Liz Scheier, NEVER SIMPLE: A Memoir
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[0:54]Liz Share is the author of never simple a memoir
[1:01]She's now a product developer living in Washington D.C. with her husband two small children and an ill-behaved cat
[1:07]Never simple is her first book and she's working on her second. This book is so good by the way
[1:12]Welcome Liz. Thank you so much for coming on mom. Don't have time to read books to discuss never simple a memoir
[1:18]Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here
[1:20]I was starting to tell you before we recorded that as soon as this book came in
[1:25]I was like I want to stop everything and read this like this is a book that if I were in a bookstore
[1:30]This is like 100% like the book I would pick up
[1:33]You know, this is like right and then it did not disappoint in the slightest
[1:37]I really really really enjoyed it
[1:39]And I actually listened to the whole thing, which I didn't think I would but I did and so every back and forth to my kid's school
[1:45]Was you walked with me? So thanks wonderful. Thank you. I thought the narrator did an amazing job
[1:50]Amy Linton just such a tell she did was that a debate by the way?
[1:53]Did you consider narrating yourself or you were like no thanks or no?
[1:56]So I used to work for an audiobook publisher back in the day
[1:59]And I think the one of the main lessons I took away from that is that just because you can write does not mean you can perform
[2:04]And I certainly knew that to be true about myself and this was definitely a job for a professional
[2:09]Got it. Well, she did a great job. It was it was really wonderful
[2:13]Well for for those who were not familiar with never simple could you explain a little bit about your memoir and
[2:19]I read was it on your website somewhere where you said you took a break and decided you wanted to write
[2:24]But you decided not to write about your mom and then two years later. It was like all about your mom
[2:31]Absolutely, so the memoir begins on a particular otherwise uneventful day when I was 18 when my mother came into the room
[2:38]She dropped two bombshells number one
[2:39]She had been married most of my life to and then I'd never heard of and number two that my father
[2:44]The man she had told me was my father was a complete fiction
[2:47]She'd totally made him up big story fake pictures fake name fake everything and the memoir kind of unspools from there
[2:54]My journey to find out who this man actually was and what else that had been going on in my house growing up was
[3:00]completely fictional and
[3:02]Yeah, so I sat down to write this story
[3:04]When I came back from eternity leave with my second child
[3:07]And my kids are 14 months apart because my husband and I are not so bright and so I had
[3:13]Two kids under a year and a half at home and so the only time that I had free was the sort of magical hour of lunch time
[3:19]When I had both child care and nobody like tugging at my sleeve needing anything either at home or at work
[3:25]So two days a week I went to the gym and three days a week I sat down to work on this writing project
[3:30]And it took two years because that's not a lot of time
[3:33]But I think the lesson there for me was that incremental work really adds up and that you can make something good out of
[3:40]Small work not to mention that two years is not a particularly long time to be working on a memoir
[3:45]You know, like I don't feel like that's out of the normal realm so
[3:48]It's not it was I think it was overall
[3:50]It was easier than I thought to get that work done
[3:52]You know a lot of things that people told me about having kids and becoming a mother
[3:56]Were turned out not to be so terribly true
[3:58]But one thing that was absolutely true was that you learned to prioritize really quickly
[4:02]Because your time is so limited that you have to make time for the things that matter to you
[4:07]Yeah, give a busy person something to do, right? Exactly, boom boom boom boom boom
[4:10]And I'm like just put it on the stack, right?
[4:13]Like the machine the machine is on just like one more copy from a busy copy machine
[4:18]Makes no difference really in the long run
[4:20]Tell me a little bit about how you wrote it like those consecutive days or non consecutive days rather
[4:26]Where you were working on it and then the final structure in terms of timeline
[4:30]I'm always so interested in where do you start
[4:33]How do you what is chronological?
[4:36]What is it like how did you decide on the timeline and all that?
