Debut novel! Jessica Elisheva Emerson, OLIVE DAYS
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 643 Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
Zibby interviews author Jessica Elisheva Emerson about OLIVE DAYS, a stunning, smoldering debut novel about a young mother in an Orthodox Jewish community of LA whose quest for authenticity erupts in a passionate affair following a night of wife-swapping. Jessica delves into her novel’s theme of duty vs. desire and her protagonist's struggle with faith, intimacy, identity, and a crumbling marriage. She also shares her deep research into Orthodox Jewish customs, her writing process, and how current events and rising antisemitism have impacted Jewish authors like herself.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books, hosted by me, Zibi Owens. |
| 0:07.6 | It's an award-winning podcast with over 1,900 episodes, all featuring authors of books you love and those you have yet to discover. |
| 0:15.5 | Listen daily five times a week. |
| 0:17.2 | Then go to Zivimedia.com and learn more about what the L.A. Times called the Zivieverse. |
| 0:22.7 | Zippy Media includes Zivis Bucshop, an independent bookstore in Santa Monica, |
| 0:27.2 | Zippy Books Publishing, Zippy Retreats, Zivis book club, and more. |
| 0:31.5 | Go check it out at Zivimedia.com and follow me on Instagram at Zivie Owens. |
| 0:36.8 | It'll take you where you need to go. Thanks for listening. |
| 0:42.8 | Jessica Elisheva Emerson is the author of All of Days a novel. Jessica was a finalist in the |
| 0:48.6 | 2024 and 2020 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and placed second in the 2020 First Pages Prize. |
| 0:55.8 | Her stories and poems have been published in journals, including Air Light Magazine, |
| 1:00.0 | the Beloit Fiction Journal, Midwestern Gothic, Crucible, Drash, and Anamone Sidecar. |
| 1:05.2 | Her original play The Grays was produced in Hollywood. |
| 1:07.9 | She earned her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, |
| 1:11.5 | and her BA in journalism from USC. Jessica lives with her husband and children in the Sonoran Desert. |
| 1:17.2 | Ask her about pie, Rancho Gordo Beans, 1970s singer-songwriters, her hollabrating technique, |
| 1:23.1 | or the recipe for a perfect old-fashioned. Welcome, Jessica. Thank you so much for coming on Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss all of days. Congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations to you. You debuted a novel this year. Oh, thank you. Feels like old news. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Thank you so much. So tell listeners what your book is about, please. Right. So writ large, |
| 1:46.6 | you could say it's about the sort of the struggle between duty and desire. But on a more specific |
| 1:51.9 | level, it's about a young, youngish, modern Orthodox wife in the Pico Robertson neighborhood, |
| 1:57.4 | a very Jewish neighborhood of Los Angeles, whose husbands on page one, |
| 2:01.3 | this is not a spoiler, asked her to do a night of wife swapping in the community and has his own |
| 2:06.3 | reasons for asking. And she does it. She does it of her own volition, although she struggles with it. |
... |
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