Hi, I'm Zivie Owens, and you're listening to the Webby-nominated podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

Please also check out my other podcast, kids do have time to read books.

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don't have time to read books and at kids do have time to read. So please follow me.

And if at any time you have suggestions, my email is Zibi at Zivvyowens.com. Thanks for listening.

Thanks so much to my latest sponsor, the Mermaidepillow Company, Mermaidpillow.com. They make these amazing pillows with sequins on the back and positive messages on the front, and they now even make custom pillows and blankets. It's an amazing company. And if you enter the code Zib-B-B-Y, you will get 10% off, which is super cool. So please check them out, MermaidPillowco.com. So I'm super excited to be here today with Eva Hagberg-Fisher, who's the New York-based author of How to Be Loved, a memoir of Lifesaving Friendship. She's also written slash co-written for other books about architecture. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Dwell, Gornica, and other publications.

She has degrees in architecture from Princeton University and UC Berkeley and received a PhD in visual and narrative culture from UC Berkeley.

So welcome.

Eva.

Hi.

Thanks for coming.

Thanks for having me.

So can you just start by telling listeners what How to Be Lo is about, please? Yes. So my pinned tweet says that it's actually a critique of capitalism dressed up as a narrative about friendship with a little bit of chronic illness and non-chronic illness to sort of move the plot along. So that's one answer. Another answer is that it is a memoir about how three friends in particular saved my life

when I needed it to be saved in various and extremely different ways.

So there's a friend Layla who I meet when I'm in my late teens, early 20s, and she saved

my life in a specific way.

And then my friend Allison,

who when I was very, very, very sick and really convinced that I was going to die, sort of

showed me how to live through that. And then my friend Lauren, who went on this pretty epic

desert adventure with me. That's so funny. Yeah. Because when I read it, I thought that the

lifesaving friendship was just Allison's. I didn't realize you were referring to all the different ones at the different times. Yes, I was referring to the different ones. And also, my book editor said that I shouldn't name that many people, but there are a lot of sort of off-stage unnamed friends who also save my life. and I try to make make observations about there's a section in the book where I talk about going to see Robocop before heart surgery because I like might have ended up with a pacemaker and I wanted to celebrate it by celebrating. Oh, what is that actor's name? The guy who played Robocop. And there's just like a group of people, right? And so there's this idea that like a group can be inexhaustible in the way that individual people cannot be by definition. So yeah, I wanted to be more generally

about friendship, about the ways in which my friends have been, I think my truest love stories

...