Brené Brown: Hi everyone. I’m Brené Brown and this is Unlocking Us.

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BB: Do you ever have one of those conversations where you just kind of lose track of time and you’re laughing… I think I laughed hard and cried at least twice in this conversation. I am talking with Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Ashley C. Ford. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh has edited an anthology called Hungry Hearts and it is a collection of innovators and creatives and thought leaders who share intimate stories of uncovering beauty and potential through moments of fear, loss, heartbreak and uncertainty. And it’s really an incredible anthology because first of all, Jennifer was my literary agent for years since the beginning of my writing career, and she put together a traveling event called Together Live. It was really a traveling love rally that brought together diverse storytellers for epic evenings of laughter and music and hard-won, hard-fought wisdom. And this went all around the country, and now these folks are contributing their stories and essays to this anthology, Hungry Hearts. So I’m talking to Jennifer today, and I’m also talking to one of the Together Live speakers and one of the contributors to the anthology, Ashley C. Ford. She and I have followed each other on social media for years, admired each other from far away. If her name sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because you heard her name as the person who set up our other podcast guests, Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman.

BB: And so, we talked to Ashley about her work. We talked to Jennifer about Together Live, and we talk about the anthology. And we cry a little bit, and we laugh a little bit, and we talk about the importance of story. It is just, again — who gets to do this for a living? Too fun.

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BB: So, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh sat at the nexus of entertainment and media for nearly 30 years. She was William Morris Endeavor sole female board member and Global Head of its literary lectures and conference divisions. In addition to representing me and my work, she represented other clients like Oprah Winfrey, Sue Monk Kidd, Alice Munro, she is particularly —  this is so funny — particularly proud of making her big screen debut as a friend eating dinner with me in Amy Poehler’s directorial debut on Netflix, Wine Country. In 2016, she co-founded Together Live, the Diverse and Inclusive traveling women’s tour driven by the mission of finding purpose and community through authentic and heartfelt storytelling. Over the four years, the tour visited 35 cities, lit 50,000 souls on fire and produced three seasons of a widely streamed podcast. Ashley C. Ford is a writer, host and educator, who lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband, poet and fiction writer, Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate lab, Astro Renegade Ford-Stacy.

BB: Her memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, will be published by Flatiron Books on June 1st, 2021. Ashley is the former host of The Chronicles of Now podcast, co-host of the HBO companion podcast, Lovecraft Country Radio, seasons one and three of Master Card’s, Fortune Favors The Bold, as well as the video interview series Profile By BuzzFeed news and Brooklyn-based news and culture TV show, 112 BK. Ashley was also the host of the first season of audible literary interview series, Authorized. She’s been named among Forbes Magazine‘s 30 under 30 in media, Brooklyn Magazine’sBrooklyn 100 and Time Out New York’s New Yorkers Of The Year, and Variety‘s New Power of New York. This is a conversation between three people who tell the truth, have fun, laugh too loud, cuss a little bit and have some teary moments.

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BB: All right, Jennifer and Ashley. Congratulations! This is an important book, Hungry Hearts: essays on courage, desire and belonging.

Jennifer Rudolph Walsh: Thank you so much.

BB: Congratulations.

JRW: Thank you.

BB: How are you all feeling? I mean, it’s a big deal to give birth to a book, right?

JRW: Well, I mean, for me, having been in the other side of the mid-wifing position for 30 years, watching babies come out of the other end, it’s wild being on the other side of that. And it’s absolutely breathtaking to see all the genuine care and support and compassion that goes into every step of the way, so it feels miraculous. And the fact that there’s a heart on the cover, and I’m born on Valentine’s Day, and this is all about love. It just feels like the universe is just giving us a giant God wink.

BB: Ashley, you’re a contributor. I can’t wait to talk to you about your essay. How does it feel for you to be out today?

Ashley C. Ford: I guess I just feel full of gratitude, not just for being included and being in a place where I felt comfortable writing and telling that story, but also feeling really centered in however it’s received. I guess that’s kind of new for me — that I would be in a place of not really worrying about how anyone would react to it, because I know the spirit that I wrote it in, and the spirit that I offered it to people. And that’s just good enough for me right now, so I just feel really grateful that that’s where I’m at because that hasn’t always been true.

BB: For those of you all listening, Jennifer is the editor of this anthology, Hungry Hearts. Ashley C. Ford is one of the contributors and a writer, and Jennifer was my literary agent for years, and so it’s just so fun. You have midwifed all my books and so it’s so fun to have your book in my hand. So Jennifer, I want to hear your story from the beginning, and I’d like it to end around the creation of Together Live.

JRW: I’m going to start by saying that the same way, Ashley just said that she’s at a place where the intention is the most important thing, and she’s really not trying to control the outcome. I love that and that feels really healed and whole.

BB: Oh yeah.

JRW: And I will say that for a very long time, I didn’t think I had a story. So, when somebody said to me, “What’s your story?” I would freeze because while I’d spent decades going around telling people every single person has a story and their story matters, I didn’t think that included me. So, a big piece of this journey for me, which I will give you my 53-year history as quickly as I can, is realizing that I have a story too, and my story matters, and that when you actually authentically share, it gives you a kind of intimacy that heals you in places that you couldn’t even imagine. So, let’s start by saying that I was a kid with —as the Jewish moms in the neighborhood where I grew up used to say — I had the gift of the gab. And I think that just meant that I talked fast and had a good turn of phrase, but they also always told me it would be so great if I could just live up to my potential, and I had no idea what that meant. I really was completely baffled about what I should be doing differently. When really, I cared about very different things than the other people in my neighborhood. I didn’t care about getting A pluses. I didn’t care about being the prettiest or the smartest. I cared about everybody’s story. I literally would stay after school and talk to the janitor about his wife’s illness.

JRW: I literally said to my pediatrician when I was nine years old, “Can I call you by your first name? Because if I have to keep calling you doctor, we’re never going to get a real relationship off the ground.” I mean, I just wanted to connect. And so, I wasn’t a great student, and in fact, I got kicked out of high school because I really had failed to distinguish myself, and my mother was so devastated, she didn’t know what to do. And for the first time in my life, I realized, if I don’t figure out of way to apply myself according to the grid that I’ve been given, I’m not going to really have the opportunity to be successful. I mean, to be told that you failed to distinguish yourself at 15 or 16, I just felt like, well, a little bit like Sooki, the elephant, Saggy Baggy the elephant, like I’d gladly improve myself if I only knew how. So I got into college, gratefull, because the college took a chance on me, and it was there that I found the voices of Maya Angelou and Kim Chernin and Maxine Hong Kingston, and I honestly thought that only white dead dudes wrote books, and so I had absolutely no idea that there was a world out there where women were talking about my own spirit and my own soul. And I was completely blown away to find out that Maya Angelou could be talking about growing up in the 30s as a black woman in the segregated South and yet her story was my story.

