The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Recipe for a Charmed Life by Rachel Linden

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

Recipe for a Charmed Life by Rachel Linden https://amzn.to/492omQI “Heartfelt, heartwarming, joyful, and uplifting. You can't go wrong with a Rachel Linden book.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber After a day of unrivaled disappointments, a promising young chef finds every bite of food suddenly tastes bitter. To save her career, she travels to the Pacific Northwest to reconnect with her estranged mom, and discovers a family legacy she never suspected in this delicious novel from the bestselling author of The Magic of Lemon Drop Pie. American chef Georgia May Jackson has one goal—to run her own restaurant in Paris. After a grueling decade working in Parisian kitchens, she is on the cusp of success. But in one disastrous night, Georgia loses her sous-chef position, her French boyfriend, and her sense of taste! Renowned for her refined palate and daring use of bold flavors to create remarkable dishes, Georgia is devastated to discover her culinary gift has simply...vanished. When she receives a surprising invitation from her estranged mother, Georgia flees to a small island near Seattle hoping the visit will help her regain her spark in the kitchen. As she tentatively reconnects with her mom, a free-spirited hippie eager to make up for her past mistakes, Georgia realizes there is something about the enigmatic island she just cannot piece together. Good luck charms start appearing in the oddest places. Her neighbor is a puzzlingly antagonistic (and annoyingly handsome) oyster farmer. And her mom keeps hinting at a mysterious family legacy. With the clock ticking and time running out to win her dream job in Paris, Georgia begins to unravel some astonishing secrets that make her wonder if the true recipe for a charmed life might look—and taste—very different than she ever imagined. About the author Rachel Linden is a novelist and international aid worker whose adventures in over fifty countries around the world provide excellent grist for her writing. She is the author of Ascension of Larks, Becoming the Talbot Sisters, and The Enlightenment of Bees. Currently Rachel lives with her family in Seattle, WA where she enjoys creating stories about hope, courage and connection with a hint of romance and a touch of whimsy.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go. There you go. When the art lady sings it, that makes it official. So welcome to the big show, my family and friends. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. As always, we have the smartest, most brightest people on the show. And all of them, but none of them are me because I'm just the idiot with the mic.

And we all know that. So we appreciate you guys coming by and enjoying the wonderful, brilliant people we have on the show. We have a returning guest on the show, a very prolific author. And before that, give us a, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, chrisfoss1, the TikTok, and chrisfossfacebook.com. Rachel Linden rejoins us on the show today she's got her newest book that came out january 9th 2024 called recipe for a charmed life i think this is an autobiography about me

no it's not there you go and she's gonna be joining us on the show she was on the show i believe last year for her book the magic of lemon Pie, which was a massive bestseller. She sold so many copies, she at first said she wasn't going to come on because she was too good for us. But then she relented and said, oh, I'll do some charity work. So there you go. So she'll be joining us on the show. Rachel is a novelist and international aid worker. She lives with her family on the island in the Pacific Northwest, where she enjoys creating stories about hope, courage, connection, and a hint of romance

with a touch of whimsy. Welcome to the show, Rachel. How are you? Oh, Chris, it's good to be back with you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing great. Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate having, we love our returning guests because they're so awesome the first time and it just gets better every time they come back, especially with our authors like yourself, who just keep writing just amazing books. Give us the dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? The best place is my website, rachelandlinden.com.

And then also I love to connect with readers on Instagram and Facebook, depending on their social media platform of choice. There you go. And what do you have against TikTok? No, I'm just kidding. I'm too old. That's i have against tiktok i'm too old to figure tiktok out and also twitter but now it's called x scares me so it's just about me being a little bit of a luddite that's all it is there you go well you know there's still time it's tiktok's actually kind of fun i think some authors are starting to make some traction over there i don't know we're still trying to make traction there yeah it's it's it's they're starting to make some traction over there. I don't know. We're still trying to make traction there.

