Author Talk: How to Survive the Writing Life

Zibby Owens, author of Blank: A Novel, speaks to Annabel Monaghan, author of Nora Goes Off Script and Same Time Next Summer, about fiction, female protagonists, fearless, funny stories, and how to survive the writing life.

Zibby Owens is the author of Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literatureand children’s book Princess Charming, and editor of two anthologies, Moms Don’t Have Time to Have Kids: A Timeless Anthology and Moms Don’t Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology. Creator and host of the award-winning, daily podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, Zibby is the founder and CEO of Zibby Media, dubbed “the Zibby-verse” (L.A. Times). It includes publishing house Zibby Books, online magazine Zibby Mag, Zibby’s Book Club, retreats, classes, and events. She also owns Zibby’s Bookshop, an independent bookstore in Santa Monica, CA. A regular contributor to “Good Morning America” and other outlets, she loves recommending books as “NYC’s Most Powerful Book-fluencer” (Vulture). A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School, Zibby currently lives in New York (with frequent visits to L.A.) with her husband, Kyle Owens of Morning Moon Productions, and her four children ages 8 to 16. Follow her on Instagram @zibbyowens and Substack where she tells it like it is.

Annabel Monaghan is the national bestselling author of Same Time Next Summerand Nora Goes Off Script. She is also the author of two novels for young adults, A Girl Named Digit and Double Digit, as well as Does This Volvo Make My Butt Look Big?, a collection of essays based on her column that appears on the Huffington Post, The Week and The Rye Record. She graduated with a BA in English from Duke University and an MBA in Finance from The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania. She hosts an author series called Friends with Words and spent several years on the novel writing faculty at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Rye, New York with her family.