Life and art and the professional and the personal and the way they intertwine and they dance together, and I see that I used to ask questions like why, how? I don't even ask questions anymore. I'm just like, this is a gift. I am supposed to learn something in all of these sectors and in reality and life. There is no separation.
This is it's okay that you're not okay, And I'm your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, tembay Lock, author of the memoir From Scratch and the hit Netflix series of the same name. Temby joins me to talk about love and Hollywood and time and meaning, all the little things settle in everybody, all of that coming up right after this first break before we get started.
Two quick notes.
One, this episode is an encore performance. I am on break working on a giant new project, releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of the show. Some of these conversations you might have missed in their original seasons, and some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that you capture all of the goodness. Second note, While we cover a lot of emotional, relational
territory and our time here together. This show is not a substitute for skilled support with a license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related to your work. Take what you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out into.
Your world, and talk about it.
Hi rans So, as has happened a lot of times on the season, I've known about today's guest four years. We just never actually met until this conversation. I first found Tim Baylock's work years before she wrote her best selling book From Scratch, back before the hit Netflix series From Scratch, back when she had her very first blog
called The Kitchen Widow. We talk about that first creative vehicle of hers in the show to day, and how flinging yourself out into the world creatively speaking, can open pathways to a life you couldn't have dreamed of in those early days when you started out. You may have seen the hit Netflix show From Scratch, based on Tembe's New York Times bestselling memoir From Scratch. The book and the show centers on her life with her late husband Satto, from Italy to Los Angeles and back again. They mix
love and food, and in laws and illness. Both the book and the show have been immensely popular, and to me, that really speaks to our collective need for love stories that aren't that usual, like everything worked out for the best Hollywood happy ending thing. This need that we have for stories that aren't all gloom and doom either. Now Tambay manages to convey the truth about grief without slipping into either one of those outdated tropes, and you're going
to hear all about that in our conversation. Tambay Locke is a writer, executive producer, and an accomplished actor. You will hear in our conversation that I was thrilled to learn that Tembay was in one of my very favorite shows of all time that most of you have probably
not seen, Eureka from the Sci Fi Channel. She's also on the hit show Never Have I Ever, among other credits, and there's this really neat section in the conversation you're about to hear where Tembe talks about those roles and what was going on in her life when she recorded those shows, and then what it's like seeing herself in them now. It's like this emotional archaeological dig via television.
Fascinating.
We also get into the challenges of creating a show based on deeply personal and emotional parts of your life, trying to stay true to that story while also protecting the tender parts of yourself, all while trying to make a show that other people will want to watch, something that will genuinely move people, as you'd imagine, and juggling all of that stuff isn't always easy, honestly, in every show,
there's so much going on behind the scenes. All your favorite shows, oh, your favorite movies, friends, real humans are doing real life just offstage. Anyway, You're gonna hear all about it in my conversation with actor, writer, executive producer
and all around amazing human Tembilack. I am so happy to have you here and to actually be able to see you and talk with you, and no one will be surprised that we've actually been chatting forever and could have been doing this hit record a long time ago.
But here we are, here, we are.
Here, we are.
I have been talking with a lot of people who who carry a loss with them into the conversation, and I started asking people to introduce us to their person, and I really love this. Before we get rolling with all of my questions, would you introduce satatas.
Oh my gosh, that's a pleasure and an honor. Thank you first of all for opening that space to do that right. It's rare that someone even asks that question of you, and I always find it's a privilege to be able to bring Saddle forward. I mean, he's always here in my sense, and I know we can get into that later, but for me, his light is always within, and when I get to sort of shine it outward,
I'm happy to do that. So Sado, my late husband, his resume would say Italian born chef and you know, lover of literature and I amateur guitar player, lover of newspapers, all of those things. He was a gentle, beautiful soul and he was a soulmate and a best friend, someone who made me look at the world in new ways and often through the prism of tiny, small moments. He was a tiny, small moments person and I can be
a big picture person. And that ability for him to sort of synthesize down a moment or an experience or the meeting of a new person was was a gift in my life. And he was the father of my of our daughter. Yeah, it was cool. It was cool. He could also be complete. You know, he's Sicilian born, so he had a streak of like a kind of
like incomparable pessimism that could like run through everything. It was just like everything had to put those to it, and that I found that like both hilarious and dramatic in the ways that you know we sometimes see on TV. But he could hold it lightly, so that was also nice.
I love this. There's like so many directions I want to go with bringing him here into this space. One thing that I want to say, it's like I think sometimes we sort of lionize the dead, Like you don't speak all of the dead, You only say the good things. And it's like when you get to have a real conversation, when you get to introduce your person as the totality
of who they are. You know, after my partner died, I always felt like when I got to talk about him or heard somebody else talk about him, it made them become three dimensional again.
Oh sure, right, absolutely sudo hated. I'm laughing at it before I can even get it out of my mouth. Here he is in his three dimensionality. You know how you call a number a one eight hundred number to like get something done and then they've got all the prompts and you have to wait. That vexed him to know end. He just wanted to get to a human and he was so impatient, so ridiculously impatient that I, you know it, slammed down the phone and he'd be like, I kid, and it was always like who are you?
You were a grown man five minutes ago and you got on a vote and they asked you to push two, three or four and you lose your freakin' mind. So anyway, that's him in the three D Hi everyone, I think he's sure.
I love this.
It's a really good lead into one of my questions here, Like the Hollywood way is to sort of two dimensionalize complex stories, right, and so much of Hollywood, especially around grief stories, is like this transformation narrative of these terrible things happened to you that we only pan on for a second, and then we come into this great transformation where Heroin learned hard lessons that only this tragedy could help them learn, Like what all of this terrible stuff?
