Laura Diamond, SHELTER US: A Novel

[1:34]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram at zibby owens. Hi, everybody. This is one of the replay bonus episodes to get you through the holiday season. Maybe you missed some. There have been over 2,000 episodes. We are going into a rebrand where we're going to be changing the name of the podcast from moms don't have time to read books to Zippy's podcast. So that is happening in the new year. In the meantime, have a listen, enjoy, and let me know what you think. Bye. Laura Nicole Diamond is the author of Shelter Us, a novel. She's the award winning author of not only Shelter Us, but Dance With Me, a memoir of her grandmother and the editor of the anthology, Deliver Me, True Confessions of Motherhood. She writes about life, family, and trying to make sense of it all on her blog, lauranicolediamond.com? And does it work on a memoir and fostering a teenage asylum seeker on the path to citizenship, which also has prompted her own journey to become an asylum lawyer, which we talked about. She and her husband raised their two sons in the small town in a big city where Laura grew up and where her parents and sisters still live, though she did leave for various adventures of her own, including to Venice Beach, Spain, and some epic American road trips. She can hardly believe that her nest is almost empty. Welcome, Laura. Thanks so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss

[3:34]Laura Diamond: Shelter Us. Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure.

[3:39]Zibby Owens: Would you mind telling listeners what this beautiful novel is about? Sure.

[3:44]Laura Diamond: Well, in the big sense, I'd say it is about longing for meaning and connection. It is about survival and resilience and love and hope and all those things that sort of grab the human heart. And that's certainly what I think was trying to come out of me. And the story is about two women, Sarah and Josie. And Sarah, she is a former lawyer. Now she's a suburban stay home mom, and she is grappling with the grief and looking for meaning in those ways that I described. And Josie is a young homeless mother, sort of down on her luck unexpectedly. And the two of them have an encounter, a fender bender in Downtown Los Angeles. And Sarah becomes fixated on this young mother and her toddler. And the story is about their burgeoning relationship and how they challenge each other and help each other find some kind of healing, I think.

[4:48]Zibby Owens: Well, I feel like there was so much healing to be done for Sarah. I mean, the novel begins with the loss of her infant daughter, which which she wrote in such I mean, it was real like, my whole mood changed when I read it. I mean, it's like very immersive and poignant and you just like ugh, the guilt that she feels because she finally got her two kids to go to sleep in their own room. And then her daughter doesn't make it through the night and then the grief counseling and oh my gosh. And then her all of her grief from losing her mother so young. I mean, this is a lot. It's a lot on her shoulders.

[5:23]Laura Diamond: Yeah. And kind of wanted to front load it so that we know at the beginning what we're dealing with as she's moving, you know, trying to cope with being present for the two children that she has and for herself and for her husband and just how overwhelming it all feels. And then this young woman comes in and just it pulls her out of herself in some way. You know, part of it is I thought when I started writing it, what I knew was I had these two women I wanted to write about. I did not know how they were going to meet. When I started writing it, Sarah had not suffered that loss. Like that came up as I was writing because I was kind of trying to figure out what would make somebody do this. Why is she so willing to go back, you know, search for this young woman she saw? What's causing this fixation? What it's kind of one of the questions that comes up, I think, that's just in a bigger sense in the world. Like, what does make people sometimes act out of character or to breach their safe bubble, their comfort, their small world, to do something really that seems extraordinary, but to her seemed so compelling. It was like the only thing she could do. So yes, so it does start with that heaviness. But I think what it came out of was just sort of this parenting fear. I never had that particular loss. I was very lucky. I have two sons, and they definitely were a lot of the inspiration for Oliver and Izzy in the book, and I stole some direct quotes from them. That fear that you don't get warned about before you become a parent, at least I didn't. And I hope it's universal because it hit me. But I mean, I don't hope it's universal, but I believe it is. That switch is flipped and you're taking care of another life, you see danger everywhere. And there's whole maternal safety industrial complex that's selling you all the things to keep your toilet seat closed and your electric sockets plugged so that you are always aware that there's danger everywhere and you've got to keep this precious thing safe. So that part of the story came out of those feelings as a mother that I think all mothers feel, which is just, know, Oh my God, my heart is now walking out in the world outside of me, and I cannot control everything as much as I want to.

[8:06]Zibby Owens: Well, it's complicated too, because as a mother, you actually are in charge of making sure they are okay. I mean, it's not like I feel like I am, but really I'm not. But for a while, they are completely dependent on you and it is your job to make sure they're okay. And obviously things happen beyond your control like this loss in the book and, you know, SIDS and all sorts of things that you can't control. But it's like, you know, you do actually have to do it. That is the mantle you have to And so how do you recover from that? And how do you transition to like, Oh, no, they're okay by themselves?

