Hi, I'm Zivie Owens, and I am the host of this podcast. Moms don't have time to read books.

I am also a newly minted USA Today bestselling author of the novel, Blank.

I've created a whole community of book lovers around this podcast, a publishing company, reading retreats, a bookstore, and more. Learn more

at Zivimedia.com or follow me on social at Zivie Owens or join the community at Zivie Readers.

Alyssa Strauss is the author of When You Care, the unexpected magic of caring for others.

Alyssa has been a journalist, essayist, and opinion writer for the past 15 years.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Glamour, Elor, the American Prospect, and elsewhere.

She's been a contributing writer for CNN, where she covered the culture and politics of parenthood,

as well as at Slate, where she wrote on feminism and motherhood.

Since 2011, she has been an artistic director of Labba, L-A-L-A-B-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-L-A-Raw-T for Jewish Culture. She lives in Oakland, California, with her family. Welcome, Alyssa. Thank you so much for coming on moms don't have time to read books to discuss when you care, the unexpected magic of caring for others. Congratulations.

Thank you. I'm magic of caring for others.

Congratulations. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. It's nice to have a book that doesn't demonize

sort of caregiving completely, right? That's not just like there's too much on your plate,

take it off, but that embraces the fact that this is something that we do and, you know,

we are still people even though we care for other people, right? Essentially. Yes. Yeah. And in fact,

we're sometimes more of people because we care for other people, right? You know, it adds,

it takes away, but it also adds. Agreed.

So tell me about how you started writing this book. Tell me about your career before the book. Tell me about your caregiving. Just go, just go. I'll just sit back. Yeah, yeah. Listen, it's actually all one tidy story. So my career before the book, I've been in the kind of the, that was, you know, part of the great feminist blogosphere of the tens, which was a really fun moment in women's writing. And around the time I had kids,

I wrote a lot about the intersection of motherhood and feminism, mostly focused on all the ways

moms are left out, discriminated against in the workplace, the maternal mortality

crisis, the fact that we don't have paid leave, the fact that we don't have universal and

affordable child care, all these things that hold moms back that are so real, so very real.

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