Hi, this is Libby Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology,

which you should run out and buy called Moms Don't Have Time to a quarantine anthology.

All proceeds of that book go to COVID-19 vaccine research.

And I'm the editor-in-chief of

moms don't have time to write a new publication on Medium. And we're accepting submissions.

So please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on

Instagram at Zibby Owens and my website is Zibi Owens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast.

Maria Edelman is the author of Girls of a Certain Age. Her work has been published by Tin House, N Plus One, The Three Penny Review,

Indiana Review, Epic, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Alaska Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly

Review, and many others. She has an MFA and Fiction from the University

of Virginia. Welcome, Maria. Thank you so much for coming on moms don't have time to read books.

Thank you for having me. I'm really excited. So Girls of a Certain Age is a collection of stories.

Why don't you tell listeners what inspired you to put this collection together and what in general this whole

collection is about? So the collection is 13 stories and the narrators are all women and they're

all told in the first person. And I would say the overarching themes are it's about the complexities

of modern girl and womanhood, what it means to live in the

female body, and also how people deal with different kinds of loss, regular losses in life.

And I wrote a lot of it in my 20s, so a lot of it was partially me figuring things out as I went

along. And it turned out that a lot of

the stories had similar themes and they kind of fit together in this collection. Beautiful. So I know

you got your MFA. Was this part of your program or when did you do this? When did you start writing

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