Will Schwalbe, THE END OF YOUR LIFE BOOK CLUB
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the web-enominated podcast Moms Don't Have Time
[0:13]to Read Books. This episode has been sponsored by Lauren Gabriellesson, which is a women's
[0:17]where brand that creates elevated essentials for the modern women's wardrobe. The collection
[0:22]is entirely designed and produced in Brooklyn, New York. The Lauren Gabriellesson woman values
[0:27]quality versatile pieces that she can wear every day that are customized to her body,
[0:31]her time, and her style. And by the way, I have two Lauren Gabriellesson headbands,
[0:36]which I wear all the time, and you can see in my photos on my events page because I wear
[0:41]them everywhere, and they're amazing and actually my six-year-old daughter steals mine all the time.
[0:46]So anyway, Lauren Gabriellesson.com. I am so excited to be interviewing Will Schwalby, who is the
[0:52]New York Times best-selling author of the end of your life book club and books for living. Some thoughts
[0:57]on reading, reflecting, and embracing life. He wrote his first book, Send Why People Email So Badly
[1:02]and How to Do It Better with David Shipley. The former editor and chief of Hyperion Books,
[1:07]Will Founded Cookster in 2008, which is now part of McMillan Publishers, where he currently works
[1:12]as EVP of editorial development and content innovation. Will is a host of podcast, but that's another
[1:18]story with Will Schwalby, originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Yale University.
[1:23]He currently lives with his husband in New York City. Welcome, Will. Thanks so much for coming on
[1:27]Mom's time to read books. Thank you, Ziggy. Thank you so much for having me. So,
[1:32]books for living. Please tell listeners what this book is about and what inspired you to write it.
[1:37]So, books for living is about 26 books that I read over the course of my entire life that taught
[1:44]me something or showed me something or gave me an insight to help me live life in a more
[1:49]purposeful, meaningful way. And one of the things I really wanted to do with books for living
[1:55]is not put together a kind of canon of the greatest books that everybody must read,
[2:00]but show the way that really any kind of book can be a book for living if it's the book you need
[2:05]to read at the time it finds you. And I love how you started with the story of sitting next to a
[2:09]Navy SEAL in an airplane and swapping books and tell me that story. Oh, yeah. I see. It was a West Point
[2:14]cadet. Oh, I'm sorry. It was a point cadet. I'm sorry. And we were, it was funny. We were on a plane
[2:21]together. Actually, there's a little bit of backstory, which I don't think I included in the book.
[2:25]Which was this was an olden days before electronic tickets. So we had been bumped from a previous
[2:32]flight and they said you have to take the next flight. We're going to put you on first class,
[2:37]but we only have one ticket stock left. So the two of you have to stay together. You have to
[2:42]spend all your time together in the airport and you have to spend all your time together in the
[2:45]lounge and you can't leave each other side. So I had an enormous amount of time in which the chat
[2:51]with this West Point cadet. And it turned out he was really interested in books and he
[2:56]wanted to be asking me for, as a gift to him, a list of books that I thought he should read to help
[3:01]him in life. And in return, he gave me his West Point cadet baseball cap, which I still have to
[3:07]this day. Oh, that's so nice. Oh my gosh. You had so many amazing passages in this book about reading.
[3:13]And I am an avid reader and loved hearing all the things you had to say. One of them, you said,
[3:18]in one of them, you said, I'm not the same reader when I finished a book as I was when I started,
[3:23]brains are a tangle of pathways and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life. So I
[3:27]like to ask, how is this book changing mine? They talk to me about this approach to reading.
[3:32]Well, it's really taking up the ancient Greek philosophical statement. You can never step in the
[3:37]same river twice. And what does that mean? It means the river is different, of course, because
[3:43]it's flowing by you. But you are different. The person who steps again in the river is a different
[3:48]person from the person who stepped in the river before. And I try to carry that philosophy
[3:54]throughout all my life and just think, how are things changing me? But books are like a controlled
[3:59]change experiment. And you can really think on page one, what kinds of things do I believe? Who am I?
[4:06]What do I think about the topic of this book? What do I think about characters? Like the ones I'm
[4:10]just about to encounter if it's a novel. And then halfway through, you said yourself, has my opinion
[4:16]changed? Do I see this person differently? Do I see people differently? What kinds of insights
[4:22]have I gained? And what else has happened to me in life over the last week, days, hours, whatever it
[4:30]is that has changed how I'm approaching this book. And I really believe that reading is growing.
