Emily Gould, PERFECT TUNES
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[1:55]I'm excited to be here today with Emily Gould, who's the author of Perfect Tunes and Novel.
[1:59]She also wrote the books and the heart says whatever and friendship.
[2:03]She contributed to many anthologies and runs Emily books, an imprint of coffee house breasts
[2:08]which publishes books by women.
[2:09]She's a contributor to Book Forum and the cut.
[2:12]She teaches writing in New York City where she lives with her family.
[2:14]Welcome Emily, thanks for coming on mom's time to read books.
[2:17]Thanks so much for having me.
[2:19]Can you please tell listeners what Perfect Tunes is about?
[2:22]Perfect Tunes is the story of a mother and daughter who are very close in age
[2:28]because Laura, the protagonist of the book, got pregnant with Marie, her daughter when she was
[2:34]in her very early 20s and the circumstances of that pregnancy and Marie coming into Laura's life
[2:43]really changed the course of what she thought her life was going to be like.
[2:47]Laura moved to New York as many people do with big dreams of being in her case a singer-songwriter
[2:55]and she is someone who has a lot of talent and not a lot of ambition in terms of figuring out
[3:04]how to get her talent out there and she falls in really quickly with a group of people including
[3:12]the man who ends up being Marie's father who are much more driven, much more ambitious
[3:18]and much more sort of savvy in the ways of the big city than she is.
[3:23]Dylan especially is like a rock star, someone who's at the beginning of what seems like it's
[3:28]going to be a stratospheric career. Unfortunately, minor spoiler, but it happens at the
[3:35]very beginning of the book. It's okay. And it's also, I think, in the jacket copy,
[3:39]so not actually is willing anything. But Dylan dies unexpectedly and suddenly and
[3:47]Laura then finds out that she's pregnant and just feels obligated to continue with the pregnancy
[3:53]and bring this child into the world because she's so in love with Dylan and feels like this is the
[3:58]last trace of him in this world. So all of that burgeoning talent and all of those artistic
[4:09]dreams get pushed to the margins of her life while she focuses on, you know, raising her daughter
[4:16]and surviving as a single mom and then the latter part of the book deals with Marie coming of age,
[4:24]being a teenager and finding with her mom, really hating her mom and wanting to know more about
[4:30]her dad's family. I jinxed it. Well done. Thanks. I'm trying to keep the figure out a way to keep
[4:37]it shorter than that. But, you know, no, that was great. I mean, that's really, I mean,
[4:41]that was, yeah, there we go. And then now pick up your copy and see later. No, okay.
[4:46]So how did you come up with this idea? What made you want to write about these characters in
[4:50]particular or this situation? Well, it's funny when I did the first draft of the book that would
[4:55]become perfect tunes. I was just obsessed with the idea of what if you could meet your mother
[5:02]as she was before she became your mother. And the first draft of this book, I was really trying to
[5:07]tackle that in a very literal way, like involving time travel. And I wrote an entire, well,
[5:16]almost a full draft and then realized, you know, I just don't have, I don't have whatever it takes
[5:21]to play with rules of reality. I'm really at this stage in my writing life better at just writing
[5:30]a straightforward, realist novel that takes place in chronological order and doesn't mess with
[5:35]the laws of the physics. Space time continuum. Yeah. And I, yeah. So once I accepted that I just
[5:42]like wasn't pulling off the time travel, that it was always going to be ridiculous no matter
[5:46]how hard I tried to take it seriously as I was writing it, I had to throw out basically an entire
[5:52]draft, like almost almost a whole book that I'd written. And it was a terrible moment, like a
[5:59]terrible day. My writing group, who I've, we meet and have been meeting for years and years, like
[6:06]almost a little more than a decade, I think they were very gentle, but they did guide me toward
[6:11]that decision. And I'm super grateful because then what I was able to do is sort of pick up the
[6:17]pieces, take the characters who at that point really existed in my mind. And some of the places
[6:25]where they'd been and the things they'd experienced. And then just sort of put them together in a
[6:30]context that didn't involve IOSCA aided time travel, something that happened in the first time.
