Move Happier: How Do You Move On After College Drop-Off? with Author Ben Markovits

Summary

Podcast Summary: “Move Happier: How Do You Move On After College Drop-Off?”

Podcast: Happier with Gretchen Rubin
Host: Gretchen Rubin
Guest: Ben Markovits
Date: March 8, 2026
Episode Theme:
This episode centers on the complex emotions and transitions involved in the “empty nest” period, using Ben Markovits's new novel, The Rest of Our Lives, as a springboard for discussion. The novel explores family, marriage, identity, health, and the question of what comes next after children leave home. Gretchen and Ben dive deeply into the psychological and emotional terrain of adulthood transitions, creativity, and the process of writing about real life.

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Main Theme and Purpose

Gretchen Rubin sits down with author Ben Markovits to explore the “empty nest” stage through the lens of his latest novel, The Rest of Our Lives. The discussion touches on what it means to redefine oneself after college drop-off, the intricacies of long-term relationships, family dynamics, and how big life changes spark personal reflection and growth.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing The Rest of Our Lives: An Empty Nest Novel

• Setting the Stage: Gretchen and Ben discuss the premise of the novel— a father, Tom, drops his daughter at college, and instead of returning home, embarks on a journey of introspection and reevaluation.

  • [04:03] Gretchen Rubin: “This is the best novel of the empty nest period. So it's such a good portrait of that time.”

• Opening Passage: Ben reads the first pages, summarizing the novel’s starting point— marital dissatisfaction, resignation, and the emotional deal Tom makes with himself once his daughter leaves home.

  • [04:13-08:40]
  • “When Miriam goes to college, you can leave, too. Maybe this was just another one of those illusions. But it helped me get through the first few months…” (Ben Markovits as Tom)

2. Clarifying the Protagonist’s Dilemma

• Decision or Possibility?: Gretchen notes that some reviews mischaracterized Tom’s intentions; Ben clarifies it’s about the possibility of leaving, not a finalized plan.
  • [09:14] Markovits: “You're right and they're wrong… He can leave. It's a building uncertainty, partly to do with things they have not confronted.”

3. The Perspective of a Passive Character

• Character Study: The guest explains his interest in exploring a protagonist who is uncommunicative and somewhat passive, a perspective less often centered in fiction.

  • [10:33] Markovits: “A lot of books are written about people having experiences, but we spend a lot of time not having experiences.”

• Human Condition: The keynote—wanting to want something from life but often opting out— is deeply human.

  • [11:54] “Somebody who's gotten to a point in his life where he thinks it's okay to opt out.”

4. Health, Art, and Real Life Intersect

• Autobiographical Elements: Ben reveals that he developed unexplained health symptoms while writing the novel, paralleling Tom’s journey.

  • [13:25] Markovits: “While I was writing the book... I started getting these symptoms, which I gave to Tom… The doctor couldn't find anything wrong with me... Eventually I did figure out what it was.”

• Writing Through Illness:

  • [14:55] Markovits: “Going through chemo overlapped with the things you learn about writing life. They're both routine-fixated… all these small things you do have large stakes.”

• Family and Care: As he went through chemotherapy, Markovits’s relationship with his wife deepened, influencing the novel’s emotional trajectory.

  • [16:04] “...there are a few moments in your life when you feel an unmediated closeness to somebody... being sick with my wife in the house was one of those moments.”

5. On Titles and Thematic Resonance

• Why “The Rest of Our Lives”?:
  • [20:49-21:55] Markovits shares the evolution of the novel's title and how it reflects themes of marriage after children, and individual identity outside of family.
  • “It meant what happens to a marriage after the kids leave home... but also who you are outside of family, in the rest of your life.”

6. Writing Process and Creativity

• Practical Approach: Markovits on being prolific:

  • [22:29] “If you put in two good hours at the desk a day... at the end of 50 weeks, you have something like 65,000 words.”

• Protecting Focus: He emphasizes the importance of ensuring that the writing time is of high quality, using tricks like basketball podcasts to clear his mind for work.

  • [23:36] “Because I'm a child… it's like whipped cream on the hot chocolate. Here's the treat; I'll walk towards it.”

• Ongoing Inspiration:

  • [24:24] Markovits: “Stuff keeps happening to you. You have different preoccupations... you’re hoping to find a story that allows you to think about them.”

7. Family, Marriage, and Realism

• Reasons for Recurring Themes:

  • [25:17] Markovits discusses his fascination with families’ and marriages’ emotional weight— how these institutions shape identity and personal history.

• Perspective on Restraint in Style:

  • [27:09] Markovits: “I'm a glutton for self restraint, which probably comes a little too easily for me... I’m really conscious of the ways that fiction can seem phony.”

8. Fiction as Memoir, and Literary Influences

• Blurring Boundaries:

  • [28:09] Markovits aspires to write fiction with the emotional truth of memoir.

• Books He Loves & Literary Models:

  • [29:22-32:54] His favorites include The Scarlet Letter (“so moving”), Goodbye to All That by Graves, and Nabokov’s Pnin (“a happy book...terrible things happen, but it’s optimistic”).

9. Happiness Practices and Life Advice

• Basketball as Mindfulness:
  • [33:28] “The great thing about shooting hoops is you can do it on your own... while you’re doing it, you’re absolutely focused... It doesn’t have to be shooting hoops, but anything like that… seems like a recipe for happiness.”

