New York Times bestselling author Kimberly McCreight returns to the podcast to discuss LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER, a breathless, shocking thriller about a daughter who returns to her childhood home in Brooklyn after months of not speaking to her mother… only to find an empty house in complete disarray, food burning on the stove, and a bloody shoe. The story unfolds through dual narratives as Cleo races to uncover her mother’s secret life. Kimberley reveals the book’s personal significance, drawing from her own experiences as a divorced mother, and then delves into the themes of midlife, parenting, public vs. private selves, and complex mother-daughter relationships. She also describes her organic writing process and hints at her upcoming book (it involves a hiking trip up Mount Kilimanjaro…). 

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Kimberly. Thank you so much for coming back on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Like Mother, Like Daughter. Congratulations.

Kimberley: Thank you. Thank you for having me again. I really appreciate it. 

Zibby: It's my pleasure. I know this book is personal to you with your daughters and I saw you posting them on Instagram and I read about them in your acknowledgements and obviously the whole book is infused with this mother daughter relationship.

Two different sets of, of, well, mother daughter, father daughter. I mean, it's, you know, it's very poignant. So anyway, congrats. It's a great, great book. Tell listeners, A little bit better of a job of what the plot is than my rambling right now. 

Kimberley: No, I like your rambling, which gets to the heart of the book, which is always to me the most important part.

Yeah, so the book opens with a college student, Cleo, uh, who arrives home to have dinner at her childhood home in Parks of Brooklyn. Um, and when she arrives, she's there to meet her mother, with whom she has this kind of. Has had long had a contentious relationship and for the past several months, they haven't been speaking at all, but she's finally agreed to come home and When she arrives, there is food burning and there is blood on a shoe and her mother is nowhere in sight.

So, that kicks off the plot. Um, the book is narrated from the point of view of Cleo in the days after her mother Cat's disappearance. And also from the perspective of Cat in the days leading up to the incident. So, you find out both what happened to Cat as Cleo tries to uncover the truth, but also, There's a lot that Cat hasn't been telling Cleo, um, about her life, about her past, about what her real job is.

She's, um, as far as Cleo knows, she's just a patent attorney. And the reality is that Cat is a fixer for her law firm. Um, and that's just kind of the beginning of the complications in, in Cat's life. From Cleo's perspective, her mother is this kind of very perfect Park Slope mother, and the reality is a lot more complicated.

Everything from, you know, the relationship with Cleo's dad, Aiden, to Cat's past and her job. So this story is, I hope, very much a page turning mystery about what happened to Cat, but at its heart, it is really a story about a mother and a daughter kind of trying to find their way back to each other, or maybe to find each other for the first time.

Zibby: Oh, I love that. So beautiful. There's a lot about, um, Midlife. There's like midlife romance. There's not knowing how much to intervene with kids and how much to let them make their own mistakes, which is like the perpetual question, right? Like, how much is too much intervention? And like, when do you just let them do their thing and fail, and when do you rescue, and I don't know, I feel like I could talk about that all day.

Kimberley: Yes, perhaps we should match notes about the right answers. Yeah, exactly. 

Zibby: Kat, of course, goes to one extreme, I would say, you know, I've never, well, I mean, maybe she's just forging a path for the rest of us. Maybe we should interfere even more. I don't know. What are your thoughts on the, on the. 

Kimberley: Yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right that it's complicated.

There really is no right answer and I think that all of these issues were things I was interested in. Kat in the book is separated from her husband. I am now divorced. Um, so there's a lot in there. The book is very personal, um, to me. So there's a lot of that, those pieces that feel personally relevant or at least things I, I now know that I've known a couple of years ago.

And then in the motherhood part, yeah, my two daughters are 17 and 20, which I can't believe is true. I'm not as old as that would seem to make me, but. Yeah. So I, you know, me parenting them, I, I, because of my own upbringing, I think I've really come to motherhood with very much a blank slate. And that is both a challenge, but also an opportunity, uh, because I don't really have any preconceived notions about the way, the right way to do things.

I have read a lot of books and I have, you know, listened to a lot of experts and done all those things, but I have found that, you know, you have to follow your instinct, obviously, a lot of the time and there is no right answer. And I think that that the idea that there is a disservice, because I'm sure my kids aren't the same kids you have.