So I wonder, having started with the realness and the three dimension, what was that like for you coming into what can be like a two dimensional transformation?
Narrative Hollywood arc.
I don't think any writer really comes to the table thinking I want to bring this to the two D like like you know, you want to get it. Yeah, yeah, But there is something in the predominant sort of narrative of what's going to be easily consumptible for people, right, you know, Hollywood's very fascinated with like having a sense of optimism at the end. That's what makes it different than French film.
Right, maybe I need to make friends.
Maybe that's my problem.
French film can hang out in the existential and like leave you on a note, like the whole film can end and you're like wait, huh, like what you know? It's the sense of closure and wrapping up and like the need to have someone sort of finished that ninety minute, two hour experience with a sense of optimism. That core drive runs deep in Hollywood, and there's times when that
is necessary and it actually is helpful. But around grief narratives, I don't know that it's always so helpful, and I think it's done us a big, big, big disservice collectively, and it's very reductive. So when we when I our team, but really certainly me as the person who had lived my own grief and who'd written about it in a book and was now part of a team adapting it.
I was very like, we can't do that thing. And yet, as will happen, you're going to get notes along the way, and I mean notes from your producing and studio partners who are trying to sort of guide the ship in a different way because they're thinking of their bigger audience. People are also tapping into their own unprocessed stuff and the idea of going near it on the page scares them and they're like, ooh, how is that going to come off? And we don't know, is that tonally right?
Could be a little too mess that could turn people off. Maybe they'll so they're always trying. So there's this tug and pull right between the creators and the writers. What are the needs and interests and demands of the people were paying for the product that you're making. To say it very bluntly, somewhere in there, there's a struggle. So for us, I always came back to the thing I'm making.
If someone were to watch this who had never grieved someone in a profound way, like they hadn't hit the rough that profound loss, right, and we all know when we've had that first deeply profound loss. I wanted the show to be some sort of really honest guide to that, and I said, let the magic, if you will, the Hollywood magic, the tensil, the light. They'll let that live in the surroundings, but that the core people, the people themselves.
Let the sort ofquote unquote aspirational qualities because of television and film. Let that live in the set design, let it live in the music, right, but let the actual human experiences be as raw as possible. And in so doing, I would hope that who that the viewer would be like oh oh oh, that oh okay, and be kind of stopped in their tracks, not in a way that makes them run and turn it off, but actually makes them lean in. That's what we attempted to do. That's
what I was hoping to do. That was that I felt like, if I could just if that becomes my north star, I'm just going to keep reaching for that, and if I can get as close to it as possible, then I will have done the best. Our team would have done the best that we could do. That's a very long answer, but it's my way of saying that there is a disservice that we have done in Hollywood by the way, we've done this and stories around people of color, We've done it in stories around and we've
done in many, many stories. Grief is just one of the ways. And I think we are in an era now of a desire for more honest and real storytelling and that includes grief.
Yeah, that's a perfect answer, because to me, a lot of the speaking and teaching and occasionally ranting that I do is like, we've only got two options in our storytelling, right, We've got like, no matter what happened to you, everything works out for the best, and everything is glorious and sunshine and puppy dogs and the widowed person finds love again and that makes everything better. Or we've got this
depressing stuck in a corner. Nobody wants to see this like, And if those are your only two options, you're gonna choose optimism, even if it's fake.
Absolutely listen. I am someone who dear Lord. I hang out in the gray so much I'm like, can I see the color.
Something?
He is kind of where I live. So though that sort of binary look at it's either full optimism or you're you know, crumpled under a table and you can't come out. That just doesn't resonate with me, because, for one thing, I can touch on both of those moments in a single.
Day and a half an hour.
Yeah, right, in a whole spectrum of things in the middle. So let's see all of those colors and let's make space for the full totality of the human experience even if there is not a sense of resolution. This this like addiction to resolution that we have. I'm like, oh, that a lot gets resolved in a lifetime.
It's so weird that addiction to resolution, and that all so many of our stories show us that resolution is possible, and so many of us insist that other people find resolution in their stuff, but like, who actually lives in that things? Like, there's some things that can get resolved, but there are some things that don't, and those stories are the stories that we need. How do you live inside things that don't get resolved, that don't get a Hollywood ending?
Yeah, or they get resolved and get And by the way, there's something called spiral learning. You circle back to that moment again in a new place in your life, and suddenly you're like, oh, I'm working on that again. Oh that showed up again. So resolution is an quote unquote, it's an ongoing experience. You resolve it for that moment, and then a new moment in a new set of circumstances, and a new you appears, and suddenly you're doing the work all over again. And that is called.
Yes, it is.
And I really do like as a you know, as a writer, as a storyteller, Like I come back to this too, like the power of telling the truth is compelling theater, right, Telling the truth is compelling theater. And I mean theater in the broad sense of like Hollywood and television and books and be like, oh all of the theater things, but like that those are the stories we need because we really take we take our stories and we learn how to do life from them.
Right.
I love what you said.
You said something about like the layers in the answers to this question, Like I know that a lot of people when we're trying to figure out how to be supportive for somebody going through any kind of hard time, whether that's grief or illness or lost my job or whatever, Like we think about what have I seen in movies in the movies.
My job is to cheer you up. In the movies.
We're going for you coming back to normal and not being so sad anymore. So like when we lie in the media, when we lie in our storytelling, we train people the wrong way to love each other.
