Totally Booked with Zibby — Lily King, HEART THE LOVER

Date: October 1, 2025
Host: Zibby Owens
Guest: Lily King (Author of Heart the Lover)

Episode Overview

In this heartfelt and insightful episode, Zibby Owens interviews celebrated novelist Lily King about her newest book, Heart the Lover. The conversation delves deeply into the book's themes—love that shifts over time, the lingering echoes of early relationships, the intersection of personal pain and creative growth, and the power that small moments and literary references hold in shaping life and story. The episode is rich in discussion about craft, personal history, processing trauma through writing, and the private details that make fiction feel real.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introduction and Background

• Zibby warmly welcomes Lily back, noting that Writers and Lovers was a book club favorite and praising Heart the Lover for its “real, emotional, classic Lily King” characters.

  • [03:36] Zibby Owens: “The way you make your characters, how you craft them, they're so real, their emotions are so real, their families, just all of it, it's just so classic you and so good.”

• Lily shares nervous excitement for her first official interview about this new novel.

  • [03:25] Lily King: "This is my, my first interview, my first podcast, like, official kind of thing. Oh my gosh."

What Heart the Lover Is About

• Lily distills Heart the Lover:

  • Follows a young woman in college whose ill-fated date sets off events tracked for 30 years.
  • It’s a “big love story,” but doesn’t follow predictable romance arcs; explores different loves—friendship, books, change over time.
    • [04:06] Lily King: "It is a big love story that does not follow the normal trajectory of a love story...the nature of love, I think in the book, changes as time passes."

• The book examines the weight of formative relationships and how personal histories and bookish influences reverberate throughout a life.

The Book’s Genesis and Process

• After her short story collection, Lily started (and abandoned) a political murder mystery set in Maine, inspired by the tensions of COVID and the moment.

• The turning point: reading Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. The evident joy in that book made Lily realize writing should be fun, launching her into Heart the Lover the very next day.

  • [05:10] Lily King: "...I read about six pages of that book, and I was like, she is having fun. She is having so much fun. I am having no fun in my chair. And I literally, the next day, I started Heart the Lover."

• The novel unfolded organically, with many discoveries (“easter eggs”) surprising even her.

  • [07:15] Lily King: "...I realized it when I took a note about the future of the book, and I wrote down the name of the person that Jordan was married to. And I was like, oh, my God. Really? I can't do that..."

Grief, Reverberation, and Real-Life Roots

• Zibby reads a moving passage from the book about a college acquaintance murdered—a loss that quietly reverberates for years.
• Lily explains her inclusion of seemingly tangential trauma:
  • Life is compartmentalized—happy milestones and undercurrents of disruption and loss coexist.
  • This subplot was drawn from her own brief, disorienting experience of loss in college.
    • [09:46] Lily King: "...I really just wanted to capture the time in her life where everything is kind of separated and compartmentalized and she kind of has to go from. From one world to another world...And I will also say that this really is something that happened to me..."

Books Within the Book — On Literary References

• The novel references 30–40 different works of literature, many drawn unconsciously from Lily’s own college experience.
• Literature as an undercurrent, “not in control”—the writing process is more dreamlike and intuitive than methodical.
  • [12:50] Lily King: "...it just, you know, I, I, I often feel like it just, I am not in control. I am not choosing...It's like trying to control a dream. You really can't do it..."

The “Small Moments” Craft

• Zibby highlights the intense, almost cinematic intimacy of scenes set in kitchens, or in subtle gestures and routines.
• Lily attributes this to a life honed toward hyperawareness—her father’s alcoholism and need for vigilance over tiny emotional signals.
  • [16:25] Lily King: "...when you have a parent who's an alcoholic, you have to pay such close attention...So I think...that's where that hyper maybe sensitivity comes from or...why those things are so important to me in writing."

Coping, Family, and Healing Through Writing

• Lily and Zibby discuss how trauma—and its denial—influenced their respective upbringings.