10. Audience Q&A Highlights

• Literary Influences:

  • [35:17] Roth, particularly Goodbye, Columbus, for the tension between upbringing and self-expression.

• The Road Trip Motif:

  • [36:09 onward] How the American landscape and road trip structure inform both the novel and Ben’s own sense of possibility and identity.

• Process Details:

  • [38:57] Markovits doesn’t always “picture” scenes; he often returns to moments, refining physical and emotional logistics to achieve realism.

• On Reading Reviews:

  • [39:36] Markovits: “I used to, and then I stopped, and then I do again. It's very preoccupying… even if they're good, it's a sugar rush.”

11. Notable Passages and Reflections on Relationships

• Marriage and Mutual Shaping:

  • [41:26] Rubin highlights a key passage where both spouses feel dominated by one another’s will, sparking a conversation about how couples create and become shaped by their joint life.
  • Markovits: “At some point in a marriage, your fingerprints are all over each other… when you’re getting mad at your partner, you’re getting mad at the person you helped come into being.”

• Personal Resonance:

  • [42:46] Markovits’s favorite passage involves Tom’s fear at his own potential for change: “He'd rather be miserable and who he was than happy in who he might be.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Married Life:

  • [08:40] “What we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.” – Tom (Ben Markovits reading)

• On Opting Out:

  • [11:50] “He wanted to want more from the world… but he thinks it’s okay to opt out.” – Ben Markovits

• On Illness and Care:

  • [16:04] “There are a few moments in your life when you feel a kind of unmediated closeness to somebody… and being sick with my wife was one of those moments.” – Ben Markovits

• On Happiness through Action:

  • [34:16] “Anything where your concentration is completely lasered in on something that you can achieve and then it’s over—that seems like a recipe for happiness.” – Ben Markovits

• On the Mutual Shaping of Relationships:

  • [41:26] “At some point in a marriage, your fingerprints are all over each other… when you’re getting mad at your partner, you’re getting mad at the person you helped to come into being.” – Ben Markovits

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:13] Ben Markovits reads from the opening of The Rest of Our Lives
• [08:40] Discussion about whether Tom has decided to leave his family
• [10:33] Exploration of passive characters and the energy not to act
• [13:25] Ben discusses real-life health issues mirrored in the novel
• [16:04] Intimacy in illness and its impact on art
• [20:49] Evolution and meaning of the book’s title
• [22:29] Ben’s disciplined writing routine
• [29:22] Recommended and favorite novels
• [33:28] Suggestion for personal happiness through focused activity
• [41:26] Key passage on mutual influence within marriage
• [42:46] Ben’s commentary on fear of transformation in life

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Overall Tone and Language

The conversation is candid, thoughtful, and modestly humorous. Both Gretchen and Ben favor a restrained tone, mixing philosophical depth with practical advice and accessible language—mirroring the plainspoken realism that Ben seeks in his fiction.

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For Listeners in Transition

This is a rich episode for anyone contemplating family change, especially the empty nest. It’s also insightful for those interested in the creative process, the emotional nuances of mature relationships, and how personal experience informs great fiction. Ben Markovits’s articulation of resignation, possibility, and the complex fabric of family life resonates throughout, offering comfort and perspective as listeners “move onward” after big life changes.

Transcript

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[Gretchen Rubin]

and save hundreds of because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situation. Hello and welcome to Happier Today. As part of the Move 26 in 2026 challenge, I'm sharing a conversation I had with the author Ben Markovitz that you can listen to while you get your 26 minutes of daily movement. We are talking about his terrific new novel, the Rest of Our Lives. It's about a father who drops his daughter off at college, but then instead of turning back home, he keeps moving onward. He keeps driving as he reflects on his marriage, health, identity and the empty nest stage. You know, I'm deep in writing my own book about the empty nest stage right now, so I love talking with Ben about what it takes to write about this transition. It's a good listen if you want something thoughtful and absorbing while you move today. So here's my Conversation with author Ben Markovitz.

[Podcast Host / Advertiser]

Hello.

[Gretchen Rubin]

I am so happy to be here tonight to talk about a book that I love. And I was part of the initial fan group for this book. I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. So I have the UK edition. So I beat everybody in the United States to it. It just came out here. It's gotten tremendous amounts of buzz. I think it was just named a Barnes and Noble Book Club pick. It is just an outstanding, thought provoking book. I've read it twice and like sort of the second time it was a very different experience than the first time, which I think is a sign of a really excellent novel. And so I'm really excited to have this conversation with you tonight. But because the book just came out in the United States and probably most people here have not read it, could you sort of characterize the book, give people a sense of what the book is and then I would love for you to read the first few pages because I think it really kind of gives you a sense of the narrator and how the novel will unfold.

[Ben Markovitz]

Sure. Yeah. So this is a book about what happens to a marriage after the kids leave home. I sometimes say something else, but if I'm going to read the opening, you'll get to something else in those opening pages. So maybe I'll just start with that.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yeah. Can I just say my next book is going to be about the empty nest period. So I think this is the best novel of the empty nest period. So it's such a good portrait of that time.

