Dr. Tara Narula and Jenny Bartoy Tackle Pain from All Sides

[1:19]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and, obviously, podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at zibby owens. I love a good anthology. As you all probably know, I've edited three of them myself and had many anthology writers on the show because I love the idea of bringing stories together. Jenny Bartoy is the editor of No Contact, Writers on Estrangement. Jenny Bartoy is the editor of No Contact, Writers on Estrangement. And I've paired her episode with the fabulous doctor Tara Narula, MD, Doctor. Narula, who wrote The Healing Power of Resilience, a new prescription for health and well-being. One of these, No Contact, is about how we protect ourselves emotionally from things like difficult relationships among others. Tara Narula's book is how we protect our bodies and using our minds to do that as well. Both of them have called upon all of our resources, whether they're emotional or physical or whatever, so that we can all get through life, live better lives, make peace with whatever we have going on, and live badass lives, basically. Jenny Bartoy is a French American writer, developmental editor and critic. And this is her first book, which is really exciting. She lives in the Pacific Northwest. Doctor. Tara Narula is a board certified cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital, also associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra Northwell, associate director of the Women's Heart Program at Lenox Hill, director of communications for the Katz Institute of Women's Health, and an award winning journalist. She is correspondent for ABC News and a former NBC News medical contributor and CNN medical correspondent. The two authors are an unlikely pairing, but that's what makes this episode, I think, so interesting. How do we get through, and how do we use books and writing to get our message across? I hope these two authors, Jenny Bartoy and doctor Tara Narula, entertain you, fortify you, and help you get through whatever it is you're getting through today. Welcome, Jenny. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about your book, No Contact. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Talk a little bit about the inspiration for this collection of essays.

[4:17]Jenny Bartoy: So No Contact Writers on Estrangement is an anthology. So it's a collection of 32 essays and a few poems on family estrangement by, I think, amazing writers. And this book showcases the complexities and nuances of family rupture and estrangement in a way that I felt was really needed. As I mean, as I'm so grateful to hear you say you haven't seen it covered this week because that was exactly the intended,

[4:44]Zibby Owens: you know, the mission for this book. Well, it's it's almost like a flip of difficult family relationships. Do you know? Like, there are so there are lots of books on the different topics that you have or the different ways, reasons why you have become estranged, but then the very act of being estranged is a whole different thing as well. So it's the pain of that. I take, like, Nicole Grave Lipson's essay on her estranged from her brother, for example, and how her kids are like, who's that? And she's like, oh, uncle Aaron is my brother. I think it was Aaron. Uncle Aaron is my brother, and they don't even know who that is. And the feeling that she feels and how she writes so eloquently about almost the guilt of that. And then there are people who are estranged whose parents are just horrific, and you're like, yeah, you should be. You should you have to distance yourself for your own safety, honestly, or well-being. Tell me about how you got these authors to contribute, what you were looking for, hoping for, and and how how you put pieced it all together. First of all, I love Nicole's essay so much. I adore her writing, but this essay,

