For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

She's become a leading voice in the culinary world and now hosts the very cooking competition show that launched her career. Kristen Kish was eliminated from Bravo's Top Chef Season 10, then fought her way back through Last Chance Kitchen to win it all. Since her 2013 victory, she's opened her Austin restaurant Arlo Grey (with another on the way in NYC), hosted Kitchens at the End of the World and Iron Chef, and stepped into the host role at Top Chef: the student becoming the teacher. In her new book, Accidentally on Purpose

In this episode, we cover:

• Pivoting, embracing change, and building a truthful, authentic life

• Why the road to success is more winding than it seems

• Recognizing when it's time to make a change or step forward

• Battling imposter syndrome, burnout, and the voice of doubt

• How life's best opportunities often come from embracing the unexpected

Thought-provoking Quotes:

"I figured out that I don't need to be anything other than myself. " – Kristen Kish

"For a long time, I didn't know myself at all. I was too scared. I was scared of knowing where I came from because what if I found out something absolutely horrible? " – Kristen Kish

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Top Chef - https://www.bravotv.com/top-chef

Bravo - https://www.bravotv.com/

Accidentally on Purpose by Kristen Kish - https://amzn.to/4iJQy04

Arlo Grey - https://www.thelinehotel.com/austin/restaurants-bars/arlo-grey/

Stef Ferrari, food writer - https://www.theycallmeferrari.com/ferrari-here

Charlotte Rose Coleman, fashion stylist - https://www.charlotterosecoleman.com/

Guest's Links:

Website - https://www.thelinehotel.com/magazine/meet-atx-family-kristen-kish/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kristenlkish/

Twitter - https://x.com/kristenlkish

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/KristenLKish/

TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@kristenlkish

Connect with Jen!

Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker

Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker

The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.

With the midterms days away, Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers of Pantsuit Politics break down what is really on the ballot, how to make sure your vote counts, and how to survive the Thanksgiving table when your family lands all over the map. This isn't an episode about how to vote. It's about how to be a person right now.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

"It doesn't cost me anything to listen to people." - Beth Silvers

"Your vote counts more in the midterm elections because fewer people vote." - Beth Silvers

"If you ask people to silence that, you lose the opportunity to connect." - Sarah Stewart Holland

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Sarah and Beth's books - https://bookshop.org/lists/pantsuit-politics-book-club

Up First from NPR - https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510318/up-first

The Daily - https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-daily

The Ezra Klein Show - https://www.nytimes.com/column/ezra-klein-podcast

For the Love with Priya Parker - https://jenhatmaker.com/podcast

Meander Bookshop - https://bookshop.org/shop/meanderbookshop

Also mentioned: Start Here (ABC News), The New York Times, Axios, News Items, and Mary Higgins Clark's Where Are the Children?

Guest's Links:

Website - https://www.pantsuitpoliticsshow.com

Substack - https://pantsuitpolitics.substack.com

Instagram - https://instagram.com/pantsuitpolitics

Sarah's Substack - https://stewartholland.substack.com

Connect with Jen!

Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker

Jen's Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen's Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker

Jen's YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker

The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.

Kim Hill had the kind of run most artists only dream of: number one songs on Christian radio, arena stages, and the biggest women’s conferences in the country. Paulette Wooten was a songwriter, musician, and ordained music minister helping build the modern worship movement from the inside. Then they met at a worship school, played a 45-minute set together as near strangers, and a year and a half of friendship on the road quietly turned into love. In a world where that was not allowed, they chose each other anyway.

As part of our Courage to Change: Do It Scared series, Jen sits down with Kim and Paulette, now the Americana duo Wooten Hill, to talk about the long, slow road out of the world that built them. They share the disastrous wedding venue chapter (Billy and the squirrels!), what changed when they stopped hiding from themselves, why they chose not to blow up their lives, and how they’ve kept love at the center even when it wasn’t returned. Plus, the summer they waited on a grandbaby in Nashville and ended up making the truest record of their lives. Their first full-length album, How Did We Get Here, is out now.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• “If I am gay, I’m gonna be gay and have a real relationship. I’m not gonna have some no man’s land.” - Kim Hill
• “I feel like someone plugged me into an amp. I feel like I sing better.” - Kim Hill
• “This is the truest art I have ever put out.” - Paulette Wooten
• “You’re not too late, you’re not broken. You are enough.” - Kim Hill
• “I find that kind of faith the most faithful kind of faith.” - Jen Hatmaker
• “Your story has made you softer, not harder.” - Jen Hatmaker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• How Did We Get Here by Wooten Hill (streaming, CD, and vinyl) - https://wootenhill.com
• The Road to Wooten Hill podcast (launching October 30) - https://wootenhill.com
• Wooten Hill on Apple Music - https://music.apple.com/us/artist/wooten-hill/1539129507
• The Treehouse + Co - https://www.thetreehouseandco.com
• “How He Loves” by John Mark McMillan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_He_Loves
• Leave us a voicemail - http://jenhatmaker.com/Podcast

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://wootenhill.com

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/wootenhillband/

Apple Music - https://music.apple.com/us/artist/wooten-hill/1539129507

Connect with Jen!

Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker

Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker

Jen’s YouTu ...

Description:

Twelve years ago, Kim and Penn Holderness made a Christmas card video in their pajamas, it broke the internet, and they both walked away from careers in TV news to make videos full time. With two little kids, two months of savings, and no health insurance. In 2013, when that was not even a job. They have been reinventing ever since, and they are right in the middle of it again.

We recorded this conversation in a very tender week. They had just moved their oldest back to college, and two days earlier, Penn's mother passed away after nine years in skilled nursing with Alzheimer's. They showed up anyway, and I am so grateful they did. We talk about the leap of 2013 and the creators who told them every new baby was worth a million followers, what they owe their kids for putting them on the internet before any of us knew better, why every couple should have a podcast even if you never post it, and why they took their family name off their show to start Laugh Lines, all about aging better together.

Then Penn tells me about the Alzheimer's prevention trial he joined, what he learned about his own genes, the changes he is making now, and how his mom's brain went to a research study at Duke within an hour of her death so it could help someone else. I was not prepared, and I cried. It is one of the most hopeful things I have ever heard about this disease. This is part of our October series, Courage to Change: Do It Scared. Still to come this month: Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers of Pantsuit Politics.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• There is no such thing as a podcast emergency.
• Don't get good at something you don't really want to do.
• There's a moment where you can't not do that thing.
• Every couple needs a podcast, even if you don't post it.
• When you can hear how you talk to your partner, it is so eye opening.
• We know what a gift it is to age. I don't want to be 20. I don't want to be 40. I'm really thrilled with the age I am.
• You start saying goodbye to someone the minute they go into skilled nursing.
• We knew, okay, we're helping. Her brain's going to help.
• We all do what we do. No one's right or wrong.
• Everybody behind us will do a better version of it. But it's kind of fun being on the front edge with y'all.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Laugh Lines with Kim & Penn Holderness - https://shows.acast.com/holdermess-the-holderness-family-podcast
• RetainYourBrain, Dr. Richard Isaacson's free brain health assessment platform - https://retainyourbrain.com
• AlzLabs, lower-cost at-home brain health blood testing from Dr. Richard Isaacson - https://alzlabs.org
• ADHD Is Awesome: A Guide to (Mostly) Thriving with ADHD by Penn and Kim Holderness - [LINK TBD]
• Everybody Fights: So Why Not Get Better at It? by Penn and Kim Holderness - [LINK TBD]
• Awake: A Memoir by Jen Hatmaker - https://bookshop.org/p/books/untitled-memoir-jen-hatmaker/22287565
•

Description:

Jenna Kutcher was a few years into a corporate career at Target when her boss slid a five-year plan across the desk. A promotion, more money, more responsibility, all mapped out by somebody else, and every step of it was something she did not want. She did not know yet what she wanted instead, but she knew exactly what she no longer wanted. So she bought a camera off Craigslist for $300.

We’re in the middle of our Courage to Change: Do It Scared series, and I’m bringing back this conversation from January 2023, when it opened our For the Love of What If series. Jenna walks us through how that camera became a photography business, then the Goal Digger podcast, then the New York Times bestseller How Are You, Really?, and why she built the next thing quietly on the side while the paycheck was still coming in. We talk about what happens when more money doesn’t buy the life you’re longing for, why time became her real currency, and the question she asked me that I could not shake: not how does it look, but how does it feel.

Stay for the end, because something happened after this tape. On the last day of 2025, after 968 episodes, Jenna paused Goal Digger while it was still going strong. She meant every word she said here.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• Her question is yours now. Not how does it look. How does it feel. (Jen Hatmaker)
• That is what courage to change actually looks like most of the time. Not a blaze of glory. Not a resignation letter thrown in the air. (Jen Hatmaker)
• A woman asking an honest question, hearing an answer she did not love, and then doing something about it anyway. (Jen Hatmaker)
• You are not in prison. You made that rule up, and you are allowed to change it. (Jen Hatmaker)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• How Are You, Really? by Jenna Kutcher - https://bookshop.org/book/9780063221949
• A New Chapter for Goal Digger - https://jennakutcherblog.com/a-new-chapter-for-goal-digger: Jenna on why she paused the podcast
• Leave us a voicemail - https://jenhatmaker.com/podcast: Tell us about the safe thing you walked away from, or the one you’re thinking about leaving.

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://jennakutcher.com

Instagram - https://instagram.com/jennakutcher

Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenna.kutcher

Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s Twitter -

Description:

Barbara Kingsolver got the offer on her first novel the same day her first daughter was born. She came home from the hospital to a blinking answering machine, and the book came out the week that same baby learned to walk. Almost forty years later, she has a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Foundation’s medal for a lifetime of work, and a recovery house for women in Lee County, Virginia, built with her Demon Copperhead royalties. She has been one of my literary heroes and true life mentors for decades, and I still cannot believe I got to talk with her.

