Wide Awake in Midlife: Jen Hatmaker on Rebuilding a Life You Truly Love
Show Snapshot:
Midlife can shatter the life you planned—and hand you a better one. At 46, Jen Hatmaker, author of 15 books and five New York Times bestsellers, discovered her 26-year marriage was over. What followed became "Awake," an instant NYT-bestseller and a blueprint for reinvention. Jen has been on Katie's dream guest list since day one, and this conversation did not disappoint. If you've ever felt like your best years are behind you, this episode will change that. We explore why midlife is the right time to stop hustling past your grief, how your body (not your brain) holds the key to healing, and how one bold solo trip rewired Jen’s life. Listen in and start planning your own midlife “Me Camp,” beauties.
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Quotable:
"We either get to wring our hands and fret and worry that our best years are in the rearview mirror—or we get to reclaim it."
Transcript:
[0:03] Katie Fogarty
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty.
[0:11] Katie Fogarty
Beauties, I have recorded more than 270 podcast episodes over five years. I've had incredible pinch-me conversations, like interviewing the former First Lady of Canada, Sophie Trudeau, and hanging with fashion OG Stacey London on a podcast mic, but today I am over the moon about our guest. So let me take a minute to zoom back. Several months ago I was out in Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest, and a woman I know, Amy Nelson, who is the ultimate connector, asked me if I would lead a fireside chat with Jen Hatmaker. I could not say yes fast enough. I was all, put me in, coach. I do not need to prep. I don't even need to Google. I have been following Jen's writing and work for years. If you had asked me to name a dream guest to have on A Certain Age when I started podcasting five years ago, Jen was so high up on that list, so I was knocked out and thrilled to get a chance to hang out with her in Austin, and I'm even more excited that she is joining me for the show today. Jen Hatmaker is the author of 15 books, including five New York Times bestsellers. She's the host of the beloved podcast For the Love. She's a speaker, a storyteller. She reaches millions of women across her platforms. Her most recent book, Awake, debuted as an instant New York Times bestseller. I've been following Jen since 2013
[1:41] Katie Fogarty
because of her humor, her wisdom — I love her writing and what she brings out into the world. She shares her life, her evolutions, her iterations so openly. She encouraged us all to be a little bit braver and more curious about how we walk through the world. I am so excited for this one. Welcome to A Certain Age, Jen.
[2:04] Jen Hatmaker
That is so nice. Thank you. Oh, sweet intro.
[2:10] Katie Fogarty
Well, thank you. I'm totally thrilled. And when Amy said, 'What do you think about this?' I was like, done, done, and done. I am so excited about this. We are going to get to crack open the pages of your latest book, Awake, and I want to talk about your writing and storytelling, but before we do that, I want to just ask you about something that I saw on your website. When we pop over to your website, you introduce yourself and you share that you're an author and a podcaster, an advocate, speaker, mama — but you also declare yourself to be a midlife reclaimer, and I was like, I need to know more about this. Walk us through what you mean by midlife reclaimer.
[2:48] Jen Hatmaker
Sure, I'm 51 — so I don't know if that counts as midlife, but I think it does.
[2:56] Jen Hatmaker
I have found myself in the last
[2:59] Jen Hatmaker
six years
[3:01] Jen Hatmaker
in the position of reclaiming my life, and some of that was by choice, and some of it was by force.
[3:10] Jen Hatmaker
I lead a couple million women, and I notice that tends to be the story that most of us are handed — an invitation for reinvention and reclamation around this age.
[3:28] Jen Hatmaker
A myriad, frankly, of transitions right now. Our roles inside our family are changing, our kids are growing and launching, parenting looks different, our bodies are changing — most of us are in perimenopause or menopause.
[4:00] Jen Hatmaker
Our careers are taking interesting turns. This is the phase where a lot of us are having changes in our marriages, whether for better or for worse — a lot of endings. And our friendships are evolving at this stage of life. So we're just in turmoil. I mean, we're in a lot of upheaval. And so this is a chance that we either get to just wring our hands and fret and regret and worry that our best years are in the rearview mirror, or we get to reclaim
[4:35] Jen Hatmaker
it.
[4:35] Katie Fogarty
And what does reclaiming it look like? I know we're going to explore a little bit about how it works in terms of your book Awake and what it meant in terms of your life, but reclaim is such a powerful, optimistic word, because I think it implies agency and it implies that we are behaving with intention and really involved with the process. Why reclaim versus just reinvent?
[4:58] Jen Hatmaker
Well, I mean, it can really — I only speak specifically to that in a personal scenario in my life. I had to reclaim because I lost a 26-year marriage, so I'd been married my entire adult life. I got married when I was 19. I wasn't even an adult when I got married, and I had no independent adult experience, I had no autonomy. I went from my dad's house to a dorm room to the marriage bed before I exited my sophomore year of college. So for me to have lost my marriage in a shocking way, in an unpredictable way, in 2020 — I had no choice. I faced a reckoning of reclamation, because all of a sudden I was standing on my own two feet, and only my feet, in every facet of my life — as a parent, as a homeowner, as a business owner, a professional, inside my friend group. It was just a complete sea change for me. And so I didn't just reinvent — I had to reclaim. I had to reclaim my own independence. I had to reclaim my own financial story and future for the first time in my life, really, across the board. And so for me this was not like a breezy, easy, happy skip down the road. I had to come face to face with so many areas of my life where I was under-equipped, I was under-educated, I was under-experienced. I had either phoned it in or, frankly, been taken advantage of to such a degree that I had to start from scratch, and I really had to rebuild my life inside a completely different container.
