

Zibby: This, tell me about finding this case. I know you mentioned it at the end in a node, but tell me about this whole thing. 

Jaqueline: So first of all, I, when I was a lawyer, I worked in a big New York City firm where I was thrilled when I got to take on a pro bono immigration case because I really was not interested in representing the tobacco clients, fighting against each other that I was doing.

And so that was one data point. But when I was. A senior in high school, my history teacher told us to choose any Supreme Court case 1900 to 1945, and we were gonna be married to that case for the semester. We were gonna write a paper, we were gonna do a project. So I, go off to the library and I'm thumbing through cases and everything is boring.

And then I. Stumble onto this case called Buck versus Bell, which if you've ever read a Supreme Court case, the opinions tend to be very long and dry. And this one was like three paragraphs, and it was about a young woman in 1927 named Carrie Buck, who had been deemed feeble-minded, as they called it at the time, and they wanted to sterilize her against her will.

And she was 17 years old at the time that this was happening to her. I was 17 at the time I was learning about it. My mom happens to be a professor of special ed, so she was aware of this case and brought to my attention that Carrie Buck was not actually feeble-minded or in any way limited she was of average intelligence and she lost her case and was sterilized against her will.

And side note, this case is still good law in the US today, and these were like these great humanitarian injustices who ruled in favor of this. They compared it to vaccinating yourself to protect society. And this was going to be protecting society from more offspring that might have somewhat flaws as they deemed it.

And so this case really stuck with me and when I actually had thought about over the years, like how could I bring it to people's attention and. It just stayed with me. And then in 2020 I was reading the news and there was a headline that said The Uterus Collector. So I'm like, what is this?

And I click on it and it was a story about a immigration detention center in Georgia where the women there were claiming that they were being sterilized without their consent. So of course my mind immediately went back to Carrie Buck and I had always wanted to tell her story, and I saw a path through which I could tell.

Both stories, and I have to say, the federal case out of Georgia is still pending a class action in federal court. There was a congressional investigation, but I also have to add that they are still just allegations and my book is entirely fictional. 

Zibby: But you didn't have to consult a lawyer on this or anything.

Jaqueline: Exactly, yeah. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. It tackles all these big issues, but it starts very small. You start the book in the bathroom like, and the most mundane thing you can think of, right? Getting ready with your husband in the morning and like how he looked and like the way you describe them.

You can just see the whole thing just so clearly, like this is a movie scene and then you watch is what happens when life piles onto a marriage and a relationship or a, like what happens. To both parties. And how do you know when it's right or wrong? How do you know if it's gone too far or not?

Is it circumstance? Is it compatibility? Like somehow through this legal case and the pressure of that and the infertility and all of it that put on this couple, you can explore those hard to tease out emotions like so well. So tell me about that. 

Jaqueline: So I'm fascinated by the idea of mediocre marriages and when to end those marriages and when to stick it out.

I think that if there's children in the relationship I err on the side of sticking it out, but I, that's, I. I don't know. It depends on the situation, but so I, I just wanted to explore, what would happen. So I know that when couples are trying to have a baby, that can put a lot of strain on the relationship if it doesn't happen exactly as they hoped and as quickly as they hoped.

And I also know just from being a woman who wanted to be a mother and is a mother, that when you're trying to get pregnant, the stress of that and the. Fear of what if it doesn't happen, and how you can start to act in ways that you would never normally act and that are illogical and the superstitions build up and just these, your husband starts to call you crazy and how that can impact a marriage.

And then as the book unfolds, it turns out that these two are not quite as aligned in their career goals for themselves as they are for, they thought they both had the same goals as each other and it's not quite and how is that gonna be? 'cause that was like a level on which they really connected and now they don't have that to share and in fact it's causing them strife.

So it's, and then I think there's also, there's in the background, Jessa, the main character had miscarried in the past, and so that was some trauma that they dealt with together, but it just complicates matters going far forward. So I just wanted to play with that like at what point do you say like Mediocres not enough.

Zibby: I must say, before I got divorced, I was googling articles like, how do you know when it's time to get divorced? Like, where is the guidebook? How, like the answer. 

Jaqueline: Let's see. 

Zibby: I know. I stopped looking. I was like, wait, if I'm Googling this, I already know the answer, but anyway. Exactly. But it's fine.

You have a very sad backstory to inform us why, how an added level of desperation for why Jessa really wants a baby biologically, which is she's lost both her parents in this car crash. She feels responsible for it because they were on their way home from parent teacher conference, which is like such a sad detail.

