Joan Silber, SECRETS OF HAPPINESS
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.4 • 602 Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
Many authors would feel daunted by the prospect of putting out a new book soon after a multi-award-winning novel. But after writing and teaching for over 40 years, Joan Silber knows the only thing in her control is to continue working on her craft regardless of getting published. Her latest book, Secrets of Happiness, takes readers around the world, from New York to Thailand and back again, and proves the age-old advice that the best way for a writer to grow is to just keep writing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Libby Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, |
| 0:12.2 | which you should run out and buy called Moms Don't Have Time to, a quarantine anthology. |
| 0:16.8 | All proceeds of that book go to COVID-19 vaccine research. |
| 0:20.4 | And I'm the editor-in-chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a new publication on Medium. |
| 0:25.0 | And we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. |
| 0:29.1 | And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens. |
| 0:32.9 | And my website is Zibby Owens.com. |
| 0:34.8 | Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. |
| 0:39.7 | Joan Silver is the author of Secrets of Happiness, a novel. She's the author of nine books of fiction, and the one before |
| 0:45.2 | Secrets of Happiness was called Improvement and was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle |
| 0:50.2 | Award and the Penn Faulkner Award. And it was also listed as one of the year's best |
| 0:55.0 | books by The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Seattle Times, and Kirkus Reviews. |
| 0:59.5 | She currently lives in New York and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA program. Welcome, Joan. |
| 1:04.1 | Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to read books to discuss secrets of happiness. |
| 1:09.6 | Thank you. I'm very happy to be here, which of course |
| 1:11.8 | is basically what everybody wants to know anyway, right? Like, this is it, this is the manual, |
| 1:16.3 | the fictitious version of this, you know, the meaning of life here. What's your main takeaway? |
| 1:21.7 | What's the secret? I do not have the secret. I engineered the title with some sense of irony, |
| 1:28.6 | although I was joking with my editor saying we can sell a billion copies if they think it's that. But in the beginning, |
| 1:33.9 | there's a woman discovers that her husband has a secret family that he's had for years. |
| 1:38.7 | So he has secrets and the idea of secrets is important in the book. But also she is the one who the second family is from Thailand. And he's in the garment business and has been traveling back and forth to Asia for years. And she has always wanted to go. So when she is divorced from him, she decides to travel to of all places, Thailand, which is where the other family is |
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