JRW: And so that was the beginning of my figuring out how to use my potential because I wanted to be as close to storytelling and storytellers as humanly possible. So, I got myself a job working as a literary agent right out of college as an assistant. And I did that until I eventually became an agent, and then I did that until I eventually bought her company. And then I did that until I sold the company to William Morris. And then I did that until William Morris merged with Endeavor and became WME. And then I did that until the good Lord delivered me to Brené Brown. And, you know, that was both the great blessing of my entire life, but also it was a real challenge because there was no way to stand in the space of Brené’s work and not live my authentic truth and not be as brave as humanly possible. And so, it was through that relationship, our incredible sisterhood that I realized that part of my evolution was that I didn’t just want to represent books anymore. As much as I love them and have been rescued by them, I wanted to be in places in community when people were hearing stories and witnessed people’s humanity together. And so it’s from that place that Together Live was born.

BB: It was such an evolution to witness. It was such a privilege to witness it, because this is inside baseball around book publishing, but Jennifer was not an agent, Jennifer was really known as the most powerful woman in publishing in a very global way, and so I remember us having the, “I don’t have a story,” conversation and me saying, “You can’t say that to me anymore. You have to save that shit for somebody else.”

JRW: Literally.

BB: I think I literally said that. I can’t be on the receiving end of that level of bullshit and keep trusting you because you have to have a story. And I know you have a story and when you said, “I have to be in a space where people are coming together and gathering,” it just felt like such a big risk and you just did it. I mean, you did it. I mean, you first did it — I remember you coordinated Oprah’s tour.

JRW: Yeah.

BB: And I remember talking to you from on the road, and I knew other people on that, and I’m like, “I know it’s exhausting. I know, it’s like so many cities. I know. Are you okay?” And you’re like, “This is amazing.” I was like, “What?” You were like, “This is just amazing. You should see the people and the tears and the connection,” and I thought, “Oh, wow. Something has got her.”

JRW: Oh yeah.

BB: Something had you, huh?

JRW: Oh yeah, I would never be sitting here with Ashley if I didn’t have this incredible, almost like an evangelistic belief, that if we could get together and share our stories, our heartfelt truths, we realize that we’re more alike under the skin than we are different. And our differences are important, but the ways that we’re alike, they’re miracles and in that is the grace to connect and to heal and to elevate us all.

BB: I believe that. And I got to tell you, I got to be a part of one of the Together Live. Friends of mine that came to the event in Austin still talk about it as something that was unlike anything they had been a part of.

JRW: Well, having you on the stage was the fulfillment of a dream for me. And it was full circle. And I never really thought of how people were going to describe the show, but when thousands and thousands of people used the phrase “life-changing” over and over again, I knew we had some magic.

BB: What was your intention behind it? So, when you closed your eyes and you pictured it, what did you picture? What did you want it to be? I know diversity, inclusivity, I know those things were top of mind, what else? What was the win?

JRW: Well, for me, what I wanted was to expand people’s mind and hearts around what it looks like to hear your story through somebody else’s lens and voice, and through that, I wanted people to feel like their connection to all of humanity was greater than they could possibly imagine,  with the ultimate goal of people realizing that none of us can be safe and well, unless all of us are safe and well.

BB: So, Ashley.

ACF: Yes.

BB: Tell me your story, please, and take us to the moment where you come aboard with Together Live as a part of that love rally traveling beauty thing, that it was — the indescribable.

ACF: Well, I’m from Indiana, born and raised, and I was born to two parents. I was technically a miracle baby. Doctors had told my mom that she couldn’t have kids, and then all of a sudden, your girl was given. Okay. It couldn’t be stopped, then it turned out not so much of a miracle baby, because I have three younger siblings afterwards. But about three or four months after I was born, my mom found out that my father had been arrested for sexual assault and that he was going to prison. And he did go to prison for 30 years. In the meantime, I grew up with my mom and my younger siblings, my brother, who my mom found out she was pregnant with very soon after my dad got arrested. And then she became a single parent of two young kids. And we were like a little group, like it was my mom and it was her kids, and we were this little family, and I honestly felt like we were all we needed, to be perfectly honest.

BB: Yeah.

ACF: But my mom, as a parent, obviously saw more of what we lacked and where the gaps were. And that created a lot of sadness and anger in her, which created a lot of sadness and anger in our home. And it definitely almost ruined some of my familial relationships, but most of them still remain strong. And I became the kind of person who writes about things like that and writes about hard family dynamics and tells that personal story, because my hope is that if I tell my personal story, it will encourage other people, not just to tell their personal stories, but also to see what can sometimes feel like the invisible threads of our shared humanity.

BB: Yeah.

ACF: Those things that connect us and hold us together and bring us together. So I talk about being a weird little nerdy kid. I talk about growing up Black in the Midwest, I talk about or write about the fact that sometimes being funny in the right environment is more important than being poor. You can get pretty far being a funny, poor kid when you have that kind of adaptive skill. I write about that. I write about members of my family, I write about myself, I write about the world. I interview people, I do and make as much as I can that contributes to the human story, but also encourages people to see the value in all our human stories. And I’ve been working on a memoir for a really long time, and I’ve been writing in all these places. And Together Live reached out and asked if I would be interested in coming on tour. There were so many people who had been on tour with them before, including you, Brené, who were encouragers and inspirations of mine. So, to be in that company was a big deal for me, but also having the opportunity to talk to that audience was a massive deal for me because I knew what kind of people are usually in that audience, and I knew what kind of talk they showed up for, and that was exactly the kind of talking I wanted to be able to do.

JRW: And you did.

ACF: They were exactly the kind of topics I wanted to be able to talk about. Thank you, Jennifer. Plus, you know, meeting Glennon Doyle or meeting Abby Wambach, meeting Amena, meeting Warren Shreedy, meeting these people who were already having these amazing conversations in writing, on podcasts, on television, in all these different arenas. I wanted to be part of that conversation, and I felt really, really lucky to be invited and really tried my best to do a good job. So, when Jennifer reached out about doing this, I knew that I wanted to write something for them, and I hoped that I had a story that was worth putting in an anthology like that. And I found it and I wrote it, and now it’s there. And I get to come talk about it with Jennifer and you, so life is great.

BB: I have to say that — I followed you for a long time, I think, we followed each other on social media for a while.

ACF: Oh yeah. Life-changing day for me, Brené. Sorry, I don’t know if I’m supposed to say that, but yeah, I remember the day Brené Brown followed me on Twitter, because I wrote it in my journal.

BB: Oh my God, I just fell in love with you.

JRW: Me too.

BB: I think of you as a storyteller and kind of a truth teller, but I really also think of you as a maker, I think of you as a creative’s creative. Do you see yourself that way?

ACF: I do, but I also have a tendency to lean into perfectionism in a way that can be really corrosive, and so it can be really hard for me to see the full picture of myself because I spend so much time picking off pieces of the paint and saying they don’t belong there.

BB: Yeah.

ACF: It’s tough for me sometimes to accept that I’m a maker because I make things and not because they are perfect when they’re done.

BB: Oh God.

ACF: So yeah.

BB: Shut up, stop it, stop it, stop it. Stop it.

JRW: Listen, come over any time, I’ll show you girls what good enough looks like.

ACF: I need a good visual.

JRW: Okay.

BB: Yes.

JRW: You’re looking at her.

BB: I want to jump into your stories, and Jennifer, in the introduction, as the editor of the anthology, you write a really sweeping beautiful introduction. And you talk about the difference between a fact and a story. And you use the example of your parents’ divorce in the book, and you say, you could just give us the fact that your parents divorced when you were nine.