[6:37]So yeah, feel like I dodged a bullet. But it was a dark, it was a dark moment for sure. So what
[6:45]what did you tell yourself when you open the document to start over and like, did you like select
[6:51]all and just press the delete button? Or did you start a new draft? I'm like envisioning you at your
[6:56]computer. Like where were you? Where were you? Where were you? No, I think I always thought that
[7:00]I think it was at the library. It was during the days also really early in my older son's life,
[7:08]my first child, where I wasn't getting much writing time. And every little scrap of time I was
[7:13]precious because it really felt like it would I would never be able to have big stretches of time
[7:19]again. And and also I was so conscious of how much I was paying to have that time. And it felt
[7:26]very, very pressured. And I just had to, like you said, you know, I did reframe and think of my life,
[7:36]my writing life, my career really as a long game, you know, try not to think about like, am I being
[7:43]maximally productive on this day during this week, during this month, during this year of my life,
[7:51]and think more of, you know, this is a book, books take four or five years. I mean, for me,
[8:01]for many people, I think that's that's like a pretty normal like book metabolism to have.
[8:08]And so this is part of that four or five year chunk of my life. This is just the first part of it.
[8:14]Yeah. But it's hard in the day to day to just go home and just feel like you have accomplished
[8:19]not even nothing, but like negative anything. But to be in the hole. Yeah. Not to sound like
[8:26]Pollyanna ish about it. But I feel like you have to go through those drafts. Like if you don't,
[8:32]then you won't get to the final draft. Like everybody keeps saying, like, they have to throw
[8:37]everything away and what a loss. And yet sometimes that's, it's not negative. Yeah. It was required to
[8:44]get here. It's so corny. It's so corny. I know, I'm sorry. No, but it's true. It's true. It's and it's
[8:51]something that I tell, I tell students and I tell my friends who are struggling with their writing,
[8:57]we all give each other the same pack talk. And it's it really just is about trusting the process.
[9:03]Like the process is a thing that exists outside of people. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you've written
[9:11]other books. Like this isn't like your first attempt is your third novel. Yeah. I feel like with every
[9:16]book though, I'm setting myself sort of a new challenge, like teaching myself a new skill set
[9:21]because my first book I was, you know, teaching myself how to write linked essays. My second book
[9:26]I was teaching myself how to write a novel. And my third book, this book, the main thing that I
[9:31]feel like I taught myself how to do in this book is how to work with a longer time frame. Because
[9:38]this book takes place over the course of 15 years. And my first book, I very, very deliberately
[9:45]made it take place over the course of one calendar year. I knew that was all I could handle.
[9:50]And also the first book has a lot of structure baked into the plot because one of the characters
[9:58]because I liked to write about pregnancy. I did not.
[10:00]experienced pregnancy when I wrote that first book,
[10:02]but pregnancy is a great way to structure a book
[10:04]because it just has a narrative structure built into it.
[10:09]A happy editor did point out to me, though,
[10:11]that one of the characters was pregnant for 11 months.
[10:14]It was so, it was, you know,
[10:19]to a fix that had to happen.
[10:20]It's a more like an elephant, I guess, and a human.
[10:24]Do you have a particular affinity for music?
[10:27]Are you like super into music
[10:28]to structure, it was structured around this sort of, like,
[10:31]cool band?
[10:33]Is it, I think, this might totally shock you,
[10:35]given that the characters in this book
[10:38]are musicians in the early arts,
[10:40]but in the early arts, I dated a musician.
[10:43]But other than that, I have,
[10:45]I really have very little in common with Laura.
[10:49]Like, she, biographically, is like me
[10:51]in that she moved to New York the same year
[10:53]that I did and lived, and lived in the East Village.
[10:57]Other than that, I think, were more,
[11:00]I feel like I have a lot more in common with Marie,
[11:02]and I gave Marie a lot more of my own experiences
[11:06]as the mother, I mean, as the daughter character,
[11:10]because I know what it's like to be a daughter,
[11:14]but I don't know what it's like to have a daughter.
[11:17]And, you know, the way things are shaping up
[11:19]in this lifetime, I never will.
[11:21]So one of the things that I wanted to sort of give myself
[11:24]in this book was like experiencing that in fiction.
[11:27]I don't know.
