Jen Hatmaker, AWAKE: A Memoir

[1:49]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram at zibby owens. Today's episode is number three of the 10 most downloaded totally booked episodes of 2025. We're almost to number one. I hope you enjoy this rerelease of an episode that so many of you probably already downloaded. Jen Hatmaker is the author of Awake, a Memoir. Jen is the New York Times bestselling author of Feed These People For the Love and Fierce, Free and Full of Fire, along with 11 other books. She hosts the award winning For the Love podcast, is the delighted curator of the Jen Hatmaker Book Club, and leader of a tightly knit online community where she reaches millions of people each week. Jen wants to inspire you to be delighted, find hope and humor, build connection, and keep going. She is a mom to five kids and lives happily just outside Austin, Texas. Welcome, Jen. I'm so happy to welcome you back on Totally Booked to talk about your new memoir, Awake, which I think is one of my favorite books ever. It is so good. I loved it so much. I empathize so much with you. As a book, it was amazing. As a story, it was heartbreaking. And I just it was just so good, the whole thing. Congratulations,

[3:43]Jen Hatmaker: I guess. Wow. Well, that's an opening line. Thank you. God, what a nice thing to say. I am so glad to be here with you. I'm happy to see you. And I really appreciate that so much because you're a book person. And there's just nothing quite like that sort of encouragement from somebody who knows books as well as you do. And so thank you. Thank you for saying that. That is just the kindest thing. I mean,

[4:14]Zibby Owens: I'm obvious I'm a very nice person, but I am not just saying that to be kind. I mean, I am You're clearly nice. I mean, I'm okay. I'm pretty nice. Yeah. Everyone says it. I don't say that I don't say this about your book lately. I really like, first of all, my favorite genre of a book is books where people get through something sort of terrible and make it to the other side. So I am well versed in that category. Got it. But yours, I mean, the way you described your grief was so raw and so real. It was just for some reason, it had more detail, color, oomph than really anything. And I don't know how you remembered everything. Maybe talk a little bit. Tell listeners maybe I should back up. Tell listeners what happened, what your book's about, and then how you infused it with so much, like, just stuff. Yeah.

[5:11]Jen Hatmaker: It's a great question.

[5:13]Zibby Owens: How'd you get that much stuff in there? Yeah. How do get that much stuff in there, says the book person.

[5:18]Jen Hatmaker: I get it, man. Let's see. You know, I'm brand new at talking about the book. Is the front edge of, like, how do I describe it? And so I'm not practiced at this, and I don't have this, like, dialed in. If this just becomes a word salad, you could give me this. Wrap it up. Would say that's so much

[5:36]Zibby Owens: rather a word salad than a polished media bit. Okay.

[5:40]Jen Hatmaker: Not getting that, sis. Good. Yeah, you're not getting that. Thank you. Let's see. Probably the small story inside of Awake is the story of the loss of my twenty six year marriage to a pastor. And as someone who had spoken and written and taught and led around, among other things, marriage and family for a year, my whole career. And it was the small story is that like shock, the grief, the loss of everything, my marriage, my intact family, all the expectations I had for my entire life, certainly the second half of my life. For a while, I felt like it was gonna be a loss of credibility. I just the loss of so many dreams, and then sort of the the slow slog back up to the surface of the water. So that's probably the small story. And that is nestled inside a bigger story that includes a pretty stark examination of I'm like, alright, this house that I thought was gonna stand the test of time crumbled. Let's look at the bricks that built it. And so it's a look at the bricks, patriarchy, religious shame and dogma, gender limitations, body hatred, which, you know, by the way, no women just invented body hatred. We were taught to hate our bodies, and thus we do and and have. Purity culture, all of it. So I'm like, you know, if we start taking apart this house brick by brick, maybe it's not such a surprise that it crumbled. And so, you know, when I was talking to publishers about this book, I told them, I said, look, my story is not special. And it's not. It is not special. There are so many women sitting in just a really similar chair. I said my story is not special. And I think that's what makes it important. This is gonna be not a, like sensationalized memoir that is so outrageous that kind of reads like fiction, you know, where you're like, woah, what a story can't relate. You know, but wow. This is more like, I feel like most of my readers from one entry point or another are gonna go same. Same. I identify with that. I relate to that. I've experienced that. I'm also trying to overcome that. Anyway, because see, what did I tell you? Word salad. Not at all. I'll tighten this up. I swear to God, I'll do better. I know. Like, the future. Nope. Can I do better? That was perfect.