[4:38]Reading is living. And there was something my mother would never say to us when we were growing up.
[4:44]And she would never say, why don't you put down that book and do something? Because reading is
[4:50]doing something. It's expanding your consciousness. And that's kind of what I meant about. I'm not
[4:56]the same reader at the end of a book as I was at the beginning. I'm not even the same reader on
[5:02]page two as I was on page one. I love that. Recently I reread a book that I had read 20 years ago.
[5:07]And I feel like that was also thinking about how much as a reader I've changed for the book
[5:12]stays the same, but you read it in a whole new way from a different point of view in your own life.
[5:16]You really do. And I think part of that is the experiences you bring, but part of it is age.
[5:21]There's, as you know, because you've read books for living, I'm obsessed with this writer,
[5:26]Lin Yu Tang. And I quote him throughout. And a Chinese writer who published in the 1930s
[5:31]about called The Importance of Living. But he has a passage that I just love where he says,
[5:37]when you read a book as a young person, it's like seeing the moon through a keyhole.
[5:45]And when you read a book as a middle-aged person, it's like seeing the moon through a crack
[5:50]in the door. But when you read a book as an older person, it's like seeing the moon when you're
[5:55]standing out on a terrace with nothing between you and what you're looking at.
[5:59]That just gave me goosebumps. I love that. Oh my gosh, that's really beautiful.
[6:04]You also talk in your book about how reading makes you feel less alone, which is something you
[6:08]do by yourself. You said one of the few things you do alone that can make you feel less alone.
[6:12]It's a solitary activity that connects you to others. And you point out in the book,
[6:16]why this is so important in today's hyper-connected world to feel connected through words.
[6:21]So tell me more about that. Well, I think it's one of the things that makes you feel less alone.
[6:26]And I'll go into that a couple, because I'm in a couple of different things by that. But I also
[6:30]am on a little bit of a crusade to rebrand reading. And I have this thing. I want to call reading
[6:36]radical listening. Love it. Because I really think that now more than ever we need to listen to one
[6:43]another. All you need to do is turn on cable news, any channel, and you will hear a bunch of people
[6:50]who are not listening to each other. And there's a quote that I love, which is, and it was not
[6:56]meant as a compliment, was the opposite of talking is not listening. It's waiting for your turn to
[7:03]talk. And I think that's how a lot of people approach listening. It's just simply waiting for
[7:09]their turn to talk, whereas books can be radical listening. And what I mean by radical listening is
[7:16]the person put down the words on the page. You have no choice if you're going to read it, but to
[7:21]hear them out, hear their argument, sure, you could skip ahead and hop around. But basically,
[7:25]you're going to have to engage with what they want you to hear. You can argue with them. It's not
[7:31]going to change the words on the page. You can scream at them, not going to change the words on the
[7:34]page. You can throw the book across the room. Still not going to change the words on the page.
[7:38]So you kind of have to put aside your ego, your prejudices, your thoughts, enough when you read
[7:46]to take in what someone else has to say. And that's a powerful thing in our lives today because we
[7:54]don't always do it when we're not reading. In fact, we rarely do it. So interesting. I'm going to
[7:59]join your crusade. If you need someone to carry part of that banner on your march, I will pick up a
[8:04]corner. I love mom. I'm going to talk about radical listening crusade. Radical listening crusade.
[8:10]I love that. That's so nice. I wonder if there could be a study of some sort of like
[8:16]do narcissists read less? Or is there a personality type? Or do you notice it? Like, is there a personality?
[8:25]People who feel compelled to talk or do they approach reading in a different way?
[8:30]No. I actually think, you know, if we if we wanted anecdotal evidence, I would say that our
[8:36]president provides that not a big reader, big talker. And I'll just leave it at that.
[8:42]Okay, we'll move on. In the book you mentioned that there's some questions we should be asking each
[8:48]other more such as what are you reading? And would you like, would you care for a nap?
