Sarah Ruhl, LESSONS FROM MY TEACHERS: From Preschool to the Present

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Sarah Ruhl, LESSONS FROM MY TEACHERS: From Preschool to the Present"

Episode Release Date: May 28, 2025
Podcast: Totally Booked with Zibby

---

Introduction to Sarah Ruhl

In this heartfelt episode of Totally Booked with Zibby, host Zibby Owens welcomes acclaimed playwright, essayist, and poet Sarah Ruhl. Ruhl, renowned for her 15 plays including "Eurydice," "In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play," and "The Clean House," brings her depth and introspection to the conversation. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur Genius Fellowship recipient, Ruhl discusses her latest work, Lessons from My Teachers: From Preschool to the Present.

Inspiration and Creation of "Lessons from My Teachers"

Sarah Ruhl delves into the genesis of her book, explaining, "I teach this class at Yale called Lessons from My Teachers, and the inspiration for that was I wanted my students to know there was more than one way in that, you know, there were many entry points in terms of how to write a play" (04:19). This academic endeavor evolved into her book, which chronicles the myriad influences that have shaped her as a writer, ranging from mentors to life experiences outside the classroom.

Relationship with Her Mother

Ruhl shares a deeply personal account of her relationship with her mother, an actress in Chicago. "My mom taught English at a Catholic high school where I grew up in Illinois. She taught me a huge amount about theater and writing just by sort of osmosis and by example" (05:30). Her mother's eccentricity and dedication to the craft provided Ruhl with early exposure to the performing arts, fostering her passion for writing.

Journey to Becoming a Playwright and Author

Reflecting on her early aspirations, Ruhl mentions, "I was one of those weird kids who knew I wanted to be a writer from an early age" (06:44). Initially aiming to be a poet or novelist, it wasn’t until she met Paula Vogel at Brown University that she was inspired to pivot towards playwriting. Vogel's mentorship was pivotal, leading Ruhl to fully embrace the world of theater.

Current Projects: "Eurydice" Rehearsals

Ruhl updates listeners on her ongoing work, stating, "I'm running after this to rehearsals for this play, Eurydice, which I wrote 25 years ago" (07:54). The production at the Signature Theater features a convergence of time, with the director mirroring his age from the original 18-year-old production, and Maya Hawke portraying Eurydice at 26—the age Ruhl was when she penned the play. This cyclical approach underscores the timeless nature of her work.

Health Struggles and Their Impact

A significant portion of the conversation centers on Ruhl's personal health challenges. She recounts her battle with Bell's palsy, later diagnosed as neurological Lyme disease, which persisted for 15 years: "I really wanted to make sense of it by writing about it" (09:21). This ordeal not only affected her physically but also influenced her introspective writing style.

Reflections on Teachers and Their Influence

Ruhl emphasizes the profound impact teachers have had on her life. "I realized they don't get thanked very much" (13:40) she reflects, sharing stories of educators like Paul Nielsen, her elementary school principal, whose true character she only understood years later. Such reflections illustrate the often-unseen influence teachers have on personal and professional development.

Story of David Constance

Highlighting a pivotal mentor, Ruhl speaks of David Constance, a classics professor who provided unwavering support during her father's cancer diagnosis: "Professors like David who kind of took me under their wing" (12:49). Her correspondence with Constance, even posthumously, underscores the lasting bonds formed through mentorship.

Pandemic Experiences and Zoom Funerals

The pandemic brought unique challenges, particularly in mourning loved ones. Ruhl shares her experience with Zoom funerals, noting the impersonal nature of such gatherings: "It's like all of Zoom just goes into one big category versus all the different experiences we have in life" (21:15). These virtual farewells lacked the tangible presence and rituals that mark significant life events.

Writing Process and Advice

Discussing her concise writing style, Ruhl attributes it to necessity: "I chose short form by accident because I was so tired and I had no time" (24:35). She advocates for brevity in writing, inspired by practices like haiku, to convey deep emotions succinctly. "You can say it better with fewer words" (24:35) is her guiding principle for effective writing.

Haiku Challenge

In a spontaneous moment, Ruhl engages in a live haiku writing exercise, demonstrating her skill in encapsulating complex emotions in a brief format. Though playful with the constraints, she maintains the essence of traditional haiku, emphasizing meditation and present-moment awareness.