JRW: Yeah.

BB: Or you could tell us the story. Will you tell us the story?

JRW: Yeah, I would be happy to. When I was nine years old, my parents told me that there was going to be a family meeting after school and this just sounded like the coolest thing I’d ever heard of. I had never been to a meeting. It sounded amazing. And so, I went to school and I asked my friend what happens at a family meeting, because her family was much more structured than my family, and she told me, “Oh my God, it means you’re going on vacation.” And I had also never been on vacation, so this just literally seemed like the best day of my life. And she had just come back from Disney World and she had a pool and everything, I mean, she was like the fanciest person in our neighborhood.

BB: Yeah.

JRW: And she’d been to Disney World. She had a pool. You understand, she knew exactly what to tell me and how to advocate for my choice of Disney World. And she told me about this ride called It’s A Small World, and she sang me the whole song, It’s a Small World After All, which is kind of interesting because it’s sort of the roots of Together Live in a way. So, I got a yellow pad and I wrote down my argument about why Disney World was the educational best choice, and I came to the meeting prepared to advocate for my choice when my dad told me that my parents were getting divorced. And I actually had never known anybody that was divorced. And I looked over at my brother and my sister, and they seemed to have some sense of what was happening, but for me, it was like I was falling through the Earth. And all I could feel was that yellow legal pad on my chest with the proof of just how naive I had been and how much I couldn’t trust my own intuition in what was going to happen next.

JRW: That was really the beginning of a journey for me of realizing that I couldn’t trust what I saw with my own eyes, and I couldn’t believe what I felt and thought to be facts, and so it took me a very long time to get to the place where I realized, “Oh, my family is never getting back together and we’re never going to Disney World.” And I’d say that’s the difference between me just telling you that my parents got divorced at nine and me telling you how it broke me open.

BB: I knew how the story was going to end because we’re friends, and so even reading it, I just kept thinking, “Where’s the kid that tells her what’s really going to happen at this meeting where is the kid that tells her like, ‘Oh shit, man. This could go bad. This could be a lot of different things, but don’t bank on Disney World.’”

JRW: We were from this very small town. I didn’t even meet anybody who wasn’t Jewish until I was 11 years old. You have these reverse experiences.

BB: Yeah.

JRW: So, I lived in a town called the Five Towns. Everybody was Jewish, everybody came from different places in Europe and settled in this tiny little town. My grandparents lived three blocks away. I never knew anybody who was divorced. I never knew anybody who had any kind of lived experience that was different than my own. It reminds me of that moment in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where he gets woken up in the middle of the night and put into the wardrobe and told, “Everything you’ve ever known about anything is about to change,” and the door closes. That was me, that moment.

BB: Oh God. There are moments in our lives where I mean, there are single moments sometimes where everything gets violently reshuffled and organized, like the whole just… Everything just gets reorganized. I’m curious, as a storyteller, someone who’s brought literally thousands of stories into the world, put together, Live Together, has brought all these stories in this anthology to us. What is the difference between a fact and a story?

BB: The story is sort of the connective tissue, it’s the thing that makes you feel what this person is going through. Itt’s the thing that makes you perhaps think, Me Too. Ashley has an incredible story in the collection where she also has a moment in her essay where somebody tells her something that changes everything, everything that she thought was true and possible, and I could say, Ashley found out someone she loved was gay. Or, I could read her entire essay and feel, “Oh my God, even though my experience, the details are different, I’m reading that story and I’m thinking, ‘Me too, I’ve been there, I’ve been on the other end of that information, that life-altering information.’” And that’s what a powerful authentic story does.

BB: It’s so interesting because it takes me to this finding from my research that we want to believe that we’re cognitive beings who on occasion feel emotion, but neurobiologically, we’re actually emotional beings who on occasion, think. And so, facts speak to a cognitive part of us that’s a really small part of us and story speaks to our true language, right? Of emotion. Ashley, I have to say that I don’t want you to tell the story because I want it to unfold for people, but I was frustrated in your story.

ACF: Why? Tell me why, Brené.

BB: I wanted everything to be predictable and you to be taken care of.

ACF: Me too. Me too. I’m a Capricorn, I wanted that so badly.

BB: Let me check something with you and then teach us a little bit.

ACF: Okay.

BB: In the beginning, I thought like, she doesn’t feel like she has a strong sense of belonging in her family, then I got to, “Oh, they belong to each other,” and these are issues that are really hard for me personally. And so by the end, I was scared, and then I saw this transformation that got me to…

JRW: Yeah, she belongs to herself.

BB: Oh, shit, Ashley belongs to Ashley.

ACF: Yes.

BB: Is that part of the story that I read in this anthology?

ACF: Absolutely. And that’s the story of me. The story of me is someone who lived in a family where I didn’t feel a great sense of belonging, mostly because the people who were around to give me that didn’t have their own sense of belonging.

BB: Oh, yeah.

ACF: And really felt like they were fighting for some recognition in their own lives for their effort, recognition that never really seemed to come and instead somehow kept getting cashed in for things like poverty. So…

BB: Yeah.

ACF: I definitely didn’t feel this sense of belonging, and one of the things you said earlier that really ties into that is because my feeling system always felt more complex than my thinking system.

BB: Oh, God, yeah.

ACF: And being able to distill my feelings into words that could be very simply communicated and understood, felt impossible in a lot of cases in trying to talk about feelings, but make it something cerebral doesn’t usually go well. And it didn’t go well for me at five, six, seven and eight, and it continued not to go well for me in my…

JRW: Yeah, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.

ACF: There you go. You know what I’m talking about.

BB: 15.

ACF: Yeah, and on. But luckily, I had found this group of friends, The Band Kids. I was a Band Kid.

BB: God, I love the Band Geeks.

ACF: And I loved, I loved it, every bit of me loved it. I loved being the color guard captain. I loved that my boyfriend was the drum major and we were these nerdy talented, but uber-loving kids, and that we created this little family within this school program. This after-school program was suddenly my family because it was the place where I felt I belonged and my relationship with my boyfriend at the time, with Brett, was my anchor. It was everything to me because he was so good to me, but also challenged me. And it was the first relationship I had where somebody challenged me, lovingly, and was never telling me I wasn’t good enough, or wasn’t ever telling me I was bad, but was actually telling me, “I love you so much that I need you to know how much you’re capable of and how much potential there is for your life. Like, I just need you to understand that,” which was something so separate from what I had been used to, and then that relationship couldn’t exist as it had before. And that was really painful. It was painful because one of the things that I feel like we don’t talk about enough in friendship, especially long-term friendships or relationships of any kind, is that we’re going to change and we should change, but when we change, sometimes our relationships have to change.

BB: Oh God, yes.

ACF: And our dynamics with the people in those relationships have to change, and the truth is some people are going to be like, “Yeah, like I love you, but we’ve got to figure out how to make this relationship, friendship, whatever, work.” And then sometimes it just can’t exist this way anymore.

BB: That’s right.

ACF: And we either need to separate or we need to build something new. Brett and I,  luckily, were able to build something new, but more importantly, I was able to build a new relationship with myself through that relationship. I was able to figure something out about myself and walk away not feeling like I’d lost a piece of me, but like, “Oh my God, did I learn so much about what was already in here.” That was the best part. It was the best part. And you know, Brett and I are still friends.