We talk about what publishing looked like in 1988 versus now, why a slow-building career was a gift to a young mom, and the stubborn hand condition we both live with that ended her public book signings. She walks us through October on her farm in southern Appalachia, where the tomatoes are canned, the peppers are roasted, and she is the one who gets the call when a lamb gets stuck. And she makes the case that rural people are close to half of this country but almost none of what we see on screen, which is why she writes books that work as mirrors for her neighbors and windows for everybody else.

Then we get into Partita, her new novel. Livia was a piano prodigy from east Tennessee who became a small-town piano teacher instead. In her fifties, the first love who derailed her calls and asks to see her, and she has seven days to decide. Barbara built the whole book like a Bach partita, with movements named for old dances and a listening list in the front. She tells us how a small-town girl fell for classical music on her living room floor, why nobody in America wants to talk about class, why revision is where art lives, and about the practice room scene her pianist friend had been waiting her whole life to read.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• I became a novelist and a mom the same day. (Barbara Kingsolver)
• I need my hands to write books. If you let me keep them, I will write you more books. (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Rural people are close to half of the population of this country, but we are just about zero percent of what you see on television, in the movies, or in the news. (Barbara Kingsolver)
• I want to write these books that are both mirrors for the people who need to see themselves and windows for the people who don’t know. (Barbara Kingsolver)
• When you’re in the flow state making something beautiful, that is love too. It’s another kind of love. (Barbara Kingsolver)
• I love revision. I feel like revision is where art really lives. (Barbara Kingsolver)
• When I’ve finished a book to my absolute satisfaction and send it out into the world, the work of it is only half done. (Barbara Kingsolver)
• When I closed Demon Copperhead, I remember thinking, I have just read a masterpiece. (Jen Hatmaker)
• Some people ask me, how can you be optimistic in these times? And I say, look who I’m dealing with. (Barbara Kingsolver)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Partita by Barbara Kingsolver - https://bookshop.org/book/9780063577541: Barbara asks you to buy it from your local independent bookstore. The listening list is in the front of the book.
• Labor: One Woman’s Work by Dr. Mary Fariba Afsari - https://bookshop.org/book/9781668015407
• Higher Ground Women’s Recovery Residence in Pennington Gap, Virginia, founded with Demon Copperhead royalties
• Barbara’s earlier books we talk about: Demon Copperhead, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal, Veg ...

Description:

This episode is sponsored by Function.

October is Menopause Awareness Month, and every time we talk about midlife bodies on this show, what you write back to me isn’t really about hot flashes. It’s about being dismissed. Walking into an appointment, saying something feels different, and being told it’s normal. Dr. Tiffany Lester, a board certified integrative medicine physician and the Women’s Health Medical Director at Function, has built her career on refusing that answer.

We get into the wellness trend she went all in on and walked away from (and why so much of the research behind it was built around men), the moment her own lab results told her perimenopause had arrived, and what a standard annual physical tends to miss. She explains why markers like ApoB and fasting insulin matter so much in our forties and fifties, whether knowing this much about your body makes you healthier or just more anxious, and where the line sits between owning your health data and needing a doctor across the table. I share what happened when I brought my own results from Function to a new doctor, and we talk about who gets left out of conversations like this one and why health equity is so personal to her.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• As Dr. Stacy Sims likes to say, we’re not little men. We are separate. And that’s okay, it’s not a bad thing. (Dr. Tiffany Lester)
• I knew intellectually that this transition was coming. But I still wasn’t ready for it somehow. (Dr. Tiffany Lester)
• We have in some ways been conditioned to accept the bare minimum. (Dr. Tiffany Lester)
• It’s much harder to dismiss a woman when she’s there with black and white data. (Dr. Tiffany Lester)
• We do not have to just grin and bear it. (Jen Hatmaker)
• A lot of people don’t even know what they don’t know. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. (Dr. Tiffany Lester)
• It starts with knowing your numbers and not guessing, because you can’t manage what you don’t measure. (Dr. Tiffany Lester)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Function - https://functionhealth.com/FortheLove: Join and use code FORTHELOVE25 for a $25 credit
• The work of Dr. Stacy Sims on women’s physiology

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://drtiffanylester.com

Instagram - https://instagram.com/drtiffanylester

Substack - https://drtiffanylester.substack.com

People tell me I’m brave all the time. About the divorce, about the book, about rebuilding my life while everybody watched. And every single time, I feel a low-grade panic, because I know what it actually looked like from the inside: sitting in my parked car for 45 minutes because I could not make myself walk in, typing one sentence and deleting it 15 times, sobbing in the parking lot outside my brand new financial planner’s office. I was not brave. I was scared, and I moved forward anyway.

We’re kicking off our October series, Courage to Change: Do It Scared, and today it’s just me and you. I’m handing you a much smaller word than “ready.” Ready is a feeling, and you can’t schedule a feeling. Willing is a decision, and you can make it on a Tuesday while you unload the dishwasher. We’ll sort fear into two piles: the warning you should heed and the fee you simply have to pay. And I’m going deeper on two stories: the months I waited too long to face what was happening in my marriage, and the years I coddled my fear before publicly changing my theology on LGBTQ inclusion in 2016. That was the best fee I ever paid.