[Ben Markovitz]

Thank you. When our son was 12 years old, my wife had an affair with a guy called Zack Zerski whom she knew from synagogue. He was a little younger, three or four years, had three boys, all younger than our two kids, but was in some sense in the same position as my wife. They both had partners who made good money, which meant that they didn't have to do much and got bored and restless and maybe even depressed. Zach's wife was head of oncology at Westchester County. I saw Zach touch Amy's hand under the fold out table at the Purim Food bank drive under the paper cloth. He was short, about 5 8, broad shouldered and dark. He wore linen shirts open at the chest. His chest hair had started going gray. On Sundays he played guitar for the kids at Temple Beth and taught them Jewish songs like Spin Spin Sevy Von very pro Israel in a tree planting, happy clappy way. He was the kind of guy who danced with all the old ladies and little pigtailed girls at A bar mitzvah, so he could also put his arm around the pretty mothers and nobody would complain. Even before I saw them holding hands, I didn't like them. My parents are Catholic, but my dad thought religion was just a big fancy dress party, and he hated fancy dress. Maybe this is why I never got involved in the synagogue, which meant Amy had a whole social network where she had an identity and I didn't. She told me about Zach after I already knew and after it was already over. Amy had highly developed guilt feelings, which were so strong she couldn't help being mad at whoever she felt guilty toward, which was often me. She said she wanted to make me mad, too. She just wanted some kind of reaction. That's all she was looking for. But that's not really my style. If there's something you can do to fix something, I try to do it. But in this case, I wasn't sure what she said. You don't feel anything about anything, I said. Everything I do, I do for you and the kids. Nothing else matters to me. So what do you want to do? I asked her. Do you want a divorce? But she didn't want that. At least not until the kids had left home. The home and the kids were all she had to show for the last 12 years of her life. The thing with Zach didn't mean anything. It was more like a kind of self harm. She knew that I knew that when she was a teenager, she used to cut herself on the thigh, a bid for attention. But Amy's a person who tells stories about her motives and actions, which are very persuasive to her as well. So it's sometimes hard to talk about or even work out what's really going on. You fall in love with somebody when you're 26 and you see them in all kinds of different lights and according to their potential. But after years and years of marriage and shared parenting and all the other shared decisions you have to make just to get through the days, you accumulate a lot of data about that person that after a while just seems more or less accurate. If you continue to have illusions, that's your fault. So if you stay married, it's because you've accepted that this is what they're like and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they're unlikely to do or give you. It's like being a Knicks fan. But I also made a deal with myself. When Miriam goes to college, you can leave, too. Maybe this was just Another one of those illusions. But it helped me get through the first few months after Amy told me about Zach. And for the sake of the kids, we had to pretend that everything was fine, when, in fact, what we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Beautiful. There's so much there, but. Yes. Okay. But here's the thing I have been dying to ask you. In all the reviews of the book that I have seen, they have said that he had decided that he would leave when his daughter Miriam left. But to me, I didn't read the book. I thought, I can leave, but that Tom himself had not decided what to do. But all of the reviews were like, he has decided to leave. And now he's sort of grappling with that. But it's.

[Ben Markovitz]

You're right and they're wrong.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Okay.

[Ben Markovitz]

I'm contractually obliged to say at the beginning that this is not a picture of my marriage.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben Markovitz]

My wife is not here, but my daughter is reporting back. So I just thought I would make that clear. Yeah. I'm actually.

[Gretchen Rubin]

He can leave.

[Ben Markovitz]

He can leave. I mean, the fault is partly mine, because if you're trying to come up with a glib way of saying what the book is about, about. I sometimes say he makes a deal with himself, that he can walk out of the marriage when the kids leave home, but it's not like he writes a contract and signs it, and then as soon as the day comes, he's out of there. It's that there's this building uncertainty, partly to do with things they have not confronted.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yes. Which are many.

[Ben Markovitz]

Which are many. Yeah.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yes. Yeah. Well. And that's what's interesting to me about this narrator, because this is a character who often appears in life, certainly, but often appears in literature, a kind of an uncommunicative presence there, kind of holding himself aloof, not engaging. We often are in the minds of the people that are processing and telling the stories and having all the reactions and trying to get a rise out of this other person. But this is the perspective of that person. And what drew you to that character? Because it's a very refreshing perspective to be reading through.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I just said that this is not my marriage. Maybe I'm a little like Tom in this respect. There's this wonderful line in the Linklater movie Slackers, where a couple of guys are sitting in a bar or coffee shop In Austin, which is actually where I grew up. And somebody says, everybody talks about all the energy it takes to create, but nobody talks about all the energy it takes to not to create. And I think that's a great line. And a kind of corollary of it is that a lot of books are written about people having experiences, but we spend a lot of time not having experiences. Yeah, yeah. And that seems an important part, not just of our lives, but of who we are. One of my early novels was set at a private school, very much like Horace Mann, where I taught. And it had to do with an English teacher. And my kind of keynote line for him. It's not like I always have a keynote for a character, but sometimes it's useful to have a kind of tuning fork idea. You strike them and that's the sound they make was this line that I gave him. He wanted to want more from the world. And that seems to me a more general part of the human condition than sometimes gets written about.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Interesting. So did you have that for this character?

[Ben Markovitz]

You know, it only occurred to me when I was, you know, I've been talking a lot about the book and I thought, oh, yeah, I wrote a guy a bit like this before, but yes. As a kind of general predicament. Yeah. I thought this is somebody who's gotten to a point in his life where he thinks it's okay to opt out.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Well, he's very resigned. Yes, he's very resigned. And that goes through the novel in many, many different ways. And he isn't a person who's fighting for something. He's saying that's not. And what does he say? It's right there in the first few pages where he says, like, that's really not my thing. That's not my style.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah. I mean, he is somebody who then drives off. So he's not completely passive. He does something that he probably shouldn't do, but he gets in a car and he doesn't go home.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Well, if anybody here knows about my four tendencies personality framework, this is a total non sequitur. This is a book about two obligers having obliger rebellion and how that plays out.

