Joanna Rakoff, MY SALINGER YEAR

[0:54]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a New Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Joanna Rakoff is the author of My Salinger Year. She's also the author of the bestselling novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for fiction, and as I said, My Salinger Year, which is an international best selling memoir, which has been adapted into a feature film starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Quayley. Joanna's books have been translated into 20 languages and nominated for major prizes in The Netherlands and France. She has written frequently for the New York Times, Vogue, Marie Claire, and many other publications. And we had the best time recording in person, which is always such a treat in this post COVID world. Hi, Joanna. Hi. I'm so happy to be here. It's so nice to do this in person.

[2:10]Joanna Rakoff: Yes, this is like the highlight of the spring.

[2:15]Zibby Owens: I'm so glad you came back to New York, that I could make an excuse for you to

[2:19]Joanna Rakoff: come back. I know, it's so strange and exciting to be back here.

[2:24]Zibby Owens: So awesome. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. Oh my gosh. Thank you for dealing with my crazy kids and my husband. Chaos. Total chaos at the end end of the school year. Okay. So my calendar year. Tell listeners if they don't know what it's about or they happen to have missed our virtual book club, what it's about and

[2:41]Joanna Rakoff: how it's become this new movie and gotten all sorts of new attention? Oh, god. Okay. So my calendar year is a memoir. It's often called a novel, which I take as a compliment. Did I say novel? No. You did not. Did I already mess up? Oh my god. Okay. That's like the story of my life, actually. But basically, I I take it as compliment because I feel like that means that it reads like a novel, which was my goal in writing it. But it is a memoir. It is about the year 1996 that I spent working at New York's oldest and most storied literary agency for a kind of grand dame literary agent who in the book is just called my boss. In real life, her name was Phyllis Westberg, who it turned out represented J. D. Salinger. But I didn't know this when I took the job. I only found out after I started. And I was told on my first day that I would not see Salinger. I wouldn't talk to him on the phone. He wouldn't call. He wouldn't come in. And then within an hour of my arriving on my first day, he called. And it turned out that it was an unusual year for him, an unusual moment for him because he decided to come out of his hermitude. I don't know if that's a word. Let's make it a word. I And like he wanted to publish a new book in a very unusual way. So whereas previous assistants and my boss had had, of course, like 40 of them, or 30 of them, I guess, had really had no contact with him. She wasn't lying to me. I was on the phone with him all the time, and I did meet him. And this whole situation with him was a lot of my job, actually. And I'm sort of bearing the lead here, I realize. Because the other big part of my job was that I had to answer his fan mail. And I was supposed to send just a very terse form letter, but I was so kind of moved by a lot of the letters. They were so wonderful and charming and a lot of them were very confessional that I ended up corresponding with a lot of the fans, and it changed my life.

[4:46]Zibby Owens: What a way to start off, like, a literary career with, like, regular correspondence with one of the greatest, like I mean, my gosh, I'm trying to think of my first job after college. Like, maybe I called a printer or something. You know, I had, like, no responsibilities at all. That's so neat. Yeah.

