If you love to read books, chances are you love to talk about them too. But have you ever wondered about whether your favorite celebrities or public figures love to read as well? If you might share a favorite book or preferred genre with them? Well, I sure have! So, I’m on a mission to find book lovers (book nerds, if you will!) in unexpected places. In this interview series, I’ll be talking with people you recognize but don’t necessarily associate with books — musicians, actors and actresses, athletes, and more. We will be discussing all of their current projects you want to hear about, of course, but we will also be digging into their unique reading and writing lives!
In this interview, I had the opportunity to chat with the charming and hilarious Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg. Hosts of the hit podcasts By the Book and We Love You (& So Can You), Jolenta and Kristen recently released their book How to Be Fine, which synthesizes what they have learned from living by 50 self-help books on their podcast. Read on to learn more about their favorite episodes of the podcast, the new book, and their vast reading interests beyond the self-help genre!
Hi Jolenta and Kristen! Thank you both so much for taking time to chat with The Nerd Daily! To start, could you tell our readers a little about yourselves?
Kristen: I’m a midwesterner-turned-New Yorker who loves sequins and mostly sees herself as a pragmatist. I adore Dolly Parton, the Golden Girls, my book club, and buying things for half price. In addition to hosting By the Book and We Love You (& So Can You) with Jolenta, I’m also a culture critic, royals expert, and podcast consultant.
Jolenta: I’m a comedian originally from Portland, OR. I moved to the big city over a decade ago to work in theater, realized I’d rather make people laugh than audition for plays, and have been doing stand-up and storytelling ever since. I love Cher, reality TV, and making podcasts.
Kristen: Jolenta and I met years ago, when we both worked for a hard news radio show. We were seemingly the only two people on staff who knew every show on TLC and every song by Dolly Parton. At one point, Jolenta came up with the crazy idea to live by the rules of self-help books for a podcast, and invited me along for the ride. Thus, By the Book was born.
Your new book, How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self-Help Books, just came out on March 17, 2020, but you have been hosting the fabulous podcast By the Book since 2017. How did you decide to translate what you’ve been doing with the podcast into a self-help book of your own?
Jolenta: Ever since we finished our first season of By the Book, people have been asking us to distill what we’ve learned and share our experiences in an even more in depth way than we already do on the podcast. Once we had a few more seasons and many self-help books under our belts, we felt we’d observed enough themes and formed enough thoughts on the subject to actually distill some of the lessons we’ve learned from the experiment overall, and that’s how we came to write How To Be Fine.
You open your book with the following quote from Dolly Parton: “I don’t like to give advice. I like to give people information because everyone’s life is different, and everyone’s journey is different.” For folks who perhaps are not familiar with the podcast or haven’t read your book yet, can you talk a bit about how this quote fits in with your approach to the self-help genre?
Kristen: In How To Be Fine and on By The Book, we try to make clear that we aren’t aiming to impart universal truths or “knowledge.” We’re just trying to share our own stories and every story is different. For example, if you identify as a man or if you’re in a same sex relationship or if you live outside the US or if a million other things, your experiences with the books we live by may be completely different than our experiences. In turn, just because a book’s principles work for one of us, doesn’t mean they will for you and vice versa.
I love the way you structured the book into three parts: things that worked for you, things that didn’t, and things more books should include but don’t. How did you settle on this format?
Jolenta: The first two sections of the book are what we get asked about most. Seeing all the advice books we’ve lived by, which tend to always improve our quality of life and which tend to always detract. And we felt the last section was very important, there are things that Kristen and I turn to every day to get by and live less stressful lives that self-help gurus tend to gloss over or bring up as a last resort for when a reader is so deficient that they need extra help. We wanted to be sure to share our experiences with things that improve our lives that often carry social stigma or are simply overlooked by the wellness industry. Things like therapy, learning to structure your time, taking medication, etc.
You both already had some experience with the daunting task of writing a book via your podcast episode “How to Write an Ebook in Less Than 7-14 Days That Will Make You Money Forever” in September 2017. (Great episode by the way!) Kristen is also the author of the book So You Want to Start a Podcast, which was published in 2019. Can you talk a bit about the process of writing How to Be Fine? Was it easier or harder to be writing a book with another person?
Kristen: I can say that writing on my own was both harder and easier. Harder because I had to write twice as many pages, seeing as I didn’t have a co-author. But easier because I didn’t have to make my chapters fit in with anyone else’s … I didn’t have to check in for continuity or flow or anything else when it was just me. In short, they both have their challenges and their advantages!
In How to Be Fine you talk about how the podcast started off as kind of a fun idea that you thought would be humorous and entertaining, but it has evolved into something so much more. How has this experience impacted you both more deeply?
Jolenta: Kristen has become far less skeptical about people who turn to self-help books. Noticing that a lot of the advice we come across is for people who feel disenfranchised and like there is nowhere else to turn. I’ve learned to become more discerning. I love advice, but before we started this project, I never really thought about where my advice was coming from. Having to live by so much of it has forced me to confront the fact that “expert” is a term that can be self-proclaimed, and you’re allowed to pick and choose what works for you.