Future Outlook and Book Release

Looking ahead, Ruhl expresses excitement about sharing her book with various circles: "I am looking forward to sharing it with friends and neighbors and family and students and former teachers" (28:10). Balancing her literary pursuits with her theatrical work, she remains unfazed by the nerves that often accompany new projects, buoyed by her longstanding success with works like Eurydice.

---

Notable Quotes:

• "I chose short form by accident because I was so tired and I had no time." — Sarah Ruhl (24:35)

• "I realized they don't get thanked very much." — Sarah Ruhl (13:40)

• "It's like all of Zoom just goes into one big category versus all the different experiences we have in life." — Sarah Ruhl (21:15)

---

Conclusion

This episode offers a profound exploration of Sarah Ruhl's life, work, and the influential figures who have shaped her journey. From her early inspirations and academic influences to personal health battles and the nuanced relationships with her teachers, Ruhl provides listeners with an intimate glimpse into the experiences that inform her creative endeavors.

Transcript

[Zibby Owens]

Clips from the Totally Booked Live series are now up on Instagram totallybooked with Zivi. Check it out.

[LinkedIn Ad Voice]

Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? Well, with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company seniority skills. Wait, did I say job title yet? Get started today and see how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started at LinkedIn.com results terms and conditions apply.

[Instacart Ad Voice]

If you're a parent or share a fridge with someone. Instacart is about to make grocery shopping so much easier because with family carts you can share a cart with your partner and each add the items you want, since between the two of you, odds are you'll both remember everything you need. And this way you' never have to eat milkless cereal again. So minimize the stress of the weekly shop with family carts, download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes. Plus enjoy. Zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees apply for three orders in 14 days. Excludes restaurants My husband and I recently realized that neither of us were getting the sleep we deserved. So we sat down and talked about our ideal beds for him. So soft as feathers for me, firm as a plank. This would be a huge issue if it weren't for the Sleep Number Smart Bed. Thankfully, with our new Sleep Number Smart Bed, we can each dial in our desired Sleep number settings to our ideal comfort and finally get the sleep we deserve. Plus, the Klymit series feature makes sure our bed stays nice and cool through the warm summer months. Why choose a Sleep Number Smart Bed? So you can choose your ideal comfort on either side. And now it's the Sleep Number Everything Smart Bed Sale. Every Smart Bed and base are on sale during our Memorial Day event. Up to 50% off limited time, exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.

[Zibby Owens]

Hi, this is Zibby 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.

[Sarah Ruhl]

Is worth your time.

[Zibby Owens]

As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know, get insider insights and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram ibeowensk.

[Sarah Ruhl]

Welcome to Totally Booked with Zibi. I am so excited to be here with Sarah Rule, who I've never met in person until now, but have been on Zoom with. So exciting. Her new book, Lessons from My Teachers From Preschool to the Present was so good. I cried, I laughed. I just like loved it. So I'm so excited to talk about it. Here's a little bit about Sarah that you might not know. Sarah Rule is a playwright, essayist and poet. Her 15 plays include in the Next Room or the Vibrator Play, the Clean House and Eurydice. Eurydice.

I mean, who knows how the Greeks said it but I say Eurydice.

Eurydice. Sorry, Eurydice. She is a two time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Tony Award nominee, and the recipient of the MacArthur Genius Fellowship. Her books include a memoir and 100 essays. I don't have Time to Write a New York Times Notable Book. You can read more about her [e-mail] welcome Sarah.

Thank you for having me. It's delightful to meet you in person.

It's delightful to meet you in person too. You have so many lessons you share here which really serve to illustrate your whole life, what you've learned, who you've loved, all the things. Tell me about the inspiration for starting the collection and how did you even start?

It's always a good question, how did one start? Because the writing process sort of covers all the process up and you forget like childbirth. I teach this class at Yale called Lessons from My Teachers and the inspiration for that was I wanted my students to know there was more than one way in that, you know, there were many entry points in terms of how to write a play. So in that class I taught four playwrights who I learned from and I tried to teach not only their work but how they taught. And then at a point I just thought maybe there's a book in this notion or this title, Lessons from My Teachers. And I probably started with my most sort of formidable teacher, Paula Vogel, who is the reason I write plays. And then at a point I worked my way backward because I thought about elementary school, preschool, and my mother, who I really consider a first teacher, and my father and my dog. I mean, I have lots of teachers who are not inside the classroom.