[4:39]Yeah, so I sat down to write it in, you know, spoiler
[4:43]What would be the last year of my mother's life when she was in securely housed
[4:47]And I was spending, you know hours every week talking to
[4:51]Lawyers and the police and caseworkers and whomever she she'd run afoul of at that moment
[4:57]And so at first it was just sort of somewhere to put all the like fear and concern and love and
[5:02]rage and everything that comes into taking care of an elderly mentally ill parent
[5:07]And so the first parts of it were all around that and the second half of the book is really
[5:11]About that kind of care scenario
[5:14]And then she died a year into the project and I looked up and I had half a book
[5:18]I had 50,000 words and I thought wow, this is not you know
[5:21]This is not a therapy project after all
[5:23]This could really be something and maybe be something that would help other people in similar positions
[5:29]So I took that section of the book and thought what do you need to know to make this make sense?
[5:34]What do you need to know about her life to know how someone you know starts as one of the first
[5:39]women lawyers what working in New York and ends up
[5:43]You know about to lose your apartment
[5:45]And so the book progressed along those lines of how to make this a story that that hung together
[5:51]I loved how you sort of did a little detective work along the way to try to figure things out
[5:55]Once you got that news
[5:57]Yeah, and you were like well how were we surviving here on the inside
[6:01]You know how was all this working when she when she wasn't working?
[6:04]Where was the money coming from and all your deep dives and set backs and
[6:09]Like the disappointing call with the sister and you know
[6:13]I just so I kept like rooting for some sort of you know
[6:16]Like every at every stuff like no make this rewarding for her
[6:19]You know like what's gonna happen now
[6:21]And the way you wrote about your mom when her health was starting to decline that weekend where you were out of town
[6:26]And I think fire islanders thing you came back and she was she had been on the floor for 24 hours
[6:31]And you had to get her back into bed with all the details around that moment where that was heartbreaking heart-breaking. Oh my gosh
[6:38]Yeah, the uh, I think that's part of the story that I hope will be helpful to other people is that
[6:43]No matter what the circumstances are elder care is challenging right?
[6:46]We live in a country where it is
[6:48]You know
[6:49]ruinously expensive and the system can be
[6:52]Kafka-esque and it is just really challenging
[6:55]To get good care for someone who is
[6:58]In those last years of their lives and then you throw these you know complicating factors into it and it can be
[7:05]Dramatic and difficult. It's also hard when you when you have such a complicated relationship and then all of a sudden they become
[7:12]Frick, you know needy right? It's such a power shift
[7:16]And you have to like in that moment decide like okay am I stepping up
[7:20]Or not and how does that make me feel and can I forgive all of the stuff or I'm projecting or whatever but
[7:27]No, I was like, can I forgive and how does it affect my own family right because when I when I started talking to
[7:32]Some of the social workers
[7:34]There was always an assumption that she would come to live with me if her housing situation didn't work out
[7:38]My mother could be quite violent even in her later years and at the time
[7:42]I had a one and a half and a two and a half year old
[7:45]And I was trying to picture what our lives would look like if I could never
[7:48]Leave them alone in her when she was awake and ultimately my husband and I decided that was not an option
[7:56]And I don't know if that was the right decision
[7:58]I don't think I'll ever know and honestly if you gave me those years back
[8:02]To do again
[8:03]I would probably make a different decision about every single thing and how do I still be wrong?