[5:03]Joanna Rakoff: I think that it was an unusual situation. One of the tiny aspects, or maybe it's not tiny, one of the aspects of the book that I left out is that this was also an unusual year for my boss, who was this very imperious, kind of, let's just say old school publishing lady. You know, so, I mean physically, just to set the scene, she was the kind of person who would come in wearing a really dramatic caftan, with a necklace, you know, with some sort of like huge pearl embedded in layers of gold that was so heavy that it was kind of weighing down her neck or like a big medallion. And she just she's a huge huge ornate glasses that if this were now, you'd be like, Oh, those are so Versace. But then that wasn't even part of the lexicon, like gold glasses. And she was not of the sort of school of she was not a twenty first century boss who was like, Hey, how's it going? You know, she just kind of ignored me. And she chain smoked, she wore fur coats, she drank coffee all day and went out for three hour lunches, from which she would come back smashed. You know, and like fall asleep in her chair. So this is, you know, a very different kind of work situation than you would have now. But she had a very unusual personal life as well. She had never gotten married or had a family because she was kind of it was almost like she was a nun, and Salinger was the god that she worshipped. Or I guess, like, the cheesier way of saying it would be that she was married to work. Like, the agency was her family and her her everything. But she had a lover who was married to someone else. And for more than twenty years, he had been involved with my boss, which his wife was fully aware of. And he went back and forth. He lived part of the week with one woman, part of the week with the other. They all socialized together. His wife called my boss almost every day to talk about him. And wow, here's the horrible part. While I worked for her, he committed suicide basically in front of her. And still, even all these years later talking about it now, I feel like I'm going to cry talking And about I found out afterwards that he was severely bipolar and he required constant care. He had been an actor in his youth but had actually stopped working because of his mental health issues. And so my boss, you know, was devastated by this and she left. She just was gone for months. And while she was gone, I had to pretend to the world that everything was fine. And so Salinger would call and I would say, oh, she's, you know, in a meeting or she's at lunch. And eventually, he noticed and said, you know, she's been out a lot. I was like, yes, she's so busy. But in fact, I was actually doing her job for her, every aspect of it. You know, I was negotiating contracts. I was doing everything. And looking back on it, it's pretty demented. I was 23 years old when I first started this job. And 24. And I will say, I think I was a somewhat mature kid because of the circumstances of my growing up, but still, I shouldn't have been doing this.

[8:25]Zibby Owens: Wow. On the other hand, you know, a lot of people, this would be a total dream come true, right? Like, how do you get up, work your way up the ladder? Oh, wait. You know, here I am doing like a full on agent job within a year. It's pretty remarkable, you know. It's true. You know, and the truth is that I loved it. I think that I

[8:46]Joanna Rakoff: a very I'm a person who likes to work independently. So it was I loved working on my own. And as a person who's very self motivated, I think I worked harder when she wasn't there than when she was there. Because I enjoyed working without someone kind of peering over my shoulder. And I probably did a better job because I wasn't nervous that she was going to criticize everything I did. She was very harsh. And, yes, so it was kind of a dream come true. And the strange thing about it was that I took this job really almost as a lark. I had been in grad school. I had finished a master's in English. And I thought that I wanted to go on and get my doctorate. And I was supposed to actually start my doctorate, changed my mind at the last minute. So I thought of this as just kind of like a lost year, like an interim year. This was just a job. I just wanted to be in New York and be with my college friends and I wanted to do something literary. And I realized that I was good at this. And I had never been that good at anything in my life. I'm sure that's not true. And it's kind of true. Was good at, like, ice skating. There was a brief moment when I was like a serious figure skater. But I, you know, when I was a good student, but not the best student. But in terms of agenting, I was really good at it. And my boss came back and this is portrayed in the movie. There's a scene in which this kind of happens. In the movie, my boss was almost gobsmacked by how well I had done this job, including negotiating contracts and working over contracts, which actually is like a quite specific task. You you almost need to have a lawyer brain, which I didn't think I had at all. My parents wished that I had. And so I hadn't taken this job because I wanted to be an agent. Not at all. But I had this period where I thought, Oh wait, maybe I should do this. And I kind of thought I was going to stay on and do it. Wow.

[10:53]Zibby Owens: Crazy. And so then when did you know that

[10:56]Joanna Rakoff: you had a book on your hands? A very long time after. In fact, the truth is, I never knew I had a book on my hands. I never wanted to write this book. The idea for it did not come from me. So I really am a journalist and a fiction writer. And I'm not a person who's written a lot about myself. I say this even as I like ramble onto you about myself. I love hearing it, so keep going. I really, you know, I wrote for magazines and newspapers to support myself while I was writing my first novel. And I mostly I actually loved writing about other people. My favorite thing to write were profiles.

[11:32]Zibby Owens: Profiles and book criticism. You should take my job. I know. I'm like, you should just be sitting here.

