Zibby interviews bestselling Israeli author, photojournalist, columnist, and activist Lihi Lapid about her latest novel, ON HER OWN (a tense and immersive psychological read about two families in crisis), and her earlier book, WOMAN OF VALOR, which will soon be published for the first time in the U.S. by our company, Zibby Publishing, with a new title, I WANTED TO BE WONDERFUL! This powerful memoir about motherhood, identity, sacrifice, and raising a daughter with severe autism left a lingering effect on Zibby, leading her to acquire it for her publishing house. Lihi talks about her journey from news photographer to writer, her experience as a mother in the public eye (she is married to the former Prime Minister of Israel), and the courage it took to publish such a vulnerable and honest book. The idea to acquire it came up in this episode and now it's coming out October 21st!!!

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Lihi. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zibby. I'm so excited to talk to you about so many things. 

Lihi: Thank you. 

Zibby: Thank you for coming on Lihi. When we did our event together at Temple Emmanuel, you talked about your first book, Woman of Valor and how that had been a personal book and one that had really taken off, and then you had written your novel, and so I started by reading Woman of Valor and it made me cry. 

Lihi: Ah, wow. 

Zibby: I loved it so much. I. I feel like I need to sit and reread it again just to soak up all of your knowledge and it's like the best book I think I've ever read about marriage and resentment and parenting with children and oh my gosh, it was so good. 

Lihi: Wow. Okay. It's, it's, yeah.

Wow. It's not the book we're, we are scheduled to talk about. 

Zibby: I know. I'm sorry. I got just, I couldn't stop reading it. I just couldn't, I was gonna read a page or two just to be familiar with it, and then I ended up reading the whole thing and I couldn't stop. 

Lihi: Actually it was a very huge bestseller in Israel and I think I wasn't ready for that, so I didn't really try to help it go on outside of Israel, but I do think that it's got a lot of place, really. It was a book that changed something in Israeli society because it was the first time someone very famous talked about being a parent for kids with special needs. So it was a really something.

Very different. So thank you for reminding it and loving it. 

Zibby: No, it was so good. Do you mind telling listeners a little bit, I can summarize it too, but how you ended up writing that book? What do you mean by you are famous? Like just give a little background. 

Lihi: Okay. I'll give a little background. Hi, I am Lihi Lapid and I never thought I would write, actually, I never thought I would write.

I just. I was a news photographer, a tough news photographer with motorbike and short hair, but I married someone that, he's a rider. And he wrote in the newspaper, then he became a politician, but before that, and his father was writing books and writing through the newspaper, and his mother is a very famous author.

So as a young woman, I said, I rather know what they are talking about. Instead of feeling a little bit stupid at dinners. So I went and studied a little bit of literature and few years passed and I became a mother. And then I realized that no newspaper once and news photographer that breastfeed every four hours and on the motorbike, there is no place for baby chair.

And I found myself unemployed, but it's not unemployed as I was left without the thing that I thought all my life I would do, which is photography. It was the thing that I studied, that I did, that I expressed myself through, and then I started writing a book about this change, becoming a mother, becoming a family.

I wrote a book that was never translated or anything, but it started this talk about, we are growing up and they tell us all the time. We can do whatever we want to do. We can be whatever we want to be, and I'm not so sure it's always the truth. We can try and do a lot of things, but I do think that there's a moment in the life of women when they become mothers that something changed.

And it can be a change of what we want to be. Or what happened to me that I couldn't be anymore a news photographer, but I also fell in love with those little babies. It was Lyor and after a year and one month, his sister. And this change is a change that, that I wasn't prepared for because I grew up thinking, being a woman, being a man, what's the difference?

Really? Then I realized that there is a difference, and then the book was published and then I was offered to write a column in the newspaper, which I wrote for 15 years about about family, but about family from the side of a working mother of someone that doesn't give up on herself. And she wants, like our generation, the generation that we can slow down sometimes.