Oh my gosh. My gosh. I always worry when I'm a parent teacher conference what if something happens when I'm here? And I as, anyway. So tell me about that particular backstory piece. 

Jaqueline: So I. I third part of it is, you have to think about what would make somebody want their own biological child so desperately, because, adoption is an option, surrogacy is an option, like egg donors, all of that.

Thank goodness in our modern society, people have choices. So why would there be this woman who so desperately wants her own biological child? So she needed to want that in order for her to feel this conflict with the women in Dete, the detention facility, to not just to feel it so viscerally and so deeply what's being taken away from them when they are being sterilized.

And in the same way as Carrie Buck, who also in the time at which she was sterilized, did not have all of the medical options that we have. And, the saddest part, I think about Carrie Buck or one of the saddest parts is that if you look back to her early childhood, she really loved taking care of her younger siblings, animals and there's records of that and it's just especially heartbreaking that she really wanted children and there was no option for her. So I just, and also, with Jess's parents gone, she also only has her grandmother, who is so much older and so loving, but she missed out on that on so much of that parent child relationship and had it this other way where, you know, attendance and stores were assuming that her grandmother was her mother, where she had to miss the daddy daughter dance at school. And all of these little heartbreaks leading up to the joy things she thinks she's gonna have when she has a baby. And she thinks maybe she'll see, her dad's smile or her mom's nose and it will bring back a little piece of what she lost as a kid.

And when that becomes difficult for her, it's especially trying. 

Zibby: Oh, you really nailed that feeling of just waiting to get pregnant and wondering if you're responsible and how they all, everybody says, don't stress. And you're like, I'm not stressed. I'm not stressed. Like I can handle it.

Yeah. It's like ridiculous. The stress of modern life, you can't get, you cannot escape that like it is omnipresent. But anyway. 

Jaqueline: It's true. And then there's also the issue that no matter how much people say it's, we are getting pregnant. I think when it comes down to it the body, the person with the body that's supposed to hold the baby feels pressure that cannot be described or understood by the other partner at that time.

Zibby: Yeah. And I also found it interesting that his name's Vance, right? 

Jaqueline: Vance Uhhuh. 

Zibby: I found it interesting that he was like. Am I not enough for you? Because like I don't usually hear that point of view and he's I know we both want a baby, but like I'm okay with it if we don't have it and like I don't feel like you're okay with just me.

Jaqueline: Yeah. No, and I think that part of it is that they're still relatively newly married. They're still young. There's plenty of time they have, they are a family or a couple with means. So there are options, and justice is so single-mindedly focused on having the biological child that I think it does feel reasonable for him to question, but here I am. I'm like, will you have me? 

Zibby: I also love just how realistic it was for, I felt like I was the main character Jessica, like going into the, in the pro bono, in the jail, like meeting with Isabella and the other people who she ends up talking to and nurses and all of these people. And she's nervous at first, like she's what am I doing? How can I help? And they even had this like really playful. Interaction. Okay, you and your fancy pens or whatever. But you see her gaining confidence throughout and honestly just like knocking it out of the park at the end. But we get to go on that whole journey with her, which is almost like empowering as a reader, right?

Like we are gaining confidence as she is gaining confidence and it's like such a payoff, like there's such a payoff at the end. Talk about that and how she talks about freezing and the role of trauma and all of that. 

Jaqueline: So I wanted, one of my favorite things to do when I'm learning more about a subject is to have the, to learn along with the character and show a little bit of like how that journey was for me and to put that in there and so I did do a pro bono immigration case as an attorney, but my the guy who I was representing was not detained at the time, so it was very different. He came to our fancy offices and, everything was taken. We got little finger sandwiches and stuff, so this was very different and I actually, I reached out to a number of different human rights organizations that put me in touch with people who are currently incarcerated and they have these like pen pal programs where you can either write letters or you can video conference. So I was video conferencing with different people and learning a lot through them and through hearing from them. And so I wanted to give Jess that same journey of sliding, little bits and bits until she really understood it and, which at the same rate, like as neither Jess nor I are the ones being detained or the ones who came to a new country.

So I wanted also to show that, I like we can never completely understand. But Jessa also has the complication that as a child who suffered a trauma, she does have this freeze response. When she gets overwhelmed or she gets frightened where she just, some people see an accident about to happen and they run into fix it, other people freeze 'cause it's so scary.

And that's her response. And when she first goes into the detention facility. And begins to process the fact that this woman might be deported and it's all on Jessa to save her from that fate. And she has family in the US and her daughter is here, and if she fails, this woman's whole life is gonna change in a negative way, most likely.