Um, and so the reality is every. The right thing to do is different in every circumstance, and luck plays a bit of a role, too. I think that I'm very close with my daughters, and I've gotten really lucky. I definitely erred on the side of, I say, like, drill sergeant meets prison warden. Um, that was kind of how I mostly parented.

And, you know, my daughter, Particularly my older daughter would say that's definitely true, but I think over time I've tried to focus most on empathy and understanding them and validating them as humans and trying to see them as people. And I think that works in all aspects of life, but I think it particularly works with parenting.

Zibby: Yeah. And even within the family. The kids can be so different. I mean, what works with one kid doesn't work with the next kid. 

Kimberley: What works with one kid doesn't work with the other. That's even true of my two, and they're two daughters and they're only a couple of years apart. But I find like, I butt heads more with one of them who shall remain nameless than the other one, um, because our personalities are more different.

And so like the other daughter, more naturally, I can kind of intuit where she's coming from and figure out a way to get in and connect. Right. Um, and with the other one, her brain just works differently than mine. And so I have to like, Take a minute before I react to that, but it's like, just, oh, it's so hard and so complicated every day, every single day.

I have no idea every single day, they'll come and I'm like, oh God, now what are you asking me? Like, I don't know, I have no idea. And the reality is you're supposed to know, or they need you to know. And so half the time I'm like, all right, I'm going to just, I'm going to try to pretend I know. Right now, because they do need you to do that.

Zibby: Yeah, that's true. Although I'm definitely the first one to be like, I think so, or like, when there's something, you know, I don't know. I'm always like, I'm in the same boat. I don't know. Is this person going to be okay? Or are they going to be, you know, I'm scared too. Or I don't, I don't know. It's probably the wrong.

Kimberley: No, no, I don't think so. 

Zibby: I make it up every day. I'm always making it up. 

Kimberley: I think that making, I think that again, I think when you have like ruptures with your kids and then repairs, I think admitting you don't know, I think admitting you've made a mistake and that you're sorry. I mean, all these things, I think.

You know, in the end of the day, are we treating them how to keep trying to teach them how to be people? And that means being fallible and, and not knowing sometimes. And I think that all you can do is, is, you know, I've, I've read more than once that they learn most from the example you provide and how you live your life.

And so I think that that's the best thing you can do is try to like be true to yourself and live honestly and be the best person you can be and all your interactions. Because I feel like more than anything, more than anything, what you see. I feel like they're watching what you do. 

Zibby: So, from the divorce angle, was that then coming from a personal place of being tired of the dating apps and meeting somebody in person?

Kimberley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, like, yeah, there's, uh, there's a bit about dating apps on it, yeah, I mean, for sure. Like, I've been on dating apps and they're terrible and also useful and all of those things. So, for sure. Like, all of that, those references came from personal experience. Absolutely. 

Zibby: Haha. And it's ironic, wasn't your last book, The Perfect Marriage?

Kimberley: Um, A Good Marriage. It was a few books ago. It was a few books ago, but for sure, if you want a recipe for evaluating your own marriage, which may or may not survive the test, writing a book called A Good Marriage will, um, will do that. It's just like the last time, asking yourself, wait, what, what, what about my marriage?

And so I actually think that a lot of what led me to write that book was kind of the, the questions that I was already having and I think a lot of as a writer, as you know, what you're doing is balancing kind of these subconscious questions you have for yourself as you sit down to work on any project.

So I think, you know, the, the questions, it wasn't as a result of writing that book. I think they predate.

Zibby: No, I'm, I'm kidding. Yeah. Although that would be terrible. Every book. 

Kimberley: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Led to that. 

Zibby: Led to that. 

When you talked about your own childhood having a blank slate of motherhood, tell me more about that.

Kimberley: No, it just was, I mean, you know, without getting into a lot of details about it, it was certainly like a challenging upbringing. So you know, as a child of a, uh, early divorce and a lot of chaos in my family. And so, yeah, I mean, I would say I largely raised myself, um, and so as a result of that, uh, like I don't, I didn't have a traditional, I didn't have a traditional parent relationship. And so, you know, I just, when I came to it myself, it really was a blank slate. 

Zibby: Well, in the book, we have neighbors and colleagues and classmates and all these people who are within the same inner circle of each other, and yet nobody actually knows each other, right?