[6:57] Katie Fogarty
Your book opens with such an explosive scene — realizing your husband of 26 years is having an affair. This scene is gripping, it's propulsive. You pull the reader right in, and a reader might expect that the rest of the book that unfolds is going to be a divorce story and memoir. And while that is certainly one of the threads that runs throughout the book, there are multiple themes that really shaped your sense of self and identity, and your relationship — the church systems that you were raised in, patriarchy. You talk a lot about body shame and what it means to be a woman in the world, to walk through the world that we're all living in right now. I would love to hear your thinking on how the word reckoning that you used — how these systems intersected with your divorce, and which, if any, were harder to navigate.
[7:45] Jen Hatmaker
Yeah, I always say that Awake is really a small story inside a big story. The small story is divorce, and it's very specific to me and my family, and my particular version of it. But it is really nestled inside a much larger story that has tendrils that go out far and wide for virtually every woman anywhere near our season of life, and they're impossible to extrapolate from the story of my marriage and the story of my adulthood. So certainly growing up in a highly conservative, kind of high-control religious environment was absolutely formative — I mean, to my worldview, to my experience in a handful of ways, to some positive habits and interpersonal connections in my life for sure, but in a larger amount of ways contributed to a lot of body dissociation and gender limitations, and what ultimately looked like me co-signing onto the effects of misogyny in my own life — inside my marriage, but also inside my work. And it's not just me. I mean, I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, but a lot of my community members, anybody who grew up in kind of a high-control religious environment, understands the narratives that we were handed about women, about authority, about sex, about who has the final say in what we perceive and choose and believe. And I was taught very early and very often that I was not a reliable narrator in my own life, that I could not be trusted, that my heart and mind and desires were squirrely at best, downright diabolical at worst, that anything that I wanted was considered selfish. My highest offering was to put myself last, and that was not ambiguous — that's the language that was used. Others first, you last. And I understand — I think the motivation behind that came from a better place, but the implications of a generation of women who were told that it wasn't just their duty, but their holy and acceptable sacrifice to be last place in any given scenario really created a mess. And so I moved into marriage like that, I moved into adulthood like that. It took a really long time to reverse that narrative, and I'm still working on
[10:47] Katie Fogarty
it. So, Jen, was the writing of this book the process that helped you heal and move away from that, or did you have to take a lot of ground in terms of your development and pushing back against these forces in order to write the book?
[11:01] Jen Hatmaker
I think both are true. I had certainly made miles and miles of headway on my own grief, on my own recovery, and then when I was able to be healthy enough to look at my own patterns, I had done a lot of work on my complicity, on my contributions to the disintegration of our marriage and the relational dynamics that contributed — and I'd done a lot of work on myself. I was certainly not writing from the same place of raw trauma that I had experienced initially. I was much further down the road than that. And then additionally, having waited to write and assess and tell the story in a truer, more genuine, and honest way, the actual writing of Awake was incredibly curative for me. And I'm a writer — this is how I process the world. That's the tip of the spear for me, in terms of working out my own perspective, working out my own story, working out my own understanding of the world. And so by the time I finished the manuscript, it had served me so beautifully before anybody else had ever read one word, and I knew that writing Awake was allowing me to very gently close that chapter and set it down. It was closure for me. I said what I needed to say. I worked out the pieces that I could have worked out up to this point, because there will be more — I mean, that'll continue to unspool. But I also feel like, okay, I'm done. I'm done with this part, I'm done with this season of my life, I'm done with this incredible upheaval and loss and recovery, and I'm excited to see what's next.
[12:59] Katie Fogarty
You share such a beautiful story in the book, where you're the mom of five kids, you turn the manuscript over to your daughter, and you invite her to read it before you bring it out into the world. And I would love it if you could share with our listeners what that conversation was like.