Talk a little bit about your relationship with your mother.

My mom is an Actress in Chicago, and she's a total delight. She's very eccentric and she used to kind of run down the stairs repeating monologues from Ionesco. And if I didn't have a babysitter, she would just take me to her rehearsals and I would sit in the dark in the back and take notes, which sometimes she would pass along to the director. And she taught English at a Catholic high school where I grew up in Illinois. And so she taught me a huge amount about theater and writing just by sort of osmosis and by example. And my mom is a great conversationalist. She could talk to like a stump. I'm much more reserved. But she was always asking questions. She's interested in the life of the mind and she's still acting. She's 82, and she's gonna be in Marsha Norman's Night Mother in Chicago pretty soon.

And can you just take everybody back to how you became a playwright and author and everything? Like, where did this come from? Yes, you had this example of your mom, but just a little bit more to fill everybody in.

I mean, I guess I was one of those weird kids who knew I wanted to be a writer from an early age. Like almost before I could write in a funny way, my mother used to take dictation and she would write down stories that I would come up with. And so I mostly wanted to be a poet and a short story writer or novelist. I think at a point I wanted to write great philosophical novels. That was the dream. When I was 18, what did I know of life? And then my mother having influenced me and brought me into the theater, it was always there. I sort of understood actors and I knew how plays were made, but it didn't occur to me to write them. I sort of thought playwrights were dead people whose plays fell from the sky through the Sam French portal and landed on actors desks. But then I met Paula Vogel at Brown when I was, I think, 19. And she's such an incredible teacher. And it was really her inspiration that caused me to switch over to playwriting.

Amazing. And what is the play you're running to right after this?

Oh, I'm running after this to rehearsals for this play, Eurydice, which I wrot 25 years ago. It was done in New York 18 years ago, and I'm doing it at the Signature Theater. And one thing that's kind of amazing is the director is now, you know, 71 and I'm 51, the age he was when he first directed it. And Maya Hawke, who's playing. Eurydice is 26, the age when I wrote it. So it's sort of all of these cycles of time converging.

So I talked to you about your memoir, Smile. And there is a coda to it in this book where we learn a little bit more about some of the health things that caused all of that to happen. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Sure. So I have three kids, and I had a high risk pregnancy with twins. And after I gave birth, this side of my face was paralyzed. And they diagnosed me with Bell's palsy, which usually goes away quickly. And in my case, it just lasted and lasted and lasted. And it turned out that I actually had Lyme disease on top of pregnancy, which I didn't know until I wrote a book about it. And a doctor reached out and said, I think you have neurological Lyme disease. And I said, oh, no, no.

I mean, she found this out like last year. Like a couple. Yeah, yeah.

It was insane. And how old are your kids? They're old now. My oldest is 19 and I have twins who are 15. So this saga with my health was 15 years. And I didn't want to talk about it for a while. It felt private. And as a writer, I think we're not used to thinking much about our bodies, much less writing about them. And then at a point, I found it occupied so much of my internal life, thinking about not being able to smile or, you know, at the time, express emotion. And it was such a life changing event that ultimately I did want to make sense of it by writing about it.

And how do you feel now that, you know that it was misdiagnosed?

I was really angry for a while. Angry at doctors who missed it, and angry at Lyme is so politicized. I think that people miss it partly because they don't believe. Like half the profession probably over diagnoses it and the other half under diagnoses it because they're at war about whether chronic Lyme is even a thing. So I was really angry for a moment, and then I was just very grateful to get treatment. I got IV antibiotics and I felt a lot better. And I was grateful to the reader who reached out. It was like literally the healing power of literature was this guy called me out of the blue and diagnosed me.

We should all write books about all of our issues. Yeah. This is such a blessing, obviously, that. That you were able to have some closure on it and finally figure it out. Oh, my gosh. Talk a little bit about some of the Teachers that you were like, yes, these people have to go in, but how should I tell the story? Like, there's so much we learn from every teacher.

