Dena: My book is a memoir of adventure, motherhood, and love woven into a spiritual journey… In 2014 I was a mother who pretty much had it all. I was a busy home birth midwife with a very successful practice. I had two amazing daughters who were thriving. I had a marriage, a house, a yard, a dog, a cat, etc. From the looks of it, it looks like everything was swell. Inside, something deep inside me was eroding. I felt hollow.
Neil: After reviewing over three hundred positive psychology studies to write the book, I can now tell you without a shadow of a doubt that model is fundamentally reversed. Actually, we shouldn't tell our kids, “Great work leads to big success, leads to being happy.” We should say, “Being happy leads to doing great work, which leads to the big success.”
Julie: Time to Parent is basically a manual -- I think it’s the manual that's been missing from society for generations -- of how a parent can think about how to organize their time to cover everything that really needs to be done. We all want to be there for our kids but not lose ourselves in the process. We want to spend time in our relationships but also have time for ourselves. Parenting is the biggest, most challenging, most noble job in the world. There's never been a manual of how to manage your time.
Jennifer: Out of Place is the story of a twelve-year-old girl named Cove who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, which is an island off of Cape Code, with her mom. She's never left the island once in her entire life, which was fine with her until the day that her best friend Nina comes and tells Cove that Nina’s going to be moving to New York City with Nina’s two fathers. In that moment, Cove’s entire life feels like it’s falling apart. She has no idea how to make it better. It’s a story about friendship and mistakes and big acts of courage.
Watch a video from this interview here!
Nora: Still Kickin is a retail-based nonprofit, which means we primarily are a retail company. We sell these shirts and many other items. Most of them say Still Kickin, which is a shirt that you're holding, this kelly green shirt with weathered-looking letters that's a tracing of Aaron’s favorite shirt. He was wearing that the day that he had a seizure, which is the day that we found out that he had a brain tumor. We thought that was so funny. I remember walking into the ER. He was like, “Hey,” pointing at his shirt. I'm like, “What a shirt. What a great shirt. Let's bust you out of here.” It turns out it was really serious, what was happening to him. We didn't know. We were so oblivious. This was Aaron’s idea. All of it was Aaron’s idea. Almost right away when he found out he had cancer, he was like, “I want to recreate this shirt. I want to sell it. I want to give the money to people who really need it.”
Sheri: I had a front-row seat to all the most prolific wisdom-keepers of our time. I had the ride of my life. I found myself at fifty-six realizing that, with a rough, rocky start in my twenties, but by thirty-five I had finally manifested the beginnings of the career of my dreams. At fifty-six, the reckoning I had to do was that I hadn’t manifested the life of my dreams. One area, being someone else's something, someone's mother, someone's employee, someone's spouse or partner, that does not a full life make. I had to have a real moment with myself. I had to say, listen, I deserve to live the life of my dreams. Nobody knows more about making dreams come true than me.
Amanda Stern is the author of Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life, a memoir about her undiagnosed childhood panic disorder that takes place in New York City in the Etan Patz era. The subtitle, Dispatches from an Anxious Life, is only a small piece of the puzzle of how the course of Amanda's life was shaped. Listen and learn more about her compelling story.
Biz: I really felt like a lot of the books I read with my first child made me feel not necessarily comforted or confident about what was about to happen. A lot of books also made me feel like if you were nervous about it, then you were probably doing it wrong. I felt like I kept running into all these situations that were never spoken about in a book. Theresa, who cohosts the show with me, she and I would come in and start talking about something. More than once we'd say, “Why is this not in a book?” We wanted to make a book that reminded you no matter how you were doing it, if it was working, good job. [laughs] You’ve done it. You've discovered how to parent. That's basically why we made the book.
Jennifer: Mrs. Everything is the story of two Jewish American sisters from the 1940s all the way through the present and slightly beyond into a lightly fictionalized future where there's a woman president. It’s the story of these two women. There's the rebel and the good girl, who sort of switch places halfway through the book. Through their eyes and through their experiences, it’s the story of women in America. That's what I was setting out to do. I wanted to tell a sister story and a woman story and an American story, a story about America. That's what I hope I did. I hope it’s a great, big, fun juicy beach read too.
