Tembi Locke, FROM SCRATCH: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

[2:17]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zibby Owens, the creator and host of the award winning podcast that you're listening to right now, thank you so much, called Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. It is a daily podcast three hundred and sixty five days a year, and each day we talk to an author about all of the things related to their career, their book, their life, and more in thirty minutes or less because who has time? I am now an author myself, although I wasn't when I started this podcast, and you can get my new memoir, A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature wherever books are sold starting July 1, and my children's book, Princess Charming. You can learn more about me at zibbyowens.com. But really, you're here to learn more about the authors, and that is what we're going to do. Also, be sure to check out all the other podcasts in the ZCast Podcast Network. You can learn more at zcastnetwork.com and definitely check out those shows as well.

[3:13]Tembi Locke: I hope you'll all check out the all new Zippy Mag, z I b b y m a g, the literary lifestyle destination with essays, book news, a lit lifestyle feature, and even some classes. Check it out at zippymag.com.

[3:28]Zibby Owens: Temby Lock is the author of From Scratch, a memoir of love, Sicily, and finding home. She's a New York Times bestselling author, TV producer, actor, and screenwriter and has a passion for connecting with an audience both on the page and on screen. Her memoir from scratch was a 2019 Reese's book club pick and a New York Times bestseller. Alongside her sister Attica in Hello Sunshine, she adapted the book as a limited series for Netflix which releases today, 10/21/2022. And I have to say I was lucky enough to get an advanced screener of the entire series, and I watched the first few episodes with my little guys, which was probably not appropriate, but whatever. They loved it. And I laughed, and I cried, and I just loved it. And then I read the book, and and I completely fell in love with Temby, and she is now my new favorite person, which I told her, basically. So, anyway, Temby, by way, is an accomplished actor with over 60 film and television credits, most recently recurring on Never Have I Ever. Off screen, Temby is a nationally recognized speaker for her keynotes on resilience, loss, and motherhood. Her TEDx talk has been viewed by individuals and nonprofits worldwide. Through her work, she aims to inspire people to embrace resilience,

[4:39]Tembi Locke: love, and the power of community. Doctor. Welcome, Temby. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Enough Time to Read Books to discuss your beautiful, amazing memoir from scratch. Oh my gosh. Thank you, Zippy. It's so wonderful to be here with you today. I feel so privileged that I got to see an advanced screener of your Netflix show. You've seen it? I? Screener of it? I did. Oh my It's so good. Oh, thank you. It's so amazing. And I have to say, I was watching it. I probably shouldn't have been doing this, but I was like, guys, I need the TV. We're gonna watch this. Turn off like Nikki, Ricky, whatever they're watching. So I had my seven and nine year old watch with me, and I was like, I'm taking you to Florence. And then every so often, there would be a racy scene and I would have to like lunge and jump on top of them. And at one point, my daughter's like, wait, but why is he taking out for underwear? And I was like, moving on. I don't know. Maybe she peed in her pants. I don't even know what to say.

[5:40]Guest: Yeah. Yeah. There's that. That's a part of life too.

