Joan Lunden Shares What’s Beyond the Script

[2:03]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. Oh my gosh. I loved interviewing Joan Lunden about her book, Joan Life Beyond the Script. We did this interview live in front of an audience. She couldn't have been more delightful. Her daughter turns out I knew her daughter who and she had interviewed me for her own podcast along with Megan Murphy. Anyway, it's just a small world, and Joan's career from her time at Good Morning America to now has just been amazing what she has accomplished, and her backstory is even more amazing. How she lost her father when she was young in a plane crash, how she fled essentially to Mexico and did college over there, lived there for a long time, the way she clawed her way up and became sort of an unlikely anchor starting as weather girl and and becoming who she became of twenty years on GMA, and also all the amazing stuff since then. Fun facts. She has seven children now, seven, on her second marriage. And, also, she was an original momfluencer, if you will, and really changed the workplace for women. If you didn't know any of that, you will learn it in her book, and we talked about that in the show. Joan has written many other books, including why did I come into this room, a candid conversation about aging, had I known memoir of survival, chicken soup for the soul family caregiving, and even good morning. I'm Joan Lundin. Enjoy. Welcome, Joan. Thank you so much for coming on totally booked to talk about your new book, Joan Life Beyond the script. Congratulations.

[4:19]Joan Lunden: It's a delight to be here with you. Yay. Yay. Alright.

[4:23]Zibby Owens: That was that was not good enough. Let's do a Thank you. Much better. Oh my gosh. Your book was amazing. You got so much in here. You've had such an insane life. You've overcome so much. You've gone through so much. You've accomplished so much. How did you even know where to start with this book? What did you want in this book versus the things you've written, the things you've done before? What did you want in here? It is my eleventh book, but I've never I mean, a legacy memoir is just different.

[4:55]Joan Lunden: And it's a challenge. Have had My husband always says, You've had such an extraordinary life, but you don't sometimes understand that because to you it was ordinary. But there was nothing ordinary about it. And you'll enjoy hearing about the process because I started this certainly more than ten years ago because I put it down when I got diagnosed with breast cancer because I wrote the book, Had I Known. And then I picked it up again and then I was involved in all these women's health campaigns, my heart, my passion, women's health. And I just felt compelled to write a book about women and aging. Because like every step through my life, you know I left GMA, wrote a book about change. I thought what am I dealing with now? Aging and so are like tons of other women. So I have to write about it. So I wrote my last book which was Why Did I Come Into This Room? A book about aging and women. And then I took it up again and I wrote it and I handed it in my publisher. And she said, This is an autobiography. And an autobiography is a collection of all the things you've done in your life. It's basically Joan Lunden reporting on Joan Lunden's life. And I would expect that from you because that's what you've spent your life doing. I think your readers want a memoir. And I said, okay. And she said, I'm gonna put you with an editor. Turned out she was much more than an editor and I insisted on putting your name on the front of the book. She writes novels and memoirs and I got like a master class for a year. But when you, a memoir takes you into the moment. So instead of saying the timing wasn't right and I had to tell this executive at ABC I wasn't gonna take the job, and you say, I'm riding up in the elevator like my stomach's in my throat. How am I gonna ever tell this guy this is the job I wanted all this time and now he offered it and I have to explain why I can't take it right now. Oh my God, there he is. So I sit down at the table. The waiter is unfolding the napkin, putting it in my lap and it's, Thank God, because it gives me a moment to kind of figure out how am I going to tell him this. It takes them into the moment and lets them understand the emotion and the trepidation and the vulnerability of the moment instead of just talking about what happened. So I basically rewrote the whole book and it took a year. And the only thing is that when you open up moments, you have to leave like four or five other moments on the floor, on the cutting room floor. And that was hard because they were all like special things that I wanted to share, but you can't share it all. I mean, maybe that's the only weird downside of an extraordinary life is you can't put it all into a book when they say, could you please stick with a 100,000 words? I think I turned it in the first time. Was like a 180,000 words and like, okay. Fine. I'll call down.