[8:08]Yeah, because there's there's really no way to know if you did the right thing
[8:11]That's the hard thing about elder care is that
[8:13]You know, we especially as you know
[8:16]busy over-achieving people we always think there's the right answer right
[8:20]There's the the good thing to do and if we just
[8:22]hire the right lawyer or
[8:25]Take off the right box on the to-list
[8:27]We can make the right decision
[8:29]But with these circumstances, there is no right decision
[8:32]There's just the least worst and it's figuring out how to identify the least worst
[8:37]Yeah, but yeah, I mean, I still
[8:42]Like I mean, no position to judge
[8:43]But I still think you know your obligation becomes to your kids and any scenes
[8:48]I mean you wrote so much in the book about
[8:51]The the really scary times you had with your mom and the time where there was a policeman there
[8:57]And she whacked your head against doorframe and they were just like all right have fun and left you guys alone
[9:02]I mean it's so devastating and to even and have that
[9:07]As a possibility around these
[9:10]Creatures who also depend on you and that's a risk. So yeah
[9:15]Yeah, something I tried to do in the book was to
[9:18]Sort of paint the whole picture of someone who is living with and struggling with mental illness because my mother could be very very violent and very
[9:26]Living with her could be difficult as you have just
[9:28]noted
[9:29]But she was also really brilliant and really funny and she
[9:32]Gave me a lot as a parent and she really tried the very best she could
[9:36]It's just that her very best was not
[9:39]Great and she didn't have any resources to be a better parent
[9:43]And so I tried to
[9:45]Build a story around her to really show all of the sides of her
[9:49]You know, she wasn't to villain. There was no mustache twirling
[9:52]No, like hand-stip steepling a la mr. Burns
[9:55]She was just a person who didn't have the ability to do what the world had given her
[10:00]And I didn't mean to suggest she was like a bad person.
[10:02]Oh, no, that's not how that came across.
[10:04]Not at all.
[10:05]I feel like, you know, and I don't want to give things away
[10:07]in the book, but like the scene where you realized why
[10:11]she had reacted so strongly when she caught you
[10:13]at home with a boy when you should have been at school
[10:16]and you finally understood why that was such a trigger to her.
[10:19]It's such a gracious act and then it helps
[10:22]the reader understand things too.
[10:25]So I don't know.
[10:26]I feel like you did a very good job at the whole picture of her.
[10:29]Thank you.
[10:29]That's my hope, which is not easy when it's a mom
[10:32]with like 18 million experiences you have with her.
[10:34]I mean, was it hard?
[10:36]What did you decide not to include?
[10:38]Were there things that were too or was most of the scenes
[10:42]you wanted to do keep and keeping in about her?
[10:45]So I think I kept in as much as I could.
[10:48]I wish I had known more about her life
[10:49]that I could have included about her young life,
[10:51]but the only living person, as I was writing,
[10:54]who had known her at that age, was her brother
[10:55]who was suffering with a brain tumor
[10:57]and actually died a few months ago.
[10:59]And so those stories were not really available to us anymore.
[11:02]And that's something I thought about a lot
[11:04]as writing when I was writing the book
[11:05]because the history she gave me was not always true.
[11:09]And that's one of the reasons we don't know about history
[11:11]is because it's represented to us.
[11:13]But a lot of it is also just gone.
[11:15]If you don't have a memoirist on the family of these stories
[11:20]can just disappear as people pass on from the earth.
[11:24]One scene that I originally tried to write about
[11:27]and ultimately could thought was that in my mid 20s,
[11:31]she came to me and said, I am going to be evicted.
[11:34]I have run out of money.
[11:35]You need to move in with me so that I can, you know,
[11:39]say any apartment.
[11:40]And I did move in with her and lived in her living room
[11:42]for about two years.
[11:44]And my mental health really took a pretty hard crack
[11:48]during that time.
[11:49]And after about two years, I finally said
[11:51]I have to prioritize this,
[11:53]even if this does turn out badly for her and I left.
[11:56]And I found out later that that had been not true,
[11:59]that she was fine for the rent.
[12:01]And she had just wanted to keep me closer to her.
[12:03]And so when I think back on that time,
[12:06]I first of all, I think of my mid 20s self
[12:08]so like falling to pieces.
[12:10]And also think of how I'm still pretty angry
[12:12]that that happened.
[12:13]And I was just not up to the task of relating that
[12:16]with any kind of sensitivity or objectivity at the stage.
[12:20]Well, that's very interesting.
[12:22]I feel like you provided a foil for your relationship
[12:25]with your ex-girlfriend, Laura and her mom
[12:28]and how enmeshed that their relationship was.
