Finding Yourself in Motherhood with Emma Tourtelot

[0:02]Zibby Owens: 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. I really loved Emma Tore Tullow's book, No One You Know, a novel, so much that I actually picked this as my April book club pick even though it's coming out already. The way that she wrote about the stresses and intricacies of being a wife and mother were so poignant, introspective, and just I just kept underlining and dog earring pages. The book is really interesting about grief, friendship, parenting, a small community. I just loved it, and hopefully, you'll read it along with me for our April book. A little bit of bio for Emma. She's the coauthor of eight nonfiction books about sex and relationships, which she got very embarrassed when I asked her about because we recorded this live at Minnie Rose, and has penned regular columns for New York, Glamour, and The Guardian among others. She was also the cocreator of Nerve Personals. After providing sex advice for almost two decades as one half of the writing duo, Emin Lowe, she is now a middle school librarian, and this, no one you know, is her first novel. She lives in the Hudson Valley in New York with her husband and two teenage children,

[1:55]Emma Tourtelot: and the Hudson Valley plays a big role in the book as well. Welcome, Emma. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about No One You Know, a novel. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Of course. You should all know I am obsessed with this book. I chose it for my book club pick for April which is my next available slot when I wrote when I read it and I am just a huge fan. I love the way you write. I love the themes you write about, the way you tell the story. I'm just like I just love love love this book. So delighted to be here in person at Minnie Rose. Okay Emma, tell everybody what the book is about and why you wrote it. So this is a mother daughter story, it's a dual narrative so it's the mother daughter take it in turns telling the story. It's a teenage daughter who's gone through something really tragic before the boot begins. She's lost her best friend. And I wrote it. I was at the time I was writing it, my daughter, she didn't lose a friend in the same way, but her best friend moved away. Yeah. And it was it's middle school when losing your best friend is really, it's really, and it was the first time something really big happened to one of my kids that I couldn't fix. And I just had to watch her go through this thing and sit with her. And it just, it was this realization that I wouldn't always be able to fix the world for her. When she was younger, it was just, I could always set up a play date or bake with her and this was the first time I couldn't fix the world for her and so I wanted to write about that feeling of being a mother. It's the worst. No, not being not being a mother is the worst. Not being able to fix the problem is the worst. Yeah. Because it's like your heart is outside your body in a way. Yeah. How old is your daughter now? She is 17. She's here. Oh, no way. Almost 18. She's right there in the front. Oh wow, exciting. She's okay, she turned out okay. I'll interview her next. This is very exciting. Okay, we'll talk a little bit about how you started writing it. Like what was the inspiration? I know you talked about that loss but it's one thing to go through something very emotional. It's another to like crank out an entire novel about it. So maybe take us back to how you came into writing to begin with and then how you arrived at this particular project. So I was, I've been writing since college. I was a non fiction writer first. I wrote about sex and relationships for almost two decades. So I was an advice columnist. So I am So I've always written about the heart, I think is how I put it. And I So I've always written about relationships and feelings and I knew I wanted to write fiction eventually, but I just Every time I try to write fiction, it just, it felt really awkward. It felt like I didn't have anything to say. And then after I had kids, I started writing and I think maybe because I wanted to write about a place and I moved around so much. And once I landed in the Hudson Valley, it felt like a place that I wanted to set a story. So I actually, the very first part of this book I wrote, I don't even know if much of it ended up in the final draft, but it was about a mother and a daughter with chickens and trying to keep the chickens alive. And that's the very first part I wrote. And I didn't even know yet what the thing was that would happen to the daughter and I didn't know what it was that she would seek refuge in. I just knew it was this mother and daughter and I knew I wanted it to be a year. And I knew that I wanted something to kind of pull the mother and daughter apart and then bring them back together again. But I began with the chickens, we had chickens in our yard and we were these idiots from the city who came out to the country and didn't realize how hard it would be to keep chickens alive and that's where I began the story. Amazing. Well, it's really not only is it about Indi losing her best friend Maddie but it's about her mom and her relationship, how this loss affects the marriage, their relationship, the community. She writes of Substack about real estate. She's a real estate agent and that's hilarious by the way. All of the listings and all of her thoughts and feelings and then it's also how her daughter finds refuge in an unexpected source online which is also a fear, right? You never know what you're getting and what your kids are up to and how all these things combine into a very dramatic moment where we have to we're on the edge of our seat kind of trying to rooting so much for this family to pull through this incredibly difficult time. So it has like all the all the really interesting themes. The way you wrote about loss and the way Indi writes about the loss of this pivotal figure in her life, I just want to read a little bit from So that if that's the chapters alternate between the daughter and the mom. So the daughter Indy says, I don't know how to be in this room without Maddie and I don't know how to be still without her beside me. I don't know how to do anything without my