A Fresh Story

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 still doing the same thing she did as a little girl: taking what she cannot control, and making something true out of it.

Jordan is the author of the eco-thriller Fallout, a novel that crackles with urgency, danger, and the kind of moral complexity that only comes from a writer paying close attention to the real world. The story follows a journalist — a new mother — who gets pulled into a collective of eco-anarchist women on a mission to take down a dirty energy company that has poisoned both people and the earth. But beneath the thriller framework, Fallout is really a book about grief: what we do when the world as we knew it starts to fall away, whether we close ourselves off or rise up and fight for what's right. Jordan wrote it in the years she was first becoming a mother, watching parched California hills in January and feeling something she could only call grief. By the time she finished, a second character had emerged — a woman in her fifties navigating perimenopause — and Jordan recognized herself in her too. That's how she writes: gathering the mosaic, piece by piece, until the picture becomes clear. Jordan has also written seven books on the craft of writing — including her newest, The Sound of Story, a deep dive into developing voice and tone — and she brings that same care and precision to everything she makes.

This episode is for the writer who has a story inside them and doesn't know where to begin. It's for the reader who wants a thriller that leaves them thinking long after the last page. And it's for anyone who has ever sat with something heavy — grief, rage, helplessness — and wondered what to do with it. Jordan's answer, the one she's lived since childhood, is this: write it down. Turn it into art. There is always someone out there who needs to hear exactly what you have to say.

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 the point where staying serves us — because we were never given a script for what comes next. Jessica Strawser, author of eight novels, noticed this gap everywhere she looked. And she wrote a book about it.

The Quitters Club is Jessica's newest novel — an ensemble cast story about four lifelong best friends who, the year they all turn 40, plan a reunion getaway and make a pact: they will each go home and quit the thing that's been quietly breaking them. For one woman, it's a career. For another, it's a marriage that has drifted into something unrecognizable. For another, it's the fertility journey she's been on for years. The novel follows all four of them as they reckon with what it means to walk away — not in defeat, but in the direction of something truer. Jessica built the book around a central question she kept hearing in her own life, in conversations with friends, in the rooms where women talk honestly: when does quitting become not giving up, but saying yes to something better? She's had her own pivots — a magazine industry that collapsed almost the moment she entered it, a career that required its own reinventions — and that lived experience gives the novel a weight and warmth that goes far beyond entertainment.

This episode is for every woman who has felt the specific exhaustion of holding something together that stopped working a long time ago and needed permission — from someone, from anywhere — to finally let it go. It's for the book club looking for their next conversation starter, the woman approaching 40 wondering what her second act looks like, and anyone who has ever whispered to themselves that something has got to give. The Quitters Club is proof that quitting, done right, is one of the bravest things you can do — and that you don't have to do it alone.

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 and shorter stories until fiction had compressed itself into flash, then sit down in a house in Orlando that once belonged to Jack Kerouac and finally let something large and long and true come through. She didn't know she was writing toward herself. But she was.

Shasta is the author of When We Were Feral, a debut literary novel set in 1990s New Hampshire about three girls — Maggie and her friends — searching for answers about their missing mothers. It is a novel about friendship in its most primal form, about the particular cruelty and fierce loyalty that live side by side in female adolescence, and about what it means to grow up in the absence of a mother's presence. The book was born from a short story, expanded through a three-month writing residency where Shasta wrote a thousand words a day and didn't plan anything — just followed the girls where they led. The adult timeline she originally wrote got cut in revision, because, as she puts it, everything she loved about the book was in that child timeline. The longing. The wildness. The unresolved ache at the center of it all. Shasta grew up in the world she built in this novel, and she set it in 1990s New Hampshire because she still holds a longing for that place and that time — a longing the book finally gave her permission to explore. Writing it, she discovered something she hadn't expected: how many unresolved feelings she still held about her own mother and the particular wound of maternal abandonment.

This episode is for anyone who has ever circled around a childhood wound in their adult life without fully looking at it — and for every reader who grew up in the 1990s and felt the complicated, electric tension of female friendship before they had words for it. It is for the writer who thinks they only know how to write short things, who needs to hear that the long story is in there waiting. And it is for anyone who has ever needed a novel that doesn't look away from what girlhood actually felt like — not the polished version, but the feral one.

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 personally lose someone, but who nonetheless lost something.

The collection asks us to sit with the strange complexity of grief — public and private, collective and intimate, named and nameless — and to consider the possibility that all of it is real, and all of it counts. Chloe's poems don't resolve that question so much as they hold it tenderly open, the way grief actually lives inside us.

This episode is for the person who has ever felt uncertain about whether their grief was theirs to claim — whether their loss was significant enough, public enough, close enough to warrant the weight it carries.

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 you are left holding a baby and a secret you're too ashamed to say out loud. Fiction writer Danit Brown knows that feeling intimately. It was the seed from which her debut novel grew.

Danit is the author of Television for Women, a sharply observed, deeply human novel about Estie — a 32-year-old who decides, largely because she feels she's supposed to, that it's time to have a baby. Before the birth, her husband loses his job under circumstances that raise uncomfortable questions about who she actually married. After the birth, Estie begins to realize that motherhood looks nothing like what she grew up watching on screen.

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 with that fear and write the book anyway. What she discovered on the other side of that writing was something she hadn't expected: not resignation, but deep, abiding contentment.

Jamilah is the author of Black Single Mother: Real Life Tales of Longing and Belonging — a memoir and cultural reckoning that weaves her own story with the stories of 21 other Black single mothers, tracing the full emotional landscape of an experience that is too often defined by statistics and stereotypes rather than truth and humanity.