[12:31]Tell me a little bit about that
[12:32]and even how you processed watching that,
[12:35]like co-dependency, play out in real life.
[12:38]Yeah, so my ex, the woman I was with for about eight years
[12:41]and her parents were divorced, her father was living,
[12:44]but she and her mother were very close.
[12:46]And at first, I think I understood that
[12:48]to be the sort of perfect relationship.
[12:51]You know, they call each other in time is good and bad
[12:53]and all of that.
[12:55]But as time went by and I saw that, you know,
[12:59]whenever Laura would get off the phone with her,
[13:01]like sometimes she would cry
[13:02]because her mother had said something sort of kindly cutting
[13:05]to her and that she would be afraid to make certain moves
[13:08]in her life without her mother's approval,
[13:10]although she was well into her theaters at the time.
[13:13]I realized that there are just,
[13:15]there are a lot of ways to have a difficult parent child
[13:17]relationship.
[13:18]They're all complicated, right?
[13:19]The world is not hurting for the stories
[13:21]of complicated parent child relationships.
[13:24]And so that sort of made an interesting contrast to me,
[13:27]you know, the ways in which these relationships
[13:29]were not what we might consider ideal,
[13:31]but in very different ways.
[13:33]Interesting.
[13:34]Yeah, it's always good to see what everybody else
[13:36]is dealing with.
[13:37]Yeah, I think another part of the book
[13:40]that I personally loved so much was your experience
[13:43]in publishing and how, you know, how you started out
[13:46]and even the big room or closet,
[13:48]you call it where you got to get all the bugs
[13:50]and how you navigated your way through the industry
[13:54]and science fiction and your Midwestern experience
[13:55]and just that whole storyline.
[13:57]How do you feel about being on this side now
[14:00]having worked on that side and like what new perspectives
[14:04]do you have or, you know, what did you take with you the most?
[14:08]Oh my gosh, so many new perspectives.
[14:10]So I was in publishing for many, many years as an editor.
[14:13]And from there, I went to rangela.com and Amazon.
[14:16]And so I've been on now the editorial side,
[14:19]the retail side and now the author's side.
[14:20]Wait, wait, slow that down because I find this so interesting.
[14:23]Explain more like where you started
[14:25]like what your different things were
[14:26]and when you switched different sides of the business.
[14:29]Yeah, so I did a couple of tours of duty at Random House
[14:31]and one of the things when there were different companies
[14:33]there now under one.
[14:35]And I was a development in acquisitions editor,
[14:37]which means that you buy books or rather buy the license
[14:40]to publish books from authors through their literary agents,
[14:43]work on the book with them and then publish them.
[14:46]And I mostly did genre.
[14:47]I started in romance and then went to science fiction.
[14:50]And I think that was helpful in publishing a book of my own
[14:53]because I just sort of had a shortcut to,
[14:56]you know, the lingo and the things about publishing
[14:58]that are maybe a little bit weird
[14:59]because I already understood them
[15:00]and didn't have to be introduced to these concepts.
[15:03]But mostly now I just hope that I was kind enough
[15:05]to my authors the week of publication
[15:07]because I did not realize how nerve-wracking this
[15:10]to be on the other side.
[15:12]And so that has been, I'm looking back on that
[15:15]with great hope that I was sufficiently supportive
[15:17]of my authors.
[15:18]Oh my gosh.
[15:19]Okay, so you did the Peg of Random House
[15:21]and then what made you go to Barnes and Noble on Amazon
[15:24]and how did you shift like the job functions and everything?
[15:28]And what do you?
[15:29]Yeah, so I left Random House in January 2009
[15:32]because the economy had crashed
[15:34]pretty dramatically as you may recall.
[15:36]And there was just a mass layoff of Frost Random House.
[15:39]That was the day we discovered
[15:40]who kept a bottle in their dust.
[15:42]Most people turned out.