[8:41]Laura Diamond: I don't I

[8:42]Zibby Owens: don't think yeah, I was going say it's not loosening up quite yet for me. No.

[8:46]Laura Diamond: My boys are now 21 and 17, and that means they drive. And, you know, the 21 year old lives in another state in college. Yeah, there are different kinds of coping mechanisms that most of the time we use to not think about the worst things. But that also kind of helps inform the joy and the appreciation for the day. Like, this day is a gift because we do not know what's going to happen. So I'm going to hug you despite your tantruming at me or whatever it might be. That's true.

[9:23]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. So, Laura, how did you get into writing? Tell me your life story. Where did you grow up? Like, how did we get here? The brief version. The brief version, yeah. I never envisioned being a novelist or a professional writer.

[9:38]Laura Diamond: I was almost always, since my childhood, a journal keeper, a diary keeper. And I remember my first Hello Kitty diary that my mom got me. The fact that it was Hello Kitty was the main draw. But then writing in it, carried me through high school and trauma and all the bad poems about the heartbreak. Went to law school because I was really interested in being a public interest civil rights lawyer. And it carried me through that too. Keeping a journal kept my humanity going while I was reading about contracts and torts. And, you know, it allowed me to keep in touch with that. I don't know, just to observe. In fact, there was a scene in Shelter Us that came from just a small moment that I remember writing about it. I was in Berkeley and I was walking on the sidewalk and behind this old couple that was holding hands as they went down the curve ever so tenderly and gently to make sure they made it. And I wrote about that in my journal. And I think writing a journal, it's like doing scales in a way. It keeps you noticing things. It keeps you alive to details. When my first son was about two and a half, I was practicing law. I had gone part time and even that was not working for me. So I decided after a lot of took a long time to let go of it, but I decided, you know what? I'm going to press pause on this law stuff. I just want to be home with him. I'm so surprised by this. I didn't expect that, but I want to be home. And the moment I made that decision, it was like, I have more time to write. And it was still just journal, and that became sort of personal narrative. And I took a class right before my second son was born. And when he was napping, finally, I self published an anthology about motherhood. One day when I was writing one of those personal stories, I started making things up. And I remember it was about a day at the beach or some moment we'd had. But I started writing about this woman in the third person, and she started doing things that I hadn't done. And for a little while, I followed that. And soon enough, I decided, you know what? I'm writing a novel because I want to explore some of these things that I have not been through. You know, my life's kind of dull. And I want to be able to say some other things and explore this grief and explore this connection with these two characters. And I announced to everybody that I knew, I'm writing a novel, so that I would hold myself to it and not stop because I knew I'd be too embarrassed if I never finished it. And it took a long time. My announcement of the year of the novel was 2008, and it was published in 2015.

[12:39]Zibby Owens: That's not bad. No, it

[12:42]Laura Diamond: is what it is. Keep going until it's ready. And I felt that it was ready. So that's my story. That's my writing journey.

[12:57]Zibby Owens: And then how did you get in? So you also do the Palisades Book Club for the library. Right. Other Right.