[11:28]It just seemed like something that I wanted to explore.
[11:31]I think especially after I learned
[11:33]that my second child was also a boy,
[11:36]I felt even more sure about like writing about this dynamic
[11:40]that I will never know, probably.
[11:42]Oh my god.
[11:44]Yeah, I'll sign up and stay tuned.
[11:45]Yeah, we always say things like,
[11:47]if we win the lottery or whatever,
[11:49]but like, you know, we're pretty much
[11:52]stretched our max in all kinds of ways right now,
[11:55]especially, you know, with like our older son, Rafi,
[11:59]having such an enormous personality.
[12:02]So yeah, I'm pretty, I'm actually pretty happy
[12:04]with the situation as it is.
[12:06]I don't really, I always have the option of writing more books,
[12:10]you know.
[12:10]There you go.
[12:11]Yeah.
[12:12]I can just put them on a shelf.
[12:13]Yeah.
[12:14]They don't have to like go to college.
[12:16]Yeah.
[12:17]You know, they don't need their own room.
[12:18]No, you don't have to like buy a larger car.
[12:21]Yeah.
[12:22]Yeah.
[12:23]We're like the car situation with four kids like, you know,
[12:25]we're like constantly like, there just isn't a big car.
[12:28]You'd like a truck anyway.
[12:30]Yeah.
[12:31]If you'd like a bus or something.
[12:32]Yeah.
[12:33]That would be cute though.
[12:34]It wouldn't be cute.
[12:35]It couldn't park in anywhere, but you know, I can't park anyway.
[12:37]So fair enough.
[12:39]So in this book, you do have an interesting thing happen,
[12:43]which is that Laura has to deal with Dylan's death
[12:46]in the context of the wider national morning
[12:50]for 9-11, which happens at the same time.
[12:52]And you wrote, she passed fading posters on lampposts
[12:55]that people had put up looking for their lost relatives
[12:57]and friends with blurry color photocopies,
[13:00]photocopied photographs.
[13:01]She wished that she could mourn with all the other mourners.
[13:03]Maybe then her burden wouldn't feel so huge.
[13:06]When she caught herself weeping silent tears while walking
[13:08]down the street, she knew that people assumed
[13:10]that she was crying for one of the other dead people.
[13:12]And again, she felt like a liar.
[13:15]So where did this come from?
[13:16]Did you have a loss over 9-11?
[13:18]Did you just imagine?
[13:19]Have you ever felt sort of like out of step
[13:21]with other people's emotions in the same way?
[13:23]I mean, Laura is so emotionally immature,
[13:27]and she's revealing it in that moment.
[13:29]She's so young, and she has no idea what the magnitude
[13:32]of 9-11 means to the people who lost someone.
[13:37]And she's experiencing very shitty, selfish emotions
[13:40]in that moment.
[13:41]It felt really important to me to be true,
[13:43]to Laura as someone who is imperfect and really young,
[13:47]and yet having these really big, challenging,
[13:50]life decisions thrust upon her.
[13:53]I mean, a lot of the book is about,
[13:54]like, Laura figuring out how to grow up
[13:57]at the same time that she is becoming a mother.
[14:01]My own 9-11 experience informed this part of the book
[14:06]just because I did live in New York at that time.
[14:09]But it was also like a, you know,
[14:11]I was, I'm a little younger than Laura, even.
[14:14]So I just remember the process
[14:16]of really sort of like learning over the course of years,
[14:19]how childish and how incomplete,
[14:24]like my generations, like capacity for understanding something
[14:27]of that magnitude really was.
[14:30]But I think it really did shape.
[14:32]I mean, it shaped my experience with what it was like
[14:34]to live in this city for sure.
[14:36]And it also really coincided for me
[14:39]with, this was like a little bit weird to say,
[14:42]but I think a lot of people had this experience too
[14:44]of really deciding that they wanted to live in New York
[14:47]forever and really like falling in love with the city.
[14:51]Because, you know, it was a moment
[14:53]of really seeing people at their best
[14:55]and really seeing people care about strangers
[14:59]and care about people that they didn't know.
[15:00]And that was really special and really unique.
[15:03]And in some ways, I got to experience some of that
[15:05]again after Hurricane Sandy.