[7:50]Zibby Owens: But that's really the art of the memoir because we could all fill a bazillion books if we just reported on everything that happened in our lives. But what makes a memoir great is when you do pick out those moments that together, maybe it's just a scene, maybe it's just one moment on air, maybe it's just this one

[8:07]Joan Lunden: afternoon, but it so encapsulates who you are as a person that we feel we get to know you. And I feel that's what you did so well in this one. And it wasn't just actually, I didn't view it as a challenge. I viewed it almost as a gift that the publisher said to do this, and this is why. I'm a voracious reader, and I just read all kinds of novels all the time and memoirs, and I said, well wait a second, why do I love all those books? Why don't I write a book like the books I love? So the book reads more like a novel than an autobiography And I loved that about it. And I never could have done it without the help of this other writer who was a master at setting Pamela Rich. Pamela Rich. I mean, she is a woman who could come up with adjectives that we wouldn't have thought of, you know? Which you know, was, and she also helped me let go of stories. And she'd say, Yeah, that's amazing. It's amazing that you did it, but we can't tell them all. So what's the one that's going to be the most important in telling the story of your life and the arc of your life. And that was kind of like an overriding goal of mine, not just to talk about all the great things that happened, because frankly, most of those have been written about different places, but to tell about the nuances of making those decisions of whether or not to do something and even owning up, if you will, about opportunities that came along that I didn't lean into and then thought, Oh, man, that's what everybody expected me to do. Why didn't I do that? And you don't always have to follow the script. That's why it's life beyond the script. Certainly when I left GMA, everybody expected me to pop up on some big talk show or something. And I didn't. And I had opportunities and I didn't lean into them. And I needed to tell that story, in today's world, because people are losing jobs right and left. AI is going to phase people out. Companies are scaling down. And they're going to face that scary unknown and have to somehow find the resilience and be open to possibilities. And I thought that's really maybe one of the most important things I could share was how vulnerable I felt and how much it kind of shook me and how I managed to not just follow the script, but decide to be open to other things. And I got to tell you, I don't think I could have written this five, ten years ago. Sometimes it takes some time to be able to have the perspective, to be able to look at the whole arc of your career and your life. And especially with me because it was always thought that it was that twenty years on GMA that was like the big over. I'm still introduced today every time I go do a speech, former cohost of Good Morning America. And I think, yeah, but for the last twenty five years I've done incredible work in advocacy and women's health. But it really took getting this far away and being able to look back to say, that was an amazing body of work in national journalism, but so is this twenty five years. And you don't have to always pop what you did or do the same thing. And I don't think I ever allowed myself to give myself the credit for that until I really went through this exercise frankly.

[11:25]Zibby Owens: Wow. Well, the book deals with so many of the setbacks that you went through and I feel that it's all about reinvention really. It's about rebounding and reinvention. Starting with the loss of your father early on, all the way to the end of the book where you lose your mom. I mean, the amount of times I almost cried with all the things that have happened. By the way, Jed Johnson, who was a dear friend of yours was my mom's decorator. Oh really? Yeah. Anyway. That doesn't surprise me. Anyway,

