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

Zibby Readers. Simone Garindo is the author of The Wives, a memoir.

Simone's writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Long

Reads, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Christian Science Monitor, the best women's travel

writing self and others. She has received fellowships and grants from the International

Women's Media Foundation, the Georgia Council for the Arts, and the Hainbridge Center for

Creative Arts and Sciences. She lives in Tacoma, Washington with her husband and two

children. Welcome, Simone. Thank you so much for coming on moms. Don't have time to read books to discuss

the wives a memoir. Congratulations. Thank you, Zavi. I am so honored to be here. Yay. Okay, tell listeners

what your book is about, and congrats on it being a book of the month club pick, by the way. So exciting.

Thank you. Yeah, it's been an incredible experience putting it out into the

world. So it's a memoir. And it's really about the first four or five years of my becoming a

pretty unlikely army wife, moving from New York City, where I was an editor to Columbus, Georgia.

And all the things that came with that in terms of a real identity, abending transition,

as well as becoming part of a close-knit group of women, the other wives, you know,

who were all pretty remarkably different from one another,

but we got close in these really pressurized conditions. And it's really about that and just

stretching to get close to people who are different from you and also to, and really to navigate

that too in one's own marriage and about kind of just the power of human

...