Absolutely, And I knew that, for whatever reason in this lifetime, things lined up in a way that I had this opportunity with making from scratch on a global platform, and I thought, well, dog gonet, I'm going to take my shot, and I'm going to try to get as close to truth as possible because I don't want to be a part of the canon that is constantly putting out just this sort of middling you know, I don't know the word schlock comes to mind, but like it was like,
I'm just like I just can't. I can't. And I know because I and I'm going to truly date myself. But many of our listeners, I'm sure your listeners will know, I was a child who when the film Terms of Endearment came out. I can't tell you how many times I saw that film as a child. Now, you one would think that's not a film for children, and yet
there was something about the honesty in that movie. And when we were breaking the story for From Scratch and we were trying to take a book, crack it open, and make it into eight episodes, we talked about certain key moments in film and television that we had seen collectively as writers that each of us responded to, is that that was truth. Okay, what element of that could live in our show? Right terms of Germ is one of those shows that came became in films that came up.
So you're right, insofar as the things we see, they leave an imprint on us. Right, So my young Psyche saw particularly, I'm going to just break it down the scene with Shirley McLean and Deborah Winger when she's in the hospital and she's dying and the mother is like shake. So you know, like I was like, oh, a lioness fighting the system, asking for good care, a mother and a daughter, the kind of breaking a part of a relationship to open up a new chapter for both of them.
You know, it was like all of it I got as a child. That's the power of storytelling. And I cannot stress the importance of that now at a time when there is so much loss and death in the world. I mean that post pandemic, if there is such a thing, because COVID is still very ongoing and unfolding experience. We've just normalized a certain level of death now in the world right to the virus. There's the death around climate change, and it could go on. There's the whole systems that
don't sort of support and work. So we're all experiencing these griefs and we need to be able to talk openly and honestly.
This is the thing is that like this stuff isn't siloed. As much as the medical industry or the psychiatry industry, or the media industry want to silo these things. They are all the same cloth. Like the ways that we portray any kind of hardship in books or on the screen, like this trickles out into life, right Like we don't know how to talk about the cascading and multifaceted grief of the last several years.
We don't know how to talk about.
The grief that is unspooling because of the political batshitness in the world and the rise of fascism. We don't know how to talk about grief in communities of color. We don't know how to talk. We don't know how to talk about any of this stuff, and there are many many reasons for that, Like I could talk about
that forever, but this is not about me. But like there there is such a void in our understanding of how to talk about these complex issues without reducing them or bypassing them again, like we come back to that binary option of we can either reduce it to something that has a resolution and a happy ending, or we can just not.
Look at it.
And unfortunately we are just not looking at it.
Oh, I completely completely agree, and it's hard to look at but it's necessary and those of us who have the ability to do that work. And by the way, it doesn't have to even be in media. I have dear friends who even even people who are not close to me, but people as strangers I would meet who you know, and I'm thinking specifically in hospital settings when Sada was very ill, who just would like cut through
it at the soda machine. Yeah, just could see like I was that caregiver who was stressed, beyond stressed, and they would just drop a nugget of knowledge that was just truth, right, and then they'd go back into their world and I could carry that truth with me. I had the privilege of dear friends who had walked similar paths, who were you know, decades ahead of me, who would take me by the hand and say, let me give
you an insight into the truth. So I think it's this combination of people we meet in the three D every day in our quotidian lives and what's happening in media.
And I hope that we And and by the way, I will say, you know, I'm not a TikTok person, but I will say that even if somebody for a nanosecond, and I think the sort of medium there is short format that if you get thirty seconds of truth, even through a format like TikTok, and perhaps it opens up a portal for you to ask more questions and then you go to more substantive sources for help. Okay, great, TikTok.
You just did something nice, right, You brought a little kernel of truth into someone's day that might open up something else. So we, I think, have to be excavators in our lives for truth, right, And if we can offer that to someone at a grocery store, at the post office or pumping gas, and we're just like, you know, do that I try to do it when I'm in situations where I can. I kind of sense someone's a
caregiver and there's some signs around that. Sure I can recognize the signs, and I'm like, oh, here's this little bit and it may be useful or maybe not. They can only decide, right, But I was given that gift, and so I try to offer it again, and I certainly try to do it in my work when when and where I can.
It's that power of acknowledgment, right, I'm telling the truth, and we think that that tool of a small nugget of acknowledgment of the truth of somebody's situation, like that can't possibly be enough, and it is everything, right.
Oh my gosh, it's little. You follow the bread crumbs. That's when I say, I mean, you're following your breath the bread crumbs. And for me, I know, I had the privilege of like being in I write about this in the book, it's like being with my mother in law who had a whole different understanding of grief right first of all, her age, her culture, So she was a teacher for me around grief and that was really really valuable in a way that no one else in my life could teach me.
There's a lot in there also about sovereignty and agency and boundaries. Right. I love that you said I'm going to drop this nugget here, but you only pick it up if it feels good to you.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely, because there is a lot of unsolicited quote unqu and I don't need that any So it's a very fine line. Like I kind of like sometimes if I because I'm like, oh, do I really do I say this? Is?
This?
Is this? You know, I have to try to check myself a little bit, right, But I also often say I just feel my heart. It is called to say this if it resonates if not, like go with go with God, you.
Know, yeah, right.
And there were times when people would say stuff to me that in the moment I was like, and lo and behold. Four years later something would I'd be like, oh, that's what that person was talking about. Oh now I get it. Now I'm ready to take that in. But you know, and so you never know, You just never never never never know.
You never know.
But it is it's true that we have to have the agency to select what is useful for us. Now, what is additive, what is expansive in our lives. What is uplifting and we take that and we take the next step. I don't even waste time anymore. And people give me crazy, but I'm just like, okay, thank you, moving on, bless your heart, right.
Heart, we love this.
