Penn Badgley, CRUSHMORE: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 643 Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As featured in People, E! and BuzzFeed! Actor, director, producer, podcaster, and bestselling author Penn Badgley joins Zibby to discuss his debut essay collection, CRUSHMORE: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age, which he wrote with his podcast co-hosts. Also available on YouTube.
Penn reflects on the origins of his podcast show and why adolescence is such a powerful entry point into storytelling. He opens up about his insecurities (from curly hair to fame itself), sharing what it’s like to grow up on camera and how celebrity shapes and distorts identity. They also dive into middle-school angst, the cultural impact of the selfie, the pressures of visibility, and the parts of fame most people never see. He also speaks vulnerably about miscarriage, marriage, and becoming a father of twins.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive |
| 0:24.0 | look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't |
| 0:29.3 | have to. |
| 0:30.3 | Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. |
| 0:36.2 | For more information, go to zibbimedia.com and follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens. |
| 0:44.6 | Penn Bagley is the author of Creshmore, essays on love, loss, and coming of age. |
| 0:51.3 | Penn is an actor, director, producer, writer, and podcaster, best known for |
| 0:56.0 | his starring roles in the CW's Gossip Girl and Netflix's You. He lives in New Paltz, New York, |
| 1:02.2 | with his wife, children, and docs. He is a co-host of the very popular podcast, Pod Crushed. |
| 1:09.3 | Welcome, Penn. Thanks so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about |
| 1:12.7 | your book, Crushmore essays on love, loss, and coming of age, which you co-wrote with your |
| 1:18.1 | co-host. So there you go. Yeah. Thank you for having me. You guys just don't want to do anything |
| 1:24.0 | without each other anymore. Oh, yeah, we do. No, well, Nava Cavlin is one of my |
| 1:31.9 | co-hosts. And she's really the founder of the podcast. It was her idea. She and I have a production |
| 1:37.4 | company that we had loosely started the same year that she had this idea back in 2020. |
| 1:43.7 | And so that's sort of, you know, there was like |
| 1:47.0 | early COVID days where everybody wanted to start a podcast, right? And I mean, I knew well enough |
| 1:52.9 | being in media as I was, never wasn't at that point. But I knew it would be a lot of work. |
| 1:58.9 | But I did love the idea of loosely as we do starting at 12. |
| 2:04.3 | You know, that's what we do on the show. We start at 12 years old. We explored this unique |
| 2:07.8 | period of adolescence. You know, we had all this kind of stuff behind it as to why we thought |
| 2:13.9 | this period of life is so unique, so incredible, and kind of mortifying. |
... |
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