Coming up this month: Barbara Kingsolver, Kim and Penn Holderness, and Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers of Pantsuit Politics. You’re not going to feel ready. But you can get willing, and willing is available to you in the next ten minutes.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• In my life, ready never came. Not one time in my entire life did readiness already exist before the hard thing.
• Ready is something like a feeling, and you can’t schedule a feeling. Willing is a decision. Willing is a choice.
• Fear is not measuring whether or not you should. It is measuring whether or not this thing matters.
• There is fear that is a warning that should be heeded. And then there is fear that is just a fee. It’s just a cost that you’re going to have to pay.
• The first one has a real object, but the second one has an audience.
• The fear was a fee. It was not a warning. And I did have to pay it. It’s the best fee I ever paid.
• I may not be ready, but I am willing.
• You’ve done harder things than this. And you did those things scared too.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Awake: A Memoir by Jen Hatmaker - https://bookshop.org/p/books/untitled-memoir-jen-hatmaker/22287565
• Join the AWAKE Collective on Letters from the Middle - https://jenhatmaker.substack.com
• October AWAKE Collective Reflection Guide, with this month’s writing prompt: “The Thing I Would Do If I Were Not Scared”
• Leave us a voicemail - https://jenhatmaker.com/podcast: Tell me the change you’re scared of, or the one you already did scared.

Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker

This month’s Jen Hatmaker Book Club pick is The God of the Woods, and Liz Moore joins Jen straight off the set of the Netflix series she is co-showrunning in the Adirondacks. Liz talks about the family cabin with no TV and no internet where she read every old book in the house, her early years singing in New York clubs while working weekends at a guitar store, and the practical family that taught her to keep a day job. She explains the difference between a TV writer and a showrunner, why she loves casting local square dancers and first-time actors, and how the cast is deepening the characters she wrote. Plus how she starts a four-year novel knowing only the people, the place, and the first problem, her worries about what AI will do to developing brains, the title her publisher vetoed, the hand-drawn map at the front of the book, and what she is reading right now.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• You have to know people, you have to know place, and you have to know problem.
• You just sort of whittle down what feels right emotionally until you get to a place that feels right emotionally, and then that’s the end of the book.
• You have to experience frustration in learning and then get past it in order for the brain to grow.
• I want the title to have multiple meanings, and for those multiple meanings to become apparent as the reader moves on.
• I have too many jobs that I love, which is a huge blessing in life.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
• Long Bright River by Liz Moore (and the Peacock series)
• The Words of Every Song by Liz Moore
• Raven Black by Ann Cleeves
• London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Get Down by Asali Solomon
• Sing Sing (film)
• Louis L’Amour westerns
• Temple University MFA in Creative Writing

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://www.lizmoore.net/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/lizmoorebooks/

Twitter - https://x.com/LizMooreBooks

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/lizmoorewriter/

Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker

The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.&nbs ...

Description:

Julianna Glasse was a Christian pop singer playing megachurches and arenas, married to a Major League Baseball player, and in January 2017 she sang at Donald Trump's National Prayer Breakfast weekend after voting the way her husband voted. Two years later she walked away from her faith, her marriage, and nearly everything she had built. Jen and Julianna trace the unraveling: the question she asked while holding her newborn daughter, the friend who handed her Plato's allegory of the cave, the "Christian drinkers" who changed clothes in the car after her concerts, and the day her then husband threw her books on the floor and said the sentence that became her title. They talk about love versus fear as a compass, why storytelling reaches people that shouting never will, and what Julianna would say to evangelical women quietly questioning how they vote. Now an Oxford alum, Julianna leads the This Is What Happens When Women Read foundation, which partners with Oxford's Saïd Business School to fund MBAs for women leaving high-control religions and cultures and has reached more than four million people in nearly 67 countries. Her memoir, This Is What Happens When Women Read, releases October 13.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• “You cannot know that which you do not know, but once you do know, it becomes your responsibility.” – Julianna Glasse
• “Does it feel like love or does it feel like fear?” – Julianna Glasse
• “This is actually what happens when women read. We notice the systems of oppression that we are in.” – Julianna Glasse
• “Bare your teeth at the institution, at the dogma, at the policy. Do not bare your teeth to the human.” – Julianna Glasse
• “It's just the teeniest taste of hope and freedom, and that is the most powerful taste you will ever have.” – Jen Hatmaker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• This Is What Happens When Women Read by Julianna Glasse (pre-order)
• Oxford Saïd Business School
• Maria Popova, The Marginalian
• Plato's Allegory of the Cave (The Republic)
• Rebecca Goldstein
• Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The Measure of a Woman by Gene A. Getz

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://www.juliannaglasse.com/

Foundation - https://www.thisiswhathappenswhenwomenread.org/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/juliannaglasse/

Foundation Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tiwhwwr/

Foundation Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/people/This-Is-What-Happens-When-Women-Read/61566356275917/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliannaglasse/

Connect with Jen!