There's something, people are hiding things like all the time or keeping all these secrets from each other in a way. I mean, I won't give anything away, but you know, as in life, I guess, right? There are things you hold back, but I feel like the things in your book that everyone's holding back end up growing bigger and bigger and bigger throughout the, the course of, of the plot.

So when you're writing a book like this, how much do you know at the outset, and did you know, do you know about the twists and all of that at the beginning? And how do you know when you're writing somebody, which pieces to like put out there and which pieces to hold back and reveal later? 

Kimberley: Yeah, I mean, it's really, um, ends up being kind of a dialogue between character and plot.

And to answer your question, I do not know, I know virtually nothing when I start out to write. So I don't outline in advance, I figure it out as I go along. And so I've just. I'm almost done, hoping to be done this week with my next book, a first draft. And so that one, I really, I almost look at my first drafts probably as what people would consider extended outlines.

So as I'm writing, I am learning about the characters and then figuring out the plot and it kind of will toggle, I'll toggle back and forth. I have a general sense of the spine and the structure and the main characters, but often I'll start out with a character, even a main character and realize that it's kind of, I've started almost on the opposite in the opposite direction from them.

Like either they seem prickly and they're actually nice or they're, you know, seem nice and they're actually prickly or what, what have you. Um, and I can, I realize that again, it's a kind of interplay between the plot and the characters because my books, I, I, I hope and I think are a balance of both and theme too, right?

So those, those things are all working together. But by the time I'm done a first draft, then I've kind of figured everyone out, which means the beginning of the book has a lot of problems in it. So I've got to kind of go back and start again. And so my process is iterative. And I would say I probably do in the neighborhood of you know, six or seven full rewrites of a book before my editor ever sees it. And that's almost like the entire book. Oh my gosh. To be written. So it's working with like a giant outline. And the virtue of that is I'm not tied to any outcome as I write a book. So if something's not working, I'm like, well, I'm going to abandon that.

I'm going to switch and, and those generally aren't again, huge thematic points. It will be, an approach to how I was going to get there. So when you talk about kind of these smaller secrets everyone has, I have now set up everybody on the chessboard and I'm like, all right, well, some, you know, I've gotten to point D on the map and point B isn't working.

So I have to like move that. And then, and so I start moving everyone around and, uh, reorder the book and, and often change characters, but I've got at least a framework. It's like building a house, you know, I framed the house and I, you know, I work at it. from, from that way. And so it's long, but I think if you outline your work is front loaded, you're just doing that work in advance.

I just can't do it without the process of seeing the scenes. I can't do it just with bullet points, but I do create a bullet point outline as I'm going along. 

Zibby: Hmm. Wow. One of the things that I, I found, like, very emotional is you had a line, like, even though they are biological kids, like, they have no compulsion to keep us in their lives if they don't want to.

Right? It's a choice. Like, we can just upset them, and then they can say, forget it. And that can be it. No matter how much love you pour in, it's up to them, essentially. It can be up to them. There's, you know, two people in every partnership, but I think that's part of the fear that all I feel like most mothers are feeling at all times, like, what if, what, you know, what could happen?

What's the worst that could happen that would push my child away from me forever? And it's another kind of loss, right? Lost by their own volition, but still like the loss that you fear at all times. Tell me about that. Cause I feel like that was very much, you know, even with Doug and his daughter and his, you know, part of the.

Kimberley: Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, I think the line is something like no matter how much you love them, they are not obligated to love you back. 

Zibby: Yeah, that's it. 

Kimberley: For me, it's interesting that is kind of liberating to, to remember that, that like my job as a mother is to love them and to make them feel accepted unconditionally and know that they are safe and know that they're loved by me, no matter what the world does to them.

And I think more that I look at. The relationship like that, it's kind of freeing because I don't have any expectations and you know, I guess I just take that part of it really seriously and then hope that if I'm doing that right, that the rest will flow from it. But you can't control. I mean, that's reality, because that's reality.

Like, who knows what will happen? Who knows the past, their life will take them on. And I'm not somebody who's in, has a relationship, uh, actually with my, you know, my family. So, you know, I, I know that that is a way, you know, life events can unfold in that way. And so there's a certain peace in that, I think, in accepting that it is something beyond your control.

And the only thing you can control, again, is, is how much you love them. In the best way you can, right? Whatever that means. 

Zibby: That does not bring me any peace at all. That gives me so much anxiety, to be totally honest with you. 

