Anissa Gray, LIFE AND OTHER LOVE SONGS
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
[0:06]This 30-minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, 365 days
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[1:03]Anissa Gray is the author of Life and Other Love Songs.
[1:06]And actually, for those of you who are in my book club, you can go to zippybookclub.com.
[1:11]This is my pick for, I think, June.
[1:13]We will be reading this together.
[1:15]And I'm very excited.
[1:16]Anissa is a senior writer at CNN Worldwide and a contributor to Emmy and DuPont Columbia
[1:21]Award-winning coverage of some of the most consequential stories of our time.
[1:26]She began her career at Reuters as a reporter based in New York covering Business News
[1:31]and International Finance.
[1:32]Born in St. Joseph, Michigan, Gray studied English in American Literature at New York University.
[1:37]She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her wife.
[1:40]And this is her second time on the podcast.
[1:42]Welcome, Anissa.
[1:43]Thanks so much for coming back on mom's.
[1:45]Don't have time to read books.
[1:46]Last time, you were here for the care and feeding of ravenously hungry girls.
[1:50]And now you're back for life and other love songs.
[1:53]Welcome back.
[1:54]Thank you so much for having me back, Nippy.
[1:56]As I was just saying, a second ago, I just enjoyed this book so, so much.
[2:00]and this is going to be our Debbie's book club pick that we will have, we'll have our
[2:04]meeting.
[2:05]I think it's June 6th.
[2:06]There's something, I think June 6th.
[2:07]So, very excited.
[2:08]I'm told to 6th.
[2:09]Yeah.
[2:10]I'm so excited to have my book club read it and all of that.
[2:12]Anissa, tell everybody what your book is about.
[2:15]My friend of the love songs is a story about what happens to a family after the father
[2:20]disappears.
[2:21]So, the father in this family, us, armstead, fairly ordinary guy, at least on the surface.
[2:28]He goes missing on his 37th birthday.
[2:31]He leaves behind a white Deborah who is an aspiring singer, but she's coming to terms
[2:38]with life as a suburban housewife, which is far outside anything she had ever imagined
[2:45]for herself.
[2:46]They have a daughter Trinity, who they adore.
[2:48]So, when us disappears for Deborah and Trinity, it absolutely upends everything.
[2:56]And as the story moves forward, and we come to learn with them, you know, the reasons
[3:04]how and why us disappears, it only gets more troubling.
[3:08]You do such a good job of sort of setting the stage and having us really like fall in love
[3:13]with them as a couple, the beginning, like you really take us back so that you feel like
[3:18]very invested in the characters, like you set the scene early on with this party where
[3:24]they meet, and you get you go back and forth with perspective, which I love, so that
[3:29]you see how everybody's feeling, although I feel like you had first person for Deborah,
[3:34]but wasn't us third person, or do you want me to tell me about that choice?
[3:40]I knew immediately that us was going to be written in third person because of sort of the
[3:44]trajectory of his story.
[3:46]For me, it was almost not a choice, but this was for me as a writer, one of the first
[3:51]times I was writing in third person.
[3:53]So it's an interesting construct for me because I have to sort of have in my head,
[3:58]but who is speaking?
[4:00]Who is this person telling me about us?
[4:02]So in my mind, it was Trinity telling us about her father and third person, so yeah.
[4:08]And what about Deborah being in first person?
[4:11]First person, I think with Deborah, it was really important to be very close to Deborah because
[4:18]so much of her emotional journey, we were going to be with her quite a long time.
[4:22]I just wanted us to see a director, her eyes, and it's saying with Trinity, Trinity
[4:27]is also written in first person.
[4:28]I wanted these two women to tell their own stories.
[4:32]And you jump in time too, because you start out with Trinity's perspective.
[4:35]I should have mentioned that, but you start out with her perspective and then jump back
[4:39]in time and show us the evolution of the whole relationship and everything else.
[4:45]And you just develop all the characters.
[4:47]Well, even the cousin, while she's working in the kitchen, along with Deborah really
[4:54]just wants her to introduce her to Oz at the very beginning and just everybody is so
[4:59]vivid and just jumps off the page, not to mention all the emotion behind it as well.
[5:05]You have this one scene, and I don't know, this is sort of like a random example, but in
[5:09]the middle of the book where it really shows, and I think you were saying this with the
[5:13]suburban mom-ish scene, can I just read this like one paragraph here?
[5:17]Oh, yeah, please do.