[15:44]And so we sort of all of us who'd been laid off
[15:48]sort of scattered into the world
[15:49]figuring out what to do next
[15:51]because we had this very specific skill set
[15:53]and we're trying to figure out what it transferred to.
[15:56]So I freelanced for a while
[15:58]and I worked for a startup that did ebooks for the iPhone.
[16:01]This was before the Apple store.
[16:03]And it was like seven engineers and me
[16:07]in a single room next to a court's photography school,
[16:10]which I have to admit, I did not realize was still a thing.
[16:14]But that was an amazing experience.
[16:16]I'd never worked for it.
[16:17]That would actually be really fun to take that class
[16:19]to learn how to do that.
[16:20]Like I would be interested in that.
[16:22]Oh, it's like how do they do that?
[16:23]They just like pound away and it's like, you know.
[16:25]Yeah, there's just little machine
[16:27]about the size of a terrier that you
[16:29]that like a wheelie thing that you had a job behind you.
[16:31]I don't know.
[16:32]Yeah.
[16:33]I wish I'd had a good more time to chat with those people.
[16:35]But from there, I went to barnanoble.com
[16:37]to do digital strategy
[16:39]and from there, that was on to do audio books.
[16:43]But then when were you an educational consultant?
[16:46]Because that you listed that somewhere on some website.
[16:48]It said that and I was like, when did that happen?
[16:50]So I worked for an educational nonprofit now.
[16:52]Educational nonprofit, sorry.
[16:53]Yes.
[16:54]So when we moved to DC, my husband got his dream job here
[16:58]as a tax attorney for the DOJ, which I'm assured
[17:01]is more interesting than it sounds because it was a disaster.
[17:05]And so I looked around at DC and there's no publishing in DC.
[17:08]It's still very, as you know, very well, a New York
[17:11]Center industry and was lucky to start working
[17:14]for a nonprofit here, making applications and websites
[17:18]and all of the stuff we work with teachers.
[17:21]Very cool.
[17:22]Love it.
[17:22]I just read a children's book about, oh, you know what it was?
[17:26]It's called, it's by James Patterson
[17:28]that's on of his middle grade books.
[17:30]It's called Laugh Out Loud.
[17:31]And in it, the parents of Jimmy are tax attorneys.
[17:36]Like one's a tax attorney and one is a tax something else.
[17:39]And so all the jokes are about April 15th and all this stuff.
[17:42]Anyway, you should get it for him.
[17:43]He might find it amazing.
[17:44]But anyway, I think it's called Laugh Out Loud.
[17:46]Anyway, I'm reading it to my kids.
[17:47]That's excellent.
[17:48]You also go, I mean, there's so much in the story.
[17:51]You didn't want to have kids for a long time.
[17:53]You were afraid you would mother in the same way
[17:55]or what if that happened to you?
[17:56]And you just didn't like kids particularly.
[18:00]And people assured you you would like your own kids.
[18:02]But you weren't so sure about that, which I know a lot
[18:05]of people have been in that same position.
[18:08]Talk to me about that decision-making process
[18:10]and that being the mom of two kids.
[18:12]Yeah, so I was never a particularly maternal person.
[18:16]And it just was not in my life plan.
[18:19]But my husband really, really wanted kids.
[18:21]And at the time that he and I were dating,
[18:24]everything else in my life had sort of gone carplunk, right?
[18:27]I was, things were not going well at my job.
[18:29]I had not long before I got in that of this long relationship.
[18:32]I just moved.
[18:32]I just had major surgery.
[18:34]It was just everything at once.
[18:36]And I thought, well, you know, my previous plan
[18:38]didn't work out so hot.
[18:39]So maybe it's time to start thinking about a different plan
[18:42]and having kids is something a lot of people do.
[18:45]It's not crazy at all, like terraforming Mars, right?
[18:48]This is an option.
[18:50]And I kind of thought, you know,
[18:51]I was in my late 30s at the time.
[18:53]I thought, we can give it a shot.
[18:54]If it doesn't work, I'm not going to go to great lengths.