Description:

Why do we keep doing the same thing over and over in love? Same argument, same shutdown, same spiral, same reach toward somebody who cannot or will not reach back. We are grown. We have read the books. And still, something inside us takes the wheel and steers us right back into the ditch.

Dr. Galit Atlas says the one driving is probably not you. It is probably the child you used to be.

Galit is a psychoanalyst in New York who has spent more than twenty years in a room with people trying to talk about love. Her last book, Emotional Inheritance, was an international bestseller translated into twenty-nine languages. Her new book, Come Closer, names six wounded children most of us are hauling around inside: the frightened child, the melancholic child, the ashamed child, the invisible child, the guilty child, and the chosen child.

In this conversation, Galit walks us through all six, what each one actually looks like in an adult relationship, and why we keep reaching for the familiar even when the familiar is what hurt us. She unpacks the invisible child who learned to hide too well, the guilty child who is always bracing to be blamed, and the chosen child who cannot separate from the parent she was recruited to take care of. She also opens her own story: her father's childhood in Iran, the losses her family did not have the privilege to name, and what happened when he showed up for her at the hardest moment of her life.

This is not a book about bad parents, and the rummaging is not for its own sake. It is the only way to stop the repeating. The goal is not an apology. The goal is getting the wheel back.

Read it with a pen in hand. And you probably already know exactly who to send this one to.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• “The frightened child is afraid of closeness because they learned that the people they love and the people they depend on can hurt them.” – Dr. Galit Atlas
• “The familiar is our home. For better and for worse, even if it's filled with demons, it's our home.” – Dr. Galit Atlas
• “We repeat in order to repair.” – Dr. Galit Atlas
• “The invisible child masters the art of disappearing.” – Dr. Galit Atlas
• “As adults, we have the power to know ourselves, we have the power to evolve and to heal. It's on us.” – Dr. Galit Atlas
• “The goal is to get the wheel back and be in charge of the adult versions of ourselves.” – Jen Hatmaker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy – https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Come-Closer/Galit-Atlas/9781668067147
• Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma by Dr. Galit Atlas
• D.W. Winnicott on hiding: it is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://www.galitatlas.com/

Instagram - https://instagram.com/galit_atlas

Substack - https://wildanalysiswithgalitatlas.substack.com/

Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram -

Description:

Calling all book lovers, calling all readers, calling everyone who has faced down a reinvention in the middle of life. Zibby Owens is one of the book world’s most tireless and warm-hearted connectors: a podcaster who has interviewed more than 2,000 authors, a publisher, a bookstore owner, a self-described accidental activist, and now an author herself. Ten years ago she was a perfectionistic stay-at-home mom of four on the Upper East Side, up at 4:55 a.m. to sign up for parent teacher conferences, with color-coded calendars and no time to read. Then she got divorced, fell in love with her tennis pro, recorded a podcast into her phone from her bed on a whim, and rebuilt the whole thing: new career, new marriage, new name, new voice.

Her memoir in essays, Between Chapters: How I Started Over, Took Some Chances, and Found the Plot, is out now. In this Sacred Work conversation, Jen and Zibby get into what losing the plot actually feels like from the inside, the tiny unglamorous steps that add up to an entirely different life, why she sunsets things that are still making money, and how books became the connection vehicle for a whole community of women. Also: shy kids who grew up into very public careers, and the permission slip Zibby would hand her 39-year-old self.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• "There is a way. You are not stuck. Your life is not over. You can take these small steps to remember who you are. And it is not selfish. It is imperative." - Zibby Owens
• "When you cannot remember the last time you belly laughed, that could be a red flag to pay attention to." - Jen Hatmaker
• "Save nothing for the swim home." - Jen Hatmaker, quoting her agent Margaret
• "Talking about books is really talking about life." - Zibby Owens
• "It’s not just, well, I guess this is it because it has to be. This is it because it can be, and it should be." - Jen Hatmaker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Between Chapters: How I Started Over, Took Some Chances, and Found the Plot by Zibby Owens (Zibby Publishing)
• On Being Jewish Now, edited by Zibby Owens
• "A Mother’s Right to Sanity," Zibby’s essay that went viral overnight
• The Between Chapters essay platform on Substack, where readers write about their own chapters
• Authors in the mix: Dani Shapiro, Anna Quindlen, and Sarah Mlynowski, who told Zibby to start a podcast
• Childhood favorites: The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Charlotte’s Web, Nancy Drew, and Little House on the Prairie

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://zibbymedia.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/zibbyowens/

Substack - https://www.zibbyowens.com/

Podcast - Totally Booked with Zibby https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/totally-booked-with-zibby/id1366633318

Connect with Jen!