[13:14] Jen Hatmaker
Yeah, my number one concern — and this has got to be shared by every memoirist alive — is that it involves so many other people, and they didn't ask for their story to be told, and they're not telling it. I'm in charge of telling it, which means it's my perspective, it's my memory, it's my way of seeing things. And even if we're largely in agreement, no two people inside the story would tell it the exact same way, and I understand that. And so, wanting to take really good care with the people in my life, in my family — because divorce breaks a million hearts. That's not just mine and my ex-husband's story — it's our kids, it's our parents, it's our siblings, it's our friend group, it's our community. The shrapnel goes in every direction, and so it's no small feat to take on the storytelling with the attempt to honor the other people. And I was most worried about my kids. They're all young adults right now. My kids are 20 to 28, and at the time they were 14 to 22 — so teenagers and young adults. That's very formative, and so it mattered to me what they thought. So I handed my book to my daughter, who was 25 at the time. She said, 'I'm going to read it.' I didn't hear back from her for two weeks, and I about died every day — just chewed my fingernails down. But after the two-week mark, she called me, and she goes, 'Okay, Mom.' She said, 'I have read it. It's a really beautiful book.' And she said, 'I think what I want you to hear me say is that I do not feel like you have overexposed any of us.' And that was really all I needed to hear. I started sleeping again that night, and whatever fear I was still clutching about releasing this book into the world — which is so incredibly personal — pretty much ended after I heard back from my kids, who said we think you have protected us, and we feel honored, and we don't feel like you have written just a villain-victim story, which is never entirely true. When I was writing Awake, I wrote on a note card — just on an index card — and I taped it on the side of my laptop, and it just said, 'Will I be proud of this in five years?' And that was my grid that I thought through constantly. Will I be proud that I included this part of the story? Will I be proud of this paragraph? In some cases, it was so granular: will I be proud of this word? And I would take a word out that I felt like, five years from now I'm going to wish I didn't say that. And I think that kept me really connected to discernment and a spirit of generosity. Because this is the long game — Awake will come and go. It's meant a lot to readers, more than I ever expected. The response has been profoundly astonishing. But eventually Awake will be just a title on a bookshelf somewhere, and this is still my family, these are still my kids, and that's the long game I felt like I had to protect.
[16:35] Katie Fogarty
That's such a beautiful benchmark to measure — not just the words you're writing, the paragraph, the book, but also something I think anyone can use in their own life as you have conversations and move throughout the world. Will you look back at the way you behaved and regret it in five years? And what a beautiful testament from your daughter to say this book is a powerful story, and one that protects us and is something we can get behind. What a marvelous outcome from probably your most important reader. No doubt, Jen. We're moving into a quick break right now, but when we come back, I want to explore some of the other themes that are in the book. I know listeners right now are hearing that Jen went through a lot of pain, there was a lot of loss, a sense of reckoning and grappling with things, but there are so many beautiful subtexts throughout the book, and I want to explore some of the joyful moments and joyful lessons as well. We'll be back in just a minute. We're back from the break. I was saying that some of the book is so hard to read, it's so powerful and raw, and your sense of betrayal and hurt is so visceral within it. There are also so many funny and joyful moments that are threaded throughout the book as well, and I loved so much learning about your family and friends that swarmed you with love and support and lifted you up. There are texts throughout the week, throughout the day, food care — you actually had friends who showed up and built you a new front porch, which knocked me out. I was like, these are friends that we all need in our lives. What did this tremendous loss that you experienced — it was this galvanizing moment behind so much good — what did it teach you about this bigger community that you belong to?
[18:18] Jen Hatmaker
Yeah, this strangely — Awake feels like a love story to me. It feels like a love story between me and my family and my best friends, and I actually don't have an imagination for where I would be and what this would look like without them. I cannot fathom it. They jumped into the fray in such extraordinary ways, big and small, but maybe even more than big and small, they were there for the long haul. That, I think, was the bigger factor. This consistent presence, proximity to me, to my kids — grabbing me by the scruff of the neck and pulling me inch by inch forward, month after month. Because let's be honest, people go through a crisis and that first wave of presence is pretty easy — I don't mean that to diminish it, it matters, we need the first wave of first responders to come in when we crash and burn and when our lives collapse. That is a big deal and it matters. But it's much harder, frankly, on wave four, on wave number eight. I mean, after a while, I was just a bummer. So my friends stayed long after the expiration date on my grief was like reasonable — they were still there. And the way that they loved me... it'll just go down as one of the most extraordinary memories of my entire life. They loved me back to life. And so it was a beautiful experience to emerge from and realize I lost a marriage, but I didn't lose a life. My life is astonishingly connected and cherished, and my friends and my family are very extraordinary. So maybe one husband is out of the mix, but what remained was so beautiful and rich and true and loyal and good. It had the interesting effect of actually improving all my relationships. Divorce is so weird — I have noticed since that the quality of my other relationships have all improved, and I think that's multifaceted. There's a lot of reasons for that, including my capacity, the amount of energy I'm able to redirect toward the other relationships in my life, but also because I was just loved so well. And so I dedicated the whole book to my people, because they deserve
[21:12] Katie Fogarty
it. That's so, so beautiful. I'm just like, my brain right now has all these images of women in my life flashing before my eyes, in ways that I've been supported, and I hope everyone who's listening to this show has people in their corner like that. It's such a... and I think they do. We are — all my listeners are all in midlife, and you don't get to midlife without developing just a network of relationships, and you also don't get to midlife without going through hard things. I mean, you went through something extremely traumatic, but every single woman listening to the show has had the experience of the ground shifting beneath their feet when something that you thought was true evaporates in a puff of thin air. It could be a job loss, it's a death, it's perhaps a divorce, financial catastrophe, other kinds of hardships. What would your coaching be, if we were to take what you learned and experienced — if you were to share with women who are going through that dislocation, that rupture right now — what were some of the things that helped you, beyond your friends, move through into the other side?
