Season 6 - Ep. 128 Messy Mothers, Daughters, and Mentors with guest Maggie Smith

Our guest this week is author and podcaster, Maggie Smith. Maggie’s second act in her professional life is as a novelist. She spent over 25 years running a business but when it began to feel boring and she needed to use her creativity, she attended a writer’s workshop where the instructor asked everyone to write down something they could never write about; Maggie wrote about mother daughter relationships. This idea transformed itself into a novel about where mothers/ daughters/ and mentors intersect titled TRUTH AND OTHER LIES.

One of the thematic ideas of the book is how important heroes are—they inspire us and make us feel a sense of empowerment. But sometimes we move into hero worship, where we fail to see that our heroes sometimes have big glaring unbelievably unethical behaviors that we could see if we opened our eyes. Of course, the blindness that keeps us from seeing the truth about our heroes is similar to the blindness that keeps us from seeing our mothers, or parents in general, in a favorable light. The novel covers a lot of ground in a fast-paced story.

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- Truth and Other Lies by Maggie Smith
2- The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
3- The Beatryce Prophecy by Kate DiCamillo (audiobook)
4- Woman on Fire by Lisa Barr
5- Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson (audiobook and text)
6- The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont
7- The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict

Podcasts Mentioned--
1- Hear Us Roar, hosted by Maggie Smith
2- Books Are My People, hosted by Jennifer Caloyeras

Movies mentioned--
1- Chinatown (1974)