Description:

Mary Pipher has spent her whole career noticing the gap between what the culture says is happening to women and what is actually happening to them. She did it in her thirties with Reviving Ophelia, and she did it again decades later with Women Rowing North. In this Sacred Work encore, Jen sits down with the clinical psychologist and author of eleven books to talk about the second half of life and what it actually asks of you. Mary makes the case that women get happier as they age, and she has the research to back it up, along with a story about two locker rooms that lands harder than any statistic. She also talks about thanking her own worn out hands for a lifetime of work, why reasonable expectations are the one thing happy people everywhere share, and the line Jen has not been able to shake since: we all age, but we do not all grow. Only one of those is up to you.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• We all age but we don’t all grow.
• If you don’t become better you become bitter. You either grow or you shrink.
• You should thank your hands for all the work they have done for you.
• We all find what we’re looking for.
• I have everything I need to be happy right between my ears.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age by Mary Pipher
• Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher
• A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence by Mary Pipher
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• Complete list of Mary Pipher’s books: https://marypipher.com/books
• Margaret Mead’s idea of post menopausal zest
• Jane Jarvis, American jazz pianist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jarvis

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://marypipher.com

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/authormarypipher

Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker

The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.

Description:
Dr. Marisa G. Franco is back — and this time, she's turning the lens inward. Marisa is the New York Times bestselling author of Platonic and a psychologist at the University of Maryland, and her brand new book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, might just be the most important thing she's ever written. It is tender, personal, and research-backed in equal measure — and friend, it will find you.

In this conversation, Marisa and Jen dig into the central argument of the book: that trying to become a "secure" person — calm, confident, regulated, healed — is one of the most efficient ways to stay stuck. The goal, Marisa says, is not security. It's being secure-ish. That means making room for the anxious parts and the avoidant parts, the shame and the neediness and the grief, and offering those parts the care they never got instead of running from them one more time.

In this discussion, you’ll also hear:

• Why the goal was never to be fully "secure" — and what it means to be secure-ish instead
• Why your insecurities are messengers, not enemies — and how to stop whack-a-moleing them into silence
• The memories that are keeping you stuck — and the science that proves you can actually change how they live in you
• The messages installed in us by the wider world — faith, bodies, marriage, worth — and what it looks like to do this work when those messages came from somewhere we once considered holy
• And Marisa shares her own story, the one that cracked her open: a hike, a relationship unraveling, and the moment she finally stopped performing calm long enough to say the true thing out loud.

This is a conversation for anyone who has been trying to be better than they are instead of being who they are. Which is to say — it's for all of us.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• “The struggle of not feeling worthy is that you're stuck in the same sense of reality. You're trapped and you don't know how to get out. People are loving you but you don't feel loved. The beauties of life slide off of you. I just want people to get free of that.” - Dr. Marisa G. Franco
• “We have to start with allowing what is, with the truth. So many of us don’t think we can because we have to be something different than we are. But being where you are, that's where the healing happens.” - Dr. Marisa G. Franco
• “I'm still learning for my first reaction to no longer be, what am I allowed to feel according to other people? What am I allowed to look like according to other people? And for my first question to be what expresses who I am and how I actually feel, even if that violates all of the rules as to how I should feel or how I should present myself? That's where I need to begin, in the truth.” - Dr. Marisa G. Franco

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment by Dr. Marisa Franco - https://amzn.to/42N2MyE
• Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make--and Keep--Friends by Dr. Marisa Franco - https://amzn.to/4dph3rm
• Friendship MeCourse - https://shop.jenhatmaker.com/products/friendship-for-the-rest-of-us
•

Description:

Barbara Brown Taylor gave us the question that ends every episode of this show, so it feels right to hand the Sacred Work series over to her. In this encore, the New York Times bestselling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest talks with Jen about the year she spent doing almost nothing impressive: the county fair with a couple of six-year-olds, an old racehorse nobody wanted, blueberry pies for friends going through hard things, and shifts at the public library. She calls herself the saint of small things, and she is honest about how hard that is to say out loud when people want to know what big thing you are working on. They also get into why she is wary of hope that functions as an escape hatch, how she keeps her heart from going wooden in a world of terrible headlines, and why friendship is worth protecting even though nobody rewards you for it. Stay to the end for the benediction Barbara wrote for this community.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• I’ll be the saint of small things today.
• Headlines give me omniscience but no omnipotence.
• I’ve got to attend to the sustainability of a supple heart.
• I’m real wary of hope unless it functions right here, right now.
• The years are short but the days are long, and that’s a blessing not a curse.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• A Rhythm of Prayer by Sarah Bessey, which includes Barbara’s contribution
• This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley, who has also been a guest on For the Love
• When God Is Silent by Barbara Brown Taylor
• Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor
• Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor
• An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://barbarabrowntaylor.com

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/authorBarbaraBrownTaylor

Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker

The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.

Description:

Think about the last real fight you had with someone you love, then think about what you did with it. Most of us swallowed it and called it peace. Priya Parker has spent twenty years walking into rooms where groups are coming apart, churches mid-split, companies that lost their founder, families with one topic nobody will name at the table. She is back on the show with a new book, The Art of Fighting, and her argument is that the peace we keep by avoiding conflict costs us the very thing we say we want most.