[5:18]Yes.
[5:19]It's from 1975, and you say Oz came home and found Deborah alone.
[5:22]She was sitting at the kitchen table having a glass of wine in the middle of the afternoon.
[5:26]She seemed surprised when he looked through the cutout to the kitchen and saw him coming
[5:29]through the garage door.
[5:30]She pushed the wine away like it wasn't hers, like a friend might show up and fill
[5:33]the empty chair next to her and drink it.
[5:35]Deborah got to her feet and asked him, shouldn't you be at work?
[5:38]Shouldn't you be doing something other than drinking in the middle of the day?
[5:41]Shouldn't you be doing something other than checking up on me?
[5:43]Well, if you would do what you should be doing instead of that, he glanced at the wine
[5:47]glass, I wouldn't feel the need to check up on you.
[5:49]He went over and snatched up the glass through the table.
[5:51]He smacked Deborah's hand away when she tried to take it back a little harder than he intended
[5:55]apparently because she cradled her hand to her chest.
[5:58]He didn't apologize.
[5:59]He wasn't the one who should be apologizing for this.
[6:01]He stalked over to the sink.
[6:02]He dumped the glass staring at her the whole time.
[6:05]He held her gaze until she looked away, ashamed.
[6:07]It wasn't checking up on you, by the way.
[6:10]It's just like such a moment of control, despair, different perspectives on the same
[6:16]situation, communication, telling about just that as an example.
[6:20]No, I'm glad you picked that same because when I was writing it, I can remember
[6:27]vividly.
[6:28]I wanted to sort of crystallize as this drive and desire for this perfect family and
[6:37]Deborah's resistance has a tense and she's utterly lost in this moment in the story.
[6:45]And I think in that scene, the tension between the two of them, you see them in their
[6:51]curious form in that moment, having at this point in the book, they've come through sort
[6:55]of the beautiful, honey milling, you know, love stage and they're doing life for real
[7:02]and they have very different ideas about how life should be done.
[7:07]Yeah, I love it, just so, it's all just so visual.
[7:10]Thank you.
[7:11]How did you, this is like an impossible question, how did you come up with this, but what
[7:16]was the initial nugget of an idea for this and how did it grow the way it did?
[7:22]Yeah, so some years ago, I heard a story about, you know, a real-life story about suburban
[7:28]family, dad goes to work, it doesn't come home, never should be heard from again.
[7:35]In this family, they sort of fall out from that, you know, that trauma, sort of rippled
[7:40]through this family for at least two generations that I know of.
[7:45]And I sort of watched how they dealt with it and it was just something that I stayed
[7:48]with me for years and after I finished care and feeding, you know, I just started thinking
[7:54]about as a writer often does what the what is, you know, why is they found someone you
[8:01]loved, disappeared, and, you know, unlike this family, you found out exactly what the
[8:09]reason was, what would that do to you?
[8:13]What if it upended everything you thought you knew about this person, everything you
[8:18]thought you both understood in the formation of your relationship and your family?
[8:25]What happens with that?
[8:27]And so I sat down with all of these what-ifs and the arm-stead family was born.
[8:33]Wow.
[8:34]Yeah.
[8:35]I love it.
[8:36]I love them around the table.
[8:37]Did you know where you were headed?
[8:41]Like the whole time, did you know where it would end?
[8:43]I didn't.
[8:44]So my writing process is I don't write to an outline.
[8:49]I'll write like the sort of skeleton of the book, like a very rough sort of draft that
[8:57]gives me a sense of where I might be going.
[9:00]So, you know, after I wrote that little skeleton, I had a sense of that I wanted a funeral
[9:05]in the beginning and the wedding at the end.
[9:09]Now, you know, out of shit there, you know, that's the tricky part.
[9:14]But it was a journey and the way I write is incredibly inefficient.
[9:19]It is, you know, trial and error, you know, writing into dark, dark alleys and finding
[9:24]out best not the way and going down this street and finding out all that is the way.
[9:28]So, yeah, it was really just feeling my way and finding my way of which is kind of the
[9:33]power.
[9:34]Right.
[9:35]Very cool.
[9:36]And how long did this whole thing take?
[9:37]I feel like you were just on for the other book, but whatever.
[9:40]I know.
[9:41]I went back and listened to that interview.
[9:44]You did.
[9:45]Yeah.