[22:16] Jen Hatmaker
Probably the linchpin of my recovery process included an enormous amount of therapy, and that was really important for me, because I've always had a very complicated relationship with hard things and big, hard feelings and loss. I'm very shiny, I'm very glass-half-full, and I'm avoidant when it comes to discomfort. And so working with a counselor who taught me how to sit in the pocket of grief and let it be — just let it be what it is — learning how to feel it, learning how to process it, ultimately learning how to alchemize it, was a life-changing experience for me. My temptation is to hustle myself past it and get to the uptick. That's my way. I have a very high capacity, I'm resilient in nature, and I am a really hard worker. And so it's tempting for me to speed-walk to that phase. But there was just no getting around this level of grief. I honestly don't think I could have done it even if I tried. My life shattered, my life fell apart. The future I envisioned for myself fell apart. I mean, I felt like I lost it coming and going — I lost it looking backward and I lost it looking forward. And so I couldn't rely on my predictable skill sets. Learning to grieve, ironically, was how I found relief. Actually handing myself over to the sorrow, to the suffering, to the pain, to the fear, working with a professional who could teach me how to process that in my body, how to move it through — it just changed my life. And so it was very interesting to discover that the primary tool through grief and through recovery was actually my body, and I'd never ever experienced embodiment like that in my life. And so
[24:40] Katie Fogarty
Can you describe — I'm really grateful — when you say embodiment, like walk us through what that looks like.
[24:46] Jen Hatmaker
I was so trapped in trauma that I was willing to try anything. So, first of all, desperation can send us into new channels of healing. But initially I was working with kind of an energetic healer — I know that sounds woo-woo, and it is, but we included, like,
[25:04] Katie Fogarty
that's okay,
[25:05] Jen Hatmaker
yeah, yeah. It was like acupuncture and visualization, and she would do kind of energy work through my body and all the places that I was carrying it — which for me was my chest primarily. She never touched me; she's just gifted. And so she would walk me through these visualizations that were just stunning. I used a lot of meditation — meditation was an invaluable tool for me for a solid year. I couldn't sleep. My grief was so big, I had a hard time accessing it sometimes. And so I used guided meditations that were very pointed and specific. I used them during the day to regulate, and I used them every night to fall asleep. And that's completely embodied work — that is somebody telling me to be in my muscles, to relax my jaw, to feel the softness of my hands. They were pulling me out of the quagmire of my mind, which was just a poisonous loop of trauma. I had seen pictures and texts and heard words that I could not process. And so all those tools took me out of my mind and put me back into my body. And that included things like the boring stuff that we know works. Everybody on earth who knows anything about anything is telling us these are the things that work — but it's movement, it's nature, it's grass, it's water, it's music, it's art. These are like really basic tools of embodiment to put ourselves in a position to experience sensations and emotion. Damn it if they don't work — they do. And so, embodiment: turns out I could not think my way to healing. I had to live and feel my way toward healing, and my body was the tool.
[27:11] Katie Fogarty
Yeah, it's so amazing, because the mind is so powerful, for good and for bad. Your phrase, 'the poisonous loop' — I've felt poisonous loops in my life, in my past, where there's either rage or anger or hurt that just keeps replaying endlessly, like a ticker tape. And
[27:29] Katie Fogarty
yeah, to
[27:31] Katie Fogarty
short-circuit that by moving and doing new things with your body — it's so powerful the way you describe it. And I haven't done that sort of deep somatic work that you've done, but I can release a lot of stress or anger or hurt or overwhelm through doing different types of yoga classes. And so,
[27:50] Jen Hatmaker
yeah, totally,
[27:51] Katie Fogarty
there's so much power in that. I love that you shared that. What else surprised you about reinventing in midlife — or maybe not even your own? You've said the book has been so well received. It was on the New York Times bestseller list, which is just a testament to the number of people who bought it, right? The number of women and readers who connected with the material. When I got to interview you in Texas, there were women ringed around you who wanted to talk about the book, their experience. We had audience questions — people who've moved through similar experiences. What has surprised you about the reaction, and maybe what has surprised you, or not surprised you, about the way the book has been received?