They're starting to get old people on there, which means it's got a very limited time of being cool. They'll probably invent something else soon. Old people like you and me, Chris. Is that what you're saying? Well, at least me. You look very young. So I'm going to let you, I'll just take the hit on that one. So give us a 30,000 overview.

New book, Recipe for a Charmed Life. So this is a book about an American chef in Paris who in one night loses her sous chef position, her cheating French boyfriend, and her sense of taste. She wakes up the next day and all she can taste is bitter. And she gets a surprise invitation from her estranged mother to come to San Juan Island to the little town of Friday Harbor. So she goes to San Juan Island to reconnect her with her mom, who left when she was five, and to try to regain her spark in the kitchen. So it's full of food, travel, second chances

at love, delicious recipes, Julia Child makes an appearance, a little bit of romance, mother-daughter relationship story, all the good stuff. There you go. Mother-daughter relationship stories, those are always good, especially when they get along. I love my mom.

There you go. It sounds like she gets whammed there with everything all at once. Lose your sous-saf job and the cheating boyfriend. No one likes that. She shuts him in a refrigerator. I liked those main characters. She's really fiery. She's got red

hair and a temper to match. She finds him cheating with the pastry chef and she shuts him in the refrigerator. There you go. Hey, let me check with the attorneys real quick. Hey, can we allot that in the show? Is that cool? Don't do that, ladies and gentlemen. It's fiction.

It's a wonderful fiction book. Don't shut people really in a refrigerator. Yeah, don't really do that. As revenge. But it works great for novels and books. So, now, you've written several books. Is there a carryover in the characters or each of these a standalone character and new sort of book and plot? No carryover.

Just carryover in themes. There's always going to be food. There's going to be travel. There's going to be romance. There's going to be family complexity. And there will be magical realism and a hopeful, happy ending. But all new characters every time so there you go now is the slamming people in refrigerators is that going to be a new carryover or is that just

a one-off maybe it's kind of fun i really enjoyed doing it i mean one of the fun things about being an author is you vicariously get to do stuff you're not allowed to do in real life so sure did you test this in real life you know because authors do have to do a lot of research i did a lot of research for this one i did not actually shut anyone into a refrigerator but i did spend a lot of time walking through paris eating macarons and then eating oysters and now i could basically be an oyster farmer because i did a lot of research about oyster farming ah so i have had a lot of authors on the show that are like i always try and figure out when i want to go on vacation and then i tell then i tell the book publishing company yeah i got to go there and do some research

wink wink and and then yeah yeah so it's all research and then and then the bills come and they're like they're like what what is all this research yeah i know it's the best way to do research i'm doing research for my next book in italy in. Ah, there you go. And your last book was August 22, I think, when you came on the show. How often are you putting out books now? Is there a consistent speed to it? It'll be about once a year from here on out. There you go. There you go.

Well, you know, you got to take time when you're at those locales to really do your research. To really savor. I know. I feel like, you know, know historical fiction i have so much so much respect for historical fiction writers because they're like locked in libraries and looking at original manuscripts and doing all this deep deep dive and my research really is like wandering around places eating things so i do that on the weekends i still haven't wrote the book but yeah what are you researching there ch Chris? Four by four, four patties, four cheese, different ways of alternating the secret menu to try and get

the best flavor out of them. I'm going to be honest, that's a thin plot. I mean, it is right now. Actually, when it comes to plot, I'm not very thin from it, so there's that. Oh, wow. So give us a little bit of history on you. How did you grow up and what made you want to become a writer? And when did you start writing? I grew up in Ohio and Virginia in a family that grew a lot of their own food and didn't have a television. So I grew up with books as my doorway to the world. So I was a prolific reader and then started writing when I was six. I wrote my first book, which was called Beans, like the vegetable with an exclamation point. And I bound it in Cheerios boxes, cereal boxes. Yeah. My mom's better than my In-N-Out burger book. No, I mean, beans is not like the most scintillating topic ever, but my mom saved it.