Yeah. And it's partly the teachers I chose to include. There was a story involved with the teaching. I mean, because I've had even more kind of wonderful teachers that aren't in the book that there just didn't happen to be a specific story that I remembered. So, like, I wouldn't have expected to write about Paul Nielsen, my elementary school principal, because I didn't know I was carrying that lesson with me. But. So Paul Nielsen was this principal in Wilmette, Illinois, and the first kid with HIV in the state was at our public school. And there was. Ryan White had been denied entry in Indiana. And there was sort of a kerfuffle in the community as to whether there would be a group of parents who wanted to deny entry to this child. And Wilmette and Paul just really stood up to parents and was like, I'm not disclosing their identity. They belong here. Only the teachers who are teaching him will know his identity. And I had seen him as kind of a bullying, mean principal because he was, I think, unjust to me at a school food fight. So that was my perception of him. And then years later, I learned what a hero he was. And so I was trying to make sense of how I saw him as a young person and what I knew about him as a grown up.

That's amazing. There are other teachers you reached out to, too. You have the one older gentleman who you sent a letter to, and he was so surprised to hear from you. Can you talk about that?

David Constance.

Yes.

Yes. Yeah. So David Constance was a classics professor of mine speaking of Eurydice, and he taught the Ancient Tragedy and Its Influence class at Brown. And my husband and I were both in the same class, but it was nine in the morning. I was probably half asleep. We were in different sections. I never met my husband then, but I became really close with David. And my father was diagnosed with cancer when I was a freshman in October. And I thought often of just leaving, but it was really professors like David who kind of took me under their wing and would cook food at their home and invite students so that it felt. I felt like I was literally being fed by him, both by the books he was having me read, and also by making baba ganoush, you know, with roasted eggplant in his fireplace. And David died last year, and I wasn't aware that he had cancer. And I had sent him the essay I sent all the teachers, the essays I was working on before publishing them. And so I was so grateful that I'd done that because I think teachers aren't thanked that much. That was my experience writing the book because I would constantly send these essays out and sometimes it would hit a teacher on their birthday or when they were ill or. And they would say, God, I'm so moved to get this. I didn't know I had an impact. And I would think, how could you not know? Because some of these teachers to me were just legendary. And then I realized they don't get thanked very much. And I've been reflecting on that a lot and thinking about how sometimes the people who affect us the most, we almost think they have telepathy. We think they're all powerful because they've had such an impact. So it doesn't occur to us that actually they're separate people and we should track them down and thank them.

[Zibby Owens]

Today's episode has been sponsored by Fast Growing Trees. Did you know? Fast Growing Trees is the biggest online nursery in the US with thousands of different plants and over 2 million happy customers. They have all the plants your yard or house needs, like fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and so much more. Whatever plants you're interested in, Fast Growing Trees has you covered. Find the perfect fit for your climate and space. Fast Growing Trees makes it easy to get your dream yard. Order online and get your plants delivered directly to your door in just a few days without ever leaving home. Their alive and thrive guarantee ensures your plants arrive happy and healthy. Plus, get support from trained plant experts on call to help you plan your landscape, choose the right plants and and learn how to care for them. I am obsessed with the fiddle leaf fig tree, an indoor plant that I got from Fast Growing Trees. It is so beautiful and it just came right to my door. No annoying trip to a nursery or I once had to go in midtown in New York City, not even Midtown, all the way to the flower district to find a tree and put it in the car. And that was such a pain. Anyway, now these came right. Everything comes right to my door and it's amazing. This spring they have the best deals for your yard. Up to half off on select plants and other deals and listeners to our show get 15% off their first purchase when using the code readbooks at checkout. That's an additional 15% [e-mail] using the code readbooks at checkout. Fastgrowingtrees.com code readbooks now's the perfect time to plant indoors or out. Use Readbooks to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. I've gotten tired of clothes that looked cute online but feel cheap when I get them out of the box at home. I want better fabrics, better quality, better fit, just better everything. And with Quince, I got it. Their quality is incredible. Everything feels intentional and the prices are shockingly reasonable. It finally feels like my clothes match my standards. For example, take their 100% European linen shorts and dresses from $30 Luxe Swimwear, Italian leather platform sandals, and so much more. The best part is that everything with quints is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. By working directly with top artisans and and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you and me luxury without the markup. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. I also love their 100% organic cotton poplin tiered maxi dress in navy. So adorable. We'll wear this every day all summer long. So treat your closet to a little summer glow. Up with quints. Go to Quince.com Zivi for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com Zivi to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Zivi.

[LinkedIn Ad Voice]

Race the Rudders. Race the sails. Race the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger, wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today at LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply.

[Sarah Ruhl]

Are you going to do a campaign for us all to write our teachers?

I think I should. I think it would be good.