[15:07]That was another time that I felt like New Yorkers
[15:09]really came together and doing volunteer work
[15:12]after Hurricane Sandy was another time
[15:13]that I, that was a time that I was able to,
[15:17]as an older person, like, make some emotional sense
[15:21]of what that experience, you know,
[15:24]with my like, Laura S. Knevite, had been like,
[15:28]yeah, it was a, I mean, anyway, I just, I'm sorry.
[15:34]I like asking someone about their 911 story
[15:36]is like a little bit like asking someone about like a dream.
[15:38]They had because like everyone has one,
[15:39]but it's like most people are pretty boring.
[15:42]Anyway, I will spare you.
[15:44]You don't have to spare me?
[15:45]Well, it's, I mean, it was actually such a crazy time
[15:49]because I met this woman who had been one of my,
[15:52]like, writer idols.
[15:54]I was going out to Stony Brook,
[15:56]going island to meet her for the first time
[15:58]and interview to be her assistant,
[16:00]this cartoonist and author of Phoebe Glockner,
[16:02]who is just an amazing super genius.
[16:05]And I ended up spending the next three days
[16:06]at her house because trains weren't running back
[16:08]to the city.
[16:08]So we really got to know each other
[16:10]and I really got to know her family
[16:12]in this like maximally intense and crazy time.
[16:18]But I was, I was such a kid.
[16:20]I mean, I was 19, but like, I didn't even realize at first
[16:24]the first thing that I should do
[16:25]when I got off the train is like,
[16:26]call my mom and reassure her that I was okay.
[16:29]Like it didn't even occur to me.
[16:32]You know, I feel like you're being kind of hard
[16:34]on yourself because you actually work.
[16:36]I mean, yeah, no, I feel like you were acting childish,
[16:39]but you were 45.
[16:41]You were young.
[16:42]And sometimes like you're saying,
[16:44]like you maybe just didn't have,
[16:45]like you just had your brain had not gotten to.
[16:47]Yeah, no, it's true.
[16:49]You're like frontal cortex, exactly.
[16:51]Actually not fully formed at that point.
[16:53]But it's interesting to me as a novelist to think about
[16:55]like the ways that young people can be very,
[16:59]like fully formed and then the ways that we are still
[17:02]so incomplete and I thought about that a lot
[17:05]when I was ready in this book too.
[17:06]You recently wrote an essay called
[17:08]Replaying My Shame for the Cut,
[17:10]in which you talk about the experience
[17:12]of being interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel
[17:15]on Larry King Live and being unexpectedly
[17:18]the rest into a situation where you had to defend
[17:21]your role as Gockers editor and writer
[17:24]and the map of celebrities and how they felt
[17:28]about whether or not that was a safe thing to do
[17:31]if you were putting celebrities at risk.
[17:33]You had to go on the defensive
[17:36]and were completely sort of blindsided
[17:38]by where the interview was going,
[17:40]which was all caught on TV and now on YouTube
[17:42]and all this stuff was forever.
[17:44]And after that you had to have a period of complete
[17:48]like defending yourself and soul searching and whatever.
[17:52]And then you just wrote this essay now
[17:54]like last month about how that whole thing affected
[17:58]you going forward, everything from your bubblegum pink suit
[18:01]from the vintage store to how you deal with it now
[18:05]and how it keeps coming up even if you don't want it
[18:07]to come up.
[18:08]And I didn't even know how this happened to you.
[18:09]I just read your book and I was like,
[18:11]oh, wonder what, oh, good.
[18:13]I was like, well, I'm glad I googled her
[18:14]because this is like a really interesting experience
[18:16]you had at a young age when things were unregulated
[18:22]in the like vlogger space really
[18:24]and you were sort of left out to dry
[18:27]and now you've revisited it as like a mature older person
[18:31]and wrote about it.
[18:32]So I was just wondering what made you write this article now
[18:35]maybe related to this book
[18:36]or what have you thought about it as a year of past
[18:39]being in that situation and being thrust into that
[18:42]uncomfortableness that ensued?