[9:46]And you asked me, just like, well, how are you writing, working on something else and
[9:49]I was working on this book and I thought about, yeah, I was working on another family
[9:53]but I took about two years a little over two and over that period of time, a lot of life
[10:00]and it was a sort of a difficult period to write for me.
[10:04]There I lost my father at the beginning, which was destabilizing
[10:09]in that I was writing this book about a father who disappears,
[10:13]but in some ways it was therapeutic to write about it.
[10:16]And then there was the pandemic, of course.
[10:19]I happened to be an extreme introvert, and I was like,
[10:22]I'm totally built for this.
[10:24]And a lot down bringing on.
[10:27]I was not built for it, and I did develop terrible insomnia
[10:32]that I hadn't, you know, literally be treated for,
[10:35]but worked out of that and kept working on the book.
[10:39]And right there at the end, like that, you know what?
[10:43]How about a complete hysterectomy?
[10:46]And there was that.
[10:48]So, yeah, so automatic menopause, you know, hot slime.
[10:53]All of the stuff that comes along with it,
[10:55]right there and final edits.
[10:57]But I had a great team, my editor, Amanda, my agent, Michelle,
[11:02]you know, saw me through it, and then we got the book done.
[11:05]And it was an incredible journey, unlike any writing experience I'd ever had.
[11:10]It's almost like those events of your life can just be tucked away.
[11:14]And maybe you could, when you sort of put this back on the shelf,
[11:17]it's almost like those experiences,
[11:19]you could almost put back on the shelf, like, okay,
[11:22]like, yes, I can take, like a container for some of that stuff.
[11:26]In a lot of ways, that's what it, that's what it feels like on,
[11:29]I look at this book and it is an encapsulation.
[11:32]I'll certainly have the story of these characters,
[11:35]but also a story of my own life and writing it.
[11:40]Well, I'm really sorry about your father and especially knowing, you know,
[11:44]how the characters develop here and the love and all of it.
[11:50]I'm really sorry. And of course, the pandemic.
[11:52]Thank you. Yeah. I had a hysterectomy myself.
[11:54]It is not fun. No, it is not.
[11:57]It was really honestly so painful afterwards.
[12:00]It was so unexpectedly painful.
[12:02]Yeah, mine was too, especially after my god of how this told me,
[12:05]oh, I was back to work in two weeks. I'm like, what?
[12:08]Yeah, that's not happening over here.
[12:12]I was like, walking, holding the walls of my hallway, you know, like,
[12:16]oh, very painful.
[12:20]Yeah. So fun being a woman.
[12:22]Yeah, yeah. And I really appreciate estrogen and ways I never had before because
[12:29]the immediate menopause that, you know, that's something.
[12:33]Yeah, they actually left my, this is now overly from too much information.
[12:38]I definitely did leave my ovaries.
[12:40]Okay. Well, yeah.
[12:41]And it ended up making no difference because I'm already of the age.
[12:44]But yeah, that was like seven years ago or something.
[12:46]It was right before the holidays for me.
[12:48]And like, everybody was off traveling or going with family.
[12:52]And I had like cancel everything and hunker down.
[12:54]And I was like, on my hands and knees, you're like, wrap gifts.
[12:58]Anyway, that's exactly the period for me, too.
[13:01]It was right before Thanksgiving,
[13:03]totally canceled off Thanksgiving plans.
[13:05]And yeah, it was a lot.
[13:07]At least writing is like, you know,
[13:10]I mean, I had a job at one point like stocking shelves.
[13:12]Generally, like at least like sedentary enough, right?
[13:16]Like you can get it done theoretically.
[13:17]But that's true.
[13:19]And that's one of the things, you know, you sort of look at the blessing.
[13:22]Yeah.
[13:22]You know, I know people who have very physical jobs and they would not have been able to,
[13:27]yeah, you know, they would have lost a lot of time.
[13:29]And you know, to be able to sit on a couch, you know, and just sitting there with a computer,
[13:36]you know, not a lot to complain about.
[13:38]Although I really think I'm like developing trouble.
[13:41]Like, my shoulders and my wrists.
[13:44]And I'm like, I don't know.
[13:46]Maybe I'm sitting here too much.
[13:49]Totally out of alignment.
[13:51]Oh my goodness.
[13:52]That's always something.
[13:53]So when you think of the best things that are going to come out of this book,
[13:57]what are you hoping?
[13:58]Who are you hoping to like see themselves?
[14:00]Or like what emotional response would be like most satisfying for you?
[14:05]Well, I think for me, I've been a reader.