This episode is for the Black single mother who has felt unseen and quietly exhausted by the weight of other people's judgment. It is for the co-parent trying to understand the experience on the other side of the arrangement, for anyone who loves a Black woman and wants to understand her life more fully, and for every reader who has ever been afraid that telling the truth about their story would somehow trap them in it. Jamilah's book is proof that the opposite is true — that writing the life you actually have, with honesty and love, is how you finally make peace with it.

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 of The Love Project, a luminous collection of 30 real love stories gathered from the community of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California — ordinary people with extraordinary hearts who agreed to sit down, share a glass of wine, and tell the truth about love. And love, in Alison's telling, is far bigger than romance. It's the widow in her 80s who walked up to a man and asked him for one last affair. It's the woman who began writing letters to a man on death row and ended up marrying him. It's the mother who lost a child and somehow found gratitude in the grief. It's platonic love, gay love, trans love, filial love, love for a place — every version of the word that matters. Alison gathered these stories the way a journalist does: with a microphone, a notebook, and a dog named Mookie who made strangers want to stop and talk. But she also gathered them the way a woman healing from something does: with her whole heart open, desperate to remember that connection is still possible, that the world still has more love in it than hate.

At its core, The Love Project is the book Alison wrote for her 93-year-old mother — a woman who modeled resilience by finding love after 20 years of widowhood — and in doing so, wrote it for all of us. For anyone who has felt alone in their pain, disillusioned with the world, or quietly wondering if love — in any of its forms — is still out there for them, this book is a shelter. It is proof that we have more in common than what divides us, and that sometimes the bravest thing we can do is go looking for the stories that remind us of that.

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 is the author of Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice — a book that unfolds over the course of a single day: her son's zebra-themed first birthday party. As guests arrive and candles are lit, the story moves fluidly between present and past, weaving together the tender chaos of new motherhood, the slow and heartbreaking loss of her own mother to dementia, and a lifetime shaped by competitive figure skating. The book's title draws from the science of zebra stripes — "motion dazzle," the survival mechanism that confuses predators through pattern and movement. It's a metaphor Jocelyn wears close: the ways we perform, we distract, we cope, we keep going — not out of denial, but out of love and sheer necessity. Writing the book became its own act of survival. Jocelyn discovered that excavating the past didn't just clarify her story — it gave her permission to release it. To forgive herself for not being a perfect mother, a perfect caregiver, a perfect skater. To see, for the first time, how much strength had always been there.

This episode is for anyone who has ever found themselves holding two worlds at once — the one full of new life and the one quietly ending — and wondered if they were doing enough, being enough, grieving enough. Jocelyn's book is a reminder that there are no perfect answers in the sandwich generation squeeze. There is only the best we can do, the grace we can extend ourselves, and the stories we finally allow ourselves to tell.

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 doing something extraordinary. That's the story Dr. Nicole Pensak set out to tell — and it's a story that is long, long overdue.

In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, Olivia sits down with clinical psychologist and maternal mental health expert Dr. Nicole Pensak to discuss her book Rattled: How to Calm New Mom Anxiety with the Power of the Postpartum Brain. Dr. Pensak didn't write this book from a distance. She wrote it from inside the experience — a newborn and a toddler at home, furiously typing between nap windows and hair-dryer moments, compelled by the urgency of a story she knew the world needed to hear. Her own postpartum journey brought her to rock bottom. Her clinical training and research helped her climb back out. And when she returned to the academic literature to understand what had happened to her, she found something stunning: an entire science of the postpartum brain that nobody was translating for the people who needed it most. Rattled is that translation.

Structured in three parts — proactive mental health, the neurocognitive transformation of matrescence, and the path toward genuine thriving — Rattled is far more than a book about postpartum depression. It is a full-spectrum guidebook to one of the most profound transitions a human being can undergo. Dr. Nicole Pensak illuminates the mom shame, the mom guilt, the mom rage, the creative bursts, the identity shifts, and even the concept of "mom flow" — a way of accessing deep creative states in the small windows of time motherhood actually allows. For anyone navigating early parenthood, a major life transition, or a divorce that overlaps with pregnancy, this book offers something rare and irreplaceable: the experience of being seen, named, and guided — all at once.

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 quietly building the case that this wasn't personal failure. It was by design.

In this episode of A Fresh Story: Book Talk, Stefanie joins Olivia to talk about her groundbreaking new book, The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down. Written, as Stefanie shares with remarkable candor, during pregnancy and the early postpartum months — a period that made every page feel searingly personal — the book is a cross-disciplinary reckoning with the broken promises of the girl boss era. Drawing on over 400 citations across economics, public health, social science, and psychology, Stefanie dismantles the myths that have long been used to explain away women's unequal outcomes: that women are less confident, less ambitious, or simply "choose" to step back. The data doesn't lie, she says. And it's time we stopped letting the myths do the talking.

What makes this conversation — and this book — so essential for anyone navigating a life transition is Stefanie's radical reframe: the exhaustion you feel isn't the price of your ambition. It's the cost of a system that was never designed to sustain it. From breadwinning women facing increased rates of domestic abuse and emotional manipulation at home, to the way "self-care" culture quietly individualizes what are deeply collective problems, Stefanie offers readers something rare — not just analysis, but relief. The kind that comes from finally having language for something you've always felt but couldn't quite name. If you've ever been told you were "too much," this book is for you. If you've ever quietly wondered whether wanting more was somehow the problem, this book will set you free.