Loretta Rothschild, FINDING GRACE: A Novel

[1:48]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 Zibby Media dot com, and follow me on Instagram at zibby owens. Today is number eight in the 10 most downloaded totally booked episodes of 2025. We're using these two weeks to whet your appetite for those episodes you may have missed, so enjoy. Loretta Rothschild is the author of Finding Grace, a novel. Loretta is originally from London and currently splits her time between The UK and Italy. She lives with her husband, Nat, their young son, and their beloved dogs. Finding Grace is her debut novel. And by the way, I am absolutely obsessed and love this book so much. Welcome, Loretta. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zibby. I am so obsessed with your book as you saw from my Instagram, and now all these people wanna read it right now and are so annoyed that I wrote all that before it it is available. But Finding Grace, oh my gosh. It's so good. Congratulations.

[3:18]Loretta Rothschild: Oh, that's so nice. I'm so I was very touched by your post. It's it's all very new, so it's so nice when someone even knows your book exists, let alone likes it. So that was really touching, so thank you. I I didn't just like it. It's

[3:32]Zibby Owens: so good. The writing is so good. The plot is so good. The emotions. Like, I just I was so sad I didn't as I got towards the end, I just, like, wanted to slow down so I didn't lose the characters. And yet, then I also had to speed up to see what was gonna happen. And now I have so many questions, but maybe I'll have to ask you offline so I don't give anything away. Few Yes. Things know. That I It's a really tough book to talk about, and we've discovered this because

[3:58]Loretta Rothschild: the most exciting thing is knowing nothing about it. Yes. And that's been something that, you know, my agent and my editor, Sarah, we just sort of sit and go, so what can we say? And it's it's not easy. I have to say it's not easy. Even now, we still we still try and work out how to describe it. Yeah. Do you wanna give a one line description or something of what without giving things Without giving anything away, I think I would say that at core of it, at the core of Finding Grace is a love story between two characters whose lives are appended by unexpected events. And I wrote it wanting to write about these two characters. So it is a love story, but it has maybe the kind of speed of a thriller. That was what I wanted to do was have it be you know, straight from the beginning for it to just become I didn't want any I wanted to do things that were unexpected, but still being very loyal to the structure a love story.

[5:03]Zibby Owens: Well, there is it's built around a secret. And whenever people have secrets, the the sort of corrosiveness and the self destruction that comes from keeping a secret and the after effects, sort of the the ripple effects rather of secret keeping and all of that and how it can kind of drive you mad. I feel like that is part of this as well. It's a full it's a full time job for for honest people. You know? What

[5:31]Loretta Rothschild: What I discovered with Tom was I was stressed, you know, writing on his behalf and, you know, he's in a kind of He's not a liar. He's made a terrible mistake and he gets very, very fine. And it's very stressful to not be living in the truth. And it's a good lesson, you know, it's a full time job. It would sometimes wake me up at night because I would be kind of energized from certain things I was writing. It was very real. It was real to me. So I think it was really a lesson in just how unbelievably overwhelming emotions like grief and love can be and how intoxicating they are and just how dangerous they can be and put you in a place and make you do things you would never do. You know, Tom would never have done those things had he not been in such a deep well of grief. It would never have happened without giving anything away.

[6:37]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. This is killing me. Well, in broad strokes, it's it's also about motherhood, the quest to be a mother, what it means to be a mother. It's part of it is set because one of the characters, Grace, is training to be a master simile. Yay. So you have all this wine stuff thrown in. You have parenting and how to be a good parent and the role of friends. You really have the village really mapped out of how to get through something and who is supporting who. And the the and the supporting characters are so vivid, and they're not even supporting they're, like, very central characters and and just loyalty and and then mother daughter relationship. I mean, have, like, every everything. So I found myself wondering because you wrote so exquisitely about grief, and I read a lot of books that talk about grief in many ways. And there was a fresh, almost fresh it sounds how can you have a fresh perspective on grief, which is, of course, the oldest emotion in time? But but I really feel like you did and the way you wrote about it, especially with some one liners where you just distill all of it. Right? Sometimes it's the most simple explanations that are the most powerful. How have you been affected? Where does your grief story fit into these things? I think oh, that's very nice. And thank you. Because sometimes

