The vapid world of America’s top book influencer Zibby Owens offers a tonic for the ennui of upscale strivers

Owens has also interviewed Cathy Heller, the life coach, inspirational speaker, and author of Tools for Creating Prosperity and Ease; award-winning author Chelsea Bieker on Madwoman, a brilliant, urgent, heart-smashing, darkly comic, and unforgettable novel; Sarai Johnson on Grown Woman, a stunning, tender novel about how four generations of complex black women attempt to heal old wounds and redefine happiness for themselves as they raise a new generation together. And so on and so forth.

Interrupting the pattern, Bernard-Henri Lévy appeared to talk about his recent book, Israel Alone (the Jewish state is one of her pet issues). Others of the very few men who have appeared on the pod include celebrities like Matthew McConaughey, Lance Bass, and Frozen’s Josh Gad, who was invited to talk about his picture book.

In short, Totally Booked With Zibby is a retail outlet for mass-market celebrity vanity publishing and third-rate MFA fiction and young-adult books. Except Owens has the amazing gift of sounding as if she were talking about something else, something higher.

Owens is a self-described overachiever. With grit and sheer bloody hard work, the mother-of-four runs a business empire and records several podcast episodes a week. How does she do it? You see, it’s the love of reading that helps her get through difficult times. Or something like that: her origin story is self-blind and incoherent. More broadly, what Owens calls the Zibbyverse — her bookstore, her podcasts, her own books, classes, and retreats — is symptomatic of what publishing (and reading) have become: a way for a narrow but influential sliver of the population to dress up their unchallenging lives to seem interesting; to spotlight narratives that make the reality of being a rich person who still can’t cope seem nobler than it is.

This is the unconscious theme of Owens’s own books. Whether fiction or memoir, Zibby or her stand-in finds herself on the verge of a breakdown when faced with the bare facts of life — dying grandparents, growing children, and the like — before turning it around thanks to a new love or a new guru. In her 9/11 memoir, Bookends, the author becomes “depressed” after losing her close friend in the attacks and later becomes “utterly stressed out and overwhelmed by motherhood” and needs to find out “what has made her herself.” The dead friend doesn’t feel like the principal subject of mourning so much as Owens’s loss of self-esteem. Thankfully, she turns to her love of reading and writing for help when things seem particularly bleak. Then, in case you were worried, Owens finds love and “organic happiness” with a tennis pro-turned-movie producer. Read, love, self-affirm.

Owens’s Tolstoyan theme is: I have everything I want; my friends have everything they could possibly want; why am I still anxious? She, and her legions of listeners and readers, ask the same question and somehow get perilously close to the thematic of actual literature — suffering, the cycle of life, the stochastic uncertainty of all mortal creatures — without ever arriving. Instead, for someone of Owens’s cast of mind, there can only be a turn away from the reality principle toward a hot, harmless husband, a new life coach, meditation, retreats, and blithe solutions — and into books that celebrate this belief system.

Her podcast promotes the same ends. It isn’t that Totally Booked dilutes literary standards — because there is no such thing as a standard in Owens’s world. In listening to a large selection of Owens’s 2,000 or so podcasts (they’re all blissfully short), I came across no indiscretion, few hints of spite or nervous anxiety — no criticism, no conversation. Every interview is a persistent study of equanimity: rich and successful people talking to rich and successful people.

What do you do with this relentless, Blackstone-funded exploration of mental hot air? What do you do with the countervailing impulse to beat yourself over the head with a two-by-four until you don’t remember a thing about what you’ve listened to?

I don’t know. But I do know that she represents the future. Her own books garner thousands of reviews on Amazon, a decent proxy measure for big sales. Her podcast has a massive following. And her influence is increasingly felt in the wider online literary space dominated by BookTok — where influencers like Ayman Chaudhary and Pauline push titles based on their supposed emotional impact and lifestyle fit. The theme of most of these BookToks — which derive their tone from Owens’s podcasts the same way early podcasts derived their tone from Ira Glass — is “books for people who don’t read”: books for people who don’t have the attention span or time to read (and they don’t have the time, by the way, because they don’t have the attention span).

Zibby is a representative figure in a cultural crisis: The Zibbyverse is a place where there are no books, really, only book-commodities to be sold. And nobody knows, or can tell, the difference.

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Matthew Gasda is a writer, director, and critic. He is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research. He has three books forthcoming in 2025.

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