[8:25]Zibby Owens: Okay. Because it is, and I would not consider your story small. This is your life. I mean, if you want to say that your one life is small, then I guess it would follow. But who could say that? It's your life. That's all we have. Right? Yeah. That's right. And the overwhelming grief you felt in your marriage and then, yes, within the context of the church and everything you were taught and all of that, the way that you were supported specifically by your siblings your close friends is something I found quite unique as, like, a grown up. Right? Not like when you're living with your siblings or you're in college with your friends, but that you have such close relationships. And you had one moment where you were talking to your ex husband, and two of your best friend's husbands said they would just sit in the car and wait outside the whole time just in case. And that just made me cry. I mean, that's so nice. And the way your siblings, like, didn't let you sleep alone and somebody was on either side of you for so long. I mean, these are that is just love. That is just proof of love. It's just love. One of my earlier readers said,

[9:29]Jen Hatmaker: you know, because everyone's gonna take what they need or want from this book, and there's several roads inside of it. And she said, what I'm walking away with is like, this was a love letter to the people that love you. Mhmm. This was a love letter to your family, to your kids, and to your friends. And I love that description because truly, I I don't have any imagination for how any of that story would have gone without them as you saw. I mean, they're on every other page. And the way that they stepped in and just said, we are here. Mhmm. Like, you are not alone, and I felt alone. Right? I mean, I was kind of betrayed and abandoned by the one person that I thought was gonna be by my side for my whole life. And they were like, that may be over, but we're not over. Mhmm. We're still your people. You're still our person. And honestly, they love me back to life. It's dedicated to them. The whole book is. Oh my gosh.

[10:28]Zibby Owens: You had one moment where you drove away from the house, I think you were testing out some sort of Calm app or something like that. And you just drove away, and you sat a few blocks from your house and just screamed and just let it all out. Talk about that moment and how you just see yourself at that point and finding your way back to here. That was in

[10:50]Jen Hatmaker: the first week. So I was still just I I was sunk. I mean, I don't to be honest with you, reconstruct my memories. It was just such a fog of pain and shock and confusion and grief. And so it's that first week, and my whole family, we all live in Austin. My parents, all my siblings, my five grown kids, we're all there. So we have quite a commune. And so nobody had not been at my house since the first second. Everybody had just been in, which I needed and I wanted. That's not a complaint. I was so grateful for the proximity and just the motion around me. But a few days into it, I just remember feeling this knowledge inside, like, need to be by myself for a bit. I need to grieve in a way that I can only grieve in the safety of my own body without also managing everybody else's grief. You know, I'm not the I lost a husband, but they lost a son-in-law, a brother-in-law, and a best friend. Like, we were all hurting, and I I can no longer shoulder it all. And so I I had a good friend who sent me a text, and he said, you gotta get in your body somehow. He's like, this isn't a meditation app I like called Simple Habit. And I was like, whatever, man. And so I just just thought, okay. I need to be by myself. This was during COVID. It was July 2020. You know? So we were all very, I all already isolated and weird and collectively sad. And so I'm like, well, I can't really go anywhere. I'll just get in my car. I'll just drive. I'll drive for a while, and that will constitute my alone time. And I that was the first time I'd remembered that he had sent me that app, and I was like, well, hell, maybe I'll just listen to one of these meditations while I'm driving, and this will be some sort of I don't know what. And so I I'm in my driveway, and I picked one, All these meditations said just for grief. That was what it was called for grief. I'm like, alright, well, that fits. That shoe fits. It's like eleven minutes long. I'm like, great. Let me just hit play on this, and I'm gonna try. And I expected to just kind of I don't know what. I don't know what I expected. To just to drive around and have somebody talk nice words to my ears is what I thought. And having not had any practice and meditation at that point, I did not realize that the guide was going to get me into my own body to feel my own feelings. And so I heard I backed out of my driveway. It's playing. I heard him guide me through the process of feeling my own grief for maybe thirty seconds. And I drove 11 houses up my street, and I parked under my neighbor's pecan tree, and I screamed in my car. I wailed for an hour. One hour. It was insane. I have never grieved like that in my life, not before and not since. And it just it just was cascading, like out of every pore, just all of it, the humiliation, the shock, the trauma, the devastation, one hour. And I say this in the book, weirdly, it was like my first moment of relief. Was to let my body grieve in the way that it needed to. Anyway, whoo, the book's full of that kind of stuff. So what a good time, right? Everybody get excited.