She's like, when you're famous, this is going to be worth so much money. So she's got it in a Ziploc baggie in their house. And she's just waiting for the're famous, this is going to be worth so much money. So she's got it in a Ziploc baggie in their house. And she's just waiting for the day where I make it big enough that this book is going to be worth something. She's going to put it on Sotheby's or one of those auction sites for $10 million. Or she's just going to use it for extortion money. Could be. There's always that. Either way.

There you go. Maybe there's a future in publishing this. Beans. I don't think anyone's used that title yet, have they? Yeah, there are reasons that that book has not been written, Chris, by anyone other than me. Plus, you've got to get the endorsement from Cheerios and whatever else was in it. Right. Maybe the Bean Lobby.

So how did you come to write your first book, and what was it? Other than Beans, you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. My first big book. come to write your first book and what was it other than beans you mean yeah yeah i'm sorry like the first big book where the publisher was like yeah we'll we'll we'll let you write something that doesn't involve something made of food yeah exactly okay well they all they're all made of food actually that's the that's the part i know you know the theme is i started now yeah i did not intend i grew up in an italian family though too so everything revolves around the kitchen and i did not intend to start writing up in an Italian family, though, too. So everything revolves around the kitchen.

And I did not intend to start writing foodie fiction. But I just kept putting food in kind of accidentally. And about two books in, my editor was like, hey, I'm so hungry reading your books that I have to just keep this whole stockpile of snacks, like a drawer of snacks. So you just need to lean into this and make it a feature. So I was like, great. And there, Bob's your uncle there. That's what we did. There you go.

And in the back of how many of your books is there a recipe for something tasty we just started that so that started with recipe for no it started with magic of lemon drop pie and now recipe for charmed life so magic lemon drop pie had a pie recipe for lemon drop pie charmed life has two recipes for a couple french things that appear in the book that are yummy. So, I mean, these, these are double bonus books. Not only do you get a great book, you get a, you get some great recipes and then you can feed yourself later. It's like two books in one. It's like a regular size novel.

And then the shortest cookbook in history stuck in the back. There you go. But it's like a two for one folks. It's two for one. And then plus, you know, you know you get you get you can eat pie uh which you know there's nothing better than than pie i'm getting hungry just having you on the show again right people have been putting people have been actually for this one they've been putting trigger you know how trigger warnings like people online they'll do the book review and

they put trigger warnings they're putting trigger warnings for hunger on this one they're like okay trigger warning you're going to be so hungry. Make sure you have food to eat. So I may have overdone it. Like there may be a tipping point where now people are like getting too hungry because now it's a trigger warning. Yeah. If we have an explicit show where somebody swears too much on the show, we have to mark that on Apple. So this might be like a warning, intense hunger triggering.

Uh-huh. There you go. Luckily, I'm on a Sandvikik, so I don't get triggered. It's kind of cool, but it ruins everything you try and eat. But hey, did we get a check from a Zempik on that? Somebody look into that, damn it. I just gave him a plug. But yeah, a Zempik totally takes away any interest you have in food.

And it was horrible over Thanksgiving and Christmas, because i would eat like the soup of whatever the first round of food was at the at the restaurants we went to and then they would bring and i'd be like i eat like the soup or salad i'd be like well i'm full now and they bring like the main course i'm just going i can't eat that i just it was great so there you go but so i'm i'm able to resist at this point in time. So what are some essential themes? I mean, she goes from, in your book, she goes from Paris to an island in Seattle. That's got to be quite the different culture shock.

And I wanted that culture shock. I wanted to go from a place that everybody dreams of going to a place that is incredibly beautiful, but not a lot of people know exists. So I loved putting it. It's a little tiny, the San Juan Islands are this tiny chain of islands north of Seattle, and they're just absolutely gorgeous. Orca whales and rocky cliffs and vineyards and oysters. And it's delicious. And so I wanted to put it there.