BB: I was so going to ask you.

ACF: We are really, really good friends. He is one of my best friends in the entire world. I consider him to be part of my personal board of directors.

BB: Yeah.

ACF: If I have an issue, if something’s going on, I mean, in a lot of cases, he’s the person who’s known me longest. In most conversations, we’ve known each other since we were…

JRW: Yeah. You raised each other.

ACF: 12 and 13 years old. We raised each other.

JRW: I bet you if he was here, he would say you raised him right back up.

BB: I bet.

ACF: I think he would. And now he has a boyfriend…

JRW: Spoiler alert.

ACF: And they live in New York, and we were all living in New York at the same time. That’s a spoiler, for sure.

JRW: My kids always say, “Mom, you’re not supposed to say spoiler alert after you say the thing.”

ACF: I think that’s the only way to do it, Jennifer.

BB: That’s yeah. That’s the only way really.

ACF: Yeah, and me and my husband live back in Indiana now. Yeah, and they’re good friends. And it’s the best. It’s the absolute best.

JRW: You were saying the thing about the band. Brené, I know you can relate to this, I was never in a band, I’d never lived up to my potential, so I couldn’t be in a band, but I always felt like I was that kid at the end of the Music Man, the musical running to the edge of town to say to the con man, “Was there ever a band?” I’m just such a believer and I just want to belong.

BB: Yeah.

ACF: Yes.

JRW: And I think that’s why our traveling love rally was so powerful because we were able to create this family atmosphere, but even though we only probably spent three nights together, I feel like you’re my sister and I would do anything for you. Your story is a tattoo on my heart, and I wish we were just having this conversation over French fries, like we did so many great dinners, and I think that it’s contagious, Brené. People feel it. It’s like when you taste something and you’re like, “Oh, what is that yummy thing?” and it’s usually butter or bacon, but in this case, the answer was love, yummy ingredient. The answer was love. And that’s what I believe that authentic storytelling really does for you.

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BB: So Hungry Hearts, the Anthology, full of beautiful essays. I have some questions for y’all, so we have rapid-fire questions, but I have added to those rapid-fire questions, so are you ready?

JRW: Mm-hmm.

BB: Jennifer will go first. Fill in the blank for me. Without storytelling…

JRW: There’s no life. Yeah, without storytelling, we don’t authentically connect.

BB: Ashley, without storytelling…

ACF: Without storytelling, there’s no progress.

BB: I’m going to answer these, but not the rapid-fire with y’all and I have the heads up because I wrote them, but I was thinking about it. Without storytelling, I think we go away.

JRW: We never really know each other.

BB: I think we disappear in our own lives and each other’s lives. I don’t think we exist.

JRW: Yeah.

BB: We don’t know each other or ourselves because that’s how we communicate ourselves. So one of the themes I saw in these essays was a lot of family of origin, our first family pain, and I always say you have to walk into your story and own it if you want to change it. My question for y’all is, “What do you think the biggest barrier is for people to actually walk into those old stories and narratives and own them so they can rewrite the ending… What is the barrier?

JRW: I would say the barrier is shame. Yeah.

BB: Shame. Okay, Ashley?

ACF: I would say the barrier is a great lack of imagination.

BB: Oh. Beautiful. And I would say it’s… They don’t understand the pain of walking in is less than what they’re living. And so I think it’s all three of that. I think the pain they’re in is so much greater than what it takes to walk in, but they’re so afraid. They lack the imagination and they’re so ashamed. I think it’s all of it.

JRW: When Jeannette Walls handed in the first draft of The Glass Castle, I had known her for years and had no idea about her history at all. But she actually believed that when people heard that she ate out of a dumpster as a child, that people would throw garbage at her. She thought that the response to hearing this would be that people would throw garbage at her. Instead, thousands of people lined up around the block to hear her speak and share their stories, because they didn’t know they weren’t the only person that ate out of the dumpster as a kid. So, I think that that shame is so great, especially for people who’ve “made it” in some kind of success, that they think if we knew that they started by eating out of a dumpster, we think less of them. When the truth is, we would think so much more of them.

ACF: You know, The Glass Castle is one of the books that made me want to write a memoir. We studied it.

BB: No.

ACF: Yeah, I was in my first non-fiction writing class and Jeannette Walls came to our college. She was our freshman reader, and I wasn’t a freshman, but I was part of the student leadership group that mentored the freshmen as they came in, so I was part of that process as well. And I remember reading that book and it was one of the things that made me think maybe, maybe I have something to say. Maybe I have a story to tell too and then my non-fiction professor confirmed that, that I did. And 10 years later, that Professor Jil Chrisman still meets with me every Wednesday morning digitally, so we can sit and write together for an hour. Jeannette Walls, she’s a big one for me. She’s… Her book did a lot.

JRW: She’s incredible.

BB: Did you help publish that book?

JRW: Yeah, yeah.

ACF: That’s wild.

BB: So, think about that. I mean, we’re having a moment here, but I just want you to think about that, Jennifer, that before you invited Ashley to join the Together Tour, you had already impacted her life by that story to the world.

ACF: Absolutely.

JRW: The sacred web.

BB: Yeah, it’s just incredible.

JRW: So good.

BB: We’ll go Ashley first this time. Look at Jennifer’s like, “We’re on Zoom,” and Jennifer’s like “Told you.” What was unexpected or what surprised you about being part of such a diverse group of people sharing hard stories and real truths about their lives? What was unexpected or surprised you, Ashley?

ACF: I think what was unexpected and surprised me was that the people who were behind making this happen weren’t people who were just trying to sell a book, and they weren’t people who were just trying to sell another thing. Or, this is a good way to make a dollar right now, which I feel like I run into a lot and try to avoid as much as I can.

BB: Oh yes.

ACF: But it feels so good when you know you’re involved with something top to bottom where the people actually are invested in the mission of the thing and the heart of the thing. And what they are trying to do in the noblest sense is expand the life-giving source of storytelling and being part of that is fantastic. Makes me very grateful.

BB: What a nice surprise, eh?

ACF: Yes, a lovely surprise.

BB: Yeah, a lovely surprise.

ACF: And I love surprises because it just… You never know. It just doesn’t happen like that all the time.

BB: No.

ACF: And it’s really nice when you realize you’re in a place where like, “Oh, not only am I safe here, but my humanity is safe here.” Because it’s one thing to know you’re in a room and you’re safe because of who you are, and that people will be kind to you because maybe they know your name or because they read something you did, or they know how many followers you have on Twitter or something. It’s a completely other thing to be in a room and know that everybody in this room is going to be respected, based off their humanity and based off that core belief that everybody here shares, which is that because you are human, you are worthy of being here.

JRW: Honestly, that’s one of the nicest compliments anybody’s ever given me, so thank you. I mean, that is my greatest wish for that feeling. I’m just overjoyed to hear it articulated so beautifully. Thank you.

ACF: Thank you, Jenifer.

BB: Yeah, that’s intentionality and that’s a shit ton of work.

JRW: Yeah.

BB: You have to be very intentional with every choice, and there’s a million choices when you put something like that together, and it’s never the easy choices that end up creating that kind of psychological safety and container that you need. Jenifer, what was the big surprise or unexpected thing for you?