[8:54]Yes, those are my my two favorite questions or two of my favorite questions. Why I think we should
[8:59]ask people, what are you reading more? Is because it's it's a wonderful way of saying to someone
[9:08]I want to know more about who you are, but not in a very intrusive way. You know, I think there
[9:14]are a lot of reasons for not accosting each other with questions that we may think are perfectly
[9:20]innocent in one sense, but but can be judge defensive in another. A simple question like where are
[9:26]you from? Can take on a very hostile or minimizing tone in certain circumstances. It's not
[9:33]it's not always a great question to ask. In fact, often it isn't. But what are you reading is a terrific
[9:39]question or are you a reader? And if so, what are you reading? And what's amazing is how often I think
[9:45]in life we judge people and we assume things about them and we assume for example, oh, that person
[9:50]is not a reader. Well, how do we know? And it's a marvelous question and I love asking it because
[9:55]I'm almost always surprised. I am connected to my tribe.
[10:00]I've been there, there are people, and they say,
[10:01]yes, I'm so glad you asked that,
[10:03]and I'm reading this from that,
[10:04]or no, I haven't had much time recently for this ad,
[10:06]but when I was a kid, I loved to read Harry Potter,
[10:10]or no, I'm not, but you know, my dad is a huge reader,
[10:14]or, you know, no shame in it,
[10:16]no, not really reader,
[10:17]and then I can say,
[10:17]see, in any good movies lately, are you a sports fan?
[10:20]I mean, it's just going on to someone's interests,
[10:22]and trying to find ways to connect.
[10:24]But when you find a reader, it's really powerful,
[10:28]and there's a story that happened to me,
[10:32]which is, I was talking to someone who was writing an article
[10:37]on books and reading, and she was interviewing me,
[10:39]and I mentioned this question, this power,
[10:41]what are you reading?
[10:42]And I said, I gave her a challenge.
[10:43]I said, when you leave the restaurant today,
[10:46]how are you getting home?
[10:47]And she said, I'm taking a taxi,
[10:49]and I said to her, ask the taxi driver, what are you reading?
[10:53]Okay, goes off in the taxi, she calls me later.
[10:57]She said, you can't believe what happened.
[10:59]What happened?
[11:00]I said to the taxi driver, what are you reading?
[11:02]And she told me, he was so overcome with emotion
[11:05]that he almost had to pull over.
[11:07]And he said that he was a professor,
[11:09]I think it was from Greece,
[11:10]and he'd been driving a cab to make it in New York,
[11:13]and no one ever asked him what he was reading.
[11:15]They just made assumptions about him,
[11:16]oh, he's a taxi driver.
[11:17]They asked him, where's the best Greek food,
[11:19]or where are you from, what he got super tired of?
[11:22]And he was reading all sorts of things,
[11:24]and he was just delighted to talk,
[11:26]and he looks with her, and in fact,
[11:27]she wound up writing that,
[11:28]and it became one of those little stories
[11:29]in metropolitan diary in the New York Times.
[11:32]So to me, that's the power of what are you reading?
[11:34]I love that.
[11:35]And the power of napping, you also mentioned,
[11:37]and it's a really big thing.
[11:38]And you point out, too, that we put our computers to sleep,
[11:42]and yet we don't put ourselves to sleep,
[11:44]and that they get the breaks,
[11:45]but we don't, and the irony of that.
[11:47]Exactly, exactly.
[11:48]We're on all the time, but we let our computers dose.
[11:52]Napping, Marvelous, and I had real fun writing about
[11:56]the joy that certain readers, like myself,
[11:59]get from napping and reading and reading and napping
[12:02]and napping and reading,
[12:02]and just spending a whole day kind of
[12:04]groggily waking up, reading a chapter,
[12:07]going back to sleep, waking up, reading another chapter.
[12:10]And what's marvelous about that is your subconscious
[12:12]gets to work, and you find yourself
[12:15]inserted into the books you're reading.
[12:17]And when you dream, you dream yourself
[12:20]with those characters, or in those settings,
[12:22]you're on the moors with Heathcliff and Weathering Heights,
[12:25]it's so fun.
[12:26]So I highly, I'm a huge napping fan,
[12:28]but the napping reading combo can't be beat.
[12:31]That's awesome, I love that.
[12:33]You wrote really beautifully about your relationship
[12:35]with the librarian at your boarding school Ms. Locke,
[12:38]and how she perhaps intentionally,
[12:41]perhaps not affected the whole trajectory of your life,
[12:43]and how you felt accepted at the time.
[12:45]Tell me a little more about your relationship with her,
[12:47]and what she did that was so great.
[12:49]So, yes, I was incredibly lucky.
[12:52]I went to an Episcopal boarding school
[12:55]in Concord, New Hampshire, and I generally really liked it.