[18:44]So for me, I think, you know,
[18:48]clearly this has been strange 15 years
[18:52]in terms of media, the media landscape,
[18:56]the global shifts in who has power
[18:59]and how that power is distributed
[19:01]and how we get our news, how we get our information
[19:04]and I was there for this historical moment
[19:09]and I've also seen it being reframed over and over again
[19:14]by other people and instead of being caught up
[19:18]in someone else's narrative of this job that I had
[19:22]at this early stage of my career,
[19:25]at the very beginning of my career,
[19:28]I wanted to just tell my version of the story
[19:33]that tell people what my experience of this has been
[19:36]like and how it's shaped me
[19:37]and it felt important to me to write it
[19:42]and I did my best.
[19:43]It was great.
[19:44]I mean, you just did, I wanted a whole book about that.
[19:49]It's funny, when I first started working on it,
[19:51]I actually thought that I would write a whole book about shame
[19:53]or that shame would be the sort of like key
[19:57]that unlocked a lot of different themes
[19:59]and that I would continue.
[20:00]you to do essays on that theme,
[20:02]some of them like researched and reported
[20:05]and, you know, really digging deep into
[20:09]what shame has meant for a lot of people,
[20:12]not just myself.
[20:13]And then after I worked on this essay for seven months,
[20:15]I was like, oh my God, no.
[20:16]You're really, I really feel so done with this.
[20:20]So, and I really just,
[20:22]that was another thing that it turned out
[20:24]that I wanted by the end of this process.
[20:26]I was like, this is published, this is,
[20:29]what I feel right now.
[20:31]You know, I like to never say never about anything clearly
[20:34]and I'm really too fully close the door,
[20:36]but it feels to me right now like this is the last time
[20:39]that I will ever write about this stuff.
[20:41]And now I can just sort of like move on from it
[20:44]to the extent that that is possible
[20:46]because it's not like as I had said in the essay,
[20:49]it's not totally up to me, right?
[20:51]You know, no matter how many books I write,
[20:54]no matter how many books I have other peoples,
[20:57]I may be able to publish, no matter what teaching job
[21:01]I get, you know, it's always gonna be this thing
[21:03]that's in like the first paragraph of my bio, you know?
[21:06]And I have to, and I didn't put it in your bio.
[21:08]Oh, well thank you.
[21:09]Just so you know, it's not even in there.
[21:12]Oh my God.
[21:13]I was doing another, I was doing another interview recently
[21:16]and the way that we ended up talking about it somehow.
[21:18]I don't remember whether I brought this up
[21:19]or whether the interviewer brought this up,
[21:21]but the way that we ended up talking about it was
[21:22]whether it would be the, in the first few senses
[21:25]of my obituary when I die.
[21:27]Yeah.
[21:27]But, you know, life is long, who knows what will happen
[21:33]in the next several decades of my life.
[21:36]Maybe I'll only be known as like Raphael,
[21:39]I guess in Gold's mom, you know?
[21:40]Maybe he'll go on to be like a global pop sensation.
[21:44]I'll just be like, oh yeah, his, like, Emily,
[21:47]his mom.
[21:48]I think she was a journalist or a writer or something.
[21:50]My goal is just to have an obituary written about me.
[21:53]I'm like, do you think they'll write one?
[21:55]Oh, I was so vain.
[21:55]I'm like, oh, it's a foregone conclusion.
[21:58]I mean, it'll just be like tucked away
[22:06]and some obituary section.
[22:08]But yeah, like, you know, come on, written a few books.
[22:12]Yeah, we, you'll never know.
[22:15]So it doesn't matter.
[22:16]That is such a good thing to meditate on.
[22:18]I'm like, you don't feel bad or good about it.
[22:23]It is what it is.
[22:24]Yeah.
[22:25]Fully.
[22:26]That's reassuring, actually.
[22:27]Yay.
[22:28]Good.
[22:29]Yeah.
[22:30]I know, I like go down such a dark hole
[22:33]about like my whole death and like I'm like,
[22:36]I want to write the speech that people read.
[22:38]I want to like organize it.
[22:39]I want to have like the whole thing planned.
[22:41]I want to like, you know, be in charge.
[22:43]I want to know exactly who's going to talk.
[22:45]Like, and so every so often I like rewrite.