JRW: Back to sort of — everybody has a story but me. I did this for everybody else, but the person that was served most was me. So, my life expanded so beyond what I could have imagined as every night I was sitting with people who had disabilities or who are of the Muslim faith, or who were Black or indigenous or trans or gender fluid, and having dinner with them and getting to know them as human beings and having the great privilege of being led into their hearts. So, I think that the surprise was that it was my life that was invaluably served by this entire manifestation, really. I made it for humanity but it was me who was given the greatest gift.

BB: And do y’all think that’s always true? When we show up with love for the world that so often, it’s in the giving of that that we are the most served?

JRW: I do. I do.

BB: I think it’s the gift of generosity, and if you do it like, “Hey, I’m going to do this really good thing for the world. Where’s my payback?” That doesn’t work, but when you go in expecting nothing of yourself and being of in full service…

JRW: Yeah.

ACF: Yeah.

JRW: It’s a great privilege.

BB: It’s a great privilege.

ACF: It’s such a great privilege. I, for so many years, was on, almost exclusively it felt like, on the receiving end of other people’s generosity and other people’s goodwill and good heart moments and all of that. And I always thought to myself, I cannot wait to be in a position to turn that around. I can’t wait to be in a position… Because I could see… Even if I couldn’t always participate in the way I wanted to in it, I could absolutely see what it did for a person to be able to say, “I’m just going to make this happen for somebody because I can. I’m just going to make room for this person because I can.” And you see their face, you see people who are trying to not make it weird and trying to hold back their own excitement and their own joy about being able to do something for you. And I wanted to be in that position. I wanted to be able to do that. And any time I get the opportunity, it’s glorious.

JRW: I always say reflected glory is the most glorious kind and it’s true. Watching somebody else step into their purpose, into their reason that they’re here, and if you could just give a little assist or amplify or open a door. It’s the great honor and blessing of a lifetime.

ACF: Especially when you know how little can be the difference between somebody getting to do something really cool or have a really amazing life-altering opportunity and not getting to do that.

BB: God, yes.

ACF: I remember being a kid and the difference between being able to go to some special camp I qualified for, was like $100. But we didn’t have $100, so there was no going to camp, there was no… You’re so worthy of this that even though you don’t have the money, we’re going to find a way. Sometimes people are held back quite often. We need to be honest about the fact that, it could be $25. It could be $100 keeping a person from being able to do something amazing, just getting their shot. And if I can come in with that $100 and know that — here you go — then now that person has a shot that they never would have had before, that doesn’t just feel good because it’s like, Oh, I’m a good person handing over my $100. It feels good because it feels like I’m actually doing something at least a little bit about this gap that should have never been in that person’s life. $100 should never keep you from your future.

BB: No, $100 should never keep you from something awesome that has a chance to transform who you are.

ACF: Absolutely not.

BB: That’s a system built intentionally for that to happen. That’s not an accidental system.

JRW: Agreed.

ACF: Yes, yes. Come on Brené, because you’ve been on the podcast talking that truth. And I’ve got to tell you girl, every time, every time you hit it, every time somebody tries to glaze over a little something that’s systemic and you’re like, Let’s talk about the system real quick. We are going to acknowledge the system and I love that about you. I love it.

JRW: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, yep.

BB: Yeah, that’s the social worker in me. I can’t take that lens off, and so I’m grateful. I have to put credit where credit’s due. That’s how I was trained.

JRW: But you did the training.

BB: Yeah, I did.

JRW: But you did it.

BB: I did it. Hey, speaking of making the world a more loving place, were your ears burning last week, Ashley C. Ford?

ACF: Why? What I do?

BB: Oh, we were talking about you on the podcast.

ACF: Were you? Wait, which one? Was it Dare to Lead or was it Unlocking?

BB: Unlocking… And it hasn’t been released yet. It’s suspect.

ACF: Who were you talking to? I want to know.

BB: Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman.

ACF: Yes!

[laughter]

ACF: I was hoping. I was hoping.

BB: They were talking about their love story.

ACF: Talk about love. I don’t know two people who are in a place of deserving that… They deserved that love and they were both in such a good place and so ready for it. And I’m so glad that they were able to come together and build the family that they have now… I don’t even get to see them that much, but it feels like my extended family now, like the cats, the dog? I’m 100% in. They are two brilliant, fantastic women. And the fact that they would even say my name as part of their story, come on…

BB: Oh, they said they wouldn’t be together without you.

ACF: Oh my God, I hate it when they say that. I love it, but I also hate it. I love it because I’m part of the story, and I hate it because I’m just like, “Guys, no, it’s you. It’s just you.”

BB: No, I think they needed your noodge.

JRW: It’s us. You have got to say it like it’s us.

ACF: It is us. I do, I do. Plus, I have to at this point, admit that maybe I got a little bit of a gift, because I’ve introduced four or five couples that have gotten married. So… Yeah.

BB: Talk about reflective glory.

JRW: Yeah.

ACF: Yes.

BB: All right, last question, before you get to the rapid fire, which I’m going to move y’all right through with a pace that will scare you. No.

JRW: Bring it baby.

BB: Okay, Jennifer first on this one. A sliding door moment in your life.

JRW: I would say deciding to sell my small independent literary agency to William Morris because I felt like I needed a bigger boat, and I wanted to be able to serve my clients in a way that went beyond the book business, to the film and television business, to the international rights. And even though having a small business of my own that I can control felt like the safer thing, it didn’t feel like the brave and bold thing.

BB: Wow. I was so curious about what you were going to say. I told Barrett… she’s over here. She says “Hello, Jennifer.”

JRW: Hi Barrett.

BB: Barrett is my chief of staff and little sister.

JRW: Oh, I’m familiar with Barrett.

BB: Oh yeah?

JRW: I listen to the podcast. I know Barrett’s in there. I know.

BB: You know she’s right here. I was like, “What do you think it’s going to be?” I was like, “It could be so many things because she walks through a lot of sliding doors.” So that’s interesting. So, selling your small one and stepping into your power, because I heard some crazy statistic, I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but the percentage of publications in the US that went through you or people who reported to you.

JRW: Crazy. I know I am the single largest content provider in the United States of America, seriously. [chuckle] It was… stepping into my power, but also realizing my love of culture, because once I got to a large corporation, it’s like back to what Ashley was saying earlier. It wasn’t just okay for me to be safe, because I had a position of power. I needed everybody to be safe, I needed everybody to be seen and heard and valued, and whether you’re the lion or whether you’re the 10,000 worms, I needed there to be a respect and a radial balance. And once I realized that, that became a very big piece of my personal calling, which, storytelling is a high piece of that. But the larger thing is my core and humble belief that I am equal to you and you are equal to me, and there is not a single breathing human being alive, that I don’t feel that way about. So, I want to create containers for people to understand their value.

BB: You know what you taught me that I think is still a defining feature of me, I always give you credit when people say, “Wow, that’s a really interesting attitude.” I’m always like, “Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.” I remember going into some very contentious negotiations and either thinking, “I’m going to get crushed or we’re going to have to crush them.” And you would already say no, Brené, all boats can rise, and I mean, you pump some water into some oceans to make that happen.

