Confronting High-Functioning Depression with Rachel Tzvia Back
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 643 Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sometimes you just click with someone. By the end of my in-person interview with Israeli poet Rachel Tzvia Back, we were hugging — having laughed, cried, and truly connected in just 30 minutes. Why? Because she’s awesome, yes, but also because her memoir, The Dark-Robed Mother, is so intimate, vulnerable, and beautiful that it would endear her to anyone. It’s funny and hopeful, dark and poignant. It also portrays what happens to those who love you when you go through something no one can fix. This is why I do my podcast. For moments like this. I hope you’ll listen.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Zibi 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 |
| 0:24.0 | look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't |
| 0:29.3 | have to. |
| 0:30.3 | Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. |
| 0:36.2 | For more information, go to zibbimedia.com and follow me on Instagram |
| 0:40.2 | at Zibby Owens. |
| 0:44.8 | Rachel Zviyah Back is the author of the Dark Robed Mother, which is a memoir. She is a poet, |
| 0:52.0 | a translator, and a professor of literature. She's the author of |
| 0:55.7 | 12 books. Her poems and verse translations have received awards and recognitions, including the |
| 1:00.8 | Times Literary Supplement Award, Penn Translation Prize, and finalist for the National |
| 1:05.4 | Poetry Award in Translation. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming on my podcast. I loved |
| 1:10.8 | your book so much. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much for coming on my podcast. I loved your book so much. Thank you. |
| 1:12.3 | Okay. Can you please tell everybody the background of your book and basically what it's about? |
| 1:18.3 | Okay. So it's a memoir and it's a depression memoir. It's titled The Dark Roped Mother. The title, the Dark Roped Mother, |
| 1:30.3 | is one of the epithets that is given to Demeter in the ancient hymn to Demeter, Demeter being the goddess of |
| 1:39.3 | agriculture, who loses her daughter to the underworld every year. |
| 1:45.1 | Honestly, I didn't remember all the details of that. |
| 1:49.0 | I mean, I didn't remember very much at all about that whole Greek myth and hearing it the way you told it. |
| 1:55.3 | And the sadness of the mom and the darkness. |
| 1:59.3 | Anyway, I loved how you related it. |
| 2:01.1 | It's always very moving to me |
| 2:04.7 | how these ancient texts reverberate |
... |
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