[11:55]Joan Lunden: but he's another person who you loved and lost Yeah, in this my best friend from life. And I was on the air. Maybe tell that story. So we're on the air one morning just like any other day and we had our lineup and we've been briefed on all the interviews we were supposed to do. And I don't know, maybe, I forget the exact, like fifteen minutes or so into the show, producer came running out and said, you guys, there's been a horrible plane crash. And it's right out off Long Island and it's TWA packed full and it doesn't look like anybody's going to survive it. And we're like, Oh my God, oh my God. And so helicopters got up in the sky, they started taking pictures of the debris field out in the ocean, and you start reporting on this. And about maybe, I don't know, half hour, forty five minutes later, it's hard to kind of gauge it. The stage manager said, Joan, they want you in the suit. They want you in the control room. And I went into the control room and everybody was eyes on me walking in. I'm like, What's going on? One of the producers said, We have somebody on the phone who knows you and he thinks his twin brother was on the plane. And so I picked up the phone and it was Jay Johnson who is Jed's twin. These two boys I grew up with from we rode, learned to ride bikes together. And Jed had been the one that encouraged me to come to New York, accept the job at WABC. Come on, you can do it. I did it. And I got on the phone with them and he said, Is there any way you can get the manifest? So the producer said, We're already doing it. We're on the phone with TWA. They got the manifest. I said, Wait, a producer here is on the phone and I can tell they're listening. Pretty soon he looked at me and Jed's name was on the manifest. And he took the phone from me because he knew that I wasn't gonna wanna deliver that news to Jay. But then I had to go back out in the studio and go on with the show. And you report on crises and terrible, horrible, sad stories. Sometimes you get emotional, but you're never part of the story. It never is like that. And I walked back into the studio and Charlie had been told and he said to me, Go over there, splash some water in your face or something. Just take a minute. And when you come back, I got your back. And I sat down and he said, I wanted two shot coming out of the commercial. And he shared with the audience what had just transpired. So he said, if she has a hard time getting through the story and I pick it up, you can understand why. And I just kind of like nodded. I mean, I hardly could even talk. I mean, that doesn't normally happen on live television. So I mean, I thought it was important to share that also. Mean, you don't want to share all the accolades or everybody always when they talk about me, broke so many barriers. I thought if you're going to write a legacy memoir, talk about the challenges, talk about the times when you were vulnerable and how you somehow gathered yourself up and got your way through it.

[15:21]Zibby Owens: Well, think when you show us that, yes, you're reporting the news, but you are a person, anyone reporting the news, anyone in these public facing professional roles, everyone is dealing with something. And sometimes it happens right then too. And I think it just helps us all be more empathetic in general to everything we're all going through. Well, know, and you bring up a point because that was like a very unusual circumstance.

[15:45]Joan Lunden: But there are other things you're going through. I started that show as co host bringing my seven week old baby with me, which I had a lot of trepidation asking the network about that one. I said, because I'm breastfeeding and you couldn't say the word breastfeeding on television in 1979. So I was saying, can I bring my baby in because I'm breastfeeding? And kudos to them for saying yes. I wasn't sure how my colleagues would really embrace it, but I think they all just kind of watched me and said, All right, she's showing up, she's prepared, she's doing it. And she's cleaning the spit up off her blouse like she's pulling it off. But you know, when you do a job like that, yes, you have to read your research. Yes, you have to be prepared. But equally as important is that at 7AM when you turn your set on, no matter whether you got a bad night's sleep, whether you're fighting with your spouse, there's all kinds of things that just go on in your life all the time that don't exactly make you be perky and smiling at seven a. M. But I knew that that was probably one of the most important parts of my job, was at seven a. M. Have, I don't know, just a vibrancy for the day and to bring a positive attitude to that audience member before I ever delivered the first news story. And that was a big part of your job. You had to really leave it in the dressing room. Every morning before I walked downstairs out of my dressing room, I looked in the mirror and I smiled. And that was something my mom taught me. You know, you're not fully dressed until you have a smile on your face. You guys have always heard it. My mom always said it. Funny how moms are always right. We actually employ some of the things that they say.

[17:42]Zibby Owens: It's true. My mom always used to tell me, just be yourself. And I was like, who is that? What do I even mean? That's the worst advice ever. I just got pitched a book. It's literally called, Be Yourself. Just Be Yourself. I'm like, oh, she was right. She was right this whole time. They're always right. But the work you did inadvertently advocating for all moms and really changing workplace dynamics are incredibly important. And it's so crazy to me because you write so much in the book about your daughter, Jamie, and bringing this baby. And by the way, the baby is here today. So Jamie, Say say hi, Jamie. It turns out Jamie and I had already been on a podcast together. This world is just so small. But not only did you do that graciously and elegantly in the way that you did it, but you then translated that into becoming like the original momfluencer which we didn't even That wasn't big word yet.