[28:33] Jen Hatmaker
When I first wrote it, I was guessing, but because so many women had jumped into my story early on when my life fell apart — and of course I'm public-facing, so that is like shared knowledge, where most people would experience that privately, just inside their own family and community. I got to experience that on a very large public stage. And the amount of women that jumped in and said — because of course, infidelity and divorce are super common, it's not as if I have experienced something rare — and the amount of women who said, 'My God, I've been there, we've been there, we promise you're going to be okay, we promise you're going to be happy again, keep going, here's what I learned.' It felt like — at one point I remember thinking early on, when I could hardly take a full breath — 'They cannot all be lying, right? They must know something.' And it just felt like all these women were holding up lanterns for me when the path in front of me was still pitch black. And so for me, Awake feels like my lantern — it's my lantern to hold up, and it's my way of saying keep going, keep walking, here's what I learned. And so what I expected was that it might be a lighted path for people with this type of upheaval in front of them as they were going through something similar, or on the front edge of it — be it, I mean, pick a category, not necessarily divorce, but it could be anything having to do with gender and bodies and purity culture and religion. There are so many threads in there of transformation and transition. But what I've experienced more, that I didn't expect, was how Awake has really functioned largely as a mirror. It is holding up a story to women who have already lived it, and it's a witness — it's a witness to their story. It is someone else saying 'me too, same, you weren't alone, I felt the same feeling, I know what that was like for you.' And so it has been like a real affirmative book for women who have gone through their own suffering, just to hear someone else tell it in their words and in their version, but to feel like, yeah, that's exactly what I went through, that's exactly how that felt, that's a — you named a grief that was hard to describe. It put language around a lot of shared experiences. And so what a delight — what a joy it has been for me to take this book all around, frankly, the world at this point, and have collected so many readers who go, 'You told our story.' And that just feels like a real honor and a real surprising gift.
[31:35] Katie Fogarty
I love that. I love that. One of the things I also loved about this book is that — like I said — there are so many joyful threads that come through something that was really just devastatingly hard. And we get to see you really emerge on the other side with new practices for your life, too, and one of them is me camp. And I would love it if you could tell our listeners what that is, because we are approaching the summer months when you launched your me camp. And this — who knows, maybe this will also be like a lantern for people to use in their own lives.
[32:10] Jen Hatmaker
Writing about me camp in Awake was my favorite section of writing. It was so fun to get through the hardest, bleakest parts of the story and get to the parts where the sun cracked through the clouds again, and I knew I was going to make it, and I knew I was going to do more than make it — I was going to thrive. And me camp was absolutely the front edge of that turning point. It happened accidentally — I won't get into the weeds, it's in the book — but to be near one of my kids, who was really fragile and was going to be in summer camp for the entire month of July, felt like I needed to be close for a lot of reasons. And so in a blaze of insane glory — like, this was completely unthought-out, it was coming out of my mouth at the first second I'd ever thought of it, so I thought zero of this before I was saying
[33:07] Katie Fogarty
it's very fun, or very, like, you know,
[33:10] Jen Hatmaker
yeah, right — like, what the hell am I doing? But I told my kid, who was going to summer camp in Maine, a state I'd never been to, 'Okay, listen — what if I came to Maine the whole time you're there? So if you need me for any reason, because we suffered so much that year — our family just suffered. Not only had the kids' parents' marriage fallen apart, but it was COVID, and everything was a disaster, we were in a crisis. And so I said, how about if I'm just near? So if you need me, I can be there in two hours at the drop of a hat.' And then all of a sudden I was like, what am I saying? I don't even know a city in Maine. And so,
[33:56] Katie Fogarty
and you live in — for people who do not know this, Jen lives in Texas, so not next door to Maine.
[34:01] Jen Hatmaker
No, I don't know what I'm talking about. I've never even traveled by myself for a month. I had never even been to a movie by myself. It just — the whole thing was so crazy, and I had like three weeks to figure it out. This was all last-minute crisis control. And so anyway, I ended up renting a house — the most beautiful house in Bar Harbor, Maine — for the month of July in 2021. And I'm just telling you, it absolutely changed my life. As my kid was recovering at camp, I didn't mean to brand it — I didn't even know I was going — but all of a sudden when I realized that they were going to be okay, I was like, oh my god. I told social media, just randomly — I just posted it. I thought it and wrote it. This was not preconceived. I just said, 'Hey, you know what, you guys, I'm at camp. I'm at me camp. I think I'm at camp too.' And it was like I awakened to the possibility of life being beautiful again. I treated it as a yes month. I said yes to absolutely everything. I met everybody that I sat next to for dinner. I said yes to invitations, I said yes to little festivals, yes to little parades. 'Do you want to come ride in our boat?' Sure, I don't even know your last name. Let's have a boat ride. 'Do you want to come over to the neighbor's house for dinner?' I do. It was just this big, wide, expansive, open-hearted month in which I realized I am going to be okay. I am good company, I'm smart, I'm resilient. Look at how much love and joy and friendship and connection is still possible. And it meant so much to me, and it restored something so important to my soul and my outlook on my future. I have done me camp every single summer since. This July is going to be my sixth, and so
[35:57] Katie Fogarty
a whole month. Where are you going?
[35:59] Jen Hatmaker
Well, when does this podcast come out? Because I haven't announced it.
[36:01] Katie Fogarty
It's going to come out — oh, well, we'll wait then. If you're going to surprise people, we're going to wait. This one's going to be out in a few weeks. So anyhow, I would say, keep following Jen on social media — you can see it all unfold in real life.
[36:13] Jen Hatmaker
Yes, it's so extraordinary. And what's so fun — going back to your previous question — I can't even count how many women have told me now in the last five years that they do a me camp now. Because I do a big thing about it every year. I take my community with me — here's where we're going, here's who I'm meeting, here's what I'm seeing. It's so fun. And so I've got women literally all over the world who are doing their own versions of me camp, and it makes me so happy I almost cannot take it. It's so precious.