[11:39]Joanna Rakoff: It's true. I loved interviewing writers. I had a column where I just actually profiled debut novelists, and I did all sorts of stuff with that. And I was it's strange looking back on it because the economy has changed so much and journalism has changed so much, but that was like my day job. I was a freelance journalist. And I did stints where I worked, you know, as a staffer at magazines. But that was what I did to support myself while writing a novel. And now, I think that's kind of people's end goal to do what I did, what I thought of as just like my day job. And there was something freeing about thinking of it as a day job. I might have been better at it. Mhmm. Because of being like, whatever. I'm really a novelist. So, during this period when I was freelancing, I was in a pitch meeting at a magazine and I was pitching all of these reported pieces. And then at the last second, just out of nowhere, out came Or I could write a personal essay about answering Salinger's fan mail. And the editors obviously said, Yes, do that. So I did it. They assigned me 800 words, and I turned in an 8,000 word piece. Which, for those of you who don't work in journalism out there, that's way too long for almost any magazine except for The New Yorker. And this was not The New Yorker. And so it ran, and it got a lot of attention. I was asked to write a book by many editors and I was approached by agents. And I thought this seemed crazy. Like, who would want a book about me at age 23, 24? I thought, you know, a memoir is like a great person looking back on their life. This was still in the early aughts and memoirs have really changed since then. Wilde had not come out yet. This was a different era. So anyway, years went by, I published my novel. Salinger passed away and I was sort of known as this person who had answered Salinger's fan mail. So I was asked to write other pieces and be on the radio and I did all that. And then the BBC asked me to do a radio documentary about answering Salinger's fan mail, so I did that. And an editor saw the script for it and asked me to turn it into a book. And so this is, I would say this was the end of twenty ten by this point. So it was fourteen years after I had done all this. And I actually said no at first. And I said no for a long time. And eventually that editor had a meeting with my agent. And my agent had been radically opposed to my doing this book. She was like, you don't want to be known as the Salinger girl and people are going to think that you're capitalizing on your Salinger connection. That seemed fair to me. Definitely, I felt like, Okay, this is not terrible advice. But so she met with this editor and he convinced her and she got out of the meeting and called me and said, I think he's right. I think you should do it. And I was like, I don't think so. And she said, Just try to write the first 20 pages. And I did, and that became the proposal. And that became the book. It's still the first 20 like, the 20 pages of the book are exactly what I wrote. And so it was a strange inception

[14:47]Zibby Owens: of a book, I think. And now, all this time later, now it's a movie. Now it's a movie. Exactly. Crazy. Yes. So what was it like the first time you watched the movie? So And I know you've been involved in a lot with the writing and all of that executive producer

[15:04]Joanna Rakoff: and all of that stuff. But watching it is still a a really strange experience. You're seeing yourself. I think it's different than seeing a novel or short story portrayed on film because you're watching movie stars play you and people you know. So I watched it for the first time and I should actually back up and say I had seen various cuts of it along the way just on my laptop. And I was on set when it was filmed. I had seen some of it. And then before the final cut was done, we got word that it was going to be the opening film at the Berlin Film Festival twenty twenty. So this this would be in February 2020. And we found out really just in January, like, right after the New Year. And the director kind of hurriedly finished the final cut and said to me, I think that you should wait to watch it on the big screen. And I trust him. And he's a very sort of I don't know. How would you describe him? He's a person who really believes in film. Like, he's truly an auteur. And the film is really visually beautiful. The people who were involved in the way the film looked are truly kind of geniuses and visionaries. The director of photography has won a million awards. And she's really a visual artist. Her name is Sarah Mishara. And she's just incredible. And it has a little bit of like a Wes Anderson feel to it, the way it looks. So I knew that he wanted me to kind of see it as it was meant to be. And so I said, okay. So I saw it for the first time in a 1,700 person theater at the world premiere. Oh my gosh. You know, wearing a very low cut gown that I was like, am I gonna have some kind of, like, costume mishap with this or wardrobe mishap? And shoes that I could not walk in and, like, a full face of makeup that is not my normal thing at all, sitting next to Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver, like, all of us holding hands. Aw. And I just was sobbing through the whole thing. And actually, so were they. So it was really, really strange and moving. My heart was beating very, very quickly for the entire ninety minutes. So it was a really profound experience. There's nothing that I can compare it to. Just seeing these moments, not just from my life, but from my book, in a way, the book part of it, this piece of art that I created, was turned into another piece of art. And it just felt like so much, you know? Wow. That's really special.