[8:06]Loretta Rothschild: you wonder, you know, you're writing in the dark and you hope that what you're saying, someone will understand and get what you mean. But I think coming back to this idea of love and grief as copilots, they do drive in life or in fiction, you know, they're real drivers for behavior and unexpected behavior. And I think I read lot of books, but I really took the grief element of this book incredibly seriously because of the magnitude of certain parts of it. And I think I stopped trying to diagnose grief or explain it. I just kind of wandered alongside of it. And I appreciated that the grief has everyone reacts in different ways and there is no correct way to deal with grief. There's no right or wrong. And I think trying to kind of understand it would have put me in a kind of block me a little bit. Instead, I just tried to go on the ride and it was helpful having Anna alongside me because she's so fun to write with. She's a great narrator. She's very, very, you know, she's a writer. So she could also inject a fresh take on something also with the context that, you know, it's her husband. So she's talking about someone she knows intimately, which I think added to probably, I think maybe that might be the kind of, when you talk about a fresh look, it might be that little bit of perspective that really made it touch in a different way because I would sometimes get upset or emotional because it sometimes felt cruel to do certain things to a character or put them in a certain scenario. But she was very, very I had rules for her as a narrator because, you know, she is She would have taken over if I hadn't have kind of kept us slightly in check because she is a writer. She knows all these characters so well, and she's an unexpected narrator for this story. And I obviously won't say why, but she really has everything that you need to kind of inject a story with joy, grief, love. And she just kind of brought it home. Like, I couldn't have done it without her. And I actually wrote it without her. I wrote it in the third person and then I came and I just, I couldn't do it without her. She had to tell the story. So I think she in a way added that kind of special, it has something. I can't even sort of put my finger on it, but I think she really took it to a different place emotionally.

[11:05]Zibby Owens: Wait, so tell me the whole story of writing the book. You first wrote the whole thing in the third person. What what did you know like, to and when did you start writing, and what was the process? And tell me the whole story. What were you doing before? Maybe go back. Go go go back in your life, in in the writing life. Where did this So I have I think I've always been a writer. I think that, you know, you, I thought everyone walked around making up stories in their head. I thought that's what everybody did. So I would, you know, be having conversations

[11:34]Loretta Rothschild: in the car and my sister would be like, what are you doing? And I'd be like, and I'd be having an argument with two imaginary people thinking something because someone had said something, I think, well, that's really funny. And then I'd start having a conversation. And I just didn't realize everyone didn't do that. So I think you're kind of born a writer in the sense that you do kind of always have the cameras rolling, but, you know, and I think that there's certain, you know, you wouldn't do it yourself if you weren't a writer. You just, How would you come to it and think, I'm going to put myself in this almost kind of insane position of creating an entire world out of nothing. And I think I just realized one day that, you know, oh, everyone doesn't think like this. And then I was always writing things, but I was never completing something. I was never, you know, I was just doing it because it was, I had to get it out. But Anna was an extremely insistent voice in my head. She wasn't going anywhere. So I didn't, she was going to get rid of no matter what. So I think that's why this was the first thing I kind of went out into the world with, because she was so, you know, she was coming in hot. She was like, okay, this is what I want to do. Everything. And even now, sometimes I walk around and she'll make a comment about someone in my, in my, in my eye line, she'll make some passing comments. And it's actually slightly, it's better now because I'm writing my next book. And at times she just pops in with a huge opinion about something and I have to kind of take a walk or read something because she just comes in. And so it's a, I don't know anything else in a sense of a way to be. And there's a great line in a movie called The Barefoot Contessa, where Humphrey Bogart says to Ava Gardner, she says to him, can you teach me to act? Can you teach me how to act? And he says, if you can act, I can teach you. And I think it's the same as writing. If you can write, you can really learn how to write in terms of how do you make your idea digestible to more than just yourself? And that part is a different part. I think you can't sort of the sort of ideas and the wanting to create something has always been there. And then it was like, right, how am I going to execute this and make it what I see it as and digestible for people that don't know me, who I'm not sitting in front of. It turns out that was a book.