[5:54]Jenny Bartoy: I think, really encompasses the complexities I was just talking about. Just the the gamut of emotions and thoughts, right, that come up in these situations. I would say the the idea came first from my own experience of estrangement, cut in contact with my father about twenty some years ago, and really not finding a lot of resources out there for to support me through the experience. And like many stories of estrangement, it was murky, you know, who I think my father would probably say I made the decision. In my opinion, he set an ultimatum that was not acceptable. And my father and I had butted heads for a long, long time. I grew up in sort of an authoritarian family dynamic. And I had issues with that parenting style, but also issues that revolved around truth and accountability that were sources of conflict. And when I was in my early twenties, my mother left my father, and that became sort of a catalyst for just a bigger conflict, bigger issues. And I I felt and still do think that, you know, he channeled his rage toward my mother and the situation against me, and it just became someone anyway, in a nutshell, it became unsustainable, and I had to, as you said earlier, create distance for my own safety and well-being. So that was my my story, my origin story for my estrangement. And so throughout the year since then, what brought me the most healing, I would say, or helped my healing the most was connecting with others who were estranged. I didn't feel like there were a lot of books that covered the topic. Certainly, it wasn't in the in the media, but speaking with others, and it seemed to be fairly common, but just not talked about. That connection was the the greatest source of of transformation and healing for me personally. So I I wanted to replicate this in a book, you know, and how better to do it than through a collective, or as as I say in my introduction, a chorus of voices to sing this this song together. So that was sort of the beginning. And then how did I approach writers? I've researched this because I was so hungry for other stories and for resources. I've researched this for the whole twenty some years of my own estrangement. So I had a whole I'm also very organized. I had a whole spreadsheet, you know, of of stories I had found and books I had read and articles. And so I started reaching out first to authors whose books had been transformative for me. So one of those was Domenica Ruta, who wrote With or Without You, which was, I think, the first memoir I ever read that tackled estrangement. And she was the response across the board was so positive, so encouraging. I think everyone I approached said yes, or if they said no, it was because they were otherwise completely, you know, overbooked or overwhelmed. But everyone across the board was supportive, which was absolutely validating, but also just so amazing. And, yeah, I just, I mean, started sending out emails. I had to be a real sleuth to to be able to contact certain people and really worked, you know, my my network connections. But amazing responses, and some some a few of the pieces are reprints or adaptations of other essays I had read out there. But most of the work in the anthology is original work from from writers, both acclaimed and established and emerging.

[9:13]Zibby Owens: I saw that it looks like Cheryl Strayed's essay had run somewhere as an advice column or something, but it was still so moving. And I was glad you ended with that. It was such a big sort of gut punch to the end, you know, so that, you know, kind of a standing ovation moment as you close the book because she's I mean, she's just amazing. It's just She's incredible. And funny enough, her her piece so it is adapted from a dear sugar column.

[9:36]Jenny Bartoy: That was the first I mentioned Domenica's memoir was the first book I read about estrangement. Cheryl's piece was the first personal writing I ever read, I ever found online about estrangement. So she was top of my list for inclusion in this book. And, yes, I agree. Her piece is incredible.

[9:55]Zibby Owens: There was another one towards the beginning of in fact, it might have been the first one now that I'm thinking about it, but Cousins. And they became estranged due to political political rift, particularly in the last couple years and maybe, you know, the first Trump presidency. Was it first or second? Anyway, and how they had slowly drifted, but then they were on such opposite ends politically. And then the cousin dies. I mean, I'm not giving anything away. It was, like, two pages long. But, anyway, towards the end, not that we found out how, although there was an allusion to drugs or something, so maybe question mark question mark. But that was, like, so devastating because it was, like, not only were they becoming estranged due to external forces in their own opinions, but then loss on top of it. And that's such a complicated grief when you're when you have a complicated relationship and then go into loss. Right. Right. And that, I think that is a fairly common experience in estrangement.

[10:52]Jenny Bartoy: I call estrangement very often a form of grief. You grieve for the living. It resembles the stages of grief in many, many ways. And so I think actually a lot of estranged people deal with this wrestling with either the actual death of a relative from whom they're estranged or the potential of that happening. And I don't think there are any clear answers. It's very complicated. It's very hard. And I don't know that reconciliation or, you know, not reconciling really addresses or answers any questions. You know? It's like, either way, it's very complicated.

[11:25]Zibby Owens: Yeah. There was one that was particularly hard to take, I I feel like, with the abuse of a four year old and how her mom was like, what am I gonna do about it? And eventually and insisted on the man coming to the wedding later. And I was like, oh my gosh. Like, there are so many bad parents out there. Like, what is up with that? Like, there's so many parents who are just like, you know, am I banging the tambourine at the exact right cadence for my kid's baby class? And then parents who are like and I know this is sounding so obvious, but it's just when you read the devastation and the effects of one of these parents who's just like in one fell swoop can ruin your kid's life just like that. Not that it's true and she became an I mean, you know, but pose enormous challenges for for kids.