Then we continue to pursue our dreams and our thoughts, and we want to be involved and we're not like giving up on things about life. And then I will say something about Woman of Fallor, which is a book that I wrote it. Actually, after I finished writing it, I tried to censor myself in a lot of things, and I will say something because maybe a lot of people that hear your podcast are writers or want to write, and I went to my mother-in-law that she's a very famous writer, sh.

I told her, listen, I wrote a book and it's too personal and I don't know, do you write the whole truth when you write a book? And she looked at me, this tough woman, and gave me the best advice ever about writing. She said, when you write a book, you write the whole truth and then you erase a little bit.

And I try to erase things that won't embarrass anyone that. And I got to one point that I couldn't erase it, one paragraph, and I decided that the book won't be published because it was too exposing to have it published and to publish it without this paragraph, I felt that it's not the truth anymore.

I can quote the paragraph at the end after a year and a half. I sat with my husband, with your ear, and I told him, listen, I have to publish this book. And he said, you know what it means to the exposure. Are you sure you are ready for that? It's, and I said, yes and we gathered the family and decides that the book is being published and the paragraph goes like that.

I come one day to pick up my daughter from kindergarten. And the teacher says that something is wrong. I tell her that we already paid attention and we scheduled with an ear doctor because she doesn't respond like all the other kids. As time passes by, we make a lot of noise and she doesn't respond, and we ask everybody that knows.

Everybody that strongs us and know things and we realize maybe it's not just the ears. And at the crucial night before the ear exam, I pray all night and I don't sleep. I pray that I will have a deaf child. I wanted a deaf child because other, all other possibilities were so much more. Frightening. And our daughter, yeah, El is 27.

She's autistic with severe autism. It was heartbreaking at the beginning. It's very, really it's not easy. And I crashed and everything but at the end, she changed our life. She taught us a huge lesson about love and about family and about, and for me, about being a mother. So woman of Valerie is about.

Really this move between being a nice couple with dreams and things and being, be becoming a family that surrounds a girl with special needs. She's 27 now. Yeah. And she's still doesn't talk, but she started writing a little bit award here and there. Which is really opening our hearts and lives for her soul.

And it's a huge journey. So thank you so much for saying something about this book. It's really in my heart. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. That scene that you mentioned, like I kept tearing up reading the book and you have a scene later where you talk, I think to your mom. Or no, it was your dad who had never said to you that you were a good mom.

And you said finally after a couple years, you just asked him, why me? Why did this happen to me? Why did this happen to my daughter? And he said, because you were the one who was supposed to do this. This is what you were made for and you were such a good mom and how that got to your heart so much.

And it's so much just so moving, so much, it's so moving and you're like, I didn't think anyone even noticed all my effort. And I feel like that's one of the through lines of this book is you tried so hard and I feel like so many of us just try so hard. And how sometimes all the trying gets in the way of the bigger picture and then we lose ourselves in what we wanted.

And by the time you get to the end of the book and even your relationship. And you find yourself a little bit enough to go on a date with your husband, and then I was like then what happens? 

Lihi: Yeah. Yeah. I think this line between giving all of ourselves to our family, to the people that need us and between keeping some of ourselves to ourselves is a line that we need to balance. All the time. I can tell you something about about the fact that we know that a lot of parents of kids with disabilities are getting divorced.

Because it's such a huge burden on the family, on, on who's in charge, who's paying a bigger price, and the sadness and everything. And that was part of why I wrote this book, in order to hug other families that are going through and to tell them that. It's very difficult at the beginning, but at the end, not at the end.

There's a moment you need to choose. I remember sitting with your ear, like you say, on a date and going on a date, asking questions about our love. Do we love each other? If we didn't have those kids, if it, if you weren't married already. Would you go on a date with me? Would I go on a date with you? And I think we need to make sure that this, the answer for that is yes, and we need to take time in our lives to have those dates to to continue thinking about us as a couple and not just as mother and father for the same kids. And yeah, you looked at me at that time and said, this house needs to be a happy house. This home need to be happy again. And that was my main target to have this house happy for the other kids that lives in it for us as a couple and also for Yael because she really feels if the house is stressed and sad or happy and just hugging her.