[Ben Markovitz]

So from my perspective, are you one of those people?

[Gretchen Rubin]

No, no, no, I'm not. I'm not. But it is the biggest personality Type of the 4. Anyway, I don't want to digress into my own book. What bad form. But I think that that's what he did. He kind of snapped. And he's like, I'm just going to go and keep Going, I'm acting out of character. But one of the things that's really interesting about the novel is that he is dealing with this health condition which he's resigned himself to. Like, oh, I have these symptoms, but they're no big deal. They're just part of middle age. I'll get it checked out later. Even though people around him are very, very anxious about it. And this is something that. Life imitates art here. So explain how this kind of unfolded for you.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, that's an interesting. So it's true that he's on some level, resigned to it. He does say, I kept going to the doctor and they just thought it was long Covid or something. So it's not that he completely.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Well, did he go when he had. Okay, now we're getting into the novel. Like when he had the swollen face and the tears and all that was. Did he tell them about that?

[Ben Markovitz]

Well, it's sort of odd. So actually, what happened to me. So while I was writing the book, the early stages of it, I started getting these symptoms, which I gave to Tom, my character. The first of them, and I wrote about this recently in the Times, was that I was out jogging.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Great piece in the Times.

[Ben Markovitz]

I was out jogging one day and suddenly I ran out of an energy source. It wasn't like being tired in any kind of gradual way. It's like something had been switched off. And I knew that if I took five, six, seven more steps, I would collapse. And I stopped running and instantly felt normal again. Walked around for a little bit and then ran home. Thought nothing much of it. And the next day the same thing happened. And to my surprise, almost, I did go to the doctor. And I kept going to the doctor and other symptoms developed. I woke up with a swollen face. I don't want to make this a kind of medical litany because we all have those things. And the doctor couldn't find anything wrong with me. And at that point, I gave these symptoms to Tom as a kind of general picture of the way in middle age, unexplained things start to break down in your life, including your health, not knowing where it was going to lead. And eventually I did figure out what it was. And Tom, by the end of the novel, also knows what it is.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Well, and the piece, maybe describe the piece of the New York Times, because this just came out and is a very beautiful piece.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to talk about the way going through chemo, which is what I eventually had to go through, overlapped with some of the things you Learn about writing life. And they're both really routine fixated that when I was going through chemo, I had a series of tasks to do in the course of the day. Try to eat because it was hard to keep food down. Try to sleep. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of people in the room who have either experienced it themselves or known people who've gone through it and try to get some exercise. And in a way, that was an incredibly meaningful way to live. Because suddenly all these small things that you do had tremendously large stakes. And the kind of writer I am is a sort of modest realist who wants to say that all the little things we do in life have tremendously large stakes. And so there was a kind of correlation between what it meant to be ill and what it meant to do the kind of writing. I'm not saying that I hope the book is a little more fun than that. The book is like going through chemo. That's my selling point. It says it on the jacket.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yeah, yeah, but so you were. And your family went on a cross country trip. So you really did draw on your own life too, to tell this story. But then in other ways, it's wildly different, of course.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah. I mean. And the book is dedicated to my wife because in the novel, various people have to deal with this physical collapse. In reality, it was just my wife who sat with me every hour in the chemo chair. And one of the consolations of being sick. I mean, I said this at my book launch in England, so my daughter's heard it before. I don't think it will be too upsetting for her. But there are a few moments in your life when you feel a kind of unmediated closeness to somebody. I think sometimes when a baby is born, it can be like that. They claim your body skin to skin. They own it in the same way that you feel like you own them. Maybe when you first fall in love. And being sick with my wife in the house was one of those moments. And so there were a lot of constellations that also changed the writing of the book. I originally had in mind a more loveless story than the one I wrote. But the experience of feeling the way the world suddenly shifts around you a little bit when you're ill. It doesn't always happen, but it can happen. Made me want to change the kind of book I was writing.

[Gretchen Rubin]

And we'll be right back for more of my conversation with author Ben Markovit.

[Ben Markovitz]

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[Gretchen Rubin]

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[Gretchen Rubin]

So one of the things I love in novels and in all art is titles Because I think sometimes you can see a piece of art completely differently, just depending on the title. And I think this is a brilliant title for this book. But talk about why you picked this title. And I think you had other working titles. Like, one was the Drop off, which is also a really good title. So take us through why you picked the title that you did.

[Ben Markovitz]

It was hard to come to partly. So I thought of the Drop off because it starts when he drops his daughter at university, then keeps going. And that seemed to isolate one element of the story, but maybe not others

[Gretchen Rubin]

that it was, too. It made it seem like it was all about one thing.

[Ben Markovitz]

It made it seem all about one thing in my mind. I didn't think I was ever going to use it. So one of the things his daughter sometimes says to this guy is he calls him angry. She calls him angry white male. Not because he is angry. I mean, I think we've seen that he's not particularly angry, but it's kind of a jokey, teasy thing for a daughter to call her dad, partly because he never gets angry, as a kind of provocation. And that seems like an interesting title if you'd read the book, but if you hadn't, I thought it would announce the very wrong.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yeah, it would not properly characterize the novel.

