Debut Fiction Based in New Mexico with Nancy Foley
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 643 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2026
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Want to travel to the Southwest? I Am Agatha by debut author Nancy Foley takes us there. Inspired by her grandmother’s past, Nancy wrote a story about two elderly ladies and their antics. It’s as much about the land as the people. Here’s to pursuing writing dreams until they come true.
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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 zibbmedia.com and follow me on Instagram at |
| 0:40.9 | Zibby Owens. Nancy Foley is the author of I Am Agatha. She grew up in New Mexico and has been a writer |
| 0:49.7 | in residence at Hedgebrook and divides her time between New Mexico and Oregon. I Amagatha is her first novel. |
| 0:57.1 | Welcome, Nancy. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Book to talk about I am Agatha, a novel. Congratulations. |
| 1:03.7 | Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. So you are a debut novelist. Why don't you talk about that? What I am |
| 1:10.4 | Agatha is about and how you came to publish your |
| 1:13.5 | first novel now? I'm 58 years old, so it's been a long time coming. I have been writing on my own |
| 1:21.1 | basically for 30 years and have written a few manuscripts that I shelved and never showed around. |
| 1:26.3 | And so this is all very exciting. |
| 1:28.3 | Anyway, I am Agatha. It's a unlikely romance. It's set in New Mexico in the 1970s. |
| 1:34.3 | The narrator is Agatha. She is in her 60s. She's formidable. She's definitely more than a bit of her commodgian. |
| 1:42.3 | She's a well-known abstract painter who is looking to |
| 1:45.6 | kind of get out from underneath some of her personal problems. She leases land on a remote mesa in |
| 1:50.6 | New Mexico. She builds it herself an adobe house and all she wants is to be left alone to do her |
| 1:57.0 | work and sort through her problems. Instead, she falls for Alice, who's a mild-mannered |
| 2:02.2 | small-town widow, who's different than her in just about every way. But they fall in love. |
| 2:09.2 | And the story takes place sometime, the main action of the story takes place sometime later, |
| 2:13.4 | kind of over a string of days, when a crisis arises for the two women. Now, Alice grew up in this |
... |
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