[17:45]Zibby Owens: I mean, not that many people can say that that's happened, so that's pretty cool. It's true. Yes. That is so true. Yeah. Aw. Yeah. Who knew? It's I think it's a once in a lifetime thing. It's so exciting. Oh my gosh. And the movie was so good. As I told you, I was had COVID when I watched it. But now I have to watch it again with my husband now that I, you know, cheated on him with by watching a movie without him when I feel like we watch everything together. I'm scared he's not gonna like it. He's gonna like film industry No. He's totally gonna like it. He's totally gonna like You mentioned a few minutes ago that because of your upbringing, were more mature perhaps than other people. And I know this is sort of fodder for your next book. Can you talk about your next book and the way you grew up and why that might be the case? Yes.

[18:27]Joanna Rakoff: Yeah. So my parents had me somewhat late in life for the 70s. Now, everyone has kids. They were, you know, in their mid 40s when they had me. And my family was, and this is what I'm telling you is basically the plot of my next book, which is called The Fifth Passenger. Like, cross fingers that I finish it in the next month, will be out in a year. So, and it's another memoir. I sort of wish it were a novel. Would be easier. So they had me late in life. I grew up in a relatively small town outside of New York City. It's a town called Nyack, a Hudson River edge town. And I always knew there was something my family felt very different and I thought that it was because my parents were older than all the other parents. But just there was something odd and unusual about my house. And I had a sister who was 18 years older than I was who had a very contentious relationship with my parents. I never understood why they were always fighting and why there was so much tension. And there were always things going on that I didn't understand. I sort of grew up in this atmosphere of things happening and people would sort of stop talking when I walked into the room. Or I would walk into the room, actually sometimes, and I would find my mother sitting with her face in her hands, and then she would look up at me and start crying. And I thought that it was because I had done something wrong, always. And I would say, you know, what did I do? What happened? What did I do? And I would try to figure it out. And when I was about 10 or 11, I found a photo of a family. And they looked a little familiar to me, but I couldn't place them. And I have a big extended family in New York and California. We spent a lot of time with my extended family, so I thought maybe these are my cousins. I don't know. The photo definitely looked like it was from another era, like the sixties, sort of, the way people were dressed in their hair. And I just had this feeling that I should not ask my parents about this photo. It was in my dad's office, kind of tucked away. And I just kept looking at it. I would sneak into his office and look at it. And finally, one night, right before bed, I asked my dad about it. And he said, he pointed to the man, the sort of father figure, and he said, that handsome devil is me. I did not recognize him as my father. My father had white hair. This man had black hair. He pointed to a woman also with black hair and said, that's your beautiful mother. Again, I had a mother with white hair. This person had black hair cut in, like, a very trendy style, which my mother did not have. He pointed to a girl and said, that's your sister Amy, the sister I knew. And then he pointed to the two other kids. And as he did, he started crying and said, this is your sister Anita, and this is your brother Mark. And it turned out that there were two I had two siblings who were in between my sister Amy, 18 older than me, and me, who had died a year before I was born. So I didn't find this all out at the time. My father started crying and hugged me, and I just went to bed, and I never asked him anything else. And then over the course of my life, I slowly found out little bits and pieces of things. Some of them while I was on book tour for my first book, which is called A Fortunate Age. And I'm a very slow writer, it came out a long time ago in 2009. And I when I was on tour, it was, you know, a sort of a book that got some attention at the time. And so I was in newspaper. You know, I would go to San Francisco and be in the Chronicle. And so people would see my picture and realize that I was I, come to my events. And by people, I mean people who knew my brother and sister. So, you know, I would do an event and someone would be in the signing line, get to the front of the line, and just burst into tears and hug me across the signing table, and then eventually calm down while the booksellers were looking on shocked about what was going on. And I guess I wasn't aware of this because there were no pictures out in my house. I look almost identical to my sister Anita. So people that knew my family, Nyack is a really small town, You know, people that were close to Anita and Mark, people that weren't, everyone knew my family. So all over the country, people would come to these events and see me burst into tears, tell me their stories. Sometimes they would hand me a letter telling me their story. Sometimes they would hand me their card and say, can we get coffee and talk about your family? None of them knew that I didn't know anything. They all assumed that I had grown up knowing this story, but I hadn't.