[18:33]Joan Lunden: Talk about that a little bit too. And you just put your finger on it. You said I inadvertently, and you're right. I was not a feminist. I wasn't like bra burning feminist. I was just a young woman that had a baby. I mean, I'll tell you, I got the call. I was still at Eyewitness News. I was in my little news cubby at my typewriter. And I was getting my story ready and my phone rang, it was my agent, and he said, I just got the call from ABC. They're offering you the job as cohost of Good Morning America. I was like, Oh my God, that's great. I'll call you after the show. I have to finish my story. And like twenty minutes later, the phone rang again. I thought he was calling me back. And it was my gynecologist saying, Congratulations, you're pregnant with your first child. And like delight dilemma. And I think women at that time would have been expected to say, Oh man, bad timing. That would have been so great. And it never occurred to me to say that ever. I was like, I mean, my motto is whenever someone asks you if you can do something, just say yes and then go figure out how to do it. And I just started figuring out how am I going to do this? And I'd done a lot of interviews with La Lache League and I knew I wanted to breastfeed. And I said to my agent, Go tell him I need to bring the baby to work with me. And he was like, You're kidding me, right? I said, No, no, no. I'm really serious. So yes, I changed corporate policy all over America by what I was doing, but I didn't do it as a flag waving feminist coming out here, I'll show you what I can make this network do. I mean, I asked with a lot of trepidation. They actually said yes because there had been not a lot of love lost between David Hartman and the co host prior to me. They just wanted my tush in that seat when the fall lineup started. So I think they was like, Fine, whatever. Just tell her to come in before the fall season starts. And I think they really wanted it to be the best kept secret. So they had this big press conference after my first day on air and it was packed. And they were like, Wow, all this press came to see who we're gonna put as the new co hosts of GMA. And they took me aside and said, Whatever you do, do not say anything about the fact that you have a baby upstairs. These guys, these are critics and reporters. They'll chew you up and spit you out. They'll think that you can never actually concentrate and do your job. I said, Fine. I didn't really plan on bringing it up. So David Hartman, we walk in and David Hartman introduces me. And I say a few words, open it up to questions. First question, Time Magazine. We hear you're bringing your baby to work. How did you work that out with ABC? Like my eyes shot to the back of the studio where all the executives were standing and like I had to answer the question. I said, Well, actually, I got it in my contract that I could bring my newborn with me because I'm breastfeeding. Print that. And then second question, Newsweek magazine, but this show travels the world. What will you do? And I said, Well, actually they agreed contractually that I can bring the baby with me. And almost a year later, I took her with me on the Concorde, remember that? Yes. To London to cover the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana. And it took like five minutes for everyone to realize that the breaking story of the day was not who was the new co host of GMA. It was that a major media company had allowed a woman to bring her baby to work. And I don't think ABC understood the ripple effect that would have in the business world or what a positive reaction we were going to get from our audience. Now, I'm going to tell you something that's not in the book because I just learned it in the last few months. Because I've been fact checking with some of the producers who were on the show to make sure that everything I said that the When you're doing your whole life story, you're constantly fact checking who was president then, who was this, do I have my timeline right? And the person who was the executive producer when I started said, I'm gonna tell you something. When you started really showing because back then we had A line dresses. They were horrendous. They weren't this cute little mommy maternity stuff that the girls have today. And the president of the entertainment division, and our show was under the entertainment division at that time, called and said, You gotta get Joan Lunden off the show immediately. He's like, Why? Because you could see she's pregnant. Nobody wants to see a pregnant lady walking down the street, let alone on your TV in the morning when you're having your coffee and cereal. You got to take her off. And he said, Well, that's not really the feedback we're getting from our audience. We're getting like really positive feedback. He said, I got David Hartman together and a few of the other producers and we powwowed and we said, We ought to go with what the audience is saying. And they stood up to him and he finally acquiesced and backed off. And he said, But we decided not to tell you about it at the time. Said, I'm so glad you didn't tell me because it would have made me feel so self conscious. I'm glad I learned it fifty years later about that conversation. Oh, my gosh. But that's what it was like back then. It was just a really different time.

