205. Zibby Owens with Julia Quinn: Books, Writing, and Letting Our Stories Unfold

Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series

When someone recommends a book to you that you end up loving, something special happens: you feel closer to that person somehow, understood on some unspoken level. That could be one of the reasons why Zibby Owens, a top influencer in the book publishing world, has garnered a passionate fanbase of her own as the host of the award-winning podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books™.

While Owens spends most of her time discussing other author’s books, she’s now ready to tell her own story, Bookends, which is a deeply personal memoir about her journey to finding her voice and rewriting her story — all stemming from her lifelong love of books.

Her vivacious energy, authenticity, and steadfast support of authors started in childhood, a precedent set by the profound effect books and libraries had on her own family. But after losing her closest friend on 9/11 and later becoming utterly stressed out and overwhelmed by motherhood, Zibby was forgetting what made her her. She turned to books and writing for help.

Just when things seemed particularly bleak, Zibby unexpectedly fell in love with a tennis pro turned movie producer who showed her the path to happiness: away from type A perfectionism and toward “letting things unfold organically.” What “unfolded” was a meaningful career, a great love, and finally, her voice, now heard by millions of listeners.

Owens shares her story while exploring things like relationships, love, food issues, the writing life, and finding one’s true calling. There’s something powerful about sharing the love of books, and Owens tells us just how powerful that can be.

Zibby Owens is an author, podcaster, publisher, CEO, and mother of four. Zibby founded Zibby Owens Media, a privately-held media company designed to help busy people live their best lives by connecting to books and each other. One division is Moms Don’t Have Time To, the home for Zibby’s podcasts, publications (including two anthologies), and communities. The other is Zibby Books, a publishing home for fiction and memoir, co-founded with Leigh Newman. Her award-winning podcast, Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, has been downloaded millions of times. She is a regular columnist for Good Morning America, Katie Couric Media, and Moms Don’t Have Time to Write on Medium. Her upcoming memoir, Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature, comes out July 1, 2022. She is also the author of the children’s book, Princess Charming. She lives in New York with her husband and four children.

Julia Quinn is the author of the wildly popular Bridgerton books, now a Netflix original series produced by Shondaland Media. She is a graduate of Harvard & Radcliffe Colleges and briefly attended Yale School of Medicine before deciding to pursue a full-time writing career. She is the author of nineteen consecutive New York Times bestsellers. In March 2021, all eight Bridgerton novels were on the NYT list at the same time, a record for an adult fiction author. Her novels have been translated into 41 languages, and in the United States alone, there are over 20 million copies of her books in print.

Bookends: A Memoir Of Love, Loss, And Literature University Book Store