What does it take to keep becoming?

We dive into Michelle Obama’s memoir with a candid, hopeful conversation about where identity starts, how it stretches, and why purpose, not pageantry, changes lives. Becoming is more than a political memoir; it’s a field guide for growth when the ground shifts under your feet.

From a tight-knit South Side home to Princeton lecture halls and the relentless spotlight of the White House, we follow the real work behind “Becoming”: respecting kids as full people, naming systemic barriers without losing heart, and finding tools for reflection that actually fit your life.

We talk about confidence as a practice, not a trait, and the power of saying yes to yourself when the room says no. You’ll hear how Michelle reframed the First Lady role around substance and how those choices challenged corporate norms while building common ground. We also get real about the invisible labor of women, the racialized scrutiny that followed her every outfit and sentence, and the line that still echoes: grief and resilience live together.

If news fatigue has dimmed your hope, this episode offers practical ways to protect it: curate your inputs, seek help when you need it, and anchor to community. We share simple habits: quiet walks, gratitude notes, honest check-ins that keep optimism alive without ignoring pain. It’s a warm, grounded tour through the memoir’s biggest lessons on leadership, partnership, and civic action, designed for anyone asking how to stay human and useful when progress stalls.

Come for the stories; leave with a sturdier stance. If this conversation resonates, tap follow, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.

Support the show:
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If you have any comments or questions, please connect with me on Instagram or email babesinbooklandpodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear your suggestions and feedback!

Link to this episode’s book:
Michelle Obama’s “Becoming”

Transcripts are available through apple’s podcast app—they may not be perfect, but relying on them allows me to dedicate more time to the show! If you’re interested in being a transcript angel, let me know.

This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Theme song by Devin Kennedy

Special thanks to my dear friend, Jaime!

Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod

If belonging feels like love, purpose, and family… how do you tell when it’s actually something darker?

In this episode, we sit with the hard truths behind Bethany Joy Lenz’s memoir Dinner for Vampires. Through the quiet metaphor of a “meal” that slowly turns devouring, Joy reveals how a search for purpose and belonging can be manipulated by those who feed on vulnerability. We explore the slow erosion of identity, the psychological grip of coercive groups, and the courage it takes to push back from a table that was never nourishing you. This conversation looks beyond the headlines and asks what it really means to reclaim your voice after years spent in the shadows.

We talk cult dynamics 101: us-versus-them thinking, leaders without oversight, and the chilling rule Joy names so clearly: “in a cult, safety means agreement." Still, this isn’t a story about losing faith; it’s about reclaiming it.

If you want a gripping, clear-eyed look at coercive control, Hollywood pressure, and the courage it takes to walk away, press play. Then join the conversation: subscribe, share this with a friend who loves memoirs and media. If you like what you hear, please leave a review!

If you leave a kind review, I might read it at top of show!

For the extended discussion of this episode (an additional 15 min), subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon.

Support the show:
Buy us a book
Buy cute merch

Buy Dinner For Vampires

Other Links:
Watch A Biltmore Christmas
Which Disney Princess Are You?
Psalty’s Salvation Celebration
Variety- One Tree Hill Cast, Crew Detail Assault, Harassment Claims Against Mark Schwahn

Transcripts are available through Apple’s podcast app—they may not be perfect, but relying on them allows me to dedicate more time to the show! If you’re interested in being a transcript angel, let me know.

This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Technical editing done by Brianna Picone.
Theme song by Devin Kennedy

Special thanks to my dear friend, Priscilla!
Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod

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 complicated love, her mother’s unwavering belief and reflect on what can spark when the people who matter most tell you there’s nothing wrong with you.

Geena’s story and memoir widens from personal to political: pre-colonial history without gendered pronouns, the costs of documentation that doesn’t match your face, and the power of her viral TED Talk to turn shame into strength. We sit with the big questions: Why is femininity seen as a threat? How do entertainment and policy diverge? What changes when a community moves from visibility to rights? By the end, Horse Barbie reads like a manual for courage. It shows how story becomes strategy and how one woman’s voice can help many step out of the shadows.

If you care about trans rights, immigration, pageant culture, modeling, or the way love can change a life, this conversation brings nuance, warmth, and a clear takeaway: policy matters, family matters, and stories move hearts faster than arguments ever will.

If the conversation resonates, subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who needs a hopeful, human lens on trans life and advocacy.

If you leave a kind review, I might read it at top of show!

For the extended discussion of this episode (an additional 24 min), subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon.