I want to go with. So much of what we've been talking about is like that, that mix of the personal and the professional and how those intertwined. So if it's okay with you, I want to dive into that a little bit. So one of the things that I learned about you that I did not know is that, oh goodness, you are in one of my favorite series of all time. I was eureka, Oh my gosh.
Yeah, okay, So here's the thing, Well, thank you for that.
The way that I screeched when I saw that kind I just say, okay, continue.
I loved being on the show, and that show was a savior for me in many many ways. I'm going to tell you in the practical, professional way, and then I'll tell you like the emotional way. Practically. It arrived in my life at a time when I was in the crux of caregiving, said I was for super sick, going through lots of chemotherapy. I had a child who was under the age of five at home, and I
had not been working. And as we know currently, as we're recording this, we're in the middle of an industry wide writer an actors strike for exactly these reasons, right, And I remember when the audition material came in for Eureka to play the role of Grace. I was like, I cannot do this, and I don't know. I just had a It was like my system was like I
can't do it. And I remember talking to my acting coach because I quotched on it, and she was like, you know what, go in and dedicate this performance to somebody you love. Forget about whether you get it or not. Just dedicate it to someone you love. I go in and do the thing. I get a call back, I do another one. I get the call back. Before you know it, I'm on set and I have the job. It filmed in Vancouver, I lived in la and it required that I was away for periods of time, so
I had to create. Suddenly, this job made me so I was earning money now, which was great, earning my healthcare great, needed all those things, but it made me have to build a community at home because I had to be a way to work. So suddenly I had to instantly call upon friends, and I had people who'd come over to do my daughter's hair and I couldn't do it. People who were bringing food because my husband could drive people who And so this TV series gifted
me in two ways. I was carrying so much by myself alone, and suddenly working forced me to shift into a new gear and a community emerged. I mean I emerged because I had to seek them out, you know, actively seek them out, and that ultimately became a gift because it was a teaching tool for me. I think I had become so conditioned that I had to carry everything on my back. So suddenly I was like, oh my god, my artist gets to sort of sore and
explore it. Me with these amazing other actors and creators on set, my family isn't actually falling apart. Maybe it's actually good for them to have other energies. And so the show was very additive in my life. Plus them,
the writing is so good on that show. And I'm playing the role of a woman who loses her husband and then he lives in these multiple timelines, which I was like, I didn't even get the full wisdom of that until years later when my own husband died and I was watching the series with my daughter, and suddenly the role that I played had a whole new meaning because she was asking these deeper questions of herself, which is, where does he live in time and space? And that's
a big, big question. I mean, so it's sci fi. For those listeners who don't know, Eureka is clearly a sci fi show. It's fantic, it's it is a really good show. I don't know that. I love that you love it. I loved doing it. I loved beginning to play opposite Joe, and that show lives in a very it lived. It came at a very particular time in my life and taught me a lot.
Of lessons that continue to unfold in the true sense of sci fi work. Yes, yes, right, And it reminds me of what you know, Echoes what you just said a minute ago, that something that happened, when it happened, you understood it in one way, and then it continued to unfold and have a different something else about it gets revealed, And it's not like I think sometimes we apply that reductive model here to like, oh.
You weren't ready back then.
Like no, oh, I was a different person back then, and this hits different now.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
You know good pieces of literature, they're great books. And you know, take a favorite book that you had as a teen or as in college, let's say, and return to it every ten years of your life. Yeah, reread that book every ten years. It will means something different. You will meet the text in a different way. And I say, you know that that was my experience with with Eureka. I mean, I'm sure if I watched it again in ten years, it'll mean something.
Yeah, that reminds me.
So.
I loved Sallenger when I was in high school, and Franny and Zoe was my favorite book.
Loved that book.
And I remember that I read it shortly before Matt died, and it was a completely different book from me. But one of the things that it gave me was a window to that teenage self. Oh, I know, it told me things about her that I'd forgotten.
Mm hmm, right.
And I hear that.
And what you're saying that when you come back and you watch Eureka and you see yourself playing the role of a widow, what it tells you about who you were then and who you might be now and makes you curious about what's next. Yeah.
And it's so deep for me because I'm watching a younger version of myself who is pre widowed. Yeah, And I'm like, oh, so I'm not just watching the character. I'm watching the person playing the character knowing that she is about to have a major turning point in her life,
you know. And I'm thinking about, like, you know, there's certain scenes I'm watching and I'm like, oh, I remember that scene when we shot that and I just called home because you know, Satoh was coming back from chemo, and like, oh, you know, I remember having to bring a little bit of that into the scene because it was such a big thing happening in my personal life that I couldn't separate it from my work that day. And I thought, you know, all I can do is
integrate it. Yeah. So anyway, blah blah blahah. You may not use any of that stuff, but it's there.
I have used in all of it because I love that show. But there's a theme here, right. One of the things that I do when I'm getting ready to talk with somebody is look for a theme.
It's what my brain does.
And you've got You've Got Grace and Eureka, and then you've got Never Have I Ever, which is also a show centered around grief. I think a lot more so in the first season, sure, but it's everywhere in that show. So you were a different person when you started Never.
Have I Ever?