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[26:02]Joanna Rakoff: And so I guess really I'm not even answering your question, but the reason I sort of was maybe a bit more mature than your average 23, 24 year old is because my parents kind of treated me like I was a companion rather than a child. And we traveled everywhere. They took me with them everywhere. I went to dinner parties with them. And I now know that it was because they just were afraid to leave me alone. It turned out that my brother and sister had died in a car accident while they were on vacation. They had left the three kids and gone on vacation without them, and there was a car accident. And so they just never wanted to leave me. So I sort of was raised almost like their kind of little friend. You know, they talked to me like I was a little adult. And so, yeah. And your mother now has Alzheimer's? Doctor. Yes. And is your father still alive? Doctor. No. My father died a long time ago, you know, than ten years ago. Doctor. Yeah. My mother, we believe, has Alzheimer's. She has dementia. It's pretty advanced at this point. Though she has a lot of moments of lucidity.

[27:10]Zibby Owens: Doctor. And by the time before your father died, did you guys come to some sort of peace and understanding of what happened? Doctor. Miller: We did not. So

[27:19]Joanna Rakoff: I feel like this is so crazy in this day and age, but we have still never talked about any of this. What? You never did with your dad and you still have not with your mom? No. And my father on his deathbed mistook me, kept mistaking me for Anita and kept talking to me as if I were her and saying, so often I'm gonna cry, you know, saying, I've missed you so much. I've missed you so much. You know, you were my favorite. You know, you're my most beautiful girl. You're my sweetest girl. I missed you so much. I can't wait to be with you. And eventually, because he said he said, tell me what it's like over there. I know the things that you hear about people saying on their deathbeds, it turns out they're true. And so we never talked about it. I've tried to talk to my mother about it, and she kind of shuts down. She'll occasionally, over the years, say a little something, you know, as in my oldest child was born with kind of dirty blonde curls. And my mother said, Oh, I always wanted a blonde child. You know, and then there was this long silence. And she said, I had a blonde child, meaning my sister Anita. And she was like, But, you know, I lost her. Oh, well, that's that. Nothing can be done.

[28:39]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. I know. Wow. Well, first of all, I can't wait to read that book. But second of all, I feel like I want to say I'm so sorry. Well, first of all, I'm sorry. First of all, second of all, third of all, I'm I'm so sorry for the loss that your parents went through and the fact that they couldn't even talk about it and the fact that you went through this childhood of secrecy and and not really knowing everything. That's I mean and yet you're so like you present in such a like you're so happy and joyful and warm and bubbly as a person, you know? I mean, you wonder sometimes do people's personalities come out of these sort of traumas because of them, in spite of them, you know, unrelated?

[29:25]Joanna Rakoff: I don't know. I know. I think about that all the time, actually. I recently read this book that you may have read called The Body Keeps the Score. It's

[29:34]Zibby Owens: so good.

