Publisher and podcaster Zibby Owens will help you decide what to read this summer

Boston Globe

a day ago

Owens also runs an eponymous publishing company; owns Zibby's Book Shop in Santa Monica, Calif.; and hosts literary salons and retreats around the country, including around Boston. She's also a writer and editor herself ('On Being Jewish Now,' an anthology featuring Jewish writers reflecting on identity; 'Bookends,' a memoir centering around the death of her best friend on Sept. 11).
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She's been candid about her connectedness — Owens grew up in Manhattan; her dad is businessman Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group — but she's also really vulnerable about the universal struggles that level us, from divorce with four little kids to self-image issues to identity crises, and she amplifies a variety of voices on her platforms. We chatted about rejection, self-discovery, and summer reads.
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You went to business school at Harvard. What took you down this road?
Books have been the throughline of my own story forever. I fell in love with reading with 'Charlotte's Web.' I started to cry and was forever hooked on reading as the way to think and feel and cry and laugh. You probably know this from your sons, and I know from my kids: You can develop a love of reading, but some people are just born readers. I was just one of those born book lovers.
I had my first miniature book published when I was 9 by my grandparents. One of the essays was 'Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers,' about a set of twins in a haunted house. Another was how the doughnut got its hole in the style of Rudyard Kipling. They did a limited print run of 20 books and gave it to me on my 10th birthday. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I eagerly handed out my books to my teacher and all these people I cared about. I had an essay published in Seventeen magazine that I wrote when I was 14 about how I felt in the wake of my parents' divorce and how I had gained a bunch of weight over the course of one year.
I interned at Vanity Fair, and I realized after a day that there was no path from editorial to quickly becoming an author. I realized professionally that there was no easy path to being an author.
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I went to business school, and two weeks after I got there, my best friend died on 9/11. She had been my college roommate, and it changed my point of view on basically everything.
I realized that 'life is short' is not just something people say. Literally, she was here one minute; gone the next. I was unpacking all her clothes and [thought], I might as well do the things that I want to do in life before it's too late.
After business school, I took a year off to freelance full time and write a book full time, a fictionalized version of what happened with her and me. I got an agent. It ended up not selling.
My dreams of being the youngest published author in the world had faded by then. It wasn't until I got divorced — fast forward, I'd ended up having four kids — I suddenly had all this time, every other weekend. I started writing a bunch of essays. The essays led me to want to try to publish a book again, because I honestly was so humiliated by my other book not selling that I didn't try to write fiction for over a decade.
You know, I write about families, parenting, and how hard it is to find community. It's very easy to feel like we're out there alone, doom-scrolling at 11 o'clock before we fall asleep.
Using books, you've been a conduit for creating community with 'Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books,' which I know is now 'Totally Booked.' What do you hope that people get from these podcasts?
Moms like me were so busy. We'd talk about books, but a lot of people didn't have time to read them. We didn't want to feel like we were totally missing out. I used to rip magazine articles out and share them with friends before Facebook.
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I wanted to give women like me a free pass. You can be a non-reading reader and still maintain that piece of your identity. I feel like so much identity can be stripped away when you're a parent, especially with young kids. By interviewing the people who wrote the books, I felt like I was at least giving people a way to stay in touch with that piece of themselves.
It was with a sense of humor, a wink, and a nod. Obviously, it was not going to be The New Yorker podcast. It was supposed to be the way you would talk to a friend, which is sort of how I do most things in life, whether it's a social media post or the tone of an anthology I'm curating, or my own memoir. It's authentic and close. I feel like people who are attracted to that end up being similar in some ways: They're nice people who want to connect and want to laugh at the craziness of life.
Part of the name change is: My kids are a little older now, I don't feel like I'm that frantic young mom that I was, and so many people were deterred from listening because of the 'moms' label. I didn't want that to happen anymore, especially because I don't talk about parenting books, per se.
Zibby Owens.
James Higgins ©2025
What's the author criteria for your podcast?
Most of the books are contemporary fiction, memoir, or nonfiction designed to help me see the world or myself a little more clearly. I don't do science fiction. I want to read books that help me live my life better.
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In this cultural moment, which is fraught in so many different ways, what's your sense of who's buying and consuming books right now?
This is not exclusively, but older women and young women — people who, I think, are really trying to find their place in the world: young women who are coming of age; out with their friends and not quite settled, and then women who maybe are empty nesters and feel a little bit unsettled — those life stages when you have a little bit more time and more willingness to be led. I feel like those two groups of women read the most and certainly shop the most often.
A lot of the men who come into the store are looking for information on something like education or nonfiction. Women are looking more for escape and connection.
As a writer, it's tough not to be hard on yourself. I remember hosting an event in Boston with famous authors and thinking, 'They're so much younger or more successful than me!' How do you put that in perspective, when you're interviewing people who are wildly successful authors?
That's such a fun question. When I was writing, before 'Bookends,' I just kept pitching, and I would get a rejection and close out of email and sit down with another author who was a mega-bestseller with tears still on my eyelashes. I thought: Maybe this is not going to happen for me. I have to live with that.
We all get choices about what to do with our limited time here. I started to realize that maybe the value I bring to the world is not in the books that I write. Maybe there are other things that I'm called to do. I try to justify it that way. If I were only writing full-time books, I would get more done. But I'm not only writing full-time books. I'm doing a million things that I also love, and so are you. Everything is a tradeoff.
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This is just the way I was made. I'm not made to be a novelist, only sitting at my desk in a fictitious world all day. I love doing that, but I can't do that exclusively.
What are you reading?
I'm doing a series of live shows right now, so I'm prepping for all of those. I'm finishing Jeanine Cummins's book 'Speak to Me of Home' [about three generations of women connected by their Puerto Rican heritage]. And also 'Greenwich' by Kate Broad, which is quite delicious, although I have to say: I'm probably 70 pages in and I'm like, 'Who dies? Somebody is supposed to die! Who is it going to be? We still don't know!'
I'm also prepping [to feature] 'What My Father and I Don't Talk About,' the anthology from Michele Filgate [about the complexity of the writers' relationships with their fathers].
I know you don't talk exclusively to moms, but we're a big part of your audience. How do you hope people feel after listening to your podcast or going into your bookstore?
I hope that I help them navigate the world a little more easily and with a sense of humor. They're not alone in anything they're going through, no matter how isolated they might feel. All they have to do is open the next book, and they realize that.
Anytime they feel that sense of loneliness or isolation or overwhelm or 'less than,' they can read and immediately feel better, or they can listen to a podcast and glean something about the human experience that maybe they would have missed.
Interview was edited for clarity.
Kara Baskin can be reached at