Yes, So here's the crazy thing about Never Have I Ever? Is again it was one of those things where like, and maybe this says more about me. It's like, you know, an actress, but like the part came through, the audition material came through, and I'm like, Okay, what what am I going to do with this? How am I going
to make this special for me? Right? And the thing about doing a Mindy Kaling project, And this is not uncommon with what are expected to be high profile shows or shows where you don't want the information to get out too quickly in sort of like in the Internet world of it all, so they don't release the whole scripts. I got just my material with a little bit of
context around the storyline. That was it. So what that means is it wasn't until in the middle of the pandemic, which is when the show dropped on Netflix, because I filmed it prepten. Then suddenly the world changed and we're all in lockdown. I'm sitting on the couch with my daughter, who is the same age as the daughter that I have on screen in the show. And that's what I realized. The show is about grief. So I'm watching it in real time. Wow, because I didn't know. I didn't have
the privilege of having read all the scripts. I read the scripts that I was in, so I didn't know the largest storyline because it had been sort of underlocking true. And so then I'm like, holy, I am losing it on the couch with my daughter, and my daughter's watching it like cringing because the mom that I play on screen is absurd. I mean, let's face it, elasism. She's an absurd mother. I love playing her because I get
to dial up all of that stuff. But again, life and art and the professional and the personal and the way they intertwine and they dance together, and I see that I used to ask questions like why how? I don't even ask questions anymore. I'm just like, this is a gift. I am supposed to learn something in all of these sectors and in reality and life there is
no separation. There's no separation between you know. If I go as big as between this world and the other world, this veil, you know, this side of the veil and the other there's just no separation. It's all this experience that we are all living through and having. And I find that in life. I find it in my art, and I try to integrate them consciously when and where I can. And I'm grateful when I have the awareness of, oh,
let me try to integrate these two things. Whenever I feel like a sense of separation, now, I'd say, I got to find a way to enter. I don't like this, I don't I need to integrate these experiences, and I'm not. Always takes me sometime a minute before I am ready to do that, or I give myself permission. But it's really valuable when I can, you know, it's really valuable.
And I think grief taught me that. I think I really felt like for the longest time, my work was one thing, my personal life, and my grief was something else. And then I realized, you know what, it's all my life.
That's right. As I read several times in things about from Scratch, you are living the source material, right, like we're always living.
The source material, always.
Always, always, always, always always, and you know, yeah, so that again, never have I ever was a true, true gift.
And the other gift in it is to be a part of again a show, something that's in the zeitgeist, in this case, the globalitgeist, which is pointing an arrow to say it's okay to grieve and it can look like this, And you know, I just feel honored that, like some part of me got to be a part of that. That's my ministry.
I love it. I love it, I love it.
I love it, and you know I when I was widowed, so two thousand and nine, the landscape of grief both in like the way that the medical and the psychological profession talked about it, but specifically how media culture talked about it like it was a wasteland. So I've been able to see the developmental arc, right, the narrative cultural arc of what is changing and how are our portrayals changing?
And I think this is true not just in grief, it's across the board that we're starting to see our storylines reflect the truth of existence in a lot more ways.
And you're a part of that work.
I mean absolutely, Yeah, Yeah, you've been laying the track.
You've been laying the track for years, and it is a part of the collective change and that is so important. I remember first discovering and be like, holy moly, there's a just a there's just a cut through it on us to hear right, and that kind of to be truly brazen in that way and to sort of, you know,
keep that drum beat of honesty going. It's really really valuable and it's not easy to do, but I think collectively and culturally humans need someone who's keeping the drum beat of truth even while people doing other percussive instruments and they're doing wind instruments and you know whatever, but someone's going to be reading the drum of truth or it don't work. I mean, I don't know therums in a symphony. Clearly, I'm not a musical person.
I'm going with the drum beat because it's true. I love that. Thank you.
Hey.
Before we get back to my conversation with Tembe, I want to talk with you about creative approaches to grief. And I'm both Tembay and I have written about grief, turning our experiences into books and television shows and podcasts. But even before any of those things happened, writing was how we survived grief itself. Actually, I should just speak
for myself. Writing was how I survived now. Writing isn't going to cure anything, but it can help you hear your own voice inside whatever is going on in your life, and that's in incredibly powerful. My thirty day Writing your Grief course is still one of the best things I've ever made for you. With all of the things that I've created, it's still one of the best things I've ever made. There are a lot of grief writing workshops out there with prompts like tell us about the funeral.
Writing your Grief is not like that. The prompts are deeper, they are more nuanced. They're designed to get you into your own actual story, really into your heart and out of your brain. You can read all about the Writing your Grief course at Refuginggrief dot com backslash WYG. That's WYG for Writing your Grief. You can see a sample prompt from the course and get writing your own story in minutes. The course is self guided, so you can start right now. Refuginggrief dot com backslash w y g.
Or find the link in the show notes.
Okay, back to the fabulous Tambei Lach. You've mentioned a few times here, and it certainly intersects with me. But like this service, especially in the wider context of all of the things that we've been talking about, You've said about from scratch that making this show was the hardest and highest form of creativity in service to love that you ever could have imagined.
Yeah, you said it, right, I mean, that's it. It was. Yeah. I mean I get emotional just thinking about it because I think I'm still processing the experience, and quite frankly, it might be for the rest of my life. But I did the depths to which it was difficult, and I mean that in the sense of what it required professionally. To me, it was a hard show to make, just on the purely production level of like what does it mean to make shows in Hollywood? It was a hard show.
It was a hard show. We made it in the middle of a pandemic. It had three languages, it was in two countries, in five cities. It required a lot. It was not an easy shoot. Okay, Then there's the emotional piece that I am processing because I am kind of a I was a doula, a sharp you know, to two hundred people trying to tell the story that was essentially my story, but it had to be anchored in my truth, but be universal enough to resonate with everyone.
So then there's this whole sort of creative and intellectual piece and emotional piece that's happening. And I showed up every day to step into my past, my very immediate visceral past, sometimes with my own you know, the set dressing would have artifacts from my own home right inside
of the set dressing. Okay, it's not easy things what's doing, but I felt like it had to have a visceral truth to it that I The only way I knew to capture that was to put as much reality in the frame as possible, and that meant offering up literally pieces, tangible pieces of the lived experience into this on screen.