[29:35]Joanna Rakoff: Have to read it. I actually feel like it was an Oprah pick and it came out a while ago. Like, I want to say, I mean, by a while, I mean, maybe like five years ago. And it's basically about trauma and how trauma lives in the body. It's written by this man, his name is, I think his name is Beryl Vanderkook. And anyway, it's just so fascinating. And he's sort of the preeminent trauma researcher. And he's worked with all the other preeminent trauma researchers. And it just is so interesting because this is one of the things that he investigates as in like, do some people go through incredibly traumatic experiences and come out essentially unscathed or even stronger for it, whereas other people, their lives are destroyed. And I will say, you know, my sister's life was really kind of destroyed by these events. You know, she was driving the car in which she was driving the car. Yes. And one of the things that I've tried to suss out as I because this book involved years of research and I've just tried to figure out was her life destroyed by this the fact that she had to keep a secret that she was told, you know, you can never talk about this. We're just going to put this behind us. Or wish her life destroyed by the fact that she has this residual guilt about this accident. I just don't know. Or by my parents sort of having these very ambivalent feelings toward her because they of course love her. She's her their daughter, but she of course, you know, possibly I mean, I think they believe she was responsible for they did believe she was responsible for her Anita and Mark's death. So you know, I just don't know. When I look at my parents, you know, my mother was really kind of destroyed by this. But my father, who has a very different personality, was a very happy person. And he really did weather it really, really well. And was this because of their upbringing? They had very different upbringings. My father was from a really solid home. My mother was not. But who knows? Or is it just the way your brain is wired? So I read this book because I thought it might help me understand. But it was just fascinating in and of its own right. Wow.

[32:02]Zibby Owens: So I have like a thousand other questions about the next book, but I'm getting off. Oh my gosh. Can you just say how old were your do you know how old your brother and sister were when they died? Doctor. Yes. I didn't know until recently. Very recently, they were 12 and 14. Doctor. Oh.

[32:17]Joanna Rakoff: Doctor. Yeah. Yes. And I've interviewed a lot of people who knew them. And it was so interesting just to hear about their lives to be honest. I have been trying so hard to unravel the stories surrounding their deaths but then to hear about what they were like as people was so fascinating because some people will say to me, oh, they were so young, you know, and almost as if like, well, it wasn't that big a deal, you know. But they were fully formed people who did all sorts of fascinating and amazing things. I'll tell you one tiny, tiny story, which is that so Nyack is a town. A lot of people in the New York area are familiar with it because it's actually a pretty popular place to live now. And a lot of people in the entertainment industry and the arts live there. It's always been a kind of countercultural and liberal enclave. And but it also is a kind of old money, like original New Yorker, you know, like original New York Dutch families sort of enclave. There's a country club there called, and you will understand just how old New York this is. So, it's just called the Field Club. And in my childhood and prior to that, Jews and blacks could not join. And my family lived in a pretty affluent neighborhood in Nyack on a street called Broadway. And on one side of Broadway, the side that faced the river, there are just all these beautiful mansions. Actually, writer Norman Rush lives in one of them. It's it's beautiful. And across the street from us was an old Nayak family that were actually half Jewish, half black. And my brother's best friend was the older son in the family. Anyway, they were so this was, you know, the early 70s. They were so irritated by this that they went and graffitied the sort of main, like, beautiful old house at the field club. I can't actually say on the podcast what they said because there are expletives involved. But I Nothing good. Nothing good. Yeah. And I just, I've heard this story from everyone who knew Mark, and they all told it to me in this gleeful way, because he just was, I guess, a really ferocious person who was very political, but also very funny, and a huge prankster. So, anyway. Wow.

[34:36]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. I can't wait to hear more about this. It's fascinating and devastating all at the same time. Wow. Oh my goodness. Okay. Well,

[34:47]Joanna Rakoff: it's definitely a

[34:48]Zibby Owens: hard thing to talk about, the story. It's not. It's just

[34:54]Joanna Rakoff: heavy because you can just feel the pain that still lingers there. Yeah, yes. I know. Yeah, I talk about this in the book. It's one of those things where, you know, for my whole life, people would say, Do you have siblings? And I would say, Oh, I have an older sister. They would say, Oh, how much older? I'd say, She's much older. How much older? 18 years older. Oh, so you must have been in an accident. And in fact, I was the most planned child there was. My parents had me after losing these two children on purpose. And I would think, like, what do I say? Do I, you know, do I explain? And I would just sort of laugh. And because I knew that if I said, well, there were two kids in between us and they died, then people would be like, and so, yeah. So I just never talked about it ever. Well, bet in some part it's really therapeutic

[35:45]Zibby Owens: to just have it all out, right? No? Not yet. Not yet. But maybe that will come. Let's hope. Let's Alright. Keep working on the book and let's see how you feel when you turn it in. Exactly. Oh my gosh. Well, I feel like just having the secret yourself free like that I don't know. I just think it's gonna I think you're right. It can't I I well, maybe not. Maybe it'll be terrible. I know. We'll find out. Keep me posted. Okay. So any advice to aspiring authors?