[Ben Markovitz]

And then I had this idea of the rest of our lives. And then I started reading the book and saw that it was a phrase that kept cropping up, but meaning different things. So part of it meant what happens to a marriage after the kids leave home and you have to get along without a family. But also it meant who you are outside of the marriage, outside of family, in the rest of your life. And that tension seemed to me sort of what the book was about, and so I stuck with it.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Right, right. Well. And it's also kind of unlived possibilities. And that is part of what Tom is sort of reviewing and reflecting on as he drives across the country, which is like, what are all the lives that I could have lived? Or that. What are all the sliding doors, you know, that he experienced? And it's. Yeah. Well, now I want to talk about process, because I think people are very interested in how people come to ideas, how writers. Just what their process is. So just what is your process? Just in terms of how much. I mean, you're extraordinarily prolific. How do you structure your time so that you can get all those words written and done?

[Ben Markovitz]

I think the best thing about being a writer is that it's not very much work. And what I mean, by that is if you put in two good hours at the desk a day, five days a week, and I never do word counts. But even if you write, let's say, 300 words in those two hours, which isn't a lot, it's like a paragraph, that's 1500 words a week, and at the end of 50 weeks, you have something like 65,000 words. Two hours a day is not much. The hard part is that there's no point in functioning at half of your capability. So you have to find whatever you can do to make those two hours the ones in which you are as focused as humanly possible. And any trick you can use to get you there seems to me fair game. Mine is watching a lot of basketball. And when I'm not watching basketball, I'm often listening to basketball podcasts, because anything I can do to make those two hours ones where I'm sitting down and thinking as much as possible about what I'm writing that day seems fair game.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Why does thinking about basketball help you write?

[Ben Markovitz]

Because I'm a child.

[Gretchen Rubin]

But you mean, it's sort of like it gives you everything else that you wanted the other time. So then you have all your reserved.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, it's like whipped cream on the hot chocolate. Like, this is what I like. Here's the treat. I'll walk towards it.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Okay, so you bring all of your discipline and your rigor to those two hours, and then it's just. You could just play then.

[Ben Markovitz]

I can play. I mean, actually, I mean, when the kids were home, I could then hang out with the kids. Now that they're older, I have to beg them to play with me. But it's like, yeah, like anything else I read in the afternoon sometimes, stuff like that.

[Gretchen Rubin]

And then because you have written so many novels, do you always know what you're gonna do next? Do you have periods where you don't know? I'm a big fan of Weekend in New York and Christmas in Austin, which are about the same family. How do you decide what you're going to do next? And do you always know what's going to come next?

[Ben Markovitz]

I don't always know. I'm just. One of the advantages, I guess, of being a kind of modest realist as a writer is that stuff keeps happening to you. You can't stop it. And that means that you have different preoccupations. I just said it's a bit like having a conversation. There are different things you want to talk about, and so you're hoping to find a story that allows you to think about the things that you want to think about.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Well, this reminds me of that line in the Big Chill where he says at the end, the character says, I've decided I'm going to write a screenplay about this weekend. And she said, well, weren't you going to write a screenplay before? And he was like, oh, yeah, but that was about last weekend. Right. You're always moving forward and having experiences to.

[Ben Markovitz]

Right. You can't stop them. I mean, you'd like to, but you can't.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Well, and in many of your novels you do explore sort of family and marriage. And is that just because that's what's interesting to you in life or because the novel, I mean, what drives you to that subject?

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, I mean, I really liked being inside a family when I was a kid. I was miserable when I went to university because I didn't understand why you'd want to live in a world of 18 year olds. And then you kind of think when you're a kid that being in a family is a permanent state of affairs. And then you get to your 20s.

[Gretchen Rubin]

This is so interesting because now I have all new insight into the character. One of your characters, the one who wants to build the family compound.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yes, yes, right. And it's a big character for me. I want to go back to childhood. And then you get to your twenties and suddenly you have this kind of interregnum period. Because if you're going to have a family, eventually there's this period where you're outside of family and then you have kids and it seems like a permanent state of affairs until they leave again. And so this divide between what it means to live inside a family and outside of a family seems really interesting to me both as a human being and as a writer. And it's something that I like to write about. So the reason I write about marriage is sometimes, I think, a failure of my imagination. It's partly because how can you show how much weight this thing has? And one way to do it is to take it away from people. I would like to be able to write a book in which you can feel the weight of it without taking it away. And so in this case also to feel the weight of his marriage, he has to run away from it. But a lot of people feel the gravity of what they're going through without that. And I'd like to do that in fiction sometimes.

[Gretchen Rubin]

But it is true that often we don't recognize what's important until we lose it or fear that we might lose it. It's just very hard. It's like, be grateful for your health. It's just like. It's hard to wrap your mind around what it is to lose it until. While you have it safely. Well, you described yourself as a modest realist. And one of the reviewers described your style as restrained and plain spoken, which I think is a very accurate description. Is that your natural. Do you aim for that? How is that a reflection of your style?

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, I mean, so the restraint. I sometimes joke with friends that I'm a glutton for self restraint, which probably comes a little too easily for me and I'm suspicious of it. So as a matter of personal style, maybe I should be less of that. I should, like, ease up on the self restraint. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Gretchen Rubin]

That's how I am too.

[Ben Markovitz]

You're a glutton for self restraint.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Discipline is my freedom.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yes. The style thing, I just. I'm really conscious of the ways that fiction can seem phony and the games you can play that are not quite right. And obviously fiction is funny because I made it up. These things didn't happen to me. But what are the notes that creep in that alert readers to the fact that you're telling a story? And that is not real.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Well, in this book, it is almost like he's telling someone a story. Like he'll say, oh, I haven't said very much about my son yet, but let me tell you, it is as if he is. But we don't know who that person is. We're not informed about that. But it is in a. Like, I am telling something to someone.