[5:44]Tembi Locke: And I get it. I've been the mom and my daughter actually, you know, has seen previewed most of the series as well. She's like, I can't with that scene. Can you turn that off? Can you move forward? I can't. It's so good, though. Are you happy with it? It's so good. I'm very I'm very honored and I feel I'm so proud of of all the collective work we did together to make this show happen. Oh, my gosh. It's beautiful. The performances are beautiful. Our team of producers amazing. So I just am just honored beyond imagination. And was it amazing to work with your sister? Yes. Yes. That is the icing on the cake. That's the cake. That's all of it. I mean, who would have ever imagined in a lifetime to collaborate with your sister in such a deeply personal way around such deeply personal material and then just to sort of elevate each other. It's amazing. I did notice she has a much bigger role in the movie, in the series than she does in the book. I was thinking to myself, well, that's interesting since she's like writing this or producing it or whatever. Wrote herself a bigger role there. Yeah. I mean, we certainly wanted to, in the series, explore one of the wonderful things about adapting a book, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, whether you are adapting it yourself or another team of people is adapting it, is the ability to sort of the adaptation can be hopefully in ours is when it's at its best is it's additive to the original material, which is to say that it does not dislodge or disrupt or take away from the original material. The original source material is always the original source material. This is like extended conversation. I mean, Celeste Ng says it best when she said it's like a cover of my book. You're doing a cover of my book. Know, a cover album. Yeah, a cover album, a cover album of a book. That's the way she described Little Fires Everywhere, right? Where you are pulling forward themes that are maybe in one brief paragraph in a book, but in a series, especially a limited series, you can build that out. You can let the audience explore that. So we certainly wanted to do that with a lot of the relationships in the book that are maybe, you know, we don't I don't spend a lot of time writing about them in the book, just to give you context for, you know, sort of my first person experience. But on screen, we get to go there. Yep. I love the scene. I actually haven't stopped thinking about How when Leto is in LA and he's at the when he makes that beautiful Thanksgiving dinner and all of those amazing looking dishes and the peppers and all that. And then when Amy's family comes and they just, like, quietly put it on the side. And then he has to say, you know, where I come from, we believe in using the freshest ingredients, like, right from the ground and not things that are you know, and then eating it right away and all of this. And they're looking at him like, yeah, not so much. You know? Like, let's go back to the mac and cheese, turkey and whatever. Well, the prepared turkey that they slapped down on the table. And how he was saying also, you know, in, like, in Italy, like, we walk you know, in Sicily and in Florence, like, we walk after the meal. That's just what we do. And all these things, and you keep hearing, why are people in Europe, like, some why do they not why don't they have obesity problems as much and all of this stuff? And then you're like, well, look at our supermarket as you show him, like, walking through in this, like, desert wasteland of packaged products. Right? I found that just fascinating as I make my own food choices. Yeah. I think, you know, having been married to a chef who is the son of farmers, who was the son of farmers, had a completely different relationship with nature, food, and what it means to have a life around the table completely. He introduced me to a whole other world. I did not have that growing up. I grew up in Houston, Texas. We definitely had Stoper's meals in front of the love boat or TV or whatever was on at the time. Right? Of the love boat. Well, yeah. They're probably rebooting it, I think, in some way. But anyway, the point is, it was sort of being his partner riding sidesaddle shotgun with him for all the years of our relationship and marriage gifted me a whole new perspective onto things. And when we, you know, when I really when I was writing the book. And reflecting on both who he was and what he taught me, but also the relationship with my mother-in-law, which is a big part of the book. Yes, yes. You know, seeing what she also taught me and sort of holding those two people, big people in my life side by side, and they're both two love stories. There's the love story with Sato and there's the love story with my mother-in-law. So food is a big part of that. And then, of course, I definitely have my commentary on the American sort of approach

[10:36]Guest: to things because we are sort of we're sort of fast and quick and

[10:40]Tembi Locke: full of all the preservatives to make it sort of last. And I think that is not the point. Yes, it's not supposed to be fast. It's not supposed to last. Know, it's supposed to be fresh densely nutritious and and regenerative and nourishing and smoothing and all those things. My husband is Italian. He's not from Italy, but his family's from Italy. And he's a chef, not a chef professionally, but he went to culinary school. He cooks for us all the time. And I feel like he used to love it so much. And then we had the pandemic where he had to make us every meal. Gosh. I'm I sorry for know. And he's like, I can't do this anymore. I can't do it. There's like he's like, food is an expression for me. It's an art. It's, you know, I love to make people happy. He's like and the kids just like looking at and they're like, no.

[11:30]Zibby Owens: What else? You know, what else you got over there?