[14:16]Zibby Owens: Really am so sorry that this happened to you, that your life was ripped away in this way. Thank you. Because especially I mean, this would be a powerful book no matter what. But when I met you, like, my first encounter, you're this, like, star of the show, keynote, mom two point o speaker telling these hilarious stories about your son at, like, the Stop and Shop or something, like, decorating some sort of cake, and I was, like, laughing so hard. That's right. Whatever. And you're just, like, always on and made up. Yep. And, like, I just assumed everything was, like, go go, all good. Like, you just never know what's going on behind But how and you talk in the book about the way in which your story kind of leaked and how that became even another thing you had to deal with. Yeah. Talk a little bit about going through all this and then going through radio silent on social and trying to carve out space and really not being allowed.

[15:09]Jen Hatmaker: Yeah. Gosh. You know, the thing about sort of being a public facing person is that if you have your integrity intact and and who you are out in front of the camera is still the same person you are behind the camera, which is how I am. That's For better or for worse, the online people get the brunt of exactly who I am and what my deal is and what I think and what my family looks like and what's going on. So I just did not have that there was no capacity to pretend or to to be silent about it or to carry on as usual. I just couldn't do it. I I could not even imagine. I could not even imagine it. So I just said not I just went zeroed out on socials. And which is unusual for me because, you know, that's where a big chunk of my work is located. And, of course, that's noticed. And it wasn't that I was trying to hide or fake. It was that I was in paralysis. I mean, I was we we were fighting for our lives in my home. So Instagram was the last thing on my mind, like, making sure everybody knows what's going on. And we were starving for private privacy. I mean, we were just crushed, like, my whole family. And so, anyway, this person who she calls herself a journalist, and I don't know. But she and we had tried everything. We had and I'd gone off the line offline for quite a while. And so I was just not right. We hadn't even told all of our family yet. And she kinda found the public filing of our divorce, which we tried really hard to keep behind the paywall. Like we tried really hard with the initials and so that it just wasn't public domain. But you know, that stuff's easy to break through. And she figured it out. And she wrote this huge article about our divorce and called my credibility into question. And she's kind of a lightning rod for fundamentalist Christians. That's her space. And so it was so interesting. And not everybody in our life knew at that point. So it was so exposing and so oh, that just was like a layer of pain onto what we were already experiencing. And it was interesting to watch all of her followers come for me. This is we knew this was gonna happen. She she is not a real Christian. Like everybody came for me and blamed me. And my husband's omitted in the reckoning altogether. It was just really interesting to go, ah, in this world, the women are blamed and shamed for virtually everything. And so that was really, really painful, and really disappointing. And if I would give anybody credit, I would say that the community at large really let her have it for that. Even though they were also finding out that day from her that they were like, this is low. And this isn't this was beneath you. And this had no dignity, no honor in it, no kindness, no compassion. And so it didn't matter. The damage was done. So Ugh. I'm so sorry.

[18:31]Zibby Owens: You you talk talk a lot about your relationship to the church and your family's relationship and your community and how, you know, sort of by the end of the book, you've decided not that you're not going to church for a little bit. Like, you you're on a pause while you recalibrate, essentially. What do you want readers to know about this journey that you went on? I hate to say it's a but, you know, like, what are you know, is it that we're all supposed to find you know, walk to the beat of our own drum, or what is it? Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. And their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, I recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zippy for free shipping and three sixty five day returns. Quince.com/zippy.