[12:59]In fact, I loved it.
[13:00]Not was a pretty happy outgoing kid,
[13:02]but it was the late 70s, and very soon I realized,
[13:06]I had realized all along that I was gay,
[13:07]but I started to admit it to myself.
[13:10]And the news was just filled with horrible things
[13:12]at that time.
[13:13]That was Anita Bryant's crusade against gay people.
[13:16]And that was when Harvey Milk and Mayor Muscone
[13:19]were shot to death and the person who assassinated them
[13:22]was sentenced to only months in prison
[13:24]on what was called the Twinkie Defense.
[13:26]He said he'd had so many Twinkies to eat
[13:28]that he had too much sugar in his body.
[13:30]And at my boarding school of 500 kids
[13:32]and 100 faculty members,
[13:33]there was no out gay student or faculty member
[13:36]and never had been.
[13:38]So it was happy in one sense
[13:41]and incredibly isolating on the other.
[13:43]And when I was feeling low or just in need of some solitude,
[13:48]I would go into the library almost always the same time
[13:50]in the afternoons.
[13:52]And there I would find Ms. Locke,
[13:54]who was the school librarian, who was a fantastic figure.
[13:58]And she would make these special brownies that she had.
[14:02]And one day I walked in and Ms. Locke wasn't there
[14:06]and the library cart was where it always was
[14:08]in front of her desk.
[14:09]And I noticed that there was a book.
[14:13]And I sort of knew she knew when I usually came in
[14:17]and I suspected that book was for me.
[14:21]So I read that book and she would leave various books for me.
[14:26]And one of them was Giovanni's room by James Baldwin.
[14:30]And this is a book about a young man named David
[14:35]who goes to Paris and falls in love
[14:38]with a young man named Giovanni.
[14:40]And it's a very dark book.
[14:42]Things do not end well.
[14:44]But there are these glorious scenes
[14:47]that show two men in love
[14:49]as they're walking down the Shamsa Lisei throwing strawberries
[14:51]and I think it was Cherry's cherries and each other's mouths.
[14:54]And it really showed me a vision of a life
[14:58]that I had not been able to imagine myself,
[15:00]a life that could be lived without dread.
[15:03]And so I don't quite say that book saved my life
[15:07]because I think that's over dramatic,
[15:08]but it saved the life I have.
[15:10]It showed me a vision of a life that I could live.
[15:13]And I always have this intense gratitude for Ms. Lock
[15:17]and as I write in books for living,
[15:19]I did go back at reunions and tell her
[15:22]how much she meant to me and what she done for me,
[15:24]but I don't think I did it enough
[15:26]or to the extent that I showed up.
[15:29]So in some ways I really wanted to put that chapter
[15:32]in this book as a thank you to Ms. Lock.
[15:35]Did she read it?
[15:36]No, she's lost here, been long.
[15:37]No, I'm sorry.
[15:39]Yes, she died of ALS.
[15:41]Oh, God.
[15:42]And she left what a legacy.
[15:43]I mean, when I meet other people who went to my school
[15:46]and was co-ed, Girls and Boys, now women and men,
[15:49]one of the things that go, oh, Ms. Lock,
[15:50]they're like, she had such an impact on so many people.
[15:53]So it's also not just a thank you to her,
[15:56]but it's kind of a love letter to school librarians.
[15:59]It's so nice.
[16:00]Oh my gosh.
[16:02]You wrote in books for living about your experience
[16:05]answering phones at the price of gay men's health crisis
[16:10]during the beginning of the whole AIDS epidemic.
[16:13]And it just talks to me about that.
[16:15]I had not read anybody's account
[16:17]of sort of that particular,
[16:18]like your particular point of view was so interesting
[16:21]that you, well, anyway, just tell me about it.
[16:23]Not so much.
[16:24]It was a pretty awful time.
[16:26]I mean, when I look back now,
[16:28]I knew how awful it was when we were going through it.
[16:30]I actually had no illusions about that,
[16:32]but I'm just still stunned about how unprecedentedly awful
[16:38]it was.
[16:39]And so in the early 80s, when AIDS started to hit,
[16:49]and the first time I read about it,
[16:52]there was a small number of men gay men affected.
[16:55]It was in the New York Times.