My husband's family has a cabin they built by hand up there. And so it's a really special place for our family. And I love to introduce people to it because it's a really special place for our family. And I love to introduce people to it because it's just like this gorgeous little Pacific Northwest treasure. So I like using those. Maybe you shouldn't tell anybody about it so it can stay gorgeous. No, I like sharing things. I like sharing things in the book so that people can feel like they go without getting out of their armchair.

And January and February are the perfect times to do that too. There you go. So in that setting, it's kind of, I suppose, isolating. Does it help bond the mother and daughter together a little bit? Yeah. So this is an interesting, I've turned the trope of like the woman whose life falls apart. She goes back to her hometown that she swore she'd never be back to. I turned it on its head because she's never been here. And this is a mother she doesn't have a relationship with.

And so she's going to an entirely new place. Her mom left when she was five. And so she's going to rediscover her, you know, rediscover this relationship with her mom and ends up falling in love with the island. And it's a really sweet, but complex mother daughter story.

Wow. Now, does she meet a pool boy on the island, or can you tell us that? Probably not. Hilariously, not a pool boy, but an oyster farmer. You're so close. Oh, that's right. A really grouchy, kind of taciturn oyster farmer

who looks hot wearing those chest-high rubber orange overalls that shellfish farmers. You also look good in those. And not everyone can pull it off so yeah so that's the love interest and they don't get along at all and he's he's not he's not pleasant but he's hiding secrets of his own and then you know one thing leads to another you can't resist those men in waist-high international distress orange overalls yeah that's just hot so i mean you've seen these guys when you're up there

visiting, right? I have. I've interviewed them. I actually interviewed this really sweet guy in his 20s who was really cute and scruffy. And I thought, how does someone look that good wearing overalls? So, I just put him in. I changed him a little bit, but I was like, all right, Hot Oyster Farmer, here we go. Hot Oyster Farmer is actually the name of my OnlyFans channel in my spare time. Most people don't know that. OnlyFans jokes. You can find it at, I don't have a joke for that. So do you have a favorite section or chapter in the book that you had fun writing or in looking back, you're like, I really like that part of the book.

You know, I have a pet peeve with some modern heroines that they don't just do a lot. They're a little bit insipid. And so I wanted to give this heroine, I just let her be a hothead. And she just does things. She says, yes, she does things. She's a little bit spontaneous and impetuous, like, you know, cheating boyfriend in the refrigerator. And so there are a couple times where she just does stuff that may not be the best idea. But she says yes to things and she goes for it. So those were the fun parts to write, to do things that in your real life, you'd probably be too polite to do, but on a page you're kind of rooting for her. So it's not just the refrigerator. There are a couple other, there are a couple other points where you're just like, you go girl. But then, you know,

if it was real life, you'd probably be like, Ooh, that's, that's not what nice girls do, but she does it. I mean, something like that. I would like to see a movie of this because I want to see the guy getting slammed in the refrigerator. So I'd love to see this inverted movie. Hey, from your mouth to movie producers' ears. There you go. It's available. Yeah. I mean, that's the scene right there.

That's Oscar material, maybe. I don't know. If you have the right, like some Oscar person do it, it'll probably be good. One of those people, I don't even know who, Matthew McConaughey or something. And then can he play a French guy? I'm sure he can play anything, really. I mean, as long as his shirt's off, he can play it. A French guy with a Texas accent?

No problem. With a Texas accent, I love it. So which authors or books have influenced your writing style or themes that you explore? Oh, I really love Kristen Hanna. She's actually on the next island north of me. And I have loved her forever before she did historical. So I love her. And then Catherine Center is another one I just adore. And so there are quite a number. Debbie Maycomber's on another island north of me. There's islands everywhere in the Pacific Northwest, just like throw a rock in any direction, you an island with a best-selling author on it somewhere

really yeah i need to get in on this gig you got to get on this i think it's because we have clouds nine months a year and people are just like no i think i'll just stay in and look out the window and write a book wow and the beautiful vistas of the ocean and stuff now were they were the best-selling authors before they moved there or after they moved there? Because this might help me in my next book. That's true. Is it the location? Like, do they choose the location or does the location make them famous?