[36:43] Katie Fogarty
I mean, as you should — that sounds so incredible. I love this idea of a month-long me camp. But you could do mini me camps too,
[36:50] Jen Hatmaker
totally. And most people do,
[36:52] Katie Fogarty
which is phenomenal. And it's something I think that — you were talking about growing up in a certain church where you were told put yourself last, but I think any woman listening to this show has had experiences in their lives and forces that have — whether it be mothering or work, or just the way the world works — encouraged women to put themselves and their needs last. And this is such a phenomenal way about resurrecting yourself, your interests, and allowing yourself to just be, in ways that sometimes we don't. We're recording this shortly after Mother's Day, and I have such mixed feelings about Mother's Day. My kids did a wonderful job, and we were with my mom, but like when I was growing up, I always felt Mother's Day was about other people, and it was like, oh my god, don't make me do the Mother's Day where it's like,
[37:39] Jen Hatmaker
totally,
[37:40] Katie Fogarty
you know, we're like — everything is a right, and it's nominally for you, but you're like, what you actually might want to be doing is dead last anyway,
[37:47] Jen Hatmaker
and the tricky secret there that patriarchal forces and religious forces don't want to acknowledge or admit is that when women have permission to choose their preferences and their desires, their hungers, the things that they want and hope for in life — it is a net positive for everyone around us. It isn't actually selfish. It doesn't mean we are sacrificing our families or our communities on the altars of our own whims, as that impulse is painted. What is actually true is that largely what women want is such a culturally positive life — we want good things for our people, we want good things for our kids, we want good things for our neighbors. The data supports this: empowered and supported women are such a force of good for the people that they love. And so this whole idea of feminist women just choosing themselves and sacrificing everybody else is an absolutely false narrative. A better me means I am absolutely a better mom, a better friend, a better sister, a better daughter. It's why I said earlier: after my divorce, when I went into such a high-impact season of self-discovery and recovery and improvement through a million ways — therapy included — all my other relationships improved because I was better, I was healthier, and thus I was a better partner in every relationship I'm involved in. And so it's actually good for the world when women have autonomy over their own desires.
[39:52] Katie Fogarty
Yeah, 100%. It's also great for things like creativity. I feel like — and I haven't had this in this season of life where I'm really sandwiched between my mother's caregiving needs and just managing my life and my job and my kids and all these other things, and my brain is waterlogged. It is operating at 55% at best, because there are so many inputs. And recently I had just a moment where I had time again, and it was very fleeting, but my brain was percolating with ideas that I haven't had in so long, because I've had no access. I'm just in this bubble of other needs. I recognize that this is a season and I am okay with being here because I want to be able to care for my mom while she needs me, but it's interesting — just when women have the space to prioritize even just space, it's amazing what can happen. So,
[40:58] Jen Hatmaker
totally,
[40:58] Katie Fogarty
I so agree with you. And I love something that you said at the beginning of this part of the conversation, Jen — giving yourself permission. That's been another really big theme of A Certain Age — 270 shows, and I feel like permission comes up on almost every one of them. I had a wonderful author on, the very first author I ever interviewed, almost five years ago, and she sat down to write a novel at 54 and published it at 56 when she got picked up by a publishing house, because she said, 'I finally gave myself permission to write it.' And that has really stayed with me, and it's something that I think about probably every week, because we are so powerful, and sometimes we need to get out of our own way and give ourselves permission to do the things that we want to do, or to change, or to reinvent. So my question for you is: I know you did a lot of therapy, I know you explored other modalities for managing and navigating through your stages of grief — but what role, if any, did your aging, being in midlife, play for you to be able to reimagine your life in this way?
[42:08] Jen Hatmaker
I just turned 46 when I lost my marriage, and that had some benefits that I don't think I would have had access to had I not been in midlife — not the least of which is that I had the time to build my own career. I wasn't any longer in my twenties having babies. I had been able to, just by virtue of time, devote a couple of decades to building my work, to creating my career as it stood, and that was a function of my age — and thank God for it. That has allowed me to be independent and manage my own financial life. I didn't have to completely overhaul my family structures or my career structures to all of a sudden support myself financially, which would have been the case when I was younger. I mean, there was a season of my life when I didn't even work — I was home with the kids, raising a bunch of babies. And so there is something to be said logistically for being older and having had the runway to build a life that I was already in and didn't have to create from scratch in the moment of crisis. That would have been such a burden, and I hear from women all the time who have to do it — who have to go back and get a degree, who have to go back into the workforce after a really long time, or have to change their job to make it more financially sustainable. Age does generally bring us to a place of more independence. But then there's also just the wisdom factor — having lived long enough to have realized that I was going to make it, that I deserved happiness, that I deserved a good second half of my life, and that I didn't deserve what happened to me. I think the younger version of myself would have found a way to blame myself. It was the environment I grew up in — women were held responsible for the bad behavior of men. And I think age gave me the wisdom and the perspective to be able to go: okay, this and this, that's not on me, I did not deserve that, and I did not cause that. And then also, with the wisdom of the other hand, to say this and this: these are my patterns, and if I decide not to address them, then I will just simply walk them into my next relationship. And so I was able to splice out what belonged to me and what was my responsibility to face, and what was really just my responsibility to grieve and process, forgive — if that was my path — and ultimately recover from.