[16:57]Within a couple of years,
[16:57]the number still was 1,112 and counting,
[17:01]according to the famous Larry Kramer article
[17:03]in the New York native,
[17:04]which for a gay man living in New York was a staggering number,
[17:07]but for the rest of the country really didn't care.
[17:10]I mean, it was happening to gay men and who cared.
[17:13]But I felt deeply the need to do something.
[17:15]I also had a boyfriend who it became clear to me had died of AIDS
[17:20]and somewhat out of altruism,
[17:24]but more just to stave off panic,
[17:26]because there was no test for AIDS,
[17:28]no one knew how caused it.
[17:30]No HIV hadn't been discovered.
[17:33]Actually, in the first, it wasn't even called AIDS.
[17:34]It was called gay related immune deficiency,
[17:37]I think GRID Grid.
[17:38]And so I started working at the hotline
[17:41]in the just founded GMHC.
[17:44]We were working out of a single room
[17:46]in a townhouse in Chelsea.
[17:49]I would go to the hotline and spend hours there.
[17:52]I was still in college at the time.
[17:54]This was on summer breaks or vacations.
[17:57]While at college, I worked in AIDS Project,
[17:59]New Haven, doing the hotline.
[18:01]And just received one unimaginably horrible call
[18:05]after another.
[18:06]And they were literally calls like,
[18:09]my lover is in bed, he's dead.
[18:13]I'm lying next to him.
[18:14]I cannot get any funeral home to come and take his body away.
[18:18]And I would have a list of,
[18:20]well, I have a couple funeral homes
[18:22]who can try this one, you can try that one.
[18:24]Good luck.
[18:25]People being thrown out of their homes,
[18:27]people losing their jobs.
[18:28]And just people in despair,
[18:31]maybe because of someone they lost,
[18:33]maybe because they had just been diagnosed
[18:35]or this group who had worried themselves sick,
[18:39]many was very good reason.
[18:41]And it was pretty shattering to sort of sit there
[18:44]and take call after call after call after call.
[18:46]And we had some information, but not much.
[18:50]And that was a very formative experience in my life.
[18:56]It was, as someone else described it,
[19:00]like we were at war and everybody around us was at peace.
[19:03]And you would then leave the Chelsea townhouse
[19:07]and get on the subway and go somewhere else
[19:09]where there was a party or a show.
[19:12]And you would come from a battle zone
[19:14]and these people didn't even know it existed.
[19:17]And the city wasn't doing anything.
[19:20]The president of the country, years into AIDS,
[19:23]had never said the word AIDS.
[19:25]And we later found out when he did talk about it
[19:27]was only to laugh about it and cry about it.
[19:29]And so yeah, it was a horror.
[19:32]And one of the things that I wanted to put this down
[19:37]for lots of reasons.
[19:38]One of them was I think when people who didn't live through it
[19:43]look back on it, they don't realize the span of time.
[19:47]They don't realize the decade that we lived
[19:50]with friends dying left and right,
[19:52]while nobody knew anything.
[19:54]Act up came later.
[19:56]Anti-retrovirals came later.
[19:58]But there was almost...
[20:00]to decade of living in this environment and also living as a young man.
[20:05]I was right out of college, I was in college, really believing with fairly decent
[20:11]evidence that it was likely I wouldn't live to 30.
[20:14]One other thing I want to say about that is, and this is the context I wrote in books
[20:19]for living about it, is a lot has been said quite rightly about the writers that we lost
[20:24]and we lost so many great writers to AIDS, but I wanted to talk about the readers we
[20:29]lost because we lost hundreds of thousands of readers and so when we read, I feel
[20:37]like I'm not just reading for myself, I'm reading for them, I'm reading for people
[20:41]who aren't here to read anymore.
[20:44]I could sit here and listen to you all day, you were like, I see why your books are
[20:47]so, you are the consummate storyteller, every question is like a well-crafted, no it's
[20:52]true, I'm like, well can I ask you next?
[20:56]So my storyteller, I think there are times when people are dinner parties are like, can we
[21:00]tell them a little time out?
[21:02]Oh my gosh, no, come to my dinner parties, I love it, well tell me a little more now about
[21:07]the writing side, because books for living, it's really a memoir you talk about all these
[21:12]important things in your life and your loss of your friend, David Bear, what you were
[21:16]about so beautifully and all these other milestones and experiences and yet you, the lens
[21:22]through H.U.P. Rotate was books that can see if we can help other people.