[21:46]Jen Hatmaker: I don't know. I I don't have that answer, and I don't have a prescription. This book is really different from anything I've ever written, and my writers my readers are gonna know that immediately. I have my history here as a writer, as a leader, whatever, has been to have an idea, spend a ton of time in my brain thinking about it, reading about it, learning about it. And then I write it all up, and then I've just handed it to my readers on a silver platter and went here. Here's what we think about this. I've done the work. I've managed it. I've got the answers. I have the solutions. Here it is. You don't have to do anything, but just digest it and sign on the dotted line, right? Very prescriptive, very like hindsight, or this is what I've learned, or this is what I think. And this awake is not anything like that. It's it's it's not prescriptive at all. It's only descriptive. It's written in vignettes. It's not written in chapters. I don't give myself the benefit of hindsight. I just write it in little as you mentioned earlier, how'd you get all that in there? Little moments, exact moments and memories, and I wrote them all in real time, like as if they happened that day when I wrote it on the page. So I don't draw conclusions about it. I don't say, three years later, this is what I've sorted out. I just say, here it is. And I put it on the page, and I leave it to the reader to do what she wants with it, and to pick up what she needs from it, and draw her own conclusions, and that includes church. So I don't have a this is what I think readers should do with this, or this is what I think they should walk away with, or this is I think the right path. I don't know. And I say that in the book that I don't I worried a little bit about that unresolved leadership, but I'm like, then I just remembered, I'm not your leader. I'm your sister, and I'm telling you my story. So for me, right now, I'm still not in traditional church. And I just for reasons, and I just can't be there right now, which is not me saying I'll never be there, or I think somebody else shouldn't be there. It's complicated. It's complicated because part of my examination of the bricks that built the house included a lot of organized religion stuff where I had to say in honesty, this sort of men first, men only in some cases, women second sexual shame environment worked exactly like it was supposed to. Like, I didn't get it wrong. That was the message. And that's the theology. And so I'm just still wrestling around with that. And is there a version of that that I will someday want back in my life? Maybe. I don't know what, but not right now. Okay. No pressure. Yeah. All good. Yeah.

[24:47]Zibby Owens: You write about managing being a mom and managing your kids' emotions. You have five kids, two adopted kids, which you write about, and yet you are the one who is supposed to be there for them. And that is also, like, a primary concern of yours that, yes, it is your loss, but it is their loss, and you want your family to be okay. And you have a, you know, rather dramatic, although you don't go into detail, with something going off the rails with one of your kids and how that is sort of a precipitating event for you falling apart when you know that your child will be okay. Talk about that because parents obviously can relate to that desire to protect and also having a how do you do all the things at once?

[25:29]Jen Hatmaker: Yeah. When this happened, when it first started, when it first happened, I had two kids in high school, two college age, and one recent graduate from college. So they were all in that later teen, young adult space. So that's not the same as somebody who loses the marriage and they've got a kindergartner. You know, that's a different management. You that's different language. That's different explanations. That in that in a lot of cases, even with my circumstance, you know, there would have been like a a joint custody situation too. I never had any of that. Like, from day one, I was the only functional parent and continued to be. So we never shared custody. My high school kids never ever, you know wasn't like you're going to their house. He's going to dad's house. Let me get so I had the full weight, and it was COVID school. So what a disaster that year was. God, 2020 can f off. COVID school, we're all just we're just coming apart of the seams. And I remember just feeling so anxious about my kid's pain, about their loss, about their process. I I was worried about everything. What is the future gonna look like? Is their relationship with their dad destroyed? Will there ever be a resurrection here? Will are they ruined? Are they doomed? Did we just doom them to just to trauma and I I I worried to the end of every pier. I walked my imagination to the end of every pier and imagined us all just jumping off into the ocean. So my counselor was really the one who helped me recalibrate how to parent my kids. My daughter Sydney, who at the time let's do let's see. Was 20. She was 20 at the time. And she was telling me something one day about how she was feeling and just how disorienting and disruptive and disappointing it was for her to have a dad who said, you know, these our values for her whole life, and then to abandon them and do the exact opposite of everything. That, you know, fair. It's a fair point. But because I was so anxious about getting every all the kids, like, hustling them toward healing. And I don't know if resolution is the right word, but, like, I don't know what. And so I noticed that I'm just, like, make I'm I'm exhibiting classic codependent behavior with my ex husband, which is me making excuses for his choices. So this is the thing, and you know that this, and, you know, you'll still want a future with dad. I'm doing the whole thing. And she finally just goes, mom, when you talk to me like that, you make me feel so lonely. Like, I am the only one still sitting here in grief and pain, and you are just pushing me to be beyond it. And I was like, oh my god. And I took that to my my therapist that week, and she said she's like, I don't know if I knew anybody ever told you this, but parents don't get to shield their kids from bad things. Sorry. They're gonna experience pain like every human being in on the face of the earth ever. And it's not your job to fix it, to polish it, to hustle it. Like, that's not your deal. You're not that powerful. And she told me something that I put into play that day. She said, when it comes to parenting your kids right now, comfort over coaching. And I was like, I sit comfortably in the pocket of coaching. And I had to learn that day that I literally cannot I there's not enough right words or good speeches or whatever I was trying to do to fix a dad who walked away from the his life. I can't fix that. I can't coach that. I can only comfort that. And so that was the day that I laid down my frantic interventions to try to make all of this better.