[18:58]Long story short, I was five months pregnant
[18:59]to my wedding, which we were not exercising.
[19:02]And then my second came very soon after that.
[19:05]And it has been, I mean, it's a lot.
[19:08]It's a lot.
[19:08]You know what being a mom is like.
[19:10]It's, you know, I also, it was a couple of days
[19:12]after my second birthday that my second child,
[19:14]second birthday that the pandemic began.
[19:17]So just as we were getting out of that stage of parenting
[19:20]where you can't leave the house
[19:21]because your kids are young,
[19:22]we couldn't leave the house
[19:23]because there was a global pandemic.
[19:25]So it was just a very sort of, you know,
[19:28]all of the isolation of early motherhood
[19:30]really spun out longer than you would expect.
[19:33]But my kids are great.
[19:35]It turns out I'm not my mother, which is helpful.
[19:37]And so far, count of serial killers,
[19:40]my household is zero.
[19:41]So we'll see that goes.
[19:43]No promises for later, but we seem to be doing okay so far.
[19:46]Oh my gosh.
[19:47]You know, it's so funny.
[19:48]I mean, my kids, my youngest now is seven.
[19:51]So at the start of the pandemic, you know, five.
[19:53]It was finishing preschool.
[19:54]But I remember thinking, well, at least my kids aren't like two.
[19:57]Yeah.
[19:59]Anyway, I know that's terrible.
[20:00]I'm like, I was like, I don't know if I would survive.
[20:02]If I still had like, I don't know if I could have done it
[20:05]if I had just tiny kids at home.
[20:06]Like, I don't know that I didn't almost lose my mind
[20:09]on a daily basis during that period of time,
[20:11]but maybe it would have been worse or maybe not.
[20:13]I don't know.
[20:14]I mean, there was no good situation, right?
[20:16]Nobody was like, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know.
[20:19]I find it easier as they get older.
[20:21]Even though I love the baby stage and all of that,
[20:23]I mean, I miss that a lot.
[20:25]At least they can get themselves dressed just here.
[20:28]I'm looking forward to being a grandparent
[20:30]of the babies in the cute stage, right?
[20:31]Because then they'll be adorable,
[20:32]but then you can give them back.
[20:34]Yeah, I'm excited for that, too.
[20:36]I think we both have a long ways to go.
[20:40]At this point, I'm like, I hope I live long enough
[20:41]to be a grandmother.
[20:42]I mean, I'm such an old mom from my littlest guy.
[20:44]You know, I'm like, we'll see.
[20:46]I'll be like hobbling, hobbling along.
[20:48]So what has been the effect?
[20:50]This memoir's been out now for what two months or so.
[20:53]What?
[20:53]How has this affected your life?
[20:55]It got such amazing reception, which I'm not surprised
[20:58]about, but Apple best books of the month
[21:01]and just recommend it everywhere in New York Times,
[21:03]like everywhere by everyone.
[21:05]Now what?
[21:06]Like how did it make you feel?
[21:07]Where do you go from here?
[21:09]Yeah, thank you.
[21:10]I've been so stunned by the reaction and so grateful for it,
[21:13]because publishing moves so slowly,
[21:16]I sold the book a year and a half before it came out.
[21:19]And so that sort of lulled me into a false sense of security,
[21:21]because I was out there in the world
[21:23]like someday my book will be published
[21:24]and people will know the story.
[21:25]Tralala, this will happen sometime.
[21:27]And then one day suddenly a lot of people had read it.
[21:31]And so there were sort of the two buckets there, right?
[21:33]There were the strangers on the internet who had read it
[21:36]and there were the people in my life who had read it.
[21:38]And I think the latter was even a little bit weirder
[21:41]because a lot of these were things
[21:43]that I sort of alluded to with my friends
[21:47]and because they're hard to talk about.
[21:50]First of all, you just don't wanna be the person
[21:52]bringing some of these challenging issues to the party,
[21:55]right?