Support the show:
Buy us a book
Buy cute merch

Buy Horse Barbie

Other Links:
Evan Hurst substack

Transcripts are available through Apple’s podcast app—they may not be perfect, but relying on them allows me to dedicate more time to the show! If you’re interested in being a transcript angel, let me know.

This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Theme song by Devin Kennedy

Special thanks to my dear friend, Jaime!
Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod

What if home isn’t a place you find, but a place you build step by step?

I sit down with author and family physician, Brittany Penner, to unpack Children Like Us: A Métis Woman's Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home, her powerful Métis memoir about identity, adoption, and the radical work of healing. From being carried out of the hospital by a social worker to navigating a white Mennonite upbringing, Brittany traces how the Sixties Scoop shaped her beginnings and how lineage still insists on being seen-- in faces, gestures, and the stories that refuse to disappear.

Brittany shares the artistic leap that changed everything: throwing away a 100,000-word draft(!!!) and rebuilding the book through photographs and VHS tapes. We talk about using images to verify memory, honor body knowledge, and write with precision without losing lyric grace. She opens up about medicine too and reveals how tending to her own pain transformed how she advocates for Indigenous women in clinical settings, why believing someone can be the most clinical act of all, and how she protects joy in her creative life so it doesn’t calcify under the weight of systems.

At the heart of this conversation is a simple practice with a profound arc: walking herself home. After a separation that reawakened old losses, Brittany found steadiness in daily walks, watching seasons turn as grief softened. We explore found family, kinship that ignores the word “half,” and the way motherhood reframes generational trauma with tenderness and resolve.

If you’re wrestling with where you belong, how to write your truth, or how to hold hope when hope feels heavy, this episode offers a map that is honest and quietly brave.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review. Your words help others find these conversations :) And if you leave a kind review, I might read it at top of show!

Support the show:
Buy us a book
Buy cute merch

Buy Brittany Penner's "Children Like Us"

Transcripts are available through Apple’s podcast app—they may not be perfect, but relying on them allows me to dedicate more time to the show! If you’re interested in being a transcript angel, let me know.

This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Theme song by Devin Kennedy

Special thanks to my new friend, Brittany!
Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod

What a treat! This month's Bonus Episode: What Lies Beneath is available for all! No subscription required :)

PLEASE if you have not watched the movie, do that first and then listen to this episode!

My friend, Priscilla, stops in for a deep dive into why this psychological thriller still stings: Michelle Pfeiffer’s nerve and nuance, Harrison Ford’s brilliant portrayal, and Robert Zemeckis’s love letter to Hitchcock that uses mirrors, windows, and water to make the ordinary feel unsafe.

We unpack the film’s design from the ground up, including a Nantucket-style lake house built to glow in daylight and brood at dusk, multiple bathroom sets engineered for those impossible angles, and CGI used with restraint: steam that writes, reflections that betray, a ghost that returns for one exquisite moment of justice. The camera starts at eye level and sinks lower as dread rises, and Alan Silvestri’s score threads anxiety through every door creak and bathtub ripple. It’s meticulous craft serving a clean, propulsive plot: seance to possession, repressed memory to reveal, paralytic serum to bathtub suffocation, bridge crash to lakebed truth.

At the heart is a theme that still resonates-- how a woman’s intuition gets minimized when her evidence looks like superstition. Claire’s haunted house becomes a map of gaslighting—neighbors who might be violent, a husband who “cares,” a past smudged by trauma. Step by step, the film tests what we believe and why, until the lake gives up what the living tried to hide. Whether you think the marketing blunted the twist or simply reframed the suspense, the story’s spine holds: nothing stays buried forever.

If you loved the breakdown, check out our Bonus Episodes (available on Patreon or Apple Podcasts) for more smart deep dives!

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod

What if the phrases you hear in a workout could actually carry you through the hardest chapters of your life?

My friend Suz and I sat down with Emma Lovewell’s memoir, "Live Learn Love Well", and followed the thread from the bike to real-world resilience: family roots on Martha’s Vineyard, the ache of divorce, the shock of loss, and the steady return to self through movement, mindfulness, and self-respect.

We talk about why “progress, not perfection” is more than a punchy motto—it’s a practical way to live when goals get heavy and life gets loud. You’ll hear how Emma’s early exposure to meditation and her mother’s fearless body comfort set the tone for emotional tools that actually work. We also dig into gardening as a life practice: patience, compost as “valuable trash,” and the deep peace of tending something you can control when everything else feels uncertain.

Her care your identity shines through every page as Emma aims to help us all discover our Voice. She shares what it meant to feel caught between cultures as a half Chinese woman, and how a trip to Taiwan reframed belonging as a bridge rather than a gap. Suz and I reflect on forgiving without forgetting and learning to shout out your wins—big and small—so opportunities can find you. If you need a reset that blends therapy-backed tools with sweat-tested wisdom, this conversation meets you where you are and walks beside you, one honest rep at a time.