You could do letter to my teachers with the same font.

Ooh, I like it. There you go.

Yeah, because you're encouraging me like I've had so many teachers. And your book then of course makes me think about what has gone on in my life that has really informed me. And do those people know? And not even just teachers? I mean, your book is not exclusively nor even mostly about actual teachers. They're about other people in your life or things and things. Like so many people can be our teachers and we can learn from.

I think it's so important and to do it Quickly, because, you know, three of my teachers who I wrote about died in the last, you know, six months. So I might have thought that I had a longer time to share the essays about them. And sometimes we just don't have as long as we think we have.

And tell me a little bit more. You wrote about the loss of your father in law to Covid talk about that time a little bit more.

And, oh, it was crazy. He died in early March and we couldn't go back for the funeral. And so we watched his funeral on Zoom. And I remember my kids aren't actually that close with that particular grandfather. He was a little bit estranged. And so my daughter asked to eat popcorn during the Zoom service. And I was like, it's not a movie. Like, we're not eating popcorn at your grandfather's funeral. But it really caused me to reflect on presence and ritual. And there's a family in our building that we do Shabbat with. And we did it more and more during the pandemic because we were a little bubble. And so those, those neighbors brought over food when my, when my father in law died. And I just thought, oh, now, now it's marked. Now his death has been marked. I didn't feel his death was marked on Zoom, but I felt it was marked when neighbors brought food over. And I feel like it was a real lesson for me from the pandemic that seemed so obvious, particularly being a playwright and knowing how important gathering is. But that these milestones of celebration and mourning, it's very hard to celebrate on your own. It's very hard to mourn on your own. So I feel so grateful that we're back in space with each other.

I unfortunately had a number of Zoom funerals with people I loved, and it was just not being able to have other people reach out and give you a hug and mourn collectively and all of that. It's like, did it even happen?

Did it even happen? Yeah. I do think there's something about memory too, that we don't remember things as well on Zoom. They don't sort of imprint. And I don't know if it's the smell of people, the touch of. I mean, all of it.

It's like all of Zoom just like goes into one big category versus all the different experiences we have in life. That sounds so obvious, of course.

Well, it's like the difference between reading a book and the materiality of it and reading it on Kindle. And I do read books on Kindle, but I sometimes don't remember them as well, as book books. And I wonder if it's like something about holding the book. I can remember where I was when I was reading the book, and then.

Every time you see it from then on, you remember again. It's like this repeated exposure, in a way, versus a file that you're never gonna see again.

Yeah, it's like, remember that time I read that book on Kindle in my bed before I fell asleep?

Oh, my gosh. What do you think you've taught someone?

That's interesting. I tried in the book to focus less on what I was teaching than on what I was learning. But I hope that I've taught one or two things at this point in my life. What have I taught? I mean, I think as a teacher at Yale, I inherited, in a way, the class of Paula Vogel, who was on sabbatical. She had her playing decent on Broadway. And so I came as a substitute teacher and I had three little kids. And I thought, how can I possibly. But then I thought, how can I not? I don't want to let Paula down. And I would love to teach. And then it turned out I loved teaching, and it turned out Paula loved having writing time. So we sort of switched and I stayed. And I think it took years in the classroom to feel as though I wasn't just passing down the lessons of my teachers, but had my own lessons to give and years to kind of create my own specific practice. I made up a course last semester called Poetry and Playwriting, where I tried to encourage the writers to really merge the practice of poetry with playwriting, which is kind of how I write plays. And I realized I had been withholding that information from them. Not consciously, but I just didn't. It didn't occur to me to really lay bare my process and give it to them. So it's interesting to me that it was over a decade in the classroom before I shared that.

I feel like you have something to share, really, about essay writing, because having read your last collection and this, you distill each moment and each essay to such a point that it doesn't even take you very long to get across. Some of these excerpts are quite short, but you somehow encapsulate everything and evoke so much feeling. How do you approach an essay and, like, how can the rest of us do it better?