Kimberley: All right, well, we might have to find you another approach. You know, maybe you can meditate on it and get there.

I mean, listen, it's a work in, you know, it's a work in progress. 

Zibby: No, I'm kidding. I mean, I'm kidding. Obviously, I know, you know, all we can do is our best and love them as much as we can and all of that. But You know, I still want them to love me. 

Kimberley: I know, I know. But it's the same thing. There's a line another character says later on.

I think it's actually, it's somebody, Lauren, I think that Kat's friend who says like, they're not cakes. Like you can put in all the ingredients and put them in the oven and then like there's genetics. There are their life experiences. There are just so many things that are out of your control. That's more about like how they turn out.

Like, you know, do they, do they, do they? Are they using drugs? Are they, you know, like, succeeding in their life? Are they, you know, you, you can't control all of those outcomes. So, I guess for some reason, that brings me peace, you know, just to accept that. 

Zibby: Yeah. How did you pick the drug dealing plot? point. 

Kimberley: I don't know.

I, you know, like, I guess my theaters, I mean, usually the things in my book come from either my personal experience or what would frighten me and that would definitely frighten me. So I think that's where that came from and because I think it's one of those things that like looked at one way. So in the book, Cleo, the daughter is involved in some like drug running on campus.

Um, so there's, you know, it's at least contained in the sense that there's generally not a lot of violence involved, et cetera. But, you know, I, I think that you can see how easy it would be if you're a kid to get into something like that and how it could quickly get out. Of control, but actually in the book is not actually the biggest danger either, which is part of the recurrent theme in the book is that cat is, and I think I have fallen prey to this a lot.

As I have learned one thing my older daughter does, which I wish she would stop doing is to share with me stories about the things she did in high school that I didn't know about. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Kimberley: What are her favorite things to do now? She's like, just tell me a story the other night. She's like, and then this, I'm like, no, I don't know.

Never tell me the story. Because I had no clue it was going on, whatever it was. And obviously, you know, she's fine. She's great. She's doing well now. But like, it's the reality is the things you're worried about. Inevitably, there's something else that you're, that you don't even know what's going on that is actually what you should be worried about.

Zibby: Yes. Then the strategy of, of worrying is just not helping me out as much as I hoped. 

Kimberley: Yeah, exactly. Like just worrying, weirdly, does absolutely nothing. 

Zibby: Yeah, totally. 

Kimberley: Yeah. 

Zibby: Well, tell me a little bit more about the next book. 

Kimberley: Yeah, so my next book is called, at least for now, Someone Else's Husband. 

Zibby: Uh oh. You're going to make everybody very nervous.

Kimberley: Like, it's my husband? Whose husband am I talking about? 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Kimberley: So it's set in New York again, um, which I do like to set, I think all, but like one of my books has been set in New York. But it's got a young woman who I, I climbed Kilimanjaro last year and part of the storyline is, is flashing back to a hiking trip and there was a group of men on the trip with her as a single person.

And then when the book opened, she has been found, she's dead. And he, you know, the, the scenario from the perspective of her in the past and the wife of, uh, one of the men on the trip. So, you know, it's, it's, Ultimately, I, I, it is kind of a love story, um, and so, uh, but it's a complicated, as my books often are, complicated trajectory to get there.

But I got to write a little bit about Kilimanjaro, Klan of Kilimanjaro, which was fun. 

Zibby: What was that like? 

Kimberley: It was incredible. I mean, it was certainly like my own little, like, eat, pray, love moment, but it was, I highly recommend it if you want to step off the face of the earth at some point. It's, um, it's pretty remarkable.

Zibby: Wow. Did you have to train forever and all of that? 

Kimberley: I have trained for a lot of stuff, usually like on an ongoing basis. I had, was training for a half Iron Man at the time. So I was, I had kind of was already in shape. 

Zibby: You just threw it in. You just threw it into the mix. 

Kimberley: Threw it in. But it's actually not, it's actually not that.

It requires a basic level of fitness, but it's not like the hardest part is camping. You camp for eight days on the mountain without showering and without, you don't, you, you don't have to set up your own tent and stuff, luckily, but there's people to help you, but that was the hardest part. I'm not a camper.

So I was very over that by like 24 hours into it. 