[Ben Markovitz]

As much as possible. I would like it to read as if it could be memoir sometimes. Actually, it does. It's interesting. Nonfiction writers sometimes want to borrow from fiction writers. The craft, the tools of the craft. I often am jealous of nonfiction writers.

[Gretchen Rubin]

That's so interesting. I've never heard anybody say that you're trying to write fiction like a memoir.

[Ben Markovitz]

Well, so we talked about it.

[Gretchen Rubin]

But you do have foreshadowing.

[Ben Markovitz]

I do have some foreshadowing. And you really have to be careful with it. Right. You can't overuse it. Yes, but I think we talked before about Goodbye to all that.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yeah.

[Ben Markovitz]

Which is Robert Graves memoir of his childhood.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Such a good book. Oh, my gosh.

[Ben Markovitz]

Read that book leading up to the first World War and the way that the war changes him and makes him say goodbye to the culture that raised him. And I loved that book. When I was about 17 years old, we moved to Berlin for a year. I had no friends and Instead of friends, I had books.

[Gretchen Rubin]

You say you'd moved several times, and you sort of. You're like, I'm done, like, doing the whole make friends thing. It's too hard or what?

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, I moved. I went to 11 different schools as a kid. It was over. And I remember saying to my daughter once when she was having trouble in school, you know, books, not friends. Books, not friends. They're more reliable. And I just read and reread Goodbye to All that. Partly because he wrote it at such speed, it changed, just felt true. And how can you recreate that in fiction?

[Gretchen Rubin]

We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more of my conversation with Ben Markovitz. Well, I love to read, and I imagine a lot of people in the audience love to read. What are some of your favorite novels? Like, if you could tell everybody here to read, what would you tell them? Or what do you go back to and reread and reread, or just whether because you want to imitate it or maybe it's a completely different kind of style and it's just. You just love it. You mentioned Goodbye to All that. That's an outstanding book.

[Ben Markovitz]

So good, you know, a novel. I secretly just. And it's totally unlike anything I write. I just think the Scarlet Letter is amazing.

[Gretchen Rubin]

See, I have a thing where I cannot read any book or watch any movie or any play that has the theme of unjust accusation. I can't read Atonement. I can't read Oliver Twist. I can't see.

[Ben Markovitz]

It's too painful.

[Gretchen Rubin]

I cannot bear it. And I could smell it a mile away. Like, I have an amazing ability to. And I mean, she's justly accused in a way, but it feels so unjust. So I just can't even bear the thought of that novel.

[Ben Markovitz]

I could see that. I mean, it's also. It's not a realist novel. It's written in this fantastical style.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Hawthorne.

[Ben Markovitz]

And I think for a lot of us, it gets ruined in high school because you just. And actually, there's a Byron line.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Talk about Byron.

[Ben Markovitz]

There's always a Byron, Byron.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Give a plug for Byron.

[Ben Markovitz]

There's always a Byron line. He once said, farewell Horace, whom I hated. So basically because I had to read him in school. So this is an old problem. He then loved Horace. And I actually, I went to so many different schools. I didn't read the Scarlet Letter in high school. And I came to it because I was teaching a class in the Great American Novella. And I thought it was a novella. It turned out not to be. It's really long. And then I read it, and it's totally unlike anything that I would ever write myself. But the scene at the end when Pearl kisses her father, the child of Hester, who has not yet named himself to anyone as her father, and she finally becomes human. And you have this sense that in order to grow up as a child, your parents have to confess something to you, and that until they've confessed whatever it is, you can't be fully human. And I think the phrase is, she becomes a woman in the world when before she had been this amoral creature. I find it unbelievably moving. It's such a great book.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Okay. Yeah. What else?

[Ben Markovitz]

So another favorite is Pnin by Nabokov.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Oh, I read a review where you were talking about that, and I got a copy because I realized I had never read it. Is that how you say the name of it?

[Ben Markovitz]

I mean, my edition, I have a really beautiful early edition which has a kind of phonetic spelling in it. You're supposed to sound a little explosive. Pneen.

[Gretchen Rubin]

I think it's P N I, N. It's a novella by Nabokov or Nabokov.

[Ben Markovitz]

And it's just. It's a happy book and it's really hard. I mean, terrible things happen in it. He goes through the horrors of 20th century history. He has a lover die in the Holocaust. He has to escape a collapsing Russia. And yet it's optimistic. And even though it's written at the kind of beginning of the Cold War, it's a novel in which the Russian character Panin, actually really loves America. And all of the Americans, or most of the Americans in the book get and adore Panin. And it's really hard to write a novel based on happiness. I would like to do more of it. I think it's just a wonderful book.

[Gretchen Rubin]

It's very hard to write a good novel about happiness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's a great segue to the last question I want to ask you. And then we'll turn to the questions from the audience. Thank you, audience members. Because I write a lot about happiness, I often ask people, is there one practice or habit or activity that you would suggest just to the average person that they could do on an ordinary day, just something that they could do regularly that would make them happier, healthier, more productive, or more creative? What is it that you would suggest that they consider working on your jump shot? Oh, okay.