[21:55]It's not fun, it's not a fun conversation.
[21:57]I'm really solving the book here, aren't I?
[21:59]You are though, you're saying you wrote
[22:02]what you were too afraid to say,
[22:03]which just makes it more enticing.
[22:05]And so I think it's filled in a lot of the pieces
[22:08]for the people around me,
[22:10]but we had a small book launch in my backyard
[22:13]after the started right after the book came out
[22:15]and a neighbor sort of sidled up to me and said,
[22:18]so how does it feel to know?
[22:19]You took off your clothes and got naked in front of the world.
[22:21]And I was like, yeah, that's actually exactly,
[22:23]exactly how it feels.
[22:25]And I think the most gratifying part of the reception
[22:28]has been people reaching out to me
[22:30]who've been in similar situations
[22:32]and similarly thought they were the only one.
[22:34]So my mother had a diagnosis of,
[22:37]among other things, borderline personality disorder.
[22:39]And because one of the characterizing features of it
[22:43]is this fear of abandonment,
[22:45]it tends to have a great effect on parent-child relationships
[22:47]because there's this desire for closeness
[22:50]that goes beyond the bounds of what,
[22:53]most of what characterizes most parent-child relationships.
[22:57]And so a lot of people who'd been in this situation
[23:00]wrote to me and said, oh my God,
[23:02]my mother did the same thing.
[23:03]I felt the same way.
[23:04]I've never talked to anybody about this.
[23:06]And don't tell my publisher I said this,
[23:09]but if I'd never sell another copy,
[23:10]that will already make me feel like I did what I set out to do.
[23:15]Because when I had my first child,
[23:17]I looked around in the world and thought like,
[23:19]how do I learn how to do this?
[23:20]How do I learn how to mother?
[23:22]When my own experience was so chaotic.
[23:25]And I couldn't really find anything.
[23:26]And there's plenty of books, as I said earlier,
[23:29]about difficult mother-child relationships.
[23:32]But I couldn't find one that then took it
[23:33]to the next generation.
[23:35]Like how do you not pass it down?
[23:37]And so I tried to write what I couldn't find to read.
[23:41]That's amazing.
[23:42]I mean, that's what they say to do, right?
[23:44]The right book you unread and all of that.
[23:47]And are you working on another project?
[23:49]Or do you have a finished a novel?
[23:51]And novels are hard, it turns out,
[23:54]because in fiction you have to make up the whole thing.
[23:56]Yeah.
[23:57]With a memoir, you just look at your life
[23:59]and think what's interesting.
[24:00]But we'll see if it's any good.
[24:01]And if it actually makes it onto shelves,
[24:04]but I'm pretty pleased to have finished a second book
[24:07]because that really makes me think I can write a third.
[24:09]That's awesome.
[24:10]That's very exciting, amazing.
[24:12]So what advice would you have for aspiring authors?
[24:15]You know, I'm certainly not the first person
[24:17]who have said this, but I really think it is about,
[24:19]but in the chair, I had a word count goal
[24:21]for myself for those three days a week.
[24:23]And I had to finish those words
[24:26]before I finished my lunch, went to my next meeting,
[24:29]went to the bathroom, and after you've had two kids,
[24:32]that is quite...
[24:34]And I would sit down to write my 500 words
[24:37]and sometimes they were terrible.
[24:38]A lot of the times they were terrible,
[24:40]but editing is so much easier than writing to my mind.
[24:43]So once you get it on the page,
[24:45]you have something you can work with.
[24:47]It's not that existential drama of the blank page
[24:51]and the self-doubt of I can never fill this.
[24:53]If you can't get up until you finish the 500 words,
[24:56]you will put something on there.
[24:57]That is the advice I would give.
[24:59]I love that.
[24:59]I'm interested how you said I'm going to go,
[25:01]like, don't tell my publisher about selling more copies.