[12:10]Jenny Bartoy: Right. That's Erica Krause. Yes. Sorry. Erica Krause. Wrote that piece. Yeah. It's okay. There's a lot of a lot of stories in the book. Yes. She is an incredible writer, and I do think that is one of the the hardest Mhmm. Stories in terms of the trauma that it covers. Yeah. And I think, you know, parenting is hard. I'm a parent. I believe you're a parent as Yes. Yes. It's very challenging. It's people will call it the hardest job there is. You know? And I think no matter how hard we try, we are going to screw up our children. You know, we are gonna mess up in some ways. And I think we all hope that we are doing the best we can to show true love and help our children become the best versions of themselves they can be. But I think the reality is that even while we work toward that, many of us, as I said, do mess up, hopefully not in irreparable ways. But many people don't have the tools to to, I guess, do their best work or their best is not going to be good enough to sustain a relationship later on. I'm a developmental editor for mostly fiction and some memoir. And I, you know, write a lot of my own essays. I cover books just similar to to what you do in a smaller way. I I write, you know, a lot of criticism. I guess I do a lot of interviews and profiles of authors for various outlets. And, yeah, I've been working on my own writing, and this this book seemed more pressing to put together than my own. So I just really sort of dedicated my whatever free time I had into putting it together. And it just, like I said, the response was so incredible that it just sort of built with its its own momentum to the to the book we now have in our hands or soon. I

[13:57]Zibby Owens: I really love anthologies. People ask me about them a lot because I've edited three of them. And I and I love reading them. I love getting various voices all on the same topic and, like, just, like, sitting down and being like, well, what about you? Like, we're all sitting in a group, and it's like, really? And now her. Like, let's let's listen to this one, and how about this one? And it's just like your attention, like, gets it keeps your attention longer, I feel like, sometimes by the diverse perspectives, and you learn much more about it. Anyway, I just love I love a good anthology.

[14:31]Jenny Bartoy: I'm I'm glad you do. And I do think it speaks to the times, you know, and our attention spans becoming a little bit shorter. And I think they do serve a purpose for certain topics that work really well. I mean, I think this is one such topic where the diversity of voices is necessary to understand the complexity of the of the subject. So that really it lends itself really well to that format. When you apply your own developmental editor hat to your own work or to these essays or but more like when you're writing or you're writing a roundup or an interview or whatever. Like, how do you do that without becoming too self critical?

[15:04]Zibby Owens: I don't know that I I'm not self critical. I did just I did just assume you were self critical. I just like to make that assumption about all authors, so sorry, Ifa.

[15:13]Jenny Bartoy: Yeah. Maybe that's I was not expecting that question. That's actually a very good question. Oh, you know what? There you go. I know how to answer that. My mission as an editor, even on my website, is that I approach all writing with honesty and compassion. Right? My editing is always honest because writers pay me to actually help them, not to just give them compliments. Although I try to do that as well if you know, in many cases, it's very much warranted. But so honesty and compassion, I I think writers deserve an honest assessment of their writing, but I I do my utmost to be extremely compassionate because writing is so hard. We put so much of ourselves in it. So I would say in terms of my own writing, when I do veer into the overly self critical, that is something I try to remember. You know? Be assess honestly, but also be compassionate with yourself that it's hard work. And there's always and, also, I think the real the real writing happens in editing, we can always, to a point, always edit and improve and get it to where it needs to be. Amazing.

[16:16]Zibby Owens: Well, Jenny, thank you so much. This is so thought provoking, emotional, and I feel like I got to know all these new women and stories. So thank you for introducing me to some of them who I didn't know and reintroducing me to ones who I've read in other ways. And it was it was really a deep dive into resilience

[16:38]Jenny Bartoy: as well. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Alright. Take care. Bye. Today's

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[19:12]Zibby Owens: Welcome, Doctor. Narula. I am so excited to welcome you on Totally Booked to talk about the healing power of resilience, a new prescription for health and well-being. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Talk a little bit about some of the tenets on which you base the book and why they're so important. The first sort of half of the book, and really the underwriting