[Ben Markovitz]

You know, I'm being a little glib, but I think to do something.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Wait, explain your basketball background, though, for people who don't know.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, so my first job out of college was I went overseas and played professional basketball in Germany. And if I had been any good at that, I would not be sitting here tonight. But the great thing about shooting hoops is you can do it on your own. And it's a bit like writing in the sense that while you're doing it, you're absolutely focused on a very particular and achievable goal. And if the ball goes in the net, it's as if the universe says yes to you. And then you pick it up and you try again. And it doesn't have to be shooting hoops, but anything like that, where your concentration is completely lasered in on something that you can achieve, and then it's over. That seems like a recipe for happiness.

[Gretchen Rubin]

And do you find that it's just like it clears your mind because you're not thinking about all the. The tangled thoughts that we all have or, like, creative endeavors? It's just like in or out. In or out.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah. And I think it also teaches patience because you can't shoot well angry. You can dunk well angry. At least I used to be able to, but you can't shoot well angry. So every time you miss, you have to say, all right, and go again.

[Gretchen Rubin]

So that's okay. That's a great suggestion. A little impractical in New York City.

[Ben Markovitz]

There are beautiful courts all over town. That's not an excuse.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Oh, is that right?

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Okay. See, I guess it's if you know what to look for, you see them.

[Ben Markovitz]

Cold weather, doesn't matter. Rain, doesn't matter.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yeah, interesting. Okay, so we're going to turn to the audience. This is great. Now, the first question is related, because I was asking, what are your. Some of your favorite books that you would recommend that you just love, Love, love. But this is a question. What were some works or writers who influenced your work? So that's more about, like, who do you write in the spirit of, or who is an influence or maybe a style that you would aspire to?

[Ben Markovitz]

A lot of writers, obviously, but not just influence how I write, but how I, you know, react to the world. I think Roth made a big impact on me. I had never read him as a kid, and then in my 20s, I read a lot of Roth. And I think part of what you learn from Roth, I don't love all his books. I love some of them a lot.

[Gretchen Rubin]

What. What are a few that you'd recommend?

[Ben Markovitz]

I love Goodbye, Columbus the first one, I like Roth at most, when there's a tension between the kind of the nice Jewish boy that he was raised as and the carnal, ambitious human being that he thought needed a license to express himself. And when you feel that tension, I think the books are amazing. When the tension is gone, he loses me a little bit. But I think part of what you learn from Roth is this sense that wherever you are, whatever you're doing, whether you know it or not, you're in the midst of an argument and you have to pay attention to it now.

[Gretchen Rubin]

And this is something that we haven't talked about much, which is how does the American road and road trip shape our psyche? And yet talk about the road trip ness of this. We haven't really focused on that. And like, yeah, how does it. How does that fit into the industry?

[Ben Markovitz]

That's really interesting. I'm trying to write something about it now.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Because you've made several, haven't you, cross country trips?

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, I've made a lot of road trips that have meant a lot to me. But I was also, over Christmas, I biked with my son from a kind of natural A park in Texas to our favorite barbecue restaurant. And we biked through what used to be almost totally uninhabited land and is now starting to fill in with people moving outside Austin. And one of the things that really struck me about living in England is that it's such a dense society, dense culturally, it's so finely grained that my kids and the kids I see, have an enormously sophisticated vocabulary of personality types that they can choose from to express who they are. And I felt, as a weirdo kid in Austin, Texas, that the landscape was much more open, that it wasn't so finely grained, and that it's not that it allowed us to be weird, weirder than English kids, but when you were weird, you were on your own with it. And that was enormously freeing. And I think part of the appeal of the American landscape, especially as you head out west, is you just get a sense of the porousness of it all, the space in which you can set up shop. And that's immensely attractive, I think.

[Gretchen Rubin]

And when you were working on this novel, did you always think of it as. That would be. The structure of it is like he would go on the road, essentially, and this is your life.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, I wanted him to go somewhere, and I thought, where's he gonna go? Well, maybe to see his son in California. And that's a destination. I probably used this. I've used this phrase many Times before. It's not mine. There's a writer who says that writing a novel is a bit like driving on a mountain road late at night. You should be able to see 30 yards in advance and know where you're trying to get to. And I thought to get to California, where his father is buried, would be a destination that I could work with, but everything in between I had to make up as I went along. And then you have to think, well, what kind of events wouldn't feel too forced but would allow him to deal with some of the things he needs to deal with? And that was the kind of challenge of the book.

[Gretchen Rubin]

And did you actually do that drive yourself?

[Ben Markovitz]

We did some of it, yeah. We started in Texas, not New York, but we got to California.

[Gretchen Rubin]

And did you do it to sort of, like, make sure that your timing worked and all that?

[Ben Markovitz]

Not so much the timing, but a lot of the things that happen as sort of side incidents in the book were things that happened to us with my family on the road.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Okay. Do you picture scenes while writing, or does it stay mostly verbal for you? That's interesting.

[Ben Markovitz]

I don't know if I would call it picturing, but I do worry all the time that the scene is more complicated than my imagination can do justice to. And so I have to keep coming back to it. Who's sitting where? What do they have at stake in this conversation? So that the idea I started the scene with in which I wanted a certain thing to happen might seem too blunt an instrument, and I have to take into account what the reality would be like.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Mm. Right. If they're, like. If they're sitting face to face, they're not gonna do X, Y, Z or.

[Ben Markovitz]

Right. And if they're worried about the check, then they wouldn't get into this argument then and whatever.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Right, Right. Right. Well, here's a question. Do you read your reviews?

