More Than Love: A Conversation on Grief, Legacy, and Becoming Ourselves

There are some stories that never stop unfolding, they just shift shape as we move through life. This week, I am talking with Natasha Gregson Wagner about her memoir More Than Love.

QUESTION: Who expanded your understanding of love? Margaret did for me. Why, I think it was entirely biological/magical.

Natasha writes about her mother, Natalie Wood, with such sensory tenderness: the scent of gardenia, the lullabies sung at night, the way love imprints itself through small, ordinary gestures. Listening to her describe those early memories, I kept thinking about how memory is a kind of architecture, built from scent, sound, and touch. It’s how we carry the people we lose.

In our conversation, Natasha spoke openly about the long silence that followed her mother’s death, and the slow, private decision to finally tell her story. The memoir isn’t just about setting the record straight, though it does that, but about reclaiming her mother as a whole person: complex, luminous, flawed, human. Writing became a way of making peace with all the versions of Natalie Wood that exist - it could only happen in our current moment of holding all the complexities of personhood.

BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS (me, Carissa Potter) wants you to be here:

We talked about how grief evolves, how as children, we absorb loss without language, and as adults, we circle back to it with new understanding. For Natasha, motherhood reshaped that journey. She spoke about seeing echoes of her own mother in the way she parents her daughter, and how that reflection brings both ache and comfort. It’s one of the paradoxes of love: the deeper it runs, the more it insists on making room for both presence and absence. What I mean by this is that humans understand and make meaning through contrast - the knowing and not knowing, the living with and living without.

There’s a moment in our conversation, where Natasha says she’s learned to hold love and loss together without needing one to cancel the other. That feels like the heart of her story. Whether through writing, filmmaking, or simply living, she’s found ways to let memory breathe, not as something that defines her, but as something that continues to expand her.

We also talked about fairness, or rather, the absence of it. Natasha described how, as a child, she believed life was supposed to make sense, and how she’s since learned to live within its mystery instead. Her spiritual path, not unlike my own, reflects a search for grace in a world that doesn’t always offer answers.

As we ended our conversation, Natasha spoke about finding her own voice, apart from the legacy she was born into. “I used to think I had to live up to something,” she said. “Now I just want to live from something, from truth, from love, from my own story.”

It struck me that More Than Love isn’t only a title, or a feeling, it’s a direction. A way of saying there’s always something beyond what we think love is. Something that carries us forward, even when we think we’ve reached the end and understand it all.

Next week, Natasha and I will host a workshop on grief and resilience in Marin with Happy Women Dinners. It’s a gathering for anyone walking through loss or transformation, or just wants to hang out and talk about hard stuff. We’ll share our own stories, hold space for others, and explore what it means to live fully while holding the weight of what’s been lost.

Share this with someone who is navigating the loss and love of a parent or child who might relate and feel less alone…

I am not going to pretend to know what healing is, but it could be: not erasing the past, but learning how to walk with it, gently, openly, and with love. To wake up each morning, connect with other humans and go to bed each night. To seek out the people who push your understanding of love to be more than what it once was.

XO, Carissa

PS I break down a few times during this podcast over M’s health issues - I am not the best interviewer but Natasha was so kind and offered me the support of a good friend, for which I am so grateful.

PPS RSVP for our day event Oct 19th from 10-4pm to [email protected]

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