best friend. I'm like one of those science experiments where they severed the left hemisphere of the brain from the right and all my neurons are firing into blank space. I've known Maddie for so long that I have no real memories before her. Sure I could tell you who my teacher was in first grade and what I did for my birthday party that year but I have no idea how it felt to be me back then. How am I supposed to be me without her? I have this strange notion that if I ever speak again, it will have to be in a new language. How beautiful is that? So beautiful. Where is this grief coming from for you? How are you able to tap into this so well? I mean, I'm 52 now and people around me are losing people. You know, my husband lost both his parents within a year of each other and I watched him go through that. And, you know, I I sort of learned through watching him grieve how to be okay around grieve. When I had a good friend of mine died a few years before that, and I remember when she was dying and she was kind of people were going to say goodbye to her, and I didn't go because I didn't know what to say and I didn't know how to be around her. And then watching my husband go through this and realizing that even when someone just said to him, I'm sorry for your loss, like that meant something to him because I, you know, I'm a writer and I don't wanna use cliches and I always felt like, if I'm gonna say something to someone who's dying or someone who loves someone, it has to be original and it has to be from the heart. And then I realized, oh, it's you just have to say something. So this was kind of me I think, paying attention to how people grieve and what they need and how other people act around people who are grieving. Wow. Well, I'm sorry for your loss of your friend. That's your husband, right? Yes. And your loss as well. Indi takes a pretty extreme approach including at one point getting rid of all her earthly possessions. Talk a little bit about that. Did you research different things that happen, different gurus, like that's another theory? Yeah, so in my initial idea of the book, she was going to join a local church and become a born again Christian and that that would be where she would find comfort. But I didn't want the thing she found comfort in to be something that the parents would so easily understand and dismiss. I wanted her to find something that was her own. And at the time I was obsessed with listening to podcasts about consciousness and identity and meaning. And so I went down a lot of internet rabbit holes reading about that. But I, you know, she does make a lot of mistakes, but I think at the heart of what Indi is learning, there is some truth there and there's something real. That's kind of what I wanted her parents to see in the book too because initially they're so dismissive of these things she's learning and they don't, she wanted them to see, you know, I'm only 14 turning 15 but maybe there are things about the world I understand that you don't get. So I wanted her to give something real to be searching for. After your deep dive and after your own experiences, do you have a view on consciousness? You know, it's one of those things where when I'm listening to the podcast, I'm like, I totally get it. And then I try to explain it, and it just doesn't. I think in the book, I have Indy say that it's like one of those, like, sausage toys that, like, moves out of your hands. And so, yes, and I don't know if I can put it in words. I you know, the way I describe it in the book is that consciousness is like the ocean and a single life is a wave in the ocean, and that's the closest I can come to understanding it. It's probably more than most people could articulate at the snap of a finger. You also wrote in beautiful, heartfelt detail about marriage. It's no surprise that this is what you did for so long because the way you show us the intricacies of that relationship are really interesting. Can I read one more? Mhmm. One more passage. And by the way, I have like every other page dog eared in this book. So these are just a couple at the last minute. The morning after our wedding, I woke to the oddly pleasant sensation of being hungover in the most comfortable hotel bed in the history of Down. I read Robert Brownie's poem Now to my brand new husband because I finally understood it. How you can make perfect the present. How ideal love cannot exist in everyday life but it can exist in a moment that feels perfect. I'd never read this poem out loud before and as I spoke and felt the rhythm of each line, I understood it even more. Okay. So now I'm quoting you quoting Robert Browning. Thought and feeling and soul and sense merged in a moment which gives me at last, you around me for once, you beneath me, above me, me sure that despite of time future time past, this tick of our lifetimes one moment, you love me. That morning in our hotel bed, I thought that marriage was defined by such moments and that a successful marriage meant learning to bide your time between them. Eventually though, I discovered it was the in between that was truly ours. The secret downtime of a marriage. The long car rides, binging true crime podcasts, Ethan chopping onions for a breakfast scramble while I read out clues for the Sunday crossword, assembling IKEA furniture together while we listen to albums from our vinyl collection, Fleetwood Mac's Rumors For Me and the Beach Boys Pet Sounds For Him. We all become ordinary to each other in the end, but this doesn't have to destroy a marriage. A stable marriage depends on ordinariness, in fact. And even if it feels like a grind sometimes, it's your grind. You are two human beings who leave toothpaste splattered on the bathroom mirror or leave passive aggressive post it notes about the toothpaste splatter. You tell each other the same stories over and over again and on a good day you pretend you've never heard this one before or that it gets better with each telling. The ordinariness is the reward you earned when you chose each other, when you chose a lifetime of being rooted in place by habit and time, by the imprint each of your bodies made on your side of the mattress. Tell me there's not something beautiful in that. So good. Tears. So how's your marriage going?