[14:08]Yeah, pretty much never since I could recognize where it's in a book.
[14:12]And there's this feeling I get when I close the book on a really good book.
[14:20]I mean, it's very simple and not profound at all.
[14:25]But when you read a good book and it does like a
[14:30]then it kind of stays with you.
[14:32]And you see it on the shelf and it sort of brings you thinking about the characters.
[14:36]If someone can come away with that feeling, that is for me such a special feeling.
[14:41]And you don't get it with every book.
[14:43]If someone can come away with that feeling in life, they've been with these characters,
[14:48]they've cared about these characters.
[14:51]They sometimes think about these characters and hope they're okay.
[14:55]That wouldn't mean the world to me because that means I've written a pretty good story.
[14:59]And that's always my goal.
[15:02]Well, I feel that way and you have written a really good story.
[15:05]And thank you so much.
[15:06]People are going to flip out about it.
[15:08]I don't even know why we're doing this interview.
[15:09]Your book's not coming out until April.
[15:11]And here we are.
[15:12]It's January.
[15:12]So anyway, I know this.
[15:14]I think we're going to have to like hold this interview.
[15:15]I'm like, why is this even on my calendar?
[15:17]But whatever.
[15:18]Here we are.
[15:18]So great.
[15:19]I'm glad that you told me to play.
[15:20]I don't hope to get on as soon as possible.
[15:23]No, it's great.
[15:24]I'm like, okay.
[15:25]I'm like, does that really stay for war?
[15:27]I'm like, you know, putting my glasses on.
[15:29]I'm like, okay.
[15:30]I haven't even read out of my January books yet.
[15:32]But it's not so proper.
[15:34]No, no, no, no.
[15:35]Don't say it's food as possible.
[15:36]Be it out of calendar.
[15:38]It's fine.
[15:38]It's great.
[15:39]I'm delighted because now I have the chance to, you know,
[15:42]get the book club with you all set up
[15:44]and get an a sneak peek.
[15:46]I bet by the time this airs,
[15:48]you'll be on all sorts of lists
[15:49]because this book is wonderful.
[15:50]And you can say, remember that podcast?
[15:52]I had like, 100 years ago.
[15:54]I was like, this book, anyway, that would be fine.
[15:59]Well, no, this is a benefit from me.
[16:01]It's something great to do out of the gate
[16:05]because I enjoyed talking to you so much the last time.
[16:10]But for this to be the first event out of the gate,
[16:13]it's quite nice for me.
[16:14]Oh, good.
[16:15]Well, I enjoyed talking to you last time in this time.
[16:17]And I'm really a huge fan of how you write and your books.
[16:21]And I was so excited when I saw a new book coming out.
[16:24]And then I was like, oh my gosh, from the very beginning.
[16:27]Like in it, totally in it, loving it.
[16:30]That's wonderful.
[16:31]Thank you so much.
[16:32]Congratulations.
[16:33]Oh, I should ask now, in case we're on here a third time,
[16:36]are you working on another book already?
[16:38]And what can you tell me that we can check our facts next time?
[16:42]Yeah, I am working on another book.
[16:44]I'm in the stage where I'm about to sit down
[16:46]and actually write it out.
[16:48]It'll come to me first, the rough idea,
[16:51]but it doesn't really live until I start typing it.
[16:54]So I'm about to start typing it next week.
[16:57]Wow.
[16:58]Yeah.
[16:59]Congratulations.
[17:00]That's exciting.
[17:01]All right.
[17:01]Well, good luck with that.
[17:03]And have fun with all the press.
[17:07]And I hope that whatever your life events are contained
[17:10]in the next book are not as traumatic
[17:13]and that you have an easier go of it within the next set
[17:15]of pages.
[17:16]Yeah, I hope so too.
[17:18]So far right now, life is incredibly good.
[17:22]I feel incredibly blessed.
[17:23]And I'm so happy to see this book out there.
[17:27]I hope people enjoy it.
[17:29]I'm wonderful.
[17:30]I'm knocking wood for you.
[17:32]Thank you.
[17:34]All right.
[17:35]Hi, and is that take care?
[17:36]Bye, the big.
[17:37]Bye.
[17:39]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[17:41]to Read Books.
[17:42]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens
[17:45]and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[17:47]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com
[17:50]and sign up for my virtual book club
[17:52]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[17:54]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[17:57]for the Sound Editing.
[17:58]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[18:00]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.