Hi, I'm Zivie Owens, and I am the host of this podcast. Moms don't have time to read books.

I am also a newly minted USA Today bestselling author of the novel, Blank.

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Catherine Newman is the author of Sandwich, a novel, which has just hit the New York Times

bestseller list as I am recording

this, and I am so excited. I emailed her right away. I am just so excited for her. She is

amazing, and this could not happen to a better person. Anyway, Catherine Newman has written

numerous columns, articles, and canned bean recipes for magazines and newspapers, and her essays have been widely anthologized. She is the author of the novel We All Want Impossible Things, which was Zibby's Book Club pick, and if you haven't read it, go back and read that also. The memoir is Waiting for Birdie and Catastrophic Happiness, the middle grade novel, one mixed up night, and the best-selling kids' life skills book, How to Be a Person, and What Can I Say? She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Hi, Catherine. Welcome. Thanks for coming back on Mom's Center Time to Read Bugs. Yay.

Oh, you're so sweet. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh, it matches your pillows.

Catherine was just holding up blank, and I am holding up her buck, and she's surprised me with that. So that was very sweet. So excited to talk about sandwich. I laughed out loud. I teared up. All the good things. You know, you're just so good at eliciting feeling, and that is the joy of reading. So there you go. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Okay, tell listeners what sandwich is about.

Sandwich? Wow. I think that's like my first

thing talking about it. So. Okay. We can take as many takes as you want. I'm fine. I'm going to have to,

you know, my elevator pitch, I mean, do you remember? Because when I was talking to you about something

else and I had already written it, but it wasn't published. And the elevator pitch was like,

menopause. That was the elevator pitch. Or like, re-pitched mayhem. So, but I'm trying to

thicken it out a little. Sandwich is about a woman in her 50s named Rocky. So far so good. So far so good.

Keep going. In one week at a Cape Cod vacation home that she and her husband and their two kids have

been going to for like 20 years. And so it's this one week of vacation. Her parents join them. And she's kind of

sandwiched in the middle. And she's just having a lot of memories of years past and this feeling of the

...