[11:33]Tembi Locke: It's true that there's can see some of that in watching the show and your descriptions in the book and like how much pride can go into making a meal and feeding someone else and just not having it be a means to an end. Yeah, it is not a pass through. It's not a pass through to get to the next activity you have to do if you choose to embark on it in that way. Then by the way, that doesn't mean no one can have a three hour meal every day. That's not what we're saying. But it is a kind of taking a pause and just with intentionality, like settling, ritualizing the settling to go on to the next thing. It's something that I learned that I still, without Sato here as always that sort of I know it's like he's sitting right there on my shoulder, hey, take ten more minutes. Take ten more minutes and enjoy this moment. So. I mean, I think that's such one of the messages, right? Our time is limited. Enjoy, embrace, slow down, look around, don't miss it all. All of that. I probably should have asked you at the beginning, which I usually do, to just describe your book, but I feel like most people have heard of or will watch or will read or have read your book. But maybe you should do like the one liner in case everyone's confused as I jumped in to all these. No, no problem. No problem. So my book is a memoir, first and foremost. So it is the story of the first three summers that I spent in Sicily with my mother-in-law rebuilding my life after my Italian chef husband passed away. And the so it is both the love story of my life with my husband and everything that he taught me and what we had and our struggles, which were in part with his family initially, because they were rejecting of me, of our relationship, and then later his illness. And so it sort of arcs through that. As and then the three, those But three summers as I was a newly widowed woman with a daughter, seven years old, and trying to rebuild my life and ask of myself, how do I go forward? Can he and can the love we had sustain and be a part like I'm asking all of these deep sort of questions about what does it mean to continue to live with the person who you loved so deeply and who's been, you know, he was with me for half of my life at the time he passed. And so the book is an homage to love. And it's an homage to love both the love of partner, the love of place, the love of food, family, motherhood, but also a kind of a love for living, just living and how we do that and what that can look like, it looked like for me. But I hope that for readers, they take from it a kind of an inspiration to sort of reach for the big loves and reach for deep, big living. That's the thing that I learned from both my late husband and from my mother-in-law. And it's also about breaking down borders. You know, and I and what I mean by that is that, you know, that conflict with my mother-in-law and my family, his family was largely predicated on diversity of culture, race, language, religion. It was sort of all the things. And it was like all the things, right? And they were like, No way. This is not for us. This is not what we signed up for. And what the hell is this? Right? And so I think the book is also an invitation that if we look beyond that, and if we have the willingness right in our hearts to see our similarities as greater than our differences, not dismissing our differences, because our differences are also what makes us rich. You know, my husband's Sicilian family, I didn't know anything about that. But that's a rich culture that I've learned a lot from. Conversely, I have a very rich culture that they have learned a lot from. So it's not an either or it's a yes and and it's can be additive, if people look at it that way, embrace it that way. And so I hope the book also sort of that's in that's another current another thread that's weaving through the book. And I've heard that from readers who read it, who are like, Oh my gosh, I see this in my own family. And by the way, you know, it can be two people of the same American culture, but of two different religions. Right? You can call it another ingredient instead of another thread. Yeah. Another ingredient. Yeah. It's another ingredient. You are like one of my favorite writers of all time. I swear. I love the way you write, and I'm not just saying that. And so I wanted to just read a couple of things if I can find them. I dog eared all the pages. Oh, can I read let me read a few things? And he soothes the places this is about Sorrow, but Lito and the plate. But anyway, I could see now that sorrow had appeared in my life and almost instantly created form where there had only been space. He soothed the places I hadn't known needed soothing, seemed perfectly willing to embrace the parts of me that were wanton, unsettled, unfinished, and contradictory. Together, we had engaged life as two forks eating off one plate, ready to listen, to love, to look into the darkness, and still see a thin filament of moon. So beautiful. So beautiful. Wait. I'm gonna queue I have a few more. I have a lot more, but I won't here. Hold on. Oh, I liked how you called it oh, here. I'll read this whole I'm gonna mispronounce everything. Lucia returned again and again with heaping plates of strozzapreti with braised red radicchio and a mascarpone sauce, fusilli in a fire roasted bell pepper sauce, gnocchi with gorgonzola and a white martini reduction with shaved aged parmigiano. I began to see that sorrow was speaking directly to me, each dish an edible love letter, succulent, bold. By the third and fourth courses, I accepted that this chef who wore elf boots was making love to me, and we hadn't so much as kissed.