[25:04]Have you, do you feel though,
[25:05]and this is just something I've sort of been experiencing
[25:08]through no one's fault, perhaps just my own,
[25:10]but that once the book comes out,
[25:12]like, there is all this focus on the numbers
[25:16]that you didn't necessarily want to be focusing on,
[25:18]but it just like happens because they're like out there,
[25:22]and then you get sucked into it.
[25:23]I don't know.
[25:24]Do you feel like that happened to you or not really?
[25:26]I am trying not to get sucked into the numbers.
[25:29]Because I remember doing that as an editor.
[25:31]And so, sort of now in my head,
[25:33]I think I have the most amazing editor in the world
[25:35]and I think that is her job to worry about.
[25:37]It is my job to be out there promoting.
[25:39]I'm trying to compartmentalize who deals with what
[25:41]at this stage in the publication.
[25:43]That's very smart.
[25:44]Actually, I met your editor, Serena, right?
[25:46]Serena, did you?
[25:47]Yeah, yeah, and Pat Eisman.
[25:49]And I love the whole crew.
[25:51]They're so nice.
[25:52]They are a dream maker team.
[25:53]They're so incredible.
[25:54]Amazing.
[25:55]Well, this is all really exciting.
[25:56]Your book was really great.
[25:58]I mean, I hope you're really proud of it
[26:00]and that you feel some sort of, I don't know, closure
[26:03]or peace with your past experience as a result
[26:06]and that it was all worth it to you.
[26:07]Do you feel like that?
[26:09]I definitely do.
[26:10]It definitely gave me some closure.
[26:12]And over the course of writing the book
[26:14]was some of this discovery about my father.
[26:16]And some of it was happening simultaneously.
[26:18]And so that was really, really satisfying.
[26:21]And again, just hearing from other people
[26:23]with similar situations, I think, as great it was,
[26:27]they are telling me how great it was for them
[26:29]to see themselves reflected.
[26:30]It is just for great, as great for me
[26:31]to hear myself reflected in them.
[26:34]So I think with a lot of these situations,
[26:37]sort of the magic factor in making you whole about it
[26:41]is community and is about understanding and empathy.
[26:44]And I think we're all getting there.
[26:46]And the more honestly we can talk about it, the better.
[26:48]I totally agree.
[26:49]And by the way, I loved that you shared on Instagram
[26:52]the picture of your dad.
[26:54]Oh my gosh.
[26:55]I could not believe it.
[26:57]It's such a looker, right?
[26:58]Such a, I really wish I had gotten to know him.
[27:02]Well, but I had never said that the picture
[27:05]your referencing is one that someone sent me
[27:06]just since the book came out.
[27:07]I had maybe six or eight pictures of him before.
[27:10]He died at 28, so the pictures were all sort of
[27:13]laid high school through mid-20s.
[27:15]But this picture of when he was 12 years old.
[27:17]And really, I mean, we are identical.
[27:21]Looking the same, we are dimpled, the same.
[27:23]We are chaotic.
[27:24]It is so strange when you have not seen your face reflected
[27:27]in someone else to suddenly see that.
[27:29]Oh my gosh.
[27:30]I haven't listened to your episode of Family Secret
[27:32]since Danny Shapiro.
[27:33]But I really want to.
[27:34]I adore her and I can't wait to hear the two of you talk.
[27:36]But she's a force.
[27:38]All right, well Liz, thank you so much.
[27:41]This has been great.
[27:42]And thank you so much.
[27:43]Thank you.
[27:44]Such a pleasure to talk to you.
[27:45]Thank you, Zippy.
[27:46]You too.
[27:47]Okay.
[27:48]Bye.
[27:49]Bye.
[27:50]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms.
[27:51]Don't have time to read books.
[27:52]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens
[27:55]and at Moms.
[27:56]Don't have time to read books.
[27:57]Also sign up for my newsletter at zippyowens.com
[28:00]and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors
[28:02]on Zoom every other week.
[28:04]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan.
[28:05]In fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[28:08]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[28:10]for providing this fantastic intro and now
[28:12]to your music.