Zibby: Gosh. So what advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Kimberley: Let's see, advice for spying on authors, I would definitely get a couple really trusted readers of your work, and not just one, like, it can be a critique group, and that's obviously ideal to give you feedback.

It is impossible to accurately assess your own work in your head, uh, so you do need feedback. But make sure that they're people you trust who will be honest with you, but also productive. I have been in critique groups where there can just be people who are really motivated to show how smart they are, or to, you know, just give feedback, kind of how they would write something rather than helping you be the best writer you can be.

So that is really critical. Also set yourself up so that you can keep at it without giving up. So whatever that means, depending on your life situation, take a job that gives you, You know, be a teacher. So you have summers to write or just know that it could take a really, really long time. It took me writing full, almost full time, a decade and five unpublished books to sell my first, which is reconstructing Amelia.

So that, and I used to be an attorney before that. And so some of the books were written while I was working some not, and you know, it just can take a really long time and a lot of work and some people get lucky quickly, but make sure you give yourself time. To, to really give it a go. 

Zibby: Why did you not give up?

Kimberley: Uh, 'cause I'm an insane person. I , I don't really know , I, no, uh, that's not true. I had destroyed my career. So I had had this really fancy law career. I, you know, worked at one of the best firms in the city and I, once you are a few years away from having given that up, you can't get it back. And so I think that, you know, I also got some early success.

I got an agent and I wrote my first book in a year. And got an agent right away and he owned a book at a big agency and he almost sold that book. Almost like there was an editor who wanted it and she couldn't convince marketing. So when you get early success, I thought, and I was not an English major. I had never written anything.

And so I thought, okay, well, just logically, if I did that in a year, if I keep working, I should get there eventually. So. That was kind of kept me going for a really long time. And then I had destroyed my career. So that I was like, uh, you know, this has got to work. I just put, you know, I doubled down here.

So, but by the end, right before reconstruction, Amelia sold, I had started to look for a job again, because I thought this is not going to work. Cause it was, I was a decade in, I had written all these books. So I finally got my first job offer 24 hours before Amelia went to auction. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Kimberley: And that was working bad.

I graduated from the university. to do Pennsylvania Law School, and it was working back there in their writing department, in their communications department. So I called and said, I have to turn down the job. I sold my book. So it's kind of, it was one of those kind of great kismet kind of stories. Wow. Wow.

That's very inspiring. 

Zibby: It is. No, it is. You know, you just see it. It's never known. 

Kimberley: Well, you know, you worked at it so long too, like it's a, I mean, it's a hard, you have to just, you know, keep at it and keep going, like keep your head down and keep, keep trying to get better. I mean, that, that's like, you just can't keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Those early books. I just want to be clear. It's not like, Oh, poor me. This should have sold. They were not good. They were really, it's like, I wouldn't go back to them. So I do think like you just have to commit yourself to the work and putting the time on. 

Zibby: Love it. Still, it helps to hear from someone else, you know?

Kimberley: Yeah. Do you know how many times now I Google, I'm like, I like Google other writers giving inspiring speeches all the time. Like still, I'm like, all right. Okay. Okay. I'll get back on the worst. So like it's because it, you know, every book is its own problem. Every blank page is, you know, you know, you have to face that each time and start again.

And so it doesn't, you know, you've done it. And so that's easier, right? Like, cause you're like, I've done it. So I surely I can do it again, but you still have to do it again. 

Zibby: Yeah, I know. Where's the shortcut? 

Kimberley: No, I know. Somebody should come up with one. That would be helpful. 

Zibby: That would be, well, I mean, I think they did.

I think it's AI and that's not suitable for us either. That doesn't cut it. Um, well, congratulations. I really enjoyed this book. I really loved all the themes, the suspense, the twist. I mean, all of it, you know, and the setting and the relationships and any book that makes you kind of rethink the relationships the most important to you and think about how you can sort of improve them is, is like a gift, right?

Because it's Thank you. 

Kimberley: I really appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, that's what I hope is that people will just ask them self what themselves what the answers are for in their, you know, like, I don't have the answers, of course, or I hope that I have them for me, maybe, but I do hope it has people ask the questions.

Zibby: Amazing. 

Well, thank you. Congrats. Enjoy the, enjoy the tour and everything else. 

Kimberley: Thank you. Enjoy the summer. 

Zibby: Okay. Bye bye. 

Kimberley: Bye.