[19:35]Dr. Tara Narula: theory, is that any sort of trauma or stress elicits a stress response. So any challenge, and whether that could be, I'm going through a divorce, or I've had a death in the family, my business has failed, or I have a medical diagnosis. The response in our body to any one of those challenges is the same. It is a stress reaction where we release hormones like epinephrine, adrenaline, cortisol, all of this cascade starts from the brain, goes throughout the body, and over time that stress response becomes damaging. And I don't think we currently do a great job explaining to people what the stress response is and how it's so chronically damaging to us in this country because we're turning it on all the time. So the first part really focuses on that, but the second half and the most important part is really what we can do in response to that because we clearly can't control the things that happen to us, but we can control how we respond. And so we like to say that the resilient response is an alternative way of responding to stress. And there are different definitions of resilience that psychologists have, but the psychology research has really borne out that you can utilize several strategies, some within yourself, some that involve outside forces to move through challenge in a way that helps you grow and thrive and have meaning in your life. That to me was really the crux of what resilience is. It's the ability to not bounce back to what you were, but to move forward in a way where you can still derive joy and happiness from every single day, even if the picture of those days and the picture of you is different from what you thought. And so for me, I kind of called out what I thought were the most important tools to lay out. And I wanted to do it in a way that was very clear and understandable and easy to follow. The psychology research is there. A lot of it, when you read it, is very in the weeds and in-depth. I'm a journalist, a medical journalist, what I do is sort of take information and try to make it understandable. And so for me, picking out eight, what I call tools that people could use was the way that I wanted to go about doing this. You could think through it. Okay, one, have I accepted this problem? Two, am I thinking about this flexibly? And I found that as I was writing the book and things were happening to me in my life, I was using the steps and it was easy to follow. And so as we talk about, step one is acceptance, then we walk through several more until the last one is really purpose and finding purpose. But all of these strategies are ways, as I said, to kind of carry you through stress and allow you to grow and heal and move on in life. Amazing. Wait, let's go back to love. Yes, that's in there. That's one of the tools. That one was really you know, it's interesting because I've done a lot of interviews now for the book and everyone always said that was the one that they found the most interesting. To be honest, that was the one that was so important for me to actually put in there. And it's not one that you hear about from a psychologist. It's really not talked about a lot. But I can say, as a physician who practices medicine and sees it in my exam rooms, sees how the love between spouses or partners or kids and parents carries them through really difficult situations. And it is a form of caring and connection that is much deeper than my friends or my social circle, which is also really important. But there is something about that intimate love that is so valuable in terms of buffering us against the stresses of life. And also self love, that was the other half of the love chapter is I wanted to really say, you can't do any of these things unless you really learn how to love yourself. And so that was important there too. But I love to give the I gave the example in the book, and I love telling the story from the documentary on Christopher Reeve. Yes. Where he's sitting with his wife and he says to Dana, maybe we should just let me go in the hospital bed, you know, paralyzed. And he said that her words really saved him in that moment. And she said, You're still you and I love you. He said, Had she not said that, he doesn't know if he would be here. And that is something that I see. That's what I mean by my patients. I see how just the words, just showing up for someone, just being there is so powerful in terms of helping people recover.

[23:47]Zibby Owens: Wow. I mean, it's intuitive, but it's good to know that it actually it's not just something nice. It is essential to our being as humans.

