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

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Zibby Owens. Jessica Saffer is the author of This Is a Love Story and novel. Jessica is also the author

of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots. She grew up in New York City, attended Connecticut

college, and earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times,

Real Simple, Sever, the Wall Street Journal of Vogue, and on NPR's selected shorts. She teaches

creative writing to small groups and in the corporate space and lives in Sag Harbor, New York,

with her husband, young daughter, and dog.

Welcome, Jessica. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zibby to talk about

this is a love story. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Of course, really

beautiful book. And yeah, I can't wait to discuss. Tell everybody what this is a love story is about, please.

So this is a love story tells the 50-year romance between two characters, Abe and Jane, a writer and an artist, from the time that they meet until the very end of their relationship about 50 years later.

It also includes the perspective of their son Max, who has a nuanced relationship

with love, believes that his mother chose art over parenthood and can't seem to find his way

into a relationship at all. Also, the perspective of a woman named Alice, a young woman,

a student who sort of inserts herself into the relationship between Jane and Abe.

And then there's also the kind of untraditional but ever-present character of Central Park itself.

And sections of Central Park contain literally hundreds of anecdotes about the love that happens in the park. So there's a kind of

wide angle lens view of this one love story, but the kind of kaleidoscopic view of love in general.

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