And so that she gets this feeling over her body where she just, it's too much and she's her freezing. And then she remembers sort of some of the tactics that her therapist from way back when taught her. And she has this vague memory of things her parents did for her. And she says, this woman, I can't freeze this.

It's not an option now. And she pushes herself forward. 

Zibby: Wow. It was very empowering to read. I like how you, I very much like how you did that and Yeah, it was really awesome. Especially in light of just all the immigration stuff in the news now and how you put a face and a family to it and you let someone who's what would I do in Mexico?

I haven't even been there since I was three. What, how could I possibly, I just, that perspective was very nuanced and I like how you did that. Thank you. And then I wanna talk about, but maybe I should just call you after because you do something so cool. But I don't wanna give it away with the backgrounds, like the family backgrounds of both of them, which come out, three quarters of the way through.

I don't know where there's something they feel very diametrically opposed, and I guess this could be really anything when you uncover more information about your family of origin, what does that do? To your relationship and your sense of self in the now. So tell me about that. 

Jaqueline: So I first, so eugenics is at play in this book, and I'm gonna also try to answer without spoilers.

And I've actually been fascinated by eugenics since I read the Buck versus Bell case, and I came to learn that eugenics, American eugenics and the study, so there are, sorry, backing up, there was a science lab in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where it was like the heart and soul of the eugenics research. I grew up in Syosset, like a, the walking distance from this lab and..

Zibby: I was just there. Bounce Family Entertainment Center. Yeah, it's very crowded. I would not recommend it on a Saturday, but, okay. 

Jaqueline: So I just, it's just, it's like I, I always felt oh my gosh, how is that lab? It literally in our backyard and it was where all this eugenics research came from and there's something.

There's something very interesting about the idea of eugenics to me. That you can breed things like fruits and vegetables and animals to get the stronger, quote unquote, better version of this thing. And it's like you have to, it, you pause for a second when, because someone says what if we could.

Breed out disease and what if we could, and things like that. And it's like you have to think it through and it, but it doesn't work. And so anyway, where I was going earlier is that American eugenics were actually a large part of what led to the Holocaust in Germany.

They, it was the research here that was funded by these great philanthropists like Vanderbilt and Carnegie and, Kellogg. Like all these people we think of as super wonderful and they, the research done here inspired the Germans that, oh, we can cleanse the race. So while Jessa is working on her case, she discovers a connection to that eugenics movement that she didn't know existed for her.

And her husband, Vance is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. And it's a complicated topic. I'm really trying not to like, give. 

Zibby: It was a nice contrast and even having a survivors descendant for Vance's family. That, that adds another layer of fertility and perpetuation of the Jewish race.

And everybody feel like all Jewish people feel that pressure like that. We're all like, oh gosh, we've gotta contribute here. 

Jaqueline: That's 1000%. That's, I that I feel like my husband was like, we're stopping at four kids. But what about our responsibility? I'm like, I think four is enough.

Zibby: I feel like I actually did better than four, even though I have four kids because both my husband and my ex-husband's new wife converted to Judaism, so I feel like I really got six. 

Jaqueline: Yeah, you did it. 

Zibby: Well done. Where is my prize? Oh my gosh. Was it always called counting backwards? 

Jaqueline: No, it was originally called good breeding.

Zibby: Okay. 

Jaqueline: I, I love the reference to, anything fertility of, I think I'm like borderline obsessed with fertility and creating families. And then it was count backwards from 10. Which we decided was too long, and then it was the best Parts Of Us, which I actually might have been my favorite title.

The only problem is it sounds like a romance, but it's when you know what the book is about. And it's actually like maybe referencing body parts. And or DNA, I just thought it was a very fitting title, but counting backwards, the title relates to something that Jess's father used to say to her when she was growing up.

And it's like a mantra that keeps her going forward. And I also like how it's about looking back into the past. And so I felt good about the title when we settled on it. 

Zibby: No it's perfect. I just, I had a feeling it wasn't the first one. I don't know why. 

Jaqueline: Yeah. 

Zibby: But probably 'cause like notebooks have their original title.

Yep. No, I like the double meaning of it too with the operations. Anyway, it was. Very cool. So how long did this book take to write? 

Jaqueline: I would say that it was about a year, maybe a little bit over and several times throughout the process, I would say to writer friends, this book is killing me. I can't do it.

