National Book Award finalist! Julia Phillips, BEAR
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2024
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
National Book Award finalist Julia Phillips joins Zibby to discuss BEAR, a spellbinding and richly imagined novel about survival, obsession, and two sisters on San Juan Island whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious bear. Julia delves into the symbolic and narrative significance of the bear, drawing inspiration from Grimm’s fairy tales and her personal fascination with the animal. She touches on family dynamics, isolation, violence, and resilience, all set against the backdrop of a vividly depicted island. She also delves into her writing process, her research into bear behavior, and her upcoming project—this time set on Cape Cod.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Zivie Owens, and I am the host of this podcast. Moms don't have time to read books. |
| 0:08.1 | I am also a newly minted USA Today bestselling author of the novel, Blank. |
| 0:14.2 | I've created a whole community of book lovers around this podcast, a publishing company, reading retreats, a bookstore, and more. |
| 0:21.8 | Learn more at zivimedia.com or follow me on social at Zivie Owens or join the community at |
| 0:28.4 | Zivie Readers. |
| 0:31.5 | Julia Phillips is the author of Bear, a novel. |
| 0:34.9 | Julia is also the author of Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the |
| 0:38.8 | National Book Award and one of the New York Times book reviews 10 best books of the year. |
| 0:43.1 | I interviewed her about that book years ago. Julia's work has been translated into 26 languages. |
| 0:48.7 | A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, she has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Paris |
| 0:53.0 | review. She is on the |
| 0:54.5 | board of the Crime Victims Treatment Center, a nonprofit that helps people heal from violence. |
| 0:59.5 | She teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and lives with her family in Brooklyn. |
| 1:04.2 | Welcome, Julia. Thanks so much for coming on, Mom's Don't have time to read books to discuss |
| 1:08.1 | fair. Congratulations. Thank you so much much thank you so much for having me |
| 1:11.8 | i have already been talking about this book so much i like keep bringing it up like i don't even |
| 1:16.2 | know it's in my head you've like totally your characters all of it i keep referencing how cool |
| 1:21.8 | the setting is and just all of it i don't know i feel like in the last three book events i've done |
| 1:26.0 | i'm like but i'm reading this book there. So that makes me really happy. I think I think bears are very hot right now. So it's very topical. I think to be, uh, to be excitedly talking about bears, which I always up. So yes, you are. Yeah. You're on. You're on trend. On trend. It's really great. I've been waiting my whole life for that moment. Thank goodness. I should send you the pictures of when my family, we went to like a motel. I don't even, we took this crazy trip upstate and there were bears in the, like by the pool. And we had to. Oh, my gosh. A mother bear and her two cubs. Yeah, I'll send you the page if you care. |
| 1:45.1 | I would love to see them. |
| 1:46.3 | Are you kidding? |
| 1:47.1 | Of course. And we had to look at her dad. A mother bear and her two cubs. Yeah, I'll send you the thing if you care. |
... |
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