So there was that that was happening. There was the work with my sister, where I'm working intimately with a family member and we're navigating what does it mean to work together as siblings, which is beautiful by the way, it was deepening, but it was also there were so many, multiple, many many layers that were unfolding daily, and every day when it was hard, and I mean hard, go back to my home or sometimes if we were shooting on location a hotel, and I would just go, why am
I doing this again? Yeah? Okay, what was the original purpose of this? What's the north star? And I thought this was in service to some kind of love? And that would give me enough juice, enough clarity, enough grace to show up the next day and do it again, and then do it again and then do it again. And I think when we do things in service of love, and I am not talking about romantic love, although I
can part of it, sure, it's part of it. I am talking about the bigger loves right that is incredibly clarifying as a purity of purpose. That's what I was said, what is? And I did? I asked myself a lot. Why am I here? I asked that so many days on set, literally, I was like, why am I here?
Exactly? Why did I sign up for this?
Why? You know, why did I sign up for this? What do I have to offer everyone here? Let this happen without me here, because if I don't need to be here, why am I putting myself through this, so there always had to be some real reason for me to be on set in a particular day. And by the way, there were a couple of days where I
don't need to be here and I wasn't. I excuse myself, but I was there, gosh, ninety five percent of the time because I always found that there was some element that I could add that no one else had, some piece of the truth, that if it just had a little sprinkle of this, it might make the show better. And I hear now from viewers. People will say little things back to me, things that the moments that they enjoyed, and I'm like, oh, so glad we got that in. I'm so glad we were able to do that.
Yeah, it's such a unique position to be in where you have created something beautiful and useful from something truly devastating, and that dissonance.
Is a thing. It's a real thing.
It's a real thing, and I don't you know, there are people perhaps better suited to discuss this in more clinical terms of what is you know, and I'm not a psychologist. I have not studied it, so I can't speak to that. There's a term for it where people talk about sort of like resilience post trauma or something like that.
There's like clo traumatic growth.
There you go, that's what it's called. That's that's the clinical term pot right, Like, Okay, I don't I can't speak to any of that, don't about all that. I'm still trying to figure my own life out. But you have articulated that when we can honor and name the moments where we've been able to take something difficult, a loss and transmuted in some way. I remember talking to a minister once who said, I have a parishioner who
works on cars every weekend. And he doesn't just work on his car, he works on his neighbor's cars, and it is his grief work. He and his father had worked on cars when he was growing up. His father had passed, and what he chose to do with that pain was to work on neighbors cars. Like if somebody is car broke down, he'd be like, can I change I'll change your oil to me. That is an active beauty, right, It's not. Yeah, it's not a TV show, but it's
the same damn thing. It's like I am using I guess as the verb that comes to mind or I am stepping into my lived experience, my hurt and doing something of service with it. And that can be changing someone the loyal in their car.
And it's beautiful the image that comes up for me as you as you talk about that. You know, we started out saying, how, like you know, Hollywood loves the transformation narrative, bad things happen to help you grow and become your deepest and best self. And it's easy to reduce everything you just said to that transaction. But that's not what I heard you say. What I heard you say is can we tell ourselves the truth that something
big and deep just happened? And how does the truth of that intersect with who we are, who we've been, Who this person? If you're grieving a loss of a person, who this, what this relationship is? And is there a way that I can make a life that serves that in a way that feels aligned with everything I am and everything I know. That is a very different way of describing that than hey, you used this terrible thing
to become your true self? Right, like that's or or that martyrdom matrix of like I remember the night of Matt's funeral, people coming up to me and saying You're going to be such a good therapist because of this,
You're going to help so many people. I'm like, Okay, first of all, really bad timing, but second of all, like what you're saying there is that I wasn't a good enough therapist before and somebody had to die in order for me to be of use, and also that that sort of deeply entrenched you are only valuable if you are of service to others, which is just I mean, there's so much wrong with that. But this is again like one of those one of those gray areas, like do stop applying binary shit to humans?
It doesn't work.
But that whole area of like what does living with this?
Whatever? This is?
What is living with this in the most true way for you and who you are.
Look like absolutely because thank you. First of all you said that way better than I did. And I will add to this that this service piece. You know, sometimes in the reductive way of looking at things, people think, oh, you know, you did this service and now you're better. I can tell you right now I would do the act of service. I would show up on set in service of love, and then I'd go home and be a hot Christmas mess. Right. It wasn't like I was
somehow newly evolved. I was just like in the moment and I was in my own unfolding And what I shared earlier about the person who you know changes the oil on the neighbor's car, I often when I think of that story, think about and what was the walk back to his house like after he changed the yes and getting back into bed and opening the fridge in his house because he's still sitting then with the grief for a moment, he was able to show up in service of it, and yet he still carries it. Servicing
it doesn't mean you've alleviated yourself of grief. The grief doesn't sort of got into vapor and disappear because you've now employed it as an act of servant. I still grieve that of every day, even though I made at this TV show, right, And I you know, there are whole scenes that I don't ever have to watch again ever. Right, So yeah, we are just in the moments we're in.
And just because you quote unquote use your grief where you serve others doesn't mean that you still don't feel crazy and still feel profound losses, a sense of profound loss that you feel in the gray.
I love the spectrum of being human in this right and the permission giving and the go I go back to that sort of like the transactional analysis thing of like you you did this thing, and now you should feel better, which loops back to what we were talking about with like the old way of telling stories reinforced that, right, I remember. I think it's in the beginning of my book,
or maybe it's not. Maybe it's just in something that I was saying, and I remember saying pretty early on in my own grief, I'm like, if I ever get married again, no one will ever know about it, because I don't want them to think I'm all better. And also as a grieving person, I remember when I was reading grief books as a newly widowed person. I was thirty eight when that died, and I remember I would flip to the back of the book and see if the author was married, and if they had remarried.