Katie: Running Home, it’s about a lot of things. Predominantly, it’s about my relationship with running and with my father and how the two converged after he died in 2010. I was beset by this really crippling anxiety. I’d just had a new baby. I had a toddler and an infant. After he died, I became convinced that I was dying too. I didn't realize at the time that that's not uncommon. It’s not an uncommon way to grieve. It was terrifying to me. The book is really a story about how I grieve my father and how running healed me and the wilderness healed me.
Evangeline Lilly: I was fourteen years old when I came up with The Squickerwonkers original poem. I spent my time reading and journaling and writing. I was really into Dr. Seuss. I thought it was cool that he had this irreverent use of language. He would just makeup whatever word he wanted to. was like, I want to make up my own words. I started writing a list of imaginary words. Most of them were ridiculous and not very good. One of them on the list felt good on my tongue and really stuck. It was the word squickerwonker. At the time, I was like, what's a squickerwonker? What is that? What would that mean? What would that translate to?
Lydia: The Most Powerful Woman in the Room is You is a story about my twenty-year career at Christie’s Auction House. It’s more than a story. It’s really a lot of stories about life lessons learned through being on stage for almost sixteen years as an auctioneer. As I realized as I was writing this book, a lot of the stories really apply to things that I've learned over the course of my career. They were things that I wish someone had told me very early on in my career.
Julie: It’s the story of money, the story of wealth. In some ways, wealth has changed. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was the first guest. He was one of the country’s wealthiest men. There were more than 1,600 chandeliers at The Plaza and two men whose only job was to dust the chandeliers. The opulence was just amazing. Now we
Catherine: I've always loved food. I grew up with grandparents who were into farming and really loving the taste of real food. Total transparency, I lived with a lot of girls who were going through a lot of different things. There were definitely more challenging times. For me, I always loved food. Even as I've gotten older, that love has deepened, especially having children and watching them get excited about food. Food is the one thing that we all have in common. For parents, you have to feed your children twenty-one meals a week plus snacks. It’s something that's never going to go away.
Lisa: The Unbreakables is about a woman from Chicago whose husband and best friends end up betraying her. She loses everything in one fell swoop. She decides to go to Paris first to meet her daughter who’s also dealing with her own heartbreak. Once she gets out there, she makes a split decision to go to the South of France to really heal from her wounds. There she reclaims her sensuality and also her abilities as a sculptor which she pretty much let go of. The book came about, it was July 2015. I don't know if you remember this, the Ashley Madison hack.
Nicola: That was the beginning of it, this idea of the locals and this loyalty. When my son was young on the weekends, you know how sometimes they don't nap and you put them in the car and you just drive around? I would drive around Montauk for so long up by the lighthouse, and down to the fishing village, and down by the beach, and up by the Montauk Manor. I started piecing something together in my mind.
Wendy: The other dynamic at play is that there's almost this inner child inside of you that still wants to fix it, that wants to find a way to make that parent stop being abusive. Because you were never able to do it as a child, when you find someone as a grown-up who gives you the chance to fix them and finally be powerful enough to solve that problem, it’s almost euphoric.
I found myself applying my parent’s definition of success, so university, great job, marriage, house, a lot of assets. The way that we’re sold stuff as becoming milestones for who we are and how we’re defined and how we’re perceived, that was my common definition of success. Then I realized that success and happiness and even creativity -- that's one of the reasons why creativity’s a pillar of this book -- were actually more intertwined. Success and happiness were linked in that happiness wasn’t tied to “When I have this,” or “When I do this,” or “When this happens, then I’ll be happy,” which is what -- I call it the happiness trap -- a lot of us can get caught up in.
Darcy: My advice would be find a gripping question. You really live with a book for the time that you're working on it. I was really immersed in this stuff. To maintain your enthusiasm and your ability to push ahead, you really have to be fascinated with what you're doing and what you're learning about. That's my advice.