Yeah, maybe there's something there. I don't know. I need to do some further research on this. Yeah, there's something about that area. Yeah, that's like a real selling point for the islands out here. I'm trying to think if we've had any of them on the show. I don't think we have. Move here, become a best-selling author.

Yeah, well, I'll just turn around with a little microphone and we'll do the podcast with everybody up there as we go. That might work really well too. So what advice would you give to aspiring writers who want to pen their own novels? I think that you have to write a really good story. You have to know your brand and it is incredibly helpful to have relational connections, true, warm relational connections in this business. And it's weird because writing is essentially sitting alone in a room in your

pajamas, making stuff up for months at a time. But a lot of it comes down to, to making sure that you have really good connections with other authors, with publishers, with agents, because that's really how everything gets done. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And then throw someone in a refrigerator every now and then. Yeah. For good measure. Well, that happens during the part where I'm sitting alone in a room in my pajamas making things up. There you go. I should write my pajamas more often i normally just sit in the bean bag with a bag of cheetos naked and write but i like the pajamas thing better we have chilly weather up here so it's not you know it's not as good i don't know where you are but it's not as conducive to

like naked writing plus that cheeto dust gets everywhere in the bean bag so i don't really want to talk about that what is your writing process like for this book did you change anything did you use any different like do you write like an hour a day or or a certain time of day etc Sarah that would be nice no I have young kids and I actually wrote this book while my husband last year had three major surgeries culminating in a knee replacement and also he doesn't have an appendix now now was that from you slamming him in the refrigerator yes exactly that was all from that so this writing process was like i mean it would be lovely if i had like all these hours and i had these things no it was like get the kids to school put his knee on ice try to write a couple pages feed him soup get the kids so it was more like panic and panic and stress for this one honestly was it was it the

kind of panic where it's like we've got a deadline here people come on creativity now creativity now or else yeah i don't i don't so i mean the book turned out well but i don't recommend last year for like the epitome of of creative output i'll put it that way there you go i've thought about just put when i want've thought about just put, when I want to write, I just put a gun to my head and say, look, write something or the guy gets it. You know, there is something interesting

that writers do a lot where they do writing sprints. It's a little, it's like a couple steps down in hazardousness from your method, but you just set the timer for 15 minutes and you see how many words you can get out. And it's interesting because you feel this sense of urgency, like, oh, I'm racing against myself. And it's this little bite-sized piece of time. And they'll do it for sometimes like

they'll do five or six writing sprints, then they'll take a break, but you can get a lot written in those 15 minute chunks. But does it all make sense when you're done? I just run my wrist over the keyboard over and over again. Just be like, look how many words I got. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of surprising when you kind of get out of your own way and don't micromanage it. The word count goes up pretty quickly and they're not all bad words. Some of them are good words. I'll have to suggest that to my writing accountability group. We've got a writing accountability group, and they're taking off, and I'm just sitting here going, I don't know, I got nothing.

The only thing I would write probably at that sort of speed is, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And then I just write over, like, Jack Nicholson and The Shining, which I did reach at a certain point on my other book. I reached a point where I was like i felt like just writing that endlessly like i was gonna lose my mind but that's but then all the authors like hey this is when you're about to break through and i'm like you're insane so i don't know that's what it does there's such high highs and such low lows in the writing life there's always this point where you

think i have written the great american novel and then there's a point that usually follows not too much further along when you're like, I have spent eight months writing absolute garbage, like 90,000 words of complete garbage. I need a different career. And those coexist. And you know, the reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