[24:05]Zibby Owens: Well, think it's also really important to take away the way in which you made change by staying true to your beliefs, sticking up for yourself, and then doing it. I think often people feel they have to show up with a placard

[24:19]Joan Lunden: or shout it from the rooftops. And sometimes that's actually not the best way to make change. Well I always say when I go around and talk to women's groups, as a woman I feel like you can't just go into your boss and say, Guess what? Wonderful news, I'm pregnant. It's not so wonderful to them. They're going to have to figure out how to run their office or take care of whatever it is that is your core job. Go in and say, I've got some great news, but I've been giving it some thought and I've got some ideas on how we can plan this. My wonderful news is I'm pregnant. My husband and I have been really wanting to do this, but I've thought of how we can do this. Now you're like giving an idea of how to do this with them instead of just dropping it on their lap and expecting them to figure it out, your wonderful baby news. And at some point in time, we sat behind a low coffee table because most of the shows had the news desk. And I was on a campaign once, a health campaign with Florence Henderson. Those of you who remember Florence Henderson, well way back when she was on the Today Show. She started there as what they called back then a Today Show girl, a Today Show gal, I think was the actual phrase. And she got pregnant. By the soon as she started showing, they made her leave the show. And she had this discussion with me, I can't believe they're letting you stay on behind that low coffee table. But they designed GMA to counter program these other news shows with a news desk. They made the studio look like anybody's home in America. It was designed with like golds and rust colors and like morning sunshine and like furniture that looked kind of like what would be in somebody's home. And David Hartman and I sat behind two desks that looked kind of like Ma and Pa would be sitting there. And it was a low coffee table. So when I got pregnant, there was no hiding it. And finally, I don't know at what point in time, maybe it was even with second pregnancy, I started getting calls from, or my agent did, from companies like Beach Nut Baby Food and Hasbro Toys. And he called me and he said, You know, I've been thinking about this. Your contract is with entertainment and not with news. You could actually do these commercials. And you worry, how's the audience going to react to that? You are on a news program. And so I got together with the companies and talked about how they could be done. And I said, As long as I'm sharing information that's helpful to parents so that it's not just a blatant like buy this, then I'm interested. And this is how I became kind of a momfluencer when, I mean, didn't have some grand plan and a VR company to put this together. They asked, I said yes because I always say yes. And then we figured out how to do it and I never got any flack for it. And as a matter of fact, think it made the audience bond with me even more because they saw I was doing things that I was trying to help parents. And that's how that whole thing got rolling. And I just became this big parenting advocate, a role which was really fun to step into and I liked because I liked being a mommy and I was in the middle of having three kids. Today's episode sponsored by Quince.

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[30:40]Zibby Owens: And you continue taking us through your life as as a mom and even through your divorce, falling in love again with teenagers, what that was like, blending your family. Talk a little bit about that. I