[22:46]No, it's, I don't like ridiculous.
[22:49]Okay, that's legit crazy.
[22:51]I know.
[22:51]Yeah.
[22:52]Although it's better than being totally unprepared.
[22:54]I like to plan for everything.
[22:55]Yeah.
[22:55]Oh my God, we had this like rent a wrap.
[22:57]I went my grandfather died.
[22:58]She was the worst of my grandparents today.
[23:00]And he got his name wrong.
[23:02]It was horrible.
[23:03]It was horrible.
[23:04]I, yeah, that, that was like a moment for me
[23:07]of being like, I should really get there.
[23:09]Yeah.
[23:10]Like, that leads to a playlist, you know?
[23:12]Yeah, yeah.
[23:13]Yeah.
[23:13]Well, now that we've got to think about our deaths today.
[23:16]Again, in another context, it's before noon,
[23:19]but we went there.
[23:20]What do you want out of life now?
[23:21]You're writing this great book.
[23:23]Like, what comes next for you?
[23:24]Like, what else do you need to do?
[23:26]You've written all these books.
[23:27]Like, you've influenced so much.
[23:28]Wait, I also want to hear more about your imprint.
[23:30]Tell me about the publishing and business you were doing.
[23:33]Oh, yeah.
[23:34]It's kind of a coffee house for us, Emily's book.
[23:35]It's actually really an exciting time for us
[23:38]because our next book in the imprint comes out.
[23:41]It came out this week, actually.
[23:43]Hilary Leikner's book, Temporary.
[23:45]It just got to rave in the New York Times.
[23:47]Maybe shower in your show.
[23:48]Yeah, shit.
[23:49]She's lovely.
[23:51]And we love this book so much.
[23:53]I'm so excited for people to get their hands on it.
[23:55]It's actually already going into its second printing,
[23:58]which is really a huge deal for an independently published book.
[24:02]Yeah.
[24:02]So how many books do you publish a year?
[24:04]We were publishing two a year.
[24:06]And only by women.
[24:07]Yeah, like women and gender nonconforming people.
[24:10]We started as a book of the month club.
[24:12]And so we were doing just a book pick every month
[24:15]and distributing them as e-books.
[24:17]And then we started in collaboration with coffee house
[24:20]press, which is a small press that's actually located
[24:23]in Minneapolis.
[24:26]We started publishing books as an imprint of coffee house.
[24:29]And is that amazing?
[24:31]Do you love it?
[24:33]OK, careful.
[24:34]OK, let me start.
[24:36]Let me just say that again.
[24:38]So are you enjoying that?
[24:40]Do you enjoy your role as a publisher?
[24:42]Yeah, I've loved it.
[24:43]I mean, publishing is my first job ever
[24:46]was in book publishing.
[24:48]So I feel like it's this thing that I'm always
[24:50]going to be really interested in.
[24:52]Sadly, bittersweetly temporary is the last book
[24:55]that we have lined up right now.
[24:58]The project has sort of run its course in some ways.
[25:02]It's complicated because I think we've really
[25:06]done what we wanted to do with it.
[25:08]And we're seeing now that a lot of the books
[25:10]that have some of the same themes and some of the same sort
[25:14]of formal qualities of the books
[25:18]that we have been championing and publishing for years
[25:20]are now being published by the Big Five Presses,
[25:23]which is great.
[25:24]And it's great news for these authors.
[25:27]But for us, we sort of felt like what we can do
[25:32]as a small press is really, really limited.
[25:35]And we're always going to have a hard time saying to authors,
[25:37]like, oh, you should take less money to be published independently.
[25:42]Like, it got harder and harder to make that make sense.
[25:45]And also just for me and my best friend Ruth,
[25:47]who I've been running this business with for years,
[25:51]we wanted to take some time for the other parts of our careers,
[25:54]for me writing, teaching, everything else that I do.
[25:59]And for her writing and editing books that
[26:03]aren't necessarily books for a small press.
[26:07]So yeah, and making money also is something
[26:11]that we need to do more of.
[26:14]And as much as we have loved doing this passion project,
[26:20]like we were running low on passion, like after a while,
[26:25]it became this thing where we're sort of dredging
[26:28]the last bits of passion from the passion
[26:30]while we wanted to quit doing it while we still had any left,
[26:32]you know?