Like it's not the great American novel. It's not garbage. It's like you wrote a pretty good book. Yeah. Yeah. People seem to like your work and everything else. You kind of reached that phase. I reached that point where

I think it was close to the end. I'm like, no one's going to freaking read this damn thing. This thing's stupid. No one's going to read my book. Then I was like, you know what? I wrote my story and mine's non-fiction. I was like, you know what? I wrote all my stupid stories i've been

telling people for a million years in this book and i just don't care like i don't fuck it it's there for now and forever and no one reads it i don't care i i did it and so i just kind of gave up right at the end that's so sad there is well that was before launch day i was like i was it was like a day or two before launch day and i I was just like, I just don't care. This is a known thing. I was at lunch with Debbie Maycomber and Marie Bostwick. And who else? Oh, was it somebody else?

Anyway, like three super bestselling New York Times bestselling authors. And we were talking about a book coming out. And so one of them was like, oh, man, it's going to be a failure. It's going to be a failure. And everybody started laughing. And they were like, this is just something that happens before the book comes out. There's this week or two where you're convinced it's already out and it's failed, but nobody's seen it yet. And so you just fell prey to that. That's a totally normal thing. It happens to authors. That just means you're an author. That's all it means. It means you're an author. There you go.

When you look for inspiration for something you know when you're being in that creative process and stuff is there any place you go to or people you think about you know we've had authors on the show that sometimes they write for like maybe someone who's in prison who was inspired by the books you know they there someone had told me when i was going through that crisis that there's like chris there's somebody out there who needs your book and you're writing for them you don't know know who they are and you may never know, but they need your book and they need that book right now. Is there somebody that you write for or something you use for inspiration? Do you go out on your deck maybe and look at the ocean or you just sit with there with your

pajamas and bang away? I get a lot of emails from people and a few stand out. There was a woman who wrote and said that she was disabled. She was in a wheelchair and that she had really been struggling, feeling like she had nothing good to give to the world. And she said, you know, after I wrote, after I read your book, this was my third novel, The Enlightenment of Bees. It reminded me that everybody has something good to give the world. And so it's encouraged me that I have something good. And it's encouraged me to go figure out what that good thing is despite my disability and despite this change in my life and I think about her another woman who wrote who told

me that her mother had been killed in a hit and run accident a year before and she was reading the magic of lemon drop pie and she's like I feel like my mom sent me this book to help me grieve and help me process it so I write for people like them who want a story that is light and hope-filled, but also has a little nugget that they can put in their pocket and take away that somehow influences their lives. There you go. I love that. This is the juiciness of telling stories is the reward you get from improving people's lives, touching people's lives, motivating them. And then, of course, the trolls can attack you on Amazon as well. So that's always fun. What sort of feedback have you gotten so far on the book by

chance? Oh, people are loving it, especially because it's January. It's a good time for a book that takes you away to exotic locales to come out. And people are just saying like, it's a warm hug of a story. It's making me hungry. It's making me love these, you know, themes of reconciliation and forgiveness. But I want to go me love these, you know, themes of reconciliation and forgiveness. But I want to go back and talk, you know, you were saying like the trolls on Amazon. Here's the thing. You cannot write a book that everyone is going to love. And so I have, so I just told you like these two heartwarming messages I got. Honest to goodness, on one of my books on Goodreads, there are two reviews next to each other. One says, this book by Rachel Linden changed the

course of my career i made decisions in my business that changed how i do business because she encouraged me to be true to myself and to really reach my potential okay so that's one awesome right the next one says and i am quoting this poop on a page cannot recommend and they're for the same book and that's just the reality of it because we're writing for people. Every person that reads it, every reader reads a story in a different way. They read it from their own lens

and it's going to hit differently for everyone. And so for one, it hit and it like changed her life and her career. The other one, it hit and they were like, I want my money back. This is poop on a page. And so I share that sometimes at writing conferences with groups of writers to just say,

we cannot reach everybody. Every author wants to write the story that reaches every person on earth. They're like, we're 7 billion, 8 billion people. We can't do it. You want to reach. You want to do your best, and it's going to reach some people. And then there will be another book that reaches the other people. Yeah.