I'm not doing it. And I have, two, I like, I have a, I wanna call it a writer group, but it's really more of a support group with two other writers, Sam Woodruff and Brooke Foster. And three of us meet and tell each other where we are with our plots and what do we think and what, and, give each other suggestions.

And thanks to the two of them, they kept saying, no, it's you're there. It's almost, you're almost done. You gotta keep going. And I really owe them a debt of gratitude for pushing me to continue with it, because it was, I, it was. I think the hardest book I've written so far because there are just so many complicated issues at play and it was really important to me to get them all right or as right as possible.

But somehow, I don't know it was a good year for me in terms of like my kids not breaking arms and that's why I somehow had I a lot of time to write and I got it done. 

Zibby: And yet when I saw you on a plane recently, your one of your kids was on crutches. I guess this year is not as good.

Jaqueline: I'll not write the new book is struggling. 

Zibby: Wait, so what are you writing now? 

Jaqueline: I, it's a I'm still struggling with the description, but it's a contemporary fiction about an autistic teenager who goes missing and the person who gets blamed for it is a D one college athlete, a girl in sports, and it, she is actually potentially the only one who can save him.

Zibby: Interesting. 

Jaqueline: All right. That's an exciting premise and I have a very messy draft that is causing me stress 'cause it's due soonish. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. This is a rapid, you write at such a rapid pace. So how much, this one involves some research, like, how many are you do you sit for certain hours a day?

Do you have word counts? Like how do you get it all done? 

Jaqueline: I find I don't do word counts. 'cause when I have word counts, I find the quality of what I put down on the page suffers. I try to take every afternoon, like 12 to three, five days a week, which is not actually that much time, but it never happens that way.

And so I end up. I end up, in, in the evenings when my kids are finally like doing their homework or I am finding time on the weekends and I somehow steal enough time that I get it done. I also really love being on an airplane 'cause it's like forced work time and I am like trapped there and there's no one, nothing.

Nowhere I can go or take anyone. So that's my, I need to travel more is the lesson. 

Zibby: That's my favorite place to write too. I always say that. I feel like we should do ride or air or something like that. 

Jaqueline: Oh my goodness. 

Zibby: We could all just take off. I feel like they have Amtrak trains where people just write, but yeah.

Jaqueline: Yeah, it's not a bad idea. Train, retreat. 

Zibby: And you also contributed to on being Jewish now. Thank you for that. Do you wanna just mention your essay in that book? 

Jaqueline: I would love to mention my essay. So my essay is about my daughter's bat mitzvah, which was in November. Of 2023, very shortly after October 7th and how we had to, we struggled with the idea of having a big celebration right after such so much tragedy.

And while there was still ongoing tragedy and how we ultimately decided that our sorrow and joy could exist. Could coexist. And I have to say that being a part of this book and in this moment has been like such a gift to me. The number of people who say, this is the exact book that we needed right now.

And I feel like you hear some of it, but like it's being said to all the contributors and it think it's really providing people with a written hug almost. We get it. We see you, you feel how we feel, and we, and I just think that it's we're very lucky that you came up with this idea and that we were able to contribute and that people are out there reading it for 12th week on the bestseller list.

Yay. 

Zibby: I loved your essay in the book and I loved doing the events with you that we've done so far, and it's more to come. So thank you for doing that. 

Jaqueline: And Oh, it's so much fun. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. It's been this nice little community that's formed, which has been an un unanticipated benefit. What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

Jaqueline: My best advice is to write and to say no. When people ask you for thing to do things during the time that you wanted to be writing. The only caveat is when it's your kids need something. But aside from that, don't make lunch plans. Don't, go shopping with your friends or do you know, watch binge, watch TV at night with your husband.

Take find some time and get in the chair. And write because once you the be, I was actually just telling my daughter who's only 14, that it doesn't matter so much if her teacher is good at writing 'cause she wants to take a writing class. And she was like what if the teacher's not good? And I said, it doesn't matter just writing.

The more you write, the better you will get. And the more you get down on the page, the more motivated you will be to keep going. So that is my best advice. 

Zibby: That is great advice. Excellent. Jackie, thank you. I really enjoyed your book. Totally impressed, very thought provoking. I feel like it could be a movie.

I feel like it's got that arc, so.. 

Jaqueline: Tell someone. 

Zibby: Hope you're pursuing that. Yeah, and thank you. Thanks for coming on. 

Jaqueline: Thank you so much for having me. 

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Okay, talk soon. 

Jaqueline: Bye. 

Zibby: Bye, Jackie. 

Jaqueline: Bye-bye.