[29:37]Zibby Owens: And how do you think the book itself is going to affect the whole family system? Like, how how does your ex husband does he know about the book? How do the kids feel about the book? Like, how how is that landing? Well,

[29:51]Jen Hatmaker: there's a lot of players in that scenario, and so it's not all the same. Mhmm. Got five kids, and one ex husband. And then outside of that, I've got family. I have a family of in laws that I was in their family for twenty seven years. So there's a lot of people here and a lot of opinions. And for a while, I really let that anxiety steer the ship when it came to this book. And then I just realized if I fragment this book so much to meet everybody's personal opinion on the story and the details even or the perception of the details in some cases and preferences. This book will be useless. I I it will it will just come down to just a sliver of of the truth. And so I was left with the decision to just tell the truth as I saw it inside my own integrity, which means the worst of the details are not in there. And that was my choice. And it was a good one. And it was the right one. And what I asked myself as I wrote this book was, will I be proud of this book in ten years? In ten years, when we are all ten years down the road of healing and whatever reconciliation might look like, not, I'm not really sure. But whatever it is in ten year, will I be proud? Can I stand by this? And that is something I can say yes. And my early readers who know our family really well, including my family members and kids, have said to me without exception, this is extraordinarily gracious, and this is not salacious. It is not a tell all. My daughter said, I do not feel overexposed by this. And and I spent a lot of time in self reflection in this book, like, what's my contribution here? Right? Where did I sign on for a lot of this nonsense? And what did I do? And where was I where did I go wrong? And so I hope that's what the reader experiences. I hope that nobody reads it and goes, oh, that made me feel slimy. Because I don't that's not how I wrote it, and that's not how it reads, I don't think.

[32:08]Zibby Owens: No. I agree with you. I could talk to you about this book all day. I wanna, like, go over every single page. But thank you for writing it. Thank you for the added, you know, to do list of putting a really difficult life experience into a form that is consumable for anyone going through whatever grief, past, present, future Yeah. And learning that if you can do it, they can do it. It's incredibly inspiring. I'm

[32:35]Jen Hatmaker: not special. I don't have any capacity that anybody else doesn't have. I do not have some sort of secret reserve of strength or not. I'm just a normal person like everybody else. And it is stunning to find out that you can lose something so precious to you and still recover and still rise right out of those ashes. I mean, I remember thinking, well, I'll never be happy again. My life is doomed. I will just muddle through until I die. That's my future, and that's the best I can hope for. And so five years exactly almost to nearly to the day where you and I are sitting right now from when it all happened, I can just tell everybody listening, we're made of more than we think. And we have more capacity and resilience, and courage than maybe we ever even knew. And it is pretty amazing to rebuild a life when when those old like faulty bricks finally crumble and go, alright, I'm sitting here on a blank foundation, what do I want to build for the second half of my life? And it is so exciting, and it is so meaningful and possible. And so it isn't just a sad book about a lady's divorce. It's also about what to do when you lose something precious, Whether you walk away from it on purpose as your choice or it chooses you. It doesn't matter. Either way, monumental life change right here in the middle of life is not a death sentence. And in fact, it can be the beginning of the best possible second act. And so that's what I hope. That's what I'm experiencing. And so that is what I know that my readers have access to as well. Whatever their story is, however, alike or dissimilar it is from mine, it doesn't matter. We got the raw materials inside of us

[34:42]Zibby Owens: to rewrite a second half. It's great. It's great news. Jen, thank you. Thank you so much. I'm a huge such a huge fan of this book and you. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. My pleasure. My pleasure. Bye. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Sibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.