[30:54]Joan Lunden: also talk in the book about, I'm going to just call it the dark side of celebrity because it's not all fun and games. There is a dark side, and that is the incredible intrusiveness into your privacy. Nobody says, Hey, are you interested in signing away your privacy? But you do. And I always worried about how it would impact my children. And I always worried also, I would be out to dinner with them and people would come by your table and stop and talk to you. And I worried that they would grow up with this warped sense of reality that everybody's nice. Everybody comes over to your table and talks to you. But you know, it's wonderful because you share the joyous times in your life with millions of people. You can't imagine the baby gifts that got sent to me, like hand crocheted baby clothes. But you also have to And it's also kind of nice because when you have the sorrowful times in your life, that's also kind of shared. Going through a divorce was very difficult because I had kind of been put on this pedestal. It's like the perfect working mom and you're not supposed to get divorced. You're just not supposed to. And I knew it would be difficult, but I never knew how difficult it would be. I never knew how the tabloid papers would just crucify me for a year. And I had to hire a crisis PR company, and I guess that's what you call it. You hire somebody not to get into the press, but to try to manage all of the derogatory press. People have opinions of what you're doing. Thank God there was no internet back then. There was no social media. Nowadays, they berage you in real time. But back then, fortunately, they just wrote box fulls of letters that we would then read. But it's tough going through your personal problems in a public way. And it also is hard because that sometimes lights a match and puts it and is kind of incendiary so that a divorce becomes not as amical as it probably could have been if it didn't have all that fanning of the fire. And all you want is you want it to be able to get through it in a way that doesn't impact your children. That's really what you want when you go through a time like that. And then I remember I had this guy on the show once and he had a book and he talked about how whenever you go through a trauma or anything like that, that it took three to five years to recover from it. And I was coming up on this divorce and it's going to take me three to five years, really? Like this guy can't be right.

[33:54]Zibby Owens: When I got divorced someone was like, It'll be okay. It'll take about ten years. I was like, ten years? It feels like a lifetime. It does.

[34:03]Joan Lunden: Quite honestly, I think it was for about five years I just threw myself into momming and my work. I don't think I went out with anybody for five years. First of all, when you're in a position like I was in, guys don't ask you out. They think they're going to say no. And so they're intimidated. And it's like, Hi, I'm single now. And finally when I did start dating again, because all of my friends were like, Come on, Noah's going to come and ring your doorbell. Like you need to come out. So I started going around with like a kind of a younger set, and I would go out with them. And when I started dating again, back comes the tabloid press for every single person that you date. And by the way, a whole bunch of others that you didn't date. I mean, I'm gonna tell you something. Coming in here today in the car, we were talking about this, and I said, this isn't a kiss and tell book. I'm not talking about any of the guys that I went out with. And my daughter says to me, You mean like Steve Guttenberg? I said, I never went out with Steve Guttenberg. What are you talking about? I remember it from the tabloids, but it never really happened. It never happened. I mean, the tabloid said I left my husband for Alan Thicke. I was like, I I hope but they did more than that. They did a headline that says London commits adultery. And those tabloids are in supermarkets. Everyone sees them. And that's when I had to hire. That was the first time I hired a libel lawyer. And I mean, you can't imagine how much money I spent trying. And I sued the tabloid and I won and got a lot of money for it. But the retraction was on page three and it was about this big. And as I was writing this book, I was still thinking, still agonizing over the fact that there are still people out there that walk through that supermarket and saw that headline that says London commits adultery? And still to this day they think that because you can't unknow something that you saw. Know? So I mean, trying to protect yourself from the tabloids was just it was just nonstop

[36:17]Zibby Owens: all the time. But then you finally found someone in a deli. Yes. This is the best meet cute of all.