[36:17]Joanna Rakoff: That's such a better question. Or not not that the other question. Okay. Sorry. That's a I'll try to No. No. That's an easier question. Yes. And this is so funny. I was just asked this the other day by the director of my mom's nursing home. He was like, want to write a novel. What advice do you have for me? I was like, well, shimmy, here's my advice for you. I guess I have three major, like, very simple pieces of advice. One is to just not really think about publishing. You know, you hear so much, like I get so many DMs from people saying, so what advice do you have about finding an agent? And they haven't even written anything yet. They have an idea for a book and they think they have to get an agent. And that is not going to create a good book. You just really have to write the book. And there are people that tell you, you know, you have to write every day and all of that. And I feel like those rules don't apply to everyone. Like, I don't write every day. You know, I have three kids, and, like, the month of June is the worst month for me. I can't work through all of June or the first two weeks of September because I'm just consumed with school stuff or whatever. Like, I can't work from Thanksgiving through New Yeah. Was going say, what about December? Yes. December is the worst. Yeah. There are these periods where I just can't work or things happen. And anyone who says that says these prescriptive things is just wrong. You have to find your own rhythm as a writer. But you do have to find that rhythm. And, like for me, I know that to have a good writing day, I need to get a full night of sleep and I need to wake up before everyone else and have my mind be clear. And this was true even before I had kids. Even when I lived alone, I had to wake up right away and not do anything else. Not, you know, look at my phone, not check email, not even read. I had to just wake up. Maybe I could take a walk or go running. Even though I hate running, but it's good for figuring out your thoughts. So I'd say, like, really the most important thing, this is so dorky, but is to write. And then the other thing I would say, and just not think about publishing because it's just you just can't. It just is pointless and it's self sabotaging. And I'd also say you, of course, have to read. I cannot tell you how often people write to me or talk to me and say, how do you read so much? Everyone must say this to you. How do you read so much? How do you have time to read? And I mean, for me, I feel like I would go crazy if I didn't read all the time. It's just Yeah. I just do. It's not like it's like on my to do list. It's just part of who I am. And so I do sometimes read, you know, five books in a week, and that's just who I am. So you don't have to do that. Like, some people are slower readers than others. But if you're going to write a great book or a great essay or anything, you have to be reading all the time. You just do. Like, you're not gonna write a good book if you don't have time to read. Like, that's that doesn't make any sense, you know? So Uh-oh. For the people listening. Sorry, you guys. You need to put down your phone and read. I mean, I definitely say, like, put a lot of controls on your phone. Like, use freedom. I use a lockbox. I lock my phone away. Wow. Yeah. Sometimes for days at a time.

[39:34]Zibby Owens: Good for you.

[39:36]Joanna Rakoff: It just is like a sanity thing. It's, I don't, you know, it's not like I'm part of some kind of No, chagrin I guess. You know what I mean? I get it. I just am like, Enough. I can't take it anymore. Like, I want this thing gone. So it's either like smash it or lock it away. Yeah.

[39:54]Zibby Owens: One time I put my phone in the freezer, but I thought that was because when it overheated, might help if I put it in the freezer. Turns out, did not work. Did it break the phone? It broke the phone. Yeah. That's right. Okay. But so, you know, make sure your lockbox is room temperature. Yes.

[40:10]Joanna Rakoff: Okay, well Joanna, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on Monster you so much. Is like a dream. So exciting. Thank you.

[40:17]Zibby Owens: Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.