[13:05]Laura Diamond: I live in a town in Los Angeles called Pacific Palisades, and it is where I grew up. I did not expect to end up here. I always tell people I did leave. I did not just stay put for the whole time. That's how I feel about New York. Like, I did escape for a while, but here I am. Right. Yeah. You want to make sure you've seen the world a little bit. Yeah. So to my surprise, I ended up living back in my hometown, which is a wonderful place. It has its ups and downs, its pros and cons, which I'm writing about in a memoir now. No way. Oh, my gosh. Wait, tell me about the memoir. This is weird. Life is very strange. And I- so the memoir is almost a case of life imitating art because after I wrote this book where Sarah, who is- her mother is Guatemalan, her father is Jewish, Her grandmother came from Guatemala as an 18 year old pregnant. And she's the grandmother character I love anyway. And then Sarah spends all this emotional energy trying to decide how to help this young woman who needs a place to live and what should she do. Should she bring her in her home? No, that's crazy. That would never work. All of that, after it was contracted to be published, but before it came out, I got an email from my mother that was forwarded twice from a friend of a friend. And it said the initial writer was an immigration lawyer for a pro bono nonprofit in Los Angeles. And she said, I have a client, a teenage girl from Guatemala. She is this wonderful person. She's seeking asylum because and she had to leave home. Her parents sent her to The United States because of horrible things that happened to her back in Guatemala. What she really needs is a place to live. And I've never done this before, the email said, but she's special. And we're just wondering if maybe there's someone out there who has time in their life now to foster her for a year or so. And I was reading this email thinking- That's crazy. What? Crazy. And I showed it to my husband without saying a word because I just wanted him to have a reaction devoid of my influence. And we ended up, you know, we were not looking to do that. We were not looking to be foster parents to a traumatized teenager from Guatemala. But I could not get this idea out of my head that what if I were born in that country and not here? And what if I was that mom and I had to send my son across the world? All I could think about was, God, maybe just please let there be some mother over there who will find him and say, I've got him. I could see the silhouette of a woman. And so we couldn't delete it. We just couldn't forward it and delete it, but we didn't know what to do. So we replied to an Aboriginal attorney sending it. Maybe we can help. And two months later, Maria moved into our house. Oh my gosh. And yeah, so she, you know, it was one of those things, like I learned about the power of maybe, you know, you take one step and you take another, and then there you are. And so the memoir really explores her journey and our journey with her as a family. And it explores some of the same themes, frankly, as the novel with survival and resilience and love. I wanted to write about her because I'm just such a fan. She ended up living with us for five and a half years until she was ready to spread her wings. Did you have to meet her parents? She has not been able to go back to Guatemala to see them, and they are not able to come here. So for her, it's been almost eight years since She she's seen got asylum. She became a legal permanent resident, which is a green card holder, and she is now eligible to become a citizen and she's just waiting in line. Yeah. So once she's a citizen, she will be able to safely go back with and return. That's the risk is to say, you know, if you go back to the country that you say was not safe for you, then that could jeopardize your status. So she's got, you know, a lot of longing there, too. But she, you know, she changed all of our lives. In fact, I went back to law part time doing asylum law, which I'd never done before. And, you know, it's amazing what she brought to us. So there you go. Now you don't have to read the book. But you should because it's really great.

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[20:51]Laura Diamond: You know, I wanted to do I wanted to both with Shelter Us and with with this memoir, I think, inclination you have, like when you know somebody so special and they're portrayed in media as numbers or statistics, you feel like maybe storytelling is a way to

[21:09]Zibby Owens: humanize that statistic. It is. Yes. I mean, I feel like people just that's how we process information is through story, not through data and numbers and

[21:21]Laura Diamond: percentages and all of that. Doctor. Right. Let me tell you about this person I know. And that's where Josie came from, too, also. The character in Shelter Us was the homeless mother. I had been volunteering with a homelessness organization here in LA that focused exclusively on homeless families. And by that, ultimately, that really ended up meaning young mothers and children. Girls who had grown up in foster care, didn't have the support network so that once they were out, they didn't have a couch to land on if things didn't go well. If they didn't get that first job right after high school or couldn't pay Right, right, right. But this, by the time I met them, they were moving, they were already formerly homeless. They were moving into apartments. They were having job training and counseling with this organization. And so we spent time just getting to know them and helping them move in. They- one of the young women, especially, I was ten years older than her, but we had kids the same age. And we were talking about like, What do you do when your 14 old throws the sippy cup on the floor? And, Yeah, that's really hard. And I just thought these women are so resilient, so resourceful, and they're not really the story of homelessness. And I I think people should know about,

[22:40]Zibby Owens: you know, this is another another side of of homelessness too. People. Just people. Yeah. It's true. There was this really powerful memoir that I read by a man who had formerly been homeless in Canada. It's like the number one bestseller in Canada or something. Well, anyway, in our interview, and now I'm it'll come to me. My brain is working so slowly today. This is terrible. I'll look at it. Maybe? And anyway, he said that the number one thing with homeless people is you should always ask them their names because they feel so invisible. And it's just a reminder to them that they are human and they are seen. And right after I did this, this is not that long ago, maybe two, three, four months, I think. Anyway, when I was giving money to a homeless person on my way, you know, in New York, as one does, just like stopping. Anyway, so I gave it to this man on the street. And then I stopped. And I was like, What's your name? And he told me his name. And he, like, looked me in the eye, and I was like, Okay. And he was like, Thanks. Anyway, I was just like, Okay. And how did that make you feel? It made me feel great. I mean, I felt terrible for him. You know? And I'm like, Goodbye. Now I'm going go out to dinner. You know, it's But, you know But there's a connection. You're acknowledging his humanity. Yeah. And it's so easy to just keep walking.