[17:42]Tembi Locke: yeah. It's all I can say is yeah. And it actually thank you for reading that passage because it gives me back with such joy to just even the memories alone. And I think that's the gift of writing memoir, really, you know, and I didn't know that when I set out to write the book, I didn't I just was like, can I write this, you know, and you know, you were right, you know, it's like you are the essential questions are, can I actually put sentence after sentence, page after page, right? And like, hold a story together. So that's really the essential question. And along the way, as these memories as I was excavating, right, like our early years together, these beautiful memories came back to me and to capture them. And every time I when you read that to me, was like I was right back in Florence again, delighted and in love and seeing the promise of all of that. So exciting to I mean, thinking about you there and now watching it and reading it and having, like, these multiple visions and then actually talking to you about it. It's crazy. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[21:58]Tembi Locke: You also wrote so beautifully about grief in the most visceral, raw way, which will help anybody who's ever grieved for anyone. And the way you talked about him, you said how sorrow had been your soft landing spot, your constant in the steady stream of rejections. You said I was in the land of the newly widowed, which felt like floating in the outer rings of Mars while my body was tied to Earth. All morning, it had been like having one language in my head while the world spoke another that pierced my ears like hurried gibberish through a scratchy loudspeaker. My senses were jumbled. Sound was a bitter taste stuck to the roof of my mouth, and sight was a rough touch grazed against my eyelids. At ground zero of grief, grief up was down and down was sideways. I didn't remember where we kept the salt. Holding a knife took effort. I looked down at my feet because I didn't trust the earth underneath me to be there. Nothing, absolutely nothing makes sense in the known and unknown world except being at home near my bed in Sara's kitchen and in the room where we had said our last goodbyes. I tried like hell. I'm gonna be honest. I tried like hell to put language around a feeling that I had never felt before. And I tried to put to articulate for anyone who has never perhaps had that feeling, you will at some point, you live long enough, it's gonna you're gonna have it. But I had never been in the inner sanctum of deep, deep grief. And I thought, as I was trying to understand my own grief, I wanted, I hope that the reader would be taken into that inner sanctum with me. And the only way I could do was to try to picture it and to try to like with as much precision in language as possible to say what this feeling is. I think many of it, and I wrote this, you know, this book came out before we all had a global pandemic, before we had the systemic collective loss, right? Which doesn't feel that which is ubiquitous. And whether we acknowledge it or not, it's there, it's ever present for us. But for those of us who experienced deep loss, as I know you did in the middle of the pandemic, then those words, I hope there's comfort in acknowledging and naming. That's one of the things I've learned in my life. Like when we can acknowledge something and we can name something, it's comforting. And so I wanted to be a namer. I wanted to be a person who could name something. And that was a real challenge for me when I was writing the book. I was like, I didn't dunno. And like, what does it feel like? And I literally sometimes felt like sandpaper on the roof of my mouth. You know, it felt like all those things. It was beautiful. Really beautiful. It's practically impossible to capture. But I feel like you did as good a job as as you've done with words. But the limitations of words let me just see if there was one more. I also the way you wrote about parenting through grief, I can't find it now. But anyway, the way you wrote about how the fact that no matter what, you still had to be a mom. You still had to cope with all your feelings and deal with your daughter's feelings and get her to school. And you had, you know, your stepmother in particular, which was such a lovely relationship that you wrote about. Oh my gosh. It was such a help. Just the fact that you can't stop. Kids' needs don't change. They still need everything. They still have unfettered joy in the saddest of moments. And that's just the art of being a kid. Yeah, that duality of simultaneous converging griefs in one household, myself, mine and my daughters, and then me having to, you know, sort of experience own process, attempt to sort of navigate my own feelings while also understanding hers because I didn't have the experience of childhood grief. That's not in my lived experience. I was also just trying to, with curiosity, understand what her world must feel like while being the person who got the lunches ready, and like the clothes needed to be washed, and somehow tend to her little, her heart, you know, and answer the hard questions that I didn't sometimes want to answer. But I had to I felt like I had to and I always say mothering through the depths of grief is one of perhaps is the hardest part of all of it in a lot of ways for me because I was, you're doing and those listeners probably can recommend you're doing two things at once, if not more than two emotions, a lot of emotional labor and it's tiring. So have the people I would say have your people who can help you out. If you're someone who is near and dear to a grieving parent, fill in, please step up, fill in. It's true. They always say like, Don't even ask. Just send food. Just drop something off. Pick up. Show up. Don't be afraid that you're overstepping. There is no overstepping in grief. I feel like no one's ever like, Oh, she was such a pain when I was grieving. Like nobody ever says that. No. I mean, I had people who literally dropped Tupperware off. Like they would drop off the food and then I'd have all this Tupperware. And the part