[45:08] Katie Fogarty
I love that. Jen's book is so full of wisdom. It is her personal story, which you heard her share at the top of the show, but I found myself thinking of things in my own life whenever you raised certain things. And I think that's one of the reasons why I love memoir so much, and why I find it to be so... and this is memoir, but it's also personal — I guess a narrative storytelling. I'm not sure how to describe it. It's not entirely memoir, because you pull in different,
[45:37] Jen Hatmaker
that's right,
[45:38] Katie Fogarty
different stories and different themes and different chapters — some of the chapters stand almost like standalone essays, so it's so powerful. Because when you read and engage with works like this, you are able to synthesize and examine your own life in certain ways, which is why I found it so compelling. Jen, you also do marvelous writing on your Substack. And before we say goodbye, I want to ask you some of the questions that you share on your own Substack. 'Just One More Thing' — you often ask three questions, and when I was a guest on your show a couple of weeks ago, you asked me a handful of these. So I wanted to do it with you now, if you're up for
[46:18] Jen Hatmaker
it. Yeah, okay, yeah, totally.
[46:19] Katie Fogarty
So, number one: what is the secret dream you have? You've had so many wonderful books and me camp — what else is out there that you haven't yet tackled?
[46:31] Jen Hatmaker
I do have this little thought that refuses to exit my brain. I've learned to just notice what I'm noticing, and I'm noticing that every time I hear a really great song that's lyrically driven and in a certain kind of genre, my first reaction is not, 'Oh my god, what a great song.' My first reaction is, 'I wish I had written that.' And I'm just paying attention to that. I'm a writer, and songwriting is writing, but it's a completely different kind of writing. I've just got it in my hip pocket.
[47:12] Katie Fogarty
I actually have had that reaction sometimes when I read books. I'll think, I wish I had written that. And so perhaps that's my
[47:18] Jen Hatmaker
me too.
[47:19] Katie Fogarty
Maybe that's my future signal. So here's question number two: what's a tiny thing bringing you joy?
[47:26] Jen Hatmaker
Okay, I live on an acre in a really old house. My house is from 1908, and it's in a really old section of our town that is just beautiful. And I have 12 pecan trees, and they have all just in the last really two weeks come back to full bloom. They are so beautiful — I can't take it. And so I am outside constantly walking around my pecans, patting them on their trunks like, 'Oh, you're so pretty. Oh, girls, you've done it again. Here you are. It's your season.' Because Texas is just like the surface of the sun, and so by late summer everything is so scorched and brown and horrible and bleak. So right now this is it — the green grass, my beautiful pecan trees in full bloom. I'm thrilled.
[48:25] Katie Fogarty
Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. Okay, this is not a question that you ask other people, but I want to ask it of you. I said Jen has written 15 books — one of them is a cookbook called Feed These People. What are you most looking forward to cooking this summer before it gets scorching hot out there?
[48:41] Jen Hatmaker
I'm writing my second cookbook right now, as we
[48:43] Katie Fogarty
speak,
[48:44] Jen Hatmaker
and so that's all I'm doing. All I am doing right now is in my kitchen, cooking and shopping. You've just described my entire life. So, the better question is, what am I not excited about cooking? I mean, I am cooking everything you have ever heard of. I'm most excited because we're about one month away from our tomato season here in Texas, and it is so extraordinary. Our heirlooms — they don't last forever, we get about two months — but when they start popping up, like the garden tomatoes, the farmer's tomatoes,
[49:21] Katie Fogarty
nothing better than a summer
[49:22] Jen Hatmaker
tomato. That's it. I'm going to eat tomatoes for three meals a day. I'll find a way to do it. And I will even just do — I learned this from my friend Trey, and I know this sounds gross, but he's from Alabama. He taught me how to get like a real squishy, fluffy, yummy white bread — like the kind we're not supposed to eat,
[49:42] Katie Fogarty
yeah,
[49:42] Jen Hatmaker
and layer it with a really huge dollop of mayonnaise — gotta be Duke's mayonnaise, sorry, there's no other brand. And then big thick slices of like perfect summer tomatoes with just salt and pepper. Close it. A tomato sandwich.
[50:01] Katie Fogarty
tomato
[50:02] Katie Fogarty
has to be salt involved with that. The moment you described it I was like, and I hope you're grinding like a lot of salt all over it.
[50:10] Jen Hatmaker
So much. And so, yeah, I'm going to eat 100 of those in the months of June and July.
[50:15] Katie Fogarty
And the best thing is like, you don't have to cook them. Are we toasting the bread, or is it just going plain soft white?