JRW: Well, I love that you give me credit for that, and I’ve been in the audience when you’ve given me credit for that, and it really… It thrills me, but the truth of the matter is that in my core, I know that there is more than enough to go around. And when we stop hoarding pieces for ourselves because we’re afraid we’re not going to get enough or something’s going to be taken from us. When we stop that, and we actually really truly believe that there’s more than enough to go around, I’m not interested in a piece of the pie. I’m interested in the recipe, so that there’s pie for everybody. And I’ll say that being your partner really was an amazing opportunity to see that work on a worldwide level because you’re a rocket ship. It was obvious.

JRW: Literally, divinely inspired speaking for the universe. But I knew that I had a great opportunity for us to be who we said we were behind the scenes, as well as in front of the scenes, and that I had been preparing my whole life for that. And so, it was a great privilege for us to be pickle sisters together and to put that into practice so that every room we walked into, people felt like they were our teammate, they were our collaborators. Even our goodbyes with people when we had to move on, were always good goodbyes and people felt raised for having been in business with you. It was an incredible experience, a ride I will think about for the rest of my life.

ACF: That’s the dream.

BB: Yeah, it’s the dream. And I have to say that, to your point, Ashley, there is a systemic reason for that feeling of scarcity. That’s the scarcity mentality of… Power is finite. It must be power over not power within power too. Zero sum, one boat sink so the others… That thing was no joke, and you fought it, and I saw you fight it, not just outside of your organization, but within your organization. I don’t want to put gender on it… Well, I’ll put gender and race on it by saying that scarcity culture is definitely a product of white supremacy, it… So, it is male, it is white, it is…

JRW: Toxic masculinity, greed, lack of transparency equals scarcity.

BB: I can’t consider myself a winner unless there is a loser in my presence. And so, what was the cost that you paid for doing that differently?

JRW: If there was a cost, I never considered it a cost because the cost of not doing it would have been way, way too high to pay. That would have been my integrity.

BB: Amen.

JRW: Yes, of course, I’m sure opportunities didn’t end up staying with me or I didn’t get to grow in certain areas but it was never a cost I considered, because there is no alternative for me.  Still, there is no alternative for me. And I really feel that as we said, toxic masculinity, patriarchy, all underneath white supremacy, lack of transparency, greed, and it’s really something that is fear-based and the antidote to it is just love and light, and I know that we could kind of laugh about that, love and light and spiritual bypassing and bullshit, but the truth is beyond all of the phraseology and the hip culture around love and light and wellness is an actual truth. That is an eternal truth.

BB: I believe that.

ACF: Me too.

BB: And again, diminishing the language and diminishing the words, and diminishing and poo-pooing them is also part of the system, so we have to watch that as well. Ashley?

ACF: Yes.

BB: Sliding door moment for you.

ACF: I think my sliding door moment was deciding to become self-employed, mostly because I realized that I was not going to be able to do the kind of work I wanted to do, write the kind of things I wanted to write, make the kind of things I wanted to make inside traditional media systems. I’m still figuring out what it looks like to be trying to do these things independently, but what that has offered me is a great opportunity to do something that I think… If any women in my family have really gotten to do it, I don’t know about it. But I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time thinking about what I want. Like a lot of time, thinking about what I want. And I spent most of my life actively trying to not want things because I thought that made me more free, really not more free, but I thought it made me more flexible because not having anything of my own, not having anything I wanted felt like a really easy way to never be disappointed.

BB: Oh yeah.

ACF: But it’s really just living in a constant state of disappointment — disappointing myself before anybody else got the opportunity to disappoint me. And that just wasn’t an option as a self-employed person, when how I eat, when I eat, whether or not I have a roof over my head depends on me being able to find and commit to the right working situation for myself, which means being honest about what I do and don’t want to do. Being honest about what I’m good at and what I’m not, what I have interest in learning to be better at, and what I don’t. Would I maybe rather hire someone else to do or collaborate with someone else on or partner with someone else? It has forced me to prove to myself that I can trust myself.

JRW: Love that.

ACF: Being able to trust myself, even though I’m very, very much still on that journey, has been the thing that has allowed me to figure out how to love myself through some of my biggest hardest pain. And so, deciding to go on my own and give myself a chance to see what I can do, even when everything else in me is like, “Girl, don’t you give up those benefits. Don’t you quit that 9:00 to 5:00. You are not like these other people. You don’t have a trust fund. Your mom doesn’t have an extra room for you. You can always come home, but you’ll be sleeping on the couch if you do.” Absolutely being in a place of it’s me or It’s nothing, and figuring out that if the chips do fall, if it’s me or it’s nothing, if it’s like I’ve hit rock bottom, that having me is enough to start something new and do it better.

JRW: Having you is enough.

ACF: Yeah, that has been the big thing, and I’m not going to not say it because I’ve got to be real — I learned that from Brené. I learned that when I was living in Indianapolis the first time, I lost three jobs at the same time, my car broke down, I didn’t have nowhere to go, I didn’t have nothing to do, but I had a library across the street. I went across the street and I got The Gifts of Imperfection, and I brought that book home, and I got my little notebook and I sat and I made notes in the book. And at the end of it, I wrote down every publication I wanted to write for, everything I wanted to do as a writer. And I still have that list, and the last thing on that list is publishing a book, which I’ll do in June. But that started from that moment, figuring out that there was more going on in here maybe, than anything anybody had told me, because it was something I had to go find for myself and tell myself. And being self-employed, helped cement that from me, and now I’m here, crying on Zoom, which you know, not my finest moment but…

JRW: Oh yeah it is.

ACF: But I feel good.

JRW: I have to tell you, I actually created, on behalf of Oprah, the imprint that is going to be publishing your book.

ACF: I know. I know you did, Jennifer.

JRW: It’s just so crazy. Talk about the sacred web, it’s just… That story about The Gifts of Imperfection. I’m holding it together because I got tarte mascara on for the first time in 10 months.

BB: Thanks for joining us y’all. I can’t… I got nothing.

JRW: Sorry, I do that.

BB: Yeah, you do.

JRW: My bad.

BB: You know what, I have to go back to something you said. First of all, that story just crushed me. Barrett is sitting here thinking… Is she going to be able to pull this off moving forward? I’m like, I’m 50-50. Don’t look at me.

JRW: I got you pickle sister.

BB: I don’t think there will ever be true liberation for any of us if we are not allowed ample time to think about what we want.

ACF: I agree.

BB: When you said that, I thought that cannot be a luxury for our children, for our sisters, for our brothers. And I’m with you. Sometimes I say to myself — look, better to live disappointed than feel disappointment. Yeah, and so I get that, which is not true, but it’s my armor. But that whole thing that you said that I had time, and you kept saying it, I had time, I had time, not to think about what I didn’t want… We do that all the time, we take all the time in the world to do that, but the self-love and self-trust it takes to say, “I’m going to spend time thinking about what I really want.”

JRW: Absolutely. For me, this whole pandemic has been the first time I haven’t worked since probably the ninth grade and I’ve been taking a page from Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. I’ve been walking my path every day, and in that walking, I realize my story is actually called peace. Like I have finally had just the peace and the time to just think about what I want. That’s how this book was born too, it’s like, Well, I can actually be creative and I can actually make decisions if I just have the time to hear my own voice and be a human being instead of a human doing all the time. So, once you could be a human being then you could be a human being doing. But when you’re always just a human doing, it’s hard to give yourself that spiritual emotional space to… You have to let go of what you are to become what you’re meant to be or what you might be through that space, through that passage.