of me in my grief who was like, I'd be a little bit like, Oh, I don't know what to do with all the Tupperware. Like it's just too much Tupperware. Like somehow that was like a tipping point for me. It was something like, I just couldn't handle that. So someone said, just put it back on your porch. We'll take care of it. And so there was this cycle of like Tupperware would come with food, then the empties would go out, then it would they would refill and they would go out. And I was like, oh my God. It was just like the trains ran on time. Like the food was handled. The Tupperware was ticket. That was such it gave a little bit of ease inside of the storm. So nice. The way you just have this way with words and analogies. It's really it's just so it's really special. It's really amazing. I think I read in the author's note or somewhere that you're doing another memoir about parts of your family and a secret you uncovered or something. Is that right? There is a book coming. I can't tell you when. Don't know yet. It's the it's in the emergency room. Yeah, that's that's the I'm circling the wagons around that one. Did you write did you write it yet? Or you're writing it now? Oh, I'm in the process of. Okay. Yeah. No, it's not fully formed. It's very nascent and it's coming forward. So And in the book, you track your acting career at the same time. Are you still pursuing that actively? Yeah. So, you know, I have a so Never Have I Ever, which many people might know is this series on Netflix. Wonderful series. So I play the mom of Fabiola in that series. And so they just wrapped we've wrapped the fourth season, fourth and final season. So I've had the pleasure while I've been working on from scratch of sort of popping into that series a lot and and and showing up. And and then I'm more producing right now a lot, which isn't to say that I won't act again, but I'm in the process of producing and perhaps a new project. Oh, that's exciting. I know. Awesome. Like your whole face just lit up. So maybe that's why you're really into it. The way you wrote, and I know I keep, like, a broken record over here, was really beautiful. And yet in the book, you didn't talk about a lifetime love of writing or anything like that. It was about your love of art history and acting and different food and everything. But then here you go, whipping out this absolutely gorgeous memoir. How did that happen? Oh, that's such a great question. So let me just say I wrote all my life, right? So mostly in the form of journals. Like I just was a journaler. And that doesn't mean I journal every day. Do not. And my whole months and months might go by and I didn't journal. But I can also say I'm the kind of person who has my journals from when I was 14 years old. Like I have them in my possession. So that tells me a little something about a part of me that is somehow seeking to make sense of my lived experience because I'm constantly going back to the page. And usually when something is like a miss or wrong or I'm mad about something like I'll go in like, you know, just sort of vomit it all on the page. But when my husband was diagnosed, and you talked about my acting career, when he was diagnosed, what shifted was that I couldn't work as much as I had before because I was his primary caregiver. And I really needed a place to be creative, and I needed a place to explore some of the deep changes and feelings that were going on in my life. And so I signed up for writing classes at UCLA, mostly as a place that I could just I could write from my home. If I couldn't go on set to act, I was like, Oh, I could write at home. So throughout the duration of his illness, I was writing with no ambition of writing a book, no ambition of publishing. It was just like, I need to do this for me. I thought maybe I'll make a one woman play, maybe, you know, something like that, right? I was thinking of it from the lens as a performer. And after his passing, and time going on, my sister said to me, who is an accomplished novelist, award winning, she said, You should write a book. And I said, She's, you should write a book. And she goes back, if you don't write the book, like, I'm not going to talk to you because you need to. And that's and if you know anything about my sister, you know, that is a she's hardcore, right? In in the most beautiful way. But what she was doing was holding space for something I couldn't quite see yet, and I wasn't ready to step into. And so I sat with that for a couple of more years. And then I was ready to write the book. So that's really the sort of arc of it. And I really wrote the book thinking, okay, well, this will be a new life adventure trying to write a book. And I thought, you know, if 10 people read it, if 50 people, if a 100 people read it, I have done what I needed to do, which is put the story on the page. That was really my primary objective. So that when later on, it was written and it became a Reese's Book club pick and you know, all the rest and then Netflix, all the things I couldn't know who can imagine something like that. You don't, don't, no one imagines that, right? You just you write the book that you feel. I said, let me write the best book I can write for now. And so it opened up a creative vessel or channel, I should say in me writing. And it's something I can never I can never close that channel. Like it just has to stay open. And I'm blessed to have found that later in life. Right? Who knew? It's kind of like a who knew? Yeah. So funny. There are all these actors, all these authors toiling away being like, if only I could be a Reese's Book Club pick. You're like, I'm just going do this thing on the side. You know, and I I in a way, gosh, the blessing of no expectation. Right? I had zero. And also, you know, I didn't put a lot of stuff on it. I thought if no, it literally if I called my publisher, I literally I think I talked to Christine, my editor, and I was like, when it came, I was like, can we maybe I made a mistake? Like maybe this shouldn't it was felt so big and so vulnerable to put it out there. Was terrified of it. I wanted to rescind it. I would say take