[21:28]So tell me about, and your first book of course was amazing the end of your life book
[21:32]club where you share books with your mother as she's dying, talk to me about these books,
[21:39]this book in particular and what made you write it in this way and like your whole writing
[21:44]process.
[21:45]Well it's so funny too, you really picked up on exactly what I wanted to do, but both
[21:49]for living is a bit of a fake out because the end of your life book club about the books
[21:54]I read with my mom when she was dying in pancreatic cancer is really about celebrating
[21:59]life and living each day with joy and purpose even though she was dying and books for
[22:04]living is a memoir, it's it is disguised, it's a memoir and it is a memoir about living each
[22:15]day more purposefully and with more meaning as a tribute to those we've loved who aren't
[22:19]here to live anymore.
[22:20]But I also wanted to inspire other people to do their own books for living and sort
[22:25]of put it forward is a way of understanding your life and to remember your life through
[22:29]the books you read to give you inside at the moments you needed the most and to say
[22:33]people it can be any kind of a book, it can be a mystery novel, I read about the girl
[22:37]on the train, it can be a children's book, I read about Stuart Little, it can be a
[22:41]cut book, I read about a taste of country cooking by Edna Lewis, it just whatever books
[22:45]they are but not just as a kind of log but really a bad way of conjuring your whole life
[22:53]and the way books getting back to what we talked about earlier connect you to people
[22:57]but they connect you to people also who are no longer here.
[23:01]When you read a book that you know someone loved who's dead it brings them back or when
[23:06]you read a book that you think a friend who's no longer here might have liked or parent
[23:11]or sibling or whoever you've lost it allows you to be in a kind of dialogue with them.
[23:17]So when I was writing I found the writing really joyful because it allowed me to bring
[23:22]back all these friends and it allowed me to bring back when I was writing about the
[23:26]little prince Lee Harkens who had been a pal in high school who had died of non-Hodgkems
[23:30]lymphoma but then it literally connected me to her because I thought like this is crazy
[23:36]I haven't called her mother and since she died since the memorial service so 40 years
[23:41]later I'm on the phone with Lee's mother who became a hospital chaplain and the little
[23:47]prince brought back Lee and led me to Lee's mom and so the writing was so much fun it was it
[23:56]was what books do I remember what books influenced me and what books did I just read that that
[24:01]conjure something from my life that I want to write about and now this book is that book
[24:06]for other people it's a whole circle. Thank you and that's what I really hope is that books
[24:11]for living will do that yeah sort of get people to say who haven't I spoke to or what
[24:16]haven't I thought about or or what what kind of context can I play some of my life and so
[24:21]the writing process itself where do you like to write how long do you write right here do
[24:26]how long does he how long did the book take you to write so I write so here we are in my
[24:31]home thank you for coming to visit I write at the dining table we're looking at my laptop
[24:36]which is on the dining table so clean I guess very very pristine and I need 24 solid hours to write
[24:45]I cannot write I have a full-time job I cannot write an hour before I go to work so I we write
[24:51]all weekend every weekend and I need every second of it because I behave kind of like a crazy
[24:56]person I'm like in the shining Jack Nicholson I don't bathe I don't shave I sit there and just
[25:05]hour after hour after hour doing what any writer does doggling going into internet rabbit holes
[25:11]following weird Twitter feuds getting up walking around so I will write without stop for four
[25:18]hours in a 24 hour period but I don't know what four hours they are so I have to clear all the
[25:24]the decks and my husband goes nuts because I can't do anything when I'm writing and he'll come
[25:31]back from doing errands and this and that and he'll say like you couldn't put the coffee mode in
[25:36]the sink like you couldn't get up from and as you see it's not a big apartment it's not very far
[25:41]from the dining table to the sink and I'm like nope I could not so that's my writing process
[25:49]how long it took me I tried to come up with the first draft somewhere between one and two years
[25:56]and then work on it for another year so it's about three years well do you have plans for more books
[26:00]I'm writing one right now and I'm loving it it's a ball I'll say about it is it's about a
[26:06]40 year friendship with someone totally different from me oh oh oh my gosh can't wait to read that
[26:11]and so you have a full-time job you also have a podcast yes tell me about and cook stir which you
[26:16]started so tell me a little about the rest of your life so I kind of grew I started as a journalist
[26:22]where I was journalists in Asia for a couple of years then grew up in publishing wound up as
[26:26]editor in chief first of William Marrow book publishers and then of Hyperion books quit to start a
[26:32]cooking website called cookster.com still thriving did that for six years and sold it to McMillan
[26:37]so where I work now is McMillan and they own it so I run that and I acquired and added all
[26:41]different kinds of books so I edited Melinda Gates most recent book the moment of lift and I
[26:47]also for McMillan do a podcast that I love it's so much fun it's called but that's another story
[26:53]and I interview said people I admire mostly writers but not exclusively writers about a book
[27:00]that changed their life and what was happening in their life and and how did they find that book
[27:04]and how did they change and you don't have to know anything about them and you don't have to
[27:08]read their book it's about you know my topic the way books find people when they need the most
[27:13]and change them and I've had Jody Foster on and Melinda Gates and Min Jin Lee and wonderful writer
[27:20]Monique Trung who has a new book out called The Sweetest Fruits and I'm just having a blast.
