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Zibby Owens — author, podcaster, and founder of a media and publishing company — joins Eva and Caroline to talk divorce, reinventing your identity after years as a stay-at-home mom, and starting over at 40 through dating and remarriage. The conversation kicks off, though, with a parenting disaster: a school "puberty prep" video with hyperlinked FAQs that gave her fourth grader a full definition list he was never supposed to see. From there it goes everywhere — the slow accumulation of small decisions that ends a marriage, what it takes to rebuild a life afterward, and why Zibby's open about using weight-loss medication to quiet the "food noise" she'd carried since childhood. She also gives the first-ever preview of her upcoming memoir, Between Chapters, out September 27th.

Word of the week: reinvention. Book of the week: Between Chapters by Zibby Owens.

00:00 The school video that went horribly wrong
—:— Divorce and the small decisions that add up
—:— Rebuilding an identity after "just" a stay-at-home mom
—:— Dating and remarrying at 40
—:— Weight-loss medication and quieting food noise
—:— Between Chapters — first preview

Shownotes:

• Website: zibbyowens.com (home of her Substack "Zibby's Highlights," covering books, life, and stories)
• Podcast: Totally Booked with Zibby (formerly Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books) includes daily interviews centered around books, authors, and story creators in 30 minutes or less
• Book pre-order: Between Chapters, out September 27th — you can pre-order here -- https://zibbymedia.com/products/between-chapters
• Instagram: @zibbyowens
• Bookstore: Zibby's Bookshop — located at 1113 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, CA, with an online shop as well
• Zibby Substack: @zibbyowens
• On Being Jewish Now: https://onbeingjewishnow.substack.com/

We’re two New York City women talking candidly about the chaos of modern life, from relationships, parenting, working in and out of the home, to what it takes to stay semi-sane in a world that expects you to hold it all together and be #blessed.

We couldn’t find an honest and vulnerable conversation — so we started one! If you need a laugh, a cry, or just want to hear someone else admit their flaws and validate your crazy, you’re in the right place. Be ready to be… Unfiltered, Unafraid, and UnExpert.

Please follow, like, review, and share the podcast with your family and friends!

• Follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/micdandmedicated and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MicdMedicated/podcasts
• Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@micdandmedicated
• Check out our website: micdandmedicated.com

Surgeon General Warning Disclaimer: We are self-prescribed unexperts, so if you have any real questions or need real advice, please call your nearest doctor.

© 2025 Eva Heyman & Caroline Leventhal

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It's supposed to be refreshing. Instead, we're hitting refresh. Eva and Caroline are recording from the summer studio for the first time this season, and all anyone can talk about is camp — specifically the very particular madness of being a parent who just sent a child to sleepaway camp for the first time. Caroline is forty-eight hours in and kidsick. Eva has already mistaken another child for her daughter on the Campanion app. And somehow none of this is surprising.

They get into how camps have had to send formal written warnings to parents — please do not diagnose medical conditions from photos, please do not bribe your child to pose for the photographer, do not expect photos for the first three days — because the average camp parent has become so unhinged that the director's job is now half therapy, half crisis management, half explaining to grown adults that their kid standing alone in a photo does not mean they have no friends. They talk about the overpacking arms race, the medication spreadsheets, the Zoom therapists, the tutors, the two full-time photographers, and the charter planes — and whether any of it is actually for the kid or just anxiety management with a shopping component.

But underneath all the chaos is something real: we were raised in a world of benign neglect, and we survived. We had first kisses at camp, we changed our names for the summer, we had brothers who didn't shower for six days and developed a rash you'd only see in a third-world country, and nobody called anybody's parents. And we turned out (mostly) fine. The question is whether we're raising a generation that will.

Eva changed her name to Stephanie for an entire summer and was Lower Camper Captain. Caroline's mother wrote a letter promising caviar to celebrate her grandson’s return. And somewhere in Maine, a boy in a linen suit is having the time of his life while his mother scans 500 photos looking for his face.

Book of the week: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer — six kids at an arts camp in 1974 who decide they're destined for greatness, and the decades that follow. Everything you love and grieve about the friendships you make at camp.

We’re two New York City women talking candidly about the chaos of modern life, from relationships, parenting, working in and out of the home, to what it takes to stay semi-sane in a world that expects you to hold it all together and be #blessed.

We couldn’t find an honest and vulnerable conversation — so we started one! If you need a laugh, a cry, or just want to hear someone else admit their flaws and validate your crazy, you’re in the right place. Be ready to be… Unfiltered, Unafraid, and UnExpert.

Please follow, like, review, and share the podcast with your family and friends!

• Follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/micdandmedicated and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MicdMedicated/podcasts
• Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@micdandmedicated
• Check out our website: micdandmedicated.com

Surgeon General Warning Disclaimer: We are self-prescribed unexperts, so if you have any real questions or need real advice, please call your nearest doctor.

© 2025 Eva Heyman & Caroline Leventhal

Send us Fan Mail

The episode that started with a drug addict emptying his pockets into a tip jar at seven in the morning and ended with an explosive diarrhea metaphor — and everything in between was somehow coherent.

Eva and Caroline walk through every generation from the Greatest to Gen Alpha, and what strikes them most isn't just how each generation disappointed the one before it, but how the pendulum keeps swinging. The Greatest Generation stormed Normandy. Gen Z stormed college campuses in kaffiyehs. Caroline has been to Normandy, and it's humbling.

Also, why Gen X latchkey kids grew up to raise the most anxious generation in history, how the millennial burnout became a cautionary tale Caroline watched in real time, what happens when a moral vacuum gets filled with woke ideology instead of religion, and why the only plastic surgery philosophy that matters is the Barbra Streisand exception. They also ask Claude to define what a woman is. It goes about as well as you'd expect.

The Tyler Fish bisexual bit. The Barbie-Ken gender crisis. The "never has a generation documented so much and achieved so little" meme. And a book recommendation from Deborah Spar that every woman in her twenties should read.

Disclaimer: these are two unexpert observationists who are not anthropologists, not historians, and definitely not your doctor. They are, however, right about most of this.

We’re two New York City women talking candidly about the chaos of modern life, from relationships, parenting, working in and out of the home, to what it takes to stay semi-sane in a world that expects you to hold it all together and be #blessed.

We couldn’t find an honest and vulnerable conversation — so we started one! If you need a laugh, a cry, or just want to hear someone else admit their flaws and validate your crazy, you’re in the right place. Be ready to be… Unfiltered, Unafraid, and UnExpert.

Please follow, like, review, and share the podcast with your family and friends!

• Follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/micdandmedicated and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MicdMedicated/podcasts
• Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@micdandmedicated
• Check out our website: micdandmedicated.com

Surgeon General Warning Disclaimer: We are self-prescribed unexperts, so if you have any real questions or need real advice, please call your nearest doctor.

© 2025 Eva Heyman & Caroline Leventhal