Jen and Priya open with a hot takes round on pineapple pizza and whether a hot dog is a sandwich, which turns out to be one of Priya's actual tools: low stakes arguing is practice for the high stakes kind. From there, what unhealthy peace looks like inside a family, a team, or a church. Priya tells the story of her grandfather's funeral, where the minister's highest praise for a fifty year marriage was that the couple never fought. Jen names the four years she let a business partnership die rather than have one hard conversation. They get into how to diagnose the fight you are actually in, why “we’re not a ___” is the sentence to listen for, and what happened when Priya went looking for the best literature on group conflict and kept landing in the Christian tradition.

Conflict is not sin. It is a skill, and every one of us can get better at it.

Part of September's Sacred Work series.

***

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• Low stakes arguing helps us approach high stakes arguing. – Priya Parker
• When the going gets tough, add warmth to heat. – Priya Parker
• Human connection is as threatened by unhealthy peace as it is by unhealthy conflict. – Priya Parker
• I learned from an early age that there is loss in avoidance. – Priya Parker
• I invite you to think about conflict as a skill. And you can get better at it. – Priya Parker
• Conflict is not sin. Conflict is actually highly functional. – Priya Parker
• Fighting is about power. Avoidance is also about power. – Priya Parker
• Whose mess do you want to be in? – Priya Parker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict by Priya Parker (Riverhead, out 9/8) - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fighting-Transformative-Power-Conflict/dp/0593420225
• The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Gathering-How-Meet-Matters/dp/1594634920
• Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull - https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Expanded-Overcoming-Inspiration/dp/0593594649
• If You Met My Family, You'd Understand: A Family Systems Primer by Jack Shitama - https://www.amazon.com/You-Met-Family-Youd-Understand/dp/1732009368
•

Description:

Some families run on rules nobody ever wrote down. Here is your role. Here is what we talk about. Here is who gets forgiven and who gets blamed. We accept those terms as children, and then one day we look up and wonder who exactly signed us up for the job.

August’s Jen Hatmaker Book Club pick is Little Monsters, and Adrienne Brodeur came with the whole story behind it. She spent thirty years on the other side of the pen, co-founding Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, editing at HMH Books, judging the National Book Award, and now running Aspen Words. She published one novel of her own in 2005, then waited fourteen years for the next book, a memoir that broke a silence she had kept since she was fourteen.

Adrienne and Jen get into the unspoken rules every family runs on, why estrangement takes love rather than indifference, and what Cain and Abel taught her about the gifts we give our parents. Adrienne explains why fiction can feel more honest than memoir, makes an unpopular case for Ken, and talks about writing mania with compassion rather than spectacle. Plus the stack of books a stepmother handed her that redirected her whole life, the screenplay she is writing, and the book club’s standing offer to cast the movie.

***

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• He’s wounded, and wounded people wound. – Adrienne Brodeur
• Understanding someone isn’t quite the same as absolving them. – Adrienne Brodeur
• Fiction can sometimes feel more honest than memoir. I don’t mean factual honesty. I mean emotionally unguarded. – Adrienne Brodeur
• Who the hell decided that peacemaker was my job, or golden child, or secret keeper, or difficult one? – Adrienne Brodeur
• Turns out dead mothers still have an excellent work ethic. – Adrienne Brodeur
• Everyone wanted a flat version of themselves. – Jen Hatmaker
• We have family stories that we’re telling too, even believing, that we’re trying to believe. – Jen Hatmaker
• Some of our characters landed on their feet, but they landed on their feet in a different zip code. – Jen Hatmaker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Little-Monsters/Adrienne-Brodeur/9781982198114
• Little Monsters book club discussion questions - https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/little-monsters-by-adrienne-brodeur/guide
• Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wild-game-adrienne-brodeur/1130010789
• Man Camp by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001HN38FI
• Aspen Words at the Aspen Institute - https://www.aspeninstitute.org/people/adrienne-brodeur/
• Zoetrope: All-Story, co-founded with Francis Ford Coppola

Guest’s Links:

Adrienne’s Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/adriennebrodeur/

Adrienne’s Faceboo ...

Description:

For twenty years, one question has followed Jen everywhere she goes: what am I supposed to be doing with my life? It comes in the comments, the voicemails, the line after every event. And for a long time, Jen answered it like a career question, as if somewhere out there was a slot with her name on it and her only job was to find it and climb inside.

In this solo episode, she puts down the word calling and picks up a different one: assignment. Not the thing waiting for you in the future, but the work already in your hands, in this season, on this street, with these people. Jen untangles work from worth, names the theology a lot of us absorbed that rewarded us for burning out, and shares the questions she uses to tell the difference between an assignment that is actually hers and one that is simply available. She also talks about the assignments that end, and why finishing one well is its own sacred work.

Ordinary, faithful, unglamorous work is not the consolation prize for people who never found their capital C calling. It is the actual thing.