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[17:22]Zibby Owens: So what were you doing in your regular life while this came to be? Like, paint me a picture of life for you and then the book finding its way in. So

[17:35]Loretta Rothschild: I was living in LA. My husband was doing a He was at USC doing a He was meant to be doing his PhD. And I always had my laptop with me. I was always writing things down and I'd modeled before. So I was always kind of moving around and I was very used to kind of having all my books with me and my, you know, I carried everything with me. So I was always able to write and I just kept writing every day. Would, wherever I was, I kind of got over the idea that I needed to sit at a certain desk and do it a certain way. And I just got on with it. And LA was a place that, you know, everyone's talking about creating things, talking about things, incredible workshops. So it was sort of fertile ground to get on with something, but I did get on with it quite quietly. I didn't want to talk about it until it existed. That didn't come naturally to me. But yeah, I think that was about nine, eight years ago.

[18:38]Zibby Owens: And then how long, what happened from nine, eight years ago till now? So I started

[18:44]Loretta Rothschild: writing this book properly in lockdown. So I had a kind of maybe three or four chapters. And then with all that time, and also sort of not being, there was no more excuses. Couldn't, there was no reason I couldn't do it anymore, you know? And I loved that sort of, there was no obstacles, so I had to I had to get on with it. And I did. And that was maybe just before, so maybe four years ago,

[19:11]Zibby Owens: something like that. Four years ago. And that's that's now. And then you just took it out as a you got an agent right away. Was it just

[19:20]Loretta Rothschild: an easy process? I got an English agent first, and I got my agent, Jonathan Lloyd, at Curtis Brown. He read the first three chapters and rang me up. So it was such a wonderful moment because you just think, Oh, maybe I'm mad. Maybe this is just like, no one's going to understand what I've done. And he rang me up and just said, I can remember so well what he said. I was like, hello? He said, Britta, I I can't believe what you've done. I mean, this never happens. This is so dangerously brilliant. I don't know what to And I just thought, Oh my gosh, thank goodness. And he said, Okay, right, let's get on with this. Let's get on with this. And so I just kept writing and kept writing. And he sent it to Christy Fletcher at UTA, and she sent me a wonderful email as well saying, this is extraordinary and let's do it. And then about a year later, I finally finished it and we went out with it. And that was when I was lucky enough to have St. Martin's Press buy it and also my next book. So I get to do my next book with Sarah too, which is amazing for me. Can you share anything about your next book? I'm a bit it's too early. It's too early, but it's going very well. But it's, you know, it's the gestation period. It's very, very I'm very nervous all the time. It's gonna go. It's just that moment where you, it's

[20:53]Zibby Owens: very new. It's very new. Okay. I won't dig too deep. It's okay. But just what are the things can you share anything about your own life or an experience? Because at least for grief, and I was I was touching on this before. I mean, you can't you can't have written this beautifully about grief without having felt it. Can you? I mean, is that even possible?

[21:15]Loretta Rothschild: Did you? I I mean, I've definitely had grief in my life. I I've not had a traumatic event in the same sense as as Honor and and Grace and Tom. But I do think that grief is such a pungent emotion. And I think depending on what kind of age it hits you, it can really stick with you. And I don't know if I kind of have an experience that would kind of have led me to writing this book and led me to writing it about grief in the way I have, I think I'm always listening and I'm always wondering, you know, I became very interested in fatherhood because of this book. And I had a conversation with someone, it completely off, nothing, we weren't talking for the book or anything, we just met and he had a daughter and him and his wife were divorced and he was the sole, he looked after her most of the time. And I can't remember how we got onto it, but he said, Do you know, Loretta, I very rarely go into a restaurant where someone says, Oh, I'll get you a seat, without saying, Is it just the two of you? And it was moments like that. I didn't look for things that were bigger than the day to day. I think that maybe the reason it feels so kind of universal and real is because I didn't go on a deep dive for anything. I sound silly, but like bigger than the day. And I think that in the day, things can happen that feel you're in a certain environment, and that was obviously for that person, they were with their child. Is it just the two of us? If you hear that three or four times a week, I mean, that would be, you know, it really kind of, it really touched me. I remember sitting there thinking, I mean, wow, I mean, he goes through that three or four times a week. And it was something I'd never thought about. I'd never thought about what that might feel like. And so that was very, there were moments like that, that I really took seriously. And I wonder if maybe it's the day to day that where, you know, I don't know. I just, I really didn't take anything for granted. And I felt very, what's the word? I felt very responsible to make sure that I told that story for both the characters in the book. I wanted to make sure I did it justice because obviously without giving too much away. And it is a, you know, there is a lot of joy that comes out of something in the book. But it definitely, yeah, I took it very seriously. And I wanted to make sure I did that particular loss justice.