[26:33]I make sense, right?
[26:34]I love that.
[26:35]There should be a whole thing on, like, when passion runs
[26:39]out of your passion project, what do you do?
[26:41]Yeah, you should profile like all these different.
[26:43]I like you write that.
[26:43]Yeah, no, I think, well, I mean, I think it just happened
[26:47]pretty often and people have a hard time, you know,
[26:51]it's like the end of a relationship.
[26:53]You're like, when is the day that you want to wake up
[26:55]and blow up your life?
[26:56]Oh.
[26:57]But sometimes it needs to happen.
[26:58]And I am really scared because I have no idea what's next.
[27:02]But I just know that I need to make space
[27:05]for whatever the next thing is to come into my life.
[27:10]Not to sound like a hippie-waltness guru, but I think it's true.
[27:14]Sometimes you do need to make the space
[27:15]before you know what's going to occupy it.
[27:17]It's true.
[27:18]Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?
[27:21]Oh, gosh.
[27:23]Like, don't do any of the stuff that I did, basically.
[27:27]Oh, it's interesting.
[27:28]I guess it's sweet.
[27:29]This is the question that every author gets 1,000 times.
[27:32]I know, I'm trying to be like, I haven't been so scared
[27:34]about it.
[27:35]And I never do, like, taking it seriously.
[27:37]I'm like, no, I mean,
[27:40]you didn't see it coming.
[27:41]You're, no, I'm kidding.
[27:42]No, I, yeah.
[27:43]Like, I mean, I think the answer that everyone probably gives
[27:47]is just like constantly be reading and read a lot, right?
[27:50]Don't give that one then.
[27:51]Yeah.
[27:52]It's a good one, though.
[27:53]I mean, OK, fine.
[27:54]Yeah, I'll take it.
[27:55]Well, because like, having books be so fully
[27:59]in every single part of my life,
[28:02]and I'm also married to a writer.
[28:03]So like, really, the books are just like everywhere
[28:06]coming at me from all sides.
[28:08]And sometimes it does get difficult.
[28:12]And I'm sure you experienced this, too,
[28:13]to realize that books are actually
[28:16]this amazing technology that we have
[28:18]for transmitting one person's consciousness
[28:20]into another person's consciousness.
[28:22]And it's the best way of doing that
[28:25]that humans have come up with.
[28:26]And it's this amazing miracle.
[28:29]And sometimes, like, hitting like hard restart
[28:33]on my like reading and writing life
[28:36]involves for me, like going back to a book
[28:38]that I love and realizing why books were ever
[28:41]important to me in the first place.
[28:43]So I think that's good stock advice for writers, right?
[28:48]Like to sort of get back in touch with why you ever
[28:52]cared about this and so that it can have meaning,
[28:57]because it's increasingly hard, I think, right now
[29:01]at this historical moment to figure out
[29:02]like what we can do every day with our lives
[29:05]to find some sense and meaning
[29:09]in like the increasingly chaotic world that we live in.
[29:13]Anyway, the book that I'm rereading right now
[29:14]is The Age of Innocence.
[29:16]There's a new edition of it that just came out
[29:17]with a fabulous new introduction and forward.
[29:21]And I'm just loving it so, so, so, so, so much.
[29:24]It just gets like richer and more interesting
[29:26]every time I read it.
[29:28]Awesome.
[29:28]Okay, well, I have to say goodbye
[29:29]so I can eat something so my stomach's
[29:31]just growling like this.
[29:32]It's totally fair.
[29:33]Everybody hear my stomach on these micrometes stuff.
[29:37]Anyway.
[29:37]Yeah, that's it.
[29:39]Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[29:40]And I love your freaking screen.
[29:42]Oh, thank you so much.
[29:43]Thanks for reading.
[29:44]You've been listening to Moms and have time to read books
[29:46]with Zibi Owens.
[29:47]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter
[29:49]at zibiowens.com to get more updates about episodes like these
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[29:55]Thanks for listening.
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[30:08]for this week. Only, go check out the WeFoundTime.com essays. They're so good and they'll
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