And I find a lot of people that troll stuff and we find this on youtube and stuff because we've been on there for 15 years a lot of people that troll it they never really give it the full go like they'll like watch a minute of a video that we do or you know read a couple pages and and and then they'll crap on it and it's kind of funny i was joking about this on on facebook the other day, because on, on YouTube, we'll get these people to go, this is this,

this interview is trash. And they'll either trash me or they'll trash the guests. And, you know, I know the good guests and I'll sit there and be like, no, that was a really good interview. They were funny.

And they had a lot of energy that show. What the hell are you talking about? And I'm like, well, maybe, maybe they know something about interviewing people, and they're a prolific interviewer, and they're the Johnny Carsten, or they're the, you know, of interviewing.

And I can learn something from them, from whatever I failed them on. And then I go to their YouTube channel, and there's no videos at all. Right, right. And I'm like, well, I mean, how do you even know what a good interview is, buddy? Why don't you do some interviews let's see how you do there crackpot bud stay off the meth pie there bud yeah so screw the trolls but people love it it's got a 4.0 rating on goodreads 246 ratings 70 ratings 4.2 so far so you're killing it and i'm sure people are still reading the book to you you know those stats better than i do good job i was gonna call you i was reading

just simply a matter of reading congratulations yeah yeah well i did flunk second grade as a callback joke on the show so it's a miracle i can pull that one off but actually someone's feeding me audio in my ear but any further things or you want to tease out of the book before we go well something i think we didn't cover is that this the big oh we were talking about big themes that one of the big things is about forgiveness forgiveness of self how do we forgive ourselves when we mess up and hurt people we love and then how do we forgive people we love when they mess up and really hurt us? And we slam them in a fridge.

Well, actually, there's a full circle moment to that one that's interesting about taking accountability and not being a pushover because there is this delicate place where you don't want to be a pushover and take responsibility to things that aren't yours, but you got to own your own junk. And so this is a story about a woman

learning how to forgive and own her own junk. There you go. Own your own junk, people. Maybe you should put that as a coffee mug in the back. You can put that in a coffee. Own your own junk. My problem is I own too much junk. I need to become a minimalist and throw a lot of it away. It's the new year. It's the perfect time for that, Chris. It's true. What's the old line from Fight Club? The things you own end up owning you, which describes my last 10 marriages. Anyway, I don't know what that means. Thank you, Rachel, for coming to the show. Give us your final pitch out for people to order up your book wherever fine books are sold.

Yeah. What do you mean by pitch? Just tell them to pick up the book wherever fine books are sold. Here, I'll do it for you. No, here you go. If you like stories that are sweet, whimsical, have a touch of magical realism, have food, travel, second chances at love, have hot

oyster farmers in chest high rubber overalls, have complex mother-daughter stories, and take place in exotic places like Paris and small, charming islands in the Pacific Northwest, pick this up. There are recipes in the back, and you'll enjoy a delicious treat of a story. There you go. Do it or else. Man, you'll enjoy a delicious treat of a story.

There you go. Do it or else. Man, you did that way better than I would have, Rachel. Thank you. Thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Chris. It's always a pleasure. Always a pleasure to have you on and fun as well. Folks, order the book, Wherever Fine Books Are Sold, Recipe for a Charmed Life. January 9th, 2024, just came out by Rachel Linden. Check out our previous show with her for her other book, The Magic of Lemon Drop Pie. We had a lot of fun on that show. I remember talking about the pie recipe, and I love lemon pie. Oh, wow.

Okay, it's time to go eat, and we'll take a break. So thanks for tuning in, everyone. Go to Goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, Chris Voss, one of the tickety-tockety, and Chris Voss, Facebook.com. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.