If this resonated, follow and subscribe, share with a friend who loves Peloton or a good memoir, and leave a quick review. Your support helps more curious listeners find the show and build their own best days.

If you leave a kind review, I might read it at top of show!

For the extended discussion of this episode (an additional 7 min), subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon.

Support the show:
Buy us a book
Buy cute merch

Buy “Live Learn Love Well”

Suz and I’s favorite mantras:
Tunde’s “It’s a great day to have a great day!”
“You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only option”

Transcripts are available through Apple’s podcast app—they may not be perfect, but relying on them allows me to dedicate more time to the show! If you’re interested in being a transcript angel, let me know.

This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Theme song by Devin Kennedy

Special thanks to my dear friend, Suz!
Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod

A crowded waiting room where no one speaks.

That image frames my conversation with author Amy Gallo Ryan, whose memoir You May Feel a Bit of Pressure captures the invisible weight of infertility. Its medical routines, social silences, and the way hope can both carry and cut. We dig into why she wrote the book she couldn’t find, how ten years of drafting and revising turned chaos into story, and what it means to share the truth when the truth isn’t tidy.

Amy walks us through the physical and emotional toll of treatment (which includes Clomid, IUI, and IVF) and the quieter ruptures few people see: friendships painfully pushed away, a life controlled by injection routines and months of hope lost to blood work results, and a body that starts to feel separate from the self. We talk about identity, shame, and the primal pull to parent that defies tidy logic. We also pull back the curtain on publishing: querying too early, near‑misses, parting with an agent, and ultimately finding the right indie press.

If this conversation moved you, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs to feel seen, and leave a review telling us what moment stayed with you. It helps others find the stories that help them feel less alone.

Support the show:
Buy us a book
Buy cute merch

Buy Amy's memoir

Transcripts are available through apple’s podcast app—they may not be perfect, but relying on them allows me to dedicate more time to the show! If you’re interested in being a transcript angel, let me know.

This episode is produced, recorded, and edited by me.

Theme song by Devin Kennedy

Special thanks to my new friend, Amy. Your book is beautiful and so are you!

Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod

What does it feel like when your voice is taken from you?

In Britney Spears' groundbreaking memoir "The Woman in Me," we finally hear directly from the pop icon herself after years of silence enforced by a suffocating conservatorship.

Reading this memoir alongside my good friend Lizzie was a profound experience. Britney's story isn't just celebrity gossip; it's a stark warning about how easily a woman's autonomy can be stripped away under the guise of "protection." While she was creating chart-topping albums and performing sold-out Vegas residencies, her father controlled every aspect of her life, even pocketing more of her earnings than she received herself!!!

The book reframes moments we thought we understood through a completely different lens. That head-shaving incident? A desperate act of rebellion from a mother who'd been blocked from seeing her children. Those "erratic" public appearances? Often the result of being drugged without her consent. Throughout it all, Britney clung to performing as her sanctuary (she writes, "When I sing, I own who I am") even as that gift was weaponized against her.

What struck me most was Britney's resilience and grace. Despite everything she endured, from the cruel public scrutiny of her body as a teenager to having her children used as leverage against her, she never completely lost her sense of self or her capacity for joy. Her journey from "passive, people-pleasing girl to strong, confident woman" offers inspiration to anyone who has felt silenced.

This memoir serves as both personal catharsis and cultural reckoning. How do we treat women in the spotlight? Why do we place impossible expectations on them? And how did we allow a system to imprison someone in plain sight for thirteen years?

Britney's powerful declaration that "You have to speak the thing that you're feeling, even if it scares you" isn't just her healing manifesto, it's a call to all of us to examine how we participate in a culture that both elevates and destroys the women we claim to admire.

Join us for this deeply moving conversation about freedom, voice, and the courage to reclaim your narrative against all odds. Share your thoughts with us on Instagram @babesinbooklandpod—we'd love to hear which parts of Britney's story resonated most with you.

If you leave a kind review, I might read it at top of show!

For the extended discussion of this episode (an additional 10 min), subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon.

Support the show:
Buy us a book
Buy cute merch

Buy “The Woman in Me” by Britney Spears

Transcripts are available through Apple’s podcast app—they may not be perfect, but relying on them allows me to dedicate more time to the show! If you’re interested in being a transcript angel, let me know.

This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Theme song by Devin Kennedy

Special thanks to my dear friend, Lizzie!
Xx, Alex

Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!

Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod