Camille: It’s going to happen. You're going to get older. You're going to look different. You might feel a little different. Staying connected to your purpose, for me at least, that's been really meaningful, to understand why I'm here and what I'm trying to do. That keeps you away from the mirror and the obsession that's so easy. You start seeing wrinkles. Everything's not holding up the same way. It’s a rabbit hole if you're not careful.
Falguni: . I didn't want the typical love trope, two women fighting over a man. That's so done. That's a trope that I don't really like. One of the things that happened was that I know a couple of women who have chosen to have a child through surrogacy. I was speaking to them. I was fascinated by how they came to that point where they needed to have a child through a surrogate. Plus, I have a lot of family in India. It’s actually very common over there for sisters-in-law to have a child for someone who cannot.
Gretchen: what research shows, and I think it’s obvious from everyday life, is that when people feel happier, more energized, more focused, then they're actually more willing to engage in the world and in the problems of other people. It’s not like being happy and calm makes you want to drink margaritas on the beach. It makes you want to go register people to vote. People who are less happy and more stressed tend to get isolated and defensive. They're just dealing with their own problems. The idea that it’s a waste of your time to clean out your coat closet, I get it. It sounds trivial. I totally get that. Yet there is a connection where if somebody feels like their household is really what they want it to be and very calm, that would actually allow them to turn outward into the world more effectively.
Carolyn: Ashley and I as kids used to take all these pictures of each other all the time. We had these cheap cameras. My parents would develop the film every week. One night we decided to pretend to be Playboy models. We had pictures of each other topless and swinging on bars. It was proto-erotic. We were nine years old. There wasn’t exactly sexual energy. It was just exploration. We didn't know what was happening. It was girlhood.
Hillary: When I had my baby, I read a lot of books. The advice I was getting from experts was making me feel like a failure. A lot of this advice is written from a “my way or the highway” perspective. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, then I would feel like there was something wrong with me or something wrong with my kid. The thing that I discovered is the stuff that was really working for me was stuff that I had invented myself out of trial and error, out of moments of desperation, or things that friends had shared with me.
Daniel: What's interesting is that there are differences in men and women in their chronotypes. Men are more likely to be owls more than women. Even over the course of a lifetime, little kids are very strong larks, as most of your parents know. They get up early in the morning and start running around like insane nutjobs. Then around the mid-teens there's a massive move toward lateness. Again, it’s biological.
Zibby: I wanted to discuss Love Poems for Married People first for many reasons. One, because it’s so ridiculously hilarious and I loved it. Two, because Valentine’s Day is around the corner. This is such a perfect giftable item. Everybody should be giving it to their husbands and wives and everything. (Watch video here.)
Gary John Bishop: I've coached many, many, many thousands of people. It’s always shocking to them when you reveal somethin’ that they’ve concluded. Then they actually get a chance to get a real broad view of how they’ve lived their life with that. For many people it’s stuff like, “I'm not smart enough. I'm not loved. I'm never going to make it. I don't belong. I don't fit in.” Whatever your personal brand of it is, you're actually out to prove it every day.
Lindsey: I always think of that Gail Godwin quote, “The more you focus on the singular and the strange, the more you access the universal and the infinite.” Each essay actually comes at the question of -- we were like, “Write about being forty.” It’s a pretty broad prompt. I do think that some themes emerge.
Rowan: Poetry and tennis mix in all types of unexpected ways. I was minding my own business once. My dad called me. He was like, “Turn on the TV. Turn on Wimbledon.” I was like, “Matches aren’t going on.” He was like, “Turn it on.” Jon Wertheim was reciting a tennis poem that he'd written about Wimbledon on the air.
In one minute you can do things for your body like settle down your nervous system. It takes three nice, long, deep breaths to begin to settle down your nervous system. In a one-minute meditation you're definitely getting that. You can calm yourself. You can come back to center. You can respond to a situation that feels in a positive way for you. Instead of just reacting and screaming or yelling and feeling terrible afterward, you can take a minute to breathe, to come back to center and move forward in a way that feels good.
Jill: I was always the last picked. You know when they used to go, “You're the two captains,” and you each got to pick, I was always picked last. Maybe that was a good thing in hindsight because I knew that I wasn’t good at it. If it was where the coach did it and made everything equal, I might have actually thought I was good at something that I wasn’t.
Sarah: Read. Read everything. Read outside of your time too. When you're aspiring to be in the book world, there's a tendency to focus on, “What are the new books coming out? What's fashionable right now?” I love going way back. I was rereading Anaïs Nin. I love her writing. Go back. Read broadly. Read poets. My favorite prose writers are poets. It’s not fair. They get to do it all. Reading is really important.
Kathy: It’s funny because I after I finished the book, you forget a lot about how much work it is. When I go back and read the entries from when I was writing it, I felt like a failure a lot of the time. I felt like the book was failing, that I was failing, that things weren’t working out, that there are these huge plot holes that I was not going to be able to figure out. My advice would be that when you're writing your book, you're going to feel that level of failure, and that the project can't be completed, and that there's no way that this is going to be publishable.
Sarah Pekkanen: I could never write this kind of book on my own, absolutely. It takes both of our brains. We do feel like our brains are one and one equals three. It’s not just our combined brains. We achieve more. I'm a writer, not a math major. I tried to explain that formula I just came up with. Better together. It all comes down to better together.