[27:24]You can just send all those people to know. You can just feel like your next stuff.
[27:28]I will do a circuit. Absolutely. So what advice do you have to aspiring authors?
[27:34]Well I'll give advice to aspiring well I'll two sets of advice I'll start with memoirists.
[27:40]Okay. Which is I really believe there's a lot of terrible advice about memoir out there.
[27:47]What's most important about memoir is that it's you it's true to you. If you are a kind of person who
[27:56]always sees the best in everybody and and write a memoir that reflects that you don't have to be
[28:02]scathing to write a memoir. If you are scathing person do that but it needs to be true to your voice
[28:09]your core who you are not adhere to some artificial notion of what a memoir is.
[28:15]And in fact one of the reasons that I really wanted to write the end of your like book club
[28:20]about my mother is I love my mother and she was an incredibly I thought admirable woman and I wanted
[28:25]to present her life to the world and show how I felt about her and what she taught me through
[28:29]the books we read and the way she lived her life. And a lot of people had terrible mothers
[28:34]and difficult childhoods and a lot of trauma and that's their truth and they need to write that
[28:39]and those make very powerful books but a lot of people didn't and you can write about whatever it
[28:45]is as long as it's true to you. I do think that with writing people get way ahead of themselves.
[28:53]They think about agents and publishers and this and that write the best book you possibly can.
[29:00]Just do the best book you possibly can and then worry about that. And that's tough advice and it's
[29:06]easy to get ahead of yourself but to me it's really as simple as that and that applies whether it's
[29:12]fiction or memoir essays whatever it is it needs to be there on the page. Did you have a follow up
[29:19]you said you would only talk about memoir do you have advice to other types of authors or was there
[29:24]I mean I think this is my advice to all authors there's a question and you're not going to be
[29:32]surprised what question I like to ask any author and that is what are you reading read read read read
[29:40]you cannot be a writer without reading I just believe that to the depths of my soul and you don't
[29:47]have to read in your genre you can read anything you like but you have to read easy enough
[29:53]check okay well thank you so much your stories your book
[30:00]your advice. All of it is amazing and thank you for sharing it and your love of reading and
[30:06]I can't wait to hear what other people I pass in the course of my day-to-day reading. Maybe
[30:10]people I wouldn't have thought to ask. Oh great, I want to hear too. So when you find out,
[30:14]let me know. Okay. I've gotten some of my very best book recommendations. Oh, I just have to add
[30:19]one other. One other thing, a lot of what are you reading thing. It will not surprise anybody
[30:24]that there is, there are two groups of people who it is very important to ask this question of
[30:28]particularly people who work in indie bookstores and librarians and I have discovered a huge
[30:35]percentage of my favorite books by simply going into, we live in New York City, I go into
[30:40]three lives bookstore and I ask them, what are you reading and all the booksellers tell me and
[30:46]I choose the best ones and they've given me so much joy. So yes, ask everybody, everywhere,
[30:51]but I love to go into indie bookstores and libraries and ask that question.
[30:55]Excellent. Thank you all. Thank you.
[30:58]Thanks again to my sponsor, Lauren Gabrielson, the women's war brand that creates elevated
[31:03]essentials for the modern women's wardrobe, Lauren Gabrielson.com. Thanks for listening to
[31:09]moms don't have time to read books. You can follow me on Instagram at moms don't have time to read
[31:14]books. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the Sound Editing and thank you to
[31:19]morning moon productions for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music. Thanks for listening.
[31:24]you could always email me at zibi at zibiowans.com.