Zibby: Oh, so beautiful. Can I read a passage that I like screenshotted? Is that okay? Can I read it? Yeah, no, I know we were supposed to talk about something else, but I'm. Just over the moon. Obsessed with this book. There are so many passages. Oh, this is another, I mean there are so many I could read. This is one where you talk about bonding with the other parents of special needs kids.

You say, I was thinking about what the group fci. So you were in a small group and the facilitator got you all together. This is the first time you really connected with other parents who had, who have special needs kids. And he had asked you. To go around and talk about your hobbies, which of course is a joke because nobody had any time and all of your emotions were fried and everything.

So you say, I was thinking about what the group facilitator asked us about hobbies, and I remembered that once I had dreams, not just about children, not just about my baby girl, once before everything came crashing down. Before nights turned into days before teachers filled the house and worked with her in her room, and my man and I sat on the other side of the closed door listening to her cry, torn apart by how difficult it is for her.

And I curled up in the circle of my beloved man's embrace, wanting to scream and wanting only to wake up from this nightmare. And I remembered that before all of this, before this dizzying cycle of awful exhaustion and anger and heart wrenching sorrow, I had dreams about myself. Dreams that I hadn't dared dream for a long time, that I was ashamed to dream because how could I even dare to want something for myself when I was supposed to think only about her.

And I started realizing that if I didn't have dreams to escape to, I would fall apart. 

Lihi: Thank you for this paragraph for reading it. 

Zibby: It's so beautiful. Wait, one more. Hold on. 

Lihi: I'm just saying for the people that are joining us really, that we were supposed to talk about another book. 

Zibby: I'm sorry.

Lihi: No. You don't need, it's I think that the fact that this book, that my previous book got into your heart, that's the truth of the thing. Wow. It's ama it's a, it's really so strong for me to come back to it now. Try to, I wrote it when she was like 12. It took me few years to publish it because I was so afraid.

And now to read for you to read it when she's 27 and I know who she is and and you know what, like you said before, so many years passed and I fulfilled a lot of dreams that I almost gave up on them, but I could do them a few years later, which is amazing. Thank you. Yeah. I want to read the other paragraph for you to read.

Zibby: Oh, okay. Okay. The other paragraph, and then I promise I'll ask you about your new book. This is you write a lot about. Comparison. And you actually have a foil for your own family with this prince and princess after the fairytale, which is so interesting how you set that up and then how they end up connecting later.

I was like, that's genius. Okay. And you always think like her life is better and then you. Talk. Here, I'll just start. One evening. It's her turn to host the girls night out and they arrive. All her girlfriends, all of those who never stop, who keep constantly moving on in the race, working and growing.

One is a psychologist, one is a doctor, and one is a teacher. Without even noticing, they scatter around stories of success, of achievements, of failures, of struggles, of an exciting life, of wild, unapologetic. Shopping sprees that they don't have to justify to anyone of exhilarating trips abroad. And all the while they compliment her on her lovely palace, her tidy children and her tasty dishes, compliments that until recently were her adequate compensation, a source of pride and satisfaction, a sense of achievement and success, and suddenly seemed to her like empty shells.

This palace, which she licks clean the children whom she nurtures, the dishes that she cooks, all these things that she puts her heart and soul into, that she dedicates all her time to suddenly seems so unimportant. Yes. Okay. The house is clean, there's hot food, and the children are attended to. But they don't seem much happier than her friend's, children and not much more successful than them.

She who had no less potential than them, if not more, who was supposed to PR around the world wearing designer gowns who was supposed to buy whatever she felt like buying, who was destined for greatness and success is now receiving compliments on her clean house. On her cooking and now these compliments of theirs insult her, anger her.

She feels as though she doesn't deserve compliments. She hasn't achieved anything unique. She knows that each and every one of her friends could have a house like this, where they sitting at home all day looking at clean, and she can no longer lie to herself. She can no longer say to herself that she's happy, that she's content, that she's doing the most important thing in the world.

Wow. Wow. You should go reread this book. Yeah. Yeah. I'll, it's so powerful. So you wrote this book, in the book, you write about writing another book. What book was that? Because you carve out the time with all your might to find the moments in your crazy life to write and how important writing itself is to you.