BB: And that’s a tight wire. That’s a scary portal.

JRW: I may or may not have been bawling my brains out in somebody’s meeting room eating the most delicious egg burrito of my life, making that tight-rope decision. So, believe me, I know there’s nothing scarier than letting go of one ring before you’re holding on to the next ring. Yes, but that becoming, that space that you speak of is so rich and so true. And I agree, we need to democratize that space.

BB: Yeah.

ACF: It really made me sad to realize… One of the things that has been weird for me about going through a healing process is that you keep bumping up against yourself, but you also keep bumping up against other people in your life or your ideas of them, or your projections of them. And being able to have time to think about what I want and realizing how much that has assisted me along every other step in my life has given me such a sense of compassion for my mother.

BB: Oh my God, yes.

JRW: Absolutely.

ACF: It has expanded 100 fold, my love and my sense of compassion for my mother,  because it has taken me so much with no kids, a pretty cool dog, but no kids, and a husband who is incredibly communicative and wonderful and all those things, like his incredible support system. It  has still taken me this much and this long, it has hurt and it has been long and it has been hard, and my mom never really got the shot to take a first step in these directions.

JRW: Ashley, that is something else you and I completely have in common. This book is dedicated to my mother, and single mothers have a whole different world of hurt and pain and guilt and shame for having done the best they could with what they had and what they knew. And I feel that when you heal yourself, you heal generations behind you as well. And so, I have a tremendous, tremendous resonance with what you’re saying.

BB: Yeah, there’s grief in that for me too, thinking about What if my mom would have had a chance?

ACF: Yes. Just a chance.

JRW: What if your mom had a Brené Brown?

BB: I think she made Brené Brown, but she would have never been afforded the luxury of time to think about what she wanted. What she wanted was irrelevant to the world, to the men, to her…

JRW: Reaction, just constantly in reaction.

BB: Yeah, yeah. And service.

JRW: Yep, I agree.

BB: And not in service like the good kind, but in servitude. God, what a great conversation. Rapid fire questions. You ready?

ACF: Ready.

BB: Ashley is going to go first because she says ready first. Ready?

ACF: I’m ready.

[chuckle]

BB: Fill in the blank. Vulnerability is…

ACF: Necessary.

BB: Jennifer, vulnerability is…

JRW: Freedom.

BB: Ashley, you’re called to be brave, but it’s scary and your fear is real, it’s right in your throat. You can feel it. What’s the very first thing you do?

ACF: Open my eyes.

BB: Open your eyes. Jennifer. First thing you do?

JRW: Breathe.

BB: Ashley, what’s something that people often get wrong about you?

ACF: That I’m intimidating. Look at me. Like the brown M&M. I’m so nice.

 JRW: They are delicious.

BB: You are delicious and you are nice, but you are also fierce.

ACF: Very.

BB: So, I can see that. Yeah. Jennifer, what’s something people often get wrong about you?

JRW: I was going to actually say intimidating also.

BB: Yeah.

JRW: I think people perceive that I’m going to be scary or I’m going to be difficult to deal with in some way, or I’m going to not have a genuine sense of humility when I enter a situation. And one of the things I love about kind of being just Jen in Northern California among the redwoods is that I don’t have to have that JRW shadow that gets in front of me wherever I go. I can just be me.

BB: Ashley, last TV show that you binge and loved?

ACF: Ted Lasso.

BB: Oh, yes. Oh yes.

ACF: Ted Lasso.

BB: Ted Lasso, yes.

ACF: Yeah, loved it.

JRW: Ted Lasso, I loved more than anything. The last one that I binged and loved was called The Restaurant. Actually, I’ve been meaning to tell you about it, Brené, it’s fantastic. It set in Stockholm right after World War II. It has a little Downtown Abby, there’s like an Upstairs/ Downstairs thing. This family has had the restaurant in their family for generations. It’s phenomenal, six seasons. I disappeared from my family for two weeks.

BB: Okay. I’m in, that’s great. You know I’m always looking for something like that, that’s like painfully slow character development.

JRW: Exactly.

BB: So that’s great. Okay, Ashley, what are your favorite movies.

ACF: The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Color Purple and The Wife.

BB: Oh. Wow. God damn that movie was hard as hell.

ACF: I love it, I don’t know why I love it so much. Sometimes I just read the screenplay. Like I’ve read the book, but sometimes I just read the screenplay too.

BB: I’m going to have to do an investigation on that. Okay, Jennifer.

JRW: Well, I have too many favorite movies to say, but what I’ll say is, right this second, I just watched Life Is Beautiful, and I hadn’t seen it since it came out in the theaters and I absolutely adored it. I just forgot how funny and light it was, despite the incredibly difficult topic, and it was very funny because I watched it with my son who’d never heard of it, so he had no idea that we were heading head long into a concentration camp, and so he’s laughing and having the best time, and all of a sudden it turns very, very dark, and you could just see he was sort of like “What the hell kind of movie is this?”

BB: Yeah, tough but beautiful.

JRW: Yeah, he absolutely loved it too, so that’s the movie that pops into my head.

BB: I love that. Ashley, a concert you’ll never forget.

ACF: Shania Twain at Madison Square Garden. Riding an electric bull through the crowd. That was my moment, man. That was my moment. You’re still the one, Shania. You’re still the one.

BB: Oh, she’s fierce. She’s a badass.

ACF: I agree.

BB: Jennifer?

JRW: I’m going to go to the first concert I ever went to, which was Simon and Garfunkel in Central Park. Completely life-changing.

BB: If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re a New Yorker.

JRW: I know. Unfortunately, I did get separated from my group for quite some time.

BB: But did you even mind, is the question?

JRW: Not at all. I just attached myself to a new group.

[laughter]

BB: Okay, favorite meal, Ashley.

ACF: Oh my gosh, my favorite meal is when my husband makes me a steak and potatoes and asparagus. That’s my favorite meal.

BB: What kind of potatoes? Like baked potato or a special kind of potatoes?

ACF: He does mashed potatoes. And I don’t watch him put in the cream and butter because I don’t want to know how much is in it.

BB: That’s great.

JRW: It doesn’t count if you don’t see it.

BB: It doesn’t count if you don’t see it.

ACF: It’s just mashed potatoes.

BB: Yeah.

ACF: So, he makes it and it’s delicious every time, and also because I put in zero effort, I think it’s like the little bit of extra flavoring.

BB: Oh God, yes.

ACF: That takes it over the edge.

BB: 100%.

JRW: As I’ve always said that extra little delicious flavor is always butter. The answer is always butter.

ACF: What is that?

BB: Oh, it’s butter.

JRW: Or bacon, depending.

BB: Butter and someone doing it for you. Yes. Favorite meal, Jennifer?

JRW: I would say my all-time favorite meal is meatballs and spaghetti with garlic bread. I mean, that’s just a big old bowl of meatball and spaghetti with parmesan and garlic bread. That is just… I’m in heaven and I can just go. You say, all you can eat. It’s like. All right, you say, Well, let’s go.

BB: You could just tuck right in, huh? Okay. What’s on your nightstand, Ashley?

ACF: My nightstand has my hair bonnet for going to sleep, a glass of water always that maybe I drank, maybe I didn’t, but my husband is always putting a glass of water there hoping that I’ll drink it and always a book. Always a book. I think the book that’s on my nightstand right now is Between Two Kingdoms by…

JRW: Mine too! Sulieka Jamoud. Mine too! That’s on my night table too. I read thirty pages this morning. She has our same pub date.

ACF: Isn’t it beautiful?

JRW: Oh my God, I texted her. It is so magnificent.

BB: I cannot wait.

JRW: She’s a miracle. She’s a miracle.

ACF: I agree.

JRW: She was going to be on our spring tour that we had to cancel. She would have been you together sister on the spring tour.

ACF: I know because we were super excited that we were going to be there together.

JRW: Anyway.

BB: So, we know what’s on your night stand, a book. What else, Jennifer? We know which book, Between Two Kingdoms.

JRW: Exactly, exactly. Also, a glass of water, usually a leftover coffee mug that hasn’t made its way into kitchen sink yet, some face cream and my iPad.

BB: Perfect.

JRW: Oh and my sound machine. Oh it’s… My old-fashioned Hammacher-Schlemmer Sound Machine.

BB: Do you have the ocean, the birds, or the air?

JRW: Warm white noise.

BB: Oh, me too.

JRW: But actually, I’m brown noise. But yeah.

BB: Sometimes I think it’s talking to me through that static. Sometimes I hear conversations.

JRW: Patrick has that too. Patrick has that too. I think that’s…

ACF: There’s a movie called white noise about that. There is. There is. Where a guy hears something in there and it’s his wife.

BB: Oh God, now I’ve got to watch that.

ACF: Go and watch it.

BB: Okay, Ashley, a snapshot of an ordinary moment in your life that gives you real joy.

ACF: Not too long ago, my husband and I and our dog went for a walk and we are on a few acres, is what our house is on. There’s a ravine that leads to a river that we could walk to and we got a little lost and ended up having to climb rocks that led to somebody else’s backyard to get out of there. And also, as we came up in their backyard, they also just happened to be stepping out of their home, and saw us. [chuckle] Lighting up their backyard and they’re just standing there like, “What’s going on?” But we had gone on an adventure and had ended up lost, and it had been a long time since I was lost. And for some reason, it made me giddy. It felt so good to just be in this absurd situation with my two favorite people, my husband and my dog. It made me laugh even as my lungs were burning and I was super tired after climbing this hill, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I keep thinking about how fun it was unexpectedly.

BB: You had all the ingredients.

ACF: I did.

BB: Nature, love and wonder.

ACF: Yes.

BB: Oh good.

JRW: I love that.

BB: What about you Jennifer? Snapshot.

JRW: You know what I was just thinking about this morning, actually waking up really early and my dogs are snoring and my husband is next to me, asleep. And my son is upstairs. And I woke up really early and I knew that we were going to be talking today and I was filled with so much love and joy, and I just got my coffee and it was pitch dark outside. And I just felt, You know, this day is enough. If this is all there is, it’s been a beautiful life beyond anything I ever could have ever imagined. So, this morning, drinking coffee, sending you a text, knowing that we were going to have this conversation today.

BB: Beautiful.

JRW: That’s it.

BB: Yeah, the ordinary moments, right?

JRW: Yeah.

BB: Okay. Y’all sent to us for our mini mixtape five songs you can’t live without. So,  we’ll start with you, Jennifer.

JRW: Okay.

BB: “River” by Joni Mitchell, “This must be the place” by Talking Heads, “As” by Stevie Wonder, “Feeling good,” Nina Simone, “My sweet Lord,” George Harrison and you snuck in a sixth, which I… Only because it’s the song am I going to allow, “Angel from Montgomery” by John Prine.

JRW: That’s so funny. My son was like, “Do you think she would appreciate somebody sending in an extra one?” I said, she doesn’t have to use it. I couldn’t keep behind.

[laughter]

BB: It’s my boy, John Prine, so yeah. So in one sentence, what does this mixtape say about you?

JRW: I’m very connected to the universal consciousness, and that I am most at peace when I am plugged into songs that are about that human experience and that make me feel connected to myself and to everybody else around me.

BB: Beautiful. That’s so good. That’s so on point. Y’all gave us great songs. Ashley C. Ford playlist, killing me right off the bat with the first one. I had to listen to it when I saw it, because it’s such a great… “So Gentle on My Mind” by Glen Campbell, “Call on God” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, “If I Could” by Regina Belle, “This Is It” by Kenny Loggins featuring Michael McDonald, and “On and On” by Gladys Knight & the Pips. In one sentence, what does this mini mixtape say about you, Ashley?

ACF: That I’m having fun and I’m not alone. Every single one of those songs is a song that reminds me of somebody I love or is a song I have with somebody I love. Every single one of those songs, “Gentle on My Mind” is… That’s the song that we played right after we got married, as soon as they said, I now pronounce you husband and wife, we played “Gentle on My Mind” because that’s our song. ”On and On” and Claudine reminds me of me and my mom and my brothers and my sister sitting on her bed on a Sunday afternoon, because Claudine randomly came on TNT, and we just sat there all watching it as a family, all of these songs, every single one of these songs, I share with someone in a special way and we have fun together, I put on fun and I’m never alone in that. I’m never alone in that.

BB: What a beautiful conversation. How do I say thank you to both of you? Just beyond words, I’m so grateful. Congratulations on Hungry Hearts. If you want to see yourself in other people’s stories and be reminded of the inextricable connection that kind of surges through all of us —  this is the book. Thank you all so much for being on the podcast.

JRW: Thank you. I love you both.

ACF: Thank you for having us.

JRW: Thank you so much for having us.

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BB: Sometimes it’s just good to talk to friends, right? And I’m so glad you’re at the table with us. I really appreciate that and this community is always welcome to pull up a chair at our table for these roaring, rovering, heartfelt conversations. You can find Jennifer at @jenniferrwalsh on Instagram and @jennifer_walsh on Twitter. The book is @hungry_hearts on Instagram. Ashley C. Ford is @iSmashFizzle, I, smash, S-M-A-S-H, fizzle, F-I-Z-Z-L-E on Twitter and @smashfizzle on Instagram. Her website is ashleycford.net. Don’t forget that every episode of Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead has an episode page full of all these links on brenebrown.com. While you’re there, join our mailing list so we can keep you in the know about everything we’re up to. Thank you for being here. I’m so glad we get to share stories and find ourselves in each other’s narratives, that’s… I’ll go back to what I said in our first round of three-way questions — without storytelling, I think there’s absolutely nothing. Stay awkward, brave, and kind, friends. I’ll see you next week right here on Spotify. Unlocking Us is a Spotify original from Parcast. It’s hosted by me, Brené Brown, it’s produced by Max Cutler, Kristen Acevedo, Carleigh Madden, and by Weird Lucy Productions. Sound design is by Kristen Acevedo, and music is by the amazing Carrie Rodriguez and the amazing Gina Chavez.

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