This episode kicks off September's theme, Sacred Work, here on the show and over in the AWAKE Collective.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• "I have stopped asking what my calling is altogether. I started asking what my assignment is." - Jen Hatmaker
• "Sacred work is not a waiting room for a more important life that hasn't started yet." - Jen Hatmaker
• "The paycheck is not the assignment. The paycheck funds the life where the assignment happens." - Jen Hatmaker
• "Burnout is not evidence that you are on assignment. More likely it is evidence that you have taken on someone else's assignment." - Jen Hatmaker
• "A real assignment will cost you something. But an obligation costs you yourself. That's not the same bill." - Jen Hatmaker
• "Something does not have to be bad for it to be over." - Jen Hatmaker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• This month's Sacred Work lineup: Priya Parker, Dr. Marisa Franco, Zibby Owens, plus encore conversations with Barbara Brown Taylor and Mary Pipher
• Worth by Dr. Marisa Franco
• The AWAKE Collective monthly reflection guide. September's writing prompt: The work that is mine right now is...
• Your challenge this week: name one assignment you are actually on, then do the very next small thing it requires
• Leave Jen a voicemail: https://jenhatmaker.com/podcast

Take the AWAKE Quiz: https://JenHatmaker.com/quiz

Connect with Jen!

Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker

Jen's Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen's Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker

Jen's YouTube -

Description:

Jodi Picoult is back, and she brought her thirtieth novel with her.

If you have been in a book club at any point in the last thirty years, you know the name. Forty million copies in print. Thirty four languages. And, as of this year, the fourth most banned author in America, which Jen considers a five star review.

Jodi and Jen get into all of it: what thirty years of publishing actually teaches you (start with the underwear), why she refuses to coast when she could easily phone it in, what she believes AI will never do to a reader, and the career she never asked for as an advocate against book banning. Then they turn to Hollow Bones, out September 15, a novel that began with an anonymous postcard and a letter from a jail cell and carried Jodi deep into postpartum psychosis, the dismissal of women by medicine, and the long shadow of 9/11. She also brings back a character you have wondered about since My Sister's Keeper.

One heads up before you press play: this conversation includes discussion of postpartum psychosis, suicide, the death of a child, and school shootings. Please take good care of yourself. Support resources are linked below.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• If I'm not challenged by a book, why should you be?
• AI will never be human. Novels work because an author is reaching deep into the heart and soul of a reader and finding a chord to pluck that resonates. AI can imitate that. It can never really do it.
• It's fine for a parent to decide what his or her child should be reading. I advocate that. It is not fine for that parent to decide what everyone else's child should be reading.
• When we remove books from schools, we are not protecting children. We are taking away resources that help them deal with an increasingly complex world. And that is the opposite of protecting kids.
• Women are failed at every turn of their lives by the medical industry.
• The more you lie, the easier it gets to lie. And we are living in a time right now when lies are being peddled as truths.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult (Ballantine, September 15)
• Pre-order signed copies plus an exclusive overlay from Still North Books
• Pre-order from Barnes & Noble for the sweepstakes and a letter
• Nineteen Minutes, My Sister's Keeper, and Mad Honey (with Jennifer Finney Boylan) by Jodi Picoult
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, adapted for the stage by Jodi Picoult
• PostSecret
• PEN America on book bans
• Postpartum Support International
• National Maternal Mental Health Hotline: call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA
• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988

Guest's Links:

Website - https://jodipicoult.com/

Instagram - https://instagram.com/jodipicoult

TikTok - https://tiktok.com/@jodipicoult

Facebook -

There is a specific kind of overwhelm that hits when you walk into your own living room and everything in it seems to be asking you for something. Finish this puzzle. Put me away. Read the rest of me. Myquillyn Smith, better known as The Nester, says your house is talking to you. It is not shaming you. It is telling you the truth about your stuff.

Myquillyn is back in the guest chair, this time on her own, and her new book House Hushing is out now. She walks us through backwards decluttering (pull the loose stuff out of one room, stash it somewhere else, live with that room for 48 hours, and let it prove its case), the threshold where a room tips from fine to too much, and why so many of us cross it earlier than our mothers did.

We also get into the confession she hears most from women about their homes, the difference between a room that is quiet and a room that has no soul, how pattern and contrast work like volume dials you can turn up or down, and why she owns seasonally instead of just owning less. Plus a dead butterfly hot glued into a frame, and the ten minute fix for anyone whose house is currently yelling at them.

We are in our Say the Quiet Thing Out Loud series, and there is plenty most of us never say out loud about our own homes. This one gives you permission and a plan.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• Whenever you feel friction happening in your home, that is your house actually talking to you. And it is not shaming you. (Myquillyn)
• Less stuff leads to peace, that is what the minimalists say. But I would say intentionality leads to peace. (Myquillyn)
• More begets more. But the opposite is also true, which is so hopeful for us. Less leads to less. (Myquillyn)
• Of all the places in the world, wouldn’t it be nice if we created a home that quietly welcomed us? (Myquillyn)
• It is not a mystery, that feeling you get of just a little bit of overwhelm and a lack of joy. (Jen)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• House Hushing by Myquillyn Smith (Baker Books), at https://thenester.com
• Simplicity Me Course https://shop.jenhatmaker.com/products/simplicity-for-the-rest-of-us

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://thenester.com

Instagram - https://instagram.com/thenester

Connect with Jen!

Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker

Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker

Jen’s YouTube - https://www. ...