[23:56]Laura Diamond: Yeah. And, you know, nobody's perfect. Nobody knows exactly what to do. And that's sort of, you know, Sarah's always wondering, what should I do? It's the right thing. And she has moments where she, you know, passes homeless people and feels if, you know, so it's complicated. And yeah, I think that's important, too, to sort of to acknowledge that these are big, messy human issues, and it's okay to not be perfect and to just try

[24:29]Zibby Owens: try again. Yep. I feel like even in Brentwood, there's all those, there's like a homeless encampment now that's set up by San Viceni, you know, that whole area. The

[24:40]Laura Diamond: tragedy is that is right outside the Veterans Administration Building and those are veterans. Oh, is that what's going on? Okay. Yes. Yeah, don't get us started on talking about homelessness in LA. We will not have enough time to be there. We'll take this up another time. Yeah, we'll that in the next hour. It is a really intractable problem. You know, when I was writing Shelter Us, I had Sarah meet Josie downtown. And there weren't really people in Pacific Palisades at that time who were homeless on the street that you would see. And that's changed now. If I wrote it now, I would have Sarah walk down the block and have a conversation with Ruby in front of the library. One of the great things in this, I have to tout here, there's the Pacific Palisades Task Force on Homelessness, which I've not really been a part of. They're just tremendous volunteers. And they've piloted and modeled a project where they've rather than trying to like, let's clear everybody off, let's get them on a bus. They raised money to hire outreach workers from a Santa Monica agency to engage people and find out, you know, what do you need? Except more than 70 people have been housed. Oh, good. Yeah, it's really fantastic. It's very compassionate. And I think that people come to it for different reasons. Some people are coming from the, I don't want to see this and I want my kids to see this. Others are coming from, this is a human tragedy. Let's be the uber compassionate. The end goal is the same, you know? Wow. Yeah. What advice would you give to an aspiring author? Well, I give myself this advice all the time, and it is things take the time they take. And it is, you know, I started out talking, Oh my, I felt like my novel was taking so long. And now I feel like with my memoir, Oh, you know, it's taking so long. Like, compared to what? You know, it's so easy. That's another bit of advice might be, you know, try not to compare yourself to other people. I do it all the time. Like, how does that person write a novel a year? You know, you just have to accept that your pace is your pace. And I have this Mary Oliver poem, which is where that came from, you know, that it's taped to my wall. And I think it's called Don't Worry. Things take the time they take. Don't worry. And it's a very brief poem, but it goes on to just be like, you know, cut yourself a break. So that would be my advice. If you're a writer, you're a writer. You always come back to it. You're a writer. That was actually advice my friend gave me. Still think of her as she's a real writer. You know, I published a novel, but the imposter syndrome is strong. But we were talking about like, what do you think makes you a writer? And she said, I think even if you didn't write for a long time, it's just some if you feel compelled to come back to it, you know, even if you're still that person just writing in the journal because it satisfies your soul or fills you in some way, it's how you engage with the world and process your emotions and maybe put it right back out to the world, whether that's on, you know, a large stage or not at all. You're a writer, if that's how you if that's how you engage with with with your spirit and and others.

[28:29]Zibby Owens: So I love that. I learned that you can't things take the time they take. When I was pumping in a, like, trailer bathroom at a wedding for my twins who are now almost 15. And I was in there, everybody was pounding on the door, like, at this wedding. And I was like, I can't rush ten minutes. I have to do ten minutes or I'm not gonna be able to survive. And then I there was like, there's no amount of stress. I couldn't speed up the time. There's like nothing. And I came to this whole new place of acceptance. Like, okay,

[28:59]Laura Diamond: time, it is what it is. And I'm so glad you did because I can just as easily picture the opposite being like, I'm trying, you know? And then it all slowed down and stopped. Well, I did say, at first that was me. And then that's when I came to this. And I was like, No,

[29:15]Zibby Owens: there's nothing I can do. So anyway, first of many, there's

[29:20]Laura Diamond: nothing I can I do about think that with parenting, especially of the young ones, when you're when it's so intense and writing have a lot in common? And one of those things is that lesson of just you're just in the moment when you're doing it. You know, it may procrastinate a lot to get to the page, but once you're on it, boy, time can just fall away. And the same with following a toddler around to make sure they don't fall in a abyss or something. You're just there. And those are some pretty powerful moments and

[29:57]Zibby Owens: love them both. Yes. Laura, thank you. This was so nice. And thank you for the immersion in your book and the feelings it evoked in me and the sense of place and all of it. You're a really good writer, and it was really a joy to read. So thank you. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you, and thank you for having me. No problem. Alright. Hope to see you soon. Bye bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.

[31:47]Zibby Owens: Of what? That can't be right. It's okay. Forget everything except MyFico.