[50:21] Jen Hatmaker
Soft. I like it soft. Now, if we want to get into the weeds — when I do a BLT, which is one of my favorite sandwiches on earth, which is the same tomato, but we're adding obviously bacon and lettuce and mayo — for some reason that needs to be on toast. I don't know why, I can't explain the difference, but it just
[50:39] Katie Fogarty
is. My husband used to work in restaurants, and he explained that they get that gorgeous golden crust when they make a BLT or a grilled cheese by putting mayonnaise on the bread and then toasting it. So, yeah, like really delicious stuff.
[50:56] Jen Hatmaker
The first time somebody said, 'Use mayonnaise instead of butter on the outside of your grilled cheese,' I was like, come on,
[51:01] Katie Fogarty
like, weird, right? But it's,
[51:03] Jen Hatmaker
it works,
[51:04] Katie Fogarty
game changer. We're talking golden, all right. We're shifting gears into something that's definitely not delicious, and we're taking a hard left here. So, from what you're looking forward to cooking to: what's the bravest thing you've done recently?
[51:19] Jen Hatmaker
Hmm, that's a great question that I always ask other people. So, weird to be on the other end of
[51:25] Katie Fogarty
it. I know — that's why I'm — Jen, I stole it right from you. This is your question.
[51:30] Jen Hatmaker
It's my question. It's like, oh, I'm on the receiving end of that question. That's so interesting. I know this seems really weird, but I'm getting new siding on my house right now. I think I mentioned my house is from 1908, so the old wood is crumbling and falling apart. My house is falling apart on the exterior, and I just made this big decision to put new, like indestructible siding on my house. And it's such a big independent flex. I'm like, this is my house, I own it, I'm the only name on the mortgage. I'm making a big commitment to protecting this investment. I'm choosing brand-new colors that are mine. They're dramatic as anything — I'm just so maximalist. It's just me. All of this is me. And it just feels really brave. I'm making a big financial decision. I'm asking nobody else to tell me that I can or can't. And I just,
[52:28] Katie Fogarty
yeah, the buck stops
[52:31] Katie Fogarty
here.
[52:32] Jen Hatmaker
It does, it does. And I'm anxious, of course. I feel anxious about it. I'm really conservative financially — I'm tight with money, and I'm a saver and an investor, and I still have a lot of fear around money. And so I don't know, something about this has felt brave and exciting, and I'm proud of it, and I'm excited.
[52:54] Katie Fogarty
Yeah, I love that for you. For me, it's like I've never purchased a car, for example. I mean, I grew up in New York City, so I learned to drive at like 30, which is embarrassing.
[53:02] Jen Hatmaker
Sure,
[53:03] Katie Fogarty
and I'm so proud that I'm good at it now, because for a while it felt like — why is every 16-year-old in the country tooling around, and I can't? But I've never, like, I've never purchased a car or dealt with that kind of thing. So I totally get it — if I had to do that and I managed it... my sister did it when she got divorced, and I was just clapping for her, because for whatever reason it just felt like such a hard, big thing that I've never done.
[53:26] Jen Hatmaker
So yeah, that's it exactly — like I'm fielding all the bids, I'm talking to all the contractors, I'm making all the decisions. This was something I would have absolutely handed off in my earlier life, 100%. And so I don't know, there's something about it that kind of feels very capable and grown-up — which is great, because I'm 51 years old, I'm an official grown-up. So yeah, yeah.
[53:49] Katie Fogarty
Exactly, super cool. I love it. Well, congrats on that.
[53:53] Jen Hatmaker
Thank you.
[53:53] Katie Fogarty
This has been tremendously enjoyable. I loved this book. I loved having the conversation in Texas, being on your show, and now getting to do it again. And I want to let all listeners know who've tuned in today that Awake is a super personal account, but it's also really a blueprint for rebuilding in any aspect of your life. There is a review of the book where the beauty entrepreneur Jamie Kern Lima says — and I wrote it down because I thought it was so marvelous — 'You begin the book rooting for Jen, and by the end you're rooting for yourself.'
[54:27] Jen Hatmaker
That was my very favorite endorsement.
[54:29] Katie Fogarty
It's like — I mean, what a miraculous marvel. It just hits the nail on the head. If you need to root for yourself, if you need a reminder and some encouragement that you too can do — fill in the blank — this book will help you get there, even though it's about somebody else's life. You will be inspired to inspire yourself by the time you're done with this. So, thank you so much for writing it, and thank you for being with me today, Jen. I really appreciate it. What a pleasure.
[54:55] Jen Hatmaker
Thanks for having me, Katie.
[54:57] Katie Fogarty
This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women who are aging without apology. Jen is an incredible force. She is so warm, she is so wise, she is so open and candid. If you enjoyed this conversation, I know you will really appreciate and enjoy her book, Awake. It is full of wisdom and is written in such a propulsive, compelling fashion — I could not put it down. I would love to hear what you take away from the show. I would love to hear if you've read the book and if you've enjoyed it. And I also want to know if you think the idea of me camp is as intriguing as I do. Let me know where you would do your me camp. Tell me in an Apple Podcasts or Spotify review — reviews help other women find the show. Thanks for sticking around to the end. And, as always, special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time. And until then, age boldly, beauties.