I wouldn't read their book because.
I was like, you don't understand me, right, I have so much to say on this.
Well. I don't know. If you hear the bird that's warbling outside, he's literally communing with us because he must be feeling this too, or she I don't know. There's a bird outside.
On this, because mockingbirds always have a lot to say.
Anyway, maybe I too. So similarly, like was so I don't need to be with you and your story of remarriage. I was a whatever that is, good, God speed, good for you. Not my path, not my reality. I don't need that teaching, and I don't need any teaching. That's pointing tool. This is the thing where you go because I don't know what I need that in my life. So I don't know that I'm going to have that. I don't even know if I want that. And oh there's so much. It's like, it's not about replacing this
other person. It's not like I know how special any kind of intense human connection is. It's the goal isn't to just sort of go out and replicate that. I couldn't even understand that, right, But so many books were like about that, and it was a selling tool in many grief books. It's a big publishing selling tool of like, well, see what they've done, so you can follow whatever they did and you'll get there. Yeah, Like that's insane. That's
not a thing. So I was very clear in writing from Scratch, and when I wrote from Scratch, full disclosure. I am remarried now. I was not when I wrote from Scratch. In fact, I just started dating when I started to write the book. So I thought that was gonna be fun. I'm like, Hi, I'm dating you, and I'll see you on the weekend after I spent all week writing about my dead husband. Good luck to you.
It's such a good sorting metric.
So when I wrote the book Robert, who I was dating then with whom I'm now partner married, it was a very particular path to walk. And at a certain point, I said, here's the thing. You're stepping into a full story. That is, you're marrying not only me in seventh grade and me you know, as a toddler and me you
know in high school. You're you're partnered with me who married Sado when I was twenty five years old, who became a mother with this man, Like, you're marrying all of that, just like I'm marrying every part of you. And so let's just get to know all of that and see what happens. And if we can't get to know all of that, then this doesn't have to happen because I don't know any other way to do it. So really, the goal after loss cannot be we just all have to be partner. That is the most absurd.
It's so absurd thing I have ever heard in my life. It should that happen. If you want that to happen, And if you meet up in time and space with a partner who has the desire and capacity and curiosity to want to do that with you, and you want to do that with them, then perhaps let's see what happens. Right. But dear Lord, this this thing of you know, putting
that on people, I am not here for it. And get I recognize that people look to me now as someone who's reported to be like, hey, temp, you did it, let me see it. I'm like, good luck with that, because I'm still figuring it out. Like I'm okay, yes. All I can say is that it is possible. Love after loss is possible. That's all I can say it, because it actually is. I am living proof of that.
But the how to or like that, that's the goal because by the way that love can show up in so many ways, it doesn't have to show up in partnership. That's one way the love that you got that you can show up in the world. It can show up in so many different ways. It's not about you need to be remarried, right.
It's such a weird requirement too, Like it like the holding up of heteronormativity and that partnership is the only valid form of adults existence. Like all, there's so much in that. And then we get into the like human beings are replaceable and just like plug a different person in and then we're all good again. There's just there's so much in there. And I love the transparency and the honesty with which you live this additional love story.
And by the way, and also keeping you know, being in contract with with my husband to say you are not some new chapter like you were not just some like hey, and now the next character comes into this play. You have your own and we have our own unfolding and story. That is, there's connective tissue there, but it's not just like a book into some other story, you know. Yeah, and giving us ourselves the grace and space to find our path.
Yeah. Human beings are so complicated and so complex, and that's actually where the good stuff is, I think. So it's basically what we're saying. So it was actually pretty recently on social media you wrote that for a while, your ability to imagine felt dulled and that you are stepping into or inviting yourself into a season of radical imagination. So can you tell me what that looks like or what you're talking about? Like, I didn't like I took it completely out of context, so I'm gonna say it
again here. You recently wrote that for a while, your ability to imagine had felt dulled, and one of the next posts, or even later in that post, you said, I can see now that the very act of being willing to imagine was its own kind of salvation.
Yeah, in terms of grief, there were so many days when it was subsistence living. What do I need to get through today? I am not trying to imagine next Thursday, let alone my life in five years, not even a thing or what I want to do or wherever I go. It's I need to just be and I need the grace to be. And that was exactly what I needed
at the time. Other stages of my grief, i'd get a glimpse of, like, huh, what if an opening an aperture around or a desire and imagining of something else that I might want to add new into my life that had never been there before. And I call that the gift of imagination, right, being able to imagine, you know, I'll be very literal and saying there was times, especially as a grieving mother, where I could not imagine beyond
the moment I was in with my child. And then sometimes I would allow myself to imagine me, let's say, at her college graduation, and it just would like a little bit of sunshine would like flow into my heart. It's just the possibility of that, right, And it got me through the day. So that's where imagination was a salvation. I think what I'm meant in the post and what i mean about the season of my life that I'm in now, is that I understand the power of imagination.