[Ben Markovitz]

I used to, and then I stopped, and then I do again. I mean, you know, it's very preoccupying.

[Gretchen Rubin]

I never read them. I can't take them.

[Ben Markovitz]

You never touch them?

[Gretchen Rubin]

No. And everybody knows I don't read them. Good or bad. I don't read them. No.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah. I like a quiet life and refuse. It's like you have to argue or think or even if they're good. It's like the sugar rush that you want again and again. So it can be very distracting.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Or they get one little thing wrong and it makes you bonkers.

[Ben Markovitz]

Right?

[Gretchen Rubin]

Right. Yeah. Right. But right now you are trying to hold.

[Ben Markovitz]

Yeah, but I close one eye oh, okay, okay.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Right, right, right. Okay. Last thing I want to read. What was my favorite passage of the book, the thing that I keep returning to over and over in my mind that I found the most thought provoking. So I'll read it and explain what I like it, and then I would love for you to just comment on it and see if it. If it was particularly significant to you when you were writing it. So the thing that's interesting is that Tom and Amy both feel dominated by the will and the actions of the other. That you see them both feeling like, but you're the one in charge. You're the one with the bigger identity. And. And Tom says sometimes she complained, you don't need me. You don't need me like I need you. And I'd say, this is your world. The world we are living in, which I work hard to pay for, is your world, not mine. And I just thought this so beautifully captured. They both feel like the other is creating the world, and they're both right and they're both wrong, and they don't understand that, and they can't. They keep telling each other that, and they can't hear it. So anyway, I keep thinking of this and thinking about people, but we live in the world that you made. They both feel that way. Yeah.

[Ben Markovitz]

I mean, I feel like at some point in a marriage, your fingerprints are all over each other. And it doesn't excuse everything, but it means that when you're getting mad at your partner, partly you're getting mad at the person you helped to come into being.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yes. You have a beautiful passage about that, too.

[Ben Markovitz]

I do. I mean, I feel like they are both right in that statement.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yes.

[Ben Markovitz]

Why? I liked it.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yes.

[Ben Markovitz]

Part of the backstory, I just wanted to go over it quickly, is that he feels like he's a little bit more working class than she is. And part of what attracted him to her is that she offered him a kind of genteel living that he wanted.

[Gretchen Rubin]

They have beautiful tastes.

[Ben Markovitz]

They have beautiful taste. But then he gets there and he finds it a little suffocating, even if he's paying for it. But also from his point of view, it's a little rich for her to say whatever she says, given that he works very hard to pay for the life that she's enjoying. And so you can feel both of their resentments at the same time. And that's what I hope to do throughout the book, make everybody feel resentment.

[Gretchen Rubin]

So, to me, this just leaped out of the book. When you were writing, did it have any Special weight to you or. No. This is just one of many passages that you loved. I think often when we write, there's like, something in it that for us really was sort of. Sort of like a core. But maybe this wasn't that frequent.

[Ben Markovitz]

My daughter was quoting the Dylan line to me today. You are right from your side, I am right from mine. And that's a note I want to strike. Yes. The passage in the book that probably meant most to me was later on when he thinks for a moment that he might be able to get back with an ex and raise their child as if it were. And he's suddenly terrified of the extent to which you can change your life and not mind it.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Yes.

[Ben Markovitz]

Of your own ability to alter who you are and actually get over it. And that seems very scary to him. He'd rather be miserable and who he was than happy in who he might be.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Right.

[Ben Markovitz]

And that seems like a core idea.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Right, right, right, right. Well. And the fact that his father had done it. Yeah, no, there's almost every page. There's something that we could stop and pause and really. And really appreciate everybody. Thank you so much. Ben Markovitz, the Rest of Our Lives. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. So are you feeling happier? I know I am. I really enjoyed talking with Ben. I really found the Rest of Our Lives to be one of the best, perhaps the best novel that I have read that explores the empty nest, or as I call it, open door stage of life. If you'd like to read the book yourself, I'll link to it in the show notes. And if you want to join us for the Move 26 in 26 challenge, you'll find information about that in the episode description as well. Thanks so much for listening. And remember, the best time to start moving was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

[Ben Markovitz]

Hi, Gretchen. Craig Robinson and my little sister Michelle here we host a new podcast called IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. We know you're the queen of giving advice, so we wanted to get a few tips from you.

[Gretchen Rubin]

You know, Gretchen, a lot of our listeners are going through some major life changes. What advice do you have for folks who are trying to stay grounded in the midst of major life transitions? Craig and Michelle, I am so happy to be talking to you. Here are a few questions that might help us gain perspective. So consider questions like this. What activities take up my time but are not particularly useful or stimulating for me? Do I spend a lot of time on something that's important to someone else but is not very important to me. If I could magically change one habit in my life, what would I choose? And here's a question. Would I like to have more time in solitude, restorative solitude, or would I like to have more time with friends? You know, just thinking about questions like this can help us start to figure out how we might make our lives happier. With greater self knowledge, we're better able to make hard decisions that reflect ourselves, our own nature, our own interests, our own values. In my own case, I have found that the more my life reflects my nature and the happier I get and the more grounded I feel when I'm going through a period of major change or transition. For more great advice, search for IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. Wherever you get podcasts, you can listen to Issa Rae on letting go of certain friendships Keke Palmer on why disappointment is actually the key to career success Seth and Lauren Rogan on caring for aging parents and so many more.