It felt like it happened overnight, I watched Rebecca Woolf, a writer and mom blogger I’d always looked up to and admired, go from modeling what seemed like a perfect happy family, to losing her husband Hal, to pancreatic cancer.

Rebecca’s twins are close in age to my daughter, and I admit to having a parasocial relationship with her, admiring her, and even envying her a little from afar.

But in her 2022 memoir All of This, Woolf dismantles that gauzy, filtered image of home and happiness. Her marriage was full of love, yes, but also arguments, infidelity, and resentment.

Rebecca Woolf has worked as a freelance writer since age 16 when she became a leading contributor to the hit 90s book series Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul and its subsequent Teen Love Series books. Since then, Woolf has contributed to numerous publications, websites, and anthologies, most notably her own award-winning personal blog, Girl’s Gone Child, which attracted millions of unique visitors worldwide. She lives in LA with her four children. She has a newsletter and a new podcast called No Shame.

This season was generously sponsored by Funny Girls, which is a program run by the Harnisch Foundation that uses improv to teach leadership skills to girls and nonbinary kids in grades 3 to 8. You can learn more about its work here.

Zachary Oren Smith is the producer, and Suzanne Glémot made the art for the show. And thank you to everyone who shared their stories with us.

If you loved this episode, we have a whole first season you can listen to. You can also buy Lyz’s New York Times best-selling book This American Ex-Wife.

This show costs money to make! So if you want to support us, please become a subscriber to the newsletter.