[13:00]Zibby Owens: Anything you wanna share?

[13:02]Emma Tourtelot: You know, it's funny. My husband is here and he's always my first reader and this is this is the first second novel I've written, but the first one that's published. And he said to me once in an early draft, he's like, oh, he's like, you always make the husband sound like kind of assholes. And so but I think in that, you know, I write the woman I write the female characters first and I think, you know, there's been some editing. But, it's a good marriage. When you put the book down and you see it, like, here on the shelf and ready for everybody to read it, what is your biggest hope that people get out of the book? I hope that people see the hope in it. You know, when I describe the book to people, sometimes like, oh, that sounds really sad, it sounds really hard to read and I didn't I didn't think of it as a sad book when I was writing it. Was thinking a bit about, to me it's a book about love and it's a book about a mother and a daughter finding their way back to each other and I hope that's what people see in it more than the grief is the love. I totally agree. It's about how a family weathers the storm and everybody gets knocked off course and this is how these people stood back up again in a way but there's so much insight. I mean, reading the book, it's like you are so wise, you just have a lot, you're like an old soul and it comes through in all of these very quotable lines so I hope that that comes through as well. Thank you. Where do you take inspiration from? When you're reading, what are your go to genres or books or authors you love or I mean, read a lot of poetry which I think is probably clear when you read this. I mean, I read all over the place. I'm in two book clubs. Right now, I'm reading a lot of Catherine Nguyen because I just discovered her and she's amazing. But I love Mary Oliver's poetry. I go, like, that's kind of my Bible is my collection of Mary Oliver's poetry. The way that she writes about faith and love and life, and she's just I love everything. I love her writing. And right now, I'm listening to The Book of Longings, which a really beautiful book too. Amazing. And in terms of the writing itself, you mentioned there was a lot of editing that went into it, chickens that might not be there. Talk about the process of writing the book and how like just did you structure any of it ahead of time? Did you toss most of it? Like, give us the backstory. So I I always knew that I wanted it to end the scene when the mother and the daughter are on the fire tower. I knew I had that image of the two of them there and I didn't quite know what the conversation was going to be about, but I sort of wrote towards that. And I knew that I wanted that to be a year down the road. And I wasn't always sure how I would get there, but I kinda I wrote it fairly chronologically. I didn't start writing fiction till after I had kids, so I never got to be particularly precious about how I wrote. I just always have my laptop in the car and I wrote in a lot of parking lots while my kids were like at soccer practices or music practices. So I've I've written in fifteen minute bursts, twenty minute bursts and I kind of just go back into it. I find as long as I read at least a couple of sentences of what I've written every day, can jump back into it at any moment. Yeah, I've written in the middle kids birthday parties before. Wow. Definitely not inviting you to my kids birthday party. Like, what's that woman doing in the back there? Yeah. I think probably some people thought I was a little unfriendly but I, you know. I mean, the friendship aspect is also a big deal of in this book and and what happens when the community really turns against somebody and the mom feels on the outskirts. And I feel that's a feeling a lot of people have felt at one time or another just being a little bit pushed out or other wanting to fit in or not knowing if they wanna fit in. Talk a little bit about this friendship dynamic. Yeah. Well, so I live in a small town in the Hudson Valley and it's a town that's changed a lot over the years People have moved up from their cities, and there's definitely this dynamic of locals versus city as people call them. I've lived there twenty years. Both my kids were born there, and I still don't feel like a local. Like, I I don't know what I would have to do to count myself as a local, maybe get buried there. I don't know. But but I so there's definitely that dynamic, and my husband volunteers with the local fire department, and I saw that that was a way that he kind of connected more to the community. So I I definitely wanted to write about that aspect of sort of small town cultures and small town class wars. And then also seeing, you know, my kids are so they think of themselves as local even though I don't think of them as locals, and they're so comfortable in the town and the connections they have. And it's just funny in the same way that I'm English and my children are these American citizens, which blows my mind a little bit. My children are locals and I'm not. And so it's funny kind of watching your kids be comfortable in places that you're not and make connections in a way that you don't. So what advice would you give for aspiring authors? Just write. Just write every day. Just, I find that if I make contact with my writing every day, even if I don't, even if I only have ten minutes, as long as I'm opening the document once a day, I'm kind of half living in the dream space of the novel, even when I'm driving to work or when I'm making dinner and my I'm kind of always in the back of my head. It's like the spinning wheel is going and I'm thinking about things in the book and I'm constantly sending myself text messages while I drive, audio, not typing, when things come to me. So I think just even reading one sentence you wrote every day keeps you kind of moving forward with it. I love it. Well, thank you, Emma, for coming on the Thank you. Yes. Thank

[19:01]Zibby Owens: 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.