[23:56]Dr. Tara Narula: It is. And we release hormones. We talk in the book about oxytocin, the love hormone, the bonding hormone that's released with breastfeeding or sexual encounters or physical hugging and touching. I mean, these things actually have, again, physiological reactions in the body that are important. In my day to day life, I'm here in my office, and I see patients as a cardiologist, we talk so much about the things that you do in your life, your lifestyle, and how that is preventative for cardiovascular disease, which again, is the leading cause of death for men and women in this country. And so, so much of these little small actions that we take, exercise, nutrition, and sleep, for example, being the three that I mentioned in the book, can go such a long way in terms of, well, not only healing, but preventing disease. And so we talk about making sure you're getting enough cardio exercise. In our world, we say 150 a week of moderate cardio exercise or seventy five minutes a week of vigorous cardio, working in some resistance training twice a week. We talk about heart healthy diets, which again, most of them are all relatively similar. The Mediterranean diet, more plant based or vegetarian diets, the DASH diet, and then sleep, which American Heart Association added. They had something called Life's Essential seven, and they made it Life's Essential eight, the eight things you can do. That change happened a few years ago, and the eighth was sleep because there is again to this accumulating body of evidence showing how important sleep is, a time where we think nothing's happening, but a lot is happening in our body when we're asleep. And so getting that recommended seven, eight, nine hours is really critical. And those things are important to do when you're trying to move forward, to not neglect those. What we we talked about how the mind can affect the body when you're processing something. Well, we have the power to kind of use our body to then help our mind. That's sort of the reverse pathway with some of these things that keep you fit. I mean, five minutes doesn't sound like a lot, but it can be, it feels like a lot. I mean, it feels like a lot. Do you do seventy five minutes of vigorous exercise a week? I do the treadmill probably two or three mornings a week for about thirty minutes. And running? Yeah, walking on an incline. Okay. Yeah. So I try. I probably don't need it exactly. But also I live in New York City where I walk everywhere, which all those little things add up. I think that's an important thing is that people think I have to commit to twenty or thirty minutes. And we always tell them, even if you can build in ten minutes here and ten minutes there, all that movement in your day, that all adds up and that counts. Actually, I think you mentioned in the book that you did the treadmill and an incline. Because at first I thought you had said you were doing the incline stair machine. I was like, oh, but then I read it again and I was like, oh, no. Said the treadmill. That's a little more a little more sane. What do you feel you've had to use your resilience coping skills for the most lately? That's a great question. I I would say my kids, you know, being a parent, think is the most difficult job there is. I have several jobs and that one by far, the stakes are the highest. It's the most complicated, complex, heart wrenching, soul sucking role. You want to do the right thing. So I have two girls and they're always at the forefront of my mind. And I think whenever things happen to them or around them, it calls on my resilience as a parent. So I would say now at this stage in my life, just turned 50, that's probably where I pull on these tools the most is navigating challenges

[27:16]Zibby Owens: with raising them. I'm with you. I also have an almost 13 year old. I'm turning 50 this year. And middle school, that is that is tricky. Yeah, that's a tricky time, particularly here in New York. I mean, I feel like anyway, can offline about that.

[27:33]Dr. Tara Narula: What's your biggest hope for the book? Oh, my biggest hope is that number one, it helps even one person. And I will say, I got a message, a direct message on Instagram actually from a woman, I think it was last week, who said she was going through breast cancer treatment. She picked up the book and she wrote on this message how it was really helping her. And I was so excited to just get that one message from one person because I thought, gosh, it took four and a half years to get this book published. And you hope, I hope, that my whole life is about helping people, whether it's in my office or on television. With this, that really was the hope that even if one person feels like they can navigate their challenges better in a more healthy way from reading this, that's great. I think the secondary hope, and I've talked a lot about this, is that hospitals and medical institutions begin to institute and create resilience training programs. What became very apparent to me in writing this book is that we are clearly missing the boat when we're trying to take care of patients by not incorporating how to manage trauma of a medical diagnosis and stress. We are handing people prescriptions and sending them out the door after telling them they have some horrible diagnosis or difficult diagnosis. And that's not fair because how can possibly expect them to recover or do whatever we're asking them to do when they are literally paralyzed in fear from what just happened? And so I believe it is like low hanging fruit for medical institutions to build what would look like maybe a twelve or thirteen or fourteen week program that we could write a prescription for and send patients to. And so that is my hope that other institutions hear this and read this and say, we should be doing this. We should be creating this as a way to help people. And by the way, not only will this help them heal, I say that this book could have been called The Preventive Power of Resilience, but it is prevention. So when you do this, you follow these steps, when you are more resilient, you are preventing chronic disease from happening because you are consistently turning off the stress response and turning on a resilient response. So all the stress related complications you are potentially preventing and all the chronic diseases processes that come from that. So that is my big hope for this book. Amazing.

[29:48]Zibby Owens: I feel more resilient already.

[29:50]Jenny Bartoy: Good. Yeah. Bye.

[29:53]Zibby Owens: Bye. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Sibby, 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.