Thus begins the first 2025 episode of “book influencer” Zibby Owens’s popular podcast. Owens reads and podcasts so you can dispense with the hard work of figuring out what’s worth your precious time. She distills, she dispenses. Owens is the daughter of Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder and CEO of investment-management giant Blackstone. According to Vulture and Business Insider, Owens is New York City’s top book influencer, which probably makes her the nation’s top book influencer.

She is a relentlessly optimistic advocate for self-improvement through reading, with her thumb on one of the most powerful demographics in the country (maybe the last cohort that buys books in serious numbers): neurotic Gen X women with significant disposable income. Owens is to helicopter moms what the neuroscientist-cum-health guru Andrew Huberman is to aging bachelors: a tonic for the spiritual ennui of the technocratic striver class.

Building on the success of her podcast and, no doubt, her own vast financial resources, Owens has created a small empire under the umbrella of Zibby Media: Zibby Books, an imprint that releases a title a month in fiction and memoir; Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica; Zibby Mag (“We celebrate the glamour of the publishing world”); Zibby Classes (which connect reading and writing to personal development); and Zibby Retreats (which sends affluent women on retreats with their favorite authors).

Owens herself is endearing and likeable. According to one literary blogger, Owens has served as a “hero in the world of book promotion” for numerous authors. And technically, that’s true: Owens talks about every single book by every single author she interviews as if it were of exactly the same quality. Everything she reads is one or several of the following: urgent, stunning, brilliant, tender, intelligent, racy or sultry, or moving. There is no discrimination, no discretion, no distinction — just an interminable chain of chatter.

Owens’s first guest of 2025 was Gabrielle Bernstein, a motivation coach and No. 1 New York Times best-seller who helps readers change their lives. Her last guest of 2024 was Kristin Chenoweth, who was talking about her picture book, What Will I Do With My Love Today? (it’s about her beloved dog). Before Chenoweth, Zibby heard from the comedian Quinta Brunson, star and creator of the school sitcom Abbott Elementary, about her recently published memoir.

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.

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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?

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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.

I, for one, eagerly await the big reveal. But it’s hard to imagine that whatever Harry suggested could be worse than what Archewell ultimately produced. Apart from a 33-minute holiday special, released in December 2020, the couple’s sole Spotify output was Archetypes, which described itself as an effort to “investigate, dissect, and subvert the labels that hold women back”. Having listened to it, I can confirm: the above is less a mission statement than a strategy akin to the one employed by high-school students looking to pad the word count. (“Webster’s dictionary defines an archetype as ‘a very typical example of a certain person or thing.’ In this essay I will…”.) Meghan appears in conversation with women who, like her, have done extremely well for themselves — the first two episodes feature Mariah Carey and Serena Williams — but who, like Meghan, can still pluck a narrative about being held back by misogyny from even the most stratospheric level of success.

The Archetypes post-mortem has included damning allegations about Meghan’s lack of involvement, including that she pawned off the actual interviewing onto a producer and then recorded herself asking the questions later. Andy Cohen, host of The Real Housewives, who appeared in the final “binary breaking” episode (so-called because, unlike previous episodes, this one had men in it), has described this as “an insane rumor”; from the perspective of a famous person, like him, it is. It’s very clear, listening to the podcast, that Meghan did indeed interview her celebrity guests. It’s equally clear, however, that these are the only guests she talked to.

The academics, journalists, or even just less-famous celebrities whose voices are included on Archetypes were apparently pre-recorded with a producer, with Meghan’s reactions spliced in afterward — sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results. “I mean, isn’t that all so interesting?” Meghan coos, after a lengthy diatribe from the episode’s featured professor about “women and femmes and minoritised people” and “normative social constructs and normative social patterns”. (If by “interesting” you mean “indecipherable”, then yes, very.) And yet, the podcast needs these voices, not only to give it the gloss of a serious exploration of its subject matter, but to counteract the substanceless quality of Meghan’s interviews with fellow celebs.

