So what happens when a lifelong word wrangler decides she's done pretending that menopause is a graceful transformation? She writes a trilogy about it—sharp, snarky, and wickedfuckting honest—and then she shows up at our virtual table to talk about all of it. 🫶🏻
In this episode of Women Around a Table Eating Food, Jen introduces to Nic her dear friend and author Kennerly Clay: a 25-year veteran of writing and digital strategy, a memoirist, and the kind of woman who, at the height of her midlife unraveling, kicked her son's door off its hinges, told her kids she needed some space, and checked herself into a self-described trashy Pennsylvania hotel room. And they all survived and loved hard through it.
Kennerly is the author of Letters from East of Nowhere: Daddy's Words to Live, Drink and Die By, a deeply personal memoir about growing up in the orbit of an absent, addicted father and the letters he left behind. She's also the self-published author of the Menopausal Woman's Guide trilogy: three snackable, profanity-forward books about losing your shit, dealing with your shit, and figuring out who you are on the other side of alla dat shit.
Together, Jen, Nic, and Kennerly get into…
✨ writing as catharsis versus craft
✨ what it actually feels like to stop recognizing yourself
✨ the big diff between wanting a solution and needing to complain for a minute, and...
✨ the quiet devastation (and hard-won triumph) of nearly walking away from a marriage and choosing, in the end, to stay.
(We also talk codependency, ketamine therapy, the family meeting nobody asked for, and what it means to raise boys who know how to hold mirrors up to themselves…and to you.)
This is SO not a wellness ep! It's a convo about what happens when the life you built cracks and you decide—sometimes quite literally kicking and screaming—to rebuild. Pull up a chair. The food of choice this time is a clean bowl of white rice and miso soup. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what this conversation feels like: simple lessons at the core, warming, and deeply nourishing.
Links:
📚 Buy Kennerly's books here: https://kennerlyclay.com/