And then you get published and it's a bestseller. And is that the book that wasn't translated? 

Lihi: Yeah. It was the first book that was yeah, that wasn't that was, yeah, that changed. The first one changed my life because I be, became a writer, with a column in the newspaper. It's a big newspaper.

I can tell you that when they offered me the column, of course, they said, wow, you wrote woman's book, so we want to offer you a woman's. Column. So we need recipes and we need tips for the, and I said, but I dunno how to cook. I'm burning also salads. And then I realized that's what they want.

And it was a moment, it was also a, it was a moment in my life that I drove home and I said. Are you really gonna write a column for the newspaper with tips that you don't have and recipes when you dunno how to cook? And another voice in me said They're offering you a page in the most read newspaper in Israel.

You're taking it and you will make it what you want. Of it to be. And I gathered all my friends, all my girlfriends, and I said, each one of you gives me her best recipe, her most simple, easy to make recipe. And I started with recipes. And at the end, it was 15 years that I wrote at the end, whatever I wanted about life in Israel, about.

Things like that. And it was, I'm very happy I did it. It really changed my life writing a column. 

Zibby: Wow. And then you include a lot of the questions that came into the column, which are also beautiful. Okay. So then what happened? When did you write this book and tell listeners about your, like this book and everything.

Lihi: Okay so I wrote 15 years, my column, and then I was fired from the column in the newspaper because. My husband is a politician and to be a well, it got too complicated. And then I said, okay, now I don't have any other excuse why I don't write another novel. And I talked to a friend of mine that we tried to write something for tv, which didn't work out, and she said, do you have any story?

And I said, yes. I have a story about an old woman going down the stairs at the middle of the night, and on the stairwell, it's old Aviv, old building. There's a girl named Nina, 18-year-old that runs away from home and from bed. People that are chasing her with her mini skirt, torn. She's hiding there when this old woman opens the light and looks at her and says, Donna, my Donna, you came back for me.

But she's Nina. She's not Dana. And she goes to live with this old woman, Carmela, trying to be her granddaughter that lives far away in America. And I had this beginning of a story, and she just SMS me every day, not every day, every two weeks. What's happening with Nina and Carmela, my friend, that she's the editor, and.

And I told her I don't have time to write. Always here in Israel are politics and elections all the time and things happening. And then she said it was much before the war and she said one day she text me and she said, I will never ask about them if you won't write them. They will stay in the stairwell in Tel Aviv and.

And then I couldn't leave them there, so I started writing them like I didn't have any other choice. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. So then how long did you spend on this book? 

Lihi: I spent I think two years. I spent on this book, it, I needed, there are few subjects that are rising in this book. One, one. So first of all is the thing that there's a family, an Israeli family that the son lives?

In America, which my brother lived for 30 years in LA. So it's really, I saw my parents seeing their grandchildren growing up speaking a language that is very hard for my parents. My parents are simple people with a store and they don't speak great English. So it was very difficult for them to be to see grandkids that they can't really be there for them because they're very close to my kids and my sister kids and the kids in America, their grandkids in America.

It was, and I thought more and more families are having this, having grandchildren far away. Outside of their state or country and how do you keep a family strong together? How you keep a family happy and loving even when people live far away. I see a lot of Jews in America that their kids decided to do Aliyah to Israel.

To Israel and suddenly they're very far away and how do you keep it? And I think in this global world that a lot of kids are, a lot of adult kids are doing relocation and things like that and live far away from their parents. So after so many years, I wrote about. What we owe our kids how to be a wonderful mother or a good enough mother.

I wrote about, do our kids owe us something? What can we ask them? Can we ask them to be there when we grow older and watch us? And how do we do it? And what about their dreams? So in a way it started from that, but I needed to do a lot of research about there's a little bit of the things of the dimension there about the mother that is slowly forgetting things.

And I think one of the most strong things that happened to me was the book that, that it was being published, was published in Israel and it was a success. But when Harper's Colons, which is a very distinguished publishing house in America decided that they want to publish it. I was very happy.