Of course, Meghan is very busy and important and not obligated to talk to anyone she doesn’t want to; of course, she’s entitled to only speak with people as famous as she is, while leaving her producers to deal with the rabble. But this is undeniably at odds with the relatable image she’s been attempting to sell since Megxit, whether it’s one-on-one with Oprah or to millions of viewers on Netflix: the image of the royal princess turned humble truth-teller. Meghan (who, lest we forget, started out as an actor) is not so much an engaged host as playing the role of one, and hence Archetypes is not so much a podcast as an incredible simulation thereof. You know that saying about a stupid person’s idea of a smart person? This is like that, except it’s a narcissist’s idea of what it would be like to be curious about other people’s lives. When news broke this week that Harry’s own favourite (albeit sadly unrealised) podcast idea was to interview Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump about their childhood trauma, was anyone surprised? At the end of the day, the Sussexes invariably circle back to the only topic either of them are interested in: themselves.

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Not that I blame them. This is, if nothing else, a solid business strategy: the relentless commitment to monetising one’s own life story is itself archetypal of the modern age, not to mention classically American. And despite the entertainment value of Bill Simmons describing the couple as “grifters”, this is not quite the right word for what Meghan is, nor for what she tried to do with her now-defunct podcast. Grifters are typically in it for the money, but the nature of the Spotify contract more or less meant that she could have farted into a microphone for an hour and still get paid, but Archteypes is what she made. She chose the podcast medium; she chose this particular format. Perhaps it is worth asking why.

Is it just that this type of vaguely woke social commentary is cheap and easy and ubiquitous, the lowest-hanging fruit on today’s cultural landscape? Or is it that in our attention economy, wading into the shallowest point in the culture wars — where the activism of the keyboard warrior meets the relatability of the lifestyle influencer — is one of the few ways left to make a name for yourself that doesn’t involve reality television?

Other creators — almost always women — have tried in various ways and forms to leverage this approach to content. Sometimes it works, at least for a while: remember when Hannah Gadsby’s audience-scolding anti-comedy special Nanette was the most celebrated cultural product of 2018? Sometimes, as with Chelsea Handler’s Netflix documentary about reckoning with her white privilege, it’s an unmitigated disaster: the Rotten Tomatoes rating for Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea is a dismal 11%. It helps when the creator, or host, is willing to make it personal, and on this front, there are glimpses within Archetypes of what could have been a successful product — one that interwove Meghan’s own struggles with its broader feminist theme.

The problem, in the end, is not Meghan’s story. It’s Meghan herself.

A hallmark of the best podcasts, and what is sorely missing from Archetypes, is a sense of intimacy. The content of an enjoyable podcast is often secondary to the connection you feel with it, whether it’s a sense of sitting in on a lecture from an expert who is passionately obsessed with his subject — as in My Favorite Murder or The Rest Is History — or of overhearing a conversation between interesting people who are also interested in each other — as in Blocked and Reported, or The Unspeakable.

To be clear, Archetypes failed not for lack of trying: Meghan dutifully mimics the format of other, better podcasts, leaning into the microphone and addressing the audience in a direct, confessional tone. But these moments are so obviously scripted — in the sense that a practised actress with a trained voice is reading lines off a page — that they ring hollow. The overall impression is of somebody who knows all the words, but can’t hear the music; a person more concerned with image than connection; a woman who wants to present herself as relatable while speaking only to people as famous as she is. It’s ironic, for someone who fled the UK to escape the constraints of a highly managed life. She seems more boxed-in than ever.

There’s an interesting moment, in the final episode, when Meghan laughingly declines Andy Cohen’s offer to develop a Real Housewives-style series just for her. It’s interesting because, in some ways, this does actually seem to be what she wants: to be the simultaneous hero, author and star of her own life story, reclaiming her narrative in the manner of a Kim Kardashian or a Paris Hilton (also a guest on Archetypes). But to do this, and to make it entertaining, would require ceding control of her image — and it would require being unscripted, sloppy and real in public in a way that she’s clearly uncomfortable with. The Real Housewives do not care what you think of them. The Sussexes clearly do. Harry is currently fighting three lawsuits with British newspapers.

It’s no surprise that Meghan was drawn to the idea of podcasting, the dream of a conversation over which she has total control. But for Archetypes to work, its host would have had to recognise that the point of interviewing other people is to tell their stories, not to use them as a vehicle for telling, and retelling, your own. But even Meghan’s dialogues with celebrity guests have a funny way of circling back to become all about Meghan herself — her Cinderella story, her identity struggles and her yearning to be affirmed and accepted, first by Hollywood and then by the Royals.

And here, though evidently without meaning to, the podcast does manage to fulfil its promise on one front: if you were looking for a 12-hour portrait of the archetypal narcissist, you could not do better than this.