[36:25]Joan Lunden: So the Rye Ridge Deli in Rye Brook, New York. And I walked in and I was sitting at a table and my youngest daughter at that time was maybe 10, nine, 10 years old. And I was sitting with Laura Morton, who's now my publisher, who at the time was co writing a book with me because I had lost a bunch of weight. So once again, I write about anything I go through. I was writing a book about losing weight and healthy cooking. And this guy walks in and he looked at me and our eyes caught. And I said at my table, I said, Why can't I meet a nice guy like that? And my nine year old daughter says, How do you know he's nice? I said, I don't know. Look at that smile. It's not cocky, but it's confident. And she said, Well then go say hi. I said, Sweetheart, it just doesn't work that way. What do you mean it doesn't work that way? I said, Girls just go over and say hi to a guy. Well that's pretty stupid. That was her words. That's pretty stupid. Then how would you ever meet him? I said, Well that's kind of a dilemma that females live with, sweetheart. Meanwhile, he's still looking at me and I'm still looking at him like and he's looking around the restaurant because there were some other people there that he knew. And he walks over to their table and now he's over at their table and he's bending over talking to them. And one of them says, he tells me this later, one of them says, You know who that is that you keep looking at? He says, Yeah, I know who it is. It's Joan Lunden. He said, I'm gonna go ask her out. And they're like, No way, you're not gonna ask her out. He said, Mhmm. I'd rather know at the end of the day when I put my head on the pillow that she said no rather than not knowing. So my nine year old's saying, Mom, he's coming over our table. He's coming over now. So he walks over to our table and there was some little thing. I had been out in the Hamptons with my daughter who rides horses and he said, I was supposed to go to a party at your house in the Hamptons once with a friend, but I couldn't go because I own summer camps in Maine and I spend my whole summer in Maine. And I thought, Well, there's a little interlocutor. And he was smart enough to then say, Well, since I couldn't have dinner with you that night, maybe I could take you out to dinner another night. And my friend Laura, thank God for younger women at the table said, Here, let me give you her number. She takes a piece of paper out of her purse and writes the number of my office down. And so that was on a Saturday and Monday morning at like 09:10 when the show is over, he called.

[39:03]Zibby Owens: And now with him, you've had two sets of twins. Yes. So seven kids.

[39:10]Joan Lunden: Three older daughters while I was at GMA. And then they were all growing up and it was going to be empty nester time. I don't know, maybe I just wasn't done. Now with this guy, I've never had any kids. And I was up for doing it again. And not only that, I was at a point where I could be more engaged in being around and momming, which I kind of like not had the ability to be around and make them breakfast in the morning. Of course, I always hear from the nanny we had then that the girls would come downstairs and they would sit down at the breakfast table and she would have the GMA on and they would look to see what I was wearing. Am I right on this? And you would come over and you'd kiss the TV and then you'd say, Can we watch cartoons now? But yeah, so we went through the whole parenting thing all over again. Gotta tell you, I mean, first of all, had two sets of twins. By the way, put in more than one embryo and you could get more than one child, okay? And this was back at a time where they'd put in three or four or five embryos and to hope that maybe two would take, it's different now. They don't do that anymore. I was like, Don't beat triplets, you know? And we ended up with two sets of twins, and those kids are now March 1, the younger ones will be 21 and the older ones are 23. And we've had four kids in college for the last six years. And they're awesome. They're young adults now, but it just seems like it goes by in, like, a blink of an eye.

[40:51]Zibby Owens: My gosh. Joan, there are, 8,000,000 stories in here that we're not gonna have time to cover, and I hope that this just wets everyone's appetite to read all of the drama and the ups and downs and your obviously amazing sense of humor through it all. Oh, can we show them though what my book has that's

[41:07]Joan Lunden: brand new? Yeah, sure. All right. So here, hold this for a sec. It occurred to me as I was doing this book that most of my life everything's been on video. Everything's been recorded since I was like 23 years old. So I decided to put QR codes. There are QR codes all throughout the book. So as you are reading a story, you can then, if you're reading a real book, you can take your phone and you put your phone, I can even do it. You. You can put your phone over the QR code and it will open up and you'll actually be able to watch the story.

[41:54]Zibby Owens: Here

[41:55]Joan Lunden: do one, hold on. Okay, okay. So this is at the end of a chapter called Come Fly With Me. And I was flying in a U2 spy plane at 75,000 feet above the earth with in a spacesuit, and we had a couple of major crisis on board. We our landing gear wouldn't go down, and there was an AC, which I said, No problem. Don't worry about an AC problem. I can do without air conditioning. The pilot said, No, no, no. AC is the alternating current. We could have a fire on board. So I'm telling this story and then can you do I'm gonna have it here. Hold on. Hold Okay. Okay. You open it up and turn up your sound. Oh, wait. Of course, didn't work. Turn up your sound. Flow code.