Not every self-help book you have implemented has been a “winner,” so to speak. (Some of them have been downright ridiculous, to be honest!) How hard is it to implement the advice of books that you dread reading and “living” for two weeks? How do you work through this to try to stay as true to the book’s tenets as possible?
Kristen: Honestly, the only way I manage is by being accountable to Jolenta, our producers, and our listeners. That means buckling down – even if the book is about tarot cards or meditating or one of the million other things I roll my eyes at – and knowing that if I don’t, I’m cheating everyone who’s counting on me. The idea of shortchanging anyone just mortifies me.
Last year you launched a new podcast, We Love You (And So Can You), which focuses on helping a new guest on each episode makeover part of their life. This seems like an obvious extension of the knowledge and experience you’ve gained from hosting By the Book for so many years. When did you first have this idea and what sparked you to put it in motion?
Jolenta: Throughout the production of By the Book, listeners have wanted to go on our self-improvement journey with us. And they’ve also wanted us to live by advice that just simply doesn’t apply to our lives. Sadly, as married people, we can’t live by dating books. In order to look into other kinds of advice, and share life stories that we could never live on our own, we turned to our favorite reality tv show format and decided to make a podcast makeover show for the heart. With We Love You (And So Can You), we get to draw on our extensive knowledge of self-help and provide a self-love prescription for our guest to follow, and then we get to eavesdrop along the way.
Throughout your work you both have expressed an interest in reading in general, outside of just the self-help genre. Have you always been readers? What is the first book you remember really loving?
Kristen: ABSOLUTELY! I loved those little books with the records that would beep when it was time to turn the page as a kid. I loved reading all the dying dog books and historic girl books in grade school. I loved everything from southern gothic to memoirs to popular fiction as a teen. And as an adult, I adore my book club, which is both a support group and a literature appreciation club; we’ve now been together almost ten years.
Jolenta: Oh yes. We LOVE books and reading. My first book memory is of sitting with my mom while she read me all the Little House on the Prairie books. The first series I really got into on my own were the Rats of NIMH books. As a child rat-owner, I loved those rodent adventures. Now I’m pretty addicted to autobiographies, I love seeing how people write about themselves and craft their own stories.
What are some of your all-time favorite books?
Jolenta: Oh that’s tough, but here are my current top three: The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind by Katharine Hepburn, The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, and Twig by Elizabeth Orton Jones
Kristen: Oooh. That’s a tough one. Can I just name a few I’ve loved over the past few years? I adored Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I still think about it all the time and about how epic all our lives and histories are, even if they feel ordinary. Like everyone else on the planet, I loved Becoming by Michelle Obama. And I have to shout out The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, narrated by Tom Hanks. It’s already a beautiful book on its own, and Tom Hanks is fantastic at bringing the story to life. But it’s even more dear to me now because it was the last book I read before COVID-19, and I associate it with the joy of walking busy city streets while having my heart transported somewhere new.
What about books that you just couldn’t make it through or that just weren’t a good fit for you?
Kristen: Oof. There are loads of them. I don’t think it would be fair for me to call any of them out (okay fine, Fifty Shades of Gray). But I will say this: I think life is too short to force ourselves to finish books we don’t like. If a book doesn’t call to me in the first five to ten pages, goodbye.
Jolenta: Walden. Don’t get me started.
What is the most recent book you’ve read or a book that you want to make sure to fit in for 2020?
Jolenta: I just started reading The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova. I love learning about sociology, psychology, and juicy cons, so I cannot wait to finally get into this book!
Kristen: I’m halfway through Normal People by Sally Rooney – I can’t put it down! My book club read it when it first came out, but I was sick that month, and didn’t get around to it. Other books I want to fit in this year: Demi Moore’s memoir, Jessica Simpson’s memoir, Severance by Ling Ma, and The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton by Dean Jenson, which has been on my stack for ages, and which I finally think I might have time to read because of COVID-19.
For one last question, I’d like to loop back around to How to Be Fine and By the Book. For folks who may not be familiar with the podcast, what are a few of your favorite books/episodes that you would recommend trying out first?
Jolenta: In our most recent season, we lived by Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints. The episode is a great mix of really funny occurrences and super interesting insights on the expectations placed on women during the 60’s. It’s one of my favorite episodes and one of the best books we’ve lived by.
Kristen: I’m a big fan of the ones that showcase the absurdity and comedy of self-help books. In that vein, I’d (also) recommend our episode on Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints. And while you’ve already mentioned it, I’ll mention it again: How To Write an Ebook in Less Than 7-14 Days that Will Make You Money Forever. Just thinking about that episode brings a smile to my face. And yes, I’m still making dozens of dollars a year from the Amish romance novel I wrote!
