This episode is especially for women questioning inherited expectations around who they're supposed to be, what their bodies should look like, what they're allowed to want, and which paths they're permitted to take—and for writers, artists, and creatives navigating the vulnerability of putting deeply personal work into the world.
What if leaving the path you were given isn't a deviation from your life—but the beginning of actually living it?
Kristen Millares Young joins me on The Embodied Podcast for a conversation about women's desire, bodies, creativity, inherited shame, and the stories we've been taught not to tell.
Kristen is an award-winning journalist, novelist, essayist, and author of the memoir Desire Lines. The title comes from the architectural term for the paths people create by repeatedly leaving the prescribed concrete walkway and making another way across the ground.
That image becomes a beautiful entry point into our conversation about women whose lives, bodies, desires, and creative impulses refuse to remain inside the paths laid out for them.
We talk about Kristen's journey from investigative journalism into fiction and memoir, her decade-long investigation into the ancient goddess Cybele, being part of the Cuban diaspora, and historical forces that have shaped women's relationships with their bodies, power, sexuality, and stories.
We also get very personal about body image and aging. Kristen shares how seeing representations of Cybele across centuries helped her recognize her own changing body in the body of the goddess, while we unpack the absurd and often contradictory expectations women inherit around food, thinness, motherhood, sexuality, aging, and beauty.
And because Kristen is a writer, we talk about what it costs to tell the truth publicly: rejection, vulnerability, being perceived, perfectionism, and the emotional labor of standing with a story you were taught never to bring to light.
Thanks for tuning in!
#WomensStories #Desire #Embodiment
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Connect with Kristen Millares Young:
https://kristenmyoung.com
@kristenmillares
Get Desire Lines:
Print: https://bookshop.org/p/books/desire-lines-kristen-millares-young/af27e3462b28753c?ean=9781636285009&aid=177&listref=fall-2026
Audiobook: https://a.co/d/06dEDODC
Connect with Elizabeth:
https://elizabethdialto.com/links
