A Fresh Story

In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself, Olivia Howell sits down with Rachel Lovitt , a holistic movement coach and Reiki practitioner who helps people reconnect with their bodies, rediscover childlike curiosity, and feel like themselves again. Rachel’s specialty is making self-care radically simple — a refreshing counter to the wellness “noise” around biohacking, optimiz...

In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself , host Olivia Howell sits down with Ron Platt, co-founder of the National Association for Single and Divorced Families (NASDF) — the only national organization built to surround divorcing parents and single-family households with practical products, services, and support in one place. Ron brings a rare combination of insider experti...

At some point, most of us have stood on the edge of a new chapter — a divorce, a move, a loss, a reinvention — and felt the quiet, aching realization that we have no one to call. Not no one, exactly. But no one close enough. No one present. No one who really knows the texture of your everyday life. That loneliness isn't weakness. And according to author Alex Alexander , it isn't permanent either....

Divorce is the intersection of the biggest trauma of your life and the biggest financial decisions of your life — happening at the exact same moment. And yet most people navigate it alone, armed with a lawyer's phone number, a group chat of well-meaning friends, and advice that was never really meant for them. Melissa Murphy Pavone grew up watching what happens when someone has to make those decis...

Some writers come to the page to escape. Jordan Rosenfeld has been doing it since she was seven years old — filling journal after journal, reaching for fiction the way a child who's seen hard things reaches for anything that helps make sense of the world. That instinct never left her. It deepened. And after more than twenty years as a novelist, a writing teacher, and a freelance journalist, she's...

Nobody ever taught us when it's okay to quit. We got the poster on the classroom wall, the T-shirt slogan, the well-meaning advice drilled in from childhood: quitters never win, winners never quit. And so we stay. We stay in the job that's making us miserable. We stay in the relationship that stopped working. We stay in the fertility treatments, the career path, the life we chose at 22, long past...

Nobody tells you that the moment you've been waiting for your whole life might arrive and feel nothing like you expected. You've watched the movies. You've seen the Instagram posts. You know exactly how it's supposed to go — the birth, the first look, the wave of love so overwhelming it changes everything. And then you're in that hospital room, and the feeling you were promised doesn't come, and y...

Perforated is Chloe Yelena Miller' s second full-length collection of poetry, and it holds a particular and beautiful question at its center: who owns a loss? The book is structured around what she calls the New York City poems — prose poems born from a lyric essay about returning to Lower Manhattan on the anniversary of September 11th, a day she experienced as a child in New Jersey who did not pe...

Before she wrote the novel, before the residency, before the ninety thousand words that became her debut — Shasta Grant was a little girl in New Hampshire being raised by her grandparents, carrying questions about her mother that she didn't yet have language for. She didn't know then that those questions would one day find their form on the page. She didn't know she'd spend years writing shorter a...

There's a moment most ambitious women know well — the moment you realize that doing everything "right" didn't get you where you were promised it would. You leaned in. You asked for more. You claimed space at the table. And somehow, the table shrank. Author and financial journalist Stefanie O'Connell has spent a decade sitting with that moment — tracking the data, interviewing the women, and quietl...

Nobody tells you that becoming a mother is a neurological event. Nobody hands you a map for the identity that dissolves in the delivery room — or for the one that quietly, haltingly begins to take shape in its place. Nobody tells you that the intrusive thoughts, the rage, the moments of feeling utterly unrecognizable to yourself are not signs that you're broken. They are signs that your brain is d...

There's a particular kind of courage it takes to host a child's birthday party while your mother is lying in a hospital bed — to blow up balloons and slice cake and smile for photos while your heart is quietly breaking somewhere else entirely. Jocelyn Jane Cox knows that courage intimately. She lived it. And then, with the honesty and precision of a lifelong writer, she wrote it all down. Jocelyn...

Sometimes it takes being broken open to finally go looking for love. For journalist and author Alison Van Diggelen , that breaking came violently and unexpectedly — a terrifying encounter with a dog while hiking in Mexico that shook her to her core and forced her to ask questions she hadn't known she needed to ask. What emerged from that darkness wasn't despair. It was a book. Alison is the author...

For years, Jamilah Lemieux carried a secret fear alongside her story: that if she wrote a book about being a single mother, she would be one forever. That putting it on the page would somehow seal the fate she was quietly desperate to escape — the judgment, the shame, the longing for a different kind of life. It took her literary agent, years of urgency, and finally her own readiness to reckon wit...

There's a moment most mothers know — the one where you're nodding and smiling and saying yes to everyone in the room, all while something small and essential inside of you is screaming. Libby Ward , the Ontario-based content creator, author, and speaker who built a multi-million-person following by dancing, laughing, and telling the absolute truth about the hardest parts of raising children, knows...

There are questions most of us carry in silence—questions we've never felt safe enough to ask out loud, things we didn't learn in any classroom, and experiences we've quietly wondered about in the dark. Myisha Battle has spent her career in those silences, helping people finally say the words they've swallowed for years. As a clinical sexologist and dating coach, she's the person her clients call...

There is a moment—one most parents have had but few will ever admit out loud—where you look at your child and feel something uncomfortably close to dislike. Not a fleeting frustration, but a deep, bewildering wall between you and the small person you love more than life. If you have ever stood there, in that shame-soaked silence, wondering what is wrong with you—or them—then Mary Van Geffen wrote...

Some connections defy explanation. They arrive on a random Tuesday afternoon through a phone scroll, a face you haven't seen in decades, a name that pulls you back to childhood hallways — and suddenly, the universe has done the thing it sometimes does, folding time neatly in half. That is exactly how host Olivia Howell found herself reconnecting with Zahra Tangorra , an old schoolmate from the Nor...

There is something quietly radical about a journalist who turns her most pressing obsession—the thing that keeps her up at night, filling spreadsheets and firing off emails at 2 a.m.—into a book that asks the rest of us to pay closer attention. Fortesa Latifi is that journalist, and her debut book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online is one of those rare work...

What if the very word "mother" has been quietly shrinking you your whole life — not because you didn't love being one, but because no one ever told you that you were allowed to be more than one? That's the question at the heart of this week's conversation on A Fresh Story: Book Talk, and it's the kind of question that lingers long after you've set down the book that asked it. Dr. Gertrude Lyons is...

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes when your life is being dismantled — not by accident, but by necessity. When Heather Quick walks into a courtroom, she carries with her more than case files and legal strategy. She carries two-plus decades of watching women rebuild from the inside out — women who walked in terrified and walked out, eventually, transformed. A 26-year family law att...

Some of us learned very early that love could be unpredictable. That the sound of a car pulling into the driveway meant something different in our house. That being the last kid picked up from school wasn't just inconvenient—it was a whole education in holding your breath. Cassidy Gard, debut memoirist and former television producer, grew up being that kid: hyperaware, fiercely observant, and alre...

There are moments that crack something open in you — moments you can't unhear, can't unsee, can't unfeel. For Lori Sugarman Lee, that moment came across a desk from an insurance agent who looked at her years of raising children, moving her family across continents, building communities from scratch, and sustaining a household with fierce devotion — and said, simply, "You're just a housewife. There...

In this episode of A Fresh Story: Simple Tips to Support Yourself, host Olivia Howell sits down with Meredith Beardmore — therapist, author, and YouTuber — whose entire practice is dedicated to helping women navigate the painful and often overlooked experience of loving someone with an addiction. With both professional expertise and personal lived experience, Meredith brings rare authority to a to...

Some people lose their footing early. For Jacque Gorelick, that unmooring came at eight years old, the morning her mother died. What followed was a childhood she describes as a snow globe someone had shaken and never set down — chaotic, rootless, and full of grief she didn't yet have words for. But grief has a way of waiting for us. And Jacque's memoir, Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and...