How Zibby Owens Got Back Into Writing After Staying Home With 4 Kids

For a long time, as is often the case with mothers, Zibby Owens’s life was wholly centered on her four children. For more than a decade, the author and host of the podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books was a stay-at-home mom. She was still busy — her preferred state of being, she tells me by Zoom — serving on several nonprofit boards and deeply involved with her kids’ school, but even though she was always on the go, she says there was something missing. “It wasn’t work that fulfilled me deep down,” she says. “I was not as good a mom, honestly.”

She recalls a lunch out with one of her mom friends, pretty much her only social outlet for a stretch, someone she was and remains close with. It was only during that lunch that she discovered this close friend had a Ph.D. in psychology. (Owens herself is a graduate of Harvard Business School.) “I’m like, ‘This has never come up. How has this never come up?’” she says. “But I could tell you everything about all four of her kids.”

In this stage of her life, many of Owens’s passions took a back seat to the pulls and pushes of mothering. Before she had children, books had always played an important role in her life. Her parents were prolific readers, and between frequent library visits and seeing stacks of books everywhere, that passion rubbed off on her. “The first book I remember falling in love with was Charlotte’s Web,” she recalls. “I hadn’t finished the section I wanted to before my bedtime and I had to sneak into my bathroom after hours, because I was such a rebel. … Then I remember crying at the end, and it was the first time I had cried from reading anything, and I didn’t realize that books could really make you cry like that.”

Not long after, she wrote her first short stories, and her eyes light up as she tells me that her grandparents were so proud they actually made miniature books out of them. “I was like, ‘My name is on the spine, I love this. This is what I’m going to do.’”

But if moms don’t have time to read books, they certainly don’t have a lot of time to write them. Which isn’t to say she didn’t try. “I do remember taking one afternoon after I had my third daughter, and I was finishing nursing her, and I had the ice packs everywhere, and I went to Pain Quotidien, and I was like, ‘I’m going to go back to writing again.’ So I wrote about the sadness of stopping nursing my last kid, and then a month later, I was pregnant again,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Forget it. I’m just not going to write.’ Then I stopped again for years.”

But her kids got older, as they do. (It’s not a coincidence, Owens confirms, that she didn’t begin writing again until after her youngest child was in kindergarten.) She divorced her first husband and married Kyle Owens in 2017. The next year, she launched her podcast, which would lead to publishing two essay anthologies. Her memoir, Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Literature, came out in 2022. But she’d never let go of the desire to write fiction, something her husband wouldn’t let her forget. “Nobody was waiting for my novel, but Kyle was always like, ‘Come on, you really want to do this. You can do it. You got this.’ I think that really encouraged me to do it.”

But anyone who’s tried to get started can tell you it isn’t always easy. The summer Bookends came out, Owens had a contract for a second book, and she says she literally had to leave her house to focus. A friend in the Hamptons let her sneak into a hotel room between guests, which got her enough momentum to keep going. “I did write the first 30,000 words, and then I was like, ‘Great, I’m done.’ My editor is like, ‘That is not a book yet.’” Eventually she got there.

Everything with this book, I was like, ‘I don’t have time to write this book. If I’m going to do it, it has to be fun.’

Blank tells the story of Pippa Jones, a writer who fears her bestselling first book might be her last. She’s hopeful about her next project, Podlusters, that is until famous author Ella Rankin releases a book with the exact same plot and title. She soon finds herself in an impossible situation: repay the advance she’s already spent or write an entire book in less than a week. But when her tween son jokingly offers her a solution, she begins to wonder if his idea might be just the change the publishing industry needs.

Owens’s Pippa breaks the fourth wall at the beginning and end of Blank, with her own “Also by Pippa Jones” and dedication sections at the beginning and an Author’s Note at the end. I asked Owens what the reason behind that was: Is Pippa an avatar? Is it a commentary on how writing can come to life for authors? Owens shrugs happily.

“I just thought it would be fun,” she says. “Everything with this book, I was like, ‘I don't have time to write this book. If I’m going to do this, it has to be fun. I have to enjoy myself. I have to make myself laugh. Nobody’s sitting around waiting for me to write a novel, so if I’m going to do it, it has to be fun.’”

Pippa and Owens do have a lot in common, not least of which is that both of them found fulfillment when they made space for a life outside of their families. Children might ultimately come first, but that doesn’t mean mothers and wives are doomed to put themselves last.

“I’ve gained a lot [realizing that], so much so that I feel the need to shout this message from the rooftops in all ways, because I did go through a long period where I just felt so adrift,” she says. “As much as I love my kids, [as a stay-at-home mom], I wasn’t engaged with the wider world and that wasn’t as fulfilling.

“I will say though, I wouldn’t go back and do it any other way though,” she concedes with a smile. “I wouldn’t redo it. I did what I needed to do for these particular kids, and I don’t regret it, but it was not easy. I am a far better, more fun mom now.”

Blank is available now, wherever books are sold.