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.

Nell Freudenberger is the author of The Limits, a novel.

Nell is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, the Newly Weds and the Dissident,

and of the short story collection Lucky Girls, which I loved, by the way, which won the Penn

Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts

and Letters. Named one of the New Yorkers 20 under 40 in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Coleman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and son. And this is the second time she has been on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. So welcome back to Nell. Welcome back to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Nell, excited to talk about The Limits. Congratulations.

Thank you so much. You're welcome. Okay, The Limits. Talk to me. Tell the audience what your book is

about and where the idea I came from. And by the way, this is one of the coolest covers ever, by the way.

I agree. Do you love it?

The first try, I loved it. Yeah, absolutely. It's thrilled. Yeah, so I started writing the limits because I had become sort of obsessed with the deep ocean. The book is about a scientist named Natalie. She's French and she works on the island of Moraya in French Polynesia, which has been an epicenter for coral research for decades. And she loves the deep ocean because it's almost totally unexplored.

It's like an alien world. It's full of creatures that scientists have never seen before, but she's pulled by all of her ties on land.

She has a teenage daughter named Pia,

who is going to New York to live with her father and her new stepmother, sort of against her will.

And her stepmother, Kate, is a New York City school teacher. And she, neither she nor Pia,

is prepared for the amount of time that they're going to spend together because of quarantine.

Kate also has a student named Athena,, who is, like a lot of the students who I worked with

during the pandemic, is a girl dealing with her schoolwork, but also with caring for her nephew.

I found that a lot of teenage girls during the pandemic had suddenly had childcare responsibilities

...