This week, former television screenwriter Patty Lin discusses her new memoir End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood. She is joined by author, podcaster, and publisher Zibby Owens. This conversation originally took place October 5, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.
About End Credits:
The only script you can really write in life is your own.
What if achieving your professional dreams comes at too high a personal cost? That’s what screenwriter Patty Lin started to ask herself after years in the cutthroat TV industry. One minute she was a tourist, begging her way into the audience of Late Night with David Letterman. Just a few years later, she was an insider who—through relentless hard work and sacrifice—had earned a seat in the writers’ rooms of the hottest TV shows of all time. While writing for Friends, Freaks and Geeks, Desperate Housewives and Breaking Bad, Patty steeled herself against the indignities of a chaotic, abusive, male-dominated work culture, not just as one of the few women in the room, but as the only Asian person.
This funny, fresh, eye-opening, and inside-Hollywood story will resonate with anyone trying to please their parents, maintain a love life, and find their way in the world—and will inspire countless dreamers to listen to their inner voices and know when it’s time to get out.
PATTY LIN is an author and former TV writer/producer whose credits include Freaks and Geeks, Friends, Desperate Housewives, and Breaking Bad. She has also written pilots for Fox, CBS, and Nickelodeon. Her Breaking Bad episode, “Gray Matter,” was nominated for a Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Script of 2008 in the Episodic Drama category. She retired from television to save her sanity and began writing a book as an answer to the question, “Why would you quit such a cool job?” Her memoir, End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood, is out now. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.
ZIBBY OWENS is an author, publisher, award-winning podcaster, CEO, bookstore owner, and mom of four. Creator and host of the award-winning, daily podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, Zibby is also the founder and CEO of Zibby Media, dubbed “the Zibby-verse” by the L.A. Times. It includes a publishing house, magazine, podcast network, retreats, classes, Zibby’s Book Club, and Zibby’s Bookshop, an independent bookstore in Santa Monica, CA. A regular contributor to Good Morning America and other outlets, she loves recommending books as “NYC’s Most Powerful Book-fluencer” (Vulture). A writer herself, Zibby has published a memoir, Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature, a children’s book Princess Charming, two anthologies, and a zillion essays. Her debut novel Blank comes out in March 2024. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School, Zibby currently lives in New York with her husband, Kyle Owens of Morning Moon Productions, and four children ages 8 to 15.