But it was out at the middle of the war. It's March of 24, and when it went out, I was, I said to myself, wow, it's such a bad time for an Israeli book to be published. And also, I remember when the publishing house wanted. A store to do, to find a store in Manhattan, to have me, to have some kind of party and no bookstore wanted to host us because it was really, I think they were afraid of riots and it took us time to understand that.

That's the reason we can't find any store of books in, in Manhattan to do it. And. But then I thought about the fact that in this book, the old woman lost her son at war 30 years ago, and I thought that there is something in the way the book is written. I. Like it's about a family. And the thing that I think gets out the most in this book is that for Israel is a soldier is not a war machine.

It's not someone that dreamt of being ramble. Okay? It's not in Israel. A soldier is our son that got to the age of 18 and needs to go and defend his country and some of them dies. Or being killed. And I think this book really gives the, this notion of it's just a child that went one day to the Army and didn't come back and for this book to be published after the 7th of October was so strong that know not a lot of people that are either are not Jewish will read it, but I think whoever will read it will get this notion of what it is to be.

An Israeli mom that sends her son to the army. I remember this when my Stanley or was 18, and it did to go to the Army and he wanted to be a fighter. And I said to myself, if something happens to him, I have only my daughter that I, I need to take care of her and if something happens to him, no one will take care of me.

And I said, it's such a request from a country to ask us, the mothers to hand our kids. And I think it's it's something that we Israeli moms we hardly think about. Because it's so difficult. I'll tell you something. When my son was in the army and he was a fighter, I went to visit him in all kind of bases around Israel and everything, and my mother-in-law said If you are already, go there.

Write a book. So I wrote a book called Being a Soldier's Mom, A wonderful book with a lot of tips and a lot of things. No one bought this book. No one. It was a huge failure. And we sat at the publishing house trying to figure out what's hap, what happened. Like every book I, and then I said, listen, no.

Israeli mom wants a book named Bing. A soldier's mom next to her bed. It's too frightening. We just want those three years. To pass and for him to come back home safe and healthy. And we don't need, we can't think about it every minute because we'll go insane. And especially after this horrible year.

Oh my gosh. 

Zibby: That he, you wrote such a beautiful short piece for Our Anthology on being Jewish now about exactly this, which is so powerful, and your thoughts on the subject are so profound and so relatable, and just cut to the core of the most vulnerable moments of being a mother or a parent, but particularly a mother.

And to give voice to all of that in all these different forms is. It's like plucking a, an un, an unheard string or something, right? It's something that deep down and resonates. 

Lihi: I wanted to really thank you for the opportunity to be. On being Jewish now in the anthology and giving the voice of an Israeli mom inside of it and especially at that time.

So it's a big honor and every week that I see that more people are reading it and buying it and it, I'll tell you something. We met in New York in an evening in the morning that you did for the anthology. And I had something that I felt all those days that I was there that for many years Israelis were very sub, we have those we are a little bit arrogant.

We don't need anybody. We are okay. We Israelis, we, and on the other hand, I felt that the Americans said, Jews in America said there is Israel. It's okay. After 7th of October, everything changed. I think we, Israelis, we were suddenly, we needed so much the support of Jews in America and around the world.

Every post that someone wrote about strengthening Israel and believing us and supporting us was so important. And people that came to visit, and I think also from America and jews in America felt that Israel needs them a little bit more than they thought before. And I think that it's a horrible year and a half.

But this, what happened was that the bond between Jews in Israel and Jews in America and around the world became so much stronger. And it's really amazing that something like woke up in this relationship that were like too obvious for all of us and suddenly we're just like husband and wife.

Yeah.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Lihi, thank you for coming on. I could talk to you all day and thank you for going back in time and reliving a moment that has passed so long ago because it is a timeless story in women of Alor and your latest book too and everything. So thank you so much. 

Lihi: Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you Zibby. Really thank you. Hope for better days and for all the hostage to be home between now that we talk and until it'll be aired. Thank you much. 

Zibby: That would be amazing. Much thank you.