[24:27]Zibby Owens: Do you believe that there are doppelgangers, if you will, of all of us in the world, that there are people who are similar or that we each have a person out there who could be a proxy for us in some way?

[24:44]Loretta Rothschild: That's a great question. I wonder. I wonder. I think I know. I I don't know. I mean, I think we see what we want to see. I think Ona talks about this in the book. You know, if I introduce you to someone in the context of being connected to me, you see them, you know, if they were walking down the street, would you think, Oh, that person looks exactly like Loretta. I wonder if they're, you know, long lost sisters or whatever. I think that context is a real context really does a lot of the work for us, but I'd like to think so. I mean, it would be quite cool to have, you know, like another version of you. But, yeah, I I mean, I I can't imagine if that would be I mean, it would be quite cool.

[25:29]Zibby Owens: Are you prepared for the level of success? This book is gonna blow up. It's I just know it. It's amazing. It's gonna blow up. Are you ready for that? Are you excited for all that comes with it?

[25:42]Loretta Rothschild: You know, someone asked me the other day what I wanted for this book. And I sort of thought I wanted this book to exist in the world and maybe for a few people to read it. So everything after that is a bonus. You know, I'm so lucky to have St. Martin's Press, Sarah Crenton and I, my editor are just completely in sync and I've just met the most incredible people. And the fun of it is that they totally got it. I mean, when Sarah and I met for the first time, she got it. She got the whole thing. She didn't want anything other than what I'd done. And working with her, it was just so easy and fun and she's so bright and so smart and so clever. And I mean, a privilege to get to work with people like that. And everything is just, everything is a bonus. And I hope people like it. I hope they find a character in there that they maybe identify with or find funny or a moment that, and I think there will be, I hope so. But it's just been really incredible and I feel incredibly lucky that it's a real

[26:57]Zibby Owens: object in the world now. Do you have a book or two that you loved that you were like, if only it could be like this, like a book that

[27:04]Loretta Rothschild: You know, that's a great question because I think when I looked back at what I was reading and what really stuck with me, it was a lot of There's a great book called Grief is a Thing with Feathers, which is narrated by, has three narrators, but one is a crow. And I found that so, it really changed things for me. It kind of gave me permission to allow honor to take the lead. That book was hugely influential looking back And also just, you know, traditional love stories like Jane Eyre. I mean, these books are perfect books. So you can have an original story, which is really what I wanted to do. I wanted to write a traditional story, a traditional love story, but with the kind of modern twisty, bringing it to today, kind of what could happen. And leave questions like, does love one? Does one love take from another? Are we truly ever alone? Is that really fresh start? These things I was so interested by, and I wanted to kind of write a book that would lead people to question things that maybe in the book, I didn't want to answer things. I thought it was so fun to kind of go along with these characters and even ask myself these questions. Like does one love take from another? Is that the thing? So I'm a big, I love poetry. Actually when I looked back at some of my notes before we did this, some things I was writing, because I'm very analog. So everything is physical. So I have my notes and I was looking through and it was quite clear that I was writing and asking these questions to myself all the time. And a lot of them I can hear on his voice kind of answering, but I still post myself the questions, which is really fun. Well, Loretta,

[29:14]Zibby Owens: congratulations. So amazing. I'm so excited for you. Thank you for coming on. Thank you so much, Zibby. 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 Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.