Babes in Bookland: Your Favorite Women's Bookclub Podcast

What happens when the "honest mom" finally tells you the parts she's never posted? This week I'm talking with Libby Ward about her memoir, Honest Motherhood . Libby built an audience of over 2 million by naming the mental load, the mother wound, and the impossible pressure to be everything. But the book goes further than any caption ever could: her rural church upbringing and the deconstruction th...

Thank you for being here! Today, we look back on a few of my favorite clips from the past three seasons! xx, Alex Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How can you reclaim your truth and your power? We’re diving into Horse Barbie, Geena Rocero’s radiant and illuminating memoir that shows her journey from a one-room home in Manila, Philippians, to trans pageants, from the perfume counter at Macy’s to New York fashion sets, and from private, suffocating, fear to a TED Talk that reframed transness as power. Along the way, we discuss her father’s com...

What questions should you be asking the people you love while you still can? That's the thread running through this conversation with Dorothy Roberts, whose memoir  The Mixed Marriage Project started with a stack of boxes. After her parents passed, Dorothy opened them and found nearly 500 interviews her white father had conducted with interracial couples in Chicago, beginning in 1937, almost...

What would it mean to build women's sports around women's bodies?  This week, my friend Becca returns to discuss Lauren Fleshman's memoir "Good for a Girl". What starts as a running memoir quickly reveals itself as something far bigger: an investigation into the science of female puberty and athletics, the eating disorder epidemic inside women's collegiate and professional sports, and one wom...

What would change if women stopped being silent about the hardest parts of their lives? This week, I sit down with psychologist, author, and advocate Dr. Jessica Zucker, the woman behind the viral #IHadAMiscarriage movement, to discuss her memoir  I Had a Miscarriage  and her newest book Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women's Lives . TW: Infant loss, pre...

This week, Brett is back for a bonus episode and we are getting into "Famesick", Lena Dunham's new memoir about illness, ambition, Hollywood, and whether any of it was worth it. Brett isn't just any reader here — she worked closely with Lena during the Girls era at United Talent Agency, which means this conversation comes with some serious behind-the-scenes context that you are not going to get an...

Belle Burden's divorce memoir, Strangers , is the book everyone's talking about! She's a Harvard-educated lawyer, a Vanderbilt heiress, a hedge fund husband, and a life that unraveled with a single voicemail. But why are we so obsessed with this woman's problems? On this Bite-Sized Babes, I break down the instant #1 NYT bestseller with some hot takes: the transformation the book promises vs. what...

Can nice girls win? You know her as one of the most iconic players in Survivor history, but Parvati Shallow's memoir, Nice Girls Don't Win, reveals the story behind the strategy. My friend, Diliana, joins me as we dive deep into Parvati's remarkable journey from growing up in a cult-like commune called The Ranch, to winning Survivor twice, to finally doing the hardest thing of all: healing. We exp...

One good choice can re-route an entire life, but only if you trust yourself enough to make it.  I sit down with memoirist Cassidy Gard to talk about the real story behind her healing memoir, "Cosmic Goodness: Surrendering the Shadows to Live in the Light." We also get delightfully specific about book cover decisions, permissions, and why the right quote can set the emotional tone for a chapte...

A glossy, star-studded book launch. A memoir that rockets past 100,000 copies. Then a wave of silence from major reviewers, an investigative report, and a scientific debate that refuses to stay theoretical. We’re talking about Amy Griffin’s The Tell and the chaos that followed its triumphant debut, where celebrity endorsement meets the most contested questions in trauma psychology. My friend, Cole...

Is it possible to see joy in life's hardest moments? I sit down with memoirist Alexandra to talk about her memoir, Seeing Joy: A Story of Life, Death, and What Comes Next. We dig into how Alexandra’s story began as a caregiving blog in 2006, written first for friends and family and then embraced by strangers who recognized their own fear and tenderness in her honesty. She shares what it took...

Kate Quinn has a rare talent. She can drop you into another time period so completely that you forget you’re reading, then hit you with a detail that makes you realize how much of women’s history has been ignored, softened, or simply left out.  In our first Friday Fiction episode, I sit down with the New York Times bestselling author behind her newest release, The Astral Library, The Briar Club, ...