Well, I do love distillation processes in cooking and in writing. You know, like taking a broth and distilling it and distilling it until it's just a really clear broth. And that's how I feel about poems and essays, and I do love short form for that reason, where there's, like, just not fat. The distraction of too much waste, wasted material. And so, like, I love the poems of Ada Limon so much, and I feel like in her poems there's always an epiphany, and the poem is just leading in this very clear way towards this insight. And when I wrote really short essays when my kids were little, it was. I chose short form by accident because I was so tired and I had no time. And I thought, well, if I can remember this thought by nightfall or until nightfall and write it down, I'll be good. And it never occurred to me a book would be made of it. And it turned out the essays were then very distilled and short because they were written for the spaces I had to write them. So I guess my. My advice would be you don't have to build it out. You know, you can be really spare. I also find writing haiku a really instructive practice because you only get a certain amount of syllables, 5, 7, 5. And it just becomes a practice for all kinds of writing where you think, oh, actually, you can say it better with fewer words.

I realize you never make anything worse than by cutting.

Very rarely. And if you do, there it is. You just plop it back in.

All right, remind me. Haikus. It's been, like, about 30 years since I've written a haiku. Five, seven, five. And that's the only rule. Isn't there another rule?

I mean, if you really want to get into it, there might be rules about talk about a season or talk about a change. But no, it's really just 5, 7, 5.

Can you do one on the fly?

Oh, my gosh. Maybe. I mean, I teach this one way of writing haiku, which is where you meditate and you breathe in for five, you breathe out for seven, you breathe in for five, which is also a meditation. I learned to make the breath longer, which relaxes your nervous system. So I'll have my students meditate and then just write about what's in front of them. So if I were to write about what's in front of me, I mean, white hydrangeas are against purple flowers and a teacup. I mean, I'm too short. I'm too syllable short. If I weren't embarrassed to be doing it on time, I could maybe.

I'm really sorry. I don't know what possessed me to ask you to do that. That was not planned. I mean, none of us plans.

I like the challenge.

[Zibby Owens]

I don't know.

[Sarah Ruhl]

I mean, it's always fun watching authors write in some way, seeing the way the world works in your brain.

Yeah. So, like, ideally, with that haiku, the last couple syllables would be a little switch. Like I would be writing about the flowers and what's in front of me. And then I would have some other insight about the experience of sitting here talking that I would put into three syllables.

Timeless talks.

There you go.

There we go.

[Instacart Ad Voice]

Perfect.

[Sarah Ruhl]

Now we'll publish it and we'll be all good to go. Is there anything you're really looking forward to? I know the book's about to come out.

Well, I am looking forward to sharing it with friends and neighbors and family and students and former teachers. And I think one good thing about being a playwright and a book writer is if I'm nervous about one genre, I can tack to the other because I have this opening of Eurydice at the same time, I can't get to. I can't be a ball of nerves about either of them because I just am busy and then I'll just pay attention to the other one. But I suppose why does either have to be nerve wracking? I already wrote Eurydice 25 years ago.

So it's good to go.

It's ready. Yeah.

Well, this is good advice. Anytime anyone feels nervous about a book coming out, they can just go write a play and it'll be fine.

Switch genres.

Switch genres. Sarah, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on and thanks for being here today.

[Zibby Owens]

Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram ibbeowens and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.

[LinkedIn Ad Voice]

Want a workout that actually works? Hydro delivers a full body workout that hits 86% of your muscles in just 20 minutes. Rowing with Hydro combines strength and cardio with thousands of workouts led by Olympians in breathtaking locations. No wonder nine out of ten members are still active one year later. Try Hydro risk [e-mail] and use code row to save up to $475 off your Hydro Pro rower. That's H Y-R-O-W.com code ro ever wonder.

[Sarah Ruhl]

What your lashes are destined for? The cards have spoken. Maybelline New York Mascara does it all. Whether you crave fully fan lashes with Lash Sensational big bold volume from the Colossal, A dramatic lift with Falsies Lash lift or natural looking volume from great Lash. Your perfect Lash future awaits. Manifest your best mascara today. Shop Maybelline, New York, and discover your Lash destiny. Shop now at Walmart.

[Instacart Ad Voice]

Every idea starts with a problem. Warby Parker's was simple. Glasses are too expensive, so they set out to change that. By designing glasses in house and selling directly to customers, they're able to offer prescription eyewear that's expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Warby Parker glasses are made from premium materials like impact resistant polycarbonate and custom acetate, and they start at just $95, including prescription lenses. Get glasses made from the good stuff. Stop by a Warby Parker store near you.

[Zibby Owens]

Clips from the Totally Booked Live series are now up on Instagram @TOTALLYBOOKEDWITHZIVI. Check it out.