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: 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 -