That to be able to imagine and to give over to imagining is a radical act of salvation because it is saying I want more from life, Oh what might that look like? Oh? Who might be a part of that? Oh it becomes a way through. Doesn't change your today, but it's holding what is rude, what is true and happening right now? And also and yet being able to imagine what could be. And there was a time before and I thought, well, I just this just is what it is. I'm not even going to think about imagining
something else. So I I it's something I'm experiencing, it's something that I'm unfolding, it's something I'm putting language around it. But the best way I can say it is that to be able to give myself the permission to imagine. And the fact that I we're talking now was because I created this thing called the Kitchen Widow, which was an imagining of something that I might that what if I did create something that could speak to my particular corner of my own lived experience of grief using media,
filming recipes food. It was like this little concoction of my little corner of the Internet that spoke to sort of my understanding of me. Processing th was an that was an act of imagination. It was pure imagination, and it ultimately saved me. The fact that I gave allowed myself to imagine this corner of the universe that was unlike anything I'd seen, but that was right for me,
and it opened up many doors. And so I'm hoping now to step into a season, or I am stepping into a season of my life that wherein I am allowing my imagination. I'm inviting it, I'm welcoming it. I'm getting curious about, well, what's hanging, what's over in the imagination space, what does she want to do over there? That could be interesting? And who knows what the hell it will open up? Maybe some good shit'll come out of it. I don't know, but it didn't hurt me.
It's free to imagine. Imagining is fucking free, and that's powerful. And I think about my ancestors. They had to radically imagine a state of freedom beyond that that they knew. That radical act of freedom is why I'm here. That radical act of imagination is why I'm here. They could see something that they knew they might never actually live themselves, but they could seed it forward in their acts of generosity,
in seeding things for the future that would become. I mean I could, I could, really like, I could unpack this a lot. But imagination matters, it does matter, and it can be an act of salvation and transformation in small and in big ways.
I'm so glad I asked that question.
I'm so glad. No I'm like, thrill do you ask it? Because it's also making me think about it more deeply. Right, Yeah, So.
I normally end with a question on hope, but I think you did it, oh right, because like the question is knowing what you know and living what you've lived, what does hope look like for you?
Now?
Does it figure into anything?
And maybe you have a different answer to that question, but I definitely heard the answer in there.
Yeah.
Yeah, That's That's kind of where I am now is I know things are going to happen. Life is going, as I like to say now, life is going to keep lifing. Life is just going to keep doing what it does. Things are going to unfold, Surprises are going to happen, Losses are going to roll in pains, and joy will sit side by side. What I have a kind of say in is giving myself permission to still hang out in the dream state even while everything is
a shit show, And there's power in that. There's power in hanging out in the dream state while everything is a shit show? Is that the way we want.
To end this?
I mean, I think that's a mic drop in my opinion, right. It is everything that we've been talking about for the last hour, that the both and of things right, that the additive principle of life is really the thing, it's not the replacement.
Yeah, I love this.
We really could talk for like hours and hours and hours and hours, but I want to wrap us up for the listeners here, and I just like, I'm I'm so glad that you're in the world and that we actually got to meet. So obviously I'm going to link to both the book and the Netflix show from scratch.
We'll stick in.
A link to Eureka because if you haven't seen it, you really should.
Everybody.
Is there anything else that you want people to know about where to find you?
Yeah, so you can find me in my website. It's tenblock dot com. I have a newsletter you could certainly sign up for that. And I have a podcast now, Megan, I'm following you. I like these long form conversations. It's called Lifted. You can get it anywhere you get podcasts. I'm working on season two now, and this has been an absolute delight. I'm honored to speak with you. I feel so moved and uplifted by your questions.
Oh, thank you.
Incredibly thoughtful and you're a powerful, powerful voice in this world, and so thank you.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, stay tuned for your questions to carry with you coming up right after this break. Each week I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. The biggest thing that stuck with me this week was longevity. Sort of maybe it's like starting before you know what you're doing or why you're doing it. Ten May and I talked for a long time before we got rolling, and we talked for a
long time after we wrapped the actual show. We both started this work of publicly talking about grief, trying to find ways to tell a truer, truer word, a more accurate story of grief in these four months that we weren't quite sure of right in blogs in the early days, in videos in the early days. We both knew we needed to say something, to do something, and we both started with just the next few steps we could see.
In front of us.
And what we've each created in the years since is light years away from those early projects, completely different from what we first envisioned. But those initial steps made it possible to do everything we've done since. So I guess my message here for me and for you is do the thing right.
You don't have to know how it all works out.
You don't have to see nineteen thousand steps in advance. You don't have to wait until you're sure everything is in its very final form for all time. You just need to start. Take the seed of the story, that first spark of desire, and try it out, Play with it, see where it leads. I think that approach applies to so much of life. If there is something in you that's pulling you forward, even a little bit, try it out, see what happens next. How about you, what's stuck with you?
From this conversation. Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I do hope you found something.
To hold on too.
If you want to tell me how today's show felt for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered, let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation affected you. Remember to leave a review of this episode or the show in general on the pod platforms that allow reviews. I know they don't all allow reviews, at least I haven't figured out how to leave review on every single podcast platform, but they are out there and
I love your reviews. Follow the show on It's Okay Pod, on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video clips from the show, and use the hashtag It's Okay Pod on all the platforms, so not only I can find you, others can too. None of us are entirely okay, and it's time we start talking about that together. Yeah, it's okay that You're not okay. You're in good company. That is it for this week. Friends, Remember to subscribe
to the show. Get your own conversations going by sharing this episode with friends, therapists and community groups and random strangers and coffee shops with consent. Of course, podcast episodes are really good conversation starters, especially if it's a topic that feels interesting to you but you're not really sure how to start talking about it. Use the episode as your foot in the door. Coming up next week, Elise Lunan, author of the New York Times bestselling book On Our
Best Behavior. Follow the show on your favorite platforms so you don't miss an episode. It's Okay that You're Not Okay. The podcast is written and produced by me Megan Devine, Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, Logistical and social media support from Micah, post production and editing by Houston Tilly, Music provided by wave Crush, and today's background noise provided by the very faint background burbal
of the water fountain. I set up outside to keep the pollinators hydrated in the heat wave.