[33:14]Guest: that whatever you guys gave me like some money, right? Like three years ago to start whatever to write this, like take that back. And I'll take all those words back. And we're good. Like, let's call it even even Steven, right? And because I couldn't

[33:27]Tembi Locke: it was never an ambition in that way. I didn't start out thinking like, I want to be a was just like, I just want to write this story and, like, do the best I can with it. And now it feels really scary to share the things that I wrote. But I'm happy she didn't take me up on that offer. I'm happy that we're here. You know? I've grown a lot. Well, I'm also really happy. This was absolutely beautiful. The show is amazing. And I just feel like when you write about someone you've lost, you're keep you're introducing them to all new people who never had the opportunity to meet them. And in that way, you know, you don't actually keep them alive, but what a gift to have everybody else get to know him and and to see that beautiful love story that you had and and to witness the the sadness, but also the love and how you said that this is part three of your marriage, is being the widow of him of sorrow. It's just absolutely beautiful.

[34:23]Guest: And I'm a huge fan.

[34:25]Tembi Locke: You so much, Zibby. Thank you. And thank you also for articulating it in that way. I do feel like he's been with me throughout this whole experience. He's with me now. And you know, and it's just, it's just beautiful. Love goes on. Do you believe in signs? Oh, absolutely.

[34:44]Guest: I can have a whole other podcast about sending me in the signs, like the tea leaves, the signs, the things.

[34:51]Tembi Locke: And you know what? Why not? I agree. Why not? Totally agree. All right. Temvi, thank you. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and honor. Thank you for your work. Thank you for elevating all of these voices. Been watching you at a distance and I really appreciate the work you do and just elevating voices and writers. And I'm so happy to have been here. Thank you. Aw, that's so nice. Well, hopefully our paths will cross in person one day. That would be nice. I love that. All right. Take care. Thank you so much. Perfect. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye.

[35:22]Zibby Owens: Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.