Chasing Life

She's the author of a dozen books on food and Food Politics, which is also the name of her daily blog.

His first book is called Life as We Know It Can Be, Stories of People, Climate and Hope in a Changing World.

And the book was published this month.

I wanted to really congratulate you on writing this book, Life as We Know It Can Be, Stories of People, Climate and Hope in a Changing World.

Well, when I sat down and really it was sort of the letters, the Earth Day letters to River were gonna be a book.

And I knew that I wanted it to be coming from the point of view of how to build a life on this planet that we built for him.

She even wrote a cookbook called Spice Box Kitchen.

You know, my cookbook, Spice Box Kitchen focuses on that because one, I love spices but they're also, they have health benefits.

And we're not even gonna find scientific papers. We're gonna find popular books by Michael Pollan and Marian Nestle and Eric Schlosser and Jonathan Safran Foer and have them, it's gonna be a discussion-based class.

And we're not even gonna find scientific papers. We're gonna find popular books by Michael Pollan and Marian Nestle and Eric Schlosser and Jonathan Safran Foer and have them, it's gonna be a discussion-based class.

And we're not even gonna find scientific papers. We're gonna find popular books by Michael Pollan and Marian Nestle and Eric Schlosser and Jonathan Safran Foer and have them, it's gonna be a discussion-based class.

He's a psychotherapist whose book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, was sent to me by a listener named Cynthia, whose son John died in 2016 when he was 32.

I started The Wild Edge of Sorrow and it blew me away. I underlined things on nearly every page.

Francis Weller's book, which I really recommend, is called The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief.

I just reread Joan Didion's book.

She said, I know why we try to keep the dead alive. We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point, there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead.

I'm sure you read this book, Forgiven Remember, Charles Bosk.

This came out in the early 70s. Interestingly enough, when I was a surgery resident, our chief of surgery, a guy named Bob Bartlett at the University of Michigan, recommended that we all read this book.

And it was about medical failure, but it was interesting to your point. Forgiveness, people often say forgive and forget. You're not saying forgive and forget. You're saying Forgive and Remember. Remember in new ways, without the rancor, without the rage welling up inside us again.

In fact years after posting that first TikTok, Kasey wrote a book. It's called How to Keep House While Drowning.

I want people to know that care tasks, whether it's cooking, cleaning, dishes, feeding yourself, getting into the shower, they are morally neutral.

You do make the case in your book that I guess there are some universally applicable tips.

Casey talks about this in her book and has tips for hacking what she calls fair rest.

I know when I went out and got the Marie Kondo book, there was no part of me that was like, hmm, maybe I'll implement one of these ideas.

Okay, so this is my whole next book. And it's one of my former books called Why Him, Why Her, why you fall in love with one person rather than another.

And your culture is going to say, oh, yes, you should marry an Indian girl or, oh boy, you should try a whole different part of the world. It would be much more interesting for you, whatever.

This is the part that you are asking for. Why do we, are we naturally drawn to some people rather than others?

His latest book is called Holly, and instead of rabid dogs or murderous prom queens, it revolves around something very real, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Holly was supposed to be a walk on character in Mr. Mercedes. She was this introverted, almost on the spectrum woman who wrote poetry and pretty much stayed in her room and didn't want to have a whole lot to do with people and was kind of this muttering little plain faced woman.

But what I liked about Holly was that with every book you see her come out of her shell more and you see the combination of this person who is timid and a kind of OCD. As I say, she's almost on the spectrum, but at the same time, she's bright and she's brave.

It's it's there's a lot in this book. But but those that issue, what made you decide to go there?

Well, I wanted to write about the COVID period in a very realistic way because Holly was set in the year 2021, which was the height of the COVID epidemic.

Holly was supposed to be a walk on character in Mr. Mercedes. She was this introverted, almost on the spectrum woman who wrote poetry and pretty much stayed in her room and didn't want to have a whole lot to do with people and was kind of this muttering little plain faced woman.

She's also a professional chef. She's the author of the books, This is Your Brain on Food and Calm Your Mind with Food.

She co-wrote Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending.

And she spends a lot of her time debunking money myths. This notion that money cannot buy happiness is just like patently false.

I remember like 11 year old Maya who would take her Calvin and Hobbes books and put them on her music stand over over her sheet music.

Her book, The Menopause Brain, comes out in March 2024 and goes much deeper into this phase of life and how women can make it work for them.

I have a book called The How of Happiness and the theme of that book. It was one of the very, very early books before like the happiness kind of revolution started. It's fit.

The healthiest relationships is when we can feel psychologically safe to communicate to others.

Often as I'm hearing people talk about their conversations with others, I have to ask the question, did you say that or did you think that?

Because so much of what we're displaying and saying to other people, it's our thoughts. It's not things that we actually said.

So there has to be a lot of practice around, okay, I understand what you think about this situation. Now how do you say it to this person in a way that hopefully they'll be able to understand?

So often it is us assuming or expecting someone to be upset, to say no, that keeps us from actually asking questions, speaking more about what we need.