Some stories don’t just break the silence, they explain how silence gets built in the first place. This week, I’m joined by author Andrea Leeb to talk about her memoir Such a Pretty Picture , an account of surviving childhood sexual abuse, living with complex trauma and CPTSD, and finding a path back to yourself that isn’t linear or tidy but is real. Andrea shares the early moments that shaped her...

Are you selfish? “Selfish” is supposed to be the insult that ends the conversation, especially for women who were raised to be helpful, agreeable, and endlessly available. We sit down with author Kerry Docherty to pull that word apart and rebuild it into something sharper and more useful: self-awareness, honest boundaries, and the courage to admit what you want before you burn out trying to be “go...

Brandy Norwood’s memoir, Phases , is the kind of celebrity memoir that makes you grateful for the music and furious about the machine behind it. My friend Kate and I revisit Brandy’s cultural landmarks like Moesha, Cinderella, and “The Boy Is Mine,” then zoom out to the bigger question: what happens when an industry profits from a “good girl” image and leaves no room for a young Black woman to be...

She graduates near the top of her veterinary class and still couldn't get hired... because she’s a woman! That’s where our conversation with memoirist Linda Rhodes begins and it only gets more vivid, entertaining, and frustrating from there. Linda and I talk about her book Breaking the Barnyard Barrier: A Woman Veterinarian Paves the Way and the reality of becoming a large animal veterinarian...

Is life destiny or choice? "Drink from the Nile" is a phrase in Egypt that promises if you drink from the Nile river, you’re destined to return. Katya Dunko's memoir, named for this phrase, is her refusal to let destiny be controlled by generational trauma. She broke the chain. We talk about the real story behind her jaw-dropping book: growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine, being stowed away on a...

How do you break free of one legacy to cement your own?  We’re back with a bite-sized Babes in Bookland mini review of Liza Minnelli’s memoir “Kid, Wait Till You Hear This,” and it’s equal parts warm, jaw-dropping, and quietly devastating. I went in expecting old Hollywood stories and iconic name-drops. I got those... but I didn’t expect a brutally honest look at what fame can cost a family behind...

Author Ayana Lage joins the show to talk about Missing Me , her memoir of postpartum psychosis and the long road back.  We talk about perfectionism as a coping strategy, anxiety as a lifelong undercurrent, and the exhausting need to be seen as “good” while feeling like you’re failing inside. Ayana shares how she turned hospital journals and medical records into a tightly crafted, nonlinear memoir,...

A memoir can feel like a mirror you didn’t ask for.  We opened Christina Applegate’s and found an unvarnished account of survival: a child actor who worked to live, a dancer who prayed with her body, an artist who hid behind “Christina Applegate” until truth demanded center stage.   We dig into the fault lines: body image and shame running alongside career highs; Sweet Charity on Broadway as a mas...

Think you know Demi Moore? Think again.  My friend, Mackenzie, and I peel back the tabloid myths to trace a far more gripping arc: a child who found safety in hospital routines because home was chaos, a teenager forced to protect herself when the adults failed, and an artist who spent years equating value with a number on the scale while breaking box‑office ceilings and cultural taboos. Guided by...

Ever picked up a buzzy memoir and felt the heart was missing beneath the hype?  I sit down with Ryley from the Little Miss Podcast to unpack Elyse Myers’ debut: the charming illustrations, a few resonant lines on anxiety and connection, and the recurring moments where the story stops just shy of reckoning. We wanted the hinge points—the cause, the cost, the change—and too often found stylized vign...

What does it mean to move shame back where it belongs? We dive into Gisele Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides—a memoir that confronts sexual violence, courtroom language, and public accountability while fiercely protecting the survivor’s right to joy. I trace Pellicot’s path from the shocking discovery of years of drugging and assault to the rare choice of an open hearing and the...

Can you hold two truths at once?   I sit down with author and sociologist Deborah J. Cohan to explore her memoir, Welcome to Wherever We Are , a clear-eyed look at psychological abuse, loyalty, and the quiet heroics of caregiving. From the first moments, Deborah names what so many experience but struggle to articulate—gaslighting, threats, verbal assaults, and financial control—and shows how a chi...