• Lily’s path to healing and integrating her experiences progressed through therapy (seriously undertaken once she had kids) and ultimately through writing, especially her autobiographical novel Father of the Rain:

  • [18:30] Lily King: "When I had kids, that's really. That was when I was like, I have to deal with this...She helped me so much. Just a few years, and she just really, really, really helped me with...my anger and my sadness..."
  • [21:56] Lily King: "...once I started that, I started writing that. I wrote that book pretty soon after that. And that was hugely cathartic. I mean, it just was. It just kind of put it all to rest. I was so much better after that."

• Differences in processing among siblings, owing to their age and timing of parental divorce, are explored.

  • [23:55] Lily King: "[My siblings] were mostly out of the house, and they went to boarding school, and I didn't. But I think it's had a huge impact on them, but in a different way. I would say. I would say, in general, harder for them than me."

On Craft, Focus, and Coping With the World

• Zibby asks about maintaining creative focus amid chaos.

• Lily describes the importance of physical and psychological separation—a "room of one's own"—and the discipline of showing up to write, even imperfectly.

  • [24:53] Lily King: "I really do think a room of one's own is really important. You have to have a space. Like I shut this door. I'm in my study, it's at the top of the house. So it's hard for people to get to. They leave me alone. That is really important for me."

• Writing became a haven during tumultuous family times; the act of writing itself was sometimes the only controllable variable in her life.

  • [27:28] Lily King: "...I wrote this book through some difficult years...I never thought that I would finish this book...it saved me...I had a place to go. I had a place where I could control the variables..."

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "It is a big love story that does not follow the normal trajectory of a love story...the nature of love...changes as time passes."
  — Lily King, [04:06]

• “I read about six pages of that book, and I was like, she is having fun. She is having so much fun. I am having no fun in my chair.”
  — Lily King, on starting Heart the Lover, [05:10]

• “I am not in control. I am not choosing. I am not—something else is happening.”
  — Lily King, on her writing process, [12:50]

• "When you have a parent who's an alcoholic, you have to pay such close attention ... what gesture, what shake of the head...for self protection."
  — Lily King, [16:25]

• “I really, you know, had to work on this authentic behavior, doing things from the heart. And I had not done that because I was always trying to just keep everybody not mad at me.”
  — Lily King, [20:55]

• “I wrote this book through some difficult years ... it saved me ... I had a place where I could control the variables, even though I say I don’t control them.”
  — Lily King, [27:28]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:25 – Lily’s nerves for her first podcast about the book
• 03:36 – Zibby’s emotional reaction to reading the novel
• 04:06 – Lily’s own summary of Heart the Lover
• 05:10 – The shift from an abandoned murder mystery to starting Heart the Lover
• 07:15 – Discovery and “easter eggs” during writing
• 08:10–09:44 – The passage Zibby reads about grief, and the discussion on compartmentalizing loss
• 12:50 – On literary references and unconscious creation
• 16:25 – How Lily’s background with an alcoholic parent shaped her writing
• 18:30–21:56 – Processing family trauma, therapy, and the catharsis of fiction
• 24:53 – Craft advice: routines, space, and discipline
• 27:28 – Writing as a lifeline during personal hardship

Tone & Takeaways

With her combination of warmth and directness, Lily King offers an unfiltered glimpse into the intersection of life and art. She’s honest about struggle, discovery, and the mysterious (even magical) ways novels evolve. Zibby’s questions draw out the emotional, philosophical, and deeply personal threads that make Heart the Lover both specific to Lily’s experience and resonant for any reader.

This episode is essential listening for fans of literary fiction, process-driven writers, and anyone interested in how lived experience shapes art—often in ways that only become clear after the fact.

Host Recommendation:
Zibby strongly recommends both Writers and Lovers and Heart the Lover, suggesting book clubs and individual readers will find them exceptionally moving and worthwhile.

For More:
Visit zibbymedia.com, follow Zibby on Instagram @zibbyowens, and, as ever, buy the books!