[42:38]Zibby Owens: Everything I'm touching is not working. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Okay. You ever sound it? My sound. You're young. You're kind creative.

[42:59]Zibby Owens: on board. Oh, here. That I it even goes with you. Here.

[43:16]Joan Lunden: you can open it up to the actual exciting story. Obviously the landing gear came down and we landed because I'm here. But the idea, I remember I called my lawyer and I said, Can I put videotape all throughout the book? He's like, Well, what are you talking about? I said, Well, you can do that these days with QR codes, But I couldn't use He said, But do you own that? I said, It's all on YouTube. And I don't even know how it's all on YouTube. I didn't put it all there. But I had to have what's called dynamic QR codes because something on YouTube, it could go off of YouTube. And you have to have a QR code that if somebody buys this book five years from now, that QR code still has to take you to that video. But I thought it was Then of course, I had to go through thousands of DVDs of all I mean, I don't even know how I have the video archive that I do of my career. It's pretty extraordinary. And so I had to decide not only to decide what pictures do I want to put in the book, I had to decide what videos. But I think that's one of the really fun parts of this book that just hasn't been done before. Multimedia

[44:30]Zibby Owens: experience. Yeah. If you could just pick one thing that you really want readers to take away about you after reading the book, what would it be?

[44:39]Joan Lunden: I think I'd have to say resilience, being open to opportunities. My husband always says that you want a page out of the Joan Lundin Playbook. Whenever anyone asks you if you can do something, just say yes and then figure it out. That kind of, you'll see that it just keeps From very young, very, very young age, I just kept doing this and doing this. And also that when the bottom drops out and it happens to everybody in different ways, shapes, or forms, to be able to somehow not look at the past, not look at what you just did, not look at your accomplishments, but be open and not necessarily have to follow the script that everybody thinks that you should follow. You don't have to do what everyone expects you to do. And sometimes that opens you up to a new kind of freedom. And for me, it really did. And my dad was a doctor. He was a cancer surgeon back in the day when they didn't have radiation and chemo. And I was in awe of him. I lost him when I was 13 in a plane crash. A lot of people wonder how I kept flying in all these planes. But he would have been heartbroken if I had ever lost my love of flying and travel. And I just always thought I would grow up to be a doctor. And right before college, I went to work in a hospital. I found out pretty quickly that wasn't going to happen, stitches and scalpels. And it allowed me to be open to something else in life when I left GMA and that was health and advocacy. Even when I got diagnosed with breast cancer, it took me like less than twenty four hours to say, Wow, I just in a weird way got a gift dropped in my lap. I'm not going to go through this journey as a victim. I'm going to go through as an advocate. I'm going to learn everything I can about breast cancer and share it with women. And you know what? If on my tombstone that's all they write, that I helped save some women and go get their mammogram and understand that they also maybe need an ancillary test, then that's okay. I'm like, I'm good with that because I got this opportunity to pick up the torch of my dad and run with it. And that probably even inspired my advocacy for the next eleven years. It's been eleven years now since I was diagnosed with breast cancer. But only writing this book seriously, Zibby, was I able to really kind of stand back and give myself permission to say, The last twenty five years have also been important. It wasn't just the twenty five years that everybody else thinks of, that body of work on national television. So it was a great experience and it's an interesting experience for me especially because it meant I kept going back and looking at video of me fifty years ago and kind of reliving that and deciding what do I wanna share with everybody.

[47:44]Zibby Owens: Well, thank you so much for sharing all that you did, for all the